Spies (2002) (7 page)

I
will
go home. I start to crawl along the passageway.

‘There she is,’ he whispers.

I stop and look, in spite of myself. Keith’s mother has appeared from the direction of the kitchen door, her shopping basket on her arm. She closes the garden gate carefully behind her, and walks down the road in her usual unhurried way. We both watch, hypnotised. Keith forgets even to look through the binoculars. She passes Trewinnick and Mr Gort’s house, and opens Auntie Dee’s front gate. She walks up the path, giving a little wave towards the living-room window, opens the front door and vanishes inside.

I pick up the logbook automatically. ‘1217,’ whispers Keith. I write it down. Our boredom has vanished, and all our mutual peevishness and my unbelief along with it.

We stare at Auntie Dee’s house, saying nothing. The sense of the strangeness of things returns to me. Why does Keith have an aunt living three doors away? Aunts don’t live in the same street as you! They live in remote places to which you go once or twice a year at most, and from which they emerge only at Christmas. And Keith’s mother goes to see her not two or three times a year, but
every day
. As I stare at the almond trees and the brown half-timbering of Auntie Dee’s house I begin for the first time to see the oddity of the whole relationship. When we go to see Auntie Nora or Auntie Mel we all suffer together. Keith’s mother goes to see Auntie Dee on her own. Always on her own. Every day. What do they find to talk about?

I think of the photograph on Keith’s mother’s desk, and it occurs to me for the first time that if they were sisters when they were little they must be sisters still. An extraordinary thought. It’s true that when my mother’s talking to my father she sometimes refers to my own Auntie Mel as her sister, but it had never occurred to me to think of grown-up sisters as being sisters in the same way as Deirdre and Barbara Berrill are. I try to imagine Keith’s mother and Auntie Dee being jealous and telling tales on each other … whispering secrets to each other …

What secrets do they have, now that they’re grown up? Secrets about Uncle Peter, perhaps. Where he is and what he’s doing – little scraps of apparently harmless personal information. But from them Keith’s mother will piece together the operations of Bomber Command … Even now Auntie Dee may be showing Keith’s mother the letter she’s just had from Uncle Peter. In it are a few unguarded remarks about how his next leave’s been cancelled, and how he’s looking forward to bringing the war home to Adolf Hitler personally … and when the squadron reaches Berlin on their next mission the Luftwaffe will be mysteriously waiting for them … Uncle Peter’s plane is the first to be hit …

Or could Auntie Dee be a spy as well? Now I see Uncle Peter coming home on leave after all, strolling up the street the way he did before with his cap tipped at a careless angle, and all the children crowding around him. Only this time they’re not trying to touch his uniform, they’re not asking to be allowed to try his cap on. They’re shouting that Auntie Dee has gone – she’s been unmasked as a spy, she’s in prison. And where’s Milly, their baby daughter? She’s sitting all alone in their front room, weeping and abandoned … I feel a lump coming to my throat, I’m so sorry for Uncle Peter, I’m so sorry for Milly.

Auntie Dee’s front door opens, and Keith’s mother emerges. Auntie Dee stands watching from the doorstep, unsmiling, her hands pressed to her lips as if she’s about to blow a kiss, while Keith’s mother lets herself out of the gate and walks away down the street towards the corner with her basket. She’s going to the shops once again to do Auntie Dee’s shopping for her.

‘Time?’ I whisper urgently, picking up the logbook, as Auntie Dee shuts the front door again, her kiss still unblown.

But Keith’s already scrambling hurriedly away through the passageway, the logbook forgotten. I struggle after him as fast as I can. We’re going to follow his mother to the shops.

By the time we emerge from the bushes she’s already gone round the corner of the Hardiments’ house into the street beyond. We run to the corner after her, and look cautiously round the end of the Hardiments’ hedge.

She’s vanished.

There’s only one way to go when you get to the end of the Close, and that’s left, because if you go right the roadway peters out almost at once into a rough track that disappears through the undergrowth into the dark and disused tunnel over which the trains rumble so ominously. To the left, though, is the Avenue lined with little flowering cherry trees that leads long and straight to the main road beyond and the shops where Keith’s mother is going.

