Spies (2002) (4 page)

Or have I got everything back to front? Had the policeman already happened before this?

It’s so difficult to remember what order things occurred in – but if you can’t remember
that
, then it’s impossible to work out which led to which, and what the connection was. What I remember, when I examine my memory carefully, isn’t a narrative at all. It’s a collection of vivid particulars. Certain words spoken, certain objects glimpsed. Certain gestures and expressions. Certain moods, certain weathers, certain times of day and states of light. Certain individual moments, which seem to mean so much, but which mean in fact so little until the hidden links between them have been found.

Where did the policeman come in the story? We watch him as he pedals slowly up the Close. His appearance has simultaneously justified all our suspicions and overtaken all our efforts, because he’s coming to arrest Keith’s mother … No, no – that was earlier. We’re running happily and innocently up the street beside him, and he represents nothing but the hope of a little excitement out of nowhere. He cycles right past all the houses, looking at each of them in turn, goes round the turning circle at the end, cycles back down the street … and dismounts in front of No. 12. What I remember for sure is the look on Keith’s mother’s face, as we run in to tell her that there’s a policeman going to Auntie Dee’s. For a moment all her composure’s gone. She looks ill and frightened. She’s throwing the front door open and not walking but running down the street …

I understand now, of course, that she and Auntie Dee and Mrs Berrill and the McAfees all lived in dread of policemen and telegraph boys, as everyone did then who had someone in the family away fighting. I’ve forgotten now what it had turned out to be – nothing to do with Uncle Peter, anyway. A complaint about Auntie Dee’s blackout, I think. She was always rather slapdash about it.

Once again I see that look cross Keith’s mother’s face, and this time I think I see something else beside the fear. Something that reminds me of the look on Keith’s face, when his father’s discovered some dereliction in his duties towards his bicycle or his cricket gear; a suggestion of guilt. Or is memory being overwritten by hindsight once more?

If the policeman and the look
had
already happened, could they by any chance have planted the first seed of an idea in Keith’s mind?

I think now that most probably Keith’s words came out of nowhere, that they were spontaneously created in the moment they were uttered. That they were a blind leap of pure fantasy. Or of pure intuition. Or, like so many things, of both.

From those six random words, anyway, came everything that followed, brought forth simply by Keith’s uttering them and by my hearing them. The rest of our lives was determined in that one brief moment as the beads clinked against the jug and Keith’s mother walked away from us, through the brightness of the morning, over the last of the fallen white blossom on the red brick path, erect, composed, and invulnerable, and Keith watched her go, with the dreamy look in his eye that I remembered from the start of so many of our projects.

‘My mother’, he said reflectively, almost regretfully, ‘is a German spy.’

So, she’s a German spy.

How do I react to the news? Do I offer any comment?

I don’t think I say anything at all. I think I just look at Keith with my mouth slightly open, as I’ve done so many times before, waiting to find out what comes next. Am I surprised? Of course I’m surprised – but then I’m often surprised by Keith’s announcements. I was surprised when he first told me that Mr Gort, who lives alone at No. 11, was a murderer. But then, when we investigated, we found some of the bones of his victims in the waste ground just beyond the top of his garden.

So I’m surprised, certainly, but not as surprised as I should be now. And of course I’m immediately excited, because I can see all kinds of interesting new possibilities opening up, for hiding and watching in the gloaming, for sending and receiving messages in invisible ink, for wearing the moustaches and beards in Keith’s disguises kit, for examining things through Keith’s microscope.

I think I feel a brief pang of admiring jealousy for yet another demonstration of his unending good fortune. A father in the Secret Service
and
a mother who’s a German spy – when the rest of us can’t muster even one parent of any interest!

Does it occur to me to wonder whether his father knows about his mother’s activities – or his mother about his father’s? Or to reflect on the delicate situation that this clash of loyalties must create in the household? I don’t think it does. They’re plainly both skilled at concealing their real selves from the world, and they’ve presumably managed to keep their respective secrets from each other. In any case, how adults behave among themselves is a mystery about which I haven’t yet learnt to have any curiosity.

I’m slightly regretful, though. I think of all the lemon barley and chocolate spread I’ve had from her, all the tolerance, all the intimations of grace and composure. Pleased as I am to have a German spy to investigate, I should much rather it had turned out to be Mrs Sheldon or Mrs Stott. Or even Keith’s father. I could easily believe that Keith’s father is a German. Or could have, if I hadn’t known about his Secret Service work and his notable attempts to reduce the German population during the Great War.

No, on second thoughts I’m relieved that it’s not Keith’s father. The idea of keeping watch on
him
is too frightening to contemplate. I see his lips drawn back in the little smile: ‘Anyone give you permission to interfere with my secret transmitter, old bean …?’

Do I ask Keith the first and most obvious question –
how
he knows that she’s a spy? Of course not, any more than I’ve ever asked him how he knows that she’s his mother, or that his father’s his father. She just is his mother, in the same way that Mrs Sheldon’s Mrs Sheldon, and Barbara Berrill’s beneath our notice, and my family’s slightly disgraceful. Everyone knows that these things are so. They don’t have to be explained or justified.

