Spies (2002) (18 page)

‘No.’

‘Have you and Keith fallen out?’

‘No!’

Even my father’s aware that something’s wrong. He sits me down in the armchair opposite him after dinner, and gazes at me with mournful sympathy. ‘I’d take all your troubles from you if I could,’ he says, ‘and give you mine instead. You’ve got worse troubles than anyone’s ever had before, I know that. Mine you wouldn’t find so bad. Other people’s troubles never are.’

My father has troubles? If anything could make me smile, this would. What would my father have troubles about?
He
hasn’t betrayed his country.
He
hasn’t been given a task and failed, or been entrusted with a secret and revealed it, or left a sick and starving man to die.
He
hasn’t been tormented by that rank sweetness in his nostrils and that soft music of Lamorna in his ears, and lost them both.

‘But then yesterday’s troubles aren’t as bad as today’s troubles,’ he says. ‘And when you wake up in the morning yesterday’s troubles are what today’s troubles will be.’

Very possibly, but the difficulty is getting to tomorrow. How do you wake up in the morning if you’ve never been to sleep? Long after Geoff’s finally hidden his stack of old naturist magazines away under his bed and turned off his torch, I’m still wide awake. I hear the last trains of the day passing behind the houses on the other side of the street, bursting out of the embankment and rattling down the gradient, or straining up it in the opposite direction, and I live through the long intervals between them. I get up and put my head under the blackout blind. In the gap between the Sheldons’ house and the Stotts’ a last thin smile of moon is lingering above the sunset, as if Keith’s father had just passed that way. It’s changed sides since I last saw it, as I seem to have done. It’s become the converse of itself. Its arms are held out to the north instead of the south, and in them the last lingering shadow of the full moon I saw a fortnight ago lies dying.

By tomorrow night it will have been extinguished completely.

Nothing can happen in that darkness now, though. Can it? I go back to bed and watch the dim spill of twilight fade around the edges of the blind. Far on into the night, when no normal trains run, a steam locomotive labours slowly past, and the low rumble of its loaded trucks goes on and on, long after the locomotive itself has moved on into other people’s dreams.

My troubles are getting not better but worse. Everything’s getting more and more confused inside my head. I’m haunted by the dark figure who’s simultaneously falling through the moonless night and lying on the bare earth in a strange country, dying of cold and hunger. All around him, mocking his loneliness, is the sweet reek of some intangible happiness, and the faint, melancholy notes of an old sad song called “Lamorna”.

I must have been asleep after all, because I’m suddenly awake and full of a new anguish: he was dying down there in the damp subterranean gloom, and Keith’s mother was nursing him, her bright arms round the fading ghost, even as Keith and I were hammering on the corrugated iron above his head.

I get up and creep into my parents’ bedroom on the other side of the landing, as I used to if I had a nightmare when I was little. The room’s full of their familiar breathing – the heavy, uneven sound of it and its stale bedroom smell. ‘I had a bad dream,’ I whisper pathetically, as I used to. They breathe on, oblivious. I get on to the bottom of the bed and cautiously work my way up until I can edge myself under the covers and insinuate myself into the narrow canyon between their backs. I’ve become a child again.

But now the old safe place is no longer the comfort it was. The walls of flesh on either side of me are claustrophobic. My parents’ absorption in sleep merely makes me more distressingly aware of my own isolation in the world. I lie there more awake than ever, or more confused about whether I’m awake or not. Now the dying man’s not him but me. It comes to me with a terrible force that one day I’m going to be lying in my coffin, deep in the earth. This very body of mine that’s lying here tormented in the darkness will become lifeless stuff, held tight between the narrow wooden walls on either side, trapped by the lid pressing down on my chest and face. I understand fully for the first time that sooner or later there will come a day when I’m dead, and from that day forth I shall be dead for ever. I feel the blind terror sweep through me. I scream and scream, but no sound emerges, because I’m dead and deep below the earth. For ever.

Sudden light, too bright for me to open my eyes properly. Through my tears I can just glimpse my mother and father bending over me in hurriedly-woken consternation.

‘What
is
it, love?’ cries my mother. ‘You
must
tell us what it is!’

I weep on, still unable to move between those narrow walls, still unable to explain – unable now to speak at all or even to shake my head.

My father’s both wrong and right, I discover, when morning comes. My troubles are no less – but now at any rate I know what I have to do about them.

