The Spy Game (10 page)

H
e smoked some kind of cigarettes that had a heavy, dark smell, different from what I was used to -French cigarettes, I suppose
they must have been, or Camels. I knew he was there as soon as I went in. I did not see him but I smelled the cigarettes,
and saw his brown overcoat hanging on a hook in the passage between the entrance and the stairs. The door to the kitchen was
closed. I imagined him sitting in the kitchen smoking, reading the newspaper, his chair pushed back beside the fire.

I was glad that I did not see him because I would not have known how to speak to him. With Mrs Cahn it was not so hard. I
could play my scales, say the same things I always did, and forget about the wine-coloured dress. Today she was wearing a
plain black dress that she had often worn before. She looked elegant, tautly poised as she always was, the same as ever. People
did not change because you knew something else about them. They still looked the same. Only, if you thought of it, the way
you saw them changed. There was the person you saw, who was always the same, and then there was the other person that you
found out they were inside. Like Russian dolls. Or spies. Like Helen Kroger and Leontina Cohen.

Once during the lesson I heard him cough. (The tall man throwing his cigarette into the fire and sitting back, folding the
newspaper.) The lesson seemed to go very fast, and I did not stay on for cake.

I was already outside, gloves on in the cold, when Sarah Cahn called me back.

'Wait, Anna. I had a little Christmas present for you, just a tiny thing. I had it all ready for you and then I forgot. Don't
stand outside though, come in just a moment and I'll find it.'

She opened a door on to a bright strip of kitchen. I saw the sink, a wooden drying rack on the wall above the draining board,
some cups waiting to be washed, the back of a chair. The man's coat was close in the passage so that I could smell the smoke
on it, deep in the wool like its own smell.

'You can open it now if you like.'

'No, that's all right, I'll take it home and put it under the tree.' I said that even though we didn't have the tree yet.
I just didn't want to stay any longer.

I didn't go further than the doorway because he made the kitchen crowded. You could see he was tall even though he was sitting,
his legs stretched so far across the floor.

* * *

I had seen enough of the man to know him when I saw him again a few days later.

As Peter said, Christmas shopping in Oxford was only Mrs L's idea of fun: lunch at a Kardomah, and a visit to Father Christmas
that we were too old for, only Peter said that we had never done it and Daphne Lacey had insisted, as if we were not just
motherless but deprived. So we had to queue in the department store for what seemed hours, hot in our coats because Mrs Lacey
told us to keep them on or we might lose them, all to see a cardboard grotto and a man with old teeth and a too-red face.
Peter dragged behind all day, and Mrs Lacey kept calling him on crossly, looking hectic, her face askew so that you could
not imagine that it was really any fun for her either.

We were in another shop buying a dress for Susan. Peter was hanging about the door waiting for us to leave. Just outside there
was a three-foot-high plaster panda that had a green tray in its paws that tilted when you dropped money on to it so that
the money went into a collection box. He had put in a penny, and a threepenny bit, and now he was experimenting with folded
sweet wrappers and what-ever was in his pockets.

'You shouldn't do that,' I said. 'It's for charity.'

'So what?' said Peter, and took a piece of chewing gum from his mouth and wrapped that.

Out on the street it was dark now. It had got dark while we were in the department store, and now that the lights were on
the town looked happier than it had before, the lights bright in shop fronts and over the heads of the crowds that spilled
out from the pavement on to the road. There was such a mass of people, you did not at first distinguish them as individuals.

'Look, it's him, the man who was at Mrs Cahn's. I saw his coat. There!'

It must have been the same one. It was a distinctive coat, unusual for England - for the country anyway, as I would not have
known whether or not men wore coats like that in London - a soft smooth wool, expensive-looking, not so much brown as the
colour of caramel. (Even when I had seen it in the passage I had thought: I will know that coat if I see it again.) And the
man who wore it was taller than everybody around him. Even at that distance, fleetingly in the street, I knew that it was
him.

Peter ran out.

'What are you doing?'

'Tailing him.'

'But you can't. We have to stay here.'

'This is our only chance.'

Peter was fixed, walking fast, cutting a determined line through the crowd, taking advantage of his slightness to nip into
the spaces between people, almost running. I kept up as well as I could. I was already out of the shop and did not want to
get separated from Peter too.

'Wait for me.'

'Don't you see, we have to get close or we'll lose him. There's such a crowd, we'd lose him in it.'

The man wasn't shopping. He was going somewhere. He treated the crowd like dust to be brushed through. We would have lost
him if he had not stopped. We thought we had lost him when we came to a slightly more open space and saw him cross the road
to stand at a bus stop.

'Don't let him see us.'

'He doesn't know us.'

'He might do, sometime in the future. He mustn't know we saw him here.'

