Spies (2002)

by Frayn, Michael

  Keith opens the door completely. Stephen hurriedly scuffs his feet over the metal bars of the shoe scraper, then again over the doormat inside, and the sock with the failed garter slips back down. The door closes behind him.

  This is where the story began. At the Haywards. On the day when Keith, my best friend, first pronounced those six simple words that turned our world inside out.

  I wonder what it’s like inside that front door now. The first thing you saw then, even as the door swung open, was a polished oak hall stand, with clothes brushes, shoe horns and button hooks hanging from it, and a rack for sticks and umbrellas. Then, as you went inside, dark oak panelling, with two matching watercolours of the Trossachs by Alfred Hollings RA, and two china plates covered with blue pagodas and little blue rice-hatted figures crossing little blue footbridges. Between the doors into the living room and the dining room stood a grandmother clock that chimed the quarters, in and out of sequence with the clocks in other rooms, filling the house four times an hour with ethereal, ever-changing music.

  And in the middle of it all, my friend Keith. The picture’s no longer monochrome, evidently, because now I can see the colours of our belts. Keith’s, also fastened with a metal snake curled into the shape of an S, has two yellow bands on the black background, mine two green bands. We’re socially colour-coded for ease of reference. Yellow and black are the colours of the right local preparatory school, where all the boys are going to take, and pass, the Common Entrance exam to a public school, and where everyone has his own cricket bat, his own boots and pads, and a special long bag to put them in. Green and black are the colours of the wrong school, where half the boys are gangling oafs like my brother Geoff, who have already taken Common Entrance and failed, and where we play cricket with splintered communal bats – some of us wearing brown gym shoes and our ordinary grey shorts.

  I was acutely aware, even then, of my incomprehensible good fortune in being Keith’s friend. Now I think about it with adult hindsight it seems more surprising still. Not just his belt but everything about him was yellow and black; everything about me was plainly green and black. He was the officer corps in our two-man army. I was the Other Ranks – and grateful to be so.

  We had a great many enterprises and projects in hand, and in all of them he was the leader and I was the led. I see now that he was only the first in a whole series of dominant figures in my life whose disciple I became. His authority was entirely warranted by his intellectual and imaginative superiority. It was Keith, not me, who’d devised the overhead cableway that connected our two houses, along which messages could be catapulted back and forth, like bills and change in the local grocers, and who’d gone on to develop the amazing underground railway, operated by pneumatic pressure, like another cash system we’d seen on expeditions to a nearby department store, through which we could ourselves pass swiftly and effortlessly back and forth, unobserved by the rest of the neighbourhood. Or, at any rate, the cableway and pneumatic tubes along which we and our messages would pass, as soon we put the plans into effect.

  It was Keith who’d discovered that Trewinnick, the mysterious house next to his with the perpetually drawn blackout, was occupied by the Juice, a sinister organisation apparently behind all kinds of plots and swindles. It was Keith who’d discovered, one Sunday evening on the railway embankment behind the houses, the secret passageway through which the Juice came and went. Or would have discovered in another moment or two, if his father hadn’t ordered him to be home in time to pipeclay his cricket boots, ready for school in the morning.

  So now Keith and Stephen are standing in the hall, amidst the darkness of the panelling and the gleam of the silver and the delicate chiming of the clocks, deciding what they’re going to do this afternoon. Or rather Stephen’s waiting for Keith to decide. He may have some chore imposed by his father, which Stephen will be allowed to help with. Maintaining his bicycle, for instance, or sweeping the floor around his father’s workbench in the garage. The bicycle in particular requires a great deal of maintenance, because Keith cycles to school each day, and he has a special sports model which has to be kept oiled with special oil, and cleaned with special cleaners until its green frame gleams and its chromium handlebars and rims and three-speed hub glitter in the sun. Cycling’s plainly the right way to go to school; the bus which Stephen catches each day at the cracked concrete bus stop on the main road is plainly the wrong way. Green’s the right colour for a bicycle, just as it’s the wrong one for a belt or a bus.