I have to make one more attempt to redeem all my failures – and this time I have to succeed.

I have to go down into the darkness and bring the dying man the help he’s depending upon. I feel a sick dread at the prospect. The terrible dream I had in the night, if it was a dream, is with me still all through the day at school. We’ve got the English Composition exam, and I waste half the time gazing blindly at the paper in front of me, unable to decide whether to write about The Englishman’s Home is His Castle or The Pleasures of Idling, because all I can think about is that other exam I have to sit after school, when I go down into the living grave.

At least there’s no choice left to be made in this particular paper. I go straight to the bathroom cabinet as soon as I get home and find the box of pills I was prescribed last winter. I look in the cupboard under the stairs, where Geoff and I slept during the worst of the raids, and find, balanced on top of the electricity meters and fuse boxes, the random collection of packets and tins that my mother left there as emergency rations, along with the family first-aid box, in case the house was hit and we were trapped under the debris like Miss Durrant. I take a tin of pilchards and one of condensed milk, a packet of cheese biscuits and one of dried egg. We haven’t slept under the stairs for a long time, and in any case it’s difficult to know what my mother thought Geoff and I might do in here with dried egg.

I put all the provisions in my school satchel. What I can’t find any substitute for, of course, is whatever was inside the envelope. I shall have to try to explain what’s happened. Will he understand any English? How did he and Keith’s mother communicate? If she’s a German spy she presumably speaks German. I try to imagine her uttering those notorious gutturals … But she
isn’t
a German spy! Is she? That all belongs to a past I’ve long since left behind. Haven’t I?

‘I’m going out to play,’ I tell my mother.

She searches my face. ‘With Keith?’ she asks distrustfully.

‘No.’

‘Stand up for yourself,’ she says. ‘Don’t let him be nasty to you.’

And once again I set out on that horrible journey. It’s even more frightening now I’m on my own, of course, and the uncertainty at the end of it seems even more profound now that it’s darkened by the lingering shadow of my dream.

The lake in the tunnel has shrunk in the dry midsummer weather to a chain of puddles. The hedgerows in the Lanes beyond have lost their damp, green freshness, and gone grey in the drifted dust. It’s hot again, as it was when I came along here with Keith, and the air’s very still. But this time there’s an uneasy yellow light in the sky, and an occasional rumbling murmur that might be either thunder or a distant air raid.

One by one the disheartening landmarks are reached and left behind. The sycamore with the rotted rope. The little field of dock and sorrel. The nettle bed. The boot. The ruined armchair. Then comes the barking, and the dogs. Four of them today, and bolder now that I’m on my own, reeking of fear. Their rushes bring them closer and closer to me, and one of them snaps at my hand. Two of them come at me from behind. In a panic I spin round to face them, and the swing of my satchel in their faces makes them jump back for a moment. I take it off my shoulder and whirl it round me. The children in front of the Cottages watch me as expressionlessly as before. One of them picks up a stone and throws it at me, and I flinch even in the middle of my struggles against the dogs. Moment by moment I’m expiating all the weakness I’ve shown.

A year goes by before I’m out of range of the children’s gaze, and the last of the dogs has given one final bark and written me off.

Now the dried-up pond … the overgrown chalk pit … the green sea of weeds with the broken shafts of carts rising from it like spars from a sunken wreck … I walk more and more slowly, and stop. I’ve reached my destination.

The Barns, like everything else along the Lanes, are deeper in the rank midsummer green than they were before. The brick footings and the buckled sheets of corrugated iron are harder to make out.

I move reluctantly closer and stop again as I meet the sour, defeated smell of the elders. I begin to distinguish the brickwork, and the corrugated iron over the steps that lead down into the earth. There’s no sign of life. I hold my breath and listen. Nothing. Only the occasional grumble of the distant thunder, and the small, offhand rattle of a passing train.

The living grave.

Then, among the smell of the elders, I catch the faint breath of the other smell I smelt before, of human excrement on freshly turned soil. There’s still a living man here. And in the great silence that falls after the thunder quietens and the train pulls into the distant station beyond the tunnel, I hear the same sound as I heard before. A quiet, suppressed coughing.

Yes, he’s here still, barely twenty feet away from me.

And now, of course, I don’t know what to do. I think of Keith’s mother, coming out of the world of silver ornaments and silver chimes and descending the great ladder of the world, rung by rung, until she finds herself where I’m standing, in the smell of the elders and the excrement – and then going on, further down, into the underworld.