In fact, as I get used to the idea in the days that follow, it begins to make sense of a lot of things. All those letters that his mother writes, for instance. Who are they to? The only human beings the Haywards know, apart from me, are Auntie Dee and Uncle Peter. I suppose they must have other aunts and uncles somewhere – everyone has aunts and uncles somewhere. But mothers write to aunts and uncles a couple of times a year, not every day! You don’t need to go out to catch the post twice in one afternoon! If she were sending off reports to the Germans, though … Reports on what? Whatever she goes to spy on when she makes all those trips to the shops. The local anti-aircraft defences, probably – the air-raid wardens’ post on the corner of the lane to Paradise and the static water tank behind the library. The secret munitions factory on the main road where Mr Pincher pinches his aluminium trims and sheets of plywood.

Mr Pincher himself, for that matter, and all the assistance his activities are giving to the enemy. The strange goings-on at Trewinnick. Careless talk about the whereabouts of Mr Berrill and the McAfees’ son. The general state of civilian morale in the Close, as revealed in Mrs Sheldon’s complaints about the quality of the meat at Hucknalls and Auntie Dee’s carelessness with her blackout. She has her eye on all of us.

It even begins to make sense of a number of things (and this is surely the real test of a new insight) that I hadn’t realised didn’t make sense before. Why did the Germans drop an incendiary bomb on the Close, out of all the streets around? And why on Miss Durrant’s house, out of all the houses in the Close? But if Miss Durrant had found out the truth about Keith’s mother, and was about to unmask her … And if Keith’s mother had realised, and had gone out in the blackout and signalled to them with a torch, to guide them to the target …

There’s a torch on the table in the Haywards’ hall.

I believe another uneasy thought occurs to me, too: that it might help to explain all her incomprehensible niceness to me, all that lemon barley and chocolate spread. It’s simply part of her false identity, to conceal her true nature.

Already, within moments of Keith’s announcement, while I’m still gaping and long before I’ve begun to take in the consequences, we’ve abandoned the transcontinental railway and begun to shadow her. We watch over the banisters as she goes between sitting room and kitchen, talking to Mrs Elmsley about the polishing of the silver and the ailments of Mrs Elmsley’s mother. In the stationery cupboard in the playroom we find the exercise book we were going to use to record our observations of birds, until we gave up observing birds for tracking down the ape-like creature on the golf course. Keith crosses out birds and writes logbook – secrit. I have private reservations about the spelling, but keep them to myself, as I do all the other small occasional reservations I have about his authority.

He begins to make a record of our observations. ‘1053 hrs,’ he writes, as we crouch at the top of the stairs, listening to his mother in the hall below. ‘Phones. Asks for 8087. Mr Hucknall. 3 muten chops. Not to much fat. By noon.’ We flee into the playroom as she comes upstairs … halt our investigations and think about something else while she’s in the lavatory … emerge and follow her downstairs to the kitchen … out into the garden to watch her from behind the shed as she takes the familiar steaming, sour-smelling enamel bowl into the chicken run … She does far more different things in the course of the morning, now we’re taking note of them, than I’d ever realised, with not a single pause to rest or write letters. It’s easy to miss how active she is because she does it all in such a smooth, unhurried way – because she does it all so …
inconspicuously
.

Yes, there’s a sinister unnoticeability about the whole performance, now that we know the truth behind it. There’s something clearly
wrong
about her, if you really look at her and listen to her as we now are. You can hear a false note in the specially graceful, specially impersonal way she talks to Mrs Elmsley, to Keith’s father, even to the chickens. ‘You did remember to dust behind the dining-room clock this time, didn’t you, Mrs Elmsley …? Ted, darling, do you want anything from the shops? I’ve got to get a few things for Dee. Awfully good job you’re doing with those lettuce seedlings, by the way … Now, come on, ladies. No pushing and shoving. A nice orderly queue, please. Ration books ready …’

I detect the same falsity in the specially amused tone she uses to Keith and me, when she turns round, on her way back to the house with the empty bowl, and sees us running from cover to cover, from behind the garden shed to behind the pergola, to keep up with her. ‘Bang bang!’ she says humorously, pointing an imaginary gun at us, as if we were children. ‘Got you, the pair of you!’ She’s pretending to be part of some innocent children’s game. And all the time she’s a stranger in our midst, watching us with alien eyes.