We stood beneath an awning on our side of the road. One bus came, then another, but the man did not get on either of them.
It was cold, standing there. A third bus came and, just as it did, a woman walked up to the bus stop beside the man. I did
not see where she had come from. I hadn't noticed her anywhere on the street till then.

A big, bell-like coat in a coarse dark tweed. That coat also I had seen before. From where I stood I could see only the back
of it, and the back of the woman's head and the headscarf she had on, but I could have told you that on the front of the coat
were five big tweed-covered buttons and two pockets set at a slant above the hips.

My mother's coat. I knew it immediately.

Peter saw it too.

Was that how tall my mother was? I couldn't have said. I suddenly wasn't sure that I could quite remember. But that was like
the way she moved: that brisk, graceful way the woman lifted herself on to the bus, with the tall man standing aside and getting
on behind her.

There were lights on in the bus but the windows were steamed up from all the people on it. We could just make out these two
new passengers as they walked down and found seats. The woman first, the shadowy form of her settling in a seat that was spare
beside a window, and her dark-gloved hand going to the window and with a waving motion beginning to wipe away a patch of steam,
just as the bus began to move off.

We watched it go, the yellow clouded windows and the hand waving.

Peter went on watching as other traffic followed it away: a car, a van, more cars, a lorry then that hid the last of it from
view. Another bus drew up at the stop. This one was almost empty. The windows were clear because there weren't so many people
breathing inside. It pulled away, following the first one.

I was really cold now.

'Come on. We've got to find Mrs Lacey.'

I could not put words to what I thought I had seen. Looking about, at the street and the people, I could not so much as think
which way we had come. The people's faces seemed all the same, the faces of strangers and nothing else, nothing more personal
or individual, nothing in them that meant that they could be stopped and asked the way. And the street, I knew the street
at least. That was itself, the shops one side of it, the long wall of some college building on the other, a gateway that had
a tower like a crown above it - only I could not say if we had come up it or down.

'Where do we go? Where is it?'

I was standing in the middle of the pavement, looking along it, looking at the shop signs, not seeing what was close. I was
in the way, jolted by one person and then another, jolted against Peter.

I grabbed on to him, his arm in its thick duffel, held tight as if I would be swept away if I did not do so.

Such a long time it seemed to take to walk back the length of the way we had come. A flood of people washing by, breaking
before us; Peter walking on, turning every now and then as if to check that I was myself. His face was cold and strange. His
hair was sticking up. I noticed that he did not have his hat.

'Where's your hat, Peter?'

'I dunno. I lost it somewhere. Maybe in the department store.'

At least he knew where he was going. He got us back. Daphne Lacey was standing in the street, holding Susan tight to her and
quivering with anger. She walked ahead of us holding Susan's hand all the way to the car.

When we got home Dad was already back from work. The hall was full of the scent of the bare Christmas tree that he had just
brought in and propped up against the stairs. I ran into his arms. I could smell the forest on him, dark and green and soft
underfoot.

B
uilding a card house brings the mind to a fine point. Concentration complete, brain to fingertips. Tongue to lips. Control.

The card is crisp and clean between my fingers. I am standing a nine of diamonds against a four of clubs. I work on the floor.
I know from experience that the rug before the fireplace makes the easiest surface, its fine pile helping to support the cards.
The only problem is if someone else were to enter the room and the vibration of their steps move along the planks beneath.

There are lots of packs but most of them are incomplete. We keep them for card houses. Dad has just bought two new packs for
teaching us to play canasta. They have pictures of sailing ships on them, one pack blue, one yellow. The stiff new ones are
good for walls. I will start by using them. I will build a lower floor, with rooms that are roofed and between them open courtyards,
running all the width of the pattern of the carpet; and then with what cards are left I will make an upper floor. The older
cards, which have worn soft at the corners, I use for roof, so far as I can.

Building a card house like this takes hours. That is what it is meant to do: to take all the rest of the day, so that I need
think of nothing else.

The door opens. I hold still, afraid that a draught might spill it all. But the door is opened slowly, only halfway, and Peter
leans on it, gripping it with his two hands.

'What are you doing?'

'You can see.'

Peter sags against the door as if he must need it to hold him up.

'Don't stand there with the door open. Close it or there'll be a draught.'

And he comes in, slowly, sits across the arm of a chair.

'The fire needs stoking,' he says. He is used to stoking the fire since there is no one else in the house in the afternoons.

'Well, you can't do it now. You can't get to it without knocking down the cards.'

'That's silly. It'll burn down.'

I take up one of the old packs, begin to lay a section of roof, dropping each card lightly from just a whisker's space above
the structure, precisely across the joins and the walls.

'It'll go out and then we'll be cold.'

The fire is almost all red, most of the coal in it, which Margaret had put in earlier, either burnt away or alight. Just a
few lumps at the tip remain black, like the peaks of a mountain range.

