Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

  Olive Lawrence, who appeared alone that first afternoon so that the three of us had to introduce ourselves, was a geographer and ethnographer. She was, she told us, often in the Hebrides recording wind currents, at other times in the Far East being a solitary traveller. There was something in these professional women that suggested it was not a case of The Darter’s selecting them but of the women’s choosing him; as if Olive Lawrence, a specialist in distant cultures, had stumbled suddenly on a man who reminded her of an almost extinct medieval species, a person still unaware of any of the principal courtesies introduced in the past hundred years. Here was someone who had never heard of people eating only vegetables or opening a door for a woman so she might enter a building ahead of him. Who else would have fascinated a person like Olive Lawrence but this man who seemed to be frozen in time, or perhaps released from a recently discovered sect now miraculously in evidence in her own home town. Yet there appeared to be little choice in how women participated with The Darter. The only rules played by were his.

  The hour Olive Lawrence spent with us, as she waited for her new beau, was given over to telling us in a somewhat amazed voice about the first dinner they had shared. He had found her among The Moth’s friends and then steered her to a Greek restaurant, a narrow rectangle of a place with five tables and submarine lighting, then proposed they seal a newly found intimacy (that had not in fact occurred but would shortly) with the sharing of a meal of goat and a bottle of red wine. Did something cross her mind then, some gale warning or other? But she acquiesced.

  “And bring us the cooked head,” he requested of the waiter. The dark, horrific sentence was said so casually that he could have been asking for a sprig of fennel. She paled at the mention of the goat head, and the nearby customers proceeded to slow their own meals in order to witness the oncoming domestic contest. The Darter may not have liked theatre, but what followed was a Strindberg-like performance that lasted an hour and a half with five or six couples watching. We knew The Darter was a “quick scoffer,” because whenever we travelled with him during the dog-racing season he’d crack open and consume a couple of raw eggs while driving his Morris, then toss the shells into the back seat. But at the Star of Argiropulos he took his time. Olive Lawrence sat on a stiff-backed kitchen chair in front of us and reenacted the moment, describing every insistence and refusal when she had to be convinced or persuaded or bullied, as well as maybe charmed—she was not sure which, she no longer knew, it was all confusing as a nightmare—into eating the carcass of a goat slaughtered, she was sure, in someone’s basement near Paddington.

  Then the head.

  The Darter had won, it appeared. And the intimacy he was expecting did occur a few hours later in his flat. The two bottles of wine had helped, she told us, still downcast. Or perhaps it was because he had believed so securely that he was right, that he was not arguing about consuming the goat’s head and the one eye she had to swallow in a vindictive way. The eye had the texture of snot. She actually used that word. And the head had a texture of…of…what, she did not know. She ate it because she could tell he believed in it. It was something she would never forget.

  By the time The Darter arrived at our house, full of not very convincing excuses for being late, we had decided we liked her.

  She had spoken to us of Asia and the ends of the earth as if they were distant boroughs of London, easily reachable. She spoke about these places in a voice unlike the beleaguered one she had used to describe her Greek meal. When we asked her what she did in her job, she told us exactly what she did. “Eth-nog-ra-phy,” she said, slowing the syllables as if we should write the word down fragment by fragment. She spoke of her pleasures as a traveller, told us that in the river deltas of southern India she had drifted on a boat with just a minimal two-stroke motor somewhere in its bowels. She described the speed of monsoons—you were sopping wet and five minutes later your clothes were dried by the sun. She spoke of a pink-lit tent that housed a small statue of a minor god at ease in its shade while the world outside was devastated by heat. She was providing us with descriptions our distant mother might have sent in letters. She had been along the Chiloango River regions in Angola, where there was ancestor worship so that ghosts had supplanted gods. Her talk sparkled.

