Spies (2002) (11 page)

I look her full in the face for the first time in sheer astonishment. Does she
really
not know that Keith’s the instigator and commander of every enterprise we undertake? Can an experienced espionage agent have really so completely misunderstood what she’s observed? I suppose it’s yet another tribute to Keith – he’s obviously as good as his parents are at concealing his true nature from everyone around him.

Her eyes are brown, like Barbara’s, and they’ve lost the calm complacency with which she’s always regarded me in the past. They’re bent on me as intently as Barbara’s were while she watched me to see if I was shocked by her stupid stories. The light in Keith’s mother’s eyes, though, isn’t teasing. She’s entirely serious.

‘I don’t want to have to stop him seeing you,’ she says, very softly. ‘But then I don’t want him getting into any kind of trouble.’

Her voice becomes even softer. So do her eyes. Now that I’ve looked into them I can’t look away. ‘Sometimes people have things they want to do in private,’ she says. ‘Just like you and Keith in here. They have things they don’t want everyone talking about.’

I have a sudden fear, as she goes on looking at me and I go on looking at her, that she’s going to confess everything. I want to beg her not to. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to have to know for sure.

But she glances away. ‘Silly little things, perhaps,’ she says. ‘I don’t know … Well, Mr Gort, let’s say. If he decided to go out to the Railway Tavern one evening and have a glass of beer, he might prefer not to have people watching him and then going around announcing to everyone “Oh, Mr Gort’s in the pub again.” Or Mr and Mrs Stott. I don’t suppose they like people following poor Eddie about and staring at him. Or say you started trailing round after the people at Trewinnick. It might make them feel a bit self-conscious about their appearance.’

Her examples are unconvincing. Everyone knows Mr Gort goes to the pub. Everyone knows you’re not supposed to stare at Eddie Stott. And surely it would be a good thing, not a bad thing, if the Juice at Trewinnick became aware of how alien we found them. So she’s not going to say who it is she really doesn’t want us following, or why. She’s not going to confess. I’m half relieved and half disappointed.

‘Anyway,’ she says, picking up the empty plate, ‘I know you’re a sensible, well-brought-up boy, and I thought I’d have a quiet word with you on your own, while Keith’s not here. And we’ll keep this between ourselves, shall we? Probably best not to say anything to Keith about our little chat.’

I nod. What else can I do?

‘So you see I’m trusting you. I’m putting you on your honour. Yes?’

I nod helplessly once more.

She puts her hand on my arm and looks straight into my face. ‘You won’t let me down, will you, Stephen?’

I shake my head. She goes on gently holding my arm and looking into my face. Then, with a kind of little sigh, she lets me go, and begins to clamber back along the passageway. She stops and looks at the privet sign. ‘I’m terribly sorry about that,’ she says. ‘So silly of me not to guess. I promise I won’t intrude again.’

She struggles on a little further, then stops and turns round once more.

‘You haven’t been to play at the house for ages,’ she says. ‘Why don’t I tell Keith to ask you to tea tomorrow?’

I try to take stock of the situation, as she disappears back into the outside world. Once again I’ve let strangers into our private place. Once again everything has changed.

After she’s gone I remember the back of her dress as she clambered awkwardly away from me along the passageway, its calm simplicity confused by the dust of the bare earth, its elegant regularity mocked by the random detritus of dead leaves and twigs hanging from it. And I feel somehow … sorry for her, in spite of her crimes. I feel pained that she’s had to humiliate herself before me in this way.

I jump out of my skin, because I’ve just realised that she’s peering in at me through the branches again. She’s no longer holding the plate. Once again she has her shopping basket on her arm. She’s smiling. Her brown eyes are calm once more.

‘Thank you for having me,’ she says.

She walks calmly down the street towards the corner.

I watch her go. This time, of course, she is going through the tunnel.

I make no move to follow.

