colonial secretary
“When you put it like that …”
“It
“In the middle of all this?”
“No point in hanging about once the decision’s been made. Thanks for everything, amigo, and adios.”
“Who’s replacing him?”
Elliott smiled. “You don’t expect me to hand you everything on a plate, do you?”
“No, although a piece of fish would be nice, before it’s cooked to buggery.”
They ate the fish with a simple salad of tomatoes so sweet that it suddenly made sense why they were classified as a fruit rather than a vegetable.
“I’ve been doing all the talking,” said Elliott. “Time for a bit of quid pro quo.”
“You really think I have anything up my sleeve to match what I’ve just heard?”
“I was talking about you. Tell me something about Max Chadwick that I don’t already know.”
“There’s a whole load of stuff you don’t know.”
“Don’t be so sure; I’ve read your file.”
“There’s a file on me?”
“You’re the information officer in a key theater of war. What do
“Old Arsebreath?”
Elliott laughed. “That’s a level of detail it doesn’t go into.”
It came pretty close, though. Apparently Max had been described as “coming from a good family.”
“Well, that’s rubbish, for a start,” he protested. “My great-grandfather made a lot of money sending coal miners to their deaths. His son was a drunk, a bully, and a bigamist who never did an honest day’s work in his life.”
“A bigamist?”
“Well, maybe not technically, but he led a double life with another woman and other children.”
“And his son?”
“My father? He’s proof that the apple doesn’t always fall close to the tree.”
“Good on him,” said Elliott. “And that’s from a man who also had a bully for a father.”
Elliott already knew that Max’s mother had died when he was young. He didn’t know that she’d died in labor, giving birth to Max.
“There—something you didn’t know about me.”
“Doesn’t make the grade. I want something more personal.”
Max thought on it. Then he told Elliott about the letter his mother had written him.
It was a common enough practice, certainly for women like his mother, whose narrow hips weren’t best suited for bringing babies into the world. The doctor had warned her that it would be a difficult birth, that she might have to choose between herself and the child. She had chosen Max, and she had survived long enough to hold him in her arms before the loss of blood had killed her. Sometimes he saw himself spread-eagled on her chest, worn out from all the effort, as she slowly slipped away into oblivion. That’s how it had been, apparently; his father had told him so.
His father hadn’t told him about the letter she’d written to him, her unborn child—well, not until Max was sixteen. He’d found it long before then, though, hidden in his father’s desk, biding its time. The desk had always held a deep fascination for him, with its inlaid mother-of-pearl decoration and its drawers and pigeonholes stuffed with detritus from the world of adults. It was an irresistible Aladdin’s cave for a young boy, and whenever the coast was clear, he would go and poke around in it.
He found the letter tucked away with some other correspondence in a leather portfolio. It wasn’t sealed, and at first he was unsure what he was reading. Not long after, when he was packed off to boarding school near Oxford, he took the letter with him, a guard against loneliness. It had worked. The disembodied voice of his mother— recorded in her distinctive handwriting, with its looping p’s and g’s and y’s—had blunted his sense of isolation. She’d been with him, watching over him.
It was a long letter, and in it she spelled out the story of her life, everything from her childhood in the countryside near Versailles to the comical first encounter with his father in the lobby of the apartment building in Paris. She went to great pains to say that he (although she used the neutral “you” throughout) was the product of a fine and fulsome love affair, and she signed off with a line of French that made no sense to him whatsoever.
Had his French teacher been some creaky old chap in a tweed jacket, he probably wouldn’t have sought him out and asked for a translation. Mademoiselle Leckford, as Lucinda was known, had offered an altogether different prospect. She was young and pretty, and all the boys were a little in love with her. Max copied out the line on a piece of paper, which he presented to her after a class:
She scrutinized it a moment before asking, “Where does it come from?” Seeing that the question unsettled him, she quickly added, “You don’t have to say.”
But he told her anyway. It was good to have the excuse to tell someone about his mother and the letter she