For the first time I take a good look at Mrs Elmsley. It had never occurred to me before to wonder why she has a moustache and a wart in the middle of her forehead, or why she speaks so softly …

Then again, is the ‘Mr Hucknall’ Keith’s mother spoke to on the phone really Mr Hucknall, the familiar bloodstained comedian of the butcher’s shop? And even if he is, his connection with a known spy now makes us begin to wonder about
him
. I think of the humorously loud way he sings as he hurls the cuts of meat on to the scale when he’s still several feet away from it. ‘If you were the only girl in the world …’ Then tosses the shining brass weights from hand to hand as if they were juggler’s clubs. ‘And I was the only boy …’ Then shouts to the cash desk: ‘Take two and fourpence off this good lady, Mrs Hucknall.
And
the next, please …’ Like Keith’s mother he’s putting on a performance; he’s trying to conceal his true nature. Are ‘mutton chops’ really mutton chops, for that matter? In any case, when the boy arrives on his heavy delivery bicycle just before noon, with the plate saying ‘F. Hucknall, Family Butcher’ under the crossbar, how do we know that the little white parcel that he takes out of the great basket over the tiny front wheel really contains mutton chops?

Everything that we’d once taken for granted now seems open to question. Even what appears to be happening directly in front of your eyes, you realise when you think about it, turns out to be something you can’t actually quite see after all, to involve all kinds of assumptions and interpretations.

By the time Keith’s mother tells him to wash his hands for lunch, and I run home for mine, we’ve assembled a considerable body of evidence in the logbook. As I gulp down my corned beef and boiled potatoes, and tip my swedes into the pig-food bowl, I can’t think of anything except the next and more alarming stage of our investigation, planned for this afternoon. While Keith’s mother is having her rest upstairs we’re going to creep into the sitting room. We’re going to take the looking glass that hangs with the clothes brushes and shoehorns in the hall, and we’re going to examine the blotter on her desk, because she’ll have blotted the letters she writes and left clearly legible traces in mirror writing. If by any chance that doesn’t work, we’re also going to take the torch from the hall table, to show up the impressions the pen will have left in the surface of the blotting paper.

I’m dimly aware that my mother is fussing away on some familiar theme. I think it’s her usual: ‘You’re not making a nuisance of yourself going over to Keith’s house all the time, are you?’

‘No,’ I mumble, with my mouth full of semolina pudding; not something that Keith would ever do – or me either, if I were at his house.

‘You’re not going back there this afternoon?’

I don’t think I reply to this. I don’t think I even look at her. There’s something so hopelessly ordinary about her that it’s difficult to take account of her existence.

‘I should think his mother might like a bit of peace occasionally. She doesn’t want you boys round her feet all the time.’

I smile a secret smile to myself. If only she knew!

‘Why don’t you ask Keith to come and play here for once?’

She doesn’t understand anything, and I couldn’t begin to explain. I finish my semolina and get down from the table, still swallowing.

‘Where are you off to?’

‘Nowhere.’

‘Not to Keith’s house?’

‘No.’

Actually I’m not – not yet, because I’m not allowed to arrive there until I’m sure his father has finished lunch. I go out into the street to see if I can find anyone else to play with to pass the time. Norman Stott might be hanging around, hoping I’ll also be at a loose end. Or the Geest twins might be out in their front garden, playing one of their endless skipping games. I’m longing to tell someone about the amazing discovery we’ve made, and the important work we’re engaged upon. Or rather, not actually to tell them, but to drop a few oblique and tantalising hints. No, not even to drop hints, but to say nothing about it, and simply know what they don’t. I imagine catching one of Wanda and Wendy’s fleeting, private, superior smiles to each other, and all the time having a secret of my own, vastly superior to any that they could possibly share. I think of scuffling drearily with Norman, and doing it merely to conceal from him that I’ve really left such childish time-wasting far behind me.

But everyone’s still indoors having lunch. I walk all the way round the empty Close. Even the Avery boys’ three- wheeler is sitting abandoned in its oil stains – easy prey, with all three wheels still attached, for any passing German troops. In the absence of anyone else I should for once be prepared to exchange a few words with Barbara Berrill. She’s always hanging around when you don’t want her, pulling affected girlish faces and making affected girlish gestures. Today I could feel even more agreeably scornful of her than ever – and of course she’s nowhere to be seen.

I keep a discreet watch on Keith’s house, waiting for his father’s whistling, or some other evidence that life has resumed after lunch. Nothing. Silence. Just the self-contained perfection of the house itself, the effortless superiority which the other houses in the Close can only recognise and defer to. And now, unknown to anyone except Keith and myself, it has another advantage over them, a secret importance locked away inside its heart that no one would ever guess at.

What a surprise all the ordinary, dull citizens of the Close – my mother, the Berrills, the Geests, the McAfees – are going to be getting very shortly!

It will be an even bigger surprise for Auntie Dee, of course, when she sees the policeman on his bicycle stop at Keith’s mother’s house, because now there will be no one to look after Milly or do the shopping for her. It’s going to be very sad for Keith, too, it occurs to me, after they’ve taken his mother away, and he and his father are left alone to get on with their lives together. Mrs Elmsley will make his lunch, if she hasn’t been arrested herself. But I somehow don’t see Mrs Elmsley, with her wart and her moustache, setting out chocolate spread for tea. Will she allow me stay for tea at all?

The consequences of this investigation, I’m beginning to see, are going to be rather sad for all of us. It’s not as simple as I’d originally thought.