The Spy Game (7 page)

B
efore he went back to school Peter said, 'There's someone we haven't thought of, I only just thought of her. And she's Jewish.
Lots of Communist spies are Jewish, like the Krogers, and the Rosenbergs in America. Why didn't we think of her before?'

I hadn't mentioned Mrs Cahn because she was mine. I was the only one who knew her. I think even then I didn't want her touched.

'You're talking rot. You always talk rot. Anyway, Mummy never even went into her house.'

That wasn't quite true. My mother had gone in, the first time. I could remember her going into Mrs Cahn's front room and looking
about it with approval. It wasn't English at all, that room. I think it felt like Germany. The piano was German, a Bechstein.
My mother would have approved of that, would have put out a hand to stroke the polished wood. She was always touching things.

Every Tuesday she used to take me, in the car or on foot if it was nice. There were always a few words with Mrs Cahn at the
door, standing on the step or maybe just inside the hall if it was raining. How they got on to the subject of the seaside
that time I could not recall. Perhaps it was the one time she went in and she saw the photograph of the beach. Or perhaps
it was a fine day with a high blue sky and one or other of the women voiced a memory or a longing.

'She didn't used to chat to her or anything. She just used to drop me off and go away.'

'Didn't they talk German?'

'I think they always spoke English. Probably because I was there.'

'What did they talk about?'

'Just about the weather and things.'

'What things?'

'How I was doing. What I had to do for practice. Nothing interesting.'

Peter looked critical, as if I had missed something.

'Really, Peter, that's all.'

'I should have been there. There must have been some-thing.'

'It'd be just the same if you were there. If anyone was there. Just ordinary talk.'

'There are things like coded words, you know. Signals and things that spies use. You have to listen out for them though. You
have to have an ear.'

* * *

'See who comes and goes from her house. See if there's anything odd, anything at all, anything that changes from one week
to the next.'

'There won't be anything. Nothing happens there.'

She wasn't anything to do with Peter. I didn't want her to be a part of it.

Yet he was very serious. His thin face was tight with seriousness, his eyes fixed. I said that I would do it because he was
just about to go back to school and I felt sorry for him. His knees looked funny beneath his big school shorts and his hair
was newly cut and bared a white stripe on his neck where the summer sun hadn't reached.

'You will do it, Annie? And write to me if anything happens. You know how.'

We sat close together on the bottom step of the stairs. His trunk and tuck box blocked the hall but the door was open to outside
where Dad had gone to bring the car up to the gate. Peter's hands were fists. The skin on them was stretched so tight you
thought you might see through it, like a rubber band you pulled too far. I was glad that I did not have to go away yet to
school. We sat and did not move as Dad took the trunk, though it was heavy for him, heaving it up between his arms and lumbering
with it down the flagstone path. Then he came back for the tuck box and took that away.

I sat because Peter did, tight.

'I 'm sorry, boy, we really must be going.'

He was panting a little from all the carrying. There was a particular look he had when he was out of breath, his face drawn
out and mask-like.

'It's a fair old way and we don't want to be late.'

Peter's knees went close together so that I thought that he would not go, but he put out one hand to the banister, and then
the other, and sort of pulled himself up. It was as if he was not eleven years old but a much smaller boy.

We went out in silence. Dad closed the boot of the car over the trunk. Peter got in the front because it was his journey.
I would sit there on the way back. Usually it was dark when we came back from his school. We went in the daylight and came
back in the dark so that I knew the way there much better, knew the roads and the turnings and the towns one way round and
not the other. I sat in the back and pressed my face to the window, or sometimes wound the window right down and put my head
outside so that the wind blew my hair along the side of the car, as separate from the two in the front as if there was a plate
of glass between us, as if I was in a taxi or driven by a chauffeur. Like that I used to watch the trees and hedges pass,
and sometimes I used to narrow my eyes and play a game in my head. I used to tell myself that it was indeed the hedges that
were passing, the hedges and the road on the move like an endless tape being wound by, while the car itself and all of us
inside it were perfectly still.