The Avenue is a different kind of street altogether from the Close. The houses look superficially similar, but as soon as you turn the corner you know you’re stepping into alien territory, the beginning of the outside world. Within a few yards of the corner you run up against the War Effort – a smelly mess around the pig bins where the neighbourhood’s food scraps are collected. At the far end, on the corner of the main road, is the letter box where Keith’s mother posts all that endless flow of suspect correspondence. Just out of sight beyond the corner is the parade of shops that she visits so often and the bus stop where I wait for the 419 to school. There is Paradise – the station where my father catches his train each morning – the munitions factory where Mr Pincher does his pinching – the golf course where German planes land in the darkness …

The Avenue stretches in front of us now, clear and straight from the pig bins at this end to the letter box at the other. Hucknall’s boy is delivering to a house halfway along on the right. On the left-hand pavement two boys I half know from the bus queue are teasing a small white puppy – the kind of behaviour you’d expect from round-the-corner children. But of Keith’s mother there’s not a trace. She’s walked all the way to the main road in less time than it took us to run half the length of the Close.

We run stupidly after her. By the time we get to the far corner we’re both out of breath. We hide behind the letter box and look left towards the parade of shops. Bicycles, prams, people. Two old ladies just getting off a 419 at the bus stop, and three children with swimming costumes getting on … My eyes flicker back and forth, struggling to find the one familiar detail we’re looking for … I can’t see it. We look across the main road, up the rutted cart track that leads to Paradise … Nothing. We slide round to the left of the letter box and look right towards the station and the golf course … No.

She must be in one of the shops already. ‘You look in all the shops on this side,’ orders Keith. ‘I’ll do the ones on the other side. Don’t let her see you.’

I run from one familiar doorway to another. Court’s Bakery, with a scent of warm glazed buns that makes me instantly hungry … but no sign of Keith’s mother. Coppards, with another delicious familiar smell, of books and pencils, of sweets and newspapers. Mrs Hardiment’s in there, looking through the novels in the little circulating library. But not Keith’s mother … A queue outside the greengrocer’s. I don’t know how I’m going to stop her seeing me, if she’s standing in it and she suddenly turns round … But she’s not. Another queue in Hucknalls, of course … but she’s not in that one, either … Wainwrights, where I go with Keith sometimes to help lug home bags of chickenfeed … Difficult to see past the open sacks of grain and meal piled on the pavement into the poky, sour-smelling darkness within, but I don’t think she’s there …

She’s not in the chemist’s or the draper’s, either, or any of the other shops on Keith’s side. She’s completely disappeared. We walk slowly back along the Avenue, trying to make sense of it. The shopping basket was a camouflage, explains Keith. She was going to one of her rendezvous. But where?

‘It must be in one of these houses in the Avenue,’ I suggest. It seems logical, but when you look at them you realise at once that the people who live here are not the kind of people that Keith’s parents know. It’s difficult to imagine Keith’s mother actually walking up to any of these front doors, even for the most pressing and sinister reasons. Keith doesn’t comment on the suggestion. ‘That manhole …’ he murmurs, as we pass the studded metal cover near the pig bins. This seems more probable, certainly. It could be the entrance to one of the secret passageways with which the district is riddled. In which case she might be almost anywhere by now – on the golf course, in the old quarry, or at some remote house in the country with shuttered windows and patrolling dogs …

Her actual whereabouts, when we discover them a moment later, are more prosaic. And more surprising.

She’s at Auntie Dee’s house.

The front door opens as we pass, and Keith’s mother emerges, her shopping basket on her arm. I feel the same kind of shiver pass through me that I felt when we found the code in her diary. It’s not possible! She jumped to the shops before we could get to the end of the Close, and jumped almost instantly back again. Or else we’ve jumped back in time, and the last fifteen minutes or so haven’t existed after all. Once again Auntie Dee stands watching from the doorstep. Once again Keith’s mother lets herself out of the gate. This time, though, she turns not towards the shops but home, then stops as she catches sight of Keith and me.

‘So what have you two been up to all morning?’ she says, walking companionably up the street with us, while Auntie Dee waves to us and closes the door.

