A man and a small girl who hardly knew each other. The girl is holding pictures of smiling men beside old-fashioned aeroplanes, smoking ruins, odd rocks. These she spreads out on the floor in rows and ponders often. Sometimes she arranges them by subject: all the men, all the planes, the stones, the melted buildings, all the pictures of a young man and a young woman who is, yet cannot be, her mother. Sometimes she sets them out by what she thinks of as their “colour”—tone and contrast, the grain, the darkroom burns and fades.
I hadn’t understood, not until I unpacked Jon’s photos in Vancouver, spreading them out for the first time in a new land: my father made me a filmmaker. He’d sent this gift down the years. And I hadn’t known what he’d done, any more than he had. I was ashamed. How could this be a surprise? How could I have failed to recognize his eye—for near and far, foreground and horizon, sharp outline and soft light—as mine?
Only then, far from the house where my small self lingers with the other ghosts, did I see how film has been my way of putting life into the still-lifes of the past.
All these words from Henderson, but no pictures. All these pictures from Jon, but hardly a word. Henderson’s engaging voice— all the more engaging because I’d unearthed it where he grew up, reading the first pages in the very window, perhaps, where he started writing—his voice was filling the silence where my fathers should have been. And I saw then how words bring one nearer to the past than pictures ever can. Images emphasize the farness of that other country, make it seem more outlandish than it really was, a silent film where troops march jerkily to battle and die like puppets. But words show it to you through the eyes of its inhabitants, make you wait in a sodden dawn for the shout to go over the top.
Through many years when I might have searched for Jon, Mother had claimed the quest for herself, her right as next of kin and family head, in a way that brooked no help. And I’d acquiesced because there seemed plenty of time, expecting her to tell me one day, show me his letters, discuss lines of enquiry. But now she was gone and I couldn’t even ask why. Why nothing from Korea? Was she unable to face opening her desk to a Korean stamp? How many letters had she thrown away? Or had Jon simply not written, inhibited by the thought of wartime censors grubbing through his words?
Once I began to question the past, the possibilities grew so outrageous that I felt ashamed for thinking them: could he have killed himself? Deserted? Even defected? Had Mother guessed, or known? Was that the hidden thing?
I’d moved to Canada, away from an addled life. But what had stopped me from writing to the Air Force, tracking down Jon’s old comrades? It’s easy to blame your father, to say a long paralysis afflicted me in this area since Victor Lumley. He’d poisoned the waters in which I might have searched, and the poison stayed fresh for twenty years. Memories do not decay at a uniform atomic rate. Happiness has the shortest half-life, a quick fade to oblivion or nostalgia. But shame, guilt, anger, remorse: these are heavier isotopes, remaining toxic for a lifetime, even generations.
Now I saw these “reasons” as nothing but excuses. That summer when we packed up Mother’s house was also when the adoption law changed—not enough to let me find you, but enough to let myself be found. So I began two searches, to the right and left, after twenty years of staring straight ahead.
A man who’d flown with Jon in Korea had become a dealer in old books. He’d sent a sympathy note over Mother, enclosing his card. Morley Cosworth. Rare and used books. Houses cleared. I decided to go and see him with old books, and take a further step if possible.
I remembered him coming to Tilehouse Street when we were young, a diffident figure, not warm but kind, with a funny remark and a half-crown each for Lottie and me when he said goodbye. In those days he lived in London. Now he had a farm cottage in Cambridgeshire, only an hour away. I hadn’t seen him in nearly thirty years. Mother had always called him by his Air Force nickname, Mole. “Dear Mole,” she’d say. “Straight out of Wind in the Willows.”
Time had made the nickname even apter. He was stooped and blinking behind thick glasses at his dark front door, in an old black sweater like the fur of a mole, clasping my shoulders in large pink hands.
“Livvy! My dear! Come through. Business first, then tea. We’ll take the books out back.” We carried my boxes through the house and down the garden to an ancient henhouse patched with plywood and tarred roofing. Smells of creosote and buckram, an undertow of rot and chickens. Books lined the walls and rose from the floor in wobbly towers, others were stacked in open cartons as if awaiting burial.
