And the policeman came cycling slowly up the street and set his foot to the ground outside Auntie Dee’s …
‘And they told everyone it was because there was something wrong with Mrs Tracey’s blackout,’ says Barbara. ‘But it wasn’t, it was because of the peeping Tom – only he wasn’t a peeping Tom, because Deirdre saw him going into the house, loads of times. So instead Mrs Hayward has to go and look after Milly while Mrs Tracey goes out in the dark when no one can see, only now it gets dark too late.’
I can feel Barbara Berrill looking at me to see how I respond to all these revelations. I don’t respond. Some instinct tells me that it’s just the kind of thing that girls say, particularly the Berrill girls, who are running wild while their father’s away. The silver-framed photograph of Auntie Dee and Uncle Peter with the wings on his breast pocket comes into my mind. As soon as it touches the solidity of that silver frame, Barbara Berrill’s story bursts like a soap bubble in my hand, and leaves nothing behind but a faint sliminess on my fingers.
‘Your face has gone all squidgy again,’ she says. ‘Didn’t you know about people having boyfriends and girlfriends?’
‘Of course I did.’
She laughs, her face very close to mine. I feel the sliminess on my fingers. An x is a kiss. On the other side of the tunnel Keith’s mother is putting a kiss into the hidden box for Auntie Dee’s boyfriend Mr X to find …
‘It’s just while Mr Tracey’s away in the Air Force. Deirdre says lots of ladies have boyfriends while everyone’s Daddies are away.’
‘Barbara!’ calls Mrs Berrill’s voice. ‘Where are you? If you’re not home in one minute precisely …!’
Barbara puts her lips next to my ear. ‘Mummy’s got a boyfriend,’ she whispers. ‘Deirdre found a snap of him in Mummy’s bag. He’s an air-raid warden.’
‘Barbara! I’m not going to tell you twice …!’
Barbara begins to crawl away through the passageway, her purse dangling on the ground. She stops and turns back. She hesitates, suddenly shy. ‘My really really best friend is Rosemary Winters, in Mrs Colley’s class at school,’ she says. ‘But you could be my next-best friend, if you like.’
After she’s gone I sit unable to move, disorientated and then disabled by gathering shame. I’ve betrayed Keith. I’ve let a stranger into our special place – and Barbara Berrill, of all people. I’ve failed in my surveillance duties. And I’ve allowed myself to listen to unworthy insinuations that his mother’s getting bacon and butter on the black market – that she’s involved in a surreptitious and shameful traffic with bosoms and boyfriends. I’ve allowed myself to entertain a momentary suspicion that she’s not a German spy at all.
And there she is again, coming back up the street from the corner … going into Auntie Dee’s gate … tapping quietly on the living-room window as she passes. The front door opens as she reaches it, and Auntie Dee stands on the doorstep.
Keith’s mother hands her the shopping basket. She’s done Auntie Dee’s shopping for her once again. While all the shops were shut.
Auntie Dee searches through the contents of the basket. She’s looking for the message that Keith’s mother has brought her back from her boyfriend …
Only of course she isn’t. I think of her friendly, open smile. No one could smile like that and have any secrets from the world. I think of the trusting way that Uncle Peter smiles back at her from the silver frame on her mantelpiece.
She’s not smiling now. She’s plucking anxiously at her lip. But she’s looking up at Keith’s mother, trustingly and apprehensively, just like the little girl with the doll in the other picture who looks up so trustingly and apprehensively at the older sister who will always protect her.
Sisters … Yes. What are those two sisters talking about so earnestly there on the doorstep? They’re telling each other the kind of things that Deirdre and Barbara tell each other. Secrets … About kisses in the blackout …
Keith’s mother turns and walks back to the gate. She looks exactly as she always has – composed, tranquil, at ease with the world. Auntie Dee stands on the doorstep and watches her go. She’s changed in some subtle way. She’s become a person with secrets after all.
Auntie Dee closes her front door. A few moments later Keith’s mother closes hers. The curtain has come down again.
