Spies (2002)

by Frayn, Michael

  Or could Auntie Dee be a spy as well? Now I see Uncle Peter coming home on leave after all, strolling up the street the way he did before with his cap tipped at a careless angle, and all the children crowding around him. Only this time they’re not trying to touch his uniform, they’re not asking to be allowed to try his cap on. They’re shouting that Auntie Dee has gone – she’s been unmasked as a spy, she’s in prison. And where’s Milly, their baby daughter? She’s sitting all alone in their front room, weeping and abandoned … I feel a lump coming to my throat, I’m so sorry for Uncle Peter, I’m so sorry for Milly.

  Auntie Dee’s front door opens, and Keith’s mother emerges. Auntie Dee stands watching from the doorstep, unsmiling, her hands pressed to her lips as if she’s about to blow a kiss, while Keith’s mother lets herself out of the gate and walks away down the street towards the corner with her basket. She’s going to the shops once again to do Auntie Dee’s shopping for her.

  ‘Time?’ I whisper urgently, picking up the logbook, as Auntie Dee shuts the front door again, her kiss still unblown.

  But Keith’s already scrambling hurriedly away through the passageway, the logbook forgotten. I struggle after him as fast as I can. We’re going to follow his mother to the shops.

  By the time we emerge from the bushes she’s already gone round the corner of the Hardiments’ house into the street beyond. We run to the corner after her, and look cautiously round the end of the Hardiments’ hedge.

  She’s vanished.

  There’s only one way to go when you get to the end of the Close, and that’s left, because if you go right the roadway peters out almost at once into a rough track that disappears through the undergrowth into the dark and disused tunnel over which the trains rumble so ominously. To the left, though, is the Avenue lined with little flowering cherry trees that leads long and straight to the main road beyond and the shops where Keith’s mother is going.

  The Avenue is a different kind of street altogether from the Close. The houses look superficially similar, but as soon as you turn the corner you know you’re stepping into alien territory, the beginning of the outside world. Within a few yards of the corner you run up against the War Effort – a smelly mess around the pig bins where the neighbourhood’s food scraps are collected. At the far end, on the corner of the main road, is the letter box where Keith’s mother posts all that endless flow of suspect correspondence. Just out of sight beyond the corner is the parade of shops that she visits so often and the bus stop where I wait for the 419 to school. There is Paradise – the station where my father catches his train each morning – the munitions factory where Mr Pincher does his pinching – the golf course where German planes land in the darkness …

  The Avenue stretches in front of us now, clear and straight from the pig bins at this end to the letter box at the other. Hucknall’s boy is delivering to a house halfway along on the right. On the left-hand pavement two boys I half know from the bus queue are teasing a small white puppy – the kind of behaviour you’d expect from round-the-corner children. But of Keith’s mother there’s not a trace. She’s walked all the way to the main road in less time than it took us to run half the length of the Close.

  We run stupidly after her. By the time we get to the far corner we’re both out of breath. We hide behind the letter box and look left towards the parade of shops. Bicycles, prams, people. Two old ladies just getting off a 419 at the bus stop, and three children with swimming costumes getting on … My eyes flicker back and forth, struggling to find the one familiar detail we’re looking for … I can’t see it. We look across the main road, up the rutted cart track that leads to Paradise … Nothing. We slide round to the left of the letter box and look right towards the station and the golf course … No.

  She must be in one of the shops already. ‘You look in all the shops on this side,’ orders Keith. ‘I’ll do the ones on the other side. Don’t let her see you.’