  Like The Darter she was tall and slim, with a dazzle of unkempt hair, shaped and reshaped I am sure by whatever weather she was in. An independent creature. I suspect she would have eaten a goat if she had slain it herself in some Turkish meadow. The indoor world of London must have made her restless. In retrospect it was probably the extreme difference between her and The Darter that allowed their attachment to last longer than we expected it would. Yet whatever his fascination for her, she also seemed itching to be on her way. Perhaps she was on a break and needed to remain in London writing her reports, after which she would be off again. That small god in its pink tent had to be revisited. It meant leaving every attachment and domestic utensil behind.

  But it was The Moth’s relationship with her that we found most curious. Caught between The Darter’s and Olive Lawrence’s differing opinions about practically everything whenever they clashed in our living room, or worse, in the reverberating confines of The Darter’s car, The Moth refused to take sides. He obviously had need of The Darter professionally, for whatever reason, and yet we saw that though she was most likely just a temporary presence, The Moth was intrigued by her. We loved being around the three of them, witnessing their fights. The Darter appeared more complex and shaded now, with this generous flaw in him that preferred the company of a woman who contradicted his opinions. Not that his opinions would change. And we loved the dilemma The Moth was in, his awkwardness when The Darter and Olive Lawrence broke into flames. Suddenly he seemed like the headwaiter who could only brush away the broken glass.

  Olive was the one person who came into our house who appeared capable of clear judgement. She was consistent in her views of The Darter. She admitted his tiresomeness alongside his quick and peculiar charm, was appalled as well as fascinated, she told us, by the consummately male taste evident in his disorganized flat at The Pelican Stairs. And I had also seen her regard The Moth as if never quite certain if he were a positive or negative force. What was his hold on The Darter, her present temporary lover? And was he a benign guardian to the orphan-like boy and girl she had come to know? She always focused on the possibility of character. She weighed character, could discover it in a few grains of a person, even in one’s noncommittal silence.

  “Half the life of cities occurs at night,” Olive Lawrence warned us. “There’s a more uncertain morality then. At night there are those who eat flesh by necessity—they might eat a bird, a small dog.” When Olive Lawrence spoke it was more like a private shuffling of her thoughts, a soliloquy from somewhere in the shadows of her knowledge, an idea she was still unsure about. One evening she insisted we catch a bus with her to Streatham Common and walk its slow rise of land to the Rookery. Rachel felt uncertain in that open darkness, wished to go home, said it was cold. But the three of us kept moving forward, until we were eventually in the trees and the city had evaporated behind us.

  Around us were untranslatable sounds, something in flight, a series of footfalls. I could hear Rachel’s breath but there was no sound from Olive Lawrence. Then in the dark she began to talk, to distinguish the barely heard noises for us. “It’s a warm evening…and the pitch of those crickets is in D….They have that sweet quiet whistle, but it’s made with the rub of their wings, not by breath, and this much conversation means there will be rain. That’s why it’s so dark now, the clouds are between us and the moon. Listen.” We saw her pale hand point near us, to the left. “That scrape is a badger. Not digging, just his paws moving. Really, it’s something tender. Perhaps the end of a fearful dream. Just the remains of a small uneven nightmare in his head. We all have nightmares. For you, dear Rachel, it might be imagining the fear of a seizure. But there need not be fear
in a dream, just as there’s no danger from the rain while we are under the trees. Lightning rarely comes during this month, we are safe. Let’s walk on. The crickets might move with us, the branches and underbrush appear to be full of them, full of high C’s and D’s. They can reach as high as an F at the end of summer when they are laying eggs. Their cries seem to fall on you from above, don’t they? It feels like an important night for them. Remember that. Your own story is just one, and perhaps not the important one. The self is not the principal thing.”

  Hers was the calmest voice I knew when I was a boy. There was never argument in it. She had just this tactile curiosity about what interested her, and that calmness allowed you to be within her intimate space. In daylight she always caught your eye as she talked or as she listened, she was completely with you. As she was with the two of us that night. A night she wanted us to remember, as I have. Rachel and I would not have walked through the darkness of that forest alone. But we were confident that Olive Lawrence had some tracing in her head from a faint light in the distance or a shift of wind that told her exactly where she was and what she was going towards.

