Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

  One night, after spending a long evening with Agnes, I was travelling home on the Underground. I needed to make numerous changes to return to central London and I was sleepy. I got off the Piccadilly Line at Aldwych and walked into a lift that I knew always shook and rattled up three levels from the depths of the Tube station. The deserted space in that slow-moving lift could have held fifty commuters during rush hour, but now there was only me. A dim globe light hung in the centre of it. A man came in after me carrying a walking stick. Another man came up behind him. The scissored gate closed and the lift began to move up slowly in the dark. Every ten seconds, as we passed each floor, I could see them watching me. One was the man who had followed Agnes and me onto the bus weeks earlier. He swung his stick, shattering the bulb while the other pulled the emergency lever. An alarm went off. The brakes jammed. Suddenly we were hanging in midair, bouncing on the balls of our feet, trying to keep our balance within that dark hanging cage.

  My bored evenings at the Criterion saved me. I knew most lifts had a switch at shoulder or ankle level to free the brake. One or the other. I backed into a corner of the cage as the two men moved towards me. I felt it at my ankle, kicked the locked brake free, and it released. Red lights pulsed in our cage. The lift began moving again and then the doors scissored open onto street level. The two men stepped back, and the one with the stick flung it into the middle of the floor. I was running into the night.

  I got home scared, half laughing. The Moth was there and I told him of my clever escape—that lift at the Criterion had taught me something. They must have thought I had money, I said.

  * * *

  A man named Arthur McCash slipped into our house the next day, The Moth announcing he was a friend he had invited for dinner. He was tall and skeletal. Spectacles. A shock of brown hair. One could tell he would always have the presence of a boy in his last year at college. A bit too frail for group sports. Squash perhaps. But this first image of him was inaccurate. I remember he was the only person at the table that first night able to unscrew the cap off an old bottle of mustard. He torqued it open casually and left it on the table. With his sleeves rolled up, I saw the powerful string of muscles along his arms.

  What did we ever really know or discover about Arthur McCash? He spoke French, as well as other languages, though he never referred to this ability. Perhaps he assumed he would be mocked. There was even a rumour, or was it a joke, that he knew Esperanto, the supposed universal language, which no one spoke. Olive Lawrence, who spoke Aramaic, might have appreciated such knowledge, but she had left us by then. McCash claimed he’d recently been stationed abroad doing crop studies in the Levant. Later I would be told that the character of Simon Boulderstone in Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War may have been based on him. In retrospect it feels almost believable—he did seem part of another era, one of those Englishmen who are happier in desert climates.

  Unlike other guests, McCash was quiet and modest. He somehow always positioned himself alongside whoever was arguing loudly—it meant he was not expected to intercede at all. He nodded over a questionable joke, though he never told any—save for a surprising night when, possibly intoxicated, he recited a limerick that involved Alfred Lunt and Noël Coward, which startled the room. It was never quite remembered properly even the next day by those who had been near him.

  Arthur McCash would confuse my understanding of The Moth’s activities. What was he doing in this company? He seemed unlike the rest of that opinionated group, behaving as if powerless and without self-worth, or perhaps with so much that he did not wish to expose it. He kept to himself. It is only now I recognize that there may have been in him a shyness, possibly disguising another self. Rachel and I were not the only ones who were young.

  I am still unable to give precise ages to the individuals who had taken over our parents’ home. There’s no trustworthy recording of ages when seen through the eyes of youth, and I suppose the war had further confused the way we read age or the hierarchies of class. The Moth felt the same age as my parents. The Darter a few years younger, but only because he appeared less controllable. Olive Lawrence younger still. She appeared that way, I think, because she was always glancing to see what she could go towards, what might capture her and change her life. She was open to alteration. Give her ten years and she could have a different sense of humour, whereas The Darter, though full of shadowed surprises, was clearly on a path he had beaten down and travelled along for years. He was incorrigible, that was his charm. That was the safety in him for us.

  * * *

  —

  I got off the train at Victoria Station the next afternoon and felt a hand on my shoulder. “Come with me, Nathaniel. Let us have a tea together. Here, let me take your satchel. It looks heavy.” Arthur McCash took hold of my school bag and walked towards one of the railway cafeterias. “What are you reading?” he said over his shoulder, but kept walking. He bought two scones and some tea. We sat down. He wiped the oilcloth on the table with a paper napkin before leaning his elbows on it. I kept thinking of him coming up behind me and touching my shoulder, taking my satchel. They were not usual gestures for someone who was essentially a stranger. The train announcements, loud and incomprehensible, continued above us.

  “My favourite writers are French,” he said. “Can you speak French?”

  I shook my head. “My mother can speak French,” I said. “But I don’t know where she is.” I surprised myself at mentioning this so easily.

  He looked at the side of his cup. After a moment he lifted it and slowly drank the hot tea, watching me over the brim. I stared back. He was an acquaintance of The Moth, he had been in our house.

  “I must give you some Sherlock Holmes,” he said. “I think you will like him.”

  “I’ve heard him on the radio.”

  “But read him as well.” Then he began quoting something as if in a trance, intoning in a high, clipped voice.

  “I was certainly surprised to find you there, Holmes.”

