Mother’s trunk is made of iron and red-painted oakwood. Carved into the lid, in curlicued letters filled with dust, are her maiden initials – EHR. The wood is split and covered with a film of oily dust. The padlock and key are missing; nevertheless an iron hasp fastens the lid, the underside of which features three hand-painted miniatures. When my grandfather Mr Rafferty was still a watchmaker he collected these vignettes on his business trips to Asia, having planned to use them to decorate his export-bound watches. Instead he gave them to my mother. The first painting, the smallest and most finely detailed, depicts a littoral with the tide in full ebb; sand occupies the bottom third of the picture and the remaining area is filled by the sea; inscribed by the edge of the water is a little crab. The second scene is more typical of the period: a boat, armed with cannons and culverins, sets sail under a glowering sky; the port is thronged with well-wishers, and behind this multitude loom the dream-vistas of an Eastern city. The third shows the vizier’s daughter Scheherazade kneeling beside King Shahrayar, who is wrapped in the bejewelled blankets of his divan. Dinarzad, Scheherazade’s sister, peeps out from beneath the bed. All three are awake; the King’s eyes are wet and amazed; Dinarzad smiles; Scheherazade looks commandingly towards the King, her arms raised, her whole person poised as if to say: ‘Listen!’
Focusing my powers of listening, relaunching my history after that interloper Edrisi, and fixing my mind upon the sounds that flocked the air in the months after Rex and Mr Rafferty met in the basement of 16 Ingolstadt Place, I can reveal that my parents were married without pomp in June 1939. Reverberating around the cloisters I hear the sound of their dry-kissing lips.
There are other sounds that reach me from that day. I hear a chorus of well-wishers, admirers, advice-givers, but I can’t detect the voice of Mr Rafferty. Years on the run had left him reluctant to appear in public, despite the legitimacy conferred upon him by his association with the War Office. He was unwilling to assume his duties as father-of-the-bride and, twenty minutes before the service began, approached the official photographer, an ungainly colossus who was lost when not peering through his viewfinder, and confiscated his apparatus, indicating that he – father-of-the-bride – would swap roles with him. The photographer, accustomed to life experienced in miniature, was led out of the church and into the arms of my mother, who, as always, indulged his paranoia.
Thus, it was not Mr Rafferty whom the guests observed accompanying Mother to the altar, but an awkward giant dressed in a grey suit. Had they looked over their shoulders, however, they would have seen an equally taciturn fellow in dark glasses, smiling like an open piano.
Mr Rafferty did not utter a word that day; instead he let his camera do the talking. (He was a shutterbug as well as a watchmaker, the clock and camera being kith and kin by virtue of their desire to measure, sort, and finally kill time.) His camera hung dormant during the ceremony, covered by his jacket, and awoke in the daylight of the churchyard. Click – Mother is captured in her accordion-pleated skirt with red roses in her hair. Click – a portrait of the extended family with aching grins (Mr Rafferty waited too long before he tripped the shutter). Click – a dazzled-looking father-of-the-bride. Click – Father, his thick fair hair refusing to settle, despite the superabundance of hair wax, into a side parting, giving him a calamitous look. Click – the happy couple, their eyes bursting with hand-tinted colour; Mother’s green and diaphanous; Father’s the pale blue of a feeble dreamer.
The only evidence my grandfather left of his attendance at the ceremony were snapshots. As he was the photographer, and not the photographed, no trace of his presence survives. I could go on describing the photographs. But, although they are no doubt lodged in some cranny in the attic, and easily found, I shall leave them to the mice. Already, without setting eyes on them, my notion of the wedding has acquired a mawkish haze.
Shortly after the wedding, my father left Oxford, Lagos-bound, where he had been posted to work as an Assistant District Officer. My mother planned to join him some months later, but towards the end of July, as Europe prepared to unleash its martial hate, the government stopped non-essential sea-passages to Africa. And so Mother, who had packed her trunk in readiness, remained in Oxford during the war. She continued to look after the shop, since even during the war – perhaps especially because time takes on different properties, in particular for those who experience the rupture of death – people need to tell the time. During the onslaught, Mother refused to have me conceived. ‘I will not birth my child into this firepit,’ she told Rex in 1942, during his only leave. And so I, who, once introduced to the womb, chose to linger, was absented from the war. As I sit here at my desk, cold, my skylight framing the starless night, I ask myself questions. Would it have been different had I been born in the earlier decade? Would it have been me – Evie Steppman – no matter when Mother fell pregnant? Was I destined to matricide, or did circumstance make me a murderer?
