Spies (2002) (3 page)

And Keith and I would sit awkwardly in the sitting room, amidst the muddle of baby toys on the floor, looking disapprovingly at Milly as she brought us her dolls and picture books, and tried to climb into our laps, as smiling and trustful as her mother. The house was almost as untidy as my own home. The back garden, outside the French windows, was even worse. The grass on the untended lawn was as high as the rusting croquet hoops left over from earlier summers. Keith always had one of his father’s disapproving looks on his face while we were in Auntie Dee’s house, his eyelids slightly lowered, his lips pursed, as if he were about to start whistling. As I understood it, though, this was no reflection upon his aunt’s perfect aunt-likeness. Aunts were supposed to be welcoming, cheerful, and untidy. They were supposed to have little children who smiled at you and tried to climb into your lap. His disapproving look was simply the look that a properly brought-up nephew was supposed to have in an aunt’s house. It was further evidence of his family’s unshakeable correctness.

In any case, there was a reason for the untidiness. Auntie Dee and even the untidiness itself glowed with a kind of sacred light, like a saint and his attributes in a religious painting, because they reflected the glory of Uncle Peter.

There was a photograph of Uncle Peter in a silver frame on the mantelpiece, smiling the same recklessly open smile as Auntie Dee, his peaked RAF officer’s cap set at an angle that echoed the recklessness of the smile. The Berrill girls’ father was away in the army somewhere, the McAfees’ son was doing his bit in the Far East. But no one had an absent relative who could compare with Uncle Peter. He was a bomber pilot, and he’d flown on special missions over Germany so dangerous and so secret that Keith could only hint at them. Around the photograph were silver cups he’d won at various sports. On the shelves were rows of the adventure stories he’d kept from his boyhood, which Keith was sometimes allowed to borrow. His very absence was a kind of presence. He was manifest in the little silver brooch that Auntie Dee always had pinned to her breast, that showed the three famous initials on a blue enamel background, with the famous wings outspread around them and the famous crown above. You felt his cheerful bravery in Auntie Dee’s own brave cheerfulness, his careless disregard for danger in the very untidiness of the house and the neglect of the garden.

It was only Keith’s mother who went to Auntie Dee’s, never his father. And Auntie Dee never went to Keith’s house. The only time I saw Milly’s pushchair waiting outside Keith’s parents’ front door was later – and I knew at once that something was wrong.

Not that there seemed to me anything strange about this lopsided arrangement at the time. The ways of the Haywards were no more open to questioning or comprehension than the domestic arrangements of the Holy Family. Perhaps not even Auntie Dee, in spite of Uncle Peter, was quite up to the standards demanded by God the father.

Only one guest was always welcome at Keith’s house: teapot-eared Stephen, with the half-open mouth and the grimy tennis shoes.

*

Didn’t Stephen love his own family, then? Didn’t he appreciate at the time the qualities that he discovered in them later, and that affected him more and more deeply as he got older?

I don’t think he ever thought about whether he loved them or not. They were his family, and that was all there was to it. I suppose he appreciated some of their qualities, because he had some kind of subconscious understanding that his disadvantages in life were a necessary condition of the enthralling difference between Keith’s status in the world and his own. How could Stephen have admired Keith’s effortless good fortune in being unencumbered with a brother, if he hadn’t had to put up with one himself, if he hadn’t had to listen to him trying out his new oaths all the time (‘God in heaven’, ‘Jesus wept’) and calling everything hell’s own boring? Would he have perceived the grace and serenity of Keith’s mother quite so clearly if his own hadn’t spent most of the day in a faded apron, sighing and anxious, apparently unable to think about anything except Geoff’s swearing and Stephen’s whereabouts, and the filthy state of their room? Would even Uncle Peter have been quite such a perfect uncle if Stephen himself hadn’t had to make do with a handful of obscure aunts in flowered dresses?