  Or they might be going upstairs to shut themselves away in Keith’s playroom. His playroom’s as well ordered as the rest of the house. There are no stupid brothers or sisters to take up space and confuse everything, as there are in Stephen’s house and all the other houses in the Close where there are children. All Keith’s toys are his own, neatly ranged in drawers and cupboards, often in the boxes they came in. There’s a deliciously rightful scent of watchmaker’s oil from all the solidly engineered clockwork racing cars and speedboats. There are elaborate mechanical constructions, properly assembled from construction sets, with intermeshing cogwheels and ratchets and worm gears, and perfect scale models of Spitfires and Hurricanes properly built from kits, with celluloid canopies, and retractable undercarriages set in bellies of the most exquisite duck-egg blue. In some of the drawers are battery-powered gadgets – torches that shine in three different colours, and little optical instruments that pass light through lenses and prisms – all of them in actual working condition. There’s a shelf of boys’ stories in which desert islands are colonised, missions flown in biplanes, and secret passages discovered. There’s another shelf of books that tell you how to build a superheterodyne wireless set out of empty cigar boxes, and how to make an egg turn into a silk handkerchief.

  If it’s fine, and his father hasn’t just cut the lawn, they might be going out to play in the garden. They’re constructing a railway system which runs from the lowlands of the flower beds behind the garage up into the high mountain passes of the air-raid shelter, where spectacular bridges carry it over breathtaking gorges, then through the dangerous bandit country in the kitchen garden, and on down to the important industrial complex and dock installations behind the cucumber frame. Or will do, as soon as Keith has secured all the necessary way leaves from his father.

  They might go out for a walk, up to the golf course, perhaps, where Keith has seen some strange wild animal, a kind of talking monkey, hiding among the gorse bushes, or to the smallholdings in Paradise, where he once saw a crashed German plane with the pilot sitting dead in the cockpit. As they walk they talk about their plans to build a man-carrying glider that can be launched from the roof, or a real car with a real steering wheel. The glider and the car have of course been designed by Keith, but the car’s a project in which Stephen’s actively involved, because it’s to be powered by dozens of old clockwork motors not taken from Keith’s inviolable toys but cannibalised from the ample supply of broken ones in Stephen’s muddled toy cupboard.

  There are a great many projects in hand and a great many mysteries to be investigated. One possibility, though, is too outlandish ever to be mooted – the idea of going to play at Stephen’s house. What would be the point? There’s no great intercontinental railway being driven through the uninteresting savannahs of his back garden, and the idea never crosses Stephen’s mind of introducing anyone, least of all Keith, to the room in which he and Geoff not only play but sleep and do their homework. The presence of the two beds is unsuitable enough; Keith’s bedroom is quite separate from his playroom. Worse is what’s in and on and around the beds – a hopeless tangle of string and plasticine and electric flex and forgotten socks and dust, of old cardboard boxes of mouldering butterflies and broken birds’ eggs left over from abandoned projects in the past.

  I try to imagine the impossible happening, and Keith asking his mother if he might play at Stephen’s house … I laugh at the thought. His mother’s reclining on the sofa in the sitting room, looking up from her
library book. She raises her perfectly plucked eyebrows a quarter of an inch. What is she going to say?

  Actually I know precisely what she’s going to say: ‘I think you’d better ask Daddy about that, darling.’

  And what would Daddy say, if Keith somehow found reason and courage enough to persist with this preposterous request? Would he actually turn to look at Stephen for once, in sheer astonishment at the effrontery of the invitation? Of course not. Nor would he reply to the question. He’d simply say something like ‘Have you oiled your cricket bat yet, old chap?’ And that would be that; they’d go to the kitchen, ask Mrs Elmsley to give them a newspaper to spread over the floor, and they’d oil his cricket bat.

  What puzzles me now I look back on it is that Keith’s parents had ever allowed their son to build underground tunnels and overhead cable cars to Stephen’s house, to go birdsnesting and monkey hunting with him, to invite him to play with his perfectly cared-for toys and help clean his special sports bicycle. It’s possible that his father had simply never noticed Stephen’s existence, but his mother certainly had. She didn’t speak to him personally, but she’d sometimes address him and Keith collectively, as ‘you two’ or ‘chaps’. ‘Would you two like a glass of milk?’ she might say in the middle of the morning, looking at Keith. Or: ‘Come on, chaps. Time to pack up your toys.’ Sometimes she’d commission Keith to say something to Stephen individually on her behalf: ‘Darling, doesn’t Stephen have homework to do …? Keith, precious, do you want to invite Stephen to stay to tea?’

