“What did you do that was so terrible?”
“My sins are various.”
* * *
One afternoon a man knocked on my cubicle wall. “You speak Italian, don’t you? Your file says so.” I nodded. “Come with me. The bilingual in Italian is ill today.”
I followed him up a flight of stairs to a section occupied by those fluent in languages, aware that whatever the job was his status was higher than mine.
We entered a windowless room and he handed me a heavy set of earphones. “Who is it?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter, just translate.” He switched on the machine.
I listened to the Italian voice, at first forgetting to translate, until he waved his arms. It was a recording of an interrogation, a woman doing the questioning. The audio wasn’t good—it seemed to have been done in something cave-like, full of echoes. Also, the man being questioned was not Italian and wasn’t being helpful. The recording kept being turned off then switched on again, so there were gaps of time. The interrogation was clearly at an early stage. I had read and heard enough of these now to know they would knock the ground out from under the man later on. For now he was protecting himself by seeming uninterested. His answers wandered. He went on about cricket, complained about some inaccuracies in Wisden. They got him off the topic by asking him bluntly about a massacre of civilians near Trieste and about the English involvement with Tito’s Partisans.
I leaned forward, stopped the machine, and turned to the man beside me. “Who is this? It would help to have a context.”
“You don’t need that—just tell me what the Englishman is saying. He works with us, we need to know if anything important was revealed.”
“When is…?”
“Early forty-six. The war is officially over, but…”
“Where is it happening?”
“It’s a recording we captured after the war, from one of the remnants of Mussolini’s puppet government—Mussolini already strung up but some of his followers still around. It was found in an area outside Naples.”
He signalled me to put on the headphones and started the tape again.
Gradually, after several time jumps in the tape, the Englishman began talking—but about women he’d met here and there, details about the bars they went to, what kind of clothes they wore. And if they had spent the night together. He was easy with the information, offering data that was obviously unimportant: the hour a train got into London, et cetera, et cetera. I turned the machine off.
“What’s wrong?” my colleague asked.
“It’s useless information,” I said. “He’s just talking about his affairs. If he’s a political prisoner he hasn’t revealed anything political. Only what he specifically likes about women. He doesn’t seem to like crudeness.”
“Who does. He’s being clever. He’s one of our best. This is stuff that interests only a wife or husband.” He turned the tape back on.
Then the Englishman was talking about a parrot that had been found in the Far East, which had lived for decades with a tribe that was now extinct, its whole vocabulary lost. But a zoo had the parrot and it turned out the creature still knew the language. So the man and a linguist were attempting to re-create the language from that one bird. The man was obviously tiring but kept talking, almost as if this way he could delay specific questions. He had been useless to the interrogators so far. The woman was clearly looking for someone, identifications, place-names they could link to a map, a town, a killing, the failure of an expected victory. But then he spoke about one woman’s “air of solitude,” and in another pointless aside, about a pattern of birthmarks on her upper arm and neck. And suddenly I realized this was something I had seen as a child. And had slept against.
And so it was that during my translation of a recorded interrogation that included descriptions of possibly invented women, and parrot lore—all put forward by the captured man as useless information—I heard described the pattern of birthmarks on my mother’s neck.
I returned to my office. But the interrogation stayed with me. I half believed I had heard the man’s voice before. I even thought for a while it might belong to my father. Who else would have known those distinguishing marks—the unusual cluster of moles whose pattern, the man had joked, resembled a star formation called the Astral Plough.
* * *
Each Friday, I boarded the six o’clock train at Liverpool Street Station, and relaxed, just stared at the ribbon of landscape passing me. It was the hour of distilling everything I had gathered during the week. Facts, dates, my official and unofficial research fell away and were replaced by the gradual story, half dreamed, of my mother and Marsh Felon. How they had eventually walked towards each other without their families, their brief moment as lovers and then their retreat, but still holding on to their unusual faithfulness to each other. I had barely a clue as to their cautious desire, of travels to and from dark airfields and harbours. All I had, in reality, was no more than a half-finished verse of an old ballad rather than evidence. But I was a son, parentless, with what was not known to a parentless son, and I could only step into fragments of the story.
* * *
It was the night driving home from Suffolk after her parents’ funeral. The speedometer light on her dress covering her knees. Damn.
They had left in darkness. All afternoon she had watched him courteous at the grave, and at the reception listened as he spoke shyly and tenderly about her parents. Country neighbours she had known since childhood came up to her to give condolences and ask after the children who were at home in London—she had not wanted them at the funeral. She had to explain again and again that her husband was still overseas. “A safe return then, Rose.” And she would incline her head.
