But he is by now “a secretive,” with an unnamed position in a government office, and journeying into unstable zones of Europe, so there will be unknown stages in his story. Some theorize that what gives Felon skill in intelligence work derives from his knowledge of animal behaviour—one person recalled Felon making him sit on the bank of a river while explaining warcraft as he fished. “In these local rivers it’s the art of coaxing—everything is a waiting game.” And another time, as he cautiously dismantled an old wasps’ nest, remarking, “You need to know not just how to enter a battle zone but how to get out of it. Wars don’t end. They never remain in the past. ‘Seville to wound, Córdoba to die in.’ That’s the important lesson.”
Sometimes when he returns to The Saints he catches sight of his family gathering reeds from the marshes, the way he had done as a boy. Two generations back their grandfather had planted reeds along the river marshes, and now his heirs harvest it. There is still no pause within their conversations, but their loud words are now unshared with him and he will not hear of their disappointments in a marriage or their pleasure in a new child. He had been closest to his mother—being hard of hearing had been her defence against their endless talk, and when Marsh read a book it was similar to that comfort of deafness. Now the brothers keep their distance from him, weaving together their own communal stories, for instance about an anonymous thatcher on the coast who took the name of “Long-Flew Knife,” prepared, it was said, to kill German sympathizers in the event of an invasion. It was a country myth that spread in whispers. There had been a killing with such a blade, seemingly random, some said part of a local row. From the height of a one-storey roof his brothers looked towards the coast and spoke of it, the name of a thatcher’s tool suddenly known in every village.
No, Marsh lost them long ago, even before he left The Saints.
* * *
—
But how did he become what he became, this rural boy curious about the distant world? How did he work his way into a war-skilled gentry? He had been a youth who at twelve could sail a lure and land it faultlessly on a river surface, then swing it across the current to drift towards the presence of a trout; at sixteen he would change his unreadable handwriting to clearly record the design and tying of flies. He needed to be exact about this passion—cutting, sewing the camouflage of dry flies. It filled the silence of his days when he could make a grayling fly blindfolded, even with a high fever, even in high winds. By his mid-twenties he had memorized the topography of the Balkan States, and had an expert knowledge of old maps where distant battles had been fought, now and then journeying to some of those innocent fields and valleys. He learned as much from those who barred the door to him as from those who let him in, gained a slow informal knowledge of women who were to him more like hesitant foxes he once had held briefly and endearingly in his arms as a boy. And by the time a war grew again in Europe, he had become a “Gatherer” and “Sender Out” of young men and women, luring them into silent political service—because of what? perhaps some small anarchy he glimpsed in them, an independence they needed to fulfill—and releasing them into the underworld of the new war. A group that eventually included (unknown to her parents) Rose Williams, the daughter of his neighbours in Suffolk, my mother.
Night of the Bombers
On weekends Rose drives up to Suffolk to visit her children who are living with her mother, safe from the Blitz that is terrorizing London. During one visit, on her second night there, they hear the bombers flying in from the North Sea. A long night. They have all established themselves in the living room of the darkened house, the children sleeping on the sofa, her mother, tired, kept awake by the noise of the planes, sitting by a fire. The house, the earth around it, does not stop shuddering, and Rose imagines all the small animals, voles, worms, even night owls and lighter birds in the air, caught in the avalanche of noise coming from the sky—even fish in the rivers under the turbulence of water because of the never-ending planes from Germany coursing low through the night. She realizes she is thinking the way Felon thinks. “I need to teach you how to protect yourself,” he said once. He’d been watching her cast. “The way a fish—if he sees your line land—will work out where it comes from. He learns to protect himself.” But Felon is not there this particular night of the bombers while she and her mother and children are alone in the darkness of White Paint, with only the face of the radio lit, which speaks quietly about parts of the city—Marylebone, sections of the Embankment—that are already in ruins. A bomb has landed near Broadcasting House. There are unimaginable casualties. Her mother doesn’t know where her father is. It is only the children, Rachel and Nathaniel, her mother and she, who are supposedly safe in this noisy countryside, waiting for the BBC to tell them something, anything. Her mother nods off, then is startled awake by more planes. They were speaking earlier about where Felon might be, and her father. Both somewhere in London. But Rose knows what her mother wants to talk about. As the planes quieten, she hears her say, “Where is your husband?”
She says nothing. The planes recede into the darkness, heading west.
“Rose? I was asking—”
“I don’t know, for god’s sake. He’s overseas, somewhere.”
“Asia, is it?”
“Asia is a career, they say.”
“You should never have married so young. You could have done anything after university. You fell in love with a uniform.”
“As you did. And I thought he was brilliant. I didn’t know then what he had been through.”
“The brilliant are often destructive.”
“Even Felon?”
“No, not Marsh.”
“He’s brilliant.”