  I run from one familiar doorway to another. Court’s Bakery, with a scent of warm glazed buns that makes me instantly hungry … but no sign of Keith’s mother. Coppards, with another delicious familiar smell, of books and pencils, of sweets and newspapers. Mrs Hardiment’s in there, looking through the novels in the little circulating library. But not Keith’s mother … A queue outside the greengrocer’s. I don’t know how I’m going to stop her seeing me, if she’s standing in it and she suddenly turns round … But she’s not. Another queue in Hucknalls, of course … but she’s not in that one, either … Wainwrights, where I go with Keith sometimes to help lug home bags of chickenfeed … Difficult to see past the open sacks of grain and meal piled on the pavement into the poky, sour-smelling darkness within, but I don’t think she’s there …

  She’s not in the chemist’s or the draper’s, either, or any of the other shops on Keith’s side. She’s completely disappeared. We walk slowly back along the Avenue, trying to make sense of it. The shopping basket was a camouflage, explains Keith. She was going to one of her rendezvous. But where?

  ‘It must be in one of these houses in the Avenue,’ I suggest. It seems logical, but when you look at them you realise at once that the people who live here are not the kind of people that Keith’s parents know. It’s difficult to imagine Keith’s mother actually walking up to any of these front doors, even for the most pressing and sinister reasons. Keith doesn’t comment on the suggestion. ‘That manhole …’ he murmurs, as we pass the studded metal cover near the pig bins. This seems more probable, certainly. It could be the entrance to one of the secret passageways with which the district is riddled. In which case she might be almost anywhere by now – on the golf course, in the old quarry, or at some remote house in the country with shuttered windows and patrolling dogs …

  Her actual whereabouts, when we discover them a moment later, are more prosaic. And more surprising.

  She’s at Auntie Dee’s house.

  The front door opens as we pass, and Keith’s mother emerges, her shopping basket on her arm. I feel the same kind of shiver pass through me that I felt when we found the code in her diary. It’s not possible! She jumped to the shops before we could get to the end of the Close, and jumped almost instantly back again. Or else we’ve jumped back in time, and the last fifteen minutes or so haven’t existed after all. Once again Auntie Dee stands watching from the doorstep. Once again Keith’s mother lets herself out of the gate. This time, though, she turns not towards the shops but home, then stops as she catches sight of Keith and me.

  ‘So what have you two been up to all morning?’ she says, walking companionably up the street with us, while Auntie Dee waves to us and closes the door.

  ‘Playing,’ says Keith. I can hear he’s as shaken as I am.

  His mother, too, realises there’s something amiss. She glances at us sharply.

  ‘Oh dear – more funny looks,’ she says. ‘Something mysterious going on? Something I’m not supposed to know about?’

  We say nothing. I suppose we could simply ask her where she’s been, but I don’t think it occurs to either of us. The world has become one of those dreams where you feel you’ve lived it all before. Unless the sight of her emerging from Auntie Dee’s house fifteen minutes earlier was just something we made up inside our heads …

  ‘Anyway, chaps,’ she says, ‘whatever you’re up to I’m afraid you’ll have to give it a rest now because it’s almost lunchtime.’

  Which would be more alarming – to be living in a dream, or in a story that had taken over our memories?

  We discuss the problem backwards and forwards as we sit in the lookout over the days that follow, waiting to try again. It’s possible that the secret passage under the manhole has a branch leading back to Auntie Dee’s house. Or there may be a way in which she could squeeze along the bottom of the Hardiments’ garden, which runs alongside the Avenue, then along the bottom of our garden and the Pinchers’ – and emerge back into the street by way of Braemar, once she’s lured us away from it.

  We prise up the m
anhole cover. There is a secret passage down there, but it has an insupportably foul smell, and it appears to be only a foot or two wide. We find a loose board in the fence at the bottom of the Hardiments’ garden, but when we force it back the gap’s still too narrow for either of us to squeeze through, and in any case there’s a stack of glass cloches propped up on the other side.

  There seems to be nothing to do but to watch and wait until she goes out again.

  What do we see from our vantage point in the meantime? Or dream that we see, or imagine that we see, or imagine later that we remembered seeing?

  The policeman, yes. Cycling slowly up the street, appearing and disappearing through the leaves … No, the policeman was earlier, before the story began … On the other hand he couldn’t have come until Mrs Berrill had seen the intruder … Or were there two different policemen, one earlier and one later, who have got run together in my memory?

