The Spy Game (14 page)

T
his time our father thinks that we are old enough to know. He tells us before supper that Monday evening. He has something
just heating up in the oven and he is wearing the apron he puts on for cooking. He makes the two of us sit at the table we
have just laid and says it in a few straight words.

'There's something I have to tell you. Mrs Cahn died on Friday. I'm afraid they think she committed suicide.'

I like the plainness of the words. They steady your thoughts. Words like that can be arranged neatly like the knife and fork
beside your plate.

'You're old enough now to know about things like this.'

Then like an afterthought he says, 'You should both say a prayer for her tonight. She had a very sad life. She lost all her
family I think in the war, and she lost her husband after that.'

'Yes,' I say. 'She was very sad.'

That's it. Peter doesn't give any reaction at all. You might almost think that he has not heard. In the moment of silence
that follows I feel tears coming, but coolly, without shudders, as if they are only water.

There was a girl on a train. Slight, dark, a little older than I was. The train was full of children.

There were only children on the train and they talked as long as the train was moving, but when it stopped adults came into
the carriages and the children did not speak any more. The place where the train stopped was empty, in the middle of nowhere.
The children clung on to themselves and the little cases they had with them, and repeated to themselves who they were inside
and what they remembered until the train started going again and repeated it back to them.

Dad looks from one to the other of us, standing before us at the laid table, his apron on, his hands hanging down oddly spare.
He always looks slightly out of place when he is cooking, slightly lost. Does it come to him in this moment what he had not
said, before, what he can never bring himself to say?

4

P
eter must have intended it from that same moment he decided to burn his things. It was a calculated operation, equipped and
timed in advance. Nothing in his behaviour gave any indication, through those last couple of weeks of holiday, of what he
had in mind. If there was anything different in him it was only that he seemed more grown-up, as if his resolution had separated
him from us. He threw darts at his dartboard and he listened to Radio Luxembourg, and while he was doing this he put his plan
together and worked out his route: from school to Oxford, to London, to Harwich, to wherever he meant to go from there. East.

'What are you doing?' I'd ask, and he'd say, 'Nothing,' and go back up to his room. Later he'd come down with his air rifle
and go out and shoot things.

'Can I come too?'

'If you want.'

He went out with the gun under his arm and did not wait for me to put on my boots, so that I must run to catch up with him.
He was going down through the orchard where the daffodils were trying to come up through the grass, late, and the old trees
were grey and bare. There was a thicket of bramble and blackthorn, buds on it at last but nothing open, tracks of bared soil
where animals went in between the stems. We waited there but nothing moved. Peter did not even put the gun to his shoulder.

'Usually there's lots of birds here.'

'Well, I can't see any.'

'It's like Dad says, the winter's done for them. They've all starved in the snow.'

'Then why are you trying to shoot them? If there are hardly any left, it's not fair to shoot them, is it?'

He started to walk on, away, not answering. Through a gap in the hedge, under a single sagging strand of barbed wire, into
the field. No cattle there, but the indentation of a track along the field edge where the cattle walked last year. A couple
of pigeons flew up from an elm, too quick for him. A crow scavenged something in the distance. He wasn't really trying. He
held the gun under his arm most of the time, looked down at the ground and picked his way between the rough tufts of grass.

'Let's go back. I think it's going to rain.'

I could feel the first cold pinpricks of it, fine spots like mist.

We went through the gate now, down the track that passed the farm. There was an open barn, a bare stone barn with a corrugated
iron roof and a few tractors and machines in it. At the side of it was a brick lean-to with a window and a padlocked door.

'Watch.'

The glass panes were black, with a sheen to them like water.

He put a pellet in his gun and aimed, and shot through the centre of the central pane. Silvery glass shattered and fell to
the ground.

In the silence that followed the shot he cracked the gun open, put in another pellet, offered it to me.

'Want a go?'

'No.'

'Got to fire it now it's loaded.'

'I don't want to.'

He shot the pane to the right of the first one.

'Why are you doing that? It's not as if it's difficult.'

His look said that I should know, if I was tougher I would know, but I could see only the pointlessness of it.

He reloaded and shot again and again, with precision, until every pane in the window was gone, jagged edges of glass broken
through to the matt blackness behind them, sharp shards on the darkening mud before the shed.

The rain was really setting in now. Further up the track, Richard's father was standing under the eaves of the cowshed, talking
with another man.

'When they see, they'll know it was us.'

'Who cares?' Peter said.

He wasn't going to be there when they found out.

