Next to this last one, arranged beside it so as to make a pair, another bride, almost identical with the first, in front of what appears to be the same church door, with the same train tumbled down the same steps. This bride’s a little shorter, though, a little bolder looking, a little more up to date in some indefinable way, and the arm she’s holding is encased in a shade of grey that I know represents not grey at all but air-force blue, and that belongs to a bridegroom whose hair and smile are both still boyish.
Mother and father, aunt and uncle – all four of them watch us out of the past as we work to penetrate the secrets of the present and dismantle their future.
At the back of the drawer Keith has found a little pocket diary. I feel a fresh wave of alarm. We’re not going to look in her diary, are we? Diaries are private … But already he’s opened it, and already I’m looking over his shoulder as he turns the pages.
Again the entries are sparse: ‘Doctor … Milly’s b’day … curtains cleaned … wedding anniv …’ A few seem to be social occasions: ‘Bridge Curwens … Ted’s parents … Ted to OH dinner …’ A lot of them relate to K. ‘K’s term starts (blazer cleaned, cricket shirts) … K’s sports day … K to dentist …’
I don’t know how Keith notices the first of the secret signs. I realise that he’s stopped turning the pages, and brought the diary very close to his eyes, the magnifying glass forgotten. He looks at me. He’s wearing the special expression he has when something really important occurs. It’s the way he looked at me as the first of the vertebrae emerged from the earth at the end of Mr Gort’s garden.
‘What?’ I whisper. He hands the diary to me, and points to the space for a Friday in January.
It seems at first to be empty. Then I see that there’s some kind of handwritten mark, even smaller than the other entries, nestling inconspicuously in the little gap between the date itself and the current phase of the moon: a tiny x.
A strange tingling feeling goes through me. This is something quite different from what we’ve been recording up to now. Whatever this inconspicuous symbol means, it’s plainly something that’s not meant to be read or understood by anyone else. We’ve stumbled across something that’s actually secret.
Keith’s still looking at me with his special expression, waiting to see how I respond. There’s a certain light in his eyes that I don’t like. He can see that my courage is beginning to falter again, as it did when he held up the first of the buried vertebrae, and I didn’t want to go on digging. His expectations are fulfilled: my interest in continuing with the current investigation, I discover, has suddenly evaporated.
I put the diary back in the drawer.
‘We’d better just leave it,’ I whisper.
The corner of Keith’s mouth registers an almost imperceptible moment of superiority. I remember how often I’ve been humiliated by him like this in the past. Things start as a game, and then they turn into a test, which I fail.
He takes the diary out of the drawer again, and slowly turns the pages over.
‘But if it’s something private …,’ I plead.
‘Put it in the logbook,’ he orders.
He watches as I reluctantly scribble the date, and mark an x against it. I’m halfway to the door before I realise that he’s still by the desk, turning over more pages of the diary.
‘Something else,’ he says. ‘A different thing.’
I hesitate. But in the end, of course, I have to go back and look over his shoulder. He points to a Saturday in February. There’s a tiny exclamation mark next to the date.
‘Make a note of it,’ he says.
He turns the pages again. More x’s. More exclamation marks. As I record them, a pattern begins to emerge. The x, whatever it is, happens once a month. Sometimes it’s crossed out and entered a day or two earlier or later. The exclamation mark, however, has happened only three times so far this year, and at irregular intervals – on a Saturday in January, on another Saturday in March, and on a Tuesday in April. This last date, I’m somehow disturbed to see, is also marked ‘wedding anniv’.
A gathering sense of mystery begins to overwhelm my uneasiness. I look at Keith’s mother smiling shyly out at us from behind her veil. I can’t take it in. She actually is a German spy. And not in the way that Mr Gort is a murderer, or that the people who come and go at Trewinnick are members of some sinister organisation. Not in the way that anyone in the street might be a murderer or a German spy. She is quite literally … a German spy.
We go once again through the list I’ve written in the logbook. There’s something she does once a month. Something she has to keep track of. Some secret thing. What is it?
‘She has meetings with someone,’ I suggest. ‘Secret meetings. They’re all planned in advance – only then sometimes the person can’t come, so they have to change the date …’
Keith watches me, saying nothing. Now I’ve got my brain started, it’s racing faster than his for once.
‘Then every now and then something else happens,’ I go on slowly. ‘Something surprising, something that wasn’t planned …’
Keith’s smiling his little smile, I realise. He’s not behind me at all – he’s somehow ahead of me again, and simply biding his time to tantalise me.
‘The meetings with x,’ he whispers finally. ‘When are they supposed to happen?’
I feel the skin prickle on the back of my neck. From the sound of his voice there’s something eerie coming, but I can’t guess what it’s going to be. ‘Once a month,’ I whisper helplessly.
He slowly shakes his head.
‘Yes – look. January, February …’
He shakes his head again. ‘Once every four weeks,’ he says.
I’m lost. ‘What’s the difference?’
He waits, smiling his little smile, while I go through the diary again. I suppose it’s true. Each month the date seems to be a little earlier. ‘So?’
‘Look at the moon,’ he whispers.