Stephen’s father and Keith’s presented a particularly piquant contrast. The presence of Stephen’s father was scarcely noticeable. He was out at an office somewhere all day and often all evening, doing a job, too dull to describe, connected with controls on building materials. Once he’d been away on some business trip in the North for a whole year, and no one had ever talked about it or even noticed particularly. And even when he was at home he didn’t whistle that terrifying whistle, he didn’t call Stephen ‘old bean’ and threaten to cane him. He said very little. He often seemed like some mild-natured furry animal. He’d sit for hours at the dining-room table, with papers and files spread out in front of him, and a pair of reading glasses on the end of his nose, or else collapse into one of the scuffed armchairs in the lounge and silently doze through obscure concerts on the wireless that nobody else wanted to hear. He’d loosen his tie, and quantities of disorganised dark hair on his chest would come sprouting out of the open neck of his shirt. Then his head would sink and present the world with yet more disorganised hair, dotted in irregular tufts about the infertile landscape of his scalp. Even the backs of his hands had coarse dark hair on them – even the gaps between his turn-ups and his crumpled socks. His appearance was as unsatisfactory as Stephen’s.

Sometimes, when he was awake, he’d ask Stephen and Geoff politely what they’d been doing with themselves. He spoke slowly and carefully, as if he thought they might not understand him. And when he did finally become exasperated with them, the worst punishment he could contrive was a generalised swipe at their heads, which they effortlessly ducked. The cause of the exasperation was usually their room, and the muddle it was in, which he sometimes referred to as
coodle-moodle
. There was something embarrassingly private about this; no one else in the Close had ever uttered such a word. If Stephen argued back, and tried to insist that not clearing up the room saved time for more important matters such as homework, his father would occasionally produce an even more eccentric word: ‘
shnick-shnack
’. Stephen once repeated this to Keith, on perhaps the only occasion that he didn’t entirely believe something Keith had told him. ‘You know Auntie Dee’s baby?’ said Keith. ‘She was grown from a seed.’ ‘Shnick-shnack,’ said Stephen uncertainly, and he knew from the look on Keith’s face that he’d said the wrong thing once again.

I also remember the time Stephen told his father about the Juice moving into Trewinnick. His father gave him one of his long, thoughtful looks.

‘It’s true,’ said Stephen. ‘Keith said.’

His father laughed. ‘Oh, Keith said. In that case we need inquire no further. Shnick-shnack.’

No, Stephen must have loved his family, because loving your family was the ordinary arrangement in life, and everything in Stephen’s family, or so it seemed to him, even the coodle-moodle, was quite extraordinarily ordinary. But where he longed to be was at Keith’s house. And what he loved most at Keith’s house was being invited to tea.

Those teas! At once I taste the chocolate spread on the thick plank of bread. I feel in my fingertips the diamond pattern incised in the tumblers of lemon barley. I see the shining dark table in the dining room, where Keith and I are allowed to sit on our own, unfolding napkins from the bone napkin rings, helping ourselves from the tall jug of lemon barley covered by a lace weighted with four blue beads.

Between the silver candlesticks on the mantelpiece is a silver ashtray propped upright and inscribed ‘WWLTC. Senior Mixed Doubles. Runners-up – W. P. Hayward and R. J. Whitman, 27 July 1929.’ W. P. Hayward and R. J. Whitman, as Keith long ago explained, were his parents before they were married, and the WWLTC was the Wimbledon World Lawn Tennis Club. They would have been world champions if they hadn’t been somehow cheated out of it by another couple who were members of the same sinister organisation now entrenched in Trewinnick. On the sideboard, between two cut-glass decanters, is Uncle Peter, in another silver frame. His smile’s more restrained here in Keith’s parents’ house, and his officer’s cap is straight. Every detail is sharp on the eagle, crown, and thickly embroidered laurel leaves above the peak, and on the pilot’s wings above his left breast pocket.

At the end of an afternoon when Stephen has stayed to tea, Keith taps on the sitting-room door, and ushers him into his mother’s presence to make his farewell speech. Balanced on an occasional table by the sofa is a tea tray of her own, with a silver teapot, a silver milk jug, and a little silver box containing tiny pills of saccharine. She’s on the sofa, with her feet tucked up beneath her, reading her library book. Or she’s sitting at a desk in the far corner, writing the letters she posts so copiously, watched by another dozen or so silver- framed family photographs ranged over the desk in front of her. Stephen doesn’t dare look directly at anything in this holy place. Keith’s mother glances up and smiles. ‘Oh, is Stephen going home?’ she asks Keith. ‘You must invite him again another time.’

Stephen steps forward and delivers his speech. ‘Thank you for having me,’ he mumbles.