*
‘1700. Goes into.’
I’m back at my post next day, logbook open once again, and I’m just hesitating, two-colour pencil in hand, trying to remember what it was that Keith’s mother did go into at 1700, when my eye’s caught by a movement at the Haywards’ house.
Once again the same scene’s unrolling. Keith’s mother is coming out of her garden gate with her basket on her arm. She’s going back to Auntie Dee’s to whisper more secrets … No, this time she walks straight past Auntie Dee’s … Not that I believed any of Barbara Berrill’s ridiculous stories about them, even for a moment.
She goes on towards the corner, and I know that this time there’s no way out of it: I’m going to have to follow her. Through the tunnel. On my own.
How I’m ever going to find the courage I don’t know, but already I’m scrambling along the passageway, running down to the corner, turning towards the tunnel …
And once again she’s vanished.
The track winds through the encroaching undergrowth to the tunnel, as empty as the street to the left was each time she vanished before. I feel the familiar cold wave pass through me.
Then behind me I hear a small, familiar sound – a dry rustling and a wet slithering. I spin round. There she is, just beyond the corner to the left, tipping food scraps out of an old newspaper into the pig bins, and watching me thoughtfully. She lets the lid clank back into place, and smiles. ‘Hello, Stephen. Are you looking for Keith?’
Left, yes. There’s still left as well as right. And the pig bins. Of course.
I shake my head stupidly.
‘You seem to be looking for somebody.’
‘No.’
‘Not me, was it, Stephen, by any chance?’
‘No, no.’
I flee, and hide my confusion under the bushes. As she passes on her way back to the house she turns and looks in my direction. I don’t know how she realises I’m there watching her, when it’s supposed to be secret, but she does; and when she emerges from the house again ten minutes later I know that this time I’m really not going to have the courage to follow her.
She’s not carrying a basket, though; she’s holding a plate. And she’s not walking down the road towards Auntie Dee’s house or the corner. She’s crossing over … and coming straight towards me. I sit absolutely motionless as she peers in through the branches. ‘Stephen?’ she murmurs. ‘May I come in?’
I can’t manage a reply. In all the places that we’ve imagined her going, and all the contingencies that we’ve dimly foreseen, we’ve never considered the possibility of her coming here.
I’m too embarrassed to watch her as she struggles in along the low passageway. I know she has to make an awkward spectacle of herself, encumbered by the plate and leaning her weight on her other hand to keep her knees just clear of the earth, so that her back’s too high, and the twigs keep catching at her cardigan. She brushes a patch of ground as clean as she can of leaves and insects, then sits down cross-legged in the dust in front of me.
I don’t know what to do with myself. It’s difficult enough to know how to behave when you’re on your own with someone’s mother, even in the most normal of circumstances. But what do you do when you’re both sitting childishly on the bare earth, face to face in a space scarcely large enough for people half her height?
And when you know that she’s not just someone’s mother – that she’s a German spy, a traitor to her country?
Where do you look, for a start, when there’s nowhere to look except at her? You can’t look her in the face. You can’t look at her legs, neatly but somehow shamefully crossed beneath her navy-blue summer skirt. There’s nowhere l
eft except the bit in between, and that part of a lady, as I’ve known for at least a year now, is her bosom, and as unthinkable-about as a privet.
She puts the plate down in the small space between us. It’s decorated with roses, and there are two chocolate biscuits on it.
‘I thought you might like something to keep you going,’ she says. ‘I’m afraid Keith’s got to help his father in his workshop, so you’re going to have to play on your own this evening.’
I pick up one of the biscuits and nibble it, grateful to have something to do and some object to look at. Silence. Can she have come all the way across the road, and seated herself cross-legged in the dust in front of me, just to tell me that?
But she seems to be looking round at our domestic arrangements, like any polite visitor on a social call.
‘Very thoughtful of you chaps to put that label on it,’ she says, indicating the tile guarding the entrance passageway. ‘“Privet”.’
