I look away.
‘Oh, Stephen,’ she says sadly. ‘Oh, Stephen!’
7
So how much did Stephen understand at this point about what was going on?
I’m outside Meadowhurst, the dull new house that was once an overgrown no man’s land called Braemar, and I’m gazing fixedly at the second tub of geraniums from the left on the hard standing. It must be occupying almost exactly the same piece of space that Stephen occupied as he sat in the lookout for hours at a time in the days that followed the expedition to the Lanes. Keith had stopped coming out to play, and Stephen was too uneasy about what was going on inside the Haywards’ house to knock on his door. So there he sat, on his own. His bottom was resting on the hard dust now hidden beneath the paving stones. His head must have been more or less exactly where those scarlet blossoms are now.
I gaze at them, baffled.
From the living-room window a boy’s watching me, as absorbed and intent as I am. He’s about the same age as Stephen was then, and he’s trying to work out what’s going on inside the head of this old man who stands gazing with such insane concentration at a tub of his mother’s geraniums. He’s thinking that he’s never seen me in the Close before. He’s remembering all the stories of the thieves who stole the ornamental bird bath from the next-door neighbour’s garden, of the sick ghosts who haunt the edges of the familiar world with outstretched hands, of the pedlars he’s been warned against who offer all the terrible pleasures that must be refused, of the torturers of children, of the wandering random murderers …
I ignore him. I go on thinking about that head over there, the one growing out of the geranium pot. The thing that’s so difficult to grasp is that it’s the very same head as the one that’s here on my shoulders thinking about it – and yet I’ve still no more idea of what’s going on inside it than the boy behind the curtains has about what’s going on inside my present head. I imagine that it’s a shifting and comfortless tangle of recollection and apprehension. That it keeps recalling the thunderstorm of blows on the black iron and the silence that followed; the look in Keith’s mother’s eyes as she turned back to him at the gate and asked him her soft question; the x’s and exclamation marks; the kisses in the blackout. That it hasn’t forgotten the coming dark of the moon.
Impressions … fears … But what did Stephen make of them all? What did he actually understand?
What do I understand? Now? About anything? Even the simplest things in front of my eyes? What do I understand about the geraniums in that tub?
Only that they’re geraniums in a tub. About the biological, chemical, and molecular processes that lie behind that flaunting scarlet, or even the commercial and economic arrangements that create the market in bedding plants, or the sociological, psychological and aesthetic explanations for the planting out of geraniums in general and these geraniums in particular, I understand more or less nothing.
I don’t need to. I simply glance in that direction and at once I’ve got the general story: geraniums in a tub.
I’m not sure, now the question’s been raised, if I really understand even what it means to understand something.
If Stephen understood anything at all about what was going on, then I think it was this:
That he had betrayed Keith’s mother’s trust and let her down; that he had made things worse in some kind of way; that everything in the world was more complicated than he had supposed; that she was now caught in the same difficulty as he was about knowing what to think and what to do, the same deep unease.
I ask myself one very simple, basic question as I stare at the geraniums: did Stephen still think that she was a German spy?
My eyes unfocus as I try to recollect; the geraniums become a vague scarlet blur.
So far as I can piece it together, as the heir to Stephen’s thoughts, he neither thought she was nor didn’t think she was. Without Keith there to tell him what to think, he’d stopped thinking about it at all. Most of the time you don’t go around thinking that things are so or not so, any more than you go around understanding or not understanding them. You take them for granted. I’ve no doubts at all that those geraniums are geraniums, but all the same I’m not actually thinking the thought, ‘Those flowers are geraniums,’ or ‘Those flowers aren’t nasturtiums.’ I’ve got other things to occupy my mind, believe me.
Let me come at it another way. Let me ask myself an even simpler question: what did Stephen think she was actually doing?
