The Spy Game (11 page)

P
eter said the cold made it like Königsberg. Winters there were always like this.

The pond in the village had frozen up and some people cleared it of snow and went skating, but most of us didn't have skates
and just slipped around in our boots and fell over. I'd never been on ice skates though I guessed it was like roller skating.
It looked easy when other people did it.

Peter said that between Königsberg and the sea there was a great lagoon that froze beneath two foot of ice. When the city
was under seige in that last winter of the war, the ice was the last way out.

'There had been big bombing raids in the summer, and the Russians had been attacking for ages, getting closer and closer.
Everyone knew by then what was going to happen. For months, they'd been leaving, when there were still trains going and roads
open back to proper Germany. They didn't believe Germany was so great any more, even if people in Berlin still thought so.
They knew the Russians were winning. All that autumn, people had been going, and they went on going all through the winter.
Even when the Russians had blown up the bridges and the railway lines and they couldn't get away by land any more, they got
away by ship, but sometimes the ships were bombed by the British or torpedoed by the Russians. There was one ship that was
torpedoed by a Russian sub, and sank with ten thousand people on it, all refugees, old people and women and children and babies,
and they were all killed. Imagine that. And the Russians said it was a great victory and gave the submarine captain a medal.
That was why the ice was such a good thing. It gave them another way out. They could walk out from the city over this great
lagoon, safe between the land and the sea, where there weren't any tanks or any subs, and walk across, walk miles and miles
in the snow and across the ice, and get all the way to Danzig, and that was still a German city. That was the way the last
people got out. And the Russians finally captured Konigsberg in April, and by then the ice was melted and there wasn't any
way left.'

In 1945 our mother was sixteen. I made a picture for myself of a girl of sixteen walking miles and miles through the snow.
When snow was like it was now outside, deep and soft with dark clouds hanging right down over it so that you almost thought
you could touch them. When walking made you warm at first but after a while you weren't so warm any more and bits of you started
to hurt with the cold.

I pictured the girl walking all alone but Peter said that there were thousands of people escaping all together. So I saw a
great flock of people, dark on the snow, spread across it like a picture of caribou in the
National Geographic,
and the girl in the crowd but alone. She has lost her family somewhere. I knew that she had lost her family. Perhaps they
had been killed in Königsberg before she left or perhaps she just lost them in the crowd.

Then, but it is quite some time afterwards, she turns up in Berlin. She speaks good English so she gets a job with the British
and our father is working there too and that is how they meet. There is a story that will be told between them, told and repeated
by their children when they have them: how she was working in the same office and noticed one day that he had a tear in his
trousers and offered to mend it, and how she had mended everything for him ever after. The story used to be told like a joke,
as if he only married her because she was neat and good at sewing, when it was obvious that she was pretty and lively and
so much younger than him, obvious that there would have been competition and that there was some better reason for them to
have chosen one another.

'Do you think that was the way Mummy went, across the ice?'

Perhaps she skated. I was sure that she would have known how to skate.

'How do I know? Maybe she did. Maybe she went before.' And there was the other possibility, that she didn't leave at all and
was captured by the Russians instead.

* * *

I am practising the piano. My father is home and he likes to hear me practise. Never before has he spent so many days at home
with us, and days indoors, snowbound, the garden where he might have spent his time even in the winter smoothed over so deep
in snow you could not see a plant in it.

There is time to talk in these long days. I am going to ask him about Königsberg, about how all the people got out. That's
history. He cannot mind telling me that. I'll choose my moment, find a good moment when he's ready to talk. Just now he sits
in his chair with his eyes closed. It is impossible to tell if he is really listening. I have played the new piece without
an error, note perfect, like an armour without chinks. If he has noticed, he does not show it.

I am about to speak but he speaks first. He has been listening after all.

'It's time we had the piano tuned.' There is a cigarette burning in his hand but he has not smoked it. Delicately he lifts
it and tips the intact column of ash into the ashtray on the table. 'When did we last have the piano tuner here?'

'Ages ago,' I say. It has been two years, precisely.

