In any case, there was a reason for the untidiness. Auntie Dee and even the untidiness itself glowed with a kind of sacred light, like a saint and his attributes in a religious painting, because they reflected the glory of Uncle Peter.
There was a photograph of Uncle Peter in a silver frame on the mantelpiece, smiling the same recklessly open smile as Auntie Dee, his peaked RAF officer’s cap set at an angle that echoed the recklessness of the smile. The Berrill girls’ father was away in the army somewhere, the McAfees’ son was doing his bit in the Far East. But no one had an absent relative who could compare with Uncle Peter. He was a bomber pilot, and he’d flown on special missions over Germany so dangerous and so secret that Keith could only hint at them. Around the photograph were silver cups he’d won at various sports. On the shelves were rows of the adventure stories he’d kept from his boyhood, which Keith was sometimes allowed to borrow. His very absence was a kind of presence. He was manifest in the little silver brooch that Auntie Dee always had pinned to her breast, that showed the three famous initials on a blue enamel background, with the famous wings outspread around them and the famous crown above. You felt his cheerful bravery in Auntie Dee’s own brave cheerfulness, his careless disregard for danger in the very untidiness of the house and the neglect of the garden.
It was only Keith’s mother who went to Auntie Dee’s, never his father. And Auntie Dee never went to Keith’s house. The only time I saw Milly’s pushchair waiting outside Keith’s parents’ front door was later – and I knew at once that something was wrong.
Not that there seemed to me anything strange about this lopsided arrangement at the time. The ways of the Haywards were no more open to questioning or comprehension than the domestic arrangements of the Holy Family. Perhaps not even Auntie Dee, in spite of Uncle Peter, was quite up to the standards demanded by God the father.
Only one guest was always welcome at Keith’s house: teapot-eared Stephen, with the half-open mouth and the grimy tennis shoes.
*
Didn’t Stephen love his own family, then? Didn’t he appreciate at the time the qualities that he discovered in them later, and that affected him more and more deeply as he got older?
I don’t think he ever thought about whether he loved them or not. They were his family, and that was all there was to it. I suppose he appreciated some of their qualities, because he had some kind of subconscious understanding that his disadvantages in life were a necessary condition of the enthralling difference between Keith’s status in the world and his own. How could Stephen have admired Keith’s effortless good fortune in being unencumbered with a brother, if he hadn’t had to put up with one himself, if he hadn’t had to listen to him trying out his new oaths all the time (‘God in heaven’, ‘Jesus wept’) and calling everything hell’s own boring? Would he have perceived the grace and serenity of Keith’s mother quite so clearly if his own hadn’t spent most of the day in a faded apron, sighing and anxious, apparently unable to think about anything except Geoff’s swearing and Stephen’s whereabouts, and the filthy state of their room? Would even Uncle Peter have been quite such a perfect uncle if Stephen himself hadn’t had to make do with a handful of obscure aunts in flowered dresses?
Stephen’s father and Keith’s presented a particularly piquant contrast. The presence of Stephen’s father was scarcely noticeable. He was out at an office somewhere all day and often all evening, doing a job, too dull to describe, connected with controls on building materials. Once he’d been away on some business trip in the North for a whole year, and no one had ever talked about it or even noticed particularly. And even when he was at home he didn’t whistle that terrifying whistle, he didn’t call Stephen ‘old bean’ and threaten to cane him. He said very little. He often seemed like some mild-natured furry animal. He’d sit for hours at the dining-room table, with papers and files spread out in front of him, and a pair of reading glasses on the end of his nose, or else collapse into one of the scuffed armchairs in the lounge and silently doze through obscure concerts on the wireless that nobody else wanted to hear. He’d loosen his tie, and quantities of disorganised dark hair on his chest would come sprouting out of the open neck of his shirt. Then his head would sink and present the world with yet more disorganised hair, dotted in irregular tufts about the infertile landscape of his scalp. Even the backs of his hands had coarse dark hair on them – even the gaps between his turn-ups and his crumpled socks. His appearance was as unsatisfactory as Stephen’s.