I go back to the beginning, looking at the phases of the moon next to each of the little x’s. Yes, the x’s are approximately keeping step with the lunar calendar. Each month the x is close to the same sign, the full black circle. I look up at Keith.
‘The night of no moon,’ he whispers.
The hairs rise on my neck again. I can see the possibilities now as clearly as he can – the unlit plane landing on the fairway of the golf course, the parachutist falling softly through the perfect darkness …
I turn over the pages of the diary. The last x was two nights ago. The next is in twenty-six days’ time. After that – nothing. No x’s, no exclamation marks.
One last meeting, then, in the dark of the moon …
And suddenly the whole house is full of cascading, tangled fairy music. All three clocks are chiming simultaneously.
At the first shimmering tintinnabulations we’ve already jumped out of our skins, thrown the diary back into the drawer, slammed the drawer shut, and got halfway to the door.
And there’s Keith’s mother, standing on the threshold, as shocked to find herself face to face with us as we are to find ourselves face to face with her.
‘What are you doing in here?’ she demands.
‘Nothing,’ says Keith.
‘Nothing,’ I confirm.
‘Not taking something out of my desk?’
‘No.’
‘No.’
Did she see us? Does she realise? How long has she been watching us? All three of us stand our ground, not knowing quite how to resolve the situation.
‘Why have you got such funny looks on your faces?’
Keith and I glance at each other. It’s true – we do have funny looks on our faces. But it’s difficult to know what sort of look would be appropriate for talking to someone who we know has just had a secret rendezvous with a German courier. And when we mustn’t let her know that we know.
She puts the library book she’s holding down on the desk, picks up another, then hesitates, frowning. ‘Isn’t that your magnif
ying glass?’ she demands. ‘And what’s the torch doing in here? And the looking glass?’
‘We were just playing,’ says Keith.
‘Well, you know you shouldn’t be doing it in here,’ she says. ‘Why don’t you go outside and play?’
Silently Keith puts the magnifying glass in his pocket. Silently we replace the torch and the looking glass. I look back as Keith opens the front door. His mother’s still watching us thoughtfully from the sitting-room doorway, almost as curious about our behaviour as we are about hers.
And everything in the world has changed beyond imagination or recall.
*
So now we’re playing outside, as we’ve been told.
It’s just possible, it seems to me as I look back on it down the corridor of the years, that this was another turning point in the story – that everything thereafter would have followed a quite different course if Keith’s mother hadn’t made that simple, offhand suggestion – if we’d gone back to his playroom and discussed our shattering discovery there, in the serene and well-ordered world of his official playthings. But outside the house there’s only one place where we can talk without being observed or overheard, and once we get there we’re across the frontier into another country altogether.
If you know the right spot, in the shrubs that were once the front hedge of Braemar, you can part the screen of vegetation and crawl along a kind of low passageway under the branches into a secret chamber that we’ve hacked out in the very heart of the thicket. Its floor is bare, hardened earth. A green twilight filters through the leaves. Even when it rains it hardly penetrates this far. When we’re in here no one in the world can see us. We’ve come a long journey from the chocolate spread and the silver picture frames.
Two summers ago this was our camp, where we plotted various expeditions into the African jungle and took refuge from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Last summer it was our hide, where we did our birdwatching. Now it’s to be the headquarters of a much more serious enterprise.
Keith sits cross-legged on the ground, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. I sit cross-legged opposite him, hardly conscious of the twigs sticking into my back or the tiny creatures dangling on threads that catch in my hair and fall down the neck of my shirt. I imagine my mouth’s hanging half-open once again as I humbly wait for Keith to announce what we’re to think and what we’re to do.
I find it very difficult now to reconstruct what I’m feeling – it’s so large and complex. Perhaps the largeness of the feelings is the most noticeable thing about them. After all the days and years of small fears and boredoms, of small burdens and discontents, importance has come upon us. We’ve been entrusted with a great task. We have to defend our homeland from its enemies. I understand now that it will involve frightening difficulties and wrenching conflicts of loyalty. I have a profound intimation of the solemnity and sadness of things.
I feel more strongly than ever the honour of my association with Keith. His family have taken on the heroic proportions of characters in a legend – noble father and traitorous mother playing out the never-ending conflict between good and evil, between light and dark. Now Keith himself is charged by fate with taking his place beside them, upholding the honour of the one by punishing the dishonour of the other. And I have been granted a modest foothold of my own in the story, as the loyal squire and sword-bearer that a hero requires.
I think I also understand that he’s more than a protagonist in the events we’re living through – that he’s in some mysterious way their creator. He’s done it before, with the murders committed by Mr Gort, for instance, and the building of the transcontinental railway, or the underground passage between our two houses. In each case he uttered the words, and the words became so. He told the story, and the story came to life. Never before, though, has it ever become real, not really real, in the way that it has this time.
So now I sit gazing at him, waiting for him to announce how we’re going to conduct the adventure he’s launched us upon. He sits gazing at the ground, deep inside his own thoughts, apparently unaware of my existence. He has moods when he finds me as unnoticeable as his father does.
One of my tasks as his sword-bearer, though, is to prompt his imagination by offering useless suggestions.
‘We’d better tell your father.’