It was a sign of his cleverness that he left from school, not home. He even laid a false trail, told one of the other boys
that he was going home, that he couldn't stick it at school any more. So they expected him at home when he ran away. The school
called Mrs Lacey and she called my father and he came back from work, and for days there was someone in the house, all the
time, in case he turned up or if he called, just my father at first, or Margaret or Mrs Lacey, but later it was a policeman.
Mainly it was the one policeman, a stolid man who sat in the kitchen and smoked cigarettes and called me love, but sometimes
it was others. Some of them wore uniform and some did not.

At first it was only my father who questioned me. Later, when Peter still didn't turn up, the police questioned me as well.
Could I think of anywhere he might have gone, anywhere at all that he had mentioned? Even if it was only a hunch? No, I said,
not at all. He didn't talk to me much any more. I didn't know anything he did. He hadn't said anything, ever. The denials
mounted and spiralled until they made me feel guilty even when they were true. The police searched his room, where my father
had searched already, searched the house, came in greater numbers and I heard that they were searching the countryside. That
frightened me. That was what they did when children disappeared. They went out in lines, with dogs and sticks, policemen and
soldiers and men like the men off the farm, and beat through grass and bushes and looked in ditches and ponds.

Usually when they did that, it was in the papers and on the News. So I turned to the News as the adults usually did - only
they were not doing so now, they didn't bother. I looked in the paper and I watched the television at six o'clock. There was
a real spy case going on. All the headlines were about a man named Profumo, and call girls, a smart brunette called Christine
Keeler, who I didn't think was really very pretty. Nothing about Peter being missing. The world outside seemed far off, an
entirely separate place. Or it was we who were separate: the house an island in space, and no one outside would be able to
reach it, no one at all; not even Peter who'd got away.

In the end I told a policewoman, someone quite new, a young policewoman I had not seen before. She had come for a walk with
me. I did not want her. I had tried to go for a walk alone but it appeared that I was not to be allowed to walk alone.

We went up the hill. It was a lovely day, all green, and the view blue in the distance and hidden in it were the people searching.
There was the village below, and a police car on the road to it that must be coming to our house. Peter must be somewhere
out there too.

I asked which direction Oxford was in.

It was easier that I had not met the policewoman before, not already lied to her, not evaded.

'I've had an idea. I just thought it, just now. I thought he might have gone there.' It was just possible that he had gone
to Oxford because he thought that might be where our mother was.

I knew that he would hate me for telling.

* * *

Dad came to me. He looked so tired. I had never seen a man look so tired.

'It was only her coat. It wasn't her. It was only like her. I knew it wasn't really her.'

Once things were said you couldn't take them back. People took them and repeated them to one another and they were out of
your control. It was the policewoman I told and now here was my father, asking more. They thought that I would tell him what
I had not told them. They did not understand. I stuck to the story of the woman, the coat, the bus stop. Nothing more, and
specifically, no mention of Mr Kiss or of the connection home. I'd watched the films. I knew the rules of interrogation. Talk
if you must but disclose no more than is absolutely necessary. Then stick to your story, whoever's asking the questions.

A police car brought him back in the middle of the night. I heard it come. We had been told and were expecting it, and Dad
had spoken to Peter on the phone. I had been sent to bed but lay there awake and waited, knowing by the light under the door
that my father was waiting too, in the light downstairs, and the murmur of the television died, the notes of the national
anthem with which the television closed down, and the clock struck twelve, and two - and I felt anxiety that I had fallen
asleep and missed one, and lost count of the quarter-hours, and missed whatever might have happened in them. The car came
quietly. The voices at the door were hushed and brief. I could imagine a sleeping or half-sleeping boy passed from one man
to another, hear his steps as he was gentled up the stairs, his head resting against his father's shoulder, an arm about his
waist, put into his bed. I did not get up to see him. I pretended sleep when Dad came into my room, afterwards, to check on
me and tuck me up. Lie still; eyes closed, not scrunched, lips just open, breathing slow. I knew that the boy in the next
room was awake as I was, alert to every sound and hating me.

'Why did you tell them?' he said.

Yet I had not led them to him. It was pure chance that he was found: a random check on a lorry in a Dutch port, an English
boy hiding behind some crates. Easy enough once you have the boy to check him against the police register, even if he does
not tell his name.

'I hardly told them anything. Just about the bus stop. And Dad drove me to Oxford with this policeman and we drove round and
round, and I didn't even tell them which bus stop it was.'

'You told them anyway. Don't you see what that means? '

Too many words spilled out.