He put mine on a desk under a dusty window and began riffling through boisterously, plucking out titles and holding them to the light.
“Ah!” he exclaimed with mock excitement, “The Royal Windermere Yacht Club 1910–1950. Now there’s a work of special interest.”
“Signed by the author,” I said. But he set it down without looking. The hands lifted up another. “The Application of Modern Magnets. Hmm.… Title says it all, really, doesn’t it?” He went on like this for some minutes. “Will twenty be all right for the lot, Livvy? I know it’s not much, but at least you’ll be shut of them. Some dealers only take the good ones.”
His vast stock looked undisturbed, roughly sorted into novels, travel, religion, art, historical and scientific subjects, separated by narrow tunnels just big enough for Mole. I wondered if he ever sold books at all, or merely hoarded them compulsively.
“I can tell by your silence, Livvy, that you’re unimpressed. Try to see my difficulty. If I give you twenty quid today, I may sell them over the next six months for thirty. Thirty-five if I’m lucky. Good thing I’ve got my pension.”
“I’d better stop looking around,” I said, “or I might leave with more than I brought.”
“Ah! Now I can tell which side you’re on.”
He pointed to heaps of books like mine, forlorn and sun-bleached, from the century’s middle years. “Interior decorators take em for filling shelves in boardrooms and hotels. You know, touch of class, aura of a gentleman’s library. They pay by the foot.”
“I’ve stayed in those hotels. I’ve run to those shelves, looked through top to bottom, and never found a single thing to read. Always wondered where they got them.”
“Exactly. There’s nothing there at all. If there was I wouldn’t have done my job. You don’t sell reading books by the foot.
“Tell you what,” he added. “I’ll throw in another fiver. How’s that?”
It was a low moment, flogging stuff that wasn’t really mine, that might have meant something to my parents. The deal done, I had a Parthian glance, noticing a tatty atlas. I remembered Mother saying it had been Jon’s, when he was a schoolboy. Lottie must have tossed it in the box.
“Can I keep this, after all? You keep your fiver.”
Mole took the atlas for a moment, fingering red expanses of lost empire. “Won’t miss it, Livvy. Have it on me.” He touched my arm. “Why don’t we go in now for a cuppa?”
He served very weak tea with a very stale biscuit. His house smelt damp and forgotten, like the biscuit. No woman had lived there for years. The wallpaper—1920s floral in oxblood reds, hot pinks, ochre and baby blue—had once been ugly. Now it was faded enough to have a vague period charm, like a stage set. A grandfather clock ticked in the passage hesitantly, as if about to stall.
“Do you keep in touch with any of the people you knew in Korea?”
“Nobody’s asked me about that in years.” He thought for a moment. “Half of em have fallen off their perches. Dare say a few still go to reunions. Pilots mainly. Once my eyes started to go they only let me fly a desk. Couldn’t recognize myself across a room now. Anyway, it’s all so bloody long ago. When you get to my age, you see how long ago everything is.” He halted, as if out of practice with conversation.
“And how recent, too. I know that sounds utter rubbish, but the other day it struck me I’ve lived through a tenth of the time since Magna Carta. Imagine that! Ten of me end to end a
nd you’re back in the thirteenth century.” He paused again. Loneliness comes in two kinds: one chatters on oppressively, the other can’t find words. Mole seemed to oscillate between the two.
“Being old’s a bit like flying. When you’re up there at forty thousand you see how big the world is, and at the same time how small. My early years seem prehistoric. I mean, look at things now. Korean cars!” He stared into the ticking darkness of the passage. “I think time must have gone by more slowly in the past, don’t you? Before the steam engine. That’s when people began to feel it. An avalanche. Change running away with their lives. All of Victorian literatures about change.”
“Yes,” I said. I was thinking how slowly childhood had passed, until sixteen: a long steep hill, a penance in advance for anything I might do later. Then a greasy slope on the far side.