I walk slowly forward to the head of the steps. The coughing stops. He’s heard me.

The steps have crumbled and fallen away. At the bottom, under the corrugated iron, they vanish into darkness. In that darkness, I know, are his eyes, watching me.

I want to say some word to break the silence, but I can’t think what that word should be.

I take out of my satchel the things I’ve brought, and put them down on the top step. I should be delivering something else, too, I realise – some message to replace the letter I’ve lost. I should say something to explain why she hasn’t come for so long, and why she’ll never come again.

It’s impossible, though. I’ve delivered all I can manage. I pick up my satchel to go, feeling his eyes on me.

And then, out of the darkness, his voice. A single quiet word:

‘Stephen?’

Did Stephen understand at last who it was down there in the darkness, when he heard his own name spoken?

I really have no idea, as I try to piece all this together half a century later, whether he understood or not. All I can remember is the chill that went through him at the sound. All I can feel now is his frozen paralysis as he crouched there with his satchel half on his shoulder, unable to move, to speak, even to think at all.

‘Stephen?’

Again, and as quietly as before. So it was someone who recognised Stephen. Someone who knew his name.

‘What are you doing here?’

The voice was still quiet, but hard with alarm and suspicion. There was no trace of any foreign accent. He didn’t sound like a tramp. From his voice he could almost have been a neighbour. A master at school. One of the family.

And Stephen still didn’t know who it was?

I can’t help wondering now what that figure in the darkness thought about this same question. I suppose he simply assumed that Stephen knew. I suppose it never even occurred to him that Stephen might not know. Certainly not that Stephen might both know and yet
not
know at the same time.

‘Why have you come?’

Stephen managed to point at the things he’d put on the step.

‘Was it Bobs who sent you?’

Bobs
. The emergence of this name from the darkness was even more paralysing than the sound of his own, because he’d never heard anyone except Keith’s father call her that before. He couldn’t answer; he couldn’t admit to knowing who Bobs was. Not when this intimacy was uttered by an old tramp. By a German. By an old tramp and a German with a voice almost as familiar as Keith’s mother’s own.

I remember that the coughing started again, and that Stephen plucked up courage to lift his eyes and look into the darkness, now that the darkness was melting a little. He could see a dark tangle of hair and beard, and the shaggy outline of it moving as the man coughed. For a moment Stephen glimpsed the brightness of the eyes watching him. The man was sitting on the ground, in what seemed to be a muddle of blankets and sacking, his back propped against the side of the underground chamber.

Did Stephen really not understand who it was? I think he still thought the man was an old tramp, but perhaps now he realised that he was also not an old tramp. I’m pretty sure he still adhered to the central tenet that the man was also a German. But perhaps he was beginning to understand that he was a German who was entirely English.

The coughing fit passes, and when the voice speaks again the tone’s softer and less challenging. ‘She can’t come?’

I shake my head.

‘Is there a letter? Have you brought a letter?’

Another shake. He sighs.

‘Why can’t she come?’

How can I ever begin to explain? ‘She just can’t.’

Another silence, and then the voice is softer still. ‘Things are difficult for her?’

Again I don’t respond. Again he understands my meaning. Again he sighs. ‘What – Ted?’

I’ve heard Keith’s mother say the word, just as I’ve heard him call her by her name. It’s even more difficult to grasp, though, that Keith’s father possesses such a simple human attribute as a name, and impossible to acknowledge it when it’s uttered, as Keith’s mother’s was, as mine was, out of the alien darkness. I go on looking at the ground.

The man utters something that sounds like a little groan. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, and the voice is softer still. ‘Can you tell her that?’

Still no response from me, but this time he’s not so sure what my silence means. ‘Yes?’ he persists. ‘
Will
you tell her?’

I nod, for the same reason as I’ve nodded on earlier occasions, because there’s nothing else I can do, though how I’m ever going to tell her anything I can’t imagine.

‘And tell her …’ He stops. ‘Tell her …’

More coughing, and even when it ceases he still can’t speak. I have the impression that he’s begun to shiver. ‘No, nothing else,’ he says finally. ‘It’s over, then. It’s over.’

Silence. I’m still crouching on the step, and my knees are cramped. Have I completed my task now? Have I explained everything I can manage to explain? Has he told me everything he can manage to tell me? Can I escape? The silence goes on and on. There seems to be nothing more that he wants to add. I stand up.