Sometimes, when he was awake, he’d ask Stephen and Geoff politely what they’d been doing with themselves. He spoke slowly and carefully, as if he thought they might not understand him. And when he did finally become exasperated with them, the worst punishment he could contrive was a generalised swipe at their heads, which they effortlessly ducked. The cause of the exasperation was usually their room, and the muddle it was in, which he sometimes referred to as coodle-moodle. There was something embarrassingly private about this; no one else in the Close had ever uttered such a word. If Stephen argued back, and tried to insist that not clearing up the room saved time for more important matters such as homework, his father would occasionally produce an even more eccentric word: ‘shnick-shnack’. Stephen once repeated this to Keith, on perhaps the only occasion that he didn’t entirely believe something Keith had told him. ‘You know Auntie Dee’s baby?’ said Keith. ‘She was grown from a seed.’ ‘Shnick-shnack,’ said Stephen uncertainly, and he knew from the look on Keith’s face that he’d said the wrong thing once again.
I also remember the time Stephen told his father about the Juice moving into Trewinnick. His father gave him one of his long, thoughtful looks.
‘It’s true,’ said Stephen. ‘Keith said.’
His father laughed. ‘Oh, Keith said. In that case we need inquire no further. Shnick-shnack.’
No, Stephen must have loved his family, because loving your family was the ordinary arrangement in life, and everything in Stephen’s family, or so it seemed to him, even the coodle-moodle, was quite extraordinarily ordinary. But where he longed to be was at Keith’s house. And what he loved most at Keith’s house was being invited to tea.
Those teas! At once I taste the chocolate spread on the thick plank of bread. I feel in my fingertips the diamond pattern incised in the tumblers of lemon barley. I see the shining dark table in the dining room, where Keith and I are allowed to sit on our own, unfolding napkins from the bone napkin rings, helping ourselves from the tall jug of lemon barley covered by a lace weighted with four blue beads.
Between the silver candlesticks on the mantelpiece is a silver ashtray propped upright and inscribed ‘WWLTC. Senior Mixed Doubles. Runners-up – W. P. Hayward and R. J. Whitman, 27 July 1929.’ W. P. Hayward and R. J. Whitman, as Keith long ago explained, were his parents before they were married, and the WWLTC was the Wimbledon World Lawn Tennis Club. They would have been world champions if they hadn’t been somehow cheated out of it by another couple who were members of the same sinister organisation now entrenched in Trewinnick. On the sideboard, between two cut-glass decanters, is Uncle Peter, in another silver frame. His smile’s more restrained here in Keith’s parents’ house, and his officer’s cap is straight. Every detail is sharp on the eagle, crown, and thickly embroidered laurel leaves above the peak, and on the pilot’s wings above his left breast pocket.
At the end of an afternoon when Stephen has stayed to tea, Keith taps on the sitting-room door, and ushers him into his mother’s presence to make his farewell speech. Balanced on an occasional table by the sofa is a tea tray of her own, with a silver teapot, a silver milk jug, and a little silver box containing tiny pills of saccharine. She’s on the sofa, with her feet tucked up beneath her, reading her library book. Or she’s sitting at a desk in the far corner, writing the letters she posts so copiously, watched by another dozen or so silver- framed family photographs ranged over the desk in front of her. Stephen doesn’t dare look directly at anything in this holy place. Keith’s mother glances up a
nd smiles. ‘Oh, is Stephen going home?’ she asks Keith. ‘You must invite him again another time.’
Stephen steps forward and delivers his speech. ‘Thank you for having me,’ he mumbles.
‘As long as you both had fun together,’ she says.
I don’t suppose Stephen’s words meant very much to him at the time, so let me say them again now, on his behalf, before everything that was going to happen happened. With sincere gratitude, and a sense of wonder at my good fortune that has grown only stronger over the years. Gratitude not only to Keith’s mother, but to Keith himself, to all the others after him whose adjutant and audience I was, and to everyone else who wrote and performed the drama of life in which I had a small, often frightening, but always absorbing part:
Thank you for having me. Thank you, thank you.
