The Spy Game (6 page)

T
here were so many things that adults did not seem to see, even when they heard them spoken, even when they were there before
their eyes. There were things I saw that my father did not see. I went out for walks with him, that summer when we were home.
It did not rain when we were home. Possibly it had not rained, he said, it had rained hardly at all, for all the time that
we were away in France, since the lawn when we came back had barely grown and the ground was very hard. We walked through
the fields on the edge of the village where the wheat had just been harvested, down tracks through the stubble, and I saw
between the golden stalks where the soil had dried and cracked. I thought of what I knew about earthquakes and it seemed to
me then that each crack showed where a chasm might open beneath our feet, but my father walked on, his dry hand holding mine
lightly when I reached for it, unaware of any danger. He did not see that the hard harvest land was dead land, cracking open.
He did not see that in Peter also there were cracks.

***

'J. Edgar Hoover says the Communists have three hundred thousand spies hiding all over the West. That's a whole secret army,
everywhere.'

'Who's J. Edgar Hoover?'

'He's the head of the FBI. In America.'

That was the sort of thing Peter talked about. The FBI and MI5 and Moscow Centre. He didn't talk about normal things. I wrote
that in my book. I wrote that he was thin and that his hair fell across his face, probably because he was always looking down,
at a model or a book, looking at the ground, looking away. (That's how he is in the photographs I have; he's looking the wrong
way or he has a hand across his face at the wrong moment, or he's squinting because of the sun.) I understood him because
he was my brother but still he was strange to me. He was clever. Everybody said he was clever. He read fast, he remembered
facts and figures, and could repeat them to you any time. But there were other things, simple things, that he didn't seem
to see at all, as if facts were easier for him than reality.

His books told him whatever could be known about the various secret services: where their offices were located, how they were
run, the hierarchies and procedures. He drew a diagram to show me how spy rings were organised. He said that Moscow Centre
excelled at this. There was the director of operations at the heart of it all, and then separate arms reaching out, like a
spider, but there could be an infinite number of arms stretching a great distance, sometimes with one, two or three joints
away from the central body. At the tip of each arm was the field operative, and at each joint a liaison agent, and the operative
knew no one but the agent, neither the director nor any of the other operatives in the ring. Sometimes the operative never
even met the liaison, but communicated by messages at pre-fixed drops or by radio signals. All the messages were coded and
recoded. Each operative had one code name in the field and another code name at the centre. No one knew more than it was absolutely
necessary for them to know, so no one could tell. So every operative was separate, in his own cell, and yet the whole thing
was also like a spider's web, and when something touched it, the vibrations ran all through but only the one operative might
be affected; and if that operative was captured or something, then that operation could be wrapped up and left, quite separate
from the rest.

'Don't they save them?' I asked.

'It's more important to save the system.'

He said that we should have our own code, so that when he went away to school nobody could read our letters.

'But you don't write me letters. You always write to Daddy, not to me.'

'But if I did, if I needed to, we'd have the code. We've got to have the code first.'

Such urgency in the way he talked, head down, eyes moving on before I could catch them.

'Can't I just write ordinary writing?'

'Of course you can, for ordinary things. The code's for emergencies.'

He said we would have some words for a key. I must remember these words, and then I would put the letters of the alphabet
beside them and switch them, in order, cutting out the ones that repeated, and switch the letters when I wrote. He didn't
like any of the phrases I suggested so he gave me his own, Winston Churchill. Where Churchill ended, the code continued, the
alphabet running on in the usual way. If people didn't know where we'd started from, they'd never work it out.

'You'll have to write it down each time, and destroy the paper after so no one can find it.'

He made me practise it and write him notes so that I had it straight before he went away, message after message encrypted,
folded and double-folded and slipped into a pocket or left beneath a cereal bowl.
Can you read this? If you can, put an orange in the fridge. Watch Margaret till she goes then come and find me.
It got easier as you began to remember the transpositions and didn't have to work them out each time.

Later he added a refinement.

'We need to have a security check, when you write. So I know the message really comes from you.'

'Who else would it come from?'

'What you do is you have some other secret sign embedded in the message.' (If I did not understand 'embedded' I wasn't going
to ask.) 'Preferably something nobody else would notice. It should be something very simple, and something that's very easy
to remember. Like putting the date the wrong way round, like Americans do, with the month before the day. Or put in the year
but put it wrong. Put 1692 instead of 1962. They'd think it was only a mistake, see?'