'Are you just going to do that, make a card house?'

'Yup.'

'All day?'

'Yup.'

I shall go on doing it until I have used up all the cards. Until it gets dark, until children's hour television starts, until
we can go to the Laceys' for tea. Until Daddy gets home. Until there is something else going on.

Peter throws something across the card house into the fire. It is a dirty jelly baby that he must have had in his pocket for
days. The little figure shows up for a moment against the red coals and then burns away.

'If you were a sleeper, how long do you think it would take before you forgot who you really were?'

'I don't know what you're talking about.' I am starting on the second storey. The first pair of cards slip on the shiny surfaces
of those beneath and fall flat, but the structure holds.

'If you were living undercover for years and years. Wouldn't you get confused?'

'I'd always know who I was. I couldn't be anyone else.'

'How can you tell? You've never even been away on your own.'

'I just don't think I would.'

'If you didn't have your name. If you weren't Anna any more. If you didn't have any of your things, anyone at all who knew
you from before. Not Dad, not me, not anyone. What then?'

'I'd still be me, wouldn't I?'

'Yeah, but who would that be? Think. You're speaking another language. You've got another name. Everybody calls you by that
other name. You've got friends, maybe even another family. Which person would be you?'

'I don't know, Peter. I don't know what you're going on about.'

Peter is not slumped any more but stiff, leaning forward on the arm of the chair. He is bent forward at an angle like his
penknife when it is half-folded. Even when I concentrate on the card house I can feel him there, stiff like a knife above
me.

'What if you've got a husband, children? What are they then? Just part of your cover?'

There is an intense moment of silence then he puts his feet to the floor and stands up.

'Don't stamp,' I say. 'It'll fall down.'

3

M
argaret said the man's name was Istvan Kiss. Susan thought that was funny and did not understand why we two did not laugh
as well. And he was a musician. The neighbours heard him playing the violin. That was noted in the village, that the widow
and her exotic visitor played music together in the afternoons.

'Must be a Russian,' Peter said.

'Well, he couldn't be English, could he, with a name like that? Neighbours say he doesn't talk at all. Might not even speak
English for all we know.'

'What language do you think they use to talk to each other?'

Of course the name was Hungarian. It wasn't a Russian name even. I know that now. He was only a Hungarian violinist. And yet
there were nights when he loomed up in my dreams, following me through a crowd as we had once followed him, but the following
never ended and I got nowhere against the flood of people, and he never drew closer and nobody stopped.

It was Peter I might have feared. Peter drove us into it. He made us think what we should not have thought. Peter made everything
so complicated, his denial distorting everything around us.

Country children should understand about death: that it happens and it is there and that is that. Don't they see dead things
all their lives? Myxy rabbits. Squashed hedgehogs on the road with their innards spilling out, tangled lengths of intestine
in lurid waxy shades of red and blue. Dead birds that you can pick up by their feet or by a stiff wing and bury. In that winter
that followed, that cold winter, there were many dead birds. Once I buried a thrush in a shoebox. I had found the bird close
by the house, on the open snow. Perhaps it starved, my father said. Look how all the ground where it might have found worms
is covered deep in snow, how the berries are gone from the whitened bushes. Or perhaps it had just died of cold. That was
what I thought, taking it inside, laying it in the box on a bed of green tissue, noting when I brought it into the warm how
soft the speckled feathers were on its breast. Of course the ground was too hard for digging. My father suggested we make
a place at the bottom of the compost heap, the rough heap he had by the gate to the orchard. He lifted out chunks of frozen
debris with jabs of his fork and made a hole where I laid the box, where there was brown soil beneath.

It was the winter of 1962-3, the great winter of my childhood, when the snow came in December and lay right through until
March. Thousands of English birds died that winter, garden birds and songbirds that were caught by the freak of the climate.
It was many years before their population would recover. Years before the time would fade from people's talk.

The snow came two days after Christmas. We were having a posh lunch at the Laceys' when the snow began to fall in big feathery
flakes. We ran straight out as we were on to the lawn. The flakes fell waveringly and lay on our hair, and on the grass and
on the hard leaves of the shrubs. It fell in a soft silence that made laughter tinkling and distant, made distant the banging
on the window that was the grown-ups calling us in.

'Here, come back! Who told you you could get down? Come in and put on your coats at least!' And when that was done the grown-ups
went back to their meal, looking like a picture of themselves sitting at the table through the long windows, with the snowflakes
falling before them. There were candles on the table, in the silver candelabra that were wound with ivy, and glasses with
wine in them, and crackers stacked in piles like logs.

It was one of those full moments that make a memory, when everything else falls away. People later classify childhoods as
happy or unhappy. Best would be to tot up these moments when nothing else mattered. That was what childhood was for.

