Spies (2002) (13 page)

‘Which way now?’ I ask humbly, my voice still not much more than a whisper.

Keith scans the wide horizon of this desolate sea. The only signs of life are tiny figures working on one or two distant islands formed by patches of allotments. Miles away on the other side, like the low cliffs on a far shore, are the last houses in the uncompleted streets where building stopped. What we have to believe is that, from somewhere over there, someone has been coming all the way across this moonscape every evening to check the contents of the croquet box, and that to the same remote destination Keith’s mother has now already made the same desolate journey in reverse.

But where, on all that wide shore, is their landfall?

‘There must be a path somewhere,’ murmurs Keith.

We cast about in the dust where the lane expires. Everywhere among the coarse clumps of vegetation the cracked soil shows through, like the bald pate among the tufts of hair on my father’s head, so that there are paths everywhere and nowhere.

We’re at the end of the world here, and the same unthinkable thought has returned to both of us. We have to go back to the last place we’re sure she reached: the Cottages.

We dawdle about, though, in the vague, nothingy terrain at the end of the Lanes. Still neither of us says anything about the Cottages, and I know Keith’s as reluctant as I am, because there’s nothing that even he will be brave enough to do when we get there.

Everyone calls the place where we are the Barns, though there are no barns to be seen, only a desolation of overgrown brick footings and collapsed sheets of black corrugated iron, left over from farm buildings that must have fallen down years ago. Even these last traces are beginning to disappear beneath clumps of elder and a wreckage of old enamel bowls with their bottoms hanging out. There was an old tramp living in here somewhere last winter, but Norman Stott says the police took him away. We poke around among the old pots and pans, putting off our return to the Cottages. Keith picks up a flint and throws it at a blackened kettle lying near the low, tumbled brickwork among the elders. It rings out sharply in the silence. I pick up a flint in imitation and throw it, but the kettle remains silent. We’ve found something to do to keep ourselves occupied for a while. Keith throws another flint, and hits. I throw again and miss.

There’s a movement among the elders.

Keith, about to throw for a third hit, lowers his arm. ‘The old tramp’s back,’ he whispers.

We wait. There’s no further movement. Keith throws his flint at the elders. It hits some other metal object – something larger and less hollow, by the sound of it. One of the sheets of old corrugated iron that are lying around, perhaps.

Keith creeps closer. I creep with him.

Among the few remaining courses of broken brickwork there seem to be some steps leading down into the ground, either to a secret passageway or to the remains of a cellar. Someone has laid a few sheets of corrugated iron on top of the brick footings so that they make a kind of roof.

‘He’s down there,’ whispers Keith. ‘I can hear him.’

I listen, but all I can hear is the sudden, familiar rattle of a train somewhere behind the trees, where the line finally emerges from the long cutting it goes into behind the McAfees. There’s something about the offhand, everyday indifference of the sound that makes these dreary woods seem even drearier. I catch the sad, sour smell of the elders in my nostrils, as acrid as cat’s pee, and instantly evocative of the soft, pulpy uselessness of the elder’s wood, which won’t burn on a bonfire, and which feebly snaps if you try to make anything out of it. The hopelessness of the elder’s pretensions to be a proper tree – its humiliating position at the very bottom of the hierarchy of trees – seems curiously appropriate to the way the familiar world finally gutters out here at the end of the Lanes. We’ve come on a journey from the highest to the lowest – from the silver-framed heroes on the altars in the Haywards’ house; through the descending social gradations of the Close, from the Berrills and Geests to us; from us to the Pinchers; on down through the squalors of the Cottages and their wretched occupants; and then reached even lower, to an old derelict taking refuge under a sheet of corrugated iron in a stinking elder bush, without even a dog to speak up for him. Without even a privet to go to the lavatory in.

Where does he do it? On the ground somewhere, like an animal. I can smell it, mixing with the smell of the elder. I can feel the germs coming off it.

The sound of the train has died away. And now I do hear something. Coughing. Very quiet coughing. He’s trying not to let us hear him. He’s scared. Scared of Keith, scared of
me
. He’s
that
low in the table of human precedence.

