The Spy Game (3 page)

P
eter, sweetheart, how can you waste such a day as this? Out with you now, and take some air!'

That was what our mother would have said. She used to say it so often I could remember precisely the rhythm in her voice,
the bright tone that carried clear from room to room across the house.

Peter was home from boarding school and it was summer. It must have been that first summer after we were alone but from the
sort of day it was it could have been any one of them. All those summers when I look back on them seem the same.

Peter didn't go outside and there was no one to make him. Our mother used to worry over Peter because he was so pale and thin.
Our father, on the days when he was home, did not seem to notice. He was gentle with us but sometimes that seemed a passing-by,
as if we did not quite touch, and the soil and the leaves and the stems of the flowers in the garden were more tangible to
him than we ourselves. All the light hours of the day he seemed to be in the garden, and when the days were long, supper was
late so that we had filled ourselves on bread and peanut butter before he remembered that he must come in and cook.

On the days that he went to work, I used to get up at the same time and see him off, Peter a little later. Then Margaret came,
each morning, and often Susan came to play or sometimes we went to Susan's house; and when Margaret was gone Mrs Lacey fed
us lunch and after that the two of us went pretty much where we pleased, though Mrs Lacey was there if we needed her, if we
were hungry or cut ourselves. The routine had come about so naturally that it never occurred to us to think that the adults
must have talked and planned (discussed and decided as they had so many other things) and arranged the structure of our lives.
For ourselves, we knew no control but only eased into a freedom of a kind that the adult world did not recognise, that was
the unspoken freedom of the mother-less. No one to be answerable to, every minute of the day, no one to make us put our boots
on before we went out, no one watching. When my mother was there I can remember saying, ten times a day, 'What shall I do
now?' and waiting in all the vacancy of a child's boredom for a bright reply. That was not so any more. We were ourselves
alone and thought for ourselves, and there were no words to it. We just did what we did.

Peter made aeroplanes. Each Saturday morning Dad took us into Cheltenham and Peter bought a new model kit and a wartime comic
book, and in the week that followed he made the plane. He had British ones and German ones, and a few American bombers, and
hung them from the ceiling of his room. He knew all about them, when they were built and where they fought and what kind of
guns they had. When he was younger the whole house sounded with the dogfights he staged from his bed, with rattles of guns
and ack-ack and dives and cries of
Achtung!

On this day the house is quiet. Only the two of us in it and Peter intent in the playroom making the latest plane. I was singing
a moment ago, out in the sun. I love to sing. I was singing songs round and round so that they never ended, singing out in
the garden and in through the French windows, and now that I have stopped the empty rooms have fallen back more silent than
before.

'What's the matter, Peter?'

Peter sits hunched with his hair falling to his eyes. The plane lies still in pieces on the table, only parts of it made.
His face is blotchy, his hands tight and awkward with anger.

'Has your plane gone wrong?'

Till then I think we had not spoken of her. Not seriously at least, not in any way that I can remember. Peter had come home
immediately afterwards, and we saw each other then, and we spent the various school holidays together, but we had not talked
about it.

'How do we know she's dead?'

His eyes were shiny so that I did not look into them. He was almost crying. I looked at his fingers instead, how they were
white with the pressure. They held the wing of the plane so tight that I was afraid he might break it and then he would cry
for sure.

'Because they told us.'

Actually, but I could not have said this to him, I knew before they told me. I had had the thought from the moment of the
phone call, when I was sitting playing cards with Susan and the News was on the television, and Mrs Lacey in the hallway outside
the sitting room door said, 'When?' and Mrs Lacey's voice had a crack in it, which failed to resonate like a cracked bowl,
and though she had tried to make the flat word sound ordinary its significance had seeped like a gas into the air of the adjoining
room. And Mr Lacey was swearing for some reason, and not paying attention to her. He was looking at the television screen,
angry at something he saw there.

'Because they told us,' Peter repeated, but the certainty had gone from the words.

Peter was collected now, more his usual self. He put the wing down. He began to peel the dried glue off his fingertips, stripping
it off like skin and laying it on the spread newspaper on the table.

'That's just what they said. It doesn't have to be so just because they said it.'

He had his authority back now, the elder brother making statements to his sister. Usually when Peter said things he was right.
He lived in a boy's sure world of knowledge and facts, names and dates and numbers. He could identify a make of car or an
aeroplane, could quote the height of Everest or Freddie Trueman's bowling figures. He must explain. I did not speak but waited
for him to explain.

