Ondaatje's Warlight begins in London in 1945, the year peace arrives on paper but not yet inside a house. A boy of fourteen watches his parents leave for what he's told is business abroad, and finds himself in the care of two men his sister nicknames for a moth and a bird, men who turn out to have spent the war in ways nobody thinks to explain to a child. The curfew has technically ended. It survives anyway, in the boy's habits: streets he learns to read for which windows still hold a light, doors he learns not to ask about.
I think about that premise every time I remember the week my mother had surgery. I was seven or eight, crouched on a low stool at the edge of her hospital bed, drawing a superhero with hair too yellow to belong to anyone. A nurse told her I had talent. I don't remember the nurse's face anymore, only the smile I gave her, and the fact that the whole family was there, crowded into a room too small for it, morning light coming warm through the blinds as if it wanted in on whatever we were celebrating. I had no idea yet how rare that room was. Every uncle, every cousin, present and accounted for. No strangers standing in for anyone.
That's the quiet unease at the center of Warlight: not that the guardians are dangerous, exactly, but that they are kind in their own limited way, and the boy has to build his sense of safety out of people who are only passing through his life. My family filled a hospital room out of habit, without discussing it, the way you'd set a table. His had to be improvised from a moth and a coat that smelled of the docks. I don't know which of us learned more about love. I know which of us slept easier.
The scent takes its name from the hour the streets go quiet, not from fear of it: a lamp behind oilskin, leather still damp from the rain, bergamot caught on a coat collar, the cedar smell of a bookcase inherited rather than bought. Something for the version of a house where the people looking after you might be strangers, and the lamp stays lit anyway.