During their last week of work the brothers slipped themselves into their rope halters and leaned over the roof, using the blade of the long-flew knife or the long eaves knife to trim the gable ends. Looking up through the window, the boy could see just the iron blades sweep back and forth, the remnants of straw falling like barley.
Then the family carried him, once more horizontal, back onto their cart and disappeared. The silence that had been lost filled the house again. Now and then in the following months the girl and her parents would hear of the Felons working on a house in a distant village, as if crows had found a new copse to nest in. But the youngest son, Marsh, whenever he was allowed free time, attempted to overcome his limp. He’d wake in the dark and walk past houses they had once thatched, or go down into the river valleys as night began dissolving, already with birdsong. It was the hour with that tense new light that Marsh Felon now began searching for in books whenever the writer strayed from a plot to attempt a description of that special hour, perhaps remembered from the author’s youth too. The boy began reading every evening. It allowed him a deafness while his brothers talked. Even if he knew the thatcher’s craft, he was separating himself from them.
Plenitude. What does that mean, exactly? A surfeit of things? Replenishment? A complete state? A wished-for thing? The person named Marsh Felon wished to study and inhale the world around him. When Rose’s family rediscovered him two years later, a young man, they barely recognized him at first. He was still watchful, but he had become another, already serious, curious about the workings of the wider world. Her parents gathered him in as they had once done during the injured solitude of his youth. Aware of his intelligence, they were to support him through his university years. He had essentially left his own family.
* * *
Felon nested himself against brick cornices, then climbed up the college tower in the dark, more than a hundred and fifty feet above the unseen landscape of the quadrangle. Three nights a week he tested himself along the rain-slicked tiles until the hour or two before light when buildings and lawns began to display themselves. He had never considered the public tests of rowing or rugby; just his scarred fingers and quick movements revealed his strength. In a secondhand bookstore he had found an anarchic work, The Roof-Climber’s Guide to Trinity, and assumed at first its obsessions were a fiction, a childhood adventure, so he had begun to climb as if to search out its truthfulness, or perhaps a meticulous raven’s nest in a belfry. He saw no one else there on those nights, until one evening he came across two names scratched with a nail, beside the year 1912. He strolled the cloister roofs, ascended rough walls. He felt ghost-like even to himself.
He started seeing other nocturnals. It turned out to be a climbing tradition based on that privately printed book Marsh had discovered by Winthrop Young, a rock climber before his Cambridge days, who, missing such adventures, turned what he called the “sparsely populated and largely anonymous buildings” into his college Alps. The Roof-Climber’s Guide to Trinity, with maze-like illustrations and meticulous descriptions of the best climbing routes, had during the two previous decades inspired generations of “stegophilists” who ascended drainpipes along the “Beehive Route” and slithered across the insecurity of tiles cresting the Babbage Lecture Theatre. So there would be other climbers, yards away, alongside Felon. He stilled when he saw them, slid past with no acknowledgement. Just once, in a windstorm, his hand reached out and gripped a coat as a body fell past him, and he pulled the person into his arms, the shocked face staring through the buffeting wind at him, an unrecognized first-year student. Felon left him there on a safe ledge and climbed higher.
In December, descending a chapel tower, Felon passed a woman who touched his arm, refusing to let him pass without a greeting. “Hello. I’m Ruth Howard. Mathematics—Girton College.” “Marsh Felon,” he found himself saying. “Languages.” She continued, “You must be the one who caught my brother. You’re the secretive. I’ve noticed you up here before.” He could barely see her face. “What else are you studying?” he said. His voice felt loud to him in the dark. “Mostly the Balkans, it’s still a mess.” She paused, while looking out at nothing. “You know, I’m sure you do…there are a few roof sections no one can achieve alone. Would you like to team up?” He made a tentative but negative gesture of his head. She lowered herself and was gone.