His school was down a long drive, a tall house of reddish brick with a turret on one side and long windows. We said goodbye
in the hall, standing close to the entrance and with the length of the room stretching away. It was a long room and high like
a church, with a dark wooden staircase at the end of it and a floor of polished tiles the colour of dried blood. Peter vanished
in it quickly. He was lost among the other boys, all of them dressed and seeming to look the same, and the hard space echoed
so with their running about and shouting that I was glad to leave.

2

M
y father is on his hunkers in the herbaceous border. It has rained in the night and the soil is soft, so that the weeds come
up in his hands and he hardly needs to use his fork, but only pulls at them and then chucks them on to the path in loose green
heaps to be raked up and put in the barrow later. I had taken the rake and helped for a short time but that was boring and
he didn't seem to notice, so I put the rake down and only looked, and now there is nothing to do.

I start to pick some flowers to take into the house. There are almost as many flowers as in the early summer. There are roses
still and other summer flowers in second bloom, and September flowers that have aged and heavy colours, like golden-rod and
red and amber dahlias, and the tall purple monkshood behind them - and this I know that I must not pick because there is poison
in it. Even if you only pick it, the poison could enter through the skin.

I look at the monkshood close, see the leaves that are glossy like health, the narrow cowled flowers, the shadow in them.

'Does a person die straight away?'

And my father smiles, and he says no, that isn't how it happens, only that they would be sick, or sleepy, and very ill perhaps
if they actually ate the plant.

'You shouldn't grow it,' I said.

T
he piano teacher's house was at the other end of the village on a street that led out towards the main road. It was a plain
street squeezed up against the hillside, the houses all much the same, stone houses with narrow windows right on the pavement
that you could see into, china ornaments arranged on the sills for you to see, empty armchairs in neat front rooms. Sarah
Cahn's was set back from the rest by just a few steps, so that there was space for the plants that grew up the walls and hung
close about the windows that time of year.

Inside, the house felt quite apart from the rest of the village. I had always thought that it was like abroad. Now that I
had been abroad I could say that, that it was like the Continent. The room where I had my lesson was the one at the front,
where the sunlight fell in narrow streams in the late afternoon. There were lots of dark things in the room and they glowed:
the shining wood of the piano, the paintings, the bowls of blue and red coloured glass that made spots of colour on the walls
behind them. Sarah Cahn herself was a slim dark woman with a soft voice. There was a smile, a greeting, a question about how
the holiday had gone.

'OK,' I say. The light on the piano keys makes them look cool, like water.

Daphne Lacey had driven me there in the car. She was going somewhere and she was late, as she always was, and we had left
in a rush and now I was not ready to play. She had chattered all the way. Daphne Lacey was always turning her head as she
drove and saying anything that came into it. I would have preferred her to keep her eyes straight and look at the road like
my father did and speak in that impersonal, measured way in which proper drivers spoke as they drove. Or not spoken at all.
Then there would have been time to separate the pieces of my brain, the music from all the words, Daphne Lacey's words, Peter's
words before. Next time, I thought, I shall walk to my lessons, like we used to do, before. I shall walk alone; they'll let
me do that now. I shall be a girl carrying a brown leather music case and the music will already be there in my head when
I arrive, and nothing else. It will be close, and I shall sit straight down and play. If I do that, there will not be this
horrid pause at the keyboard, this moment when I look down at my fingers and they seem stiff and separate, and frozen.

'Wait,' says Mrs Cahn.

Sarah Cahn has a soft voice, soft and composed. Peter does not know that. To Peter she is only a name.

'Wait,' she says. 'Don't start yet. Come and have a piece of cake first. As it's the first day and we have not seen each other
all summer.'

Her clothes were dark like the things in the room but she wore a scarf with rich colours in it that glowed like the pieces
of glass. No one else dressed like that in those days. No one wore black in the country. It was a smart, urban, Continental
colour. People probably thought that Sarah Cahn was beautiful, but in an uneasy, unconventional way. Her eyes were dark pools.
Her face and hands were always on the move but her eyes were still. Sometimes, when she played something on the piano and
stopped, and I looked at her, I had the feeling that I might fall into them.

'I like your kitchen.'