So what was the source of that disconcerting perfume?
It wasn’t the neat standard roses in the Haywards’ front garden, nor the muddle of heaven knows what in ours. It wasn’t the limes in front of the Hardiments, or the buddleia at the Stotts and the McAfees, or the honeysuckle at Mr Gort’s and the Geests.
I walk slowly back down the street, looking at the houses opposite the Haywards, trying to be sure. It didn’t come from No. 6 – that was the Berrills, and a barbed-wire entanglement of overgrown wild roses … No. 5 was the Geests … At No. 3 we’re back to the Pinchers. So it can only have been this one, in between the Geests and the Pinchers, No. 4.
I stop and examine it carefully. The rustic sign on the wrought-iron gate says Meadowhurst, and there’s not much garden visible apart from four neat tubs of geraniums and three cars parked on the flagged hard standing. The house itself looks unfamiliar to me. Its whole style is subtly different from all the other houses in the street – it was plainly built much later. Yes, this was the place – our Arcadia, our Atlantis, our Garden of Eden, the unclaimed territory left after Miss Durrant’s house was gutted by a stray German incendiary bomb.
It was called Braemar in those days. Already, when Stephen and all the other children in the Close played there, the brambles and fireweed and dog-roses had begun to conceal the melancholy little landscape of uncleared rubble covering the foundations of the house in which Miss Durrant had lived and died. The whole garden was running wild, like the Berrill girls, and the tall green hedge at the front, which Miss Durrant had kept so rectilinear, and behind which she had maintained her privacy so carefully, had lost its shape and grown into a straggling underwood that closed the entrance to this secret kingdom completely and lost it to the world.
Stephen spent a lot of time concealed in the midst of those unremarkable dull-green bushes that had once been a hedge. He scarcely noticed them, though. Not, at any rate, until some time towards the end of that June, when they came into blossom around him, and half-suffocated him with the coarse sweetness that would pursue him down the years.
I gaze at the four tubs of geraniums and the three cars. Of the bushes now there’s no longer a trace. I can’t help laughing at myself when I remember what they were, because the species is so commonplace, so despised and ridiculed, so associated with the repression and concealment of all the wild feelings it seems to have released in me. Let me say the name and get it out into the open, once and for all.
The source of all my great unrest is this: plain ordinary privet.
Where the story began, though, was where most of our projects and adventures began – at Keith’s house. At the tea table, in fact – I can hear the soft clinking made by the four blue beads that weighted the lace cloth covering the tall jug of lemon barley …
No, wait. I’ve got that wrong. The glass beads are clinking against the glass of the jug because the cover’s stirring in the breeze. We’re outside, in the middle of the morning, near the chicken run at the bottom of the garden, building the transcontinental railway.
Yes, because I can hear something else, as well – the trains on the real railway, as they emerge from the cutting on to the embankment above our heads just beyond the wire fence. I can see the showers of sparks they throw up from the live rail. The jug of lemon barley isn’t our tea – it’s our elevenses, waiting with two biscuits each on a tray his mother has brought us out from the house, and set down on the red brick path beside us. It’s as she walks away, up the red brick path, that Keith so calmly and quietly drops his bombshell.
When is this? The sun’s shining as the beads clink against the jug, but I have a feeling that there’s still a trace of fallen apple blossom on the earthworks for the transcontinental railway, and that his mother’s worried about whether we’re warm enough out there. ‘You’ll come inside, chaps, won’t you, if you get chilly?’ May still, perhaps. Why aren’t we at school? Perhaps it’s a Saturday or a Sunday. No, there’s the feel of a weekday morning in the air; it’s unmistakable, even if the season isn’t. Something that doesn’t quite fit here, as so often when one tries to assemble different bits to make a whole.
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.’
3
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.
Spies (2002) Page 3