Spies (2002) (16 page)

Do I feel all right? I feel …
something
disturbing. I don’t think it’s sick. I think it’s … a kind of
soaring
sensation. I have a sense of freedom, as if I’m no longer bound by the rules and restrictions of childhood. I can open locked boxes and break meaningless oaths with impunity. I’m on the verge of understanding mysteries that have been closed to me. I’m emerging from the old dark world of tunnels and terrors, and coming to a broad upland where the air’s bright, and remote blue horizons open all around.

She holds out her hand for the cigarette and takes another little puff. This time it makes her laugh as well as choke.

‘What?’ I ask.

‘Us,’ she says, when she can speak. ‘Smoking.’

We pass the magic fire back and forth. We hold it in various bold and striking ways – between two extended fingers, like Geoff, or with the flat of the hand raised up beside the face like a salutation, and the elbow supported in the other hand, like Mrs Sheldon. We push our lips forwards to receive the sacrament. We draw them in to savour the mouthful of smoke. We watch the little red glow brighten and fade with our breath, and the blue smoke curl up through the leaves.

We lie back in the dust and squint at the sky and smoke and talk about things. Or rather Barbara does. She hates Miss Pinnegar, the art teacher at her school – they all hate her, they call her Drawing Pin. Rosemary Winters used to be her best friend, but she isn’t any more, because she said something spiteful to Ann Shakespeare about her. She wonders what Keith’s mother and her boyfriend will do now that everyone’s on the watchout for him.

‘It’s not her boyfriend,’ I explain calmly. ‘They’re just German spies.’ Only I don’t, of course. I say nothing.

‘Perhaps next time he comes in the middle of the night she’ll creep out of the house and they’ll run away together,’ she whispers.

‘They’re German spies!’ Only the reason I don’t say it this time is because I know that it’s all much more complicated than that. Softness and bosoms and kisses come into it somehow. Simple spying was part of the world of secret passages and bayonets that has just curled away with the blue smoke of the cigarette, and dispersed in the open sky.

She takes another puff of the cigarette and hands it to me. There’s almost nothing left but the cork tip.

‘We could watch to see what happens,’ she says softly. ‘We could creep out of our houses at night and hide in here, like your brother and Deirdre.’

A kind of shiver goes through me, and an uneasiness stirs in my stomach. Perhaps I am beginning to feel sick. What I’ve remembered, as I think about me and Barbara hiding here side by side in the night, is that in three days’ time it will be the dark of the moon.

I’ve remembered something else, too – where I last saw a packet of cork-tipped cigarettes.

Perhaps it wasn’t Geoff and Deirdre in here last night. Perhaps it was him. Watching the house. Waiting his moment …

The cork-tipped cigarettes in the hidden box beyond the tunnel were Craven A. I look at the stub I’m holding. The name on the paper has been smoked away. Between us we’ve destroyed the evidence.

And now everything has changed once again. The air of the Close each evening is full of birdsong – I’ve never really noticed it before. Full of birdsong and summer perfumes, full of strange glimpses and intimations just out of the corner of my eye, of longings and sadnesses and undefined hopes.

It has a name, this sweet disturbance. Its name is Lamorna.

Lamorna. I find the word on my tongue over and over again, saying itself of its own accord. Lamorna is the softness of Barbara Berrill’s dress as she leaned across me to look in the trunk. Lamorna is the correct scientific description of the contrast between the bobbly texture of her purse and the smooth shininess of its button. Lamorna is the indoor-firework smell of the match, and its two shining reflections in her eyes.

But Lamorna is also the name of the softness in Keith’s mother’s voice when she called to me through the leaves, wanting my help, and the pleading look I glimpsed for a moment in her eyes before she realised I wasn’t alone.

Lamorna. A distant land across the sea, blue on the blue horizon. The sighing of the trees. The name of a song I once heard. There’s just a little of the terror of the Lanes in it, too, and the silence under the elders.