'Think, Anna. What did they actually say?'

'What did they say to you?'

'Oh, nothing much. Just that Dad was coming to take me out. And I thought that was odd because it was a Tuesday. Then Dad
came and Matron packed some things and we got in the car.'

Not what was said but what was done, that was what Peter told. In that case I would not tell either.

Daphne Lacey had to break the news. Even at the time I think I understood that it was hard for her.

Mrs Lacey's manner that morning was strange and sharp. She looked madder than ever. We had always thought secretly that she
was a little mad. There was an odd, darting intensity to her, an effect that was heightened by her garish taste in clothes
and the smudges of turquoise colour that she put like punctuation marks above her faded eyes. We once saw a bee-eater in the
tropical cage at the zoo that had a dash of just that same colour about its eye. Peter whispered that it was like her even
though Susan was with us, and Susan couldn't hear us, and we giggled.

The fog had cleared overnight. The morning was bright.

'I think I'll take Benjy for a walk after breakfast. You'll come with me, Anna, won't you, dear?'

We had been told that we must be nice to the Laceys because they came from Malaya and had been in a Jap camp. That meant that
they had been prisoners of war. Mrs Lacey had suffered a lot and had lost a child. She looked too old and brittle to be Susan's
mother but Margaret said that Susan was a replacement.

Susan was made to stay in, on some pretext or other, and I walked out with Mrs Lacey alone into the bright morning with the
poodle beside us. The sun was surprisingly warm. The ice had turned to shiny puddles and there were drips coming off roofs
and the dark twigs of trees. We walked down a path that led off the street, and then out past the houses and vegetable patches
to a gate and a field. There were sheep in the field and Mrs Lacey put Benjy on a lead and let me hold it. She knew how much
I liked to hold the dog. The hill rose smoothly up before the path and rounded off beneath a clear sky.

'There's something I have to tell you, Anna dear. You see, your father telephoned, he called us yesterday, he couldn't come
back last night. He asked me to tell you something.'

She didn't put her arm around me or anything, and I did not look at her but only at the trodden path and the grey dog with
his wagging dish-brush tail, and the lead connecting me to him.

'Your mummy's gone to heaven.'

I couldn't picture heaven. In the wood the beech trees were bare and if you looked up the sky was a brilliant blue between
their branches. Mrs Lacey's heaven would be lush and green and filled with tropical flowers, orange and purple and crimson
with petals like tongues.

'There was an accident, he said. He said that it was very quick, very sudden. It must have been over very quickly.'

I do not think that I spoke.

I saw the dog before me and the beeches, and coming out from the trees again beneath the hill I saw the sharpness of the light
on the winter grass. These things I would remember. The clean form of the hill and the scar in its side where stone had been
quarried and a thorn bush grew in a spiky black outline from a crack in the bared rock. A drystone wall cutting across. I
would remember them always.

The church stood where we came back into the village, by the field that was the playground. When we got to it, Mrs Lacey suggested
going in.

'Why?'

'I thought it might be nice to say a prayer.'

I had only been into the church once or twice. I liked it from the outside, I liked the sandy warmth of its stone, but inside
it was bare and white with long cold windows and an empty smell that must have been made of damp and limewash.

'But we're Catholic. It's not a Catholic church.'

So we walked by the gate and did not stop. Mrs Lacey's face was tight and like a mask with its painted points of colour.

* * *

'We've only got their word for it,' said Peter. 'We didn't see her, did we? All we know for sure is that she went away, we
don't know anything else. We didn't even go to the funeral.'

Peter was a boy and two years older. He had all the toughness in him of his age and of his time away at school. Peter sowed
doubts and doubts were power.

'When you think about it, we don't really know any-thing about her, do we?'

'That's because of her being German, because Daddy met her in Berlin.'

'Yes, but all the same, we should know something. We don't know her family. We don't know anyone who used to know her. We
don't even know where she came from, or anything.'

'Yes we do.'

'What?'

'Know where she came from. I know the name of the place. She told me. It was a big place, bigger than Cheltenham. It was called
Königsberg.'

'That's what she said, but it's not there. I checked. It isn't on the map. At school, I checked, and it wasn't there.'

'That's not true.'