The tea was cold. The evening had clouded over, drizzle flecking the window. The feeble light seemed to soak into the brick floor, which had sunk over the years below ground level. Mole took the tea things out, and came back with a dusty bottle.
“Must drink to your fathers … er. … Whisky all right? Been saving this for a guest. Livvy, I’m so sorry about your mother. And your father, of course. But you knew that.”
“Were you two close, or more just comrades-in-arms?”
“I like to think I was your fathers friend.” Silence. I’d hurt him.
“I remember you coming to visit us in the early years. It meant so much to Mother. To all of us.”
We drank, he asked about my life and Lottie’s. But my pulse was racing with the big question I had to ask: Did he believe the official version of my father’s disappearance?
Mole thought a long time before answering. “As I was saying, I like to think I was your fathers friend.… But I can’t say he confided in me. I doubt anyone was close enough to Jon for that. In a war you live on the surface. Got to. Your friends go out and come back, and then one morning off you all go and two or three don’t come back. So you keep a certain distance. But Jon seemed unusually … withdrawn towards the end. As if something had upset him. Some news perhaps. One worried a bit. One got a feeling.”
His voice fell to little more than a whisper. “Nobody saw him go down. Never found a trace, did they?”
“How do you mean, a feeling?”
“Nothing really. Nothing at all. I’ve said enough.”
“No you haven’t. Look, never mind old loyalties. Do you think my father could have killed himself? Or even deserted? I want you to tell me if you do. I often feel he’s still alive somewhere. That he’s alive as you or me.”
“If he’s alive, Livvy, he’ll be more alive than me.” Mole gave a bleak chuckle. “He always was. You’re doers, you Wyverns. Not bookworms. He’ll be like you.”
“If I was such a doer I would have come to see you years ago”.
The remark seemed to reassure him.
“I have thought from time to time there’s a chance he didn’t go down in action. That he just. … He wouldn’t have been the first. Once in a while a chap simply flew and flew until the juice was gone, and bailed out. Over Formosa. Or a small island. You could get about a thousand miles in a Meteor. Less in a Sabre. Cowardice, they called it then. I wouldn’t have said so. Certainly not in Jon’s case.” He cleared his throat and took a sip, blinking. The clock gathered itself to strike six, each chime preceded by a struggle, old clockwork mustering a sneeze.
“Your father hated that war. The more he knew it the more he loathed it. A lot of us did. One day I expect it’ll all come out.”
“What will?”
“What we really did over there.”
“Your squadron?”
“We the Free World, Livvy. We the People. Yanks ran the show. Rest of us had to take everything on trust.” He clasped both hands around his glass, as if warming his fingers, his eyes fixed on the window. A farmer was passing on a tractor, followed by a pack of beagles.
“They said we mustn’t let ourselves be fooled. We were dealing with fanatics. Automata. An enemy who held life so cheap he was capable of anything. They said there were no such things as civilians.” Mole took off his spectacles and wiped them carefully. “You’d see these bedraggled peasants, Livvy. Local people. In coolie hats. Hundreds of em straggling down muddy tracks in the hills, mile after mile. Carts and bundles and pigs and whatnot. Yanks said they weren’t peasants at all. They were infiltrators. Chinese and North Korean regulars, cleverly disguised.” He gulped his drink. “Perhaps some of them were. They showed us films. Old women unmasked as young soldiers, confessing on their knees. We believed it at first. But when they started ordering chaps who’d flown over Germany—chaps like Jon—to mow down peasants.…”
A pink hand reached for the whisky, refilled his glass, the neck of the bottle drumming on the rim. He was silent again. I waited.
“I remember something he said, Livvy. Not long before he disappeared. If those are Chinese troops, Mole.… If those are Chinese troops, what are all those children doing down there?”
About a year before Mother’s death, I bought a flat on the strength of the Nova deal (U.S. network, good money). It’s the top of a fifties walk-up on English Bay, a pile of mildewed stucco in a jungle of morning glory and azaleas near the old Sylvia Hotel, where Errol Flynn is believed to have died of some sexual excess and raccoons climb up the ivy to steal chocolate from the rooms.