“But he is also Marsh. He wasn’t born into this world. He’s the accident, with, it seems, a hundred careers—thatcher, naturalist, an authority on battle sites, and whatever else he is now….”
There is again a weight of silence from her mother. Rose eventually stands up and goes to her, and in the firelight she sees her peacefully asleep. Everyone has their own marriages, she thinks. After the recurring bouts of thunder from the planes her children are asleep on the sofa, defenceless. Her mother’s pale fine hands are on the armrests of her chair. Northeast of them is Lowestoft, southeast is Southwold. All along the coast, the army has buried mines on the beaches to protect against a land invasion. They have commandeered homes, stables, and outbuildings. At night everyone disappears, and five-hundred-pound bombs and high-explosive incendiaries whistle down on the sparsely populated houses and streets, so it seems as light as day. Families sleep in cellars, moving their furniture in with them. Most of the children have been evacuated away from the coast. The German planes returning to Europe will jettison their remaining bombs as they head back. So the only evidence of inhabitants comes after the sirens cease and they gather on the Front Parade to gaze at the sky and watch the planes departing.
Rachel struggles awake just before dawn. Rose takes her by the hand and they walk out into the stilled fields, down to the river. Whatever route the bombers took they have not come back this way. The water is flat, undamaged. They hold on to each other and walk along the bank in the dark, then sit, waiting for light. It is as if everything is hiding. “The important thing is I need to teach you to protect those you love.” She still has some of Marsh’s long-ago words in her. The morning gets warmer and she removes her sweater. Nothing moves in the shell-shocked water. Her bladder is full but she keeps it that way as part of a prayer. If she does not crouch down, if she does not piss, they will all be safe, in London as well as here. She wants somehow to participate, to control what is happening around her. In this time of unsafety.
“A fish camouflaged in shadow is no longer a fish, just a corner of landscape, as if it has another language, the way we need to be unknown sometimes. For instance, you know me as this person, but you don’t know me as another person. Do you understand?”
“No. Not quite.” And Felon explained it to her again, glad she did not just say “Yes” to him.
An hour later Rose walks with Rachel towards the faint outline of the house. She is trying to imagine Felon’s other lives. At times it feels he is more innocently himself only when he has a creature in his arms or a parrot on his shoulder. His parrot, he has told her, repeats everything it hears, so he can say nothing of importance in its vicinity.
She realizes it is this unknown and unspoken world she wants to participate in.
Quiver
When people in the Service who knew him spoke casually of Felon in public places, any reference to an animal would do. And the range of creatures chosen to depict him often led to comic extremes. The New World porcupine, a diamondback snake, the madrigal weasel—whatever came to mind at that moment was not important, being there only for camouflage. It was this range of creatures assigned to Felon that suggested how unknowable he was.
So he could be photographed in Vienna having dinner at the Casanova Revue Bar with a beautiful teenager and her parents, and, after sending his companions off in a taxi to their hotel, be elsewhere two hours later, with a courier or a stranger. And if a few years later he was seen at that same Vienna bar with Rose, the same beautiful young woman no longer a teenager, he was there not for the seemingly obvious reason but for another purpose, as she was. They would slip from one language to another, depending on who was beside them, or who was noticed over the other’s shoulder. They behaved as uncle and niece without irony. It was believable, even to themselves. For he needed to release her often on her own into another role—undressing down to her nakedness into one disguise or another. She might be in a European city working with him, then return on leave to her two children. And after a time she would be with him again in another city where Allied and enemy agents stumbled across each other. But for him, their roles of uncle and niece were a decoy, not only for their work, which freed him to be with her, but to continue his growing obsession.
His job as a Gatherer meant finding talent in either the semi-criminal world or among specialists—such as a well-known zoologist who had spent most of his life in labs weighing the organs of fish, and could thus be relied on to precisely construct a two-ounce bomb in order to destroy a small obstacle. It was only with Rose, eating across from him at some roadside inn, or driving beside him from London towards Suffolk on the dark roads, her pale hands blond under the speedometer as she lit a cigarette for him, it was only with her that the purpose of his work slid from him. He desired her. All those inches of her. Her mouth, her ear, the blue eyes, the quiver at her thigh, her skirt lifted and bunched: was it to satisfy him? His hand wishing to be there. Everything left his mind but that tremor.
The one thing he did not allow himself was to consider how he must appear to her. Normally he’d have assumed he could seduce a woman with his wisdom, character, whatever it was that might have drawn her to him in the first place. But not simply as a man. He felt old. Only his thoughtful eyes could swallow her without hesitation or consent.
