Spies (2002)

by Frayn, Michael

  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, beca
use 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.

  But then what can we do, if she’s a German spy? We have to make sacrifices for the War Effort. We have to endure hardships for the sake of the Duration.

  I hear whistling. Round the side of Keith’s house I catch a glimpse of his father, heading in the direction of the kitchen garden. I put all feelings of pity behind me, and open their garden gate.

  ‘You chaps have got things to keep you occupied, have you?’ says Keith’s mother, putting her head round the playroom door on her way to retire for her rest. We nod mutely. ‘Just try not to make too much noise, then.’

  We never make too much noise. But now we make no noise at all. We sit on the floor in absolute silence, not looking at each other, straining our ears until we hear the soft, well- oiled click of her bedroom door closing. Then we creep downstairs, freezing at every creak of a board or squeak of fingers on banister. Very softly Keith takes down the looking glass from its hook, and picks up the torch from the hall table. Very slowly he turns the handle of the sitting-room door, then pauses again, looking back at the stairs.

  The grandmother clock ticks. There’s no other sound. I wish I were back at home.

  He eases the door open. Inside the room the silence is more absolute still. Every suggestion of sound is absorbed by the thicknesses of the pale green carpet, of the dark green velvet curtains and the matching upholstery. We glide across to the desk as silently as Sioux. The darkness of its polished surface is lit by the gleam of silver and its reflections: a paper knife, a table lighter, a pair of candle snuffers, and the various silver-framed photographs reclining at dignified angles on unseen elbows. Keith opens the two leather-bound wings of the blotter.

  A virgin snowfield confronts us, with no trace of blotted mirror writing. He puts the looking glass aside and switches on the torch. He lays it down at the edge of the blotter, in the way that we’ve read about in various books, so that it casts long shadows like the setting sun, then bends down and peers through the magnifying glass from his stamp-collecting kit. Slowly, systematically, he inches his way from the centre outwards.

  I look at the photographs in the silver frames while I wait. From one of them a girl of about the same age as Keith and myself gazes solemnly back at me, slightly out of focus. She’s standing in a garden dappled with sunshine, wearing long white gloves that cover her bare arms up to her elbows and a wide-brimmed summer hat several sizes too big for her. It’s Keith’s mother, I realise uneasily, and she’s playing at being the grown-up she has since become. She has a protective arm around another little girl, several years younger, who’s holding a doll and looking up at her, trusting but very slightly apprehensive. It’s Auntie Dee, playing at being her elder sister’s little girl. There’s something almost improper about the sight of them like this, stripped of their protective adulthood, caught out in a childish pretence, and something quite upsetting about Auntie Dee’s innocent ignorance of what her older sister will one day become.

  Keith straightens up and silently hands me the magnifying glass. I bend over and imitate his methodical slowness. There are impressions in the blotting paper, but they’re very faint and confused. Some of them might be the shapes of overlaid words. I think I can make out a few odd letters, and perhaps even one or two syllables: ‘Thurs’, possibly, and ‘if you’.

  Keith whispers in my ear: ‘Do you see it?’ He points. I peer at the area around his enormous fingernail. I think I can distinguish a figure 8 and a figure 2. Or else a figure 3 and a question mark.

  ‘Code,’ whispers Keith.

  He makes a note of various letters and digits in the logbook, then closes up the blotter. I feel nothing but relief that the operation’s over and that we can get out of the room before his mother wakes up or his father comes back to the house. But Keith puts a restraining hand on my arm; he hasn’t finished yet. He softl
y slides open the long drawer beneath the desktop. His mother goes on gazing at us out of her silver frame as we bend down again to examine its contents.

  Headed writing paper … envelopes … books of tuppenny-halfpenny stamps … Everything neatly ordered, with plenty of space … An address book …

  Keith takes out the address book and turns over the pages. The entries are written in a neat, clear hand. Ashtons (cleaners), ABC Stationers … Mr and Mrs James Butterworth, Marjorie Beer, Bishop (window cleaner) … Who are Mr and Mrs Butterworth and Marjorie Beer? They may be code names, of course … Doctor, Dentist … There are no more than a handful of names under each letter, and a lot of them seem to be tradesmen. I notice ‘Hucknall (Butcher) …’ No one in the Close, so far as I can see, except Mr and Mrs Peter Tracey … Keith examines each of the entries through the magnifying glass, and transcribes a few of them into the logbook.

  Meanwhile I look at the photographs again. Three laughing figures in tennis whites: Keith’s mother and Auntie Dee, with Uncle Peter lounging boyishly between them, and beside them a fourth figure whose lifeless clipped grey hair and grimly ironic smile have already taken on the character I find so alarming. The same four on a beach, with Uncle Peter standing on his head, and Keith’s mother and Auntie Dee holding him by his ankles. Then a serious young bride standing in front of a church door, shyly holding her veil back from her face, the long white train of her dress tumbled elaborately down the steps in front of her: Keith’s mother, her arm tucked demurely through the arm of a grey tailcoat with an ironic smile above it.