Spies (2002) (10 page)

Barbara Berrill’s still looking at me, and she’s smiling again. No, I haven’t actually said the words. The smile’s no longer mocking, though. It’s conspiratorial.

‘Shall we follow her and see where she goes?’ she whispers.

‘
Follow
her?’ I repeat, shocked to hear my urgent longing articulated for me. ‘Don’t be daft.’

‘Perhaps she’s getting something on the black market. From round the back of the shops, like Mrs Sheldon. Deirdre’s seen Mrs Sheldon getting things from the back door of Hucknall’s after it’s closed.’

I’m stung to have Keith’s mother’s high treason dismissed as such a mean and minor act. ‘Of course she isn’t,’ I say contemptuously.

‘How do you know?’

How do I know? Because I know she’s not even gone in the direction of the shops! She’s beyond the tunnel, bending over the box, putting something in … And taking something out, it occurs to me. Putting in another packet of cigarettes … and taking out a packet of butter or a few rashers of bacon from one of the Cottages in the Lanes?

Could it all be just that? Going to Coppards for the occasional allotment of the cigarettes that she and Keith’s father never smoke, and exchanging them for handfuls of black- market groceries? It suddenly seems only too likely. My heart sinks.

I say nothing. I can’t look at Barbara. But I can feel her still looking at me, smiling her mocking smile again.

‘Or perhaps,’ she says softly, ‘she’s taking a message to Mrs Tracey’s boyfriend.’

Now I do turn to look at her, too uncomprehending to conceal it. Auntie Dee’s
boyfriend
? What’s she talking about? How can someone’s aunt have a boyfriend?

‘Didn’t you know?’ whispers Barbara. ‘Deirdre’s seen her kissing him. In the blackout. She went up to the tunnel with your brother, and there they were.’

I’ve been ambushed once again. I’m in the middle of another minefield.

‘He used to come round to Mrs Tracey’s house when everyone was asleep,’ says Barbara. ‘Only Mrs Hardiment saw him and she thought he was a peeping Tom and she called the police.’

And the policeman came cycling slowly up the street and set his foot to the ground outside Auntie Dee’s …

‘And they told everyone it was because there was something wrong with Mrs Tracey’s blackout,’ says Barbara. ‘But it wasn’t, it was because of the peeping Tom – only he
wasn’t
a peeping Tom, because Deirdre saw him going into the house, loads of times. So instead Mrs Hayward has to go and look after Milly while Mrs Tracey goes out in the dark when no one can see, only now it gets dark too late.’

I can feel Barbara Berrill looking at me to see how I respond to all these revelations. I don’t respond. Some instinct tells me that it’s just the kind of thing that girls say, particularly the Berrill girls, who are running wild while their father’s away. The silver-framed photograph of Auntie Dee and Uncle Peter with the wings on his breast pocket comes into my mind. As soon as it touches the solidity of that silver frame, Barbara Berrill’s story bursts like a soap bubble in my hand, and leaves nothing behind but a faint sliminess on my fingers.

‘Your face has gone all squidgy again,’ she says. ‘Didn’t you know about people having boyfriends and girlfriends?’

‘Of course I did.’

She laughs, her face very close to mine. I feel the sliminess on my fingers. An x is a kiss. On the other side of the tunnel Keith’s mother is putting a kiss into the hidden box for Auntie Dee’s boyfriend Mr X to find …

‘It’s just while Mr Tracey’s away in the Air Force. Deirdre says lots of ladies have boyfriends while everyone’s Daddies are away.’

‘Barbara!’ calls Mrs Berrill’s voice. ‘Where are you? If you’re not home in one minute precisely …!’

Barbara puts her lips next to my ear.
‘Mummy
’s got a boyfriend,’ she whispers. ‘Deirdre found a snap of him in Mummy’s bag. He’s an air-raid warden.’

‘Barbara! I’m not going to tell you twice …!’

Barbara begins to crawl away through the passageway, her purse dangling on the ground. She stops and turns back. She hesitates, suddenly shy. ‘My really
really
best friend is Rosemary Winters, in Mrs Colley’s class at school,’ she says. ‘But you could be my next-best friend, if you like.’