  “But not more so than I to find you.”

  “I came to find a friend.”

  “And I to find an enemy.”

  The quiet McCash seemed energized by his own performances, which made the lines funny.

  “I hear you had a close call in one of the Underground lifts….Walter told me about it.” And he proceeded to ask me about it in detail, exactly where it had happened, and what the men looked like. Then, after a pause, he said, “Your mother is probably concerned, don’t you think? Being out that late at night?”

  I stared at him. “Where is she?”

  “Your mother is away. Doing something important.”

  “Where is she? Is it dangerous for her?”

  He made a gesture as if sealing his lips and stood up.

  I was unnerved. “Shall I tell my sister?”

  “I have spoken with Rachel,” he said. “Your mother’s all right. Just be careful.”

  I watched him disappear into the crowd at the station.

  It had felt like an unravelling dream. But the next day, arriving at Ruvigny Gardens again, he slipped me a paperback of Conan Doyle stories, and I began to read them. Yet although I was full of curiosity for answers to what was happening in our lives, there were for me no fog-filled streets or back alleys where I might find clues as to my mother’s whereabouts, or what Arthur McCash was doing in our house.

  * * *

  “ ‘I used often to lie awake through the whole night, and wish for a large pearl.’ ”

  I was almost asleep. “What?” I said.

  “Something I read in a book. Some old man’s wish. I still remember it. I say it to myself every night.” Agnes’s head on my shoulder, her eyes looking at me through the dark. “Tell me something,” she whispered. “Something you remember…like that.”

  “I…I can’t think of anything.”

  “Anything. Who you
like. What you like.”

  “I suppose my sister.”

  “What do you like about her?”

  I shrugged and she could feel that. “I don’t know. I barely see her now. I suppose we felt safe around each other.”

  “You mean you don’t feel safe, not usually?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you feel safe? Don’t just shrug.”

  I looked up into the dark of the large empty room we were sleeping in.

  “What are your parents like, Nathaniel?”

  “They’re all right. He works in the city.”

  “Perhaps you can ask me over to your house?”

  “Okay.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think you will like them.”

  “So they’re all right, but I won’t like them?”

  I laughed. “They’re just not interesting,” I said.

  “Like me?”

  “No. You’re interesting.”

  “In what way?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  She was silent.

  I said, “I feel anything can happen with you.”

  “I’m a working girl. I got an accent. You probably don’t want me meeting your parents.”

  “You don’t understand, it’s a strange household now. Really strange.”

  “Why?”

  “There are always these people there. Strange people.”

  “So I’ll fit in.” More silence, waiting for me to answer her. “Will you come over to my flat? Meet my parents?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. I’d like that.”

  “That’s surprising. You don’t want me in your house, but you’ll come to mine.”

  I said nothing. Then, “I love your voice.”

  “Fuck you.” Her head moved away in the darkness.

  * * *

  —

  Where were we that night? Which house? What part of London? It could have been anywhere. There was no one I liked as much to have beside me. And at the same moment there was a relief in us being possibly finished. Because even if I felt most at ease with this girl who had pulled me through, into, and out of those houses, with all the questioning that came so naturally to her, it was becoming too difficult to explain my double life. In a way I liked it that I knew nothing about her. I did not know her parents’ names. I had never asked her what they did. I was curious only about her, even if Agnes Street was not her name but simply the location of the first house we went to in some borough I’ve now forgotten. She had once grudgingly told me her real name as we worked side by side in the restaurant. She did not like it, she’d said, and wanted a better one, especially after hearing mine. She’d mocked the poshness of “Nathaniel” at first, its pretentiousness, dragging it out even to four syllables. And then, after mocking my name in front of the others, she’d come across me silent during a lunch break and asked if she could “borrow” that piece of ham out of my sandwich. And I had not known what to say.

  I never did with her. She was the talker, but I knew she longed to be the listener as well, in the way she wanted to embrace everything that was taking place around her. Just as she had insisted the greyhounds come into the house when I turned up that night in The Darter’s car, so they had bounded in between her legs and later bent and focused their arrow-like faces towards the sound of our breathing when we were in each other’s arms.

  I did eventually have a dinner with her parents. I had to turn up at her restaurant and go back into the kitchens several times before she actually believed me. She must have felt I was just attempting politeness. We had not been alone since the night she had proposed it in the dark. They lived in a one-and-a-half-room council flat, so she moved her mattress into the living room at night. I watched her gentleness with her quiet parents, how she calmed their awkwardness around me. The wildness and sense of adventure I knew in Agnes from work and in those houses we met in did not exist here. Instead I became aware of her determination to escape her world, working eight hours a day, lying about her age so she could take the night shifts whenever possible.

  She was inhaling the world around her. She wanted to understand every skill, everything people spoke about. With my silence I was probably a nightmare to her. She must have thought I was born with distance in me, secretive about what I feared, secretive about my family. Then one day she ran into me with The Darter and so I introduced him to her as my father.