I painted everything white, for the light. For colour I had cyclamens and flowering cacti, Rivera prints, Mexican rugs. Sparrows nesting in a soffit showered guano down my kitchen window, but I loved the cheeps and little bald heads popping out to be fed when the parents came home.
I bought it (the bank did) for the view. I can walk along the bay on summer nights beside water like silk, lights staining down from the far shore, gulls palely sleeping at the edge of the dark. On the boulevard are small Asian palms and a smell of seaweed from the beach, and cedar bark, cherry blossom, mock orange.
The afternoon sun burns through a drift of woodsmoke from a lumber mill; out on the bay a seal rises in a tanker’s wake; and islands stand on the water, some helmet-shaped, others like drowned bodies, all furred with trees, olive-black in winter and lettuce green in the glycerine light of spring.
So I see my home, a minds-eye view. Strange to picture that cold arm of this ocean whose warm heart I hear beating on the reef. As I describe it for you I’m back there. Each hour in memory is an hour of parole.
Film’s an ephemeral art. One idea in ten gets taken seriously, one tenth of those get developed, and a tenth of the survivors make the screen. Odds of a thousand to one. But I love the process, the research. Suddenly, overnight, I become expert in something I’ve never thought about: the French and Indian War, the Dead Kennedys (the band), life in deep-sea vents, the drinking feats of Malcolm Lowry, the diving feats of the sperm whale (it can go ten times deeper than a nuclear submarine). In the past few years I’ve lost myself in all the above, ransacking libraries, interrogating illustrious professors. Things I’ve scarcely heard of become my life, keep me up late, invade my dreams. They become affairs. Which is why filmmakers, like actors and artists, are impossible to live with.
Several men have tried it over the years. The one who lasted longest was a seaplane pilot. Michael. He used to take me across to the Gulf Islands. Fly the Saltspring Quickie: Easy, affordable, and over in 20 minutes. He owned a piece of woodland with a cabin up the Sunshine Coast (one of Canada’s great wishful thoughts, he said, like the Progressive Conservative Party). We’d go there weeks at a time, until the world beyond the huge trees would disappear and we were at the centre of everything, a feeling I’d never had in England. I know what Dr. Freud would say about my pilot, but what I really loved about him was his love of the outdoors. Michael gave me that, and I still have it, though we lost touch some years ago when he moved to Venezuela.
The illustrious professor I’m “seeing” is married, older, an authority on Pacific writers—by which he means any au
thor he admires who’s written about this ocean or lived beside it. I’ll call him Bob. It is he who’s come to rescue me, at great risk to marriage and career. Bob is my friend on the outside.
Our relationship was the stolen kind, little holidays from reality at my flat and out-of-town hotels. But when Bob heard I was in prison, he dropped everything and flew out to Tahiti. He says he’s combining my rescue with research for a book on Pierre Loti’s Mariage—his “first real book” in years—and I suppose that’s what his wife thinks. I know he’s here because he’s a good man and he loves me. He must. All this way, all this risk and expense, to hold hands with an accused murderess through bars.
He made it clear from the outset that he would never leave his wife because of their children (two boys, the younger still at school), and this suited both of us just fine. I think he used to worry about my childlessness—that a woman at my time of life might be in the grip of womb-hunger, fishing for sperm with a Ph.D. behind it. I didn’t tell him about you (I’ve told nobody in Canada). I merely said I’d had enough of children when I was one myself.
You may have guessed by now that although I’ve never married I like men. Perhaps my interest is anthropological, the lure of the Other. When you grow up without them in the house, men are a strange tribe at the fringe of civilized life. I’ve gone a bit native in my fieldwork among them. I look around me nowadays at the new man—the kind who changes the baby’s diaper in the airport washroom—and think I may have become a throwback, a Neanderthal, loyal to an earlier incarnation of the race.
Our first meeting was professional. I’d begun work on Great Lives, a series on dead Canadians, in this case gin-soaked Malcolm Lowry, who wrote Under the Volcano in a squatter’s shack outside Vancouver.
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