‘Don’t go,’ he says at once, and there’s that same note in his voice that I’ve heard before from Keith’s parents – the command with the faint suggestion of pleading in it. ‘Stay and talk for a moment. It gets a bit bleak, lying here. Nothing to see but that little patch of green at the top of the steps. Nothing to do but think. Funny view you get of the world … Sit down.’

I sit down on the top step, still helplessly obedient to adult authority.

‘So why
you
?’ he asks. ‘Why did she pick
you
?’

I shrug. How can I explain?

‘You seemed to be doing your level best to make a nuisance of yourself before. Shoving your nose into things that didn’t concern you. That was just some kind of game, was it?’

I keep quiet. There’s no way I can explain!

‘So what’s this? Another of your games? What did she tell you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing. But here you are.’

Once again I can’t think of any response. Here I am, yes.

‘So are you going to say anything to anyone else about it?’

Yes. No. I don’t know what I’m going to do.

‘Yes or no?’ he persists.

I manage a shrug.

‘What does
that
mean?’

‘No,’ I mumble.

I’m suddenly overcome by the sheer dreamlike strangeness of the situation. I’m negotiating with an old tramp. I’m being sworn to secrecy by a German. In a hole in the ground in the middle of a clump of elders, on a close summer afternoon with a hint of thunder in the air. And the strangest thing of all is that it’s
not
strange. There’s something absolutely ordinary about these elders, these broken bricks, this hole in the ground, this heavy day, this sick man.

‘How’s Milly?’ he asks.

‘All right,’ I shrug.

He knows all our names. A cold unease goes down my spine to think that a German, an enemy who’s fallen out of the night sky, speaks our language just as we do – that he knows all about us and our lives, just as if he were one of us. He’s come and sat in our most secret places in the darkness, and watched us. He’s moved invisibly amongst us all, like a ghost, and got to know our names and faces.

‘What about …?’ He stops. He seems to be trying to remember the name of someone else to ask after. ‘… Milly’s mother?’ he says finally. I make the same response.

His voice is so ordinary, so familiar. But he’s not ordinary or familiar at all! He’s an old tramp, filthy and bearded. And he’s a
German
! His Germanness lingers in the air, as inherent a part of his identity as Mr Gort’s murderousness, as intimately pervasive as the scent of the privet in my life, as insanitary as the germs he’s giving off.

‘I heard the dogs barking at you,’ he says. ‘Aren’t you scared of them?’

Another shrug.

‘So if I said, “Here, take this bucket, and go past the dogs, and fetch me some water from the well behind the Cottages …”?’

I nod. He makes no move to hand me a bucket, though.

He laughs. ‘Yes, you’d go all right. You’d go like a shot. To get away from me. You’d go, but you wouldn’t come back.’

I say nothing. He’s said it for me.

‘Poor kid,’ he says, in a different voice. ‘But that’s what happens. You start playing some game, and you’re the brave one, you’re the great hero. But the game goes on and on, and it gets more and more frightening, and you get tired, because you can’t go on being brave for ever. And then one night it happens. You’re up there in the darkness five hundred miles from home and suddenly the darkness is inside you as well. In your head, in your stomach. You’ve cut out, like a dicky engine. You can’t think, you can’t move. You can’t see, you can’t hear. Everything’s drowned by this great scream of terror in the darkness, and the scream goes on and on, and it’s coming out of
you
.’

He’s started to weep. Between one word and the next, out of nowhere. I long to be anywhere else on earth. But of course I have to wait.

‘So then the others have to get you home,’ he whispers. ‘They’re as sick at heart as you are, and somehow they have to keep their nerve and get you home. They trusted you and you failed them. And afterwards you could never look at them again, you could never be with them. From that day on you’re an outcast. There’s no place for you anywhere any more.’

He’s shivering again, too, so that the weeping is trembly and strange. Gradually the fit subsides. ‘So it’s all over, is it?’ he says, his voice steady again, but very low and flat. ‘I always knew it would be, of course, sooner or later.’

Behind the trees a train emerges from the cutting.

‘That’s the only thing that keeps me sane,’ he says. ‘The sound of the trains. I lie here waiting for them. Three times an hour up, three times an hour down. Down to the houses in the Close. Up and out to the great wide world. I’m on all those trains. Down to the Close. Up and away.’