…
I visited Mr Rafferty this afternoon. I found him in an excitable mood. As he swung open the door to his room, he said, ‘Welcome, Herr Hoffmantel, you’re already late for the performance.’ He gestured me to sit. He busied himself in the white rectangle of his room, adjusting invisible knobs on the few pieces of furniture – iron bed, washstand, several moulded chairs, a low table; each white, seamless and unforgiving – doing little exercises with his fingers. Every so often he knocked on the side of the bed, scuttled to the door and flung it open. ‘Come in, Mr Mudge,’ he would say. Or, ‘Monsieur Le Roy, it’s wonderful to have you here.’ He ushered each new arrival to their seat. After some time, during which more elaborate preparations were made, Mr Rafferty turned and faced his audience. He took out an ivory stick, which, pinched between thumb and forefinger, he brandished in an exaggerated arc. After appealing for calm, he went to the small perspex window at the far end of the room, flipped the latch, climbed onto one of the chairs and cocked his right ear as far as the white bars would allow. The throb of an Edinburgh afternoon drifted into the room. He snapped the window shut. Silence. ‘Take your seats, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘The performance is about to begin.’ He came down from the chair. He resembled a decrepit circus master. ‘Signorina Marías, settle comfortably, I know how you like to fidget! And you, Mr Sinai, here’s a handkerchief for your cucumber … to which we are all indebted, but whose noise we mustn’t let spoil the performance. Regrettably, I must add, the Gräfin von Hahn-Hahn is unable to attend. She telephoned me this morning to say she has just invented electricity.
‘Each of you is skilled in the art of listening,’ he continued. ‘You each received an aural training from childhood. This performance, then, is constituted by you. I am simply the conduit.’
Mr Rafferty once again opened the window. He stood facing the angled square of perspex, his back to me, both arms raised, in his left hand the ivory wand with which he conducted the silence. For, in spite of the open window, silence reigned over that padded room. Then he raised his arms, balled his hands and punched the air. At once, silence changed her name.
In swept the thrum of traffic, dully, distantly, vibrations of cars, buses, truck-thunder, the sudden shriek of a bicycle’s brakes. Silence. From which opened quiet machine-noise, the Green Man’s yelp. And now the flurry of footsteps, shouting voices, the collapsed hobble of the old. And there were seagulls, perched on roofs and everywhere circling; shifting, the sand at Portobello beach; shivering, the leaves of the old oak on Princes Street.
At length, when the city was sounding in an immense caterwauling, Mr Rafferty leaped to the window and snapped it shut. Delighted with his performance, I began to clap.
Later that evening, as I waited for a bus at York Place, the silence was immense. For the first time in many months the ringing in my ears had disappeared. And the few sounds I heard at that almost completely deserted hour were solitary and discontinuous, which only deepened the silence.
Why does that which makes the greatest noise breed silence? Certainly, after the cruel disharmony of war, in the weeks and months following May 1945, and stretching into the New Year, a great silence prevailed.
Silent were the skies. Silent the soldiers, inched under the soil. Silent too the burned bodies, heaped in cinders. Unspeaking were my parents after the war. Silent the guns. Silent the wasted cavalcade of men, women and children as they journeyed, blind, towards their homes that were different to how they had left them. Without noise, heaped under blankets, my parents made love for the first time. Silent too the fires that had burned down cities. Silent the gas chambers, an echo of their quietening work. Silently the seed thrust towards the egg. Silent the monsters of war, spent of fuel. Silent the waves breaking against the bow of the mailboat as it pierced the seas towards Africa. Silence at the Captain’s table, where Rex and Evelyn once dined on their way to Lagos. Silent, without tears, were the mothers whose children died for Progress. Silent the birds in Japan. Silent the rock. Without words, my parents crossed the bar of Lagos and motored towards Customs Wharf. Silent the yachts, rocking in the wake of their boat. Silent the lawns, with their muted underlife. Silently my parents sipped tea on the veranda. A season of silence.
And all the time I was growing inside Mother and listening.