  What I see now through the greenery is Uncle Peter, home on leave, standing outside his house, with his blue uniform flecked with pink by the soft pink snowfall from the almond trees, smiling and happy, surrounded by all the children of the Close. They gape at him, suddenly tongue- tied, their worshipping faces reflected in each of the shining brass buttons on his uniform. The eagle on his hat lifts its proud head beneath the gold and scarlet crown, and spreads its gilt wings protectively over Norman and poor little Eddie, over the Geest twins, over Roger Hardiment and Elizabeth Hardiment, over the two Avery boys and the two Berrill girls, even over my brother Geoff …

  No, this was earlier, too. It must have been, if the almond was in blossom. Keith and I aren’t watching from our hiding place – we’re there among all the others, transfigured like them by the golden light from the buttons, proud beneath the haughty stare of the eagle …

  Unless we never saw him at all, and he’s stepped out of the black-and-white photograph in that silver frame on the Haywards’ mantelpiece … But what I remember, as vividly as I remember anything in my long life, are the colours! The blue of the uniform, the pink of the blossom, the two spots of blood-red velvet in the crown above the eagle. And I remember the sounds! Of his laughter – of Milly’s laughter. He and Milly were laughing because he was holding her in his arms, and she was reaching out to take hold of the pretty gold embroidery on his hat …

  And now it’s night, and the sky’s a flickering orange, and there are men in steel helmets running among the tangle of hoses in the street … But this was looking out from behind my father in the gateway of our house, much earlier still, when Miss Durrant’s house still had a well-trimmed hedge in front of it …

  What I do finally see from our lookout, though, what I certainly see, is Keith’s mother again.

  I’m on my own. I think Keith has had to stay at home and help his father build a new extension to the hen house. But suddenly there she is, closing the garden gate carefully behind her, and walking down the road exactly as she did before, unhurried and composed. Past Trewinnick and Mr Gort’s house … and into Auntie Dee’s …

  I open the logbook. ‘1700,’ I guess, since the watch is with Keith at the hen house. ‘Goes into …’

  But already she’s out again. She’s closing Auntie Dee’s front door behind her, and coming down the garden path, holding not a shopping basket but a letter. She’s going to the post for Auntie Dee.

  I scramble through the passageway, my limbs muddled with excitement. I’m going to be the one who solves the mystery!

  By the time I get free of the bushes she’s once again turned the corner by the Hardiments and gone. I run to the corner after her, faster than I’ve ever run before.

  Once again the Avenue stretches in front of me, clear and straight and empty, from the pig bins at this end to the letter box at the other.

  This time, instead of blindly running down the Avenue after her, I stand still and think. It’s taken me no more than – what? – ten seconds to reach the corner. She can’t have got to the letter box in ten seconds, even if she’d run all the way. I don’t even believe she could have opened the manhole cover, either, certainly not got inside and closed it above her. She couldn’t have squeezed through the gap in the Hardiments’ fence.

  She must be in one of the houses – there’s nowhere else. Again I try to think clearly. I’ve run from the fourth house along the Close, so she can’t have got much further than four houses along the Avenue. I walk slowly past the first half- dozen houses on either side, and look carefully at each of them in turn. I don’t know what I’m hoping to see. A glimpse of her through one of the windows, perhaps … a face somewhere keeping a lookout … a short-wave radio antenna concealed behind a chimney …

  Nothing. Every one of them is invested with the same undifferentiated, brooding, sinister ordinariness. She could be in any of them.

  Again I think carefully. Whichever of them she’s in, sooner or later she’ll have to come out. All I need to do is wait out of sight, and watch.

  I slowly retire to the corner of the Close – walking backwards so that none of the houses in the Avenue is out of my sight for an instant. Even if I have to stay here until bedtime I’m going to make absolutely sure that she can’t get back into Auntie Dee’s house unobserved again, and emerge like a hallucination as she did before.