After she’s gone I sit unable to move, disorientated and then disabled by gathering shame. I’ve betrayed Keith. I’ve let a stranger into our special place – and Barbara Berrill, of all people. I’ve failed in my surveillance duties. And I’ve allowed myself to listen to unworthy insinuations that his mother’s getting bacon and butter on the black market – that she’s involved in a surreptitious and shameful traffic with bosoms and boyfriends. I’ve allowed myself to entertain a momentary suspicion that she’s not a German spy at all.

And there she is again, coming back up the street from the corner … going into Auntie Dee’s gate … tapping quietly on the living-room window as she passes. The front door opens as she reaches it, and Auntie Dee stands on the doorstep.

Keith’s mother hands her the shopping basket. She’s done Auntie Dee’s shopping for her once again. While all the shops were shut.

Auntie Dee searches through the contents of the basket. She’s looking for the message that Keith’s mother has brought her back from her boyfriend …

Only of course she isn’t. I think of her friendly, open smile. No one could smile like that and have any secrets from the world. I think of the trusting way that Uncle Peter smiles back at her from the silver frame on her mantelpiece.

She’s not smiling now. She’s plucking anxiously at her lip. But she’s looking up at Keith’s mother, trustingly and apprehensively, just like the little girl with the doll in the other picture who looks up so trustingly and apprehensively at the older sister who will always protect her.

Sisters … Yes. What are those two sisters talking about so earnestly there on the doorstep? They’re telling each other the kind of things that Deirdre and Barbara tell each other. Secrets … About kisses in the blackout …

Keith’s mother turns and walks back to the gate. She looks exactly as she always has – composed, tranquil, at ease with the world. Auntie Dee stands on the doorstep and watches her go. She’s changed in some subtle way. She’s become a person with secrets after all.

Auntie Dee closes her front door. A few moments later Keith’s mother closes hers. The curtain has come down again.

*

‘1700. Goes into.’

I’m back at my post next day, logbook open once again, and I’m just hesitating, two-colour pencil in hand, trying to remember what it was that Keith’s mother did go into at 1700, when my eye’s caught by a movement at the Haywards’ house.

Once again the same scene’s unrolling. Keith’s mother is coming out of her garden gate with her basket on her arm. She’s going back to Auntie Dee’s to whisper more secrets … No, this time she walks straight past Auntie Dee’s … Not that I believed any of Barbara Berrill’s ridiculous stories about them, even for a moment.

She goes on towards the corner, and I know that this time there’s no way out of it: I’m going to have to follow her. Through the tunnel. On my own.

How I’m ever going to find the courage I don’t know, but already I’m scrambling along the passageway, running down to the corner, turning towards the tunnel …

And once again she’s vanished.

The track winds through the encroaching undergrowth to the tunnel, as empty as the street to the left was each time she vanished before. I feel the familiar cold wave pass through me.

Then behind me I hear a small, familiar sound – a dry rustling and a wet slithering. I spin round. There she is, just beyond the corner to the left, tipping food scraps out of an old newspaper into the pig bins, and watching me thoughtfully. She lets the lid clank back into place, and smiles. ‘Hello, Stephen. Are you looking for Keith?’

Left, yes. There’s still left as well as right. And the pig bins. Of course.

I shake my head stupidly.

‘You seem to be looking for
somebody
.’

‘No.’

‘Not
me
, was it, Stephen, by any chance?’

‘No, no.’

I flee, and hide my confusion under the bushes. As she passes on her way back to the house she turns and looks in my direction. I don’t know how she realises I’m there watching her, when it’s supposed to be secret, but she does; and when she emerges from the house again ten minutes later I know that this time I’m really not going to have the courage to follow her.

She’s not carrying a basket, though; she’s holding a plate. And she’s not walking down the road towards Auntie Dee’s house or the corner. She’s crossing over … and coming straight towards me. I sit absolutely motionless as she peers in through the branches. ‘Stephen?’ she murmurs. ‘May I come in?’

I can’t manage a reply. In all the places that we’ve imagined her going, and all the contingencies that we’ve dimly foreseen, we’ve never considered the possibility of her coming
here
.

I’m too embarrassed to watch her as she struggles in along the low passageway. I know she has to make an awkward spectacle of herself, encumbered by the plate and leaning her weight on her other hand to keep her knees just clear of the earth, so that her back’s too high, and the twigs keep catching at her cardigan. She brushes a patch of ground as clean as she can of leaves and insects, then sits down cross-legged in the dust in front of me.