'I'll call him straight away.' He gets up to find the number.

I'll have to ask him later, another time. I play the piece again. Mrs Cahn would want me to pay attention to tempo and dynamics
now. Play it again, she would say. She would set the metronome. Listen, till you hear the pulse inside you.

'When will he come?'

'I don't know. I haven't called him yet.'

The idea sets off a tremor of possibility. The piano tuner came the day after it happened. They let him in and he spent some
time alone in the house.

'Will it be soon?'

'I shouldn't think he's doing any calls at the moment because of the snow.'

There was no need for him to hurry, it was hardly an emergency, but he came the very first day that the road to the village
was open, appeared at the door like a successful explorer flushed from the cold, with his little brown bag and stories of
the depth of the snow at various points along the road. A man must work, he announced, and made a joke with a nervous laugh.
A man could not just hibernate the winter through. Yet I thought that was just the sort of thing a man who looked like him
should have done. He seemed even mousier now than the other times: a shabby brown man, his eyes exaggerated like those of
some nocturnal creature behind the lenses of his glasses. He unravelled himself, shedding hat, scarf, coat in the hall, and
under his great coat he had on a thick beige cardigan, and fingerless gloves that he kept on and that I thought somebody must
have knitted for him, unless he had knitted them himself. There was something rounded and feminine to him that meant you could
imagine him knitting.

It was like before. The tuning fork, the same systematic discordance, the same corrections, working down and then up the keyboard.
The piano open, all its ribs and innards bared.

'How does it work?' I asked. 'How do you know when it's right?'

'I listen how the sound is made up,' he said. 'The whirring within the note, the frequency, the beats per second. Do you hear
it?'

'Yes,' I said, but I didn't. I heard only jarring, tensions like lies, meanings withheld.

And he went on, insistent, precise, sound by sound jarring through me until I thought I could not listen any more, and then
suddenly he was finished and he raised his hands, high wrists as if the fingerless gloves were gone and there were instead
the black sleeves and white cuffs of the concert pianist, and played, at last, something fluent, fluid like Chopin.

'Lovely,' he said. 'A lovely little instrument. But you need a new string. You've a broken string on the low B. It's all right,
there are two strings, it still plays, but I don't have one with me. I'll have to order you another one. I'll bring it round
when it comes. Tell your mum that for me, will you? Tell Mrs Wyatt 1'11 be round with it, in a week or two.'

Two whole years gone by. How did he not know?

'You can tell Mr Wyatt,' I said. 'Mrs Wyatt's dead.'

His eyes seemed ever bigger behind the glasses. He fumbled with the tuning fork.

'Oh I'm so sorry, dear, I didn't know.'

'But it's ages ago now. Not last year but the one before. Just the day before you came.'

It was a kind of test: as if the sudden words might make his disguise drop off, all his shabby oddness, which might only have
been a costume put on with his role. Only it didn't drop off, and he looked more embarrassed than ever, and put all his outdoor
clothes back on and shambled out.

The piano tuner came that day, and the milkman and the post (the postman late, with so many days' worth of letters that they
didn't fit through the door) and the delivery van from the shop. And when I went down to the shop with Susan that afternoon,
I saw Mr Kiss go. Already we knew that there would be more snow coming. Even if you had not heard the forecast you could see
it in the sky.

He was at the counter buying cigarettes, trying to buy his brand but they didn't have it so he had to buy some other - some
plain English Virginia tobacco, but in a little village shop you cannot expect much choice. He looked hurried, annoyed, and
brushed by us without seeming to see us; and soon as he had gone out he came back in to buy some matches, and bought them
over our heads while we waited with Mrs Lacey's list. But when we went out with our basket he was just sitting there in his
car. He had the engine running but he sat quite still before the steering wheel, smoking and staring straight ahead. It was
just beginning to snow by then. The clouds that had lightened that morning and lifted away were weighing down again, hanging
over the hills heavier and darker than the land. We had walked to the end of the road before the car drove off.