  There were other times, however, when a different ease took over and she’d fall asleep unconcerned in my father’s leather chair at Ruvigny Gardens, her feet tucked under her, even if the room was full of The Moth’s friends, the look on her face still intent, focused, as if continuing to receive information. She was the first woman, in fact the first person, I ever saw do that, sleep so casually in the presence of others without guilt. Then wake refreshed half an hour later when others were beginning to tire, and stride off into the night, refusing The Darter’s not-too-convincing offer to drive her home—as if she now wished to walk through the city alone, with a new thought. I would go upstairs and watch her from my bedroom window as she entered and passed each pool of streetlight. I could hear her whistling faintly as if recalling a tune, something unknown to me.

  In spite of our night journeys, I knew Olive’s profession usually meant daylight work, measuring the effects of nature on coastlines. She had worked apparently within the Admiralty on sea currents and tides, barely out of her teens, during the first stages of the war. (She admitted to this modestly only after it had been almost revealed by someone in The Moth’s group.) There were all these landscapes within her. She could read the noise of forests, she had timed the rhythm of the tidal slop along the embankment at Battersea Bridge. I am always curious why Rachel and I never ventured into a life like hers and her vivid example of independence as well as empathy for everything around her. But you must remember we did not know Olive Lawrence for that long. Though the night walks—accompanying her along the bombed-out docklands or into the echoing Greenwich Foot Tunnel, our three voices singing a lyric she was teaching us, “Under stars chilled by the winter, under an August moon…”—I will not forget.

  She was tall. Lithe. She must have been lithe, I suppose, with The Darter when she was his lover for the brief period of that unlikely relationship. I don’t know. I don’t know. What does a boy know? I always saw her during that time as self-sufficient, for instance when she slept in our semi-crowded living room in a state of separateness from all the others. Is this the censorship or tact of the young? I can more easily see her embracing a dog, lying on the floor beside it, the weight of its head on her throat, so she is scarcely able to breathe but content to let the animal remain there, that way. But a man dancing close to her? I imagine a response of claustrophobia in her. She thrilled to open space and weather nights, as if she could never be contained or fully revealed there. And yet of all those acquaintances and strangers who walked into and out of the house at Ruvigny Gardens, she was the most distinct. She appeared to be the accident, the outsider at our table, whom The Darter had discovered at my parents’ house, and more surprisingly taken up with so she would soon be known as “The Darter’s Girl.”

  “I’ll send you two a postcard,” Olive Lawrence said when she eventually left London. And then was gone from our lives.

  But somewhere on the borders of the Black Sea or at some small village post office near Alexandria, she would indeed mail us a platonic billet-doux about a cloud system in the mountains that suggested an alternative world, her other life. The postcards became our treasures, especially as we knew there was now no communication between her and The Darter. She’d journeyed out of his life without a backward glance. The idea of a woman mailing a postcard as part of a promise to two children far away indicated an expansiveness as well as aloneness, a hidden need in her. It signalled two very different states. Though perhaps not. What did that boy know….

  There are moments after I’ve put down such thoughts about Olive Lawrence when I almost believe I am composing a possible version of my mother, while she was away, doing something I knew nothing about. Both these women were in unknown locations, though of course it was only Olive Lawrence who courteously and beyond the call of duty mailed postcards to us from wherever she was.

  And there is the third corner of the triangle these two women made up, which I also consider now. It is Rachel, who needed a close relationship with a mother during that time, to protect her in the way a mother could. She had walked between Olive and me that night up the slow incline of hill into Streatham woods, being told that when she was in the darkness with us there would be no danger, that there was no danger even in dreams or during the unstable tumult of her seizures. There were only crickets in song above us, only the scratch of a badger as it turned in comfort, only the hush and then a sudden whisper of the oncoming rain.

