Spies (2002) (6 page)

If you know the right spot, in the shrubs that were once the front hedge of Braemar, you can part the screen of vegetation and crawl along a kind of low passageway under the branches into a secret chamber that we’ve hacked out in the very heart of the thicket. Its floor is bare, hardened earth. A green twilight filters through the leaves. Even when it rains it hardly penetrates this far. When we’re in here no one in the world can see us. We’ve come a long journey from the chocolate spread and the silver picture frames.

Two summers ago this was our camp, where we plotted various expeditions into the African jungle and took refuge from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Last summer it was our hide, where we did our birdwatching. Now it’s to be the headquarters of a much more serious enterprise.

Keith sits cross-legged on the ground, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. I sit cross-legged opposite him, hardly conscious of the twigs sticking into my back or the tiny creatures dangling on threads that catch in my hair and fall down the neck of my shirt. I imagine my mouth’s hanging half-open once again as I humbly wait for Keith to announce what we’re to think and what we’re to do.

I find it very difficult now to reconstruct what I’m feeling – it’s so large and complex. Perhaps the
largeness
of the feelings is the most noticeable thing about them. After all the days and years of small fears and boredoms, of small burdens and discontents, importance has come upon us. We’ve been entrusted with a great task. We have to defend our homeland from its enemies. I understand now that it will involve frightening difficulties and wrenching conflicts of loyalty. I have a profound intimation of the solemnity and sadness of things.

I feel more strongly than ever the honour of my association with Keith. His family have taken on the heroic proportions of characters in a legend – noble father and traitorous mother playing out the never-ending conflict between good and evil, between light and dark. Now Keith himself is charged by fate with taking his place beside them, upholding the honour of the one by punishing the dishonour of the other. And I have been granted a modest foothold of my own in the story, as the loyal squire and sword-bearer that a hero requires.

I think I also understand that he’s more than a protagonist in the events we’re living through – that he’s in some mysterious way their creator. He’s done it before, with the murders committed by Mr Gort, for instance, and the building of the transcontinental railway, or the underground passage between our two houses. In each case he uttered the words, and the words became so. He told the story, and the story came to life. Never before, though, has it ever become
real
, not
really
real, in the way that it has this time.

So now I sit gazing at him, waiting for him to announce how we’re going to conduct the adventure he’s launched us upon. He sits gazing at the ground, deep inside his own thoughts, apparently unaware of my existence. He has moods when he finds me as unnoticeable as his father does.

One of my tasks as his sword-bearer, though, is to prompt his imagination by offering useless suggestions.

‘We’d better tell your father.’

No response. I understand why not as soon as I’ve said the words, and the picture of what they represent comes into my mind. I see us approaching his father as he works in the garden and whistles. We wait for him to look round or draw breath. He does neither. Keith has to raise his voice. ‘Daddy, Stephen and I have been reading Mummy’s diary …’

No. ‘Or the police,’ I try.

I’m not quite sure, though, what I mean by this in practical terms. I’ve no experience of reporting things to the police – I’ve no idea even where you find police when you want them. Police happen when they happen, walking slowly past the shops, cycling slowly up the street. And now, yes, a policeman obligingly comes pedalling up the street inside my head. ‘Excuse me,’ says Keith politely, while I wait behind him. The policeman stops, and sets a foot to the ground, as he did that day outside Auntie Dee’s house. He looks at me and Keith distrustfully, as he did at the children running excitedly up the street beside him then. ‘My mother,’ he says, ‘is …’

But the words will not imagine themselves. Not said to a policeman. In any case there’s no response from Keith.

My next try: ‘We could write an anonymous letter to Mr McAfee.’

Mr McAfee turns into a kind of policeman sometimes, in the evening or at the weekend, though with a flat peaked cap instead of a helmet, and at any rate we know where to find him – at home next door to Keith’s house. We wrote him an anonymous letter once before, laying information against Mr Gort. Keith wrote it himself, in a disguised hand. He addressed it to Mr Mercaffy, and told him that we’d found four human vertebrae. There’s no sign so far of Mr Gort’s being arrested.

