Spies (2002) (8 page)

I scramble through the passageway, my limbs muddled with excitement. I’m going to be the one who solves the mystery!

By the time I get free of the bushes she’s once again turned the corner by the Hardiments and gone. I run to the corner after her, faster than I’ve ever run before.

Once again the Avenue stretches in front of me, clear and straight and empty, from the pig bins at this end to the letter box at the other.

This time, instead of blindly running down the Avenue after her, I stand still and think. It’s taken me no more than – what? – ten seconds to reach the corner. She can’t have got to the letter box in ten seconds, even if she’d run all the way. I don’t even believe she could have opened the manhole cover, either, certainly not got inside and closed it above her. She couldn’t have squeezed through the gap in the Hardiments’ fence.

She
must
be in one of the houses – there’s nowhere else. Again I try to think clearly. I’ve run from the fourth house along the Close, so she can’t have got much further than four houses along the Avenue. I walk slowly past the first half- dozen houses on either side, and look carefully at each of them in turn. I don’t know what I’m hoping to see. A glimpse of her through one of the windows, perhaps … a face somewhere keeping a lookout … a short-wave radio antenna concealed behind a chimney …

Nothing. Every one of them is invested with the same undifferentiated, brooding, sinister ordinariness. She could be in any of them.

Again I think carefully. Whichever of them she’s in, sooner or later she’ll have to come out. All I need to do is wait out of sight, and watch.

I slowly retire to the corner of the Close – walking backwards so that none of the houses in the Avenue is out of my sight for an instant. Even if I have to stay here until bedtime I’m going to make absolutely sure that she can’t get back into Auntie Dee’s house unobserved again, and emerge like a hallucination as she did before.

As I edge backwards around the corner by the Hardiments some strange presentiment makes me turn and glance briefly up the Close. And there she is – a hallucination already, standing on the doorstep of Auntie Dee’s house, half turned to leave, talking to Auntie Dee in the doorway. Once again Auntie Dee stands watching as once again Keith’s mother lets herself out of the gate.

Once again I feel the earth shift under my feet.

I stand stupefied as she walks back up the Close towards her house. It occurs to me that she’s no longer holding the letter. She’s not only jumped back in time – she’s jumped forward in space to the letter box first.

Perhaps it’s not a spy story we’ve woven ourselves into, after all. It’s a ghost story.

The next time it happens Keith’s with me, and we’re watching his house so intently that we see her as soon as she comes out of the front door. Keith’s father is working in the front garden. She stops to say something to him, then comes out of the gate, carefully closes it behind her, and walks down the street, her shopping basket on her arm once again, as unhurried and composed as ever.

She goes into Auntie Dee’s house. We wait, crouched and tense, ready to move. This time we’re going to be out of here even before she’s round the corner. We’re going to be at the corner ourselves before she has time to reach even the manhole cover.

‘She could have some kind of rocket thing,’ I whisper.

Keith says nothing. I’ve told him all my theories several times already. Also, he doesn’t like the fact that I had the latest mysterious experience when he wasn’t there.

We wait. My knees ache from crouching. I try to shift my weight from one leg to the other.

‘Or a kind of time machine,’ I suggest uneasily, for the fifth time.

Keith’s eyelids come down. I understand. If theories involving secret passages, rockets, time travel, and the like are to carry conviction, they have to be uttered in his voice, not mine.

And now there she is, coming out of Auntie Dee’s with the shopping basket. At once we’re scrambling along the passageway, the twigs tearing at our faces, my hands trampled by Keith’s sandals scrabbling the earth in front of me … We’re out on the street, moving with unbelievable quietness not twenty paces behind her as she walks to the corner …

She hasn’t heard us. We’re round the corner behind her almost without losing her from sight for an instant …

And there she is still, walking away from us, just passing the pig bins. We stop and watch her, not daring to move any further, not daring to breathe or to blink. We’re going to see the trick done in front of our eyes.

She walks on, still unhurried, still composed. On and on. Growing slowly smaller and smaller …

Past the letter box at the end … round the corner …

To the shops, like anyone else.

*

Days go by, and nothing more happens. There’s just school, and school, and school, and fights with Geoff, and odd tedious hours of fruitless watching.

One evening we catch her coming out with letters in her hand. She walks down the road, and passes Auntie Dee’s without going in. We run to the corner … then watch her walk slowly to the letter box at the end and post them. Another day – it must be a Saturday – we see her set out with her shopping basket, call at Auntie Dee’s … and emerge accompanied by Auntie Dee, with Milly in her pushchair. We run to the corner … and there they are, dwindling unremarkably away down the Avenue together.

