Spies (2002)

by Frayn, Michael

  I obviously have to talk to Keith about it and let him work it out. She’s his mother! She’s his spy! But just as obviously I can’t tell Keith about it, because she told me not to. She told me not to and I helplessly nodded my head. I agreed. I as good as gave her my word.

  Even before this there were a lot of things piling up that I couldn’t tell Keith about. Barbara Berrill’s visit. Her stupid stories about his mother and his aunt. Now I’ve been burdened with another secret that I have to keep from him. But how can we possibly proceed if I don’t tell him this one?

  I feel as if my head’s going to burst with trying to accommodate all these contradictions. But then, as I go on gazing at that serene white world outside the window, everything begins to seem simple after all. If only I had a knotted rope, as Keith had suggested, I should climb out of the window and let myself down into that great calmness. I should take it into me and become part of it. I should perform one simple, heroic deed that would settle everything once and for all.

  I should go through the tunnel now, while the world’s completely still, and she’s not there to be watched or followed. I should discover what it was she left in the box this time, before anyone has a chance to remove it. I should find the evidence that would prove beyond all doubt that Keith’s right, and that his mother really is a German spy.

  One single heroic deed, to lay at Keith’s feet in the morning. And with that one blow all my problems would be solved and all my weaknesses and errors wiped away, as surely as all the defects of the day are dissolved by the moonlight.

  I should go through the darkness of the tunnel. On my own. And out into the moonlight beyond.

  If only I had a knotted rope …

  The white stillness goes on and on. I’ve never seen the world like this before.

  Slowly it comes to me that I don’t actually need a knotted rope. I could simply walk down the stairs.

  Now I’ve thought the thought, I know I have to do it. I know I’m going to do it.

  And at once I’m terrified. The summer night has become suddenly freezing. I start to shiver so uncontrollably that I can scarcely get the jumper over my head or the sandals on my feet. I can hear my teeth rattling together like dice in a shaker. Geoff stirs in his sleep, as if he’d heard them too. I feel my way downstairs, and through the kitchen to the back door. Very slowly I ease back the bolt, still shaking. I step silently out into the silver darkness, and become part of it.

  Never in my life before have I crept out of the house in the middle of the night. Never before have I experienced this great stillness, or this strange new freedom to go anywhere and do anything.

  I shan’t have the courage to go through with it, of course. I shall die of fear before I get beyond the end of the street.

  I must do it, though, I must.

  Between the reflected disc of silver-grey behind me and the second one in front of me is a darkness whose shape is defined entirely by sound. The huge reverberations of the water plopping from the wet blackness overhead into the black water beside me merge into suites of scutterings and splashings trailed by unseen nocturnal creatures fleeing before the long echoes of my panicky breathing. In my terror I lose my footing on the unseen narrow causeway along the edge of the unseen lake, and have to keep touching the slime on the walls to steady myself. The slime is full of germs – I’m getting germs all over my hands.

  And then at last I’m out into the open night again, and looking up in gratitude at that serene white face riding full and round above the railway embankment. The night’s coming when I shall be out in the darkness again with no moon to whiten the world. And even as I think the thought, a cool breath of air stirs, and the moon sails behind a cloud. The delicate white world around me evaporates.

  I stand stock still, mastering my new access of panic. Slowly I piece together a world of sorts from the different densities of blackness around me, and from a few small sounds. The stirring of the leaves in the trees along the lane. The murmur of the telegraph wires along the railway track above me.

  I creep forward again. By touch I find the harsh brickwork of the retaining wall … the rusty links of the wire fence … the broken stalks of the cow parsley … the metallic smoothness of the box and its embossed inscription.

  I listen. The rustle of the leaves, the murmur of the telegraph wires. My own breath. The distant barking of the dogs at the Cottages in the Lanes. Nothing else.