Keith rouses himself from his trance. He feels under the branches at the back of the chamber for the concealed flat stone, and takes out the key we keep underneath it. At one side of the chamber is a dented black tin trunk that we recovered from the rubble of the house, closed with the padlock I was given last birthday for my bicycle. He unlocks it, and puts away the logbook among the other things we keep in there, arranged as neatly as Keith’s official toys. There’s a piece of twisted grey metal from a shot-down German plane; the stub of a coloured pencil, of the sort used by teachers for correcting, that writes blue at one end and red at the other, recovered like the trunk itself from the broken scraps of Miss Durrant’s life; a candle stub and a box of matches; four live .22 rounds that Keith swapped at school for a model of a tank; and the Union Jack that we hang from the branches above the trunk to celebrate Empire Day and the King’s birthday.

Out of the trunk he takes our most secret and sacred possession – the bayonet with which his father killed the five Germans.

This simple description, though, doesn’t do justice to the metaphysical complexity of the object that Keith’s now holding. It both is and is not the sacred bayonet, just as the wafer and the wine both are and are not the body and blood of a being who both is and is not a god. In its physical nature it’s a long straight carving knife, which we found like so much else in the ruins of Miss Durrant’s house. Its bone handle is missing, and Keith has sharpened the blade with the grindstone on his father’s workbench so that it has an edge at the back as well as the front, and a point like a rapier. In its inward nature, though, it possesses the identity of the bayonet that goes off with his father to the Secret Service every weekend, with all its sacred attributes.

Keith holds it out towards me. I place my hand on the flat of the blade, tinglingly conscious of the sharpness on either side. He looks straight into my eyes.

‘I swear,’ he says.

‘I swear,’ I repeat.

‘Never to reveal anything about all this to anyone, except as and when allowed.’

‘Never to reveal anything about all this to anyone, except as and when allowed,’ I intone solemnly. Not solemnly enough though, evidently, to set Keith’s mind completely at rest. He goes on holding out the blade, looking me straight in the eye.

‘Allowed by me, Keith Hayward.’ – ‘By you, Keith Hayward.’

‘So help me God, or cut my throat and hope to die.’ I recite the words back to him as best I can, my voice subdued by their seriousness.

‘Stephen Wheatley,’ he concludes. ‘Stephen Wheatley,’ I agree.

He puts the bayonet carefully down on top of the trunk.

‘This will be our lookout,’ he announces. ‘We’ll keep watch on the house from here, and when we see her go out we’ll follow her. We’ll make a map of everywhere she goes.’

We prepare for the task by clearing discreet windows in the greenery, through which we can see everything that goes on in the Close, and most particularly Keith’s house, a little further up on the other side of the street.

A practical difficulty occurs to me. ‘What about school?’ I ask.

‘We’ll do it after school.’

‘What about when it’s tea or supper?’

‘We can take turns.’

The time we really need to follow her, of course, is in the darkness at the end of the month, when she goes to her rendezvous.

‘What if it’s the night?’ I ask him. ‘We’re not allowed to go out when it’s night.’

‘We’ll hide knotted ropes in our rooms. We’ll climb out of our bedroom windows and meet here. We’ll get some more candles out of the air-raid shelter.’

I shiver. Already I can feel the rough knots of the rope under my hands and the eerie chill of the night air. I can see the candles flickering, and the deep darkness of the night outside. I can hear her soft steps ahead of us as we follow her down towards the shops – past the station – through the bushes above the quarries – out on to the open fairway …

‘But
then
what are we going to do?’ I ask. At some point, it seems to me, there will come a moment when this great programme has to lead to some action by the authorities in the grown-up world.

Keith silently picks up the bayonet and looks at me.

What does he mean? That we’re going arrest her ourselves at bayonet point? Or that we’re going to follow his father’s example and stick it into the ribs of the courier she’s meeting?

Not, presumably, that we’re going to …? Not his own
mother
…!

Keith’s eyelids have come down. His face is set and pitiless. He looks like his father. He looks as his father must have looked one grey dawn in the Great War when he fixed his bayonet to the end of his revolver for the battle that lay ahead.

I shiver again. The dark of the moon … I can feel it surrounding me, pressing against my eyes …

Keith opens the trunk again. He takes out a plain white bathroom tile that we found in the rubble of the house, and the stub of the coloured pencil. With the red end he neatly prints a single word on the tile, and wedges it in the fork of a bush at the entrance to the passageway.

