Spies (2002) (21 page)

Or else he’s dead. Can I imagine him dead? Not really. Can I imagine myself, for that matter, lying in my narrow grave, with that same terrible intensity as I imagined it then? No. The imagination ages, like everything else. The intensity fades. You don’t get as afraid as you used to.

I walk up the street once more, to get full value from my air fare. One last look before someone calls the police or the local social services. Lamorna, I see, is now simply No. 6. Would the murmur of ‘Number Six’ ever have got as confused with the scent of the privet as the soft syllables of ‘Lamorna’ did? The entanglement of wild roses in the front garden there has been replaced by a few small beds of pansies at the edge of the gravel drive, and a white-haired old lady is kneeling to weed them. She glances up at me, and I suddenly realise, with the most terrible jolt of recognition, of hope and dismay, that it’s Barbara.

She looks indifferently at me for a moment, and then returns to her weeding. It’s not Barbara. Of course it’s not. I don’t think it is.

In any case, what I’m really thinking about isn’t Barbara – or Keith, for that matter – or any of the others. It’s that scarf still. It keeps nagging at me. I should just like to know for sure what happened to that, if nothing else.

Not that there’s much chance it would offer many surprises, even if I could somehow get my hands on it and unfold it at last. I know exactly what I should see printed on the silk: a map of Germany, and the rest of Europe as far west as the Channel coast – not the landscape that any German might want to spy on, or to bomb, or to parachute into. It was the escape map that all
British
aircrew routinely carried in the pocket of their flying jackets, in the remote hope that if they were shot down they might somehow try to find their way home.

Did I really not know at the time that the broken man in the Barns was Uncle Peter? Of course I knew. I knew as soon as he called me by name. No, before that. As soon as I heard him behind me in the moonlight. Or much earlier still, even. From the very beginning, perhaps. Just as he himself had always known that she was really the one.
Always her …
From the very beginning
… When was the very beginning, for him and her? Perhaps from the afternoon when he and the nice jolly girl he’d just met at some local tennis club found themselves making up a foursome for doubles with her composed and tranquil elder sister and her sister’s unsociable, middle-aged husband.
Always her
. Even as he’d stood in front of the church door in his RAF uniform later, with the wrong sister on his arm.

And yet probably he hadn’t known at all, any more than I did about him. I went on thinking, even after I’d heard him speak, that he was a
German
. This was what I clung on to – that he was a
German
. His Germanness hung in the air, as pervasive and as transforming as the scent of the privet or the sound of Lamorna. Whatever I secretly knew, and whenever I knew it, I also understood that it was something that must never be known.

I look up at the sky, as I did when I arrived; the one enduring feature of the street. I think of the uncontrollable terror seizing him, ten thousand feet up there in the dark emptiness, and five hundred miles from here. And I think of the terror that must have seized my aunt and her children, too, as the unbreathable gases from the burning house filled their dark cellar ten thousand feet below him, or someone like him.

I think of the shame that pursued him afterwards, from which he fled into that dark pit. At least my aunt and her children were spared the shame.

What we did to each other in those few years of madness! What we did to ourselves!

Now all the mysteries have been resolved, or as resolved as they’re ever likely to be. All that remains is the familiar slight ache in the bones, like an old wound when the weather changes.
Heimweh
or
Fernweh
? A longing to be there or a longing to be here, even though I’m here already? Or to be both at once? Or to be neither, but in the old country of the past, that will never be reached again in either place?

Time to go. So, once again – thank you, everyone. Thank you for having me.

And, on the air as I turn the corner at the end of the street, a sudden faint breath of something familiar. Something sweet, coarse, and intimately unsettling.

Even here, after all. Even now.

Michael Frayn was born in London in 1933 and began his career as a journalist on the
Guardian
and the
Observer
. His plays include
Alphabetical Order, Clouds, Donkeys’ Years,
Make or Break
and
Benefactors. Noises Off
won the
Evening Standard
Award for Best Comedy of the Year and the Laurence Olivier Best Comedy of the Year. His more recent plays include
Copenhagen
, which won the 1998
Evening Standard
Award for Best Play of the Year and the 2000 Tony Award for Best Play (USA), and
Democracy
, which opened to great critical acclaim in 2003. His latest play,
Afterlife
, opened in 2008.

He has also translated a number of works from Russian, including plays by Chekhov and Tolstoy. His films for television include
First and Last
(1989), for which he won an Emmy, and an adaptation of his 1991 novel
A Landing on the Sun
.

His novels include
Headlong
(1999), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and
Spies
(2002), which won the Whitbread Novel Award.

He is married to the biographer and critic Claire Tomalin.

fiction
HEADLONG
THE TIN MEN
THE RUSSIAN INTERPRETER
A
TOWARDS THE END OF THE MORNING
A VERY PRIVATE LIFE
SWEET DREAMS
THE TRICK OF IT
A LANDING ON THE SUN
NOW YOU KNOW

non-fiction
CELIA’S SECRET:
An Investigation (with David Burke)

plays
THE TWO OF US
ALPHABETICAL ORDER
DONKEY’S EARS
CLOUDS
BALMORAL
MAKE AND BREAK
NOISES OFF
BENEFACTORS
LOOK LOOK
HERE
NOW YOU KNOW
COPENHAGEN
ALARMS & EXCURSIONS

translations
UNCLE VANYA
(Chekhov)
THREE SISTERS
(Chekhov)
THE CHERRY ORCHARD
(Chekhov)
THE SNEEZE
(Chekhov)
WILD HONEY
(Chekhov)
THE FRUITS OF ENLIGHTENMENT
(Chekhov)
EXCHANGE
(Trifonov)
NUMBER ONE
(Anouilh)

film and television
CLOCKWISE
FIRST AND LAST
REMEMBER ME?

opera
LA BELLE VIVETTE
(from Offenbach’s
La Belle Hélène
)