Lamorna … And there it is, the word itself, picked out in raised metal letters, painted over in the same peeling colour as the woodwork behind them, almost hidden by a wild profusion of dog-roses, on the front gate of Barbara Berrill’s house.

On one side of the street, stiffly and correctly engraved among the verdigris beyond the standard roses:
Chollerton
. On the other, in those carefree, open-hearted, peeling metal letters:
Lamorna
.

I see all kinds of things I never saw before, wherever I look, now that the lamorna’s in the air. I look up at the evening sky, as Keith’s mother did as she stood patiently at her garden gate, waiting to be escorted to the letter box, and I see to my surprise that it’s not emptiness she was looking at, not a serene eventlessness at all, but something infinitely complex. There’s a silent air battle going on up there – the great evening dogfight between the high-flying insects and the low-flying swallows.

And once again, ten thousand feet beyond the swallows, I see the heroic vapour trails I saw scribbled across an earlier summer sky. Now it’s night, and I hear the sirens starting up near and far, treading on each other’s heels, and the heavy throb of the bombers. I see the searchlights fingering the universe, and the high palace of the falling flares, and the flickering orange above Miss Durrant’s house.

And suddenly, in a series of brief tableaux, as if the darkness were being lit up by the flashes of unheard bombs, I see the whole story.

The ghostly, silent shape of the parachute floating down, once again … The sudden sickening impact of the ground … The man lies there stunned, then crawls over the incomprehensible dark landscape of this enemy land, over the inexplicable pattern of cracked soil and coarse clumps of vegetation, of abandoned kerbstones and overgrown manholes, looking for a refuge …

He’s not a spy at all. He’s not an old tramp. He’s a German airman who has been shot down.

Somehow Keith’s mother found him. In the blackout one night, perhaps, as he crept out on this side of the tunnel looking for food. She felt sorry for him. She remembered the silver-framed portrait she has at home of another airman who may also fall to earth one night in an alien land, and crawl into a hole in the ground for refuge, and need help. She said nothing to anyone. Only to Auntie Dee, under the picture of that same other airman. She began to collect food and cigarettes from Auntie Dee’s house, and leave them out for him … Clean clothes … Hot coffee to fill the thermos she has taken from the picnic basket … Then two small boys find the box where the things are left. Now she has to bring everything to his hiding place instead. She has to meet him face to face. Every day she comes … And gradually she takes him to her bosom …

I feel light-headed. With relief that Keith’s mother is not a spy after all. With alarm that she’s giving aid and comfort to the enemy, even so, because a shot-down German airman’s still a German. And with some generalised excitement that flickers in the air, as shifting and unlocatable as summer lightning. It’s something to do with that bosom she’s taken him to. I can feel the disturbing softness of it when I collided with her in the tunnel. It mingles with the softness of Barbara Berrill’s dress, as she leaned across me to look in the trunk …

Its name breathes itself through the perfumed air as slowly and softly as a sigh:

L … a … m … o … r … n … a …

But something has changed about the perfume of the air in the lookout. The guileless sweetness of the limes and the honeysuckle has been overlaid by a sweetness of a different kind, harsh, coarse, and reckless, with just a touch of the catty stink of elder in it.

The source of it turns out to be very close to hand as soon as I lift my eyes and look. The dull green branches of the bushes that I’m hiding beneath are beginning to dissolve into a sea of reeking white.

Amidst the white, one warm afternoon, I find two brown eyes watching me. My heart jumps, first with excitement and then in the next instant, as I realise who it is, with anxiety.

‘Stephen,’ says Keith’s mother quietly, ‘now you’re alone … I want to ask you to do something for me. May I come in?’

I stop for a moment again in front of Meadowhurst. There’s Stephen, the second tub of geraniums from the left. And there
she
is, Keith’s mother, crouching beside him, the third tub.

The game had entered a new phase altogether. I think Stephen understood this even as she settled herself in front of him. In fact it had completely turned around. He’d begun as her antagonist, and now he was to become her accomplice.