A girl's voice coming out clear and poised as if she was acting, as a grown-up woman might speak when she visited another's
house. As my mother might have spoken, as she had trained me also to act. With my mother there were always words to fill a
space, smooth words that passed the required time with a shop assistant or a taxi driver or a piano teacher, and carried no
meaning beyond them. Yet I meant what I said. I did like Sarah Cahn's kitchen; it was the nicest kitchen I knew. It was small,
so that if someone sat at the table you could hardly get between it and the cooker, but it had a fireplace in it which was
cosy, and the window looked straight at the green hill slanting up close behind.

'Has your brother gone back to school? You must be lonely when he goes.'

'So-so.'

Then no more words for a while but only cake.

Find out about her, Peter had said. Ask her things. Maybe they met some time when you weren't around.

She had her back turned, busying herself about the kitchen. Mrs Cahn was not like Margaret or Daphne Lacey. She understood
that there were times to leave a person be, when a person did not want to speak. Almost, because of this, I felt that she
was the one person to whom I might have spoken. And my mother might have spoken to her also, might have been friends with
her even, and not just because of where they came from but because of the sort of people they were, because of something they
shared, because they were both different from everybody else; but there had never been anything more than politeness. There
had been only the coolness of my mother at the open door, and Mrs Cahn's eyes turning a little aside from her, or somehow
looking down, looking to me.

On the mantelpiece was the photograph from the beach. You could hardly see that it was a beach really, just an old photograph
of the little thin girl who was Sarah and a fluffy-haired woman who was her grand-mother, sitting side by side, big and small,
in a funny kind of basketwork chair with a hood. The child looked as if she had been plonked down like a doll, her legs too
short to reach the ground. There was no sea in the picture, just grey space behind where the sea must have been.

'You know the place you went on holiday, the seaside, the place in the picture? Did you ever see my mummy there? '

'Oh I shouldn't think so. Anyway I was so young when I was there, I wouldn't have known. That photo is from the last time
we went. 193I. We couldn't go there after that.'

And then later I asked, 'Is it still there now, that place?'

'I imagine so.'

'Is it through the Iron Curtain?'

'Yes, it's behind the Iron Curtain.'

'And do people go there?'

'I'm sure they do, just like we always did.'

That wasn't what I meant. I meant English people, people like us, going behind the Iron Curtain. I asked if people could go
through the Iron Curtain to live, if anyone defected because they wanted to live there instead of here. There was a famous
dancer that summer who had defected from Russia. He was in Paris with the Russian ballet, touring, and instead of going home
he had run away at the airport and asked if he could stay and dance in the West. I asked if it was possible for people to
defect the other way.

'I imagine they could, only nobody does. Only spies who are afraid of getting caught. Nobody else would want to.'

* * *

In the room with the piano were other, newer photo-graphs. There was a wedding photograph of Sarah Cahn and her dead husband.
Mr Cahn looked happy but so thin that I thought that he must have been sick already. And there was one of Sarah, quite grown-up,
with the people who she said were her second, English family.

This time when I sit down to play it is easy.

'See. That's lovely,' she says. 'Even when the mind thinks it has forgotten, the fingers remember.'

T
here were spies in Peter's mind, and others in mine. There was a book I had about Violette Szabo, who was a spy in the war.
Peter hadn't read it. He thought it was a girl's book because it had a woman on the cover.

I had read the book that summer that was gone. I had read most of it in a day, lying on my tummy under a tree in the orchard,
moving round when the sun got too hot or too bright on the page. I liked the book so I read it again. It told you how a woman
might become a spy.

Violette was a London girl but French because her mother was, and she had a daughter but it was the war so she left her daughter
behind and was parachuted into France to work with the Resistance. The first time she went to France she brought back a dress
for herself from Paris, and another for her daughter that was too big because she could not tell how much her daughter would
have grown while she was away. The second time she went, she didn't come back. She was ambushed by the Germans and captured
in a gun battle and taken to a camp. Just before the end of the war they decided to execute her.

They took her and two other English women who were spies and lined them up and shot them.

Violette had violet-blue eyes, it said in the book. She was a tomboy and brave, braver than her brother. She showed that when
she went to do her training, training with men and doing as well as them even though she was smaller. She trained to do soldier's
things, to use a gun and fight with her hands and to operate a radio transmitter, but also she trained to be someone else
because in France she was to have false papers and a false identity. Her name and everything she wore even would be different,
everything French and nothing connecting her to who she really was.