  I ease the lid open. The shiny underside as it turns catches a faint gleam of light from the clouds. There’s no trace of any light reflected from the bottom of the box, though. I’m looking into blackness. There’s something odd about the blackness – something wrong with the sound of it … What’s wrong is that there is no sound. The hard interior surfaces should give back a faint response to the tiny atmospheric breathings of the night, and no response is forthcoming.

  I cautiously put my hand inside. The texture of the air seems to change and thicken around my fingers, as they sink into some substance that gives beneath them. I snatch my hand away.

  What I felt, I work out with hindsight, as my surprise subsides, was a softness. A dry, cool softness. The box has something in it. Slowly I work out what it was.

  Some sort of cloth.

  I put both hands very slowly and carefully back into the box. Cloth, yes … A lot of cloth … Different sorts of cloth … Some of it smooth, some of it fibrous … A hem … A button … Another button …

  Underneath my fingers now is something rough to the touch, with a pattern of ridges and furrows that seems curiously recognisable. I think I know what it is. I slowly ease my hand right round it to feel its underside and its width – then stop.

  The texture of the darkness around me is changing a little. I look up, and see the suggestion of a luminous edge to the clouds overhead. At any moment the moon’s going to come out again. But something else has changed, too. Something about the sound of the world …

  I strain my ears. Nothing. Just the shifting of the leaves, the sigh of the wires, the coming and going of my breath …

  I focus my attention back on the object I’m touching. The underside of it feels the same as the top. It’s about as wide as my hand … Yes, I know what this is. I begin to slide my hand along it, so that I can feel the end of it to check, then stop again.

  The sound that’s changed, I realise, is the sound of my breathing. It’s grown more complex. It no longer corresponds precisely to the rise and fall I can feel inside my chest.

  I stop breathing. The sound of breathing continues.

  There’s someone a few feet away in the lane – someone who has come silently up to the gap in the wire fence and then stopped to listen, as I’m listening now.

  Another faint sound. A hand feeling for the brickwork of the retaining wall, just as I felt for it … Now the rusty links of the fence are being eased back. A body’s squeezing underneath them …

  There’s someone very close behind me, feeling his way towards the box. It’s a man – I can hear the maleness of his level breathing. A grown man – I can hear the size of him. In another moment I shall feel his hands as they reach out towards the box and encounter my back instead.

  I can’t move. I can’t breathe. An agonising electric coldness passes through my back as it senses the approach of those hands.

  And all at once the darkness dissolves in a flood of moonlight.

  The level breathing behind me ends in a sharp, raucous gasp.

  Neither of us moves. Neither of us breathes.

  I’ve only to turn and I shall see him. But I can’t, any more than you can ever turn when you hear the terrible figure behind you in a nightmare.

  Then the moon’s behind the clouds again and the man’s gone. I hear him scrambling back through the wire fence, and stumbling in his haste as he runs into the rutted depths of the Lanes.

  I wait, as immobile as stone, still charged with that unbearable cold electricity.

  I wait … and wait … until I hear the dogs ba
rking in the distance again, and I know for certain he’s gone. Then I turn and hurl myself unseeing through the tangle of the fence and into the booming darkness of the tunnel.

  The Close, as I come running blindly round the corner, is full of wildly swinging torch beams and demented figures running back and forth. The torches swing at once towards me and stab at my eyes. A storm of frantic clutching and whispering bursts over me.

  ‘Where have you been …? What in heaven’s name do you think you’re doing …? Have you gone out of your mind …? We were going to call the police …! Do you know what time it is …?’

  The streetful of frenzied figures resolves itself into my two parents in their dressing gowns, hustling me towards our front door, still trying to keep their voices down so as not to wake the neighbours. Geoff watches sardonically from the doorstep. I suppose it’s Geoff who told on me.

  As soon as the front door closes behind us, they’re free to raise their voices at last, and when my father turns on the lights a fresh subject for consternation appears. ‘You’re soaking wet!’ cries my mother. ‘You’re wet from head to foot!’

  It’s true; I seem to have run straight through the water in the tunnel and fallen headlong.