For weeks (or perhaps it was only days and memory has extended them) there was no school and Peter was home, and our father
was home because he could not drive to work, and everything was strange and in abeyance. Each morning when I woke the window
panes on the casements had frosted with the night's breath into patterns like coral, and I looked out through the white coral
branches to the sea-floor whiteness of the fields.

We wore woolly tights beneath our trousers. I had a white knitted hat with coloured pompoms hanging from it. Susan had one
the same as if we were sisters. We would go out with Peter and meet the village children on the hill, though usually we did
not know these children or passed them only blankly because most of them were from the council houses beyond the playground.
Peter and I had a proper toboggan made of wood, an old one that was seasoned and polished from use, but many of the others
had only trays. We let some of them have a go on ours, and then for a time they seemed to accept us.

There was one boy who was big with thick black hair, and he was the same age as Peter though he was much taller. One day he
went with Peter right to the top of the hill, the two of them pulling the wooden toboggan together up the steepness of the
slope. The toboggan came down like a bomb with the both of them on it, and ran on and on over the flattening field until it
overturned in a drift where they had begun to clear the road. When Peter got up and shook the snow from him his face was as
red and shiny as the other boy's, and almost I would not have known him for who he was at home.

The boy was called Richard. Richard to us though some of the others called him Dick. His father was cowman at the farm, and
sometimes I had seen him with a switch in his hand making a man's coarse deep calls to the cattle as he helped his father
herd them into the yard, the sounds coming strange and alien from deep in the back of a boy's throat. He was rough. He climbed
our wall and took apples from our trees and I had seen him smoke a cigarette. It meant something to have him for a friend.

Once Richard led a gang of us round the hill past the back of Sarah Cahn's. We were looking for new slopes but this one was
no good because of the wall that crossed it. The snow was very deep this side of the hill, a drift piled high against the
trunk of the big oak there, more snow piled into its crotch and along its branches, even in the creases in its bark. The wall
itself was almost hidden, only we knew where it was by the pattern of the drifts, and Peter, who had begun to show off a bit,
clambered up and found the stones beneath and started to walk along it. Richard came up behind him, and another boy, though
they went thigh-deep in the snow trying to get up. Susan and I left them be and pulled the toboggan along the track, even
if the boys said we were sissy. It was smooth on the track and we got on ahead, putting our prints into clean snow, and heard
the boys fooling around behind us.

The lights were on in her windows as we passed, but this time there was no one to see in the house.

'Mr Kiss is still there, if that's what you want to know,' said Susan. 'He's snowed up like everyone else. Mummy said that
he's a professional musician and that there was a concert that he should have given but he couldn't get there.'

'Does your mother know him?'

'No, it's just what somebody else told her. Anyway, when you think about it the concert doesn't much matter because half of
the audience wouldn't have been able to get there either.'

None of it mattered so much in this moment in the snow. It did not matter what we were doing. If the man was there or not
there. If he was who he was said to be or someone else. Who anyone was. Who I was, or Susan or Richard or Peter. Peter was
only a boy for now, rosy-cheeked, swaggering, loud unlike his usual self, leading other boys along the wall. 'There's a place
I found,' he was saying, 'Further on. And there's nothing at the bottom of it, nothing to stop you. No road or anything. It
just goes on and on.' Richard threw a snowball and then he was jumping off the wall into the deep snow and they were rolling
over and fighting and running on with the snow on their faces and down their necks but too hot for the moment to notice.

Later, when the moment had passed, it all began to matter again. It came back to us just as the cold got to Peter later, when
he was tired.

Peter was tired before Richard was, and Richard threw a snowball that smacked him in the eye, and in the shock of it Peter
lost his temper and screwed up his face and his fists, and attacked Richard for real. Anyone could see what would happen,
Peter so knotted and puny before the big boy, as if he was asking to be beaten, and he was beaten soon enough, crumpled and
crying in the snow. His nose was bleeding; there was a thick dribble of blood running down, and he put a handkerchief to it
but did not get up and only lay where he was, and for a moment none of the other children had the sympathy to go to him. We
just watched for a moment as he lay in his temper and his cold and his pain and whimpered, and took the dirty hand-kerchief
away to see how thick and bright the blood was, and put it back to his nose again; and then we all moved together, even Richard,
and helped him home.

It was the same with the other thing. It had gone from my mind all of that afternoon and then as we walked home it came back
suddenly like a shudder, as we dragged down to the road and to the village. Snow had begun to fall again. Richard and the
other boy walked ahead, Peter behind but not so far behind that we could not hear him sniff now and then and feel his shame.
Again we passed Sarah Cahn's, but by the front, with the car that must have belonged to Mr Kiss parked outside caked with
snow. I did not look in. I knew how it was without looking, even though every-thing outside was changed and white. I felt
his presence in the house there before we reached it, felt it in my spine falling back as we walked on.