Once we even follow her to the shops. We watch her queuing outside the greengrocer’s, catch glimpses of her in the bakery and the draper’s, and follow her back to the Close. There’s no sign of any rocket or time machine.

It rains, and Keith’s mother won’t let him go out. It stops raining, and we sit reluctantly under the wet branches of the lookout, yawning and bickering. I know Keith has ceased to believe my account of the second disappearance, although he doesn’t say so. I’ve begun to doubt it myself. Even the first disappearance, that we both witnessed, has drifted back into that realm of the past where inexplicable things no long seem surprising, or in any urgent need of an explanation. We’re beginning to take it as much for granted as we do the bush that burned but was not consumed, or the miracle of the loaves and the fishes.

The x’s and exclamation marks, too, have receded into the mists. They’ve become mere runes in an archaic text. The whole concept of night, as the double summer time of the war years takes sunset further and further beyond when we have to go to bed, now seems as remote as the Dark Ages, and the phases of the moon as academic as scot and lot.

Worst of all, we suddenly find ourselves on the defensive. Two brown eyes and a big mocking smile peer in at us one evening through the leaves of the lookout. It’s Barbara Berrill. ‘You two are always playing in here,’ she says. ‘Is this your camp?’

I glance at Keith. His eyelids come down, and for a moment he makes one of his father’s faces of distaste. He says nothing. He hardly speaks to any of the other children in the Close, never to girls, and certainly not to Barbara Berrill. I feel my own eyelids descend a little. I say nothing, either. I’m stung by her humiliating suggestion that we’re merely ‘playing’ in a ‘camp’ rather than keeping watch in a lookout.

‘What game is it?’ she asks. ‘Are you spying on someone?’

Keith says nothing. I say nothing, either, but my heart sinks. Our shield of invisibility has been breached, our hidden purposes discovered. And by Barbara Berrill, of all people. She thinks she’s superior to us just because she’s a year older, but she’s not, she’s beneath our notice. Everything about her is soft and girlish. Her big brown eyes, her round face, her helmet of pudding-basin hair that comes curling forward on her cheeks. Her school frock, with its blue-and-white summer checks, and its little puffy summer sleeves. Her little white summer socks. Most girlish and irritating of all, for some reason, is the purse slung around her neck, in which she takes her bus and milk money to school each day. She’s wearing it now. Why? Keith and I aren’t wearing our school caps or satchels. Why are girls like this?

‘Who is it?’ she demands. ‘Not Mr Gort still?’

She’s a fine one to talk about spying, when she’s spying herself. And how does she know about Mr Gort? She must have been spying on us for ages.

‘Go on,’ she begs. ‘I won’t tell anyone.’

We sit it out in silence, our eyes on the ground.

‘If you don’t say anything, that means you
are
spying … Right, then, I’m going to tell on you.’

The brown eyes vanish. ‘Keith Hayward and Stephen Wheatley are spying on people!’ she says loudly. It’s impossible to know whether she has an audience for this announcement or not. She says it again, further along the street. We sit frozen with shame, looking anywhere but at each other. I know now that the whole thing – the disappearances, the secret marks in the diary, everything – was just one of our pretend games. Even Keith knows it. There’s nothing we can do but come out of hiding and creep home.

We know without discussing it, though, that we
can’t
come out until we’re sure that Barbara Berrill’s not around to see our humiliation. So we wait. And go on waiting because we can still hear her down the end of the street, laughing with the Avery boys. About us, probably.

The shadows grow longer. I’m going to get a terrible telling- off if I’m not home before eight. Keith’s going to get caned.

We sit, heads down, listening. There’s a sound of soft, hurrying footsteps. We look up; Barbara Berrill’s coming back.

But it’s not her. It’s Keith’s mother. She has her arms folded and a cardigan thrown round her shoulders – and she’s hurrying, hurrying down the road into the evening sunlight. She hurries up the path to Auntie Dee’s front door, hurries back again almost immediately, and hurries on to the corner. By the time we’ve collected ourselves and reached the corner as well … the street beyond stretches away through the golden air, empty all the way to the letter box at the end.

The hunt’s on again.

Only now we don’t know where there’s left to look or what there’s left to try. We run to the manhole and the loose board in the fence. We look hopelessly into houses and gardens.

Nowhere can we find the slightest clue to where she might have gone.