‘As long as you both had fun together,’ she says.

I don’t suppose Stephen’s words meant very much to him at the time, so let me say them again now, on his behalf, before everything that was going to happen happened. With sincere gratitude, and a sense of wonder at my good fortune that has grown only stronger over the years. Gratitude not only to Keith’s mother, but to Keith himself, to all the others after him whose adjutant and audience I was, and to everyone else who wrote and performed the drama of life in which I had a small, often frightening, but always absorbing part:

Thank you for having me. Thank you, thank you.

So what was the source of that disconcerting perfume?

It wasn’t the neat standard roses in the Haywards’ front garden, nor the muddle of heaven knows what in ours. It wasn’t the limes in front of the Hardiments, or the buddleia at the Stotts and the McAfees, or the honeysuckle at Mr Gort’s and the Geests.

I walk slowly back down the street, looking at the houses opposite the Haywards, trying to be sure. It didn’t come from No. 6 – that was the Berrills, and a barbed-wire entanglement of overgrown wild roses … No. 5 was the Geests … At No. 3 we’re back to the Pinchers. So it can only have been this one, in between the Geests and the Pinchers, No. 4.

I stop and examine it carefully. The rustic sign on the wrought-iron gate says Meadowhurst, and there’s not much garden visible apart from four neat tubs of geraniums and three cars parked on the flagged hard standing. The house itself looks unfamiliar to me. Its whole style is subtly different from all the other houses in the street – it was plainly built much later. Yes, this was the place – our Arcadia, our Atlantis, our Garden of Eden, the unclaimed territory left after Miss Durrant’s house was gutted by a stray German incendiary bomb.

It was called Braemar in those days. Already, when Stephen and all the other children in the Close played there, the brambles and fireweed and dog-roses had begun to conceal the melancholy little landscape of uncleared rubble covering the foundations of the house in which Miss Durrant had lived and died. The whole garden was running wild, like the Berrill girls, and the tall green hedge at the front, which Miss Durrant had kept so rectilinear, and behind which she had maintained her privacy so carefully, had lost its shape and grown into a straggling underwood that closed the entrance to this secret kingdom completely and lost it to the world.

Stephen spent a lot of time concealed in the midst of those unremarkable dull-green bushes that had once been a hedge. He scarcely noticed them, though. Not, at any rate, until some time towards the end of that June, when they came into blossom around him, and half-suffocated him with the coarse sweetness that would pursue him down the years.

I gaze at the four tubs of geraniums and the three cars. Of the bushes now there’s no longer a trace. I can’t help laughing at myself when I remember what they were, because the species is so commonplace, so despised and ridiculed, so associated with the repression and concealment of all the wild feelings it seems to have released in me. Let me say the name and get it out into the open, once and for all.

The source of all my great unrest is this: plain ordinary privet.

Where the story began, though, was where most of our projects and adventures began – at Keith’s house. At the tea table, in fact – I can hear the soft clinking made by the four blue beads that weighted the lace cloth covering the tall jug of lemon barley …

No, wait. I’ve got that wrong. The glass beads are clinking against the glass of the jug because the cover’s stirring in the breeze. We’re outside, in the middle of the morning, near the chicken run at the bottom of the garden, building the transcontinental railway.

Yes, because I can hear something else, as well – the trains on the real railway, as they emerge from the cutting on to the embankment above our heads just beyond the wire fence. I can see the showers of sparks they throw up from the live rail. The jug of lemon barley isn’t our tea – it’s our elevenses, waiting with two biscuits each on a tray his mother has brought us out from the house, and set down on the red brick path beside us. It’s as she walks away, up the red brick path, that Keith so calmly and quietly drops his bombshell.

When is this? The sun’s shining as the beads clink against the jug, but I have a feeling that there’s still a trace of fallen apple blossom on the earthworks for the transcontinental railway, and that his mother’s worried about whether we’re warm enough out there. ‘You’ll come inside, chaps, won’t you, if you get chilly?’ May still, perhaps. Why aren’t we at school? Perhaps it’s a Saturday or a Sunday. No, there’s the feel of a weekday morning in the air; it’s unmistakable, even if the season isn’t. Something that doesn’t quite fit here, as so often when one tries to assemble different bits to make a whole.