What is it that wakes me? Is it all my anxieties about the task we’ve taken on, and about what to do now that Keith’s mother has told me to abandon it? Or is it my bad conscience about all the weakness I’ve shown and all the wrong thoughts I’ve allowed myself to think?

Or is it merely the unnatural lightness of my blacked-out bedroom?

There’s a strange white light flooding around the edges of the blackout. I get up and slip my head under the blind. The dull, familiar world outside, I discover, has been transformed. The tangle of bushes in our front garden and the frontages of the houses opposite are picked out, against a background of velvet darkness, in the most delicately brilliant and unearthly white. There’s absolute stillness, absolute silence. It’s as if the Close had become a picture of itself, or as if the ethereal chiming of the Haywards’ clocks had been caught and preserved as a silent shape in space.

Night – the almost forgotten time. And the full moon, pouring softly down from somewhere above the roof of the house, smoothing out all the muddle of the garden and the blemishes of weathered render on the houses opposite, washing away all the shame and confusion of the day, leaving only this perfect white stillness.

We’re halfway through the lunar calendar. Halfway to the next dark of the moon.

And what am I going to do? I plainly can’t go on watching her and following her now she’s seen us doing it and put me on my honour to stop. But I plainly can’t stop watching her and following her now that she’s more or less told me that if we go on we may find out something that she doesn’t want us to know.

I obviously have to talk to Keith about it and let him work it out. She’s his mother! She’s his spy! But just as obviously I can’t tell Keith about it, because she told me not to. She told me not to and I helplessly nodded my head. I agreed. I as good as gave her my word.

Even before this there were a lot of things piling up that I couldn’t tell Keith about. Barbara Berrill’s visit. Her stupid stories about his mother and his aunt. Now I’ve been burdened with another secret that I have to keep from him. But how can we possibly proceed if I don’t tell him this one?

I feel as if my head’s going to burst with trying to accommodate all these contradictions. But then, as I go on gazing at that serene white world outside the window, everything begins to seem simple after all. If only I had a knotted rope, as Keith had suggested, I should climb out of the window and let myself down into that great calmness. I should take it into me and become part of it. I should perform one simple, heroic deed that would settle everything once and for all.

I should go through the tunnel now, while the world’s completely still, and she’s not there to be watched or followed. I should discover what it was she left in the box this time, before anyone has a chance to remove it. I should find the evidence that would prove beyond all doubt that Keith’s right, and that his mother really is a German spy.

One single heroic deed, to lay at Keith’s feet in the morning. And with that one blow all my problems would be solved and all my weaknesses and errors wiped away, as surely as all the defects of the day are dissolved by the moonlight.

I should go through the darkness of the tunnel. On my own. And out into the moonlight beyond.

If only I had a knotted rope …

The white stillness goes on and on. I’ve never seen the world like this before.

Slowly it comes to me that I don’t actually need a knotted rope. I could simply walk down the stairs.

Now I’ve thought the thought, I know I have to do it. I know I’m going to do it.

And at once I’m terrified. The summer night has become suddenly freezing. I start to shiver so uncontrollably that I can scarcely get the jumper over my head or the sandals on my feet. I can hear my teeth rattling together like dice in a shaker. Geoff stirs in his sleep, as if he’d heard them too. I feel my way downstairs, and through the kitchen to the back door. Very slowly I ease back the bolt, still shaking. I step silently out into the silver darkness, and become part of it.

Never in my life before have I crept out of the house in the middle of the night. Never before have I experienced this great stillness, or this strange new freedom to go anywhere and do anything.

I shan’t have the courage to go through with it, of course. I shall die of fear before I get beyond the end of the street.

I must do it, though, I must.

Between the reflected disc of silver-grey behind me and the second one in front of me is a darkness whose shape is defined entirely by sound. The huge reverberations of the water plopping from the wet blackness overhead into the black water beside me merge into suites of scutterings and splashings trailed by unseen nocturnal creatures fleeing before the long echoes of my panicky breathing. In my terror I lose my footing on the unseen narrow causeway along the edge of the unseen lake, and have to keep touching the slime on the walls to steady myself. The slime is full of germs – I’m getting germs all over my hands.