I dreamed that, the strangeness of being someone else. I dreamed it for myself, and I dreamed it for my mother. When Violette
was trained she had to learn her cover story down to the finest detail: the whole life history of the other person she was
to become. She was drilled in it by her instructors so that she might convince even under interrogation. Again and again she
must repeat to them where this other woman was born, the memories of her childhood and of every year of her life. I did this
also. I made whole constructions of invented identities and drilled myself in them. I had all the details worked out: names,
places, schools, friends, incidents, favourite colours, clothes, bi-cycles owned, things the person I was liked or didn't
like to eat.

When I dreamed the story for my mother it was set not in France but somewhere cold beyond the Iron Curtain. It had to be there
because that was where people disappeared. Sometimes she was working for one side, sometimes for the other; or she worked
for both, first one and then the other, doubling layer upon layer until even I was unsure which one came beneath. But whichever
the variation, the place did not change: a flat, dead land; bare earth like plough with a layer of mist upon it; tracks running
into the distance; then a city that rose up suddenly out of the land, a flat cityscape with apartment blocks, all the same,
one after the other, down long streets, and blank figures in a fog. There was no sound to the city, not many cars but no sound
even to those that there were, and no colour.

I was staying the night at Susan's. If my father went out late I stayed there, or sometimes I did out of friendship, because
we had decided that we could not be parted. A friend like Susan was easier than a brother.

Susan's room was very plain, quiet like Susan herself so that if she was not in it you would not have seen that it was hers.
Her bed was in the middle of the room with a pink candlewick bedspread on it and a pyjama case in the shape of a cat, and
because the room was big there was another bed just like it against the wall. On this bed a real cat slept, the Laceys' soft
grey Persian. If I went into the room in the daytime I would often see it there, and it would uncurl itself and stalk away
at the intrusion. When I stayed the night I would hope that it would return and curl up at my feet or on the blanket before
my stomach. I used to wait for it, eyes open in the dark, listening for silent paws.

'Do you have daydreams, Susan?'

'Everybody has daydreams.'

'But, do you think you're someone different?'

'Sometimes I think I have other people in my family, lots of sisters doing things. I'd like to have lots of sisters. Four.
Or maybe three so I'd be the fourth.'

'You don't ever want to be someone different yourself? Like a boy?'

'Why would I want to be a boy?'

'Because they can do things. People let boys do more than girls.'

Susan yawned.

'Do they?'

'I think so. Don't you think so?'

Susan didn't answer but it did not matter because I could hear the cat's claws snarl in the bedspread where it hung down to
the floor, anticipate its weight about to drop on to the blanket.

'Do you ever think your parents might be someone else? Do you ever dream that?'

'I don't know. I'm sleepy.'

I stayed awake a long time. The cat was so close that I could not distinguish if its purr was sound or vibration. I would
not move or turn to sleep until it was gone. Susan's breathing was steady in the other bed. What did it mean to be Susan Lacey?
Quiet Susan, sleeping in the closed circle of her family. The Lacey history was known. It lay about the house in carved knick-knacks
and ivory figures, pictures of tigers on the stairs, photo-graphs of rubber trees and tiger hunters in the downstairs loo.
The Laceys were rubber planters in Malaya. Daphne Lacey's family had been planters too. In the war, Godfrey and Daphne had
had a terrible time when they were prisoners of the Japanese. Susan was a Lacey. She had red hair and white skin that burned
as soon as she went in the sun. She had left Malaya when she was too small to remember it but she was a Lacey all the same.
Planters transplanted, growing in England. My father said that there were lots of plants that liked to grow in England because
it was a gentle place. They came wrapped in newspaper from the nursery and he planted them in their beds and told me where
they came from, and it seemed that he named every country in the world. Sometimes they had soil of another colour sticking
to their roots, red soil or peaty black soil. If the soil and the roots were dry, he would put them into a bucket of water
overnight before he planted them. Peonies came from China and rhododendrons from the Himalayas. Laceys came from Malaya. Even
if they lived almost next door and Mr Lacey drove every morning to work in an office like everyone else.