  * * *

  —

  What had our mother assumed would happen to us in her absence? Did she think our lives would be like that popular play of the day, The Admirable Crichton—which she had taken us to see in the West End, our first play—where a butler (in our case, I suppose, the equivalent of The Moth) kept an aristocratic family well disciplined and therefore secure in a sort of upside-down world on a castaway island? Did she really assume that the shell of our world would not crack?

  Sometimes, under the influence of whatever he was drinking, The Moth became cheerfully incomprehensible to us, in spite of the fact that he appeared assured about what he thought he was saying—even if what he said involved a few clauses falling away from the path of the previous sentence. One night when Rachel had been unable to sleep, he pulled a book called The Golden Bowl from my mother’s shelf and began reading to us. The manner of the paragraphs, as the sentences strolled a maze-like path towards evaporation, was, to the two of us, similar to The Moth’s when he was being drunkenly magisterial. It was as if language had been separated from his body in a courteous way. There were other evenings when he behaved strangely. One night the radio described the manic act of a man who had pulled passengers out of a Hillman Minx in front of the Savoy and then set fire to the car. The Moth had returned only an hour earlier and listening intently to the report groaned, “Oh God, I hope that was not me!” He glanced down at his hands as if he might find traces of paraffin on them, then seeing our concern dismissed the possibility with a wink. It was clear we now did not even understand his jokes. In contrast to him, The Darter, while more excessive in his inventions, had no sense of humour, like any person who is not fully legal.

  Still, The Moth had this almost reliable stolidness. And perhaps he was our Admirable Crichton after all, even when measuring that cloudy liquid into his small blue glass cup that had once been attached to a bottle of eyewash, and drinking it down as if it were sherry. We did not mind the habit. It was the one time he was serenely open to our wishes, and Rachel could always persuade him at these moments to take us into parts of the city he appeared to know well. The Moth had an interest in abandoned structures, such as a nineteenth-century hospital in Southwark, which had been active long before the days of anaesthetic. Somehow he got us into the place and lit the sodium lamps so they shivered against the walls of the dark operating room. So many unused lo
cations in the city that he knew of, lit by nineteenth-century light, shadowed and ominous to us. I wonder whether Rachel’s later theatrical life was formed by those half-lit evenings. She must have perceived how one could darken and make invisible or at least distant what is unhappy or dangerous in a life; I think her eventual skill with limelight and fictional thunder allowed her to clarify for herself what was true and what was false, safe and unsafe.

  * * *

  —

  By now The Darter was stepping out with the Russian, who owned such a flaring temper that he was to bail out from that relationship before she could discover his address. This of course meant she too would turn up at Ruvigny Gardens looking for him at odd hours, sniffing the air for a scent of him. He became careful and never parked his car on our street.

  The presence of The Darter’s various partners meant I was suddenly closer to women than I had ever been, apart from my mother or sister. The school I went to took only boys. It was a time when my thoughts and friendships should have been with them. But Olive Lawrence’s ease of intimate conversation, the way she spoke so directly about her wishes, even her desires, brought me into a universe that was distinct from anywhere I had previously been. I became intrigued by women who were outside my realm, with no blood or sexual motive. Such friendships were not controlled by me, and they would be passing and brief. They replaced family life yet I could remain at a distance, which is my flaw. But I loved the truth I learned from strangers. Even during those dramatic weeks with the spurned Russian girlfriend, I hung around the house more than I needed to and hurried home from school in order to simply watch her pace our living room with that unsatisfied look on her face. I would walk past her and brush her arm so I could collect that moment. I once offered to accompany her to the dog track at Whitechapel, supposedly to help her find The Darter, but she waved my offer away, perhaps guessing I might have another motive to get her out of the house. She was unaware, in fact, how close she was to The Darter, who was hiding in my room, reading The Beano. In any case, the curious pleasure of female company was in me now.