  My mother tears the wet clothes off me, as if I were three years old again.

  ‘Jesus wept,’ says Geoff. ‘What were you hunting this time? U-boats?’

  ‘Oh, this was some tomfoolery with Keith, was it?’ shouts my father. I’ve never seen him in this state before.

  ‘Keith?’ cries my mother. ‘Keith’s not running around out there as well, is he?’

  I say nothing. My teeth have started to chatter again.

  ‘Is he?’ demands my father. ‘Have I got to go knocking on his door to check he’s home?’

  At this transcendentally awful prospect I change my policy and shake my head.

  ‘You’re sure?’ says my mother. ‘You’re sure you didn’t get Keith into this kind of state as well? Because if you did I don’t know what his mother will be thinking!’

  Once again I shake my head. Does she really think that I’m the one who gets Keith into states, and not the other way round? How has Keith managed to fool both our mothers so completely?

  ‘So what were you up to?’ demands my father. ‘If you wouldn’t think it impertinent of me to enquire …’

  But here I revert to total uncommunicativeness. Am I deliberately refusing to speak about things that I know must never be revealed to outsiders? Or am I simply too shocked to open my mouth? All I can think, as I stand there naked and shivering, mute and infantile, is one single despairing thought: that I could have turned round and seen who it was. I could have turned. I could have seen him. I’ve failed yet again.

  There’s something still clutched in my hand, I discover, as my mother throws a towel round me and rubs me violently dry – the ridged and furrowed thing that I took hold of in the box just before I heard him coming. I examine it at last, and it’s exactly what I thought it was. It’s as sodden as everything else, and my mother snatches it out of my hand and throws it down on the wet heap piled on the floor beside me.

  It looks entirely at home in its new surroundings: a long woollen sock, dark blue, with a heavily darned heel.

  Keith turns the sock over in his hands, inspecting it carefully. The darn has dried a paler colour than the rest, now I’ve recovered the sock from my mother’s washing basket, and the sole’s brown with age and use. He turns it inside out. There’s nothing concealed in it except a few little balls of woollen fluff.

  We’re sitting at the tea table, under the gleaming silver of the candlesticks and the ashtray that his parents won in the world tennis championships. My heart sinks as I watch him. This is the fruit of my great exploit, the treasure that I went out in the night to fetch and lay at his feet. It should be something else, of course. If it had been Keith who had done the deed it would be. It would be a map or a plan of something, perhaps. A message in code. At the very least another packet of cigarettes with a secret sign in it. Not a sock, though. Not an old sock.

  On the shining, dark tabletop, under Uncle Peter’s straightforward gaze from the mantelpiece, the brown sole and the darned heel stand out with unnatural distinctness.

  ‘There were other things in the box,’ I explain once again. ‘Shirts and things. I just happened to be holding that. When I heard the man.’

  I’ve told him about the man, and the dogs barking in the Lanes. I haven’t told him about the moon coming out. I haven’t told him that I could have turned round and seen the man in the moonlight.

  Keith’s eyelids come down a little; one of his father’s looks again. My great exploit hasn’t pleased or impressed him. I should have guessed. He’s the one who’s the hero of our projects, not me.

  ‘And you’re sure he didn’t see you?’ he demands.

  ‘I hid,’ I say, not looking at him. ‘I hid very quickly.’ I realise now – I’ve done everything wrong.

  ‘And you didn’t get a proper look at him?’

  ‘I couldn’t. I was hiding.’

  Keith turns the sock over again, dissatisfied with either it or my explanation, or both.

  ‘I thought it might be a disguise,’ I suggest humbly. ‘I thought it might be sort of ordinary clothes for someone to change into. If they’d landed by parachute or something and they were wearing a German uniform. If they were hiding in the Lanes somewhere.’