'In this book I read there's this man, Richard Hannay. He breaks a spy ring. He knows how to be a spy. You should read it
too. Anyway, he learnt from hunting in Africa, from watching the deer he was hunting, seeing how they freeze on the spot and
merge with their surroundings. Perfect camouflage. So even when you know they're out there, you can't see them. That's what
spies do. They merge, blend, try to be like everyone else. To be indistinguishable from their surroundings.'

'It's not like that here. It's not like your story. It's just ordinary here. Everybody's ordinary.'

'That's it, silly, that's just the point.'

He said that we should write everything down. If we wrote it all down a pattern might emerge.

'Write what?'

'Start with the evidence. All the things in the house that we know were hers.'

'That's hardly anything.'

There were the clothes that I'd tried on with Susan, the jewellery box - or not the box, that came from Dad's mother, but
the things in it, the good things that he'd given her and the cheap things that she'd bought, and a few other things like
a rosary that came from one of Dad's aunts who was very holy, and a funny little black cat that she brought all the way from
Germany. I knew about the cat. Peter didn't. It was made of fur and wire, with pale bead eyes and a frayed ribbon about its
neck. I told Peter she brought it from Germany in her pocket.

'How do you know?'

'She told me so.'

'It's got a name on its collar. Sophie Schwarz.'

'That must be its name then.'

'Suppose it must be.'

Peter didn't like me knowing more about it than he did.

'So what do we do now?'

'The next thing is to write down what we can remember. I've got exercise books for us. I got them from school. We write down
who she saw, what she did. How often she went out, and where, everything. You put down what you remember, and I'll do mine,
and then we'll compare what we've written. That's what you do. It's important to do it separately, without talking about it
first. If we talk about it we influence each other's memory, make the other one think they saw things they didn't actually
see.'

He got the books down from his room.

'And don't think too hard first. Just go and start doing it and see what happens. Memory's strange. Some of it comes from
the unconscious. You've got to let it come.'

He was too serious, insistent. It scared me.

'You know it wasn't true, what you said about her being undercover. You know you were only saying it.'

He took my wrist and held it in a wrist burn.

'Then what's it matter if you write this? You won't be doing anyone any harm.'

So I took the exercise book back to my room and wrote. I put it beneath my clothes in a drawer. Every now and then I took
it out and added something else as it came to me. I thought there was going to be a whole book but I covered only a few pages.
You'd think there was so much to say about a person but when they're gone the record doesn't amount to much. It diminishes
them. She took us to school, she had her hair done, she went shopping. (I was recording what she did. What she was didn't
come into it.) Margaret came in the morning, she had a cup of coffee with Margaret, Margaret went. On Tuesday or Wednesday
or Thursday, the butcher's van came by, or the grocer's, or the laundry. Peter thought it especially important that we record
things like that, the regular things, in case one was a contact. He said there would have been some regular contact, a way
of passing material or messages.

'It couldn't be the butcher,' he said.

'Why not?'

'Remember once he ran over a dog on the road? Mrs Jones's dog, that little terrier she had? He ran it over and it was dead.
I saw. And he went to her and owned up. A spy wouldn't have drawn attention to himself like that.'

The laundry came and went in a grey box with a leather strap around it. It would have been easy to put messages in, folded
into the sheets or inserted between the lists on the pages in the laundry book. The laundry man had a funny twisted leg, as
if it had been ironed in a crease. I told Peter he was wounded in the war.

'How do you know?'

'Mummy said so.'

'How did she know?'

The next day he came we greeted his van on the road and talked to him as he got down from it and limped to the house. 'Have
you two got somebody looking after you now?' he asked, and Peter was quick and said yes, there was someone in the house all
of the time, though it wasn't true just then, it was the afternoon and Margaret had gone and there was nobody else there.
I knew he did it to make us safe, just in case, but it made me afraid of what might happen. When I went to bed that night
in the clean laundered sheets I felt the coolness of them and smelled the starch, and they seemed too white. I could sense
their whiteness even with my eyes closed, as if there was a bright light that would not let me sleep.

Besides the tradesmen there was hardly anyone. It had not seemed to us before that this was odd and yet now we saw it. There
was nobody from the past: no family, no relations, no old friends who came to visit. There wouldn't be, would there, said
Peter, seeing where she came from? But there were no friends from the present either, from the time since we were born. She
almost never had anyone come to the house. She went out. Sometimes she used to dress up and go out, to Cheltenham, Oxford,
London even. Maybe she saw friends then. Who these friends might have been we couldn't begin to guess.

'How about Mrs Lacey?' I asked. 'She was her friend.'