At once, after all my cowardice in the Lanes, I’m brave. I look around for an instrument I can use to make the old man a little more frightened still. ‘What?’ whispers Keith. I say nothing. I go across to one of the heaps of old pots and pans, and drag out a bent and rusty iron bar. I’m taking the lead for once. I’m showing Keith that he’s not the only one who can think of plans and projects.

I reach out with the bar and tap gently on the corrugated iron above the old man’s head. The quiet coughing ceases at once. He’s prepared to suffocate rather than let us know he’s there.

I tap again. Silence.

Keith looks round and finds an old, grey piece of wood that seems to have split away from a fence post. He taps on the corrugated iron with it in his turn.

Silence.

I tap. He taps. Still no response. Still the old tramp’s holding his breath down there.

I bring the bar down on the corrugated iron as hard as I can. Keith does the same with his piece of wood. We rain blows down, until the iron begins to dent. The sound fills our heads so that we don’t have to think about the inconclusive end of our expedition, and the prospect of going back to the Cottages. It fills the great desolation at the end of the Lanes with human purpose and activity.

If it’s as loud as this out here, what must it be like
underneath
the corrugated iron? I can’t help laughing at the thought. I can’t wait to see the comical terror on the old man’s face as he finally comes rushing out and we run off into the Lanes.

He doesn’t emerge, though, and in the end we have to stop, panting and laughing too much to continue.

No sign of him. No sound, either, apart from our own commotion, and another train rattling indifferently by behind the trees. It’s swallowed up in the depths of the cutting, and the great silence returns.

I remember the time when Dave Avery and some of the boys from round the corner shut poor Eddie Stott up in the dark in the Hardiments’ garden shed, and then beat on the roof. I remember the unearthly animal sounds of Eddie’s terror.

The silence from under the corrugated iron is even more unearthly. Not a cry, not a curse, not a breath.

Our laughter has ceased. I feel a sudden chill finger of anxiety touch my heart, and I know that the same sensation is afflicting Keith.

The old man’s
not
dead, though. How could he be dead? People don’t die from a bit of teasing!

They die from fear, though …

Keith throws down his piece of wood. I throw down my iron bar. We don’t know quite what to do.

Why don’t we go down the steps and look? – Because we can’t.

And suddenly we both turn and run, neither of us leader for once, neither of us led.

We run and run, until first the dogs rushing at us and then the children staring at us force us to slow down. Even when we’re past the Cottages, and the last of the barking has died away behind us, we say nothing to each other. We walk on past the mouldering boot, past the nettles and the little field of dock and sorrel, past the sycamore with the rope hanging from it, until at last we are out of that skulking, ancient land beyond the tunnel.

We walk silently up the Close. We’re silent now because our panic has subsided, and we’re both thinking about the old tramp. About the unseen, unheard presence who’d die rather than show his face or let his voice be heard. The unknown who remains unknown. The value in the equation that’s yet to be determined. X.

Keith’s father is standing at his gate in his Home Guard uniform as we approach.

‘Mummy’s still not back from Auntie Dee’s,’ he snaps at Keith. ‘I’ve got a parade this evening. Early supper. She hasn’t forgotten?’

So his mother’s not back. It takes a moment for the implications of this to sink in. Then my stomach turns over. I glance at Keith. The same thought has occurred to him; his face has gone white. He catches my eye for a moment and looks away. His gaze becomes filmy and vacant. His grey lips twist into one of his father’s mirthless smiles.

‘Run down the road and remind her, will you?’ says Keith’s father.

I can’t look at Keith. I can’t let myself think about what he’s going to do, or what he’s going to say.

‘Don’t bother,’ says his father. ‘Here she is.’

We watch her come up the Close from the corner with her shopping basket. She’s hurrying for once, almost running.

‘So sorry, Ted,’ she says at last, out of breath. ‘Your parade – I know. I went to Paradise. Tried everywhere for a rabbit for the weekend. No luck. Ran all the way back.’

Keith turns away in silence and walks towards the house.

‘Supper on the table in ten minutes, then, old girl,’ says his father. ‘All right?’

He follows Keith into the house. The famous bayonet bounces in its scabbard on his khaki buttock.