The following summer in London he kept in shape by scaling city buildings at night, including the recently built expansions to Selfridges. Someone had charted the emergency exits while the building had been going up, so he was there in rainstorms as well as clear weather. “Marsh Felon,” the woman’s voice said as if she had just recognized him, though he was in fact hanging on to a slowly loosening gutter with one hand. “Wait a minute.” “All right. It’s Ruth Howard, by the way.” “I know. I saw you a few nights ago on the east wall, above Duke Street.” “Let’s go for a drink,” she said.
At the Stork she told him about other good climbs she knew of in the city—a few Catholic churches, and Adelaide House along the river, were, she said, the most enjoyable. She told him more about Winthrop Young, as his Roof-Climber’s Guide was almost a New Testament to her. “He wasn’t just a climber, he won the Chancellor’s Medal for English Verse and he joined the Friends’ Ambulance Unit as a conscientious objector in the Great War. My parents lived near him and knew him. He’s a hero to me.”
“Are you a conscientious objector?” he asked.
“No.”
“Why?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Were you ever a student at Trinity?” he asked her later.
“Not really. I was looking for the right type of people.”
“Who did you find?”
“Someone I followed and picked up on the slopes of Selfridges. He bought me a drink.”
Felon found himself blushing.
“Because I caught your brother?”
“Because you told no one about it.”
“Am I the type, then?”
“I’m not sure, yet. Let you know, when I know. How did you fall?”
“I never fall.”
“You have a slight limp.”
“It was the boy in me that fell.”
“Even worse. Means it’s more permanent. The fear. You come from Suffolk….”
He nodded. Felon had given up guessing how and what she knew about him.
“When you fell, why did you fall?”
“We were thatchers.”
“Quaint.”
He said nothing.
“I mean it’s romantic.”
“I broke my hip.”
“Quaint,” she said again, making a joke out of herself. Then, “We need someone there on the east coast, by the way. Near where you used to live…”
“In what way?”
He was prepared for her to say almost anything.
“To keep an eye on certain people. We’ve finished one war, but there’s probably another coming.”
* * *
—
He studied maps she had given him of the east coast, all the small paths between its coastal towns, from Covehithe to Dunwich. And then the more detailed maps of farms belonging to people on her list. They had done nothing wrong, were only suspect. “We need to keep an eye on them in case of an invasion,” she’d said. “Their sympathies lie with Germany. You could slip in, leave no trace, a hit-and-run, as Lawrence calls it. And that tool…what is it called?”
“A long-flew knife.”
“Yes. Good name.”
He never saw the woman named Ruth Howard again, though he came across her name many years later in a confidential government report about the continuing, unforgiving turbulence in Europe, on a note attached to someone’s angry scrawl: We find ourselves in a “collage” in which nothing has moved into the past and no wounds have healed with time, in which
everything is present, open and bitter, in which everything coexists contiguously….
It was a fierce note.
Still, Ruth Howard had been his introduction to secret wars. She’d taught him the “lost-roof technique” on the heights of Trinity, a phrase, she said, borrowed from Japanese art, where a high perspective, as from a belfry or cloister roof, allows you to see over walls into usually hidden distances, as if into other lives and countries, to discover what might be occurring there, a lateral awareness allowed by height.
And Ruth Howard was correct, he was a secretive. Few would know how or where Felon participated in the various conflicts that would smoulder through the next decades.
Wildfowling
Marsh drove up to White Paint in the dark, and he and the dog watched Rose walk towards the dimmed light of the car and climb into the back seat. Felon reversed, then aimed the car towards the coast. He drove for almost an hour. She was asleep against the liver-coloured dog. Now and then he looked at them. His dog. The fourteen-year-old girl.