PRIVET
, it says.

I don’t like to query this, now that he’s written it so neatly and authoritatively. In any case, the sense of it is plain enough – that we’re commencing a long journey on a lonely road where no one else can follow.

She’s hunched over a radio transmitter hidden in the cellars of the old castle, tapping on a Morse key, and I’m just about to spring out from behind the secret panel to confront her, when I realise that my name’s being called, and I emerge from the shadows of the castle to discover that Mr Pawle is leaning against the blackboard with ironic patience, and that all the class are looking at me and tittering, as they wait for me to answer a question he’s asked me; but what the question was, or even what subject we’re doing, I have not the faintest idea.

In the lunch hour Hanning and Neale perform their current routine of seizing my ears and rocking my head back and forth as they chant, ‘Weeny weedy Wheatley,’ and for once I feel sustained against them by the sheer importance of the secret knowledge lodged between those two abused ears of mine.

As soon as I get back from school I run straight to the lookout and start keeping watch on the Haywards’ house. But Keith has scarcely joined me before I have to go home for tea, and scarcely have I got back from my tea and he from his before we both have to go home again to do our homework, to eat our supper, to go to bed. It’s just as I’d foreseen. We have a task of national importance to perform, and we’re endlessly frustrated by all the petty demands of life.

‘Fidget, fidget!’ says my mother, as I sit at the dining-room table, squirming and sighing over the boiled fish or the Latin translation. ‘What’s got into you?’

Geoff grins his most maddening sardonic grin. ‘Another little game your barmy pal’s dreamed up?’ he demands. ‘What is it this time? Not still after the ape-man on the golf course, are you?’

I endure it all in silence. I should like to drop just the most cryptic hint, and see their faces change. But I don’t. I’ve sworn an oath, and I intend to keep it in the letter and the spirit.

‘
Now
where are you off to?’ cries my mother, as I wipe my mouth on the back of my hand, or close my exercise book, and jump up to return to my post. ‘You’re not going to Keith’s house again tonight, let me tell you that
right
now.’

‘I know, I know – I’m
not
going to Keith’s house!’

‘No, they’re going to be messing around creeping into other people’s gardens,’ says Geoff.

‘You don’t know what we do!’

‘I’ve seen you, chum! Hanging around Mr Gort’s house, looking for ape-men! It’s hell’s own pathetic, you know, at your age.’

I’ve seen
him
, too, hanging around Deirdre Berrill’s house. But this is too hell’s own shameful to bring up, even in an argument.

‘Anyway,’ says my mother, ‘tonight you can just stay in for once. It
is
Friday, after all.’

Yes, it’s Friday again, to complicate things still further. It’s always said to be
nice
if I stay in on a Friday evening, for some reason, and there’s always some kind of unspoken, unexplained reproach hanging in the air if I decline the promise of this niceness and go out.

‘Also Daddy’s home – he never sees you!’

And indeed even my father’s home, to cap it all. Dozing in the armchair once again, and beginning to wake at the sound of the argument. He smiles sleepily at me, supporting my mother’s case by demonstrating his pleasure at setting eyes on me after so long.

‘So,’ he says, in his slow, careful way. ‘Stephen! Well, well, well! Sit down! Talk to me! Tell me something!’

I sit down reluctantly in the other armchair. Friday – my father – an account of myself demanded. I’m caught.

‘Tell you what?’ I ask.

‘What you did at school today.’

What can I say? Should I tell him about Mr Sankey twisting my right ear, because I couldn’t tell him the ablative of
quis
; or about Mr Pawle twisting my left ear, because I was so busy watching Keith’s mother transmitting information to the Germans that I didn’t even know what it was I couldn’t tell him; or about Hanning and Neale distressing both ears simultaneously, because, even after being warned about it so often, I still persist in being weeny, weedy, and Wheatley?

‘Revising,’ I say.

‘Revising what?’

I find it extremely difficult to remember. ‘Equations and things. And Canada. In Geography. Wheat and minerals and things.’

‘Good,’ he says. ‘Excellent. So what is the value of x, if 7x
²
= 63?’

Above his head outside the window hangs a faint cabbalistic sign. It’s the pale ghost of the new moon, a back-to-front C written in the clear blue sky like an omen visible only to me. The celestial calendar has begun to mark off the days. First it will swell, then it will dwindle again until it vanishes into blackness. Into x, the unknown in the equation we have to solve.