She’d changed in some way. I remember noticing that at once, too. She’d changed as much as the bushes had, as much as Stephen himself, and everything else around him.

What was the change? I think she seemed somehow even more perfect than before. Her lips were redder, her cheeks smoother, her eyes more lustrous. She had a pale blue silk cravat around her neck, high under her chin, and fastened in front with a silver clasp. It seemed to lift her head, and to give her an air of regal haughtiness, even as she sat cross- legged in the dust in front of Stephen like a beggar. Which I suppose she’d become. Only now do I realise to quite what extremity she must have been driven to humble herself in this way, and to ask a child for help.

What I find it difficult to remember now is how she ever managed to broach the subject. I think she simply put the shopping basket she was carrying on the ground between them. I think she told him very quietly that he must know what she wanted him to do. I don’t suppose he responded to this. But of course he did understand.

I think she apologised for having to ask him. I think she told him that she couldn’t see any other way – that there was no one else she could turn to.

Did she explain why she couldn’t ask Keith? She didn’t need to – Stephen understood perfectly well. Keith didn’t know about any of this – he’d chosen not to. In any case there was something unthinkable about the very idea of her asking him to do it. What exactly was this unthinkable something? – Nothing exactly. What’s unthinkable can’t in its nature be exactly anything. Its inexactitude is what makes it so overpowering. It pervades the air unseen, like a perfume.

The contents of the basket were covered with a clean tea- cloth, as if it were a picnic the two of them were going to share. She didn’t show them to him. I think she explained that they were simply a few little things he needed. That who needed? He. I think that was what she called him. He … him …

Whoever and whatever he was or wasn’t, Stephen was still quite clear about one thing: he was a German. There was no way round that.

He didn’t have a ration book, she told Stephen. He was ill – he really needed a doctor. She mentioned the damp. She didn’t specify where the damp was.

Stephen remembered that quiet, persistent coughing from the underground chamber beneath the elders. He also thought of the German sitting where he was sitting then, in the lookout, lighting a cigarette in the darkness, and coughing, and stubbing it out again unsmoked.

She would have liked to send him something hot, she said, and of course Stephen knew why she couldn’t: because the thermos flask was back in the picnic basket on the garage wall, and would stay there for the Duration.

She told Stephen not to go down the steps, but to leave everything on the ground outside – just to call out and tell him it was there.

‘You do know where to go, don’t you?’ she asked Stephen quietly. ‘I haven’t just imagined that?’

Stephen kept his eyes on the ground and said nothing. She understood, though. He did know. She hadn’t just imagined it.

‘So will you do it for me, Stephen?’

Still I keep my eyes on the ground. I feel the soft, silent fall of the parachute in the darkness. I feel the bone-breaking impact, the slime of blood on the hands …

He’s a German, though!

‘Stephen, darling, listen,’ she says, as softly as the silken rustle of the parachute. ‘I can’t explain. It would take too long, and I’ve got to get back, and anyway there are some things that are not terribly easy to explain to other people.’

The softness of her voice, her closeness as she leans towards me, and above all the ‘darling’ that she uses for her own son, make my face dissolve, I know, like the canopy of the parachute settling on the ground around me. But he’s a
German
!

‘Anyway, I think you
do
understand,’ she says, as softly as before. ‘Don’t you, Stephen? In a way? You understand that sometimes people find themselves isolated. They feel that they’re outcasts, that everyone’s against them. You’ve seen boys at school being picked on for one reason or another. Perhaps because of something that they can’t help at all – something about the way they look, or the way they talk, or because they’re not very good at games. Or even because of nothing at all. Just because they’re who they are. Yes?’

I nod. I do know a boy who has been picked on. I can feel the pain in my ears, and the fear that they’re going to come right off in my tormentor’s hands as my head’s rocked back and forth. But then I’m not a
German
! That makes it quite different!

‘So
will
you, Stephen? Will you do it?’