At the estuary he let the animal out and set up the camouflage blind. He carried the guns in their hard oilcloth cases from the boot of the car back to where the dog stood, already poised as if stretching towards something out there over the muddy waterless estuary. It was that same unrecorded hour, almost nonexistent, that Marsh Felon was always fond of, with the tide beginning to come in, inch-deep at first. He could hear it in the dark. The only capsule of light anywhere was in the shell of the car where the girl was asleep, her door left open so the amber could be a marker, a compass point. He waited about an hour for the tide to enter and fill the estuary, then went back and held Rose’s shoulder till she wakened. She stretched, pushing her arms against the felt of the roof, then sat for a moment looking out into the dark. Where were they? Where was Felon’s dog?
He led her through the thick grass to the shoreline, the passing of time still being signalled by the growing depth of water. As light came up it was a foot deep, the landscape almost recognizable. Suddenly everything was awake, the birds were moving out from their nests, the gun dog, formal on the edge of the now two-foot-deep estuary, was moving backwards as the water rose, swirling fast. It would be dangerous to a stranger who was not a strong swimmer; he would be pulled away, even by this shallow tide, whereas earlier he could have walked waist-deep across the hundred-yard stretch of the Blyth estuary to that small temporary island.
Felon fired and the empty cartridge bucked free of the shotgun. The bird’s silent fall down into the water. The dog swam out, tussled with it a moment, circled and swam back with the fowl. She noticed how the dog had grabbed it by its feet so he could breathe as he swam. Birds flew over him in chaotic sixes and Felon fired again. Clearer light now. He picked up the other shotgun, explained how to break it open and double-load it. He didn’t show her, he explained it, speaking quietly, watching her face’s response for what she was actually taking in. He always liked and trusted how she listened, even when younger, her head lifted, watching his mouth. Dogs did that. She fired into the sky at nothing. He made her keep doing that to get used to the sound and recoil.
Sometimes they drove to the Blyth estuary, sometimes to the Alde. After that first night journey, whenever Felon took her wildfowling along the tidal coasts, she climbed into the front seat and stayed awake, even if they barely spoke. She’d peer into the last darkness, the grey trees rushing at them, passing alongside as if uncaught. She was already thinking ahead, rehearsing how heavy the gun would be in her hands, the cold grip of it, the sweep of it up to the accurate height and moment, the recoil and echo of noise along the silence of the estuary. So she could become accustomed to all that while the three of them journeyed towards it in the dark car. The dog leaned between the seats and placed his warm muzzle on her right shoulder, and she leaned over and pressed her own head against his.
* * *
Rose’s taut body and face barely changed over the years, kept a leanness. There was vigilance in her. Marsh Felon could never tell where it came from, for the landscape she grew up in was placid, a self-sufficient place without urgency. Her father, the Admiral, reflected that placidness. He appeared unconcerned with what took place around him, but this was not the complete portrait of him. Marsh was aware that the father, just as he did, had a busier, more official life in the city. The two men accompanied each other on Sunday walks, with Marsh, always the amateur naturalist, speaking of the mystery of chalk hills, where “whole faunas come and go, while the layers of the chalk are built from the efforts of infinitesimal creatures working in almost limitless time.” Suffolk, for Rose’s father, was such a slow, gradual universe, a plateau of rest. He knew the real and urgent world was the sea.
Between the father and Felon’s easy friendship was the girl. Neither of the men seemed tyrannical or dangerous to her. Her father might appear a stuffed shirt when asked about political parties, but he let the family dog, Petunia, clamber onto the sofa and then into his arms. His wife and daughter watched such responses well aware they did not exist for him at sea, where even a scuffed lanyard would be a punishable matter. And he was sentimental about music, would hush them when a specific melody came over the airwaves. When he was not there, his daughter missed that calm maleness that she could sidle next to for warmth when her mother’s rules were restrictive. Which perhaps was why Rose, in his absence, sought out Marsh Felon, listening to him openmouthed about the insistent habits of hedgehogs, about a cow eating the afterbirth of its calf in order to renew its strength. She wanted the complex rules of adults and nature. Even in her youth Felon would always talk to her as an adult.
