Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

Author:Michael Ondaatje
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

In the Archives

I worked each day in a fractional corner of that nameless seven-storey building. There was only one man I knew there and he kept his distance. One day he entered a lift I had just stepped into, said, “Hello, Sherlock!” as if the name and greeting were enough of a code between us, and as if the exclamation point that his voice provided would be enough to satisfy the person surprisingly discovered in such a place. Tall, still bespectacled, the same sloping shoulders, as boyish as ever, Arthur McCash got off on the next floor, and I stepped out briefly to watch him wander away from me to some office or other. I knew, as very few probably did, that under his white shirt there were three or four deep scars on his stomach, a bevelled permanence on his white skin.

I was coming into London by train and staying during the week at a rented one-room flat near Guy’s Hospital. There was less chaos in the city now, a sense of people reordering their lives. On weekends I returned to Suffolk. I was living in two worlds as well as two eras. This was the city where I half believed I might catch sight of a certain pale blue Morris belonging to The Darter. I recalled its military-looking crest on the bonnet, the amber-coloured indicator lights clicking up to signal a right- or left-hand turn, then withdrawing back into the structure of the door frame like the ears of a greyhound in aerodynamic flight. And how The Darter, as if a sensitive owl, would catch a false note in the timbre of the engine, a murmur in its heart, so that within minutes he’d be out and removing the valve cover on the 918 cc engine in order to brighten the points of the spark plugs with a strip of sandpaper. The Morris, I recalled, was his flawed joy, and any women he escorted in it needed to accept the fact that he showed it more love and concern than he would ever give them.

But I had no idea if The Darter still owned such a car, or how I might track him down. I’d attempted to visit him at The Pelican Stairs but he had moved away. The only person who had known The Darter well was The Forger of Letchworth, and I sought him out, but he too had disappeared. The truth was, I missed that remarkable table full of strangers who had altered Rachel and me more than our disappeared parents. Where was Agnes? There seemed no way of finding her. When I went to her parents’ flat, they were no longer there. The restaurant in World’s End did not remember her, the polytechnic had no address for her. So my eyes were constantly on the lookout for that familiar blue outline of a two-door Morris.

Months passed at my job. I began to realize that whatever papers might have contained material on my mother would never be revealed to me.

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