The Spy Game (5 page)

I
t must have been after that day that we began to watch. Or perhaps it was not. Perhaps it did not begin at any point. Perhaps
we had always watched, as children always have, watched our adults; children wide-eyed, the adults like to think, but seeing
so much more than the adults could or would like to know.

We had always watched but we became conscious of it only once we began to think that there was something to be discovered,
some secret or some story there. From that moment on the watching became deliberate, more intense.

MI5 kept the Krogers' house under surveillance for two months before their arrest. Each day agents came to the house of some
neighbours just over the road, where there was a bedroom with a window at the side overlooking their frontage. The agents
were women generally, since the visits of women were less likely to be remarked upon in a district where husbands went to
work and wives had coffee and arranged charity collections and events at the local arts society. Mrs Search, who lived in
the surveillance house, considered herself a friend of Helen Kroger's and continued to see her and have her to visit throughout
this period. It was revealed later that she found the experience deeply troubling.

There was no one I watched more closely than my father. In those days I was aware of him sometimes as if my nerves reached
into him and felt his moods - his occasional pleasure, his sadness, his irritations - from the inside.

Alec Wyatt. Linguist, speaker of five European languages. He was ten years older than my mother and he used be a teacher.
Then when the war came he was too short-sighted to be a proper soldier so he had done some-thing in codes instead, sitting
at a desk with a pencil in his hand. Peter was ashamed of that, the idea that his father had chewed a pencil all through the
war. Even if he had been to places that sounded good, like Baghdad, and Italy, and Berlin.

When I started a diary I wrote what I had done and thought each day on the correct dated page. I kept the blank undated pages
at the back for other people. I wrote notes on how they looked and what they did. The diary was a stiff book with embossed
gold lettering, My Diary 1962 on the front, and a lock to keep it private. I must have kept it up for half the year, and then
tired of it, or left it somewhere, and never wrote in it again.

The first description was of my father. Fairish hair, a little bit grey. Grey-blue eyes, soft behind the glasses. Tall. I
thought how I would describe him if I was a stranger and put 'a little woolly but kind'. I set myself to observing his actions,
his movement, his face. When I grew up there was proof of the closeness of my observation in the fact that I seemed to know
how to garden soon as I had a garden of my own. The tasks were familiar as if I had always performed them, and my fingers
knew as if they had always done it how to plant seeds, how to sprinkle the compost, thin, plug out, how to hold the secateurs
and at which bud to prune the roses, though I could never recall having been taught these things or done them before, but
only that I had watched them done. Almost better than his face I could recall his hands, his fingers dirty with soil, unusually
broad thumbs, distinctive so that I would have recognised them anywhere.

At any time I supposed that I might have asked him what we needed to know. I might have asked him most easily when he was
gardening, when I was standing close by and he was working and it was easy between us, his hand on the fork, the tines breaking
the soil, the fresh green weeds falling back on to it. There were so many questions a child could ask her father at a time
like that.

Why does the Queen say 'we' instead of 'I'?

Which way up does a pineapple grow?

What is a mushroom cloud?

I might have asked about Königsberg, and I might as easily, almost as easily, have asked if he or Mummy knew the Portland
people. He worked for the Government anyway, we knew that, speaking languages; and there was something secret in it so he
might reasonably have known some spies. Yet I did not ask. I stood by and I learnt only the root forms of weeds: how white
and brittle were the roots of bindweed, which broke when you pulled them and left bits that grew again from deeper down than
you could dig, or the red hairy obscenity of nettle roots that snaked this way and that just beneath the surface of the soil.
And when he straightened himself and rested he smiled and ruffled my hair, and I was happy then that I had not spoken.

One day when he was gardening Susan came round and we played at dressing up. We must have been nine or ten by then, and we
didn't dress up so much. We had used to do it often when we were smaller. Sometimes my mother would help, fixing our hair
and tying turbans and sashes, making us into witches and princesses and sultans with fine moustaches that she drew with a
burnt cork. Now we did it all ourselves. Because we were older we did not dress as make-believe figures any more but as the
women we might become.