And then at last I’m out into the open night again, and looking up in gratitude at that serene white face riding full and round above the railway embankment. The night’s coming when I shall be out in the darkness again with no moon to whiten the world. And even as I think the thought, a cool breath of air stirs, and the moon sails behind a cloud. The delicate white world around me evaporates.

I stand stock still, mastering my new access of panic. Slowly I piece together a world of sorts from the different densities of blackness around me, and from a few small sounds. The stirring of the leaves in the trees along the lane. The murmur of the telegraph wires along the railway track above me.

I creep forward again. By touch I find the harsh brickwork of the retaining wall … the rusty links of the wire fence … the broken stalks of the cow parsley … the metallic smoothness of the box and its embossed inscription.

I listen. The rustle of the leaves, the murmur of the telegraph wires. My own breath. The distant barking of the dogs at the Cottages in the Lanes. Nothing else.

I ease the lid open. The shiny underside as it turns catches a faint gleam of light from the clouds. There’s no trace of any light reflected from the bottom of the box, though. I’m looking into blackness. There’s something odd about the blackness – something wrong with the
sound
of it … What’s wrong is that there is no sound. The hard interior surfaces should give back a faint response to the tiny atmospheric breathings of the night, and no response is forthcoming.

I cautiously put my hand inside. The texture of the air seems to change and thicken around my fingers, as they sink into some substance that gives beneath them. I snatch my hand away.

What I felt, I work out with hindsight, as my surprise subsides, was a
softness
. A dry, cool softness. The box has something in it. Slowly I work out what it was.

Some sort of cloth.

I put both hands very slowly and carefully back into the box. Cloth, yes … A lot of cloth … Different sorts of cloth … Some of it smooth, some of it fibrous … A hem … A button … Another button …

Underneath my fingers now is something rough to the touch, with a pattern of ridges and furrows that seems curiously recognisable. I think I know what it is. I slowly ease my hand right round it to feel its underside and its width – then stop.

The texture of the darkness around me is changing a little. I look up, and see the suggestion of a luminous edge to the clouds overhead. At any moment the moon’s going to come out again. But something else has changed, too. Something about the
sound
of the world …

I strain my ears. Nothing. Just the shifting of the leaves, the sigh of the wires, the coming and going of my breath …

I focus my attention back on the object I’m touching. The underside of it feels the same as the top. It’s about as wide as my hand … Yes, I know what this is. I begin to slide my hand along it, so that I can feel the end of it to check, then stop again.

The sound that’s changed, I realise, is the sound of my breathing. It’s grown more complex. It no longer corresponds precisely to the rise and fall I can feel inside my chest.

I stop breathing. The sound of breathing continues.

There’s someone a few feet away in the lane – someone who has come silently up to the gap in the wire fence and then stopped to listen, as I’m listening now.

Another faint sound. A hand feeling for the brickwork of the retaining wall, just as I felt for it … Now the rusty links of the fence are being eased back. A body’s squeezing underneath them …

There’s someone very close behind me, feeling his way towards the box. It’s a man – I can hear the maleness of his level breathing. A grown man – I can hear the size of him. In another moment I shall feel his hands as they reach out towards the box and encounter my back instead.

I can’t move. I can’t breathe. An agonising electric coldness passes through my back as it senses the approach of those hands.

And all at once the darkness dissolves in a flood of moonlight.

The level breathing behind me ends in a sharp, raucous gasp.

Neither of us moves. Neither of us breathes.

I’ve only to turn and I shall see him. But I can’t, any more than you can ever turn when you hear the terrible figure behind you in a nightmare.