I’ve forgotten the terms in the one my father’s set me. ‘We don’t do that sort of equation,’ I say impatiently.

‘No? Very well, then. What is the approximate value per annum of Canada’s output of wheat, in either Canadian dollars or pounds sterling, whichever you prefer?’

I shrug hopelessly. How can I think about the economy of Canada when I know there’s a foreign agent somewhere out there in the evening sunshine studying the geography of this very neighbourhood? Marking the co-ordinates of the munitions factory where Mr Pincher works … finding secret underground research laboratories in Paradise … perhaps bringing off one of the major pieces of espionage that will be recorded with an exclamation mark …

My father wants to know everything about my life, now he’s got started. On and on he goes, in his mild, careful way. Am I getting on better with the other boys? They’re not calling me names any more? This is because I once asked my mother what a sheeny was. She said nothing, but simply propelled me into the dining room, where my father had his work spread out on the table in front of him, and made me repeat the question. I’d realised by this time, of course, that a sheeny must be one of that great class of things that can never be referred to. I’d heard the ‘she’ in it, and grasped that it was some secret thing to do with girls. My father looked at me for a long time, the way he did when I told him about the Juice at Trewinnick. ‘Did someone call you that?’ he asked. I quickly shook my head, and felt myself blushing. He went on looking at me. ‘Someone at school?’ ‘No.’ ‘What else did they say?’ ‘Nothing.’ He sighed, and rubbed his eyes the way he did when he was tired. ‘Take no notice,’ he said finally. ‘Forget it. Sticks and stones, yes? And if anyone ever says anything like that again, you just tell me and I’ll talk to the school.’

No, I tell him now – no one’s calling me names. So who are my best friends in the class these days? Which is my favourite teacher? Am I enjoying science any more than I used to?

What
I
want to know, though, is why there’s something awkward about going out to play on Friday evenings. Why my father has never killed any Germans. Why no one in the whole of my family is in the RAF. Why we have an embarrassing name like Wheatley. Why we can’t be called something more like Hayward. There’s something sad about our life, and I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. Sometimes I come home from school to find I’m kept out of the front room because some melancholy stranger is sitting in it, waiting silently for my father to come home and have an unhappy conversation that Geoff and I aren’t allowed to overhear.

It’s already getting near bedtime before I can slip away from my unsatisfactory family at last, and rush headlong out of the house. I come out of the gateway so fast that I almost run into her. She’s strolling home, back up the Close from wherever she’s been. We both stop short, startled once again at the sight of each other, as disconcerted as a big-game hunter and a tiger coming unexpectedly face to face.

‘Good heavens, Stephen!’ she says. ‘Where are
you
off to in such a hurry?’

‘Nowhere.’ My usual destination, of course, as she immediately realises.

‘I’m afraid Keith will be in bed by now, Stephen. Why don’t you come and play tomorrow?’

‘All right,’ I mutter gracelessly, and run back into the gateway as abruptly as I emerged from it.

When I think about this meeting later, after my heart has stopped racing, what strikes me about it is not just her composure, but something else as well. She seemed almost unconscious of the world around her. This is why she was so startled – because she was so busy thinking her own thoughts. And she addressed me direct. I don’t think she’s ever done that before.

What thoughts was she thinking? I believe I realise, as I recall the look on her face, and the way she called me Stephen, that they were sad ones. I believe it occurs to me for the first time that betraying your country must involve a certain moral anguish, and that there must be even more unanswered questions hanging in the air at the Haywards’ house than there are at ours.

*

I suppose it must be the following Saturday that we get down to serious observation. Peering out from our post through the long empty hours, it’s as if we were watching the almost imperceptible current of some dull lowland river, marked only by the occasional passing flotsam or lethargic eddy.

The biggest event of the morning is the arrival of the milk float. First the sounds of its slow approach: the complex ambling of the horse’s hooves … the faint clink and shift of harness as it waits and moves on … Then its appearance in front of us, with the milkman walking behind, absorbed in the familiar worn order book held open by the familiar elastic band … Another wait, the horse lost in its own melancholy thoughts, blowing down its nose and copiously urinating as the milkman takes his bottles and tours the next group of houses.