We whisper together, excited again, but more and more uneasy, more and more completely lost. We can both feel the evening getting later and later. In the end we simply have to head for home. I know what’s going to happen, of course. She’s going to emerge from Auntie Dee’s once again as we reach the Close, just as if we’d jumped back to the beginning of the evening, and everything was still in front of us.

And with a kind of dreamlike inevitability she does indeed emerge, only this time from a point slightly further back in time and space – out of the Haywards’ own house, exactly as she did before, with the cardigan still around her shoulders. Once again the eeriness of it chills my blood.

‘What in heaven’s name are you playing at, my precious?’ she says to Keith. She speaks calmly, but I realise, from the edge in her voice, and the way she keeps impatiently brushing at her hair, and slapping at something on the shoulder of her cardigan as she speaks, that she’s really angry with him for once. ‘You know the rules. You know when you’re supposed to be in. If you behave like a child then Daddy’s going to treat you like a child.’

All her overt anger seems to be reserved for her hair and her shoulder. She keeps brushing and slapping, as if she were unconsciously prefiguring the punishment that Keith’s going to get from his father. She and Keith turn to go. Neither of them looks at me.

The last thing I see as she goes is her wiping her hands against each other. The brushing of her hair and the slapping at her shoulder were evidently an attempt to get some substance off them. Now it’s on her hands, and it seems to be sticky and difficult to be free of.

And suddenly I know what it is. It’s not something sticky. It’s something
slimy
.

I know something else, too. I know where she’s been each time she’s disappeared.

I shiver. The little marks in the diary are true. The dark of the moon’s coming, and it’s going to be more frightening than we thought.

Everything is as it was; and everything has changed. The houses sit where they sat, but everything they once said they say no longer. The re-emergent greenwood has been uprooted and paved over. And Stephen Wheatley has become this old man who seems to be me. Yes, the undersized boy with the teapot ears, following his powerful friend open-mouthed and credulous from one project and mystery to the next, has become this undersized pensioner with the teapot ears, treading slowly and warily in the footsteps of his former self, and he has only this one final project and mystery left.

A surprising thought comes to this old man, as he looks at the district now from the perspective of the years: that in those days all this was
new
. These houses, these streets, those shops in the parade on the main road, the letter box at the corner – they’d been on this earth scarcely longer than Stephen himself. The whole district had been assembled like a Potemkin village, just in time for his family to move here, and for Stephen to discover it as his changeless and ancient birthright.

It was an outgrowth of the railway, of the line emerging from the cutting behind the McAfees on to the embankment behind the Haywards – the line that brought me here today. A few rough, potholed roads had been hopefully laid out around the little wooden country station; various small jobbing builders in nearby villages had bought plots and sketched out their crude private fantasies of rural life in raw brickwork and timber. A few young couples had got off the train at the weekends and looked around … paid deposits … had three-piece suites delivered and planted privet seedlings … needed writing paper and curtain tape … found shopkeepers opening up in the new Parade who could supply them. A pole was erected to show where the new bus service would stop, a letter box installed to collect the messages sent back by the settlers to the communities they’d left behind. The muddy tracks were adopted and drained, tarred and gravelled, so that the wives could push their high-sprung perambulators to the shops without jolting their babies awake, and the husbands could walk dryshod in their city shoes to the station each morning and dryshod back at night. The raw earth and bare bricks of the building plots were softened by a green screen that grew as Stephen grew, scarcely further ahead of him in life than his elder brother.

And here’s what I’m going on to consider as I look at it now: that this sudden new colony hadn’t appeared out of empty desert. A space had to be made for it, bit by bit, in the long-established settlements that occupied the ground already. The new plots were carved out of the smallholdings that had supplied the city with vegetables, out of the orchards growing its apples and cherries, and the meadows that had kept its horses in fodder. The new Windermeres and Sorrentos replaced low timber cottages where the agricultural labourers who worked the soil had lived. The straight gravelled streets rationalised the irregular network of little lanes and paths along which the ploughmen had walked to work and the carters had driven their carts.

