Spies (2002) (12 page)

‘There were other things in the box,’ I explain once again. ‘Shirts and things. I just happened to be holding that. When I heard the man.’

I’ve told him about the man, and the dogs barking in the Lanes. I haven’t told him about the moon coming out. I haven’t told him that I could have turned round and seen the man in the moonlight.

Keith’s eyelids come down a little; one of his father’s looks again. My great exploit hasn’t pleased or impressed him. I should have guessed. He’s the one who’s the hero of our projects, not me.

‘And you’re sure he didn’t see you?’ he demands.

‘I hid,’ I say, not looking at him. ‘I hid very quickly.’ I realise now – I’ve done everything wrong.

‘And you didn’t get a proper look at him?’

‘I couldn’t. I was hiding.’

Keith turns the sock over again, dissatisfied with either it or my explanation, or both.

‘I thought it might be a disguise,’ I suggest humbly. ‘I thought it might be sort of ordinary clothes for someone to change into. If they’d landed by parachute or something and they were wearing a German uniform. If they were hiding in the Lanes somewhere.’

At any rate an old sock plainly isn’t payment for off-the-ration bacon, or a present from Auntie Dee to some imaginary boyfriend. Not that I ever believed those stories for a moment. Or could have said anything about them to Keith even if I had. It would be telling tales. You can’t tell tales. Certainly not about someone’s own aunt, about someone’s own mother.

I snatch the sock off the table and hide it in my lap as his mother comes into the room.

‘I don’t know whether Stephen likes Chelsea buns?’ she says. ‘It’s all I could get in Courts.’

She smiles at us both collectively with her usual careful imprecision. Everything, she’s telling me, is to be as it always was. But it isn’t, it isn’t! Under the tabletop I’m holding the old sock that she put into the box for X, for a German parachutist, and that I took out again in spite of what she said. I can’t look at her. I know my face is in a bad way again. ‘Thank you,’ I mumble.

She goes out again, but I haven’t the heart to put the sock back on the table. ‘Why did you take it out of the box?’ demands Keith now, still dissatisfied, undistracted by the buns. ‘When they find it’s missing they’ll know someone else has been there.’

I say nothing. I can’t explain how I came to find it in my hand afterwards without mentioning my panic-stricken flight, and I can’t explain my flight without mentioning the figure breathing behind me, and my shameful failure to turn and look at him.

I choke down my bun in silence.

‘We’d better go and see what’s happening,’ he says. There’s a note of conscious forbearance in his voice. He’s resuming the burden of leadership by taking upon himself the wearisome responsibility that a leader has to accept for his subordinate’s mistakes.

I make a belated effort to honour my agreement with his mother. ‘We’d better not,’ I say.

Keith’s eyelids come down again. ‘Why not?’ he demands – and of course I can’t explain. He thinks I’m frightened. All my bravery in the night now counts for nothing.

‘I just think we’d better not,’ I repeat feebly.

He leads the way to the sitting-room door and taps on it as usual. ‘Me and Stephen are going out to play,’ he announces.

There’s a pause while she thinks about this. I can see her beyond him, sitting at the desk with the blotter open and a pen in her hand. She’s weighing up whether to trust me to keep to our agreement, and to keep Keith to it as well.

‘“Stephen and
I
”,’ she murmurs calmly at last. She’s trusting me.

‘Stephen and
I
,’ he repeats obediently. He steps back. I step forward to take his place and observe the usual ritual.

‘Thank you for having me,’ I mumble.

She smiles, perhaps at hearing the formula on my own lips again.

‘Have fun, then, chaps,’ she says. ‘Try not to get up to any mischief.’

She’s reminding me of our compact, and of course as I trail behind Keith to the end of the street, breaking that compact and letting her down at each step of the way, I feel worse than ever.

At the corner we stop and look cautiously back to check that the street’s empty behind us.

‘She was writing letters,’ says Keith. ‘She’ll be going out to the post again soon.’

I know. And will be turning right instead of left, and catching us looking in the box, and discovering my betrayal. I follow Keith helplessly through the echoing darkness, between the water and the slime, trying to persuade myself that since we’re ahead of her we’re not actually following her. We curl back the wire fence and crawl through.