At the sound of this impropriety on her lips, I feel my face getting into the same awkward state that Barbara Berrill commented on in such embarrassing terms. Perhaps she doesn’t know what the word means. I try not to look at her bosom.
‘Awful smell it’s got in summer,’ she says. No, she does know. ‘But what a lovely hidey-hole it makes!’
She picks up the open logbook. I remember the list of dates, with all the x’s and exclamation marks, and my muscles freeze with my polite mouthful of chocolate biscuit half- swallowed in my throat.
She closes it, though, and looks at the inscription on the cover: logbook – secrit. She laughs. ‘Oh dear. That’s Keith’s handiwork, is it?’
I want to lie and say it was me, to spare Keith’s shame, but no words emerge through the biscuit. I want to snatch the book away from her before she opens it again, but no movement issues from my hands.
She looks back at the sign over the passageway and laughs again. ‘Oh, I see!’ she says. ‘Private! How priceless!’
She puts the logbook down. ‘I suppose I’d better not look inside if everything in here’s so terribly hush-hush.’
I swallow the crumbs of chocolate biscuit. She looks out through the branches.
‘It’s a frightfully good place for a lookout, though,’ she murmurs. ‘You can see everything that goes on in the street. That’s what you’re up to in here, is it? Keeping watch on us all, and writing it all down in your logbook?’
I still can’t answer. Simple words like ‘yes’ and ‘no’ seem to be superimposed upon my tongue so that they cancel each other out.
‘I think Keith’s got some binoculars somewhere that he uses for birdwatching. They might come in handy.’
Yes/no. Already using them/nothing to use them for.
‘So what have you seen so far? Anything terribly suspicious?’
My head shakes itself. Perhaps I’m beginning to recover from my first shock. But in the silence that follows, as I go on trying not to look at her bosom, I can feel her smiling encouragingly down at the top of my head, and then her smile becoming serious. There’s more to come.
‘Well, I hope the Mounties get their man and all that, and I certainly don’t want to spoil your game. You chaps might just keep in mind, though, that even the best of games can sometimes get a bit out of hand. It would be a terrible shame if you upset any of the neighbours. For instance, I think it might be perhaps just a tiny bit rude if you actually followed people around.’
So she’s seen us. In which case, why isn’t she telling Keith off rather than me? Everyone knows you tell your own child off, not somebody else’s, for offences they’ve committed together. Why has she come all the way across the road to say it to me, when Keith’s not here?
‘It’s such fun for Keith,’ she says, ‘finding a real friend, because it does get a bit lonely sometimes if you don’t have any brothers or sisters, and he doesn’t make friends easily. I know you’ve got lively imaginations, the pair of you, and I know you have tremendous adventures together. But Keith’s easily led, as I’m sure you realise.’
I look her full in the face for the first time in sheer astonishment. Does she really not know that Keith’s the instigator and commander of every enterprise we undertake? Can an experienced espionage agent have really so completely misunderstood what she’s observed? I suppose it’s yet another tribute to Keith – he’s obviously as good as his parents are at concealing his true nature from everyone around him.
Her eyes are brown, like Barbara’s, and they’ve lost the calm complacency with which she’s always regarded me in the past. They’re bent on me as intently as Barbara’s were while she watched me to see if I was shocked by her stupid stories. The light in Keith’s mother’s eyes, though, isn’t teasing. She’s entirely serious.
‘I don’t want to have to stop him seeing you,’ she says, very softly. ‘But then I don’t want him getting into any kind of trouble.’
Her voice becomes even softer. So do her eyes. Now that I’ve looked into them I can’t look away. ‘Sometimes people have things they want to do in private,’ she says. ‘Just like you and Keith in here. They have things they don’t want everyone talking about.’
I have a sudden fear, as she goes on looking at me and I go on looking at her, that she’s going to confess everything. I want to beg her not to. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to have to know for sure.