And beyond the surfaced streets, in the pockets of land left between this new settlement and all the others appearing at the same time around other stations along the various railway lines, the old world continued. You didn’t have to go far to find it. On the way to the golf course you passed abandoned quarries and clay pits, where the cottagers had dug the loam to make the bricks in their foundations and chimneys, and cut the chalk for the lime in the mortar that bound them. On the other side of the main road, just behind the shops, was Paradise, the tangle of mucky smallholdings where our neighbours went to buy unrationed eggs, or a rooster for Christmas. Paradise is now the Paradise Riding Stables and Country Pursuits Centre, and the lane up to it is a well-surfaced private drive. In wet weather then the mud was deep enough to suck your boots off. On our side of the main road there must once have been another lane that had been surfaced to form the Avenue, because if you went to the end of the Close and looked right instead of turning left to the shops you could see where it re-emerged, like a stream from a culvert. A few yards from the corner the new gravelled surface petered out – and there beyond it was the old muddy lane, patiently continuing as best it could, disused by this time and half-choked by encroaching undergrowth. The surface stopped because there were no more houses left for it to go to. This was where our settlement ended, its boundary set by the barrier of the railway embankment.

In the embankment, though, like a disused postern in the walls of a medieval city, you could make out a low brick arch, the entrance to a narrow tunnel grudgingly built by the railway company to preserve the old right of way. And through this humble hole the muddy lane crept slyly on, as it always had, to the unreconstructed world beyond.

I walk to the corner of the Close and look to the right. The rest of the lane has now been surfaced as well. The Avenue continues without drawing breath, and passes beneath the railway through a high, wide bridge, with well-maintained pavements on either side of the road. I walk under the bridge along one of them. On the other side the Avenue branches into a maze of Crescents, Walks, and Meads on an estate now beginning to look almost as venerable as the Close itself.

The familiar world has reached out, and sealed the underworld away beneath the well-drained and well-lit surfaces. Light has joined up with light, and the haunted darkness between them has been abolished.

I walk back along the clean grey pavement, under the clean steel bridge, to the corner of the Close. Behind my back I hear the familiar shifting sound of an approaching train on the down line, as it emerges from the cutting behind the McAfees on to the embankment behind the Haywards. The sound changes again as it crosses the bridge … and once again I hear the rumbling hollowness of the old brick tunnel as a train went over, and the never-ending returns of the high cries that Keith and Stephen uttered to test the echoes and show they weren’t afraid, as they made one of their rare ventures through that long, low darkness.

Once again I glimpse the perils that lay beyond that echoing ordeal, where the old world resumed after the brief interruption of our familiar streets and houses, as indifferent to them as if they’d never been. We called it the Lanes, though there was only one of them, and so narrow that it almost disappeared in summer into the gross greenery of the hedgerows on either side and the shadows of ancient, crooked trees. I see the Cottages, the sly tumbledown hovels lurking behind the undergrowth in a debris of rusty oil drums and broken prams. I hear the barking of the misshapen dogs that rushed out at us as we passed, and I feel the sullen gaze of the raggedy children who watched us from behind their wicket gates. I smell the sour, catty stink of the elders around the collapsed and abandoned farm where you could sometimes glimpse an old tramp holed up, heating a blackened billy over a little fire of sticks …

Beyond the abandoned farm was a desolate no man’s land half marked out as builder’s lots, where colonisation approaching from the next settlement along had been halted for the Duration. Between the line of the railway and the wasteland of the lots, preserved for a few more years by the shifting tides of history, the last pocket of the rural world pursued its ancient, secret life. Each of the rare excursions we made into it was a frightening adventure, a series of ordeals to test our coming manhood.

And the first of the ordeals was the tunnel itself. Once again I hear our uneasy cries drowned by the huge thunder of the train passing overhead. Once again I see the circle of unwel-coming daylight at the end doubled by its reflection in the great lake that collected inside the tunnel after rain. Once again I feel the awkward twist of my body as I turn to edge sideways along the narrow causeway left at the edge of the lake, and simultaneously lean away from the glistening, dripping wetness of the brickwork. Once again I feel the dank touch of the walls on my hair and shoulder, and brush at the foul exudations they’ve left. Once again I try to wipe the dark-green slime off my hands.

So her disappearances are quite simple to explain. She’s tricked us. The letters she sets off with in her hand, or the shopping basket on her arm, are a camouflage. She’s turning not left at the end of the Close, towards the letter box and the shops, but right towards the tunnel. She’s passing through that gloomy gateway, edging her way between the water underfoot and the water on the walls, just as we sometimes nerve ourselves to do, and she’s journeying into the old world beyond, where there are no shops and no letter boxes, and where no one in the Close but Keith and me ever ventures.

What’s she doing there?