When Marsh Felon returned to Suffolk after long periods of time abroad, she would come to know him again. But she was no longer the young girl he had taught to fish or go wildfowling. She was married, with a daughter, my sister Rachel.
* * *
—
Felon watches Rose with the daughter tucked under her arm. She places Rachel on the grass and picks up the fishing rod, his gift. He knows her first response will be to test its weight, balance it on her fingers, then smile. He has been away too long. All he wants is to again catch that smile. She rubs her open palm against the grain of the impregnated rod, then picks up the infant and walks over to embrace Felon, the child awkwardly between them.
But he watches her now in an alternative way; she is no longer a learning youth, and it disappoints him. Whereas she, having driven up to her parents’ home in Suffolk and seeing him again, does not imagine him as anything other than that ally from childhood. The sense of a difference between them is not in Rose, even if she is in the midst of constant breastfeeding, waking at three or four in the darkness. If she is thinking of anything somewhere in the back of her mind, it is not Felon her neighbour from the past, for whom she still has affection, but the career she had been moving towards that her marriage has now expelled from her life. She has a child, is already pregnant with another, so a career as linguist appears lost. She is to remain a young mother. She feels less gymnastic. She even thinks of mentioning this to Felon on their walk, when she is free of the child for an hour.
It turns out that Felon is mostly in London, where she also lives with her husband in nearby Tulse Hill, but they do not run into each other. In London they have separate lives. Felon works at the BBC, along with other projects he says little about. And although he is known as the loveable naturalist on his radio show, behind that portrait he is known by some as a ladies’ man—“the boulevardier,” her father keeps calling him.
So this afternoon on her parents’ lawn at White Paint is the first time she has seen him in years. Where has he been, she wonders. Still, it’s now her birthday, and he has surprised her by arriving at her mother’s lunch for her with this gift of a fishing rod. And as they meet they promise to save each other an hour’s walk alone. “I have the blue-winged olive nymph you once made,” she says. It feels like a confession.
But she has become a stranger for him, that taut frame altered and tethered permanently to the child. She is less private, less vigilant, he does not know what it is, exactly, but he feels she has given up what she was, in some way. There was a pouncing manner in her he liked, which is no longer there. And then as she sweeps a cedar branch out of her way he recognizes the faint line of bones at her neck that brings his affection back to what he thought was no longer there.
So he proposes an idea of work to this brightest of women to whom he had once taught all manner of things: that list of the oldest rocks in the county in order of age; the best wood for an arrow, for a fishing rod—the wood she has just recognized by its smell as she held his gift to her face, when he saw the thrill of her smile. Ash. He wants her in his world. He knows nothing about her adult life, that she was, for instance, hesitant and shy longer than was perhaps usual, till she stepped towards what she desired with a determination from which none could prise her away—a habit she will always have, that pattern of hesitancy at first and then complete involvement—just as later on, in the coming years, nothing will draw her away from Felon, no logic of her husband, not even the responsibility of her two children.
Is it Felon who chooses her, or is this something Rose always wished for? Do we eventually become what we are originally meant to be? It may not have been a path built by Marsh Felon at all. Perhaps such a life was what she always wanted, the journey she knew she would at some time leap towards.
* * *
—
He buys and slowly rebuilds an abandoned cottage that makes him a distant neighbour to White Paint. But the small cottage stays mostly uninhabited, and when there he is always alone. His role as host of The Naturalist’s Hour on BBC Radio, which is heard on Saturday afternoons, displays perhaps his truest nature in those public soliloquies on newts, river currents, the seven possible names for a riverbank, the grayling flies made by Roger Woolley, the varying wingspans of the dragonfly. It is much the way he conversed with Rose whenever they crossed fields or riverbeds. Marsh Felon as a boy housed lizards in his fingers, swept up crickets with his palm and released them into the air. Childhood had been intimate and benign. That was him as he may originally have wished to be, the amateur lover of the natural world he entered whenever he could.