In the vegetation by the retaining wall there’s now nothing to be seen but the lingering shape of an indistinct absence. The box has gone.

‘He obviously did see you,’ says Keith. ‘They’ve moved their hiding place. So now the Germans know we know about them. We’ve got to start all over again, old bean.’

My heart shrivels at the sound of his father’s tone and his father’s phrase, at the accusing absence in the undergrowth, at my own hopelessness.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say humbly.

Breaking my word of honour has had nothing but bad consequences. And at any moment she’s going to be arriving with her next consignment of secrets to put in the box. She’s going to find it gone – and me there as the cause of its disappearance.

‘I’m sorry, Keith,’ I whisper. ‘We’d better go.’

But Keith’s smiling his dangerous little smile. I know I’m going to be humiliated for being so hopeless, and for my presumption in trying to demonstrate otherwise.

‘So
he
saw
you
,’ he says. ‘But
you
didn’t see
him
.’

I’m choked by the unfairness of this. Keith doesn’t know how terrifying it was to be here, on my own, in the middle of the night! He’s not the one who experienced it!

‘It was dark,’ I explain.

‘It was moonlight. You said it was moonlight.’

‘Not then.’

‘When?’

‘When he saw me. When I didn’t see him.’

The weakness of this answer dawns on me even as I say it. Keith’s smile becomes even narrower, his voice even softer.

‘You weren’t really hiding, were you?’ he whispers. ‘You were just hiding your face.’

‘Keith, please – let’s go home.’

‘You were just putting your hands over your face. So you couldn’t see. Like Milly playing hide-and-seek. Like a little baby.’

I feel the choking obstruction growing in my throat, then the shameful tears beginning to obstruct my vision. It’s the sheer unfairness of his accusation that undermines me, his grotesque concentration on my one moment of weakness after I’d demonstrated so much courage, his cruel rejection of the hard-won tribute I’d laid at his feet. But of course my tears are now the proof of his point. Through their wavering wetness I’m conscious of his smile slowly evaporating. He turns aside and shrugs. He’s lost interest in me. ‘Go on, then,’ he says. ‘Go home, if that’s what you want to do.’

I crawl back to the gap in the wire fence, still whimpering, more humiliated than I’ve ever been. I struggle to push the wire aside, and in my distress I fail even in this.

Then I stop. I try to suppress my sobs while I listen.

From the tunnel, faint but echoing, comes the sound of approaching footsteps.

I crawl back to Keith. ‘She’s coming,’ I whisper.

We both look round for somewhere to hide. But already, even from where we are, we can hear the approaching footsteps … already they’re at the gap in the wire … And already I’ve bent down and pressed my face into the ground so that I can’t see the fate that’s going to overtake me. Like Milly playing hide-and-seek. Like a little baby.

Then slowly the approaching footsteps fade away again. Slowly I realise that the world hasn’t ended, after all.

‘Quick!’ whispers Keith. ‘She’s gone past! She’s going up the Lanes!’

I sit up. He’s already scrambling towards the wire. I scramble hurriedly after him, more ashamed of myself than ever. But I can’t help seeing, as he turns to squeeze through the gap, that there’s a green grass stain down his cheek. He was hiding his face, just like me. Two little babies together. For a fleeting instant I feel triumphant vindication. Then I’m running home – and realising, halfway back to the tunnel, that Keith’s turned the other way, towards the Lanes.

We both stop in surprise. He’s going to follow her. Of course. I should have known.

He waits for me to turn back and join him, but I stand my ground. ‘What?’ he says, smiling his little smile. ‘You’re frightened of the dogs?’

I shake my head, but still I won’t move. I
can’t
! She put me on my honour! And I can’t explain.

So there we stand – because
he
won’t move, either. He won’t go without me. And with a flash of pathetic gratitude I realise that he needs me to accompany him. Without me there’s no game. Without me there’s no one for him to be braver than.

Slowly I walk back to join him.

‘Buck up, then,’ he says coldly, ‘or we’ll lose her.’

He begins to trot to catch her up. I trot with him, half a pace behind. Cautiously we slow at every twist and turn of the rutted track, at every opening in the rank green hedgerows where she might be lurking.