Keith’s mother looks at me as she turns to close the gate behind her. For a moment she stands absolutely still, considering me as she gets her breath back. ‘Was it you two?’ she says softly.

I look away.

‘Oh, Stephen,’ she says sadly. ‘Oh, Stephen!’

So how much did Stephen understand at this point about what was going on?

I’m outside Meadowhurst, the dull new house that was once an overgrown no man’s land called Braemar, and I’m gazing fixedly at the second tub of geraniums from the left on the hard standing. It must be occupying almost exactly the same piece of space that Stephen occupied as he sat in the lookout for hours at a time in the days that followed the expedition to the Lanes. Keith had stopped coming out to play, and Stephen was too uneasy about what was going on inside the Haywards’ house to knock on his door. So there he sat, on his own. His bottom was resting on the hard dust now hidden beneath the paving stones. His head must have been more or less exactly where those scarlet blossoms are now.

I gaze at them, baffled.

From the living-room window a boy’s watching me, as absorbed and intent as I am. He’s about the same age as Stephen was then, and he’s trying to work out what’s going on inside the head of this old man who stands gazing with such insane concentration at a tub of his mother’s geraniums. He’s thinking that he’s never seen me in the Close before. He’s remembering all the stories of the thieves who stole the ornamental bird bath from the next-door neighbour’s garden, of the sick ghosts who haunt the edges of the familiar world with outstretched hands, of the pedlars he’s been warned against who offer all the terrible pleasures that must be refused, of the torturers of children, of the wandering random murderers …

I ignore him. I go on thinking about that head over there, the one growing out of the geranium pot. The thing that’s so difficult to grasp is that it’s the very same head as the one that’s here on my shoulders thinking about it – and yet I’ve still no more idea of what’s going on inside it than the boy behind the curtains has about what’s going on inside my present head. I imagine that it’s a shifting and comfortless tangle of recollection and apprehension. That it keeps recalling the thunderstorm of blows on the black iron and the silence that followed; the look in Keith’s mother’s eyes as she turned back to him at the gate and asked him her soft question; the x’s and exclamation marks; the kisses in the blackout. That it hasn’t forgotten the coming dark of the moon.

Impressions … fears … But what did Stephen
make
of them all? What did he actually
understand
?

What do
I
understand? Now? About anything? Even the simplest things in front of my eyes? What do I understand about the geraniums in that tub?

Only that they’re geraniums in a tub. About the biological, chemical, and molecular processes that lie behind that flaunting scarlet, or even the commercial and economic arrangements that create the market in bedding plants, or the sociological, psychological and aesthetic explanations for the planting out of geraniums in general and these geraniums in particular, I understand more or less nothing.

I don’t need to. I simply glance in that direction and at once I’ve got the general story: geraniums in a tub.

I’m not sure, now the question’s been raised, if I really understand even what it means to
understand
something.

If Stephen understood anything at all about what was going on, then I think it was this:

That he had betrayed Keith’s mother’s trust and let her down; that he had made things worse in some kind of way; that everything in the world was more complicated than he had supposed; that she was now caught in the same difficulty as he was about knowing what to think and what to do, the same deep unease.

I ask myself one very simple, basic question as I stare at the geraniums: did Stephen still think that she was a German spy?

My eyes unfocus as I try to recollect; the geraniums become a vague scarlet blur.

So far as I can piece it together, as the heir to Stephen’s thoughts, he neither thought she was nor didn’t think she was. Without Keith there to tell him what to think, he’d stopped thinking about it at all. Most of the time you don’t go around thinking that things are so or not so, any more than you go around understanding or not understanding them. You take them for granted. I’ve no doubts at all that those geraniums are geraniums, but all the same I’m not actually thinking the thought, ‘Those flowers are geraniums,’ or ‘Those flowers aren’t nasturtiums.’ I’ve got other things to occupy my mind, believe me.

Let me come at it another way. Let me ask myself an even simpler question: what did Stephen think she was actually
doing
?