  She spoke softly and smilingly, with a kind of calm amusement at the world and no excessive movement of her lips. She spent a lot of the day with her feet up on the sofa, or resting in her bedroom, and rested is how she always seemed. She’d appear in the doorway of the playroom, rested, calm, and composed, to announce that she was going down the road to Auntie Dee’s, or to the shops. ‘You boys will be all right, won’t you? You’ve got things to keep you occupied?’ If she wasn’t going to the shops or Auntie Dee’s she’d be going to the post. She posted letters, it sometimes seemed to Stephen, several times a day.

  Keith’s father, on the other hand, spent the day working. Not in some unseen office, like Stephen’s father and everybody else’s father who wasn’t away in the Services, but in the garden and the kitchen garden, and around the house, for ever digging and dunging, and trimming and pruning, for ever undercoating and painting, and wiring and rewiring, for ever making perfection yet more perfect. Even the chickens at the bottom of the garden lived irreproachably elegant lives, parading haughtily about a spacious kingdom defined by rectilinear walls of gleaming wire mesh, and retiring to lay clean brown eggs in a hen house where the familiar smells of feed and droppings mingled tastefully with the scent of fresh creosote without and fresh whitewash within.

  The headquarters of Keith’s father’s operations, though, were the garage. The double doors at the front were never opened, but there was a small door in the side, just across the yard from the kitchen, and occasionally, standing behind Keith when he had to go and ask his father for permission to walk on the lawn, or lay out railway track on the paths, Stephen would catch a glimpse of the wonderful private kingdom inside. Keith’s father would be intent upon some piece of wood or metal held fast in the great vice on his workbench, dextrously filing or sawing or planing; or sharpening his great range of chisels on a rotary grindstone; or searching in the hundred tidy drawers and pigeonholes above and around the bench for exactly the right grade of glass paper, exactly the right gauge of screw. A characteristic scent hung in the air. What was it? Sawdust, certainly, and machine oil. Swept concrete, perhaps. And car.

  The car was another perfection – a small family saloon with constellations of chromium-plated fitments glittering in the darkness of the garage, its bodywork and engine spotlessly maintained in constant readiness for the end of the war, when there would be petrol to run it again. Sometimes the only part of Keith’s father to be seen was his legs, projecting from a pool of light underneath the car, as he carried out the full regular schedule of checks and oil changes. All it was missing was its wheels. It stood in perfect immobility on four carefully carpentered wooden chocks, to prevent its being commandeered, as Keith explained, by invading Germans. The wheels themselves were hung neatly on the wall, alongside a picnic hamper, tennis rackets in wooden presses, deflated airbeds and rubber rings – all the apparatus of a forgotten life of leisure which had been suspended, like so many things, for the Duration, that great overarching condition shaping all their lives in so many different ways.

  Stephen once plucked up courage to ask Keith privately if the Germans, with the evil ingenuity for which they were notorious, might not take the wheels down from the wall and put them back on the car. Keith explained to him that the wheel nuts which secured them were locked away in a secret drawer by his father’s bedside, together with the revolver with which he’d been armed when he was an officer in the Great War, and with which he was going to give any invading Germans this time a nasty surprise.

  Keith’s father worked and worked – and as he worked he whistled. He whistled as richly and effortlessly as a songbird, an infinitely complex, meandering tune that never reached a resting place any more than his work did. He rarely found a moment to speak. When he did, the words were quick and dry and impatient. ‘Door – paint – wet,’ he’d inform Keith’s mother. If he was in a good mood he’d address Keith as ‘old chap’. Sometimes this would become ‘old boy’, which had imperative overtones: ‘Bike away in the shed, old boy.’ Occasionally, though, his lips drew back to form what appeared to be a smile, and he’d call Keith ‘old bean’. ‘If that toy aeroplane of yours touches the greenhouse, old bean,’ he’d smile, ‘I’ll cane you.’ Keith evidently believed him. So did Stephen; there was a selection of canes waiting among the sticks and umbrellas on the rack in the hall. Stephen he never addressed at all – never so much as looked at. Even if it was Stephen who was threatening the damage to the greenhouse, it was Keith who was ‘old bean’ and Keith who’d get caned, because Stephen didn’t exist. But then Stephen never spoke to him either, or even looked directly at him, whether he was smiling or not; perhaps because he was too frightened to, or perhaps because if you’re non-existent you can’t.