Later she witnessed Felon struggling to move a full and overlapping punchbowl off a rickety table onto a more solid one, the guests’ laughter loud beside him. For some reason she’d never felt so relaxed. When everyone had gone, about eight in the evening, she and Felon left for London. She did not want to stay in the empty house. They drove immediately into fog.
They crept along for a few miles, stopping warily at every junction, and paused at a railway crossing for almost five minutes because she thought she heard the howl of a train. If there was a train it remained howling in the distance, as cautious as they were.
“Marsh?”
“What?”
“Do you want me to take over?” The dress had moved as she turned to him.
“Three hours to London. We could stop.”
She flicked on a small light.
“I can drive. Ilketshall. Where’s that on the map?”
“Somewhere in this fog, I guess.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay what?”
“Let’s stop. I don’t want to drive in this, after the way they died.”
“I know.”
“We can go back to White Paint.”
“I’ll show you my house. You’ve not seen it in a while.”
“Oh.” She shook her head, but was curious.
He turned the car—it took three attempts on the narrow fog-blind road—then drove to the cottage he had rebuilt long ago.
“Come.”
It was cold inside. “Bracing,” she would have said if it was morning, but it was pitch-black, not a clue of light. He had no electricity, just a stove he cooked on, and that kept the place warm. He began burning wood in it. He dragged a mattress in from an unseen room; it was too far, he said, from the heat. All this he had done within five minutes of entering. She’d not said a word, was just watching Felon to see how far he would go, this always careful man, always careful with her. She was disbelieving about what was happening. There was already too much closeness in the room. She was used to being with Felon in open country.
“I’m a married woman, Marsh.”
“You are nothing like a married woman.”
“And of course you know married women….”
“Yes. But he is in no way a part of your life.”
“It’s been a long time since that.”
“You can sleep here by the fire. I don’t have to.”
A long silence. Her mind tumbling.
“I think you might need to now.”
“Then I want to be able to see you.”
He went over to the fire, opened the flue, and it brightened their room.
She lifted her head and watched him directly. “You too, then.”
“No, I am not interesting.”
She saw herself lit only by the stove’s flickering light, with the long sleeves of the dress she’d worn at the funeral. It felt strange. Something had slid under her reason. And also that this was a night of fog, with the world around them invisible, anonymous.
* * *
—
She woke enveloped. His open palm under her neck.
“Where am I?”
“This is where you are.”
“Yes. It seems ‘this is where I are.’ Unexpected.”
She slept, and woke again.
“What is it about funerals?” she asked, her head against his body. It would be cold, she knew, beyond the fire’s reach.
“I loved them,” he said. “Just like you.”
“I don’t think that’s it. I mean, to sleep with their daughter. And after their funeral?”
“You believe they are rolling in their graves?”
“Yes! Besides, now what? I know about your women. My father called you a boulevardier.”
“Your father was a gossip.”
“I think, after tonight, I am going to stay away from you. You’re too important to me.”
Even in this distilled, cautious version of Felon and Rose there is a confusion and even uncertainty about what may have happened, what may have been said; nothing quite fits within the rhyme of their story. Who was it, or what, exactly, would break off the relationship that began that night by an iron stove?
She had not been a lover as she had been this night for a long time. What would it be like for him, she wondered, to leave her after this? Would it be like one of his historical anecdotes, where a small army departed a Carolingian border town with courtesy and silence, or would everything around them clatter with repercussions? She would need to leave him before that happened, leave a pawn blocking the river bridge, so neither she nor he could cross it anymore, to make clear it was an ending after this sudden and remarkable glimpse of the other. It needed to still be her life.
She turned to face Felon. She rarely called him Marsh. It was almost always Felon. But she loved the name Marsh. It sounded as if he went on and on and was difficult to cross, to fully understand, that she would get her feet wet, that burrs and mud would attach themselves to her. I think it was then, after their night by the stove, that she decided to return safely to who she still was, and remain separate from him, as if suffering was always a part of desire. She couldn’t let her guard down with him. She would wait, however, a bit longer for full light, when the joyous lover he had been would once again become unknown to her, a mystery. At dawn she heard a cricket. It was September. She would remember September.
* * *
There is a moment during Felon’s questioning by the Italian woman when the interrogators swivel away the bright light that is blinding him, and it flares briefly past her face and he, always so damn quick to pick up what occurs around him, sees her clearly. He has, as someone said, “those strangely inattentive eyes that miss nothing.” And he notices the smallpox marks on her skin and judges her instantly as no beauty.
Do they intentionally make him aware of the woman questioning him? Can they tell that he is a sensualist, that he can be teased into a petite flirtation? And the brief revelation of the woman—what does that do to him? What is his response? Does it moderate his flirtation? Is he gentler, or more confident? And if they know that much about him, enough to place a woman on the other side of the arc light, hidden in the dark, is that movement of the light accidental or intentional? “Historical studies inevitably omit the place of the accidental in life,” we are told.