I asked Susan once if she planned to go to Malaya.

'Why?'

'To see what it's like.'

'But it's all changed. It's not the British Empire any more.'

Susan had no curiosity. Susan wasn't brave like Violette.

One weekend there was a snake in the garden. It was a brownish-greenish colour and stretched out on the stones of the wall
at the bottom of the garden, where the lawn ended and there was a kind of ha-ha, the wall holding back the side of a ditch
before the field. I thought at first that it was a stalk, a long and bendy stalk, but then I knew.

When I went towards it the bright sun threw my shadow ahead of me across the grass. Just as it was about to touch, the stalk
moved, like a streak of oily liquid, and was gone between the stones.

I climbed down into the ha-ha and looked at all the gaps in the drystone wall.

'What are you doing?' asked Susan.

'I saw a snake. I'm looking where it went.'

I had an idea of what I was looking for: some round, perfect, snake-sized hole with edges polished by its body.

Susan stood well away from the edge of the ha-ha.

'Come back. Come up here. It's dangerous. If there's a snake I'll tell Daddy and he'll come and kill it. He knows how to kill
snakes.'

'That's cobras. We don't have cobras here.'

'You're not supposed to be in the field anyway. You're trespassing.'

* * *

Some days later the snake was there again. This time it was my father who saw it. He said that it was a grass snake, not an
adder, and that there was nothing to fear. You could recognise an adder by its markings, which were a kind of warning. The
grass snake was basking, he said. Snakes didn't have warm blood like people and animals. If they wanted to be warm they had
to come out and lie on warm stones in the sun.

Later he called me.

'Look ! '

'Daddy, you caught it! I didn't know you could catch a snake.'

'Nor did I.'

He looked pleased as if he had won a race.

There was a huge glass jar we had, that sometimes my mother had put whole branches of flowers in, of lilac or blossom in the
spring. He had caught the snake in a sack and put it into the jar, just so that we could see it.

It was trying to climb the sides and slipping down, again and again, as if it was writing lines of waves on the glass. The
glass was clear and the underside of the snake was pale, whitish, pressing against it. I went so close I could see the golden
rings about its eyes. But my father said that the most acute sense a snake had was touch, that it saw through vibration, that
it could feel all along its body.

I thought how the glass would feel: so cool and smooth, even where there were bubbles buried inside it, and all of the length
of one's body becoming the same cool temperature as the glass.

'I must let it go in a minute.'

'Can I just show it to Susan?'

'If you're quick.'

I ran to Susan's and called her.

'Ugh. I don't want to.'

'But it can't hurt you. It's in a jar. And grass snakes aren't poisonous anyway.'

So Susan came, and stood far back and didn't say a word.

I went right up to it and touched the jar where the snake was moving on the other side of the glass.

'See, it's fine.'

Peter wrote a letter every Sunday. It arrived the following Tuesday. The post came while I was at school. The envelope was
always addressed to Alec Wyatt Esq., as no doubt he had been instructed, so I did not open it but put it on to the kitchen
table so we could could read it together when my father got back.

We knew what it would say even before we read it.
Dear Daddy and Anna, How are you? I'm all right. The film last night was
Angels One Five.
It was quite good but I thought
The Dambusters
was better. We played a rugger match yesterday but lost it 237. Not so bad because it was the other school's first team and
we're only the seconds. Only two weeks till half-term. Love, Peter.
That was his formula. There were things you said that were always the same and it didn't matter what they meant. All that
mattered was their presence on the page.

Sometimes I saw the letters that my father wrote back. Often they were two or three pages long, and his writing was small.
Nothing formulaic to them, and that was to be expected. My father was so much better at writing things than at saying them.
Sometimes he put drawings in his letters. This week there was one of the snake in the jar, and two figures of girls with enormous
eyes running away. I thought that wasn't fair. Adults changed things to suit their purpose each time they told a story. I
decided that I would write a letter of my own to say the truth. I wrote it in his code. 22
September
1692
Daddy caught a snate and put it in a jar. I touched it.
At least,
I
had touched the glass just where its body touched.