I’m not sure he thought about even this in any very concrete way. What did he think Mr McAfee did, when he went off at the weekend in his special constable’s uniform? If the question ever crossed Stephen’s mind, he simply assumed that Mr McAfee continued to do what he was doing as he cycled down the road, which was being a special constable. What did Stephen think Mr Gort did? Well, he was a murderer, so presumably he murdered people. I can’t recall Stephen ever puzzling over who he murdered and why. What did Stephen’s father do? He vanished in the morning, he reappeared in the evening. Vanishing and reappearing seemed a full enough job description for all practical purposes.

What
do
spies do, for all anyone knows or cares? They behave suspiciously. Keith’s mother was behaving suspiciously. Wasn’t that enough?

In any case, the mystery at the heart of that shifting cloud of simultaneous possibilities was now x, the silent, unseen presence in the Barns. What did Stephen think about him?

He thought that he was a German. The less clear the Germanness of Keith’s mother’s became, the more clearly it was transferred to her courier or controller. The Germanness, revealed by Keith’s initial perception, was the source from which the whole sequence of events had taken its rise. It remained, like some residual belief in God amidst a sea of doubt about the theological details, the one sure item of faith that Stephen had to hold on to.

But Stephen also thought that he was an old tramp, since he lived in a place where old tramps lived.

So Stephen thought that he was an old German tramp?

Not at all. The idea that there might be old tramps of German nationality never entered his head. What he thought, as I understand it, was two quite unrelated things with unrelated parts of his mind: that the unseen figure in the Barns was German, and that at the same time he was something quite different – an old tramp.

Though I suspect that in a third part of Stephen’s mind there was an unconscious link between being an old tramp and being German that made the two beliefs a little more compatible: the
germs
with which old tramps were presumably covered, and which were presumably so called because they were as evil and insidious as Germans.

Did Stephen think that this ambiguous figure was also Auntie Dee’s mysterious boyfriend, as Barbara Berrill had suggested, or that Keith’s mother might be kissing him under the black corrugated iron? No – notions of that sort had become more ridiculous than ever. Even if people’s aunts had boyfriends, they certainly didn’t have boyfriends who were old tramps. Even if people kissed people in the blackout, they certainly didn’t kiss germ-laden Germans.

And yet, somewhere in Stephen’s mind, the echo of that word ‘boyfriend’, the ghost of those stolen kisses, lingered like a faint scent in the air.

What he wanted, I think, was for all the shifting thoughts inside his head to cease, for everything to stop happening and to go back to what it had been before. The clean simplicity of espionage, that had promised so well, had turned into such a sticky mess. What he wanted was for Keith to arrive with some new notion, some fresh project that would drive the old one out of both their heads.

He didn’t come, though. Stephen was left to sit and think on his own.

Another cause for unease: what had happened to him?

Every time Stephen made up his mind to go and knock on Keith’s door as usual, he saw it being opened not by him but his mother, and at the thought of her unspoken reproach, her sad ‘Oh, Stephen’, he stayed where he was, waiting for Keith to come to him.

I refocus my eyes, and lift them from the geraniums to the boy watching me. What’s
he
made of all
his
unease? He’s vanished, though – gone to tell his mother about me, no doubt. In a moment she’ll come and take a look for herself, and at the sight of me now gazing into her living-room window she’ll be phoning the police, as Mrs Hardiment did before when she saw that mysterious intruder lurking about the Close.

I move on. Up the road and across to Keith’s house again.

As of course Stephen did then, in the end. There was nothing else for it.

By then, in any case, everything had begun to recede into the past a little, as everything always does. Nothing more had happened. Everything really had perhaps gone back to what it had been before.

*

It’s his mother who opens the door, exactly as I’d feared. I can’t lift my eyes to look at her, because all my courage has been exhausted by the effort of walking up the path and knocking on the door, but I have the impression that she’s smiling down at me with her old tranquillity. ‘Oh, hello, Stephen,’ she says, and this time I can detect no shadow of reproach. ‘We haven’t seen you round here for some time.’

I utter the recognised formula, my eyes still on the ground. ‘Can Keith come out to play?’