  There were other reasons why Keith’s father inspired respect. He’d won a medal in the Great War, Keith had told Stephen, for killing five Germans. He’d run them through with a bayonet, though exactly how his father had managed to attach a bayonet to the famous revolver Stephen didn’t have the courage to ask. There the bayonet still was, though, chillingly bouncing on Keith’s father’s khaki-trousered buttock every weekend as he marched off in his Home Guard uniform; though it wasn’t really the Home Guard that he was going to, as Keith had explained – it was to special undercover work for the Secret Service.

  The Haywards were impeccable. And yet they tolerated Stephen! He was very possibly the only person in the Close who ever set foot inside their home, or even in their garden. I try to imagine Norman Stott clumping about Keith’s playroom … or Barbara Berrill being invited to tea … My imagination flounders. I can’t make it see even perfectly respectable and self-contained children like the Geest twins, or the pale musicians from No. 1, playing a decorous game of he among the rose beds. I can’t picture any of the grown¬ ups there, for that matter. I stand behind Keith in my mind as he taps at the door of the sitting room … ‘Come in,’ says his mother’s voice, scarcely even raised. He opens the door to reveal, politely taking tea with his mother – who? Not Mrs Stott or Mrs Sheldon, obviously. Not my mother (think of that, now!). Not Mrs Pincher …

  No one. Not even Mrs Hardiment or Mrs McAfee.

  But then it’s impossible to imagine Keith’s mother at any of the other houses in the Close.

  Except at Auntie Dee’s.

  Auntie Dee was yet another amazing ornament of the Hayward family.

  She lived three doors down, on the same side of the street, almost opposite Ste
phen’s house, behind chocolate-brown half-timbering and flowering almond. My mother and the rest of the street knew her as Mrs Tracey. Keith’s mother was tall; Auntie Dee was short. Keith’s mother was unhurried and calmly smiling; Auntie Dee was always in a rush, and smiling not calmly at all, but with a reckless display of white teeth and cheerfulness. Keith’s mother was back and forth to the shops all the time to get things for Auntie Dee as well as herself, because Auntie Dee was so tied by little Milly, and when she wasn’t shopping she was in and out of Auntie Dee’s looking after Milly while Auntie Dee went.

  Sometimes Keith’s mother would send Keith down the road in her place, carrying two or three new-laid eggs from that model hen house at the end of the garden, or a newspaper full of freshly cut spring greens, and Stephen would go with him. Auntie Dee’s unguarded smile would light up as soon as she opened the door to us, and she’d speak, not just to Keith, but quite directly to both of us, as if I existed just as much as Keith did. ‘Hello, Keith! You’ve had your hair cut! How smart! Hello, Stephen! Your Mummy said you and Geoff had both had terrible snuffles. Are you better now …? Oh, I’m so glad! Sit down and play with Milly for a moment while I see if I can find you a slice of cake each.’

  And Keith and I would sit awkwardly in the sitting room, amidst the muddle of baby toys on the floor, looking disapprovingly at Milly as she brought us her dolls and picture books, and tried to climb into our laps, as smiling and trustful as her mother. The house was almost as untidy as my own home. The back garden, outside the French windows, was even worse. The grass on the untended lawn was as high as the rusting croquet hoops left over from earlier summers. Keith always had one of his father’s disapproving looks on his face while we were in Auntie Dee’s house, his eyelids slightly lowered, his lips pursed, as if he were about to start whistling. As I understood it, though, this was no reflection upon his aunt’s perfect aunt-likeness. Aunts were supposed to be welcoming, cheerful, and untidy. They were supposed to have little children who smiled at you and tried to climb into your lap. His disapproving look was simply the look that a properly brought-up nephew was supposed to have in an aunt’s house. It was further evidence of his family’s unshakeable correctness.