Time is pressing her. I’ve no idea where Keith’s father is or what he’s doing, but she knows that it can’t be long now before he notices her absence. Suddenly all the urgent confidence that she came with ebbs out of her voice.

‘I know how terrible it is to have to ask you, Stephen. I shouldn’t do it if I could think of any other way. I feel so …’

The words stop. I look up to see what’s happened. Her hands are pressed to her mouth, and her eyes are filling with tears. Two almost inaudible words finally escape through her fingers: ‘So ashamed.’

She’s going to cry. I look away. This is the worst thing of all. I shall never be able to hold out now. But I
must
! He’s an outcast for good reason – because he’s
German
! I make one last final effort.

‘Auntie Dee,’ I say. ‘She could take the things. You could look after Milly, and Auntie Dee could take them.’

Silence. I look up again. She’s absolutely motionless, hands still pressed to her mouth, gazing at me through the brimming tears. And all at once I understand. The man who once used to come visiting Auntie Dee in the blackout is the same man as the German in the Barns. It’s so obvious now I’ve thought of it. It was Auntie Dee, not Keith’s mother, who found him. It was Auntie Dee who first took him to her bosom.

Keith’s mother gives a terrible, shuddering sob. Then another and another.

Silence again. I sneak another look. She’s sitting with her head bent, her hands covering her face entirely, silently shaking. I look away again. I mustn’t see her like this. Odd spots of wetness appear in the dust between us. One falls on the back of my hand.

I wait, scarcely daring to breathe. On the opposite pavement the Geest twins are chalking out a hopscotch diagram, and Norman Stott is rubbing it out again with the sole of his shoe. Barbara Berrill walks past, calling out to the Stotts’ dog. At any moment one of the children is going to hear, or Barbara’s going to come back and look in through the leaves. I remember her sitting where Keith’s mother’s sitting now, her eyes also full of tears from the smoke of the cigarette, and I realise that the very things that seemed so simple and straightforward then are not simple and straightforward at all, but infinitely complex and painful.

Still the silent shaking goes on. And it’s all my fault. It’s because I found the box, so that Keith’s mother had to take Auntie Dee’s messages all the way to the Barns instead. It’s because she had to start meeting the German face to face. She’s taken him to
her
bosom – and taken him away from Auntie Dee’s. This is why she can’t ask Auntie Dee to go. This is why she never goes to Auntie Dee’s house any more. Just by looking at things I shouldn’t have looked at, I’ve changed them. I’ve set Keith’s mother and father against each other. I’ve set Keith’s mother and Auntie Dee against each other. I’ve ruined everything. ‘I’m sorry,’ I mutter, ‘I’m sorry.’

Keith’s father emerges from their back yard. He crosses the front garden, whistling the tune that never reaches its destination, and looks round the other side of the house, then comes to the front gate and stands looking down the road. The whistling trails away.

Keith’s mother sighs a long, slow sigh. She’s stopped crying. She’s watching Keith’s father through her fingers. He turns uncertainly, and goes back towards the kitchen door.

‘I must go,’ she says in a little voice that only just manages to escape from her throat. She pulls a handkerchief out of her sleeve, and dabs it to her eyes. ‘I’ll just tidy myself up a little first, perhaps.’

I look at her. She’s completely changed once again. All that perfection she arrived with has become blurred, and I realise why it had seemed so particularly vivid before: she’d made herself up even more thoroughly than usual.

‘I’m most awfully sorry, Stephen,’ she says. ‘Let’s just pretend all this never happened, shall we? I know how good you are at pretending. And don’t worry about the things. I’ll somehow think of some other way to do it. I should never have asked you. That was quite wrong. I just felt so … so
helpless
…’

She holds the handkerchief to her mouth and gazes thoughtfully past me for a long time, as if she’s remembering something in the remote past.

‘Yes, that’s what we used to do,’ she says dreamily. ‘I used to look after Milly while Dee went.’

I can scarcely recognise her now she’s wiped most of the make-up off her face. But there’s also something curiously familiar about her appearance from some other context altogether, as if I’ve seen her before in a dream.