'I said it probably wasn't her. Just that we thought it might be. It was probably only the coat. They asked what coat, and
I said it was the tweed one, that she got it in Jaeger, that shop she used to go to, in Cheltenham, remember? '

'Don't you see?' he said again.

And, 'What if she's still here? What if they go and catch her?'

H
e had got to Hook of Holland. I took in the name of the place and pictured him there a hero like Scott at the Pole: Peter
on a spit of land, the sea crashing about, a flag in the wind. But he did not seem like a hero. He had come home silent, brooding,
shamed. He didn't speak to me or to anyone else. I remembered how it had been before and would have had that time back again,
the spy game, the burnt ciphers, the suspicion, any of it. Then he could be an agent, not just himself. And there would be
a story: Peter a secret agent returned from a failed mission, awaiting debriefing, temporarily incommunicado, guarding his
secret like a wound. If it was a story there would be a way on. Something would happen. Wounds would heal. In stories something
always happened next.

It was thought best, as Peter was to leave anyway at the end of that term, that he did not go back to school. He stayed at
home, and for some days of the week or hours of the day someone was found to come to teach him. Dad took time off also, time
which must have been meant for Peter, for contact, and yet he spent most of it in the garden.

It was very beautiful that year. I would come home from school and go out to find him and walk about it. Peter would be up
in his room. I could see that he was there by the wide open windows but otherwise I would hardly have known it. Just beneath
the windows and inside on the landing I could hear the thin sound of his transistor radio.

Dad mourned the losses of the hard winter. Many tender shrubs had died. Others had appeared to die but he had cut them back,
almost to the ground, and suddenly fine shoots appeared, green or sometimes red-tipped, and he said, 'See, it wasn't so bad
as all that. Things are still alive, underground.'

Where plants had gone or been cut away, spaces opened up that he filled with flowers. Some were from seeds he had sown early
under cover knowing what was to come. They were light, airy things, simple flowers that I loved better than the shrubs. I
walked round with him and he told me their names and I picked them and brought them into the house, poppies and cornflowers
and snapdragons, and stocks that had tiny scented stars that opened in the evening so that the moths might come to them.

The roses also had names, Peace and Penelope and Masquerade. He let me take the secateurs and cut the dead heads. If you keep
cutting them, he said, they'll flower all summer through. Where greenfly clustered along the tip of a new red shoot he rubbed
his finger and thumb along the shoot and squeezed them off, wiping his fingers later on his handkerchief. (That I would not
learn to do for years; it disgusted me so to see them squashed.) He inspected the buds, and if there had been rain and the
buds had browned on the outside he pulled off the browned outer petals, gently so that he left the heart of the bud clean
and intact.

Sometimes I was aware that Peter was watching from the window. He kept a pair of binoculars there on the sill, big old ones
that some great-uncle had had in the Navy, and a round tin of air-rifle pellets, and the rifle itself propped up against the
wall beside his curtain. Sometimes I saw the curtain pulled half over and the binoculars watching, sometimes the tip of the
gun as if there was a sniper up there. He had a telescopic sight now: he would be able to see us as if he was close to, watch
us blink and see our lips move as we spoke.

One day when I went to his room I found him kneeling at the window shooting the buds off the roses. Dad was mowing, walking
to and fro on the lawn oblivious, the sound of the mower drowning the shots.

'How can you do that? He loves those things.'

'You wait. He'll pick them up and think they have some weird disease.'

And before I went out of the door I said, 'Where were you going, Peter?

'It was Königsberg, wasn't it? Or whatever it's called now it's Russia. You were going there.'

He didn't look at me but only aimed out of the window.

'Or maybe it was Berlin. It was silly anyway. You wouldn't have found anything.'

He turned. He didn't look into my eyes but only pointed the gun at my feet.

I got out quickly and heard the shot afterwards, heard the crack and heard the pellet hit the bottom of the door.

Then there was a day when it rained, and Dad took us to Oxford. It was raining when we got up and it must have been raining
all the night as well. The water butt spilled over where the gutters emptied into it, the roses sagged on their stems with
the weight of water in them and the lavender was dark like lead. I did not know if we went that day because of the rain which
made it a bad day for gardening, or if it was because he had planned the trip already.

We had lunch on the way in a hotel along the road; red plush and a smell of smoke, the swish of cars going by in the rain,
steak and chips, and then strawberries and cream, only the cream was piped and synthetic. He had not explained what we were
going for and we did not ask, subdued by his look of mystery and by the rain which was constant and made everything slick
and unreal like a film being screened. When we got to Oxford we did not go into the town centre but skirted it, crossing meadows
limp with wet, turning almost out of the town again before we came to the gates. There was a long wall and then a gateway
with high pointed railings. We saw the gravestones through the railings and knew where we were.