'Mrs Lacey couldn't keep anything a secret.'

'Mr Lacey then?'

'He was with the Japs too. He's just as cracked as she is, but inside so it doesn't show. He looks almost all right, like
a proper colonel, an old soldier, but he isn't, he's fake. They wouldn't use someone like that.'

Of course we couldn't tell Susan. Sometimes I thought Peter liked that. He knew that all this spy stuff put the two of us
apart from Susan and tied us to each other.

Peter was brilliant with facts and systems but he couldn't deal with stories. He should have seen that making up stories was
easy. If he'd done it more he would have understood that. You made up a story and then you could turn to it when you needed
it, and sometimes it might be true and sometimes not but that wasn't what mattered the most. What was difficult was telling
your story to some-body else. If you did that it got stronger and more real, and then you didn't have control any more.

I tried to give the blue exercise book back to him.

'I'm not doing this any more. We haven't found any-thing. We're not going to find anything. There's no point. It's only a
game.'

I said that to hurt him. I knew it wasn't a game.

'You can't do that,' he said. 'Not now. You can't.'

'Yes I can.' I threw it down at his feet on the kitchen floor.

Peter may have been small and thin for a boy his age but he was much stronger than I was. He grabbed me, and took my arm and
bent it up my back so it hurt like it would break, and forced me down over the table. There were glasses and knives and things
on the table, hard, sharp things close to my eyes. I saw the edges of them shiny and glinting, too close to focus, and shouted
at him to stop, and his grip was so hard I didn't know if he would.

'All right,' I breathed, and again, 'Stop,' and, 'It's hurting,' and, 'I'll help you,' and there was a pause when he only
held me and did not press any more, and then, slowly like a machine winding down, he unclenched and let me go.

I
t was raining, a heavy summer rain that made every-thing that was green go soft with a weight of water, leaves weeping from
the trees, stems from the borders hanging over the lawn, plants splayed with the wet. It was a rain that fell straight and
did not touch the window, so that you could stand with your nose to the pane of glass and see clear through, see it falling
in fine lines that showed up where the trees were dark behind. A day like that was quiet and strange after so many days out
in the sun.

Susan phoned and I said I couldn't see her, I was finishing a book and I'd see her later.

'Bookworm,' she said, but didn't seem to mind.

When the rain stopped for a time a pigeon flew low across the lawn, slow as if the air was too wet for flying in. The pigeon's
feathers were the same heavy grey as the sky. I didn't want to go out, or see anyone at all. I sat at the table in the kitchen
waiting for Margaret to leave. Margaret did the washing up with heaps of suds and didn't rinse them off so that they bearded
the plates that she put on the rack. My mother used to tell her to rinse them but she was a stubborn sort of girl who you
couldn't expect to change. She stood there at the sink like the cows in the milking parlour at the farm. I wrote in my book
that the yellow Marigold gloves she wore went on to her big pink fingers like milking teats.

'What's that you're writing?' Margaret turned and suds dripped on to the floor from the plate she was holding.

'My diary. It's secret.'

'You two and your secrets. It's no good for you to be alone all day.'

'I think it's fine.'

'When I was your age there was five of us kids about, and the house not half the size of yours.'

'We like it how it is.' I didn't see that Margaret had much ground to stand on. Everybody knew that Margaret's youngest sister
was having a baby even though she wasn't married. Susan said that at least Joyce had had a boyfriend. Joyce was pretty. Margaret
was plain and her acne would put any man off kissing her.

When the washing up was done Margaret took the gloves off and draped them over the taps.

'Are you still there then? What are you waiting for?'

'Nothing. I'm just sitting. Writing my diary.'

'Well, you'll have to be off now out of here as I'm cleaning the floor.'

'But you did it yesterday.'

'And I'll do it again long as it keeps raining and it's muddy outside and you two traipse in and out without so much as wiping
your feet let alone changing your shoes.

That's what I mean, there's nobody here telling you what you should and shouldn't do.'

And she pushed the sponge-headed mop right up to my feet, and I lifted them up so that it could pass beneath.

'Come on, you know I need to go under the chair as well.'

I took up the diary and locked it, and walked out where the floor was still dry.

Peter was in the sitting room.

'Has she gone?'

'Not yet.'

'I wish she'd get a move on.'

He had a screwdriver.

'What's the screwdriver for?'

He hid it behind a cushion when Margaret came in at last and said she was going, and we both went to the door and watched
her leave, putting on her raincoat and leaving her footprints in a pale track across the wet lino.