'Look for yourself if you don't believe me.'

We went to the sitting room and Peter took the atlas down from the big bookcase beside our father's chair. He laid it on the
carpet and opened it where Europe began.

'Find it then.'

I looked until my legs ached from being bent on the floor. The afternoon was hot. There was a sort of hum that was a summer
day outside but I stayed in and did not notice for a long time that the curtains were still drawn from the night before and
that I looked by lamplight. Then I got up and put out the light and drew the heavy curtains back, and saw outside as if it
was a foreign country off the map. It was bright, green, behind glass; I could not go there. I went back to my place on the
floor. I used to sit on the floor with my legs folded flat, knees together and feet splayed out, but after a long time that
began to hurt. I sat some other way. I looked across four wide pages: Central, Eastern Europe, the pale-blue Baltic, the tattered
edge of Scandinavia curling above it, the solid blocks of colour beneath. My mother had said that she had lived close to the
sea. You could see ships, she had said, from the attic window of her home. I looked at all the names that fanned out from
the Baltic coast, in West Germany, East Ger-many, Poland. I looked at the names inland. Then Peter condescended to show me
how the index worked and I put a ruler to the page and worked systematically down all the tight-printed columns of Ks.

'Perhaps it begins with a C,' I said, and started again there.

'No it doesn't. It can't. I know.'

'How do you know? You don't know German.'

Conico, Conimbriga, Coningsby, Coniston.
He was right. It just wasn't there.

'See.'

I
went home just briefly that day from the Laceys'.

It was late in the afternoon. It was beginning to get dark and there were lights on in the house.

'Somebody's there. Who's there?' When I saw the lights in the windows I knew that I didn't want anyone with me, not Mrs Lacey,
not Susan, no one who had any words to them. I wanted to go in on my own, like always.

'It's only the piano tuner.'

I could hear the piano soon as the door was open: a note repeated, adjusted, played again.

'Why's the piano tuner here?'

To tune the piano, said Mrs Lacey, nothing strange about it. There was no point in sending the man away once he had made the
journey. So she had told Margaret to let him in.

We had come only to pack a bag. My father was coming home with Peter and then we were going away for a few days. He would
be driving right now, fetching Peter from school.

When we went upstairs to my room the sound was there too.

'What shall I take?'

The notes were insistent, distorting, dragging on the ear. I never liked the piano tuner coming. He made the world go out
of shape.

'You're going to the sea,' Susan said.

When the piano tuner finished we saw him go before we turned off the lights, and Mrs Lacey double-locked all the doors. Later
that same evening my father came and we drove away in the dark.

I slept in the car. A transient security in sleeping on a journey, in being carried through the night, and when the motion
stopped, being lifted, wrapped and still curled, and knowing that you were somewhere else and yet not having to open your
eyes, and being safe and put into bed. When I woke the sea was there before me. I drew back the plaid-patterned curtains from
a big window, and saw the sea in a straight line in front of the house. There were two beds in the room and Peter was still
asleep in the other one. It was the room of some boy or boys who we did not know; school photographs of strangers on the chest
of drawers and a dartboard on the wall.

The sea was a dull pencil colour with white edges against the shore. I had never come to the seaside in winter before. It
looked so cold, wide and silent beyond the fastened window. I did not hear it until I went out, soon as breakfast was over.
I ran ahead of Peter, down the steps from the garden on to the narrow strip of the beach, and low waves came in and foamed
at my feet, and I ran along that beach and over the wooden groin and along the next, until I came to a fence and a line of
bare and tattered trees. I stood there and looked across the sea to the long smooth outline of an island. It was clear that
it was an island because I could see each end of it, and the sea between was still grey, but scaly now that the sun had broken
through to shine on it.

We stayed four or five days, long enough to learn that the island was the Isle of Wight and that the rocks that stood out
in the sea beyond its tip were called the Needles, though they seemed too thick and solid for such a name. The house belonged
to some people that my father said he had known before, before the war and before my mother, but I did not remember ever having
heard of them. Henry and Madeleine, they were called. He never said which one of them was his friend, which one had known
him first; only that they were kind and that their own children were away at school. I learnt to play darts and Peter shot
a bow and arrows, and we played ping-pong on a table in the garage. One of the days my father and Henry went somewhere dressed
in suits, and we children were left with Madeleine alone. Madeleine took us out for a walk with her two red setters that bounded
with streaming hair along the shore.