'I thought it was time you came here.'

Neither of us answered.

The gates were open but we parked outside and walked. Dad took his big black umbrella out of the boot of the car and put it
up to hold over us but Peter had gone before him, the hood of his anorak down, hands in his pockets, out into the rain.

I would have held Dad's hand if it had not been holding the cane handle of the umbrella. I walked close. His steps were long
and pressed me to go fast. (Always, even now, my friends comment on the length of my stride; they do not know how this began
with stretching to keep up with my father.)

'Silly boy, he doesn't know where it is.'

Peter had walked up the main avenue to the centre of the cemetery, where there was a chapel and where smaller paths fanned
off between the blocks of graves. The avenue was wide enough to take two cars passing, like a road; the other paths were narrower
and would scarcely have fitted one. Peter was stopped some way ahead of us, beneath a tree, waiting in what little shelter
it offered.

'Which way?'

'It's on the right, further up. I'll have to show you.'

So Peter had to fall in. He did not walk beneath the umbrella, not with us, never again quite alongside us, but lagged a few
steps behind.

The stone was the simplest tablet possible: a flat rec-tangle the size of a big book, propped up on a stand like a book on
a bookrest, and the name Karoline Wyatt on it and a date, and RIP, and just grass around it, flat, no indication of the grave
or the shape of the hole that had been there. The grass was scattered with a few little wine-coloured leaves that had blown
off the small tree beside it. I recognised the kind of tree; it was a dull sort of tree but it had small white blossoms in
the spring, and it helped to keep the rain off while we stood.

'There. That's where she was buried.' The way he looked around him, he might not have been there before, casting his eyes
about, taking it in, looking down the lines of graves as if he was studying all the little differences in them, the individual
touches, the points and topknots and crosses and curves, the stone-framed rectangles of pebbles and pansies and coloured glass,
the urns and vases. 'I always meant to bring you two here sometime. Perhaps it should have been before, I don't know.' He
kept looking around as he spoke, so that I began to wonder if he was actually looking for something and what it might be that
he was looking for. 'At the time it seemed best to keep it simple. We didn't want a fuss. A fuss wouldn't have been a good
thing, would it, at the time?'

He had said we. Who was we? Henry and Madeleine, the Laceys? Who helped him fix it, without fuss? After all, there was only
him to mind, and me, and Peter, who stood where the rain still dripped on him on the other side of the grave. Just the three
of us, no one else. I thought this and we stood there, and for a time none of us said a word. A few paths further on, some
distance off past two or three more blocks of graves, there was a man walking. He had on a hat and a raincoat, and walked
as if he should have had a dog with him but there was no dog. And now that the rain was easing there was a gardener on one
of the paths, pushing a barrow loaded with tools.

'Daddy, why didn't we bring any flowers? Why didn't you tell me, so I could have brought her some flowers?'

'Next time. Next time you can pick some flowers and bring them. This time you can just say a prayer.'

He stooped to clear the few strewn leaves off the grave. I did not see why he bothered to make it tidy if he had not bothered
with flowers. He did not understand that I was really angry about the flowers. I could not forgive him for taking us there
like that, as if it was so ordinary, and not telling me to bring some flowers. Had someone told him that too, that same someone
who told him things should be done without fuss? Then I would not forgive him for doing what they told him, not ever. I tried
to say a Hail Mary silently in my head but the words got tangled. The man without the dog was walking back the way he had
come. A hearse had begun to drive up the main avenue, white and yellow flowers pressing against the length of its window.
Three more black cars behind; people in them, not flowers.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

We waited for the procession to go and then started back. The sky was lightening, luminous cracks in the clouds. When the
sun came out it would all of a sudden feel like June again. But in these last moments of greyness Peter muttered something
in my ear. He brushed by me. He still had his hood up and his hands in his pockets with his elbows out so that he jabbed my
side. I didn't catch his meaning until he had gone on a few yards ahead down the path. He said something about Harry Lime.
The name took a moment to register.

Harry Lime was the man in a film we'd seen on a Sunday afternoon.

People went to Harry Lime's funeral but he wasn't dead.

Peter was walking away like Harry Lime's girl did in the film, walking down the wide aisle between the graves. He was walking
on, away, and he would not look up even if I went alongside, even if I were to go past him and call.