For a moment she hesitates. Then she turns to call towards the upstairs landing. ‘Keith, darling! It’s Stephen!’ She turns back to me and I feel another smile bent upon me. ‘Why don’t you go up, Stephen? He’s just tidying the playroom.’

I step into the hall, and the quiet, familiar order recom-poses itself around me once again: the hall stand with the clothes brushes and shoe horns … the rack with the sticks and canes … the Trossachs … the pagodas … From somewhere outside the house the endless solo for pursed human lips comes and goes as Keith’s father passes and repasses about his business in the garden. Keith’s mother watches me as I climb the familiar stairs, and the grandmother clock chimes the quarter.

Yes, everything’s back to what it was.

Keith’s sitting on the floor of the playroom sorting the elements of a construction kit into the appropriate compartments of its box. He looks up briefly as I come in. ‘Watch where you put your feet, old chap,’ he says.

I sit down on the floor opposite him. He goes on with his work, saying nothing, as if there were nothing surprising about my having been absent, or having now returned. I think this is what he means – that nothing unusual has happened after all. He’s telling me the game’s over. The question of his mother’s espionage, which once seemed so urgent, has turned out to be too difficult to resolve. It’s been put into the archives and forgotten, like so many other questions that seemed so urgent in their time. Neither of us will ever refer to it again. He has found the solution to all that stickiness and unease, just as I knew he would.

I breathe in the sweet, familiar perfumes of the room: the metallic briskness of the flanges and brackets in the construction kit and the shiny, cardboard cleanness of the box it came in; the sharp, nose-tickling intoxications of the spirit glue that holds the wings on the model aircraft, of the acetone solvent of their camouflage; the quiet seriousness of the light machine oil that lubricates so many well-maintained bearings in so many models and motors.

‘Shall we go on building the railway?’ I suggest. ‘Shall we do the viaduct over that gorge in the mountains?’

I’m telling him that I understand. I’m agreeing that we never strained our ears in terrible silence at the Barns, that the marks in the diary meant nothing, and that the dark of the moon will come and go without event. I’m promising him that I shan’t refer to these things any more than he will, that I gladly accept his solution, that I too know the game’s over.

He goes on putting struts with struts and flanges with flanges. The perfect tidiness of the room becomes gradually more perfect still. ‘I’ve got to pipeclay my cricket stuff when I’ve finished this,’ he says.

I watch him. He’s ignoring my dull suggestion about the viaduct, of course, since it came from me and not from him. He’s suddenly going to get a completely new idea into his head out of nowhere. He’s going to lead us into some new project, and I can’t wait to find out what it will be.

There’s a tap on the door, and his mother looks into the room. ‘I’m just popping round to Auntie Dee’s,’ she says. ‘You chaps will be all right on your own, will you?’

Everything’s back to normal; she’s popping round to Auntie Dee’s just as she’s always done.

After she’s gone Keith still says nothing. He keeps his eyes on the work in hand. He’s concentrating, like me, on the normality of his mother’s routine. He’s concentrating on seeing her walk up the path to Auntie Dee’s, and not round the corner at the end of the road, or through the tunnel, or into the Lanes.

Everything’s back to normal; but we both privately know that what’s normal has changed, and changed for ever. The game’s over because the normal has reached out to absorb the abnormal. The story has changed tack, like a ship altering course, and now it sails on as straight and level as it did before, but to a different destination – and we’re no longer aboard.

Keith puts the construction kit away, and gets his cricket pads and boots out of the cupboard. I trail downstairs after him, and watch him spread everything out on sheets of newspaper in the yard. The back door of the garage on the other side of the yard is open, and from it comes another range of familiar smells: sawdust, motor oil, swept concrete, car. His father’s huge shadow, cast by the low light over the workbench, moves around the walls inside, like an ogre in his cave, over the tennis rackets and the other neatly suspended mementoes of their pre-war life, whistling, whistling.

I watch the grey smudges and green grass stains on the pad disappear beneath the first stripe of perfect whiteness. It comes to me that there’s going to be no new idea, no new game. The new normality doesn’t include them. It’s not just the one game that’s over; all our games are over. I’m the accomplice in a crime which is as indeterminate as those smudges and stains, but which is now being painted out, and I along with them.