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Schwer
“Hello, Stitch.” I recognized my mother’s voice.
This was the bargain. How did they get so close to my children?”
Where were we going? Into another life.
INHERITANCE
In November of 1959, when I was twenty-eight, after some years of what had felt like wilderness, I bought a home for myself in a Suffolk village that could be reached by a few hours’ train ride from London.
I was at a football match with Mr. Nkoma. I was in mid-river eating sandwiches with Sam Malakite.
White Paint, the house that had once been her parents’, in the region called The Saints.
I did not know at that time that my mother, Rose Williams, after the attack on us had ended all contact with Intelligence. Although
The press had only got hold of her code name, Viola.
Perhaps there was now a chance of discovering that
missing sequence in her life. It was the possibility of an inheritance. In
in order to make recommendations as to what might need to be re-archived or now eradicated. This was referred to as The Silent Correction.
Anything questionable was burned or shredded under myriad hands. So revisionist histories could begin.
“A memoir is the lost inheritance,” you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look.
Saints—the South Elmham Saints, made up of eight villages,
and the Ilketshal Saints, which had half that number. A
There was a distrust on my part and a secretiveness on hers.
Years later when I heard he had died, I held up my glass and said, “Only in open fields.” I was alone in a restaurant when I said this.
“Hello, Sherlock!”
mother. Rachel’s rough judgement of our mother would never abate.
I don't agree it is rough- pretty fair judgment
“No, a boy. His name is Walter.”
“Schumann’s ‘Mein Herz ist schwer.’ You know it, Nathaniel. It’s what we used to hear once or twice a week in our house, late at night, with the piano like a thread in the darkness. When you told me you imagined our mother’s voice joining in. That was the schwer.
Choose your own life. Even your friend The Darter told you that.”
killed. There was mention of a possible betrayal.
“She’s with Norman Marshall.” “Who’s that?” “The Darter,”
her. Though perhaps she felt she ought to influence me in some way. But I don’t think she necessarily wanted my love.
and I saw her face, her expression of—what? Surprise? A sort of joy? So finally, a mother and a son.
I could not remember the last time my mother had touched me.
Paul Morphy,”
Italian Opera House in Paris against the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard—who
like Scaramouche.
“Wow,” I say. “Please don’t say ‘Wow.’ You were only in America a few months.” “It’s an expressive word.”
gravestone, “I have travel’d thro’ Perils & Darkness not unlike a Champion.”
even chosen the line by Blake for the gravestone. So
But my mother knew all of La Comédie Humaine, and I began wondering in which of the books she might have found a version of her own unrecorded life. Whose career did she trace, scattered within those novels, until she could understand herself more clearly? She
slow moving. at this point we should be further along
Marsh Felon had entered my mother’s childhood as a teenager because
The Roof-Climber’s Guide to Trinity, and
“To keep an eye on certain people. We’ve finished one war, but there’s probably another coming.”
for instance about an anonymous thatcher on the coast who took the name of “Long-Flew Knife,” prepared, it was said, to kill German sympathizers
name of a thatcher’s tool suddenly known in every village.
he had become a “Gatherer” and “Sender Out” of young men and women, luring them into silent political service—because
Quiver
And after a time she would be with him again in another city where Allied and enemy agents stumbled across each other. But for him, their roles of uncle and niece were a decoy, not only for their work, which freed him to be with her, but to continue his growing obsession.
would prefer a little more dialogue
the quiver at
her thigh,
her skirt lifted and bunched: was it to satisfy him? His hand wishing to be there. Everything left his mind but that tremor.
and Don't like a son narrating this part
the unusual cluster of moles whose pattern, the man had joked, resembled a star formation called the Astral Plough.
“I’m a married woman, Marsh.”
gmafb
And also that this was a night of fog, with the world around them invisible, anonymous.