  At any rate an old sock plainly isn’t payment for off-the-ration bacon, or a present from Auntie Dee to some imaginary boyfriend. Not that I ever believed those stories for a moment. Or could have said anything about them to Keith even if I had. It would be telling tales. You can’t tell tales. Certainly not about someone’s own aunt, about someone’s own mother.

  I snatch the sock off the table and hide it in my lap as his mother comes into the room.

  ‘I don’t know whether Stephen likes Chelsea buns?’ she says. ‘It’s all I could get in Courts.’

  She smiles at us both collectively with her usual careful imprecision. Everything, she’s telling me, is to be as it always was. But it isn’t, it isn’t! Under the tabletop I’m holding the old sock that she put into the box for X, for a German parachutist, and that I took out again in spite of what she said. I can’t look at her. I know my face is in a bad way again. ‘Thank you,’ I mumble.

  She goes out again, but I haven’t the heart to put the sock back on the table. ‘Why did you take it out of the box?’ demands Keith now, still dissatisfied, undistracted by the buns. ‘When they find it’s missing they’ll know someone else has been there.’

  I say nothing. I can’t explain how I came to find it in my hand afterwards without mentioning my panic-stricken flight, and I can’t explain my flight without mentioning the figure breathing behind me, and my shameful failure to turn and look at him.

  I choke down my bun in silence.

  ‘We’d better go and see what’s happening,’ he says. There’s a note of conscious forbearance in his voice. He’s resuming the burden of leadership by taking upon himself the wearisome responsibility that a leader has to accept for his subordinate’s mistakes.

  I make a belated effort to honour my agreement with his mother. ‘We’d better not,’ I say.

  Keith’s eyelids come down again. ‘Why not?’ he demands – and of course I can’t explain. He thinks I’m frightened. All my bravery in the night now counts for nothing.

  ‘I just think we’d better not,’ I repeat feebly.

  He leads the way to the sitting-room door and taps on it as usual. ‘Me and Stephen are going out to play,’ he announces.

  There’s a pause while she thinks about this. I can see her beyond him, sitting at the desk with the blotter open and a pen in her hand. She’s weighing up whether to trust me to keep to our agreement, and to keep Keith to it as well.

  ‘“Stephen and I”,’ she murmurs calmly at last. She’s trusting me.

  ‘Stephen and I,’ he repeats obediently. He steps
back. I step forward to take his place and observe the usual ritual.

  ‘Thank you for having me,’ I mumble.

  She smiles, perhaps at hearing the formula on my own lips again.

  ‘Have fun, then, chaps,’ she says. ‘Try not to get up to any mischief.’

  She’s reminding me of our compact, and of course as I trail behind Keith to the end of the street, breaking that compact and letting her down at each step of the way, I feel worse than ever.

  At the corner we stop and look cautiously back to check that the street’s empty behind us.

  ‘She was writing letters,’ says Keith. ‘She’ll be going out to the post again soon.’

  I know. And will be turning right instead of left, and catching us looking in the box, and discovering my betrayal. I follow Keith helplessly through the echoing darkness, between the water and the slime, trying to persuade myself that since we’re ahead of her we’re not actually following her. We curl back the wire fence and crawl through.

  In the vegetation by the retaining wall there’s now nothing to be seen but the lingering shape of an indistinct absence. The box has gone.

  ‘He obviously did see you,’ says Keith. ‘They’ve moved their hiding place. So now the Germans know we know about them. We’ve got to start all over again, old bean.’

  My heart shrivels at the sound of his father’s tone and his father’s phrase, at the accusing absence in the undergrowth, at my own hopelessness.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say humbly.

  Breaking my word of honour has had nothing but bad consequences. And at any moment she’s going to be arriving with her next consignment of secrets to put in the box. She’s going to find it gone – and me there as the cause of its disappearance.

  ‘I’m sorry, Keith,’ I whisper. ‘We’d better go.’

  But Keith’s smiling his dangerous little smile. I know I’m going to be humiliated for being so hopeless, and for my presumption in trying to demonstrate otherwise.