And she? My mother? What did she feel? And was it he or she who had persuaded the other into this adventure? I still don’t know. I like to believe they entered this tremulous universe as teacher and student. For this was not just physical love and desire: it encompassed the neighbouring skills and possibilities of their surrounding work. The knowledge of how to retreat if contact with the other was broken. Where to hide a weapon in a train carriage so the other would know where it was. Which bone to break in the hand or the face to make a person irrational in response. All of that. Alongside his wish for a moment when she might awaken as if there were Morse between them in the darkness. Or the place she perhaps wished to be kissed. How she would turn onto her stomach. The whole dictionary of love, war, work, education, growing up, growing older.
* * *
—
“There’s a walled city near Ravenna,” Felon whispered, as if its location needed to remain secret. “And inside the city, within its narrow streets, is a small nineteenth-century theatre, an intimate jewel, that looks as if the rules of its construction were based only on the principles of miniatures. Someday we can visit it.” He said this more than once, but they never went there. There were other mysteries he knew of: escape routes out of Naples or from Sofia, the surrounding plains that three armies had camped in with a thousand tents before the second Siege of Vienna in 1683—there was a map he’d seen, made from memory, long after the siege. He explained how mapmakers were once hired, even by great artists such as Bruegel, to help choreograph their crowd scenes. And there were the remarkable libraries to see, such as the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris. “One day we can stand within it.” He tossed out the offer. It was a further mythical destination, she thought.
What did she contain in comparison to all that experience? It was like the embrace of a giant, she felt raised a league or a fathom into the air in order to witness such knowledge. Even though married, even though a linguist skilled in argument, she felt she had no vista of importance, that she was no more than a girl threading a needle by candlelight.
She had been surprised to discover Felon was secretive and complex almost out of a gentlemanly or shy courtesy. He was better at response, while she was cleverer at intellect, which was why she was eventually put in charge of harvesting data on enemy manoeuvres—as she’d once done on a small scale from a hotel roof, aided by that singular man known to me and my sister as The Moth; and in the fourth year of the war herself began broadcasting over the airwaves into Europe. She who once listened to everything Felon said was no longer the pupil. She became more actively involved, parachuted into the Low Countries after another radio operator was killed, journeying to Sofia, Ankara, and other, smaller outposts that cordoned off the Mediterranean, or wherever uprisings occurred. Her radio signature, Viola, became known widely on the airwaves. My mother had found her way into the larger world, somewhat the way that young thatcher had done.
The Astral Plough
Long before I came to work at the Archives, just after my mother’s funeral, I had pulled that paperback from one of her shelves and discovered in it the hand-drawn map on eight-by-six-inch paper of what looked like a chalk hill with low-gradient contour lines. For some reason I had kept this drawing that had no place-names. Years later, when I worked in the Archives, I discovered that whatever needed to be written down or typed up had to be done so on both sides of that same quarto-sized paper stock, single spaced. Every person in the service had to abide by this rule, from the interrogator “Buster” Milmo to a temporary secretary taking shorthand. It was a practice observed in almost every intelligence office, from Wormwood Scrubs—parts of which had once been used as an intelligence headquarters, and where as a boy I assumed my mother was entering to serve a prison term—to Bletchley Park. No other paper stock was allowed. I realized I had a map connected with Intelligence, which had been kept by my mother.
Our building housed a central map room where giant charts floated loosely in midair, so that they could be pulled down on a roller and gathered like landscapes into your arms. I would go there every day to eat a solitary lunch, sitting on the floor, the banners barely moving above me in that nearly windless room. For some reason I was at ease there. Perhaps it was the memory of those distant lunches with Mr. Nkoma and the others, as we waited to receive his casually illicit stories. I went there with the drawing after having it copied onto a transparency and began projecting the slide onto various maps. It took two full days before I found its exact match, on a map whose altitude lines fitted neatly against my original drawing. What I now had, by linking the chalk hill drawing to its reality on a large, specifically named map, was a precise location. Which was where I now knew my mother had once briefly been based with a small unit sent in, as the report had stated, to loosen the linch-pins of a post-war guerrilla group. Where one of them was killed and two of them were captured.
>
The hand-drawn map suggested intimacy, and I was curious to discover whose intimacy it was, since the drawing, at one time useful, had been saved in a favourite Balzac paperback. My mother had thrown nearly everything else away from that period when they were all doing god knows what, destroying the linch-pins. In our warren we had often come upon cases where the survivors of political violence had taken up the burden of vengeance, sometimes into the next generations. “How old were they?” I half remember my mother asking Arthur McCash the night of our kidnapping.
“People behave disgracefully sometimes,” my mother had once said to me, when I and three boys in the Fifth Form were temporarily suspended from school for stealing books from Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road. Now, these many years later, reading fragments of what clearly were silent political killings committed in other countries, I was appalled not only by my mother’s activities, but that she had put my theft in a similar category. She’d been shocked at the stealing of books. “People behave disgracefully!” A mockery of herself perhaps along with her judgement of me.