Keith follows him through his birdwatching binoculars as he goes up the path to his mother’s kitchen door. Could the milkman be another member of the ring? Spying out the secrets of all the houses he visits – writing them down in the long order book – giving them to Keith’s mother to pass on …?

‘1047 hours,’ says Keith, looking at the wristwatch he was given for his birthday, ‘milkman arrives.’ I write it down in the logbook. ‘1048 – milkman departs.’

After the milk float has gone Norman Stott emerges from No. 13, carrying a shovel and a clanking bucket. He passes immediately in front of us, talking mournfully to himself, and disappears from our field of view. There’s the sound of shovel scraping against gravel. We don’t need to see in order to know what he’s doing.

‘Horse-apples.’ This is what my father calls horse manure, for some embarrassing, eccentric reason of his own.

Things look up again for a moment when Mrs McAfee, from No. 8, comes walking slowly down the road, holding something in her hand, and goes into No. 13. This is interesting. The Stotts are not the kind of people that the McAfees would know. Mrs Stott opens the door. They talk … Mrs McAfee gives Mrs Stott the thing she’s holding … Keith peers at them through the binoculars.

‘A pair of secateurs,’ he whispers.

‘Shall I write it down in the logbook?’ I whisper. He shakes his head.

Three times an hour there’s the muffled sound of a train on the down line as it emerges from the cutting behind the McAfees’ house on to the embankment behind the Haywards, rumbles over the tunnel across the lane beyond the Sheldons, and slows for the station. Three times an hour there’s the sound of a train on the up line as it slowly gathers speed from the station, rumbles over the tunnel, labours along the rising grade on the embankment, and is swallowed up in the cutting.

The Stotts’ dog chases the Hardiments’ cat up the street, then, at a loose end, stops in front of the lookout and gazes in at us for a long time, wagging its tail in a puzzled but hopeful way. It’s a mongrel with a whitish coat, and a large spot in the middle of its back as prominent as the identification roundel on the wing of a plane. Its attentions must be revealing our presence not only to the entire street but to any passing enemy aircraft.

Eventually it loses interest in us. It yawns and raises its leg at us and goes off to roll in the road. Even the flattened scrapings of horse dung are more interesting than us.

There may be significant things going on at the houses on our side of the street, but we can’t see them. On the other side, nothing more happens at Keith’s house, after the excitement with the milkman, nothing at the Sheldons or Auntie Dee’s, at the Stotts or the McAfees …

We note a few developments at Mr Gort’s and Trewinnick. Mr Gort comes out of his front door, stands uncertainly in the street for a moment, and goes back inside. At Trewinnick a mysterious hand opens the upstairs curtains behind the evergreens, but we can’t see who it belongs to. There’s always been something sinister about Mr Gort’s house and Trewinnick, of course. But there’s something sinister about
all
these silent houses, when you look at them like this. The less you see happening on the outside, the more certain you are that strange things are going on inside …

The sun comes out. The sun goes in.

Slowly the strangeness of everything drains away again. A leaden dullness settles over the street. My attention wanders. I pick up the binoculars and look at Keith through them the wrong way round. He snatches them away from me.

‘You’ll get them out of focus,’ he whispers. ‘Go home if you’re bored, old bean.’

His father’s voice, and another of his father’s faces.

I don’t want to play this game any more, I realise. I squat there on the hard ground under the dull bushes, with the twigs sticking into my back and the caterpillars falling down the neck of my shirt, rebelliously keeping my eyes on the ants hurrying about the dusty ground instead of the stupid nothingness of the street. I realise I’m tired of pretending to believe all the things Keith tells me. I’m sick of being bossed around all the time.

‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘my father’s a German spy, too.’

Keith silently adjusts the binoculars.

‘Well, he is,’ I say. ‘He has secret meetings with people who come to the house. They talk in a foreign language together. It’s German. I’ve heard them.’

This time Keith’s lips register a slight dismissive amusement. But it’s true! My father
does
shut himself away with mysterious visitors – they
do
talk in a foreign language. I
have
heard them! Why shouldn’t it be German? Why shouldn’t my father be a German spy if Keith’s mother’s one, when she doesn’t even talk to people in foreign languages – when all she does is make stupid marks in her diary that don’t mean anything?