Then somewhere ahead of us the dogs begin to bark. Already she’s passing the Cottages. We hurry forward.

All summer afternoons in the Lanes seem to labour under a kind of hot dullness and heaviness. Even the train I can hear on the embankment behind us hauls itself over the tunnel and up the gradient towards the cutting with a kind of weariness, as if it’s overcome by the same choking green torpor. On the few occasions we’ve explored along here before, I’ve always felt we were in another, more ancient and frightening land. As the lane twists left and right, I recognise the sycamore with a rotting length of rope hanging from one of its boughs … the sudden little field now choked with sorrel and dock … the long patch of nettles … a single mouldered and gaping boot … an overturned armchair lying in a pool of sodden stuffing … Then the Cottages are upon us. And the dogs.

There are three of them, with laid-back, torn ears and evil eyes as varicoloured as their coats, performing the familiar dance of alternating hatred and fear, leaping at us – cowering away – leaping again. At once any remaining differences with Keith are ended, and I’m at his side, or rather just behind his back, trying to conceal myself and the smell of my fear as he turns to face the dogs down, and moves slowly but firmly forwards, with me moving slowly and nervously in step with him.

Our progress is watched expressionlessly by half a dozen children of various ages who are standing in front of the Cottages, in the lane itself or in the little front gardens full of rusting mangles and old mattresses. Their faces are dirty and they’re wearing dirty collarless shirts and dirty dresses five sizes too big. Everything about them is plainly laden with germs. They’re doing nothing – not playing, not calling off the dogs, not even enjoying our discomfiture – just standing absolutely still, as if they’d been standing there since the beginning of time, and watching us with wooden faces, as if we were members of some quite alien and incomprehensible race – Iron Age invaders in Stone Age territory, white settlers among aborigines.

The uneasy thought comes to me, even in the midst of my fear, that these unreadable and unapproachable creatures hold the key to the mystery. They follow the comings and goings in the Lanes just as we follow the comings and goings in the Close. They’ve seen X on his way to the hiding place in the tunnel and back. They know what he looks like. They know where he’s hiding. But there’s no way in which we could ask them, because there’s no way in which we can communicate with them.

Keith treats both dogs and children with equal disdain. He examines the Cottages with a slight, pitying smile as we pass, as if they were uninhabited. I pretend to examine them as well, struggling to appear equally condescending. I take in at any rate how low they are, and how grey and blistered their white clapboarding. I note the torn curtains at the windows, and the two small front doors. At either end of the Cottages is a densely cultivated vegetable patch, and at the bottom of each vegetable patch a little tumbledown shed: the privet.

The leaden gaze of the sullen-eyed children weighs on me almost as oppressively as the attentions of the dogs. That same gaze, I realise, has rested a few moments earlier on Keith’s mother. An unthinkable thought, which has been lurking for some time now at the back of my mind, slowly takes a slightly more definite shape: that she’s here, in the Cottages. That this is the secret knowledge these sly faces are concealing.

One of the front doors opens and a man in a grimy vest emerges. He watches us from the doorstep, chewing something with his mouth open.

X.

Is it?

We keep moving forward, fending off the dogs. It isn’t because it can’t be. It can’t be because … because if it is, there’s no way in which we can proceed with the matter. Germans we might be able to deal with. These people we certainly can’t. We have to believe she’s gone further. We have to work on that assumption.

We move slowly on, gazed at and barked at until we’re out of sight around the bend. I know that Keith has thought the same unthinkable thought as me, but neither of us makes any reference to it.

We resume our search of every possible entrance into the green confusion on either side. We pass a half-dried-up pond where we once came for tadpoles, then a small, disused chalk pit and a place where the weeds are reclaiming a muddle of collapsed farm carts and broken harrows. The lane peters out into nothingness. A great gap in the earth’s furnishings opens in front of us – acre after acre of land stripped bare of its trees and crops, marked out as building lots, then abandoned at the outbreak of war. Now a low savannah of rank weeds has reclaimed the land. The grid of avenues and cul-de-sacs, of roundabouts and turning circles, has disappeared, like the wheel nuts from Keith’s father’s car and so much else, for the Duration.