Susan had brought over a dress that she said came from Malaya. It was a flimsy thing of lime-green silk. In Malaya her parents
drank cocktails and went to parties. She said that the parties went on late into the night and the moon was bigger than in
England and the nights were hot. The spaghetti straps and low-cut bodice showed up the paleness of her skin and her gawky
body's lack of form, yet the dress, the idea and the colour of it, made her bold. Susan was normally quiet and self-effacing,
pale, freckled, red-haired, always a little stooped with shyness, yet all of a sudden she put up her hair and strutted like
an actress and became a flattened version of her mother.

'Don't laugh. What are you laughing at?'

'You look funny, that's all.'

'There's another one you can wear. Mummy said I could borrow it too.'

'No. There's something else. I know where it is.'

We went to my father's room. He was outside, mowing the lawn. I had just heard the mower start up. He wouldn't come in before
tea.

In the wardrobe, at the very back of the wardrobe behind all of his clothes, was a dress. It had been left behind when everything
else was cleared. Whoever it was that cleared the house had by intention or error left me that one dress, zipped up in a bag
as it had come from the dry-cleaner's. There was that dress and there was her fur jacket, and a drawer of folded silk scarves
and her jewellery in a velvet-lined box. The dress was a very dark blue, not so glamorous as Susan's, but I had a notion that
I had seen my mother in it, once for some distant occasion. I took off my clothes and put it on, there in my father's room
before the tall mahogany wardrobe, and then took out the fur on its silk-covered hanger.

'It's silver fox,' I said. 'It came from Berlin. Daddy bought it on the black market.'

'Did your mother wear it?'

'Of course she did. She wore it when she went to the theatre.'

Yet I had never seen it worn, never seen my mother go to the theatre.

It was soft as Susan's cat, though the silver-tipped fur was longer, and it carried a scent that must have once been hers.
Putting it on, feeling its weight and the coolness of the satin lining, was like slipping into water.

'You look like a film star.'

Susan had brought high-heeled shoes, too big. My mother's feet were smaller but all her shoes were gone. The shoes made us
tall and the make-up we had put on made us old. We saw ourselves in the long mirror: a redhead, a blonde, red-lipped, high-heeled,
lime green and fur and midnight blue. Susan stuffed her bodice with socks, pouted, posed. I stood in the slender mirror space
beside her in the fox jacket and the dark-blue dress, and wondered if anyone could have said then that I too had a look of
my mother, if not in my colouring then in the way I stood or smiled, or held my hand out to take an imaginary cigarette.

'You look lovely, darling,' said Susan, and proffered an imaginary case.

I mimed the taking of one and Susan lit it, saw the curls of smoke rising between us as Susan snapped the case shut.

'They're Russian,' Susan said. 'I always smoke Russian.'

We had glasses in our hands with cherries on sticks, raised them to our cherry lips.

* * *

I was not sure, afterwards, if that was the first moment that my father caught sight of us, or if he had been looking already
for some time. Yet the intensity of his look struck suddenly like a blow.

The glasses were gone, our hands empty. We were children again, dressed like tarts in our mothers' clothes, and he was angry.
His stare went to me, to Susan, back again to me. I thought that he would shout. I would have hated to hear him shout.

His voice when it came was soft.

'Take those things off. Right away.'

Once we would have, but we were older now. We were shy to undress in front of him. We stood, frozen in our dresses and our
lipstick, and he looked at us as if we were ghosts. I saw that his hand had blood on it, his finger wrapped in a bloodied
handkerchief. He had cut himself and come to fetch a plaster from the bathroom. He looked at us that one moment and then went
on.

Later, when Susan had gone, he came in from the garden again and scrubbed the soil from his hands, and asked if I had put
the clothes away.