But she glances away. ‘Silly little things, perhaps,’ she says. ‘I don’t know … Well, Mr Gort, let’s say. If he decided to go out to the Railway Tavern one evening and have a glass of beer, he might prefer not to have people watching him and then going around announcing to everyone “Oh, Mr Gort’s in the pub again.” Or Mr and Mrs Stott. I don’t suppose they like people following poor Eddie about and staring at him. Or say you started trailing round after the people at Trewinnick. It might make them feel a bit self-conscious about their appearance.’
Her examples are unconvincing. Everyone knows Mr Gort goes to the pub. Everyone knows you’re not supposed to stare at Eddie Stott. And surely it would be a good thing, not a bad thing, if the Juice at Trewinnick became aware of how alien we found them. So she’s not going to say who it is she really doesn’t want us following, or why. She’s not going to confess. I’m half relieved and half disappointed.
‘Anyway,’ she says, picking up the empty plate, ‘I know you’re a sensible, well-brought-up boy, and I thought I’d have a quiet word with you on your own, while Keith’s not here. And we’ll keep this between ourselves, shall we? Probably best not to say anything to Keith about our little chat.’
I nod. What else can I do?
‘So you see I’m trusting you. I’m putting you on your honour. Yes?’
I nod helplessly once more.
She puts her hand on my arm and looks straight into my face. ‘You won’t let me down, will you, Stephen?’
I shake my head. She goes on gently holding my arm and looking into my face. Then, with a kind of little sigh, she lets me go, and begins to clamber back along the passageway. She stops and looks at the privet sign. ‘I’m terribly sorry about that,’ she says. ‘So silly of me not to guess. I promise I won’t intrude again.’
She struggles on a little further, then stops and turns round once more.
‘You haven’t been to play at the house for ages,’ she says. ‘Why don’t I tell Keith to ask you to tea tomorrow?’
I try to take stock of the situation, as she disappears back into the outside world. Once again I’ve let strangers into our private place. Once again everything has changed.
After she’s gone I remember the back of her dress as she clambered awkwardly away from me along the passageway, its calm simplicity confused by the dust of the bare earth, its elegant regularity mocked by the random detritus of dead leaves and twigs hanging from it. And I feel somehow … sorry for her, in spite of her crimes. I feel pained that she’s had to humiliate herself before me in this way.
I jump out of my skin, because I’ve just realised that she’s peer
ing in at me through the branches again. She’s no longer holding the plate. Once again she has her shopping basket on her arm. She’s smiling. Her brown eyes are calm once more.
‘Thank you for having me,’ she says.
She walks calmly down the street towards the corner.
I watch her go. This time, of course, she is going through the tunnel.
I make no move to follow.
6
What is it that wakes me? Is it all my anxieties about the task we’ve taken on, and about what to do now that Keith’s mother has told me to abandon it? Or is it my bad conscience about all the weakness I’ve shown and all the wrong thoughts I’ve allowed myself to think?
Or is it merely the unnatural lightness of my blacked-out bedroom?
There’s a strange white light flooding around the edges of the blackout. I get up and slip my head under the blind. The dull, familiar world outside, I discover, has been transformed. The tangle of bushes in our front garden and the frontages of the houses opposite are picked out, against a background of velvet darkness, in the most delicately brilliant and unearthly white. There’s absolute stillness, absolute silence. It’s as if the Close had become a picture of itself, or as if the ethereal chiming of the Haywards’ clocks had been caught and preserved as a silent shape in space.
Night – the almost forgotten time. And the full moon, pouring softly down from somewhere above the roof of the house, smoothing out all the muddle of the garden and the blemishes of weathered render on the houses opposite, washing away all the shame and confusion of the day, leaving only this perfect white stillness.
We’re halfway through the lunar calendar. Halfway to the next dark of the moon.
And what am I going to do? I plainly can’t go on watching her and following her now she’s seen us doing it and put me on my honour to stop. But I plainly can’t stop watching her and following her now that she’s more or less told me that if we go on we may find out something that she doesn’t want us to know.
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