‘Oh, Stephen,’ she says. ‘Life can be so cruel sometimes. It all seems so easy for a start. And then …’

She puts her arms round her knees, the way Barbara does, and rests her chin on them.

‘When you and Keith started your little game of detectives,’ she says, ‘when you began looking in my things and following me around, I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you that it would all end up like this, with me crying on your shoulder. Poor Stephen! It was a naughty thing to do, you know, spying on people. All the same, what a terrible punishment!’

She gives me a wan smile. I know now where I’ve seen that face. It’s the one that looks seriously out of the silver frame in her sitting room. It’s the face of the young girl wearing long gloves and a broad-brimmed hat who’s playing at being a grown-up, with a protective arm around the little sister who’s playing at being a child and smiling so trustingly up at her.

Once again I feel the locked box beginning to open and reveal its mysteries. I’m leaving behind the old tunnels and terrors of childhood – and stepping into a new world of even darker tunnels and more elusive terrors.

She touches her fingers against her cheeks and eyes. ‘Oh dear,’ she says, ‘I haven’t even got a mirror with me. Am I a complete mess?’

I suppose she is. I shake my head.

She picks up the basket to go. Keith’s father appears silently from the far side of the house. Once again he comes to the garden gate and gazes silently down the street. She waits.

‘Never mind,’ she says, ‘I’ll think of something. You won’t tell anyone, Stephen, will you, now you know who it is?’

I shake my head. And I reach over and take the basket out of her hand.

She gazes at me in surprise. ‘Oh Stephen,’ she whispers. ‘Really?’

She leans forward and kisses me. I duck awkwardly away, and her lips catch me on my eyebrow. But I can feel on my forehead the tears running down her cheeks again.

As Keith’s father waits at the front gate he resumes his whistling, abstractedly, inconclusively. He goes back to the house, still whistling. Keith’s mother clambers out along the passageway. I try not to imagine what will happen when she reaches home.

She stops again, looks at the cloud of white blossom around her head, and wrinkles her nose.

‘You see?’ she says. ‘I told you it was going to be absolutely overpowering.’

She was right – it is. Or at any rate its sweet reek has overpowered me.

And, woven somehow into the sweetness of the smell, like the words into the music of a song, is the lingering sweetness of the sound:

L … a … m … o … r … n … a …

I push the basket away behind me, to make it as inconspicuous as possible. But Barbara still can’t take her eyes off it. She sits cross-legged in the dust, exactly where Keith’s mother sat, leaning sideways to see past me.

‘What does she want you to do with it?’ she asks.

‘Nothing.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Nothing. I don’t know.’

‘She just left it here and didn’t say anything about it?’

‘I can’t remember.’

Barbara smiles, but it’s not the little conspiratorial smile she smiled the last time we met. It’s her big smile again, her big mocking smile. I should have gone at once, as soon as Keith’s mother left. I was just waiting while I thought about it, to make sure I was ready to go through the Lanes again, past the dogs, to the dark stairway down into the earth under the elders.

‘She was crying,’ says Barbara softly.

There’s something intimately shameful about this accusation. I’m ashamed on Keith’s mother’s behalf, and on my own for having witnessed her tears. ‘She wasn’t crying,’ I say.

‘Yes, she was. I was watching you both. You didn’t know, did you?’

‘Of course I knew.’

‘No, you didn’t.’

My heart sinks. How have we got back to all this stupid did/didn’t, now that we’ve left childish things behind? How can the sunlit world have become so suddenly dark?

Barbara’s mocking smile is meaner than ever. ‘She kept dabbing her eyes. And her make-up went all funny.’

‘She was laughing,’ I say hopelessly.

‘Laughing?’ Barbara’s mocking smile becomes larger than ever. ‘What was she laughing about?’

‘Nothing.’

‘She was laughing about nothing? Why, is she a loony, then, like Eddie Stott?’

What’s happening? I’ve never heard her say things like this before. Not since the Lamorna time began.