Keith and I edge round the lake, keeping our backs away from the slime, our ears ringing with the echoes of every scrape of our shoes against an exposed flint, every drop of water falling from the roof of the tunnel. Keith’s in front, of course, but I’m in a state of great excitement because this is all my idea. I’m also uneasier than ever about the terrors of the tunnel; although we waited for his mother to retire for her afternoon rest before we set out, I’m certain that we’re suddenly going to hear her footsteps echoing behind us. I keep turning to look at the circle of daylight and its reflection that we’ve come from, waiting to see the advancing silhouette that will cut us off from home, and drive us helplessly on towards the skulking dogs and children in the Lanes.

We emerge back into the humid afternoon at the far end. The track ahead of us disappears into vegetation standing head-high, and the air’s heavy with the buzzing of flies and the choking scent of cow parsley. We look around, uncertain where to begin.

‘She may have a transmitter hidden here somewhere,’ I whisper, feeling some obligation to offer suggestions in support of my original insight. ‘Or there may be some kind of secret research laboratory that she’s spying on.’

Keith says nothing. He’s maintaining an attitude of judicious caution about my proposals, to remind me that he’s still leader of this expedition.

‘She can’t be going very far,’ I point out, before he orders us any further into the terrors ahead. ‘She always gets back almost at once.’

We brush the flies away from our faces, and try to read some sense into the undifferentiated tangle of mud and greenery. Only one feature seems to have any distinct identity – the brick circle of the tunnel mouth itself, and the retaining walls that flank it.

‘She’s spying on the trains,’ announces Keith.

Of course. It’s so obvious now he’s said it that I can’t imagine why we haven’t thought of it before. Even if the dull electric trains that bear my father and so many of the neighbours off to work in the morning and bring them back at night aren’t of any great interest to the German High Command, they’re not the only traffic on the line. There are sometimes ancient, grimy steam locomotives hauling long lines of goods trucks. We’ve seen trains of flatcars loaded with shrouded tanks and guns, and lines of fighters perched with folded wings like queues of resting crickets, from which a trained observer might be able to deduce a great deal of valuable strategic intelligence.

‘And she comes to this end of the tunnel …’ I reason slowly, so that Keith can overtake me and resume full control of the operation.

‘… so that no one sees her. She’s probably got some special place to hide.’

We examine the brickwork. The two retaining walls on either side slope upwards with the gradient of the embankment. At the low end of each is a rusty wire fence hung on concrete posts, and a corroded metal sign warning trespassers off. On one side the wire has come adrift from the bottom of the concrete, and you can curl it back. Keith crawls through; I follow him.

The stalks of cow parsley on the other side have been broken, and there are confused footprints in the mud. Someone has certainly been here before us, and recently. Keith looks at me and narrows his eyes. One of his father’s looks, but what it means this time is that he was right, as always.

‘Perhaps we should go back,’ I whisper. Because if this is where she comes, then she’ll come again – and it may be any minute now.

Keith says nothing. He follows the footprints and broken stalks back towards the parapet of the retaining wall, where they seem to end.

‘We don’t want her to see us here …’ I begin, but Keith’s already clambering on to the parapet, and edging up along it towards the top of the tunnel mouth. ‘She can’t have gone as far as that,’ I object. ‘She’s always back too soon.’ He pays no attention. Reluctantly I clamber up on to the parapet and shakily follow him.

The high end of the parapet brings us almost clear of the undergrowth on the embankment. Just ahead of us is the cleared track where the gangers walk, and beyond it the piled ballast. Seen from this close, the sleepers are massive, and the chairs that carry the rails lift them above the level of our heads. There’s a warm reek of creosoted wood and spilt train oil.

So she comes up here and observes … counts … makes notes … memorises … And then somehow manages to get back to the Close before we’ve returned from the shops. It doesn’t really make sense when you think about it.

‘She could be gradually assembling something,’ whispers Keith. ‘Bit by bit. A bomb. She’s waiting for a particular train. With something special on it. A new kind of plane.’

And when it comes … another exclamation mark will go in the diary.

A faint metallic disturbance becomes audible. It’s coming from just in front of our faces. The rails have begun to murmur the news of an approaching train.

We start to retreat down the narrow parapet. But at once we stop. There’s another sound below us – the echoing scrape of shoe against stone, the echoing tumble of stone into water. Someone’s coming through the tunnel.

It’s her, I know. So, from the look on his face, does Keith.

For a moment we hesitate, unable to decide which is worse – to find ourselves face to face with his mother, or to lie at the feet of a passing train in all its majestic danger. To be embarrassed or to be killed? Or even worse than being killed, to be somehow caught by the police – taken to court – fined forty shillings …