'That's right,' he said. 'That's a good girl. And once things are put away they are best left that way. No need to take them
out again, is there, poppet?'

* * *

'We can't ask Daddy. Not anything. He doesn't want to talk about it,' I said to Peter after that.

'Even if you ask him? You're always asking him things.'

'No,' I said. 'He doesn't want to be reminded.'

W
e went away that second summer to France. 'We'll go to the Brittany coast,' my father said. 'You said you wanted to go to
the sea.' We went there on a ferry, and the sea was grey. I stood against the rail at the stern and watched the white V of
the wake drawing away from England, and the gulls following in it. It was the first time I had been abroad.

I wrote in my diary that it rained in France. We drove down straight roads through grey sheets of rain. We came to long beaches
and walked the tiring length of them in the sand to look at rusting tanks and debris from the war. The beaches had beautiful
names, Arromanches, Omaha, Utah. This was where the Allies landed, my father said, tens of thousands of soldiers jumping into
the cold waves off flat-bottomed boats with their guns held over their heads. He and Peter looked at everything, the machines,
the signs, the maps, the photographs in the museums. I watched the waves and made tracks in the sand. Where the sand was wet
and shiny close to the sea's edge, my footprints disappeared as if they were sucked away.

When we swam the water was cold. The beach was shallow so that we had to walk out a long way until it came to our waists and
we could swim. There must be bits there, I wrote, on the sand where you cannot see it beneath the water. If there are bits
on the beaches they must be in the sea as well. Things from the war. Guns, helmets, bodies. Soldiers who were killed. As soon
as the water was deep enough, I swam and tried not to touch the ground again. Once or twice I swam out to where I could feel
a pull on my legs, pulling me out, away, down the beach from where I'd begun. My father called me back, then came quickly
and swam out. He said it was a current of water that pulled at me. It had a name, the undertow. It was the bottom of the wave
going back out to sea.

I wrote about it in my diary. How there must be Americans down there beneath the sea. In the hotel where we stayed the sugar
came in little printed packets with pictures of the beaches on them. I collected all the different ones I could find and stuck
them in the book, and the tickets from the places we visited.

'What are you doing?' asked Peter.

'Making a record. So I can remember it all after.'

Peter played with the other English boys at the hotel. There were three of them, a noisy family whose presence dominated the
restaurant at supper, laughing, shouting, spilling things. They were rowdy boys and I did not like them. I felt sorry for
the old man who had the table next to them and who sipped his coffee in the mornings from his teaspoon. Poor Monsieur Alphonse,
I wrote, giving him the name, knowing that Alphonse was a French name. He was a thin man and wore a hat whenever he went out
so that his face was pale as paper. Once the boys let me join them on a raid to the kitchens, and we went down in the lift
to the basement and sneaked around until a waiter chased us out, and everything was white and shining steel. On the way back
up to our rooms Monsieur Alphonse got in, and we all laughed fit I thought to deafen him.

'Where's your mother?' asked one of the boys. Their mother was always in the lounge, in a chair at the window writing postcards
and looking out to sea.

'She's a spy,' said Peter, 'working undercover.'

I was glad he did not say that she was dead.

When I was older and looked over the photographs I realised how difficult the trip must have been for my father. He read his
books and saw all the beaches but it rained and we complained that we didn't like the food.

The weather changed just before we were due to leave. Soon as I woke that last morning I knew how good the day was even before
the curtains were open. The sky was bright and the sea was shining under the sun. We went into the town and bought lunch,
a long golden loaf of bread, cheese, tomatoes, peaches, and drove out a long way along the coast. The road seemed to ride
the coast, up and down, with views coming and going of the sea. Then we stopped and walked, out along a strip of sand with
the sea on either side, to a rocky point, and there we had our picnic, where there was no one else and only a view with nothing
between us and America. I remember how I bored my eyes into the horizon as if I might see it, if I were to look hard enough.
Where those soldiers came from. How far was it? How long did it take to float there? Had the undertow by now taken them home?