He starts to cough and shiver again.

‘Off you go, then. Just pass me the things you brought.’

I can see the whiteness of his hand, held out in the darkness, waiting. There’s nothing for it but to obey. I have to crouch to get under the corrugated iron, and I almost fall headlong on the broken steps into the pit below. I’m blocking out most of what little light there is, and the only thing I can make out is the smell. It’s a mixture of damp earth, mildew, old sacking, mouldy food, illness, and the stale fustiness breathed out by the old men who drowse over the newspapers all day in the reading room of the public library.

I put the things on the ground beside him, still not looking at him, trying not to breathe in the germs. Out of the corner of my eye, though, as I turn to go, I’m aware of his two feverish eyes watching me from the dark tangle of hair and beard.

‘Wait, wait!’ he says.

I wait, my eyes now fixed longingly on the daylight at the top of the steps. I have to draw breath. I can feel the germs entering my body. Behind my back I hear the sound of a pencil scribbling over paper. A pause. Then the sound of the paper being torn off its pad and crumpled up. More scribbling. Again the paper’s crumpled up and discarded.

He sighs. ‘What’s the use? I’d like her to have something from me, though …’

Silence. He seems to have forgotten about me. I start to move towards the steps.

‘It was always her, you know,’ he says quietly. I stop. ‘From the very beginning. Always her.’

Another silence. Very quietly I make another attempt to leave.

‘Wait!’ he says again at once. ‘Here. Take her this.’

I turn back, trying not to look at him directly. He’s clawing at something wrapped around his neck. He folds whatever it is over and over, and holds it out. Reluctantly I reach towards him and take it. It’s soft and silken, and hot from the fever of his body.

‘Just so that she has something,’ he whispers. ‘And tell her … tell her … oh … nothing, nothing. Just give it to her. She’ll understand.’

Already I’m out in the light, on the broken steps, grabbing my satchel, and stuffing the folded silken handful into it.

‘Stephen!’ he calls after me urgently as I start back towards the Lanes. ‘Stephen! Tell her “for ever”. Yes? “For ever”.’

Low down in the sky, somewhere far away, summer lightning flickers. Ahead of me the dogs begin to bark at my approach.

For ever.

The three syllables echo softly on inside my head the way that Lamorna did before. Lamorna sounded like waves lapping softly on the shore; ‘for ever’ sounds like a key turning softly through the wards of a well-oiled lock.

‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘For ever.’

Something, I know, is being locked away into the past, the way Keith and I lock our secret possessions away inside the trunk, the way I shall be shut away myself one day inside my own narrow box. It’s something which had always been so, as he said, from the very beginning. And I’m the one who has been chosen to turn the key. For ever. If I can just get that word to her, we can forget that any of this happened. Everything can be as it was before.

What will happen to
him
, down there in his grave under the elders? I don’t know, I don’t care, I don’t have to bother about it, because whatever happens it will soon have happened, and then it will be in the past. For ever.

All night long the word revolves in my head with the seductive softness of the key turning in the padlock of our trunk. All through the geometry and French exams at school next day I feel the insidious softness of the little bundle of silk in my pocket. It’s pale green, mottled with brown and veined with irregular black lines. It’s some kind of map, and I can see from the one glance I’ve taken at it without unfolding it that the words on it are German: ‘Chemnitz … Leipzig … Zwickau …’ It’s a map of his homeland – the last relic of his old life. I don’t want to see any more, or to think about its naked Germanness. I simply want to give it to her, and turn the key through those three soft syllables. The question is how. I can’t just knock at the door. What should I do if it’s Keith who answers it? Or if his father’s within earshot?

All I can think to do is to go to the lookout and wait for an opportunity to present itself. She’ll guess I’ve a message for her. She’ll find some way to come across the road.

Even as I crawl into the lookout, though, I realise that it’s changed. private announces the tile inside the entrance. The floor has been swept clear of dead leaves and broken twigs. An old duster’s been spread over the tin trunk, and in the middle of the duster is a jam jar with a bunch of wilting privet blossom.

At once I become conscious again of the rank sweetness in the air all round me, and my head fills with the soft murmur of Lamorna. A wave of excitement passes through me, to think of Barbara being in here on her own, setting her mark upon it. The wave of excitement is immediately succeeded by a wave of alarm and indignation at her presumption. I snatch the jar and the cloth off the trunk before Keith comes in and discovers them.