  As I edge backwards around the corner by the Hardiments some strange presentiment makes me turn and glance briefly up the Close. And there she is – a hallucination already, standing on the doorstep of Auntie Dee’s house, half turned to leave, talking to Auntie Dee in the doorway. Once again Auntie Dee stands watching as once again Keith’s mother lets herself out of the gate.

  Once again I feel the earth shift under my feet.

  I stand stupefied as she walks back up the Close towards her house. It occurs to me that she’s no longer holding the letter. She’s not only jumped back in time – she’s jumped forward in space to the letter box first.

  Perhaps it’s not a spy story we’ve woven ourselves into, after all. It’s a ghost story.

  The next time it happens Keith’s with me, and we’re watching his house so intently that we see her as soon as she comes out of the front door. Keith’s father is working in the front garden. She stops to say something to him, then comes out of the gate, carefully closes it behind her, and walks down the street, her shopping basket on her arm once again, as unhurried and composed as ever.

  She goes into Auntie Dee’s house. We wait, crouched and tense, ready to move. This time we’re going to be out of here even before she’s round the corner. We’re going to be at the corner ourselves before she has time to reach even the manhole cover.

  ‘She could have some kind of rocket thing,’ I whisper.

  Keith says nothing. I’ve told him all my theories several times already. Also, he doesn’t like the fact that I had the latest mysterious experience when he wasn’t there.

  We wait. My knees ache from crouching. I try to shift my weight from one leg to the other.

  ‘Or a kind of time machine,’ I suggest uneasily, for the fifth time.

  Keith’s eyelids come down. I understand. If theories involving secret passages, rockets, time travel, and the like are to carry conviction, they have to be uttered in his voice, not mine.

  And now there she is, coming out of Auntie Dee’s with the shopping basket. At once we’re scrambling along the passageway, the twigs tearing at our faces, my hands trampled by Keith’s sandals scrabbling the earth in front of me … We’re out on the street, moving with unbelievable quietness not twenty paces behind her as she walks to the corner …

  She hasn’t heard us. We’re round the corner behind her almost without losing her from sight for an instant …

  And there she is still, walking away from us, just passing the pig bins. We stop and watch her, not daring to move any further, not daring to breathe or to blink. We’re going to see the trick done in front of our eyes.

  She walks on, still unhurried, still composed. On and on. Growing slowly smaller and smaller …r />
  Past the letter box at the end … round the corner …

  To the shops, like anyone else.

  *

  Days go by, and nothing more happens. There’s just school, and school, and school, and fights with Geoff, and odd tedious hours of fruitless watching.

  One evening we catch her coming out with letters in her hand. She walks down the road, and passes Auntie Dee’s without going in. We run to the corner … then watch her walk slowly to the letter box at the end and post them. Another day – it must be a Saturday – we see her set out with her shopping basket, call at Auntie Dee’s … and emerge accompanied by Auntie Dee, with Milly in her pushchair. We run to the corner … and there they are, dwindling unremarkably away down the Avenue together.

  Once we even follow her to the shops. We watch her queuing outside the greengrocer’s, catch glimpses of her in the bakery and the draper’s, and follow her back to the Close. There’s no sign of any rocket or time machine.

  It rains, and Keith’s mother won’t let him go out. It stops raining, and we sit reluctantly under the wet branches of the lookout, yawning and bickering. I know Keith has ceased to believe my account of the second disappearance, although he doesn’t say so. I’ve begun to doubt it myself. Even the first disappearance, that we both witnessed, has drifted back into that realm of the past where inexplicable things no long seem surprising, or in any urgent need of an explanation. We’re beginning to take it as much for granted as we do the bush that burned but was not consumed, or the miracle of the loaves and the fishes.

  The x’s and exclamation marks, too, have receded into the mists. They’ve become mere runes in an archaic text. The whole concept of night, as the double summer time of the war years takes sunset further and further beyond when we have to go to bed, now seems as remote as the Dark Ages, and the phases of the moon as academic as scot and lot.