'Here, you've got to help.'

The radiogram ran across half the length of the wall behind the sofa. It was a piece of furniture almost like a sideboard,
of some yellowish lacquered wood veneer and angularly modern, a block on tapered brass-tipped legs; ugly, which was why it
lived behind the sofa, but our parents had chosen it not for its looks but for the quality of its sound. To move it out we
had to move everything else first: the sofa itself, the chairs to make space for the sofa; then take the lamp from it, the
books and records, the ashtray, lay them out on the carpet just how they'd been so that we could put them back right.

'What are you going to do?'

Peter began to unscrew the back panel. He took each screw and laid it neatly in the ashtray.

'But it's still plugged in.' I pulled the plug from its socket.

'It wasn't on, silly. I won't get electrocuted if it's not on.'

He had all the screws out now, laid the back panel on the floor. There was more space inside than I had thought. There wasn't
much there really, just the speakers, one on each side, and a kind of board with knobs and wires of different colours and
blobs of silver solder. He poked around like he knew what he was doing, only of course he didn't.

'The Krogers used a radiogram. They had it connected to a transmitter, and to an aerial in the roof. They had direct radio
communication with Moscow. Their radio-gram was just an ordinary one, like ours, like anybody's, but it had a high frequency
band so that it could get reception from anywhere in the world, and it was fitted for headphones, so they could listen just
with headphones, and these were hidden in the back of it.'

'Well, there's nothing hidden in this one.'

'The Krogers did the communications for the spy ring, see. Lonsdale was liaison. He ran the spies, did the recruiting and
made the contacts, fixed the rendezvous and the dead-letter drops and everything, and the Krogers did the communication with
Russia. They made messages and documents into microdots and stuck them into the books that they sent abroad. They were second-hand
book dealers, that was their cover. They sent books to Holland and Switzerland and places, places no one would suspect and
where someone else would send them on to Moscow, and books came the same way back to them. Even when Lonsdale wrote letters
home to his wife they went that way, in microdots. Most weekends he used to go and see them, like he was their friend, and
he'd take them every-thing he'd got in the week and Helen Kroger made it into microdots. That was what they found in her bag
when they arrested her, microdots, and when they magnified them they found out that they were letters to Lonsdale from his
wife in Russia, and one that he had written back to her.'

I tried to picture my mother with these people.

I saw her in her big winter coat, a lipsticked smile in the fog. The fog made the background wash away like in a poster for
a film. I don't know if it was the first time the thought had come to me, or if it had been there for days or weeks.

'If she was one of them, then she was a traitor.'

'No. She couldn't have been a traitor,' he said.

'Why not? How do you know?'

'She wasn't English. You can't be a traitor if you're not English.'

Oh. Just that.

'Like Gordon Lonsdale, he was a Russian. He was a spy, but he wasn't a traitor. So people didn't mind about Lonsdale. Some
of them even rather admired him. His letters were read out in court and everybody heard how he had a family in Russia and
he hadn't seen them for ages, like seven anniversaries or something, and his daughter was having a bad time at school, and
his wife wanted him to buy her a dress, only he couldn't exactly send it as a microdot, could he, and he seemed like a normal
sort of person, for a Russian, and a patriot. Like a soldier on the other side in a war. You fight him but you think he's
OK because it's his country he's fighting for. It was the others who were the traitors, Houghton and Gee. They just sold their
country's secrets for money.'

'Did they get executed?'

'People don't get executed in England any more. They're going to abolish it.'

We moved the furniture back then and Peter plugged in the radiogram and switched it on. The radio made a little spit like
it always did when you started it up but that was all. Not even a crackle.

'It just needs tuning.'

Peter turned the knob, pressed the buttons that changed the wavelength.

'You've broken it.'

Peter's face went very red as he went on working the switches and nothing came out.

'What have you done?'

'Let's play a record and check that.'

It was opera, the first thing that came to hand. The volume was turned right up. A woman screamed and made us jump.

'That works, anyhow.'

Peter lifted the needle and clicked it back. Then there was only the sound of the rain outside. I had a sense that there had
been a time when it had lightened, a little earlier, when the rain must have ceased and the sun almost broken through and
the room brightened. Now it was dull again, the room a negative space filled with the pointlessness of the afternoon.

'He won't find out for ages.' Peter spoke in a whisper that was like the rain. 'He'll never know it had anything to do with
us.'

'But he'll find out sometime, won't he? And you won't be here, you'll be back at school. What am I going to say?'

'You don't have to say anything. Just don't admit it.'