  * * *

  —

  The Darter was the only one of that cobbled-together group haunting Ruvigny Gardens whom Agnes was to meet. I needed to invent a situation where my mother travelled a great deal. I had become a liar not so much to confuse her as to remove the hurt she felt because I kept the inexplicable situation in my life from her—and perhaps from myself as well. But meeting The Darter was enough for Agnes to feel accepted. Now I had made my life clearer to her, if more confusing to myself.

  The Darter, in this sudden new role as my father, took on a protective and avuncular air with Agnes. She, surprised by his manner, thought he was a “card.” He invited her to a dog track one Saturday, and this finally provided her with an explanation as to how I had turned up that night in Mill Hill with four greyhounds. “The greatest night of my life, so far,” she murmured to him. She loved arguing with The Darter. And I saw instantly what Olive Lawrence found enjoyable in his company. If he allowed himself a questionable remark, he would let Agnes grab him by the neck and attempt to strangle him. I was invited over for a further dinner at her shy parents’, with my father, and he brought a bottle of foreign alcohol in an attempt to impress them. Hardly anyone did that in those days. Most people did not even own a corkscrew, so he took the bottle out onto the balcony and shattered the neck off on a railing. “Watch for glass,” he announced cheerfully. He wondered if anyone at the table had ever eaten goat. “Nathaniel’s mother loves it,” he announced. He proposed changing the station on the radio from the Home Service to some livelier music so he could have a dance with Agnes’s mother, who gave a terrified laugh and clung to her chair. I listened forensically to everything he said that evening, making sure he got the correct name of my school, my mother’s name, and the rest of our prepared plot—for instance, that my mother was now up in the Hebrides for work reasons. The Darter enjoyed this verbose patriarchal role, though his preference was always to get others talking.

  He got on with the parents but he loved Agnes, and so I came to love Agnes too. I started to recognize aspects of her through The Darter’s eyes. He had that quick awareness about people. She walked with us after the meal down the stairs of the council flat building, and then to the car. “Of course! The Morris,” she said, “which brought the dogs!” And if I felt any nervousness about the replacement of my real father with The Darter, it subsided. After that Agnes and I would laugh over my father’s excessive manners. So when I was with my sister and this supposed father floating up the River Lee in the borrowed barge, I almost began to see the three of us as a believable family unit.

  One weekend The Moth had insisted on taking my sister somewhere, so I suggested Agnes replace her on the barge. The Darter hesitated but liked the idea of this pistol, as he called her, coming with us. She may have had a confused version of The Darter’s profession but she was flabbergasted by where we took her. This was not an England she knew. We’d gone barely a hundred yards alongside Newton’s Pool when she dove off the barge in her cotton dress. Then clambered from the water onto the bank, white as porcelain, covered in mud. “That’s a too-caged greyhound,” I heard him say behind me. I just watched. She beckoned us over and climbed back into the boat and stood there, the cold autumn clinging to her in the sunlight, pools of water at her feet. “Give me your shirt,” she said. When we tied up at Newton’s Pool we ate our lunch of sandwiches.

 
There’s another map I learned by heart that I still have clear in my memory, which distinguishes what was river and what was canal or cut in those waterways north of the Thames. And where three locks existed and we had to pause for twenty minutes while river water was admitted into or released out of the dark chambers in which we hung, so we could rise or drop to another height, Agnes in awe as that old industrial machinery rolled and clambered around us. It was the unknown brave old world for her, this seventeen-year-old who usually was tethered to just what was allowed her by class and lack of money, a world she’d probably never leave, who had sadly recited that dream of the pearl. Those weekends were her first ventures into a rural world, and I knew she would always love The Darter for bringing her on what she assumed was his boat. She embraced me, still shivering in my shirt, for inviting her on this river journey. We moved under a panoply of passing trees, which simultaneously floated in the water below us. We entered the shadow of a narrow bridge, silent because The Darter insisted it was bad luck to talk or whistle or even sigh under any bridge. Such rules handed out by him—walking under ladders was not bad luck, but picking up a playing card on the street was tremendous luck—have followed me most of my life, and perhaps they have followed Agnes too.

  Whenever The Darter read a newspaper or racing form he spread it on one thigh that was crossed over the other, and rested his head as if wearily on his hand. Always the same position. On one of those river afternoons I saw Agnes sketching him while he was lost in the intrigues of his Sunday paper. I got up and walked behind her, didn’t stop, just glanced quickly down to see what she had done. It would be the only drawing I saw of hers apart from the one on butcher paper she had given me after that night storm. But it was not The Darter she was drawing, as I thought, but me. Just a youth looking towards something or someone. As if this was what I really was, perhaps would become, someone not intent on knowing himself but preoccupied with others. I recognized it even then as a truth. It was not a picture of me but about me. I was too shy to ask to look at it properly and I’ve no idea what happened to it. Perhaps she gave it to “my father,” even if she did not believe her talent was anything special. She had worked at a day job from the age of fourteen, had never finished school, took an art course at a polytechnic on Wednesday nights that might offer a small window of escape. She would go to work the following morning energized by that other world. It was the one independent pleasure in her variously interlocked existence. During our evenings in borrowed buildings, she would wake suddenly from a deep sleep, see me watching her, and release a guilty and delicious smile. I suppose that was the moment I felt I belonged most to her.