Jo Walton: Among Others

“Morwenna Markova is a bit of a mouthful,” I said, after rather too long.

He laughed. “I said that when you were born. Morwenna and Morganna.”

“She said you chose the names,” I said, not very loudly, staring out of the open window at the moving patchwork of flat fields full of growing things. Some of them are stubble and some of them have been ploughed.

“I suppose I did,” he said. “She had all those lists and she made me choose. They were all very long, and very Welsh. I said it would be a mouthful, but she said people would soon shorten it. Did they?”

“Yes,” I said, still staring out. “Mo, or Mor. Or Mori.” Mori Phelps is the name I will use when I am a famous poet. It’s what I write inside my books now. Ex libris Mori Phelps. And what has Mori Phelps to do with Morwenna Markova and what’s likely to happen to her in a new school? I will laugh about this one day, I told myself. I will laugh about it with people so clever and sophisticated I can’t imagine them properly now.

“And did they call your sister Mog?” he asked.

He hadn’t asked me about her before. I shook my head, then realised he was driving and not looking at me. “No,” I said. “Mo, or Mor, both of us.”

“But how could they tell you apart?” He wasn’t looking at all, he was lighting another cigarette.

“They couldn’t.” I smiled to myself.

“You won’t mind being Markova at school?”

“I don’t care. And anyway, you’re paying for it,” I said.

He turned his head and looked at me for a second, then back to the road. “My sisters are paying for it,” he said. “I don’t have any money except what they allow me. Do you know my family situation?”

What is there to know? I knew nothing about him apart from the fact that he was English, which has caused me no end of playground fights, and that he married my mother when he was nineteen and then ran off two years later when she was in hospital having another baby, a baby that died because of the shock. “No,” I said.

“My mother was married to a man named Charles Bartleby. He was quite wealthy. They had three daughters. Then the war came. He went off to fight in France in 1940 and was captured there and put in a prisoner of war camp. My mother left my three little sisters with their grandmother Bartleby, in the Old Hall, the house we’ve just left. She went to work in an RAF canteen, to do what she could for the war effort. There she met and fell in love with a Polish flying officer called Samuel Markova. He was a Jew. I was born in March 1944. In September 1944 Bartleby was liberated from the camp and came home to England, where he and my mother obtained a divorce. She married my father, who had just learned that his entire family in Poland had been killed.”

Had he had a wife and children too? I felt sure he had. A Polish Jew! I am part Polish. Part Jewish? All that I know about Judaism comes from A Canticle for Leibowitz and Dying Inside . Well, and the Bible, I suppose.

“My mother had some money of her own, but not very much. My father left the RAF after the war and worked in a factory in Ironbridge. Bartleby left his money, and his house, to my sisters. When I was thirteen my mother died in an accident. My sisters, who were grown up by then, came to her funeral. Anthea offered to pay to send me to school, and my father accepted. They’ve been subsidising me ever since. As you know, I married partway through university.”

“What happened to Bartleby?” I asked. He couldn’t have been much older than my grandfather.

“He shot himself when the girls turned twenty-one,” he said, in a tone of voice that closed off further questions.

“What do you ... do?” I asked.

“They hold the purse-strings, but I manage the estate,” he said. He dropped the butt of a cigarette into the ash tray, which was overflowing. “They pay me a salary, and I live at the house. Very Victorian really.”

“Have you lived there ever since you ran off?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“But they said they didn’t know where you were. My grandfather went there and talked to them, all this way.” I was indignant.

“They lied.” He wasn’t looking at me at all. “Did it bother you so much that I ran away?”

“I’ve run away from her too,” I said, which didn’t answer his question but seemed to be enough.

“I knew your grandparents would look after you,” he said.

“They did,” I said. “You needn’t have worried about that.”

“Ah,” he said.

So then I realised guiltily how my very presence in his car was actually a huge reproach. For one thing, there is only one of me, when he abandoned twins. For another, I am crippled. Thirdly, I am there at all; I ran away. I had to ask for his help—and worse, I had to use the social services to ask for his help. Clearly, the arrangements he made for us were far from adequate. In fact, my existence there at that moment demonstrated to him that he is a rotten parent. And, truth be told, he is. My mother notwithstanding, running out on babies isn’t an acceptable thing to do—and in fact, as an abstraction, abandoning babies with her is particularly and unusually irresponsible. But I have run away from her too.

“I wouldn’t have grown up any other way,” I said. My grandparents. The Valleys. Home. “Truly. There was so much about it to love. I couldn’t have had a better childhood.”

“I’ll take you to meet my father soon, perhaps at half term,” he said. He was signalling to turn, and we turned between two elms, both dying, and onto a gravel drive that crunched under the car wheels. It was Arlinghurst. We had arrived.

The first thing that happened in school was the fight about chemistry. It’s a big gracious house in its own grounds, looking stately and Victorian. But the place smells like a school—chalk, boiled cabbage, disinfectant, sweat. The headmistress was well-mannered and distant. She didn’t give my father permission to smoke, which wrong-footed him. Her chairs are too low. I had trouble getting out of mine. But none of that would matter if it wasn’t for the timetable she handed me. First, there are three hours of games every day. Second, art and religious education are compulsory. Third, I can have either chemistry or French, and either Latin or biology. The other choices were very simple, like physics or economics, and history or music.

Robert Heinlein says in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel that the only things worth studying are history, languages, and science. Actually, he adds maths, but honestly they left out the mathematical part of my brain. Mor got all the maths. Having said that, it was the same for both of us: We either understood it instantly or you might as well have used a drill to get it into our heads. “How can you understand Boolean algebra when you still have problems with the concept of long division?” my maths teacher had asked in despair. But Venn diagrams are easy, while long division remains challenging. Hardest of all were those problems about people doing incomprehensible things with no motivation. I was inclined to drift away from the sum to wonder why people would care what time two trains passed each other (spies), be so picky about seating arrangements (recently divorced people), or—which to this day remains incomprehensible—run the bath with no plug in.

History, languages and science pose me no such problems. When you need to use maths in science, it always makes sense, and besides, they let you use a calculator.

“I need to do both Latin and biology, and both French and chemistry,” I said, looking up from the timetable. “But I don’t need to do art or religious education, so it’ll be easy to rearrange.”

The headmistress went through the roof at this, because clearly timetables are sacred or something. I didn’t listen all that much. “There are over five hundred girls in this school, do you propose I inconvenience them all to accommodate you?”