No response. I understand why not as soon as I’ve said the words, and the picture of what they represent comes into my mind. I see us approaching his father as he works in the garden and whistles. We wait for him to look round or draw breath. He does neither. Keith has to raise his voice. ‘Daddy, Stephen and I have been reading Mummy’s diary …’
No. ‘Or the police,’ I try.
I’m not quite sure, though, what I mean by this in practical terms. I’ve no experience of reporting things to the police – I’ve no idea even where you find police when you want them. Police happen when they happen, walking slowly past the shops, cycling slowly up the street. And now, yes, a policeman obligingly comes pedalling up the street inside my head. ‘Excuse me,’ says Keith politely, while I wait behind him. The policeman stops, and sets a foot to the ground, as he did that day outside Auntie Dee’s house. He looks at me and Keith distrustfully, as he did at the children running excitedly up the street beside him then. ‘My mother,’ he says, ‘is …’
But the words will not imagine themselves. Not said to a policeman. In any case there’s no response from Keith.
My next try: ‘We could write an anonymous letter to Mr McAfee.’
Mr McAfee turns into a kind of policeman sometimes, in the evening or at the weekend, though with a flat peaked cap instead of a helmet, and at any rate we know where to find him – at home next door to Keith’s house. We wrote him an anonymous letter once before, laying information against Mr Gort. Keith wrote it himself, in a disguised hand. He addressed it to Mr Mercaffy, and told him that we’d found four human vertebrae. There’s no sign so far of Mr Gort’s being arrested.
Keith rouses himself from his trance. He feels under the branches at the back of the chamber for the concealed flat stone, and takes out the key we keep underneath it. At one side of the chamber is a dented black tin trunk that we recovered from the rubble of the house, closed with the padlock I was given last birthday for my bicycle. He unlocks it, and puts away the logbook among the other things we keep in there, arranged as neatly as Keith’s official toys. There’s a piece of twisted grey metal from a shot-down German plane; the stub of a coloured pencil, of the sort used by teachers for correcting, that writes blue at one end and red at the other, recovered like the trunk itself from the broken scraps of Miss Durrant’s life; a candle stub and a box of matches; four live .22 rounds that Keith swapped at school for a model of a tank; and the Union Jack that we hang from the branches above the trunk to celebrate Empire Day and the King’s birthday.
Out of the trunk he takes our most secret and sacred possession – the bayonet with which his father killed the five Germans.
This simple description, though, doesn’t do justice to the metaphysical complexity of the object that Keith’s now holding. It both is and is not the sacred bayonet, just as the wafer and the wine both are and are not the body and blood of a being who both is and is not a god. In its physical nature it’s a long straight carving knife, which we found like so much else in the ruins of Miss Durrant’s house. Its bone handle is missing, and Keith has sharpened the blade with the grindstone on his father’s workbench so that it has an edge at the back as well as the front, and a point like a rapier. In its inward nature, though, it possesses the identity of the bayonet that goes off with his father to the Secret Service every weekend, with all its sacred attributes.
Keith holds it out towards me. I place my hand on the flat of the blade, tinglingly conscious of the sharpness on either side. He looks straight into my eyes.
‘I swear,’ he says.
‘I swear,’ I repeat.
‘Never to reveal anything about all this to anyone, except
as and when allowed.’
‘Never to reveal anything about all this to anyone, except as and when allowed,’ I intone solemnly. Not solemnly enough though, evidently, to set Keith’s mind completely at rest. He goes on holding out the blade, looking me straight in the eye.
‘Allowed by me, Keith Hayward.’ – ‘By you, Keith Hayward.’
‘So help me God, or cut my throat and hope to die.’ I recite the words back to him as best I can, my voice subdued by their seriousness.
‘Stephen Wheatley,’ he concludes. ‘Stephen Wheatley,’ I agree.
He puts the bayonet carefully down on top of the trunk.
‘This will be our lookout,’ he announces. ‘We’ll keep watch on the house from here, and when we see her go out we’ll follow her. We’ll make a map of everywhere she goes.’
We prepare for the task by clearing discreet windows in the greenery, through which we can see everything that goes on in the Close, and most particularly Keith’s house, a little further up on the other side of the street.
A practical difficulty occurs to me. ‘What about school?’ I ask.
‘We’ll do it after school.’
‘What about when it’s tea or supper?’
‘We can take turns.’
The time we really need to follow her, of course, is in the darkness at the end of the month, when she goes to her rendezvous.
‘What if it’s the night?’ I ask him. ‘We’re not allowed to go out when it’s night.’
‘We’ll hide knotted ropes in our rooms. We’ll climb out of our bedroom windows and meet here. We’ll get some more candles out of the air-raid shelter.’
I shiver. Already I can feel the rough knots of the rope under my hands and the eerie chill of the night air. I can see the candles flickering, and the deep darkness of the night outside. I can hear her soft steps ahead of us as we follow her down towards the shops – past the station – through the bushes above the quarries – out on to the open fairway …
‘But then what are we going to do?’ I ask. At some point, it seems to me, there will come a moment when this great programme has to lead to some action by the authorities in the grown-up world.
Spies (2002) Page 5