It was hours later when we walked back, and the tide had come in and covered over a section of the causeway.

'Alec,' my mother would have said. My mother had a special way of saying Alec, an inflexion no one else ever used. 'So clever,
but always so impractical.'

The stretch of sea where the causeway had been was like all the rest of the sea, nothing to distinguish where the land lay
beneath. It was not wide but it was growing, as the waves lapped up to where we stood. My father took the blanket I was carrying,
rolled it tighter and crammed it into the bag with the picnic things. Follow me. And tentatively the three of us started to
walk into the water, and I saw us as we walked, the tall man leading, treading delicately, feeling for ground, the girl behind
and then the boy.

The water was alive, rushing in. It reached up my legs and above my waist.

'I can't, Daddy.'

And all three turned and went back.

Then the boy was left on what was now the island, and the man began to cross again carrying the girl on his shoulders.

The water came to his chest, over my feet as he carried me. I looked back. Peter was left on the island. The sea was washing
against it, rising towards him, making the distance longer, the distance stretching in both directions as we walked away.

'When the tide comes in, it doesn't all go under, does it?'

'No, I'm sure not. There are grasses there.'

Then the water was lower and we were coming out of it. He put me down and went back for Peter. I was alone now, on the mainland,
and he was in the stretching water and Peter was on the island. There was an interval of time when each of us was separated
from the other by the moving water, and I saw that was how we were, the three of us, each separated, surrounded by a dark
sea that moved across and covered over the ground. But then he came up out of it, on to the dunes and the grass, up to Peter
where he stood, so still, and he turned, and Peter climbed on to his back.

He carried Peter across piggy-back, and Peter carried the picnic bag high so that it was above the level of the water.

At dinner that evening I felt bold. I suppose that it was because of the day, because of the sunshine and because of our adventure,
because it was our last day also.

'Where Mummy went to the seaside, was it like this?'

'That would have been in Germany. The Baltic. It's a very different sea.'

We were eating crabs. The hotel kept serving up crab. I didn't mind the meat but I didn't know how to get it out so he was
breaking the claws for me and putting what was edible on my plate. He was not looking at me as he spoke but focused on the
claw in his hands, and his answer was precise and yet it quite deflected the question.

'This is the Atlantic Ocean. The Baltic is just a sea hemmed around by countries. It only connects to the ocean by a narrow
sound. There's hardly a tide. And the water's different even, with much less salt in it than other seawater because of all
the rivers that empty into it.'

'What does that mean?' asked Peter.

'It's almost like fresh water. Lovely to swim in even if it's cold.'

A dark sea like a lake. People in it, swimming, floating. There was a picture of the place where she went at my piano teacher's
house, a photograph on the mantelpiece, but the picture was just of people on the beach there, and you had to imagine the
sea in the distance.

'Mrs Cahn has a picture of it.'

'Of what?'

'Where Mummy went.'

'Did she go there too?'

'They talked about it once.'

'Some of those Baltic resorts were very popular. Still are, probably, though I don't know now.'

Then Peter butted in.

'Mrs Cahn's Jewish.'

'No, she's not,' I said. 'She's German. She came here from Germany.'

'That's right. She's Jewish and German. Both.' And a moment later he said, just for the hell of it, just because he was Peter,
'Do you know what happened to the Jews who stayed in Germany, the ones who didn't leave like she did?'

'What?'

'The Germans killed them all. They stuffed them into chambers one on top of the other and gassed them and made them into soap.'

My father was saying, 'Peter, there's no need for that.'

'Well, it's true.'

'That's enough.'

I could see the 'but' beginning to form on Peter's lips. It did not come out. My father stopped him. He slammed his hand with
the crab claw in it down on the napkin, so hard that the glasses shook. He did not speak again but only looked Peter in the
eye.

Silly Peter. Anyone knew that soap wasn't made out of people.