S
uch a pity he had gone, Daphne Lacey said. The blizzard had lasted all night and once more everything was clear and white,
and the drifts had piled back across the roads and the village was closed off. Such a loss, when you thought about it. Why,
if only he had not been in such a rush to leave, the snow would have kept him longer, and they could have had him give a performance
in the Village Hall. That was what they used to do in Malaya, if anyone interesting ever came, they would put something on,
at the Club, though the Village Hall was hardly the Club. And it was so cold besides. If only they could heat it properly.
Those little heaters they had put in last year had scarcely any effect at all. Apparently the man was really quite a famous
violinist. Surely that was proved by the way he had to dash off the moment the road was open. What a pity that Sarah Cahn
had been so selfish with him. She could have shared him a little. There was nothing for her to be so cagey about. What an
odd woman she was really, keeping herself to herself the way she did.

* * *

'He was lucky to get out,' Peter said to me later. 'It must have been a problem for him, for his contacts too. They have regular
times to call in, you see, preset dates and times, and specific codes for each of them. If an agent misses one call he has
to make the next, or they have some alternative plan, some fallback plan, with a special code to say if everything's OK. If
he misses that one it starts to worry them. Moscow Centre wouldn't like it if he was snowed up here and disappeared from their
radar altogether.'

'You don't really know that. You're just saying things.'

'At least I'm trying to work it out.'

'I don't see why you have to. Why you can't just leave things be.'

'Come off it, Anna. You saw. Like I did. Don't pretend you didn't see her.'

I had started to walk away and he grabbed at me. I was quick though and he only got my sleeve.

'Let go of me.'

'But you did see, didn't you?'

Everything was tight and going out of focus, like the moment before you cried.

'Let go. You'll stretch my jumper.'

And when he let go, I said, 'OK, I saw. But I only saw a coat. It could have been someone else. It could have been any woman.
Lots of people have the same clothes, don't they?'

Peter sulked back to his room then and I took the toboggan and went over to Susan's again, and we went out on our own to the
big slope at the end of the village.

No one there but ourselves. And the snow new again, powdery over the polished crust of the slope. Even Susan is brave, without
the boys to see. On the toboggan we are flying, gripping on to each other, hair whipping each other's faces, flying over the
white ground.

Hold on. Hold on
tight.

M
arie, Marie, hold on tight.
Words come back. Something about a girl on a sled, and her cousin the arch-duke. The opening of 'The Waste Land', just a piece
of a poem that we studied at school. When I get home I will look it out. It must be there somewhere on the shelves, but such
a slim book slipped in among all the others that I have not seen it for years. I have noticed this before, that when you are
out of England things come to haunt you, words, books, pieces of knowledge that were taken for granted at home. Memories.
Once I spent a whole holiday with my husband trying to remember the name of some film we had seen, something quite un-important
that it had occurred to one or other of us to mention - and this when we were young, before we had grown old and conscious
of forgetting things. We were in Spain, travelling, inland where it was dry and wild and the plains stretched for hours before
us. If we had met another person from England we would have asked, but there was no one to meet, only villages that were emptied
with people hiding from the heat. Soon as we got home the name came back to us and we knew how very little it had mattered.

I do not understand the references in the poem. If someone ever explained them to me, then this too I have forgotten. Who
the people are who drink coffee in the Hofgarten. (And where is the Hofgarten? Not Berlin, I think it is somewhere other than
Berlin.) Who is the girl on the sled? I will need to have someone explain all this. All I understand for sure, understand
deep down as you should understand a poem, is the piece about the spring and the lilacs. April is the cruellest month. It
is April now and in Berlin it is still cold.

When my father died I went to his house alone and sorted out his things. Just me, no Peter. We spoke about it after the funeral.
He'd flown back from Hong Kong. I hadn't seen him for a couple of years and he looked good, tanned and fitter than you would
have expected for his age. Composed, slick even, every inch the successful lawyer. When he looked at me I knew he thought
that I looked old. He offered to come to the house but I told him not to bother. No point his wasting time with all that,
away from his family, away from his work. Anything he wanted, I said I would send. Partly I had done this out of considerateness
and partly for myself, for distance, to keep the habit we had formed that kept the past at bay.