But Felon in fact is always open to casual accident, a sudden dragonfly or the unexpected revelation of character, and he will play off it, wrongly or rightly. He is inclusive, just as he is broad-shouldered, boisterous in the company of strangers, all this an escape from his secretiveness. He has an openness that grows from having once been a discovering youth. His will is curious more than ruthless. So he needed a tactical executioner beside him, and he found that ability in Rose. He knows he is not the one they are after, but her—the unseen but regularly heard Viola—the woman intercepting their elusive signals over the airwaves, the voice reporting their movements, betraying their whereabouts.
Still, Felon is also a double-sided mirror. Thousands hear him as the genial broadcaster on The Naturalist’s Hour, mulling over the weight of an eagle or discussing the origin of the term “bolted lettuce,” as if he were a neighbour speaking over a shoulder-high fence, unaware of others overhearing him in faraway Derbyshire. Yet to all of them he is unseen as well as familiar. There has been no photograph of him in the Radio Times, only a pencil sketch of a man striding in the middle distance, far enough away to be unidentifiable. Now and then he may invite a specialist on voles or a tackle-and-fly designer into the basement studio of the BBC, and during such times try to be the humble listener. But his audience prefers it when he speaks for himself. They are accustomed to his roving mind, as when he unearths the John Clare line where “fieldfares chatter in the whistling thorn,” or recites a poem by Thomas Hardy about the devastation to small animals on the seventy or so fields where the Battle of Waterloo was fought.
The mole’s tunnelled chambers are crushed by wheels,
The lark’s eggs scattered, their owners fled;
And the hedgehog’s household the sapper unseals.
The snail draws in at the terrible tread,
But in vain; he is crushed by the felloe-rim.
The worm asks what can be overhead,
And wriggles deep from a scene so grim,
And guesses him safe….
It is his favourite poem. He reads the passage slowly and gently, as if in animal time.
* * *
The woman behind the glare of the arc light constantly alters the line of questioning to catch him unawares. He has chosen to confess to nothing but unfaithfulness and betrayal, perhaps thinking he might blind her with irritation. He has joked his way through the conversation with her on the other side of the lights, but I wondered: had they put a subtle woman in his path to ask him simple questions—allowing him to believe he is misdirecting her with personal details. But were his fictions revealing to her? She seeks a physical description of the woman they hold responsible. Sometimes her questions are obvious and they both laugh, he at her trickery, her laugh more thoughtful. Most of the time, even though exhausted, he recognizes the hidden intent in the question.
“Viola,” he repeats, as if bemused when she first brings up the name. And because Viola is a fictitious name he helps compose a fictional portrait for the interrogators.
“Viola is modest,” he says.
“Where is she from?”
“From farming country, I believe.”
“Where?”
“Not sure.” He needs to recapture ground, having perhaps given away too much. “South London?”
“But you said ‘farming country.’ Essex? Wessex?”
“Oh, you know Hardy….Who else do you read?” he asks.
“We know her signature style on the airwaves. But the one time we intercepted her voice we thought she had a coastal accent we cannot quite place.”
??
?South London, I believe,” he reiterates.
“No, we know it is not that. We have specialists. When did you take on that accent you have?”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Have you always had that way of speaking? A self-made man? Is the difference between you and Viola then to do with class? Because she does not sound like you, does she?”
“Look, I hardly know the woman at all.”
“Beautiful?”
He laughs. “I suppose so. A few moles on her neck.”
“How much younger than you, do you think?”
“I don’t know her age.”
“Do you know Denmark Hill? An Oliver Strachey? Long-Flew Knife?”
He is quiet. Surprised.
“Do you know how many of our people were killed by the Communist Partisans—your new allies—in the foibe massacres near Trieste? How many hundreds died there—buried in the sinkholes…do you think?”
He says nothing.
“Or in my uncle’s village?”
It is hot and he is glad when they turn all the lights off for a while. The woman continues speaking in the dark.
“So you don’t know what happened there, in that village? My uncle’s village. Population four hundred. Now ninety. Nearly all of them killed in one night. A child witnessed it, she was awake, and when she spoke of it a day later the Partisans took her out and killed her too.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“The woman who calls herself Viola was the radio link between your people and the Partisans. She told them where to go that night. And other locations—Rajina Suma and Gakova. She provided them with information, the mileage from the sea, the blocked exits, how to enter.”
“Whoever she is,” he says, “she would have just been passing on instructions. She would not have known what was going to happen. She may not even know what happened.”