I don’t know what to do with myself. It’s difficult enough to know how to behave when you’re on your own with someone’s mother, even in the most normal of circumstances. But what do you do when you’re both sitting childishly on the bare earth, face to face in a space scarcely large enough for people half her height?

And when you know that she’s not just someone’s mother – that she’s a German spy, a traitor to her country?

Where do you look, for a start, when there’s nowhere to look except at her? You can’t look her in the face. You can’t look at her legs, neatly but somehow shamefully crossed beneath her navy-blue summer skirt. There’s nowhere left except the bit in between, and that part of a lady, as I’ve known for at least a year now, is her bosom, and as unthinkable-about as a privet.

She puts the plate down in the small space between us. It’s decorated with roses, and there are two chocolate biscuits on it.

‘I thought you might like something to keep you going,’ she says. ‘I’m afraid Keith’s got to help his father in his workshop, so you’re going to have to play on your own this evening.’

I pick up one of the biscuits and nibble it, grateful to have something to do and some object to look at. Silence. Can she have come all the way across the road, and seated herself cross-legged in the dust in front of me, just to tell me that?

But she seems to be looking round at our domestic arrangements, like any polite visitor on a social call.

‘Very thoughtful of you chaps to put that label on it,’ she says, indicating the tile guarding the entrance passageway. ‘“Privet”.’

At the sound of this impropriety on her lips, I feel my face getting into the same awkward state that Barbara Berrill commented on in such embarrassing terms. Perhaps she doesn’t know what the word means. I try not to look at her bosom.

‘Awful smell it’s got in summer,’ she says. No, she does know. ‘But what a lovely hidey-hole it makes!’

She picks up the open logbook. I remember the list of dates, with all the x’s and exclamation marks, and my muscles freeze with my polite mouthful of chocolate biscuit half- swallowed in my throat.

She closes it, though, and looks at the inscription on the cover: logbook – secrit. She laughs. ‘Oh dear. That’s Keith’s handiwork, is it?’

I want to lie and say it was me, to spare Keith’s shame, but no words emerge through the biscuit. I want to snatch the book away from her before she opens it again, but no movement issues from my hands.

She looks back at the sign over the passageway and laughs again. ‘Oh, I
see
!’ she says. ‘
Private
! How priceless!’

She puts the logbook down. ‘I suppose I’d better not look inside if everything in here’s so terribly hush-hush.’

I swallow the crumbs of chocolate biscuit. She looks out through the branches.

‘It’s a frightfully good place for a lookout, though,’ she murmurs. ‘You can see everything that goes on in the street. That’s what you’re up to in here, is it? Keeping watch on us all, and writing it all down in your logbook?’

I still can’t answer. Simple words like ‘yes’ and ‘no’ seem to be superimposed upon my tongue so that they cancel each other out.

‘I think Keith’s got some binoculars somewhere that he uses for birdwatching. They might come in handy.’

Yes/no. Already using them/nothing to use them for.

‘So what have you seen so far? Anything terribly suspicious?’

My head shakes itself. Perhaps I’m beginning to recover from my first shock. But in the silence that follows, as I go on trying not to look at her bosom, I can feel her smiling encouragingly down at the top of my head, and then her smile becoming serious. There’s more to come.

‘Well, I hope the Mounties get their man and all that, and I certainly don’t want to spoil your game. You chaps might just keep in mind, though, that even the best of games can sometimes get a bit out of hand. It would be a terrible shame if you upset any of the neighbours. For instance, I think it might be perhaps just a
tiny
bit rude if you actually followed people around.’

So she’s seen us. In which case, why isn’t she telling Keith off rather than me? Everyone knows you tell your own child off, not somebody else’s, for offences they’ve committed together. Why has she come all the way across the road to say it to
me
, when Keith’s not here?

‘It’s such fun for Keith,’ she says, ‘finding a real friend, because it does get a bit lonely sometimes if you don’t have any brothers or sisters, and he doesn’t make friends easily. I know you’ve got lively imaginations, the pair of you, and I know you have tremendous adventures together. But Keith’s easily led, as I’m sure you realise.’