'You're sure?'

'I 'm sure.'

Do what you want with the stuff, he had said. Take what you want and sell the rest. There would be nothing worth shipping
all the way to Hong Kong.

'Don't you want to keep anything? Not even for your family, your girls?' There was a Chinese wife I'd met a couple of times
when she made trips to London, two daughters I knew only from a photograph he once sent of them playing on a beach. I supposed
that they had grown now and weren't little girls any more but I didn't have any other way to picture them.

'I think your girls should have something. I'd like them to. I'll look something out and send it.'

'Fine,' he said, and the word had no meaning.

The house felt strange, as if everything had been subtly moved. It should not have been so. I knew the place well enough.
It had scarcely altered since we were children, and I had always been around, coming and going, particularly in the last months
of his illness. Perhaps it was just that a house always feels different after someone has died.

I began by going through the kitchen, a bit of practical housekeeping, throwing out what few pieces of food there were that
would rot, putting into a box what I might take home and use myself. I even cleaned a little. I felt a temptation to clean
it all, cupboards and shelves and corners, all the things that an old man's eyes would have become inured to, but satisfied
myself with the work surface and the sink, and made a note to myself to call up the woman who occasionally came to clean for
him and book her for a whole day to work through the entire house. I wanted that done before it was sold.

The simple work was activity at least, an assertion of the present in the stillness of the house. I put the kettle on, laid
out on the clean worktop the makings for a cup of coffee, black coffee it would have to be since there was no milk. I walked
through the rest of the rooms where the dust had settled, and felt that I was walking outside of time and outside of myself.
Recent events, my father's illness and death, and distant childhood ones, earliest memories, seemed all of a piece, and from
all of them I was detached, as if they were only dust and you could trail a finger through and wipe strips of them away.

It was with that sense of distance that I took the mug of coffee to his desk. I placed the mug with care on a loose paper
though the leather was already ringed and marked and worn like old skin. I knew its surface well, the touch of the leather
and the round wooden handles of the drawers, knew how I expected to find it, and yet it was different from that. It had all
been rearranged. The papers of fifty years, which I had expected to find in their usual light chaos, had all been sorted and
sifted and stacked.

This was the first moment that I had felt moved since coming into the house. So this was what he had done when he was ill,
preparing things for me in his mild, considerate way. I felt him sitting in the same chair in which I was sitting now, methodically
sorting drawer after drawer, muttering and filling a wastebin and the floor about it with all that could be crumpled and discarded.
I thought of all those times I had rung him to ask how he was and what he was doing with his day, and he had said that he
was busy. He didn't tell me what with, but now I saw. He had organised himself at the last. He had put out will, birth certificate,
whatever it was you needed to register a death. Other things he had arranged in specific drawers: letters, some sketchbooks
he had had in the war, odd photographs that had not found their way into albums, receipts for whatever in the house was valuable,
keys to clocks, a compass and a cigarette case. There was a sense of emptiness in these drawers, of too much space there where
they had been crammed for years with so many things that had now been dispensed with, tidied or edited away before they might
again be seen. Even the smell of the drawers when they were opened, before I touched them, the smell of papers and dust and
bared wood, suggested recent disturbance.

Many of these contents had been familiar all my life. I had looked in the desk before, officially and unofficially. Peter
and I had gone through it, guiltily, in the days of our suspicion. Most of what I remembered was there. There was a game we
used to play at children's parties, where we were shown a lot of objects on a tray and then shown the tray again, and had
to remember what had been on it before and what had been taken away. I used to be good at that. I looked at the tray hard
and tried to keep the image of it like a photograph, memorised it and fixed it tight behind closed lids, and opened them only
when the next tray was put before us so that I could see in a flash how it was changed. Now I had the same feeling, only I
could not have named any precise object which had been taken away. The odd thing was what had appeared which had not been
there before, not when we had searched for it or any other time I had nosed through: our mother's diary. It was a blue Letts'
pocket diary for 1960, with reminders and appointments neatly marked in blue ink, filled up right through into the few pages
at the end that ran into the beginning of the January of the following year, right up to what appeared to be a doctor's appointment
in Oxford the day she died.