Then the moon’s behind the clouds again and the man’s gone. I hear him scrambling back through the wire fence, and stumbling in his haste as he runs into the rutted depths of the Lanes.

I wait, as immobile as stone, still charged with that unbearable cold electricity.

I wait … and wait … until I hear the dogs barking in the distance again, and I know for certain he’s gone. Then I turn and hurl myself unseeing through the tangle of the fence and into the booming darkness of the tunnel.

The Close, as I come running blindly round the corner, is full of wildly swinging torch beams and demented figures running back and forth. The torches swing at once towards me and stab at my eyes. A storm of frantic clutching and whispering bursts over me.

‘Where have you been …? What in heaven’s name do you think you’re doing …? Have you gone out of your mind …? We were going to call the police …! Do you know what time it is …?’

The streetful of frenzied figures resolves itself into my two parents in their dressing gowns, hustling me towards our front door, still trying to keep their voices down so as not to wake the neighbours. Geoff watches sardonically from the doorstep. I suppose it’s Geoff who told on me.

As soon as the front door closes behind us, they’re free to raise their voices at last, and when my father turns on the lights a fresh subject for consternation appears. ‘You’re soaking wet!’ cries my mother. ‘You’re wet from head to foot!’

It’s true; I seem to have run straight through the water in the tunnel and fallen headlong.

My mother tears the wet clothes off me, as if I were three years old again.

‘Jesus wept,’ says Geoff. ‘What were you hunting this time? U-boats?’

‘Oh, this was some tomfoolery with Keith, was it?’ shouts my father. I’ve never seen him in this state before.

‘Keith?’ cries my mother. ‘
Keith’s
not running around out there as well, is he?’

I say nothing. My teeth have started to chatter again.

‘
Is
he?’ demands my father. ‘Have I got to go knocking on his door to check he’s home?’

At this transcendentally awful prospect I change my policy and shake my head.

‘You’re
sure
?’ says my mother. ‘You’re sure you didn’t get Keith into this kind of state as well? Because if you did I don’t know
what
his mother will be thinking!’

Once again I shake my head. Does she really think that I’m the one who gets Keith into states, and not the other way round? How has Keith managed to fool both our mothers so completely?

‘So what were you up to?’ demands my father. ‘If you wouldn’t think it impertinent of me to enquire …’

But here I revert to total uncommunicativeness. Am I deliberately refusing to speak about things that I know must never be revealed to outsiders? Or am I simply too shocked to open my mouth? All I can think, as I stand there naked and shivering, mute and infantile, is one single despairing thought: that I could have turned round and seen who it was. I could have turned. I could have seen him. I’ve failed yet again.

There’s something still clutched in my hand, I discover, as my mother throws a towel round me and rubs me violently dry – the ridged and furrowed thing that I took hold of in the box just before I heard him coming. I examine it at last, and it’s exactly what I thought it was. It’s as sodden as everything else, and my mother snatches it out of my hand and throws it down on the wet heap piled on the floor beside me.

It looks entirely at home in its new surroundings: a long woollen sock, dark blue, with a heavily darned heel.

Keith turns the sock over in his hands, inspecting it carefully. The darn has dried a paler colour than the rest, now I’ve recovered the sock from my mother’s washing basket, and the sole’s brown with age and use. He turns it inside out. There’s nothing concealed in it except a few little balls of woollen fluff.

We’re sitting at the tea table, under the gleaming silver of the candlesticks and the ashtray that his parents won in the world tennis championships. My heart sinks as I watch him. This is the fruit of my great exploit, the treasure that I went out in the night to fetch and lay at his feet. It should be something else, of course. If it had been Keith who had done the deed it would be. It would be a map or a plan of something, perhaps. A message in code. At the very least another packet of cigarettes with a secret sign in it. Not a sock, though. Not an old sock.

On the shining, dark tabletop, under Uncle Peter’s straightforward gaze from the mantelpiece, the brown sole and the darned heel stand out with unnatural distinctness.