* * *

'Will we go there again, Daddy?'

'What, to Madeleine's?'

'I liked it there. I want to go in the summer so I can go in the sea.'

'Perhaps,' he said. 'If they ask us.'

We never did. There was no sequential reality to add to this interlude, which came to memory later in disconnected images
like snapshots or a dream. Later, I was to wonder who Henry and Madeleine were, and if they really did exist, and told myself
that I would surely find them if only I were to go along the south coast, to sail say from Bournemouth to Southampton, and
look in along all the shore with the Isle of Wight behind me. Henry and Madeleine I would not know again; they seemed quite
indistinct; but I was certain that I would recognise the house. A safe house. I had the image of it clear: set just back from
the beach, not old, probably Thirties, white, parts of the upper storey hung with tiles; wide windows and dormers in the roof
above; all looking out to the sea. And hydrangeas. I had an image of them by the steps that led up from the sand, steps made
of broad planks with pale sand scattered across them, and tall blue hydrangea bushes. Yet remembering it afterwards, it seems
impossible that it could have been so: if we visited the place just that one time in January, then how could I have known
the colour of the flowers?

So little that is known for sure, so much confused. The past seems sometimes mutable as the present, changing before my eyes.
I had to learn to fix it about a constant, at least something near a constant. The house we lived in, that was fixed. Every
piece of it I used to go over and fix about myself. For years I did this, when I was at school and again later, in other places
after I had moved away. I would take myself around the house and the garden in my mind before I went to sleep: into the hall,
through open doors and up the stairs and around the upstairs rooms.

To my own room, with a picture of a rider on the wall and the tiny glass animals that I collected on the shelves. Peter's
room, my father's with the yellow bedspread, the spare room that was just that, spare, with white airy emptiness, the little
room where the ironing was done that had a round window where I used to hide away and read.

Downstairs then, and out of the French windows into the garden.

When we got home it was just the three of us. The house told us that, it was so clean and neat; the letters on the sideboard
in the hall, all the loose papers and magazines in piles at the corners of the tables. Margaret must have come every day even
though we were gone, polished the furniture and the silver and the brass handles on the doors, and left the smell of it behind
her. Tidied and hoovered and dusted and polished, and erased. Something had been erased from the house, and so completely
that I did not see at first that it was the presence of my mother. Her coat gone from its hook and with it her shoes, the
fur-lined boots that she wore to go out in the cold. Her bag and her diary that she kept in the kitchen. Jars and bottles
from the bathroom. From every room, her touch: the arrangements of things, the positions of cushions and ashtrays; the sense
that she had been there.

Yet this was more than Margaret could have done alone. I knew that someone must have been there with her, if not my father
then Mrs Lacey or someone other who was strange to me. Some cold hands had been through and touched everything, systematically
identifying, selecting things, taking out her clothes with the soft smell to them, lifting them up, folding them away, clearing
her dressing table, gathering up the lipsticks and the nail polish and the cotton wool and the compacts, disposing of them,
while Margaret went stolidly after and breathed on the glass and cleaned away the rings where the little bottles had stood
and the spilled powder.

Sometimes when I made a mistake in my schoolwork, my mother used to help rub it out. When I did it myself I left a shadow
on the page, and sometimes crumpled it or took the surface off the paper. When my mother did it she held the page smooth between
red-varnished fingertips and rubbed so gently with the other hand that, if the pencil had not been pressed too hard, the paper
was left white and perfect and good as if it was never written on.

The house was like that. There were no marks. You had to make an effort to remember where she had been.

They had rubbed her out.

The strange thing was that the space which spoke her absence most was not any of the rooms she had lived in, not her bedroom
even with her dressing table by the window and the stool before it, none of these but my own room. Only there was there a
sense of her, pressing in. She was in the walls, the curtains, in the dark slit where the cupboard door failed to close. There,
or about to be there, known, immanent, her voice most of all, about to break through, almost recalled, so that I almost heard
its tone, its warmth, its accent. And yet the silence held and there were no words. It held and quivered, like a note sung
too long, until I felt that I could not breathe. I ran, gasping, to my father's room. See: my mother's room had already become
my father's room. There was his bed and there was space in it. The sheets in the space were cold, but warm close up to him.
A little later Peter came in too, and the other side warmed also.