I found it in the lowest drawer, the last drawer I came to. I put it on the desk top and riffled through the other contents
of the drawer, and finding nothing more of interest closed it, closed all of the drawers in the desk before I read, careful
and deliberate, starting from the beginning, page by page.

What Peter once would have given to see that. What I would have given. And now it had only pathos: the banality of it, of
dentist's and doctor's appointments and beginnings and ends of term, the impersonal reduction of a life into a book hardly
bigger than a cigarette packet. There was only one line written there that was personal in any way. That line. At the back,
in the spare pages for notes, a phrase that I recognised at once:
lilacs out of the dead land.

What would he have made of that, if he had known? If he had been there, if he had come with me. If he was not even then on
his flight home, flying away back to being whoever he had made himself.

Look, Anna, see that!

A boy, holding me there by the force of his feeling - not the man who had become a stranger but the boy I knew too well, picking
through drawers and files and papers. Thin energy. Quick fingers. Burning eyes. See that. See the tidied desk, the evidence
of the house. See. I was right, wasn't I? I was right all along. No random event but only conspiracy. Some other hand, always,
some hand other than our own, our mother's, our father's, dealing things out.

Even now, so long after, they had not forgotten. They had remembered, and come and searched and cleared and arranged. Determined
what we would find and what we would not find. Made all this, the order and the empty space, a deliberate thing, arranged,
composed, something more than the work of an old man tidying up for death.

So there. Told you so. The thought came to me and there was no holding it back.

I took the diary away with me that first day, and a cardboard box of food, nothing else. I loaded the box into the car and
then went back and locked the door and felt the house behind it as it used to be, as if the rooms inside were still alive
as they had been, and there was the smell of aeroplane glue in them and the coal fire burning.

You have to remember these things, Anna. Don't write them down. You can't write them down anywhere but you've got to remember
them always.

As if we were followed, watched, liable at any time to interrogation. And I was a child and confused and could not get them
straight, the codes and checks and fallbacks, systems of communication and operation, all that trade-craft he tried to teach
me, that I understood only in fragments. How even the connections are concealed, how each agent is isolated, never knowing
more than is necessary for them to know. How a single phrase, some quite innocuous phrase or a line from a published book,
might identify them or hold the key to a cipher.

I drove back home and did not have the strength to get the box out of the car. I would get it in the morning and sort everything
then, tins of tomatoes, stale coffee, outdated herbs, half-used bags of sugar and flour that would hang about and sadden the
larder for months. I only took the diary in.

My husband and daughter were in the kitchen.

'What's that?' my husband asked.

A slim blue book, a frayed blue ribbon hanging from it. An object of such familiarity that I did not really need to say.

'You OK?'

'Tired. I'm just tired.'

He opened a bottle of wine, scrambled some eggs for our supper. I put the diary away in a drawer.

Soon afterwards I happened to see there was an old film about Violette Szabo on television. I had nothing better to do that
day so I drew the curtains and sat down and watched it in the afternoon. The film was made in 1958 but I had not seen it before.
I had read the book when I was a child but I had not seen the film.

There was a recognition code Violette used when she met a member of the Resistance.

Violette: It's good that spring
is
here at last.

French garage mechanic: It was a long winter.

Violette: And now the days are drawing out.

Virginia McKenna did not look like the Violette I had imagined.

I would have to put the pieces together, I saw then. For myself, if the past was ever to make sense. Go back over the stories,
the stories I carried in my mind and the stories that were real. Visit the places where they happened. When there was time,
I would go and find out for myself whatever was to be found.

When my daughter came back from school she was surprised to see the curtains drawn. You've been watching telly, Mum. Then
you can't stop me from watching now.

There was something I had to see, I said. Something that reminded me of when I was a child.