‘Playing,’ says Keith. I can hear he’s as shaken as I am.

His mother, too, realises there’s something amiss. She glances at us sharply.

‘Oh dear – more funny looks,’ she says. ‘Something mysterious going on? Something I’m not supposed to know about?’

We say nothing. I suppose we could simply ask her where she’s been, but I don’t think it occurs to either of us. The world has become one of those dreams where you feel you’ve lived it all before. Unless the sight of her emerging from Auntie Dee’s house fifteen minutes earlier was just something we made up inside our heads …

‘Anyway, chaps,’ she says, ‘whatever you’re up to I’m afraid you’ll have to give it a rest now because it’s almost lunchtime.’

Which would be more alarming – to be living in a dream, or in a story that had taken over our memories?

We discuss the problem backwards and forwards as we sit in the lookout over the days that follow, waiting to try again. It’s possible that the secret passage under the manhole has a branch leading back to Auntie Dee’s house. Or there may be a way in which she could squeeze along the bottom of the Hardiments’ garden, which runs alongside the Avenue, then along the bottom of our garden and the Pinchers’ – and emerge back into the street by way of Braemar, once she’s lured us away from it.

We prise up the manhole cover. There is a secret passage down there, but it has an insupportably foul smell, and it appears to be only a foot or two wide. We find a loose board in the fence at the bottom of the Hardiments’ garden, but when we force it back the gap’s still too narrow for either of us to squeeze through, and in any case there’s a stack of glass cloches propped up on the other side.

There seems to be nothing to do but to watch and wait until she goes out again.

What do we see from our vantage point in the meantime? Or dream that we see, or imagine that we see, or imagine later that we remembered seeing?

The policeman, yes. Cycling slowly up the street, appearing and disappearing through the leaves … No, the policeman was earlier, before the story began … On the other hand he couldn’t have come until Mrs Berrill had seen the intruder … Or were there two different policemen, one earlier and one later, who have got run together in my memory?

What I see now through the greenery is Uncle Peter, home on leave, standing outside his house, with his blue uniform flecked with pink by the soft pink snowfall from the almond trees, smiling and happy, surrounded by all the children of the Close. They gape at him, suddenly tongue- tied, their worshipping faces reflected in each of the shining brass buttons on his uniform. The eagle on his hat lifts its proud head beneath the gold and scarlet crown, and spreads its gilt wings protectively over Norman and poor little Eddie, over the Geest twins, over Roger Hardiment and Elizabeth Hardiment, over the two Avery boys and the two Berrill girls, even over my brother Geoff …

No,
this
was earlier, too. It must have been, if the almond was in blossom. Keith and I aren’t watching from our hiding place – we’re there among all the others, transfigured like them by the golden light from the buttons, proud beneath the haughty stare of the eagle …

Unless we never saw him at all, and he’s stepped out of the black-and-white photograph in that silver frame on the Haywards’ mantelpiece … But what I remember, as vividly as I remember anything in my long life, are the
colours
! The blue of the uniform, the pink of the blossom, the two spots of blood-red velvet in the crown above the eagle. And I remember the sounds! Of his laughter – of Milly’s laughter. He and Milly were laughing because he was holding her in his arms, and she was reaching out to take hold of the pretty gold embroidery on his hat …

And now it’s night, and the sky’s a flickering orange, and there are men in steel helmets running among the tangle of hoses in the street … But this was looking out from behind my father in the gateway of our house, much earlier still, when Miss Durrant’s house still had a well-trimmed hedge in front of it …

What I do finally see from our lookout, though, what I certainly see, is Keith’s mother again.

I’m on my own. I think Keith has had to stay at home and help his father build a new extension to the hen house. But suddenly there she is, closing the garden gate carefully behind her, and walking down the road exactly as she did before, unhurried and composed. Past Trewinnick and Mr Gort’s house … and into Auntie Dee’s …

I open the logbook. ‘1700,’ I guess, since the watch is with Keith at the hen house. ‘Goes into …’

But already she’s out again. She’s closing Auntie Dee’s front door behind her, and coming down the garden path, holding not a shopping basket but a letter. She’s going to the post for Auntie Dee.