I’m not sure he thought about even this in any very concrete way. What did he think Mr McAfee did, when he went off at the weekend in his special constable’s uniform? If the question ever crossed Stephen’s mind, he simply assumed that Mr McAfee continued to do what he was doing as he cycled down the road, which was being a special constable. What did Stephen think Mr Gort did? Well, he was a murderer, so presumably he murdered people. I can’t recall Stephen ever puzzling over who he murdered and why. What did Stephen’s father do? He vanished in the morning, he reappeared in the evening. Vanishing and reappearing seemed a full enough job description for all practical purposes.
What do spies do, for all anyone knows or cares? They behave suspiciously. Keith’s mother was behaving suspiciously. Wasn’t that enough?
In any case, the mystery at the heart of that shifting cloud of simultaneous possibilities was now x, the silent, unseen presence in the Barns. What did Stephen think about him?
He thought that he was a German. The less clear the Germanness of Keith’s mother’s became, the more clearly it was transferred to her courier or controller. The Germanness, revealed by Keith’s initial perception, was the source from which the whole sequence of events had taken its rise. It remained, like some residual belief in God amidst a sea of doubt about the theological details, the one sure item of faith that Stephen had to hold on to.
But Stephen also thought that he was an old tramp, since he lived in a place where old tramps lived.
So Stephen thought that he was an old German tramp?
Not at all. The idea that there might be old tramps of German nationality never entered his head. What he thought, as I understand it, was two quite unrelated things with unrelated parts of his mind: that the unseen figure in the Barns was German, and that at the same time he was something quite different – an old tramp.
Though I suspect that in a third part of Stephen’s mind there was an unconscious link between being an old tramp and being German that made the two beliefs a little more compatible: the germs with which old tramps were presumably covered, and which were presumably so called because they were as evil and insidious as Germans.
Did Stephen think that this ambiguous figure was also Auntie Dee’s mysterious boyfriend, as Barbara Berrill had suggested, or that Keith’s mother might be kissing him under the black corrugated iron? No – notions of that sort had become more ridiculous than ever. Even if people’s aunts had boyfriends, they certainly didn’t have boyfriends who were old tramps. Even if people kissed people in the blackout, they certainly didn’t kiss germ-laden Germans.
And yet, somewhere in Stephen’s mind, the echo of that word ‘boyfriend’, the ghost of those stolen kisses, lingered like a faint scent in the air.
What he wanted, I think, was for all the shifting thoughts inside his head to cease, for everything to stop happening and to go back to what it had been before. The clean simplicity of espionage, that had promised so well, had turned into such a sticky mess. What he wanted was for Keith to arrive with some new notion, some fresh project that would drive the old one out of both their heads.
He didn’t come, though. Stephen was left to sit and think on his own.
Another cause for unease: what had happened to him?
Every time Stephen made up his mind to go and knock on Keith’s door as usual, he saw it being opened not by him but his mother, and at the thought of her unspoken reproach, her sad ‘Oh, Stephen’, he stayed where he was, waiting for Keith to come to him.
I refocus my
eyes, and lift them from the geraniums to the boy watching me. What’s he made of all his unease? He’s vanished, though – gone to tell his mother about me, no doubt. In a moment she’ll come and take a look for herself, and at the sight of me now gazing into her living-room window she’ll be phoning the police, as Mrs Hardiment did before when she saw that mysterious intruder lurking about the Close.
I move on. Up the road and across to Keith’s house again.
As of course Stephen did then, in the end. There was nothing else for it.
By then, in any case, everything had begun to recede into the past a little, as everything always does. Nothing more had happened. Everything really had perhaps gone back to what it had been before.
*
It’s his mother who opens the door, exactly as I’d feared. I can’t lift my eyes to look at her, because all my courage has been exhausted by the effort of walking up the path and knocking on the door, but I have the impression that she’s smiling down at me with her old tranquillity. ‘Oh, hello, Stephen,’ she says, and this time I can detect no shadow of reproach. ‘We haven’t seen you round here for some time.’
I utter the recognised formula, my eyes still on the ground. ‘Can Keith come out to play?’
For a moment she hesitates. Then she turns to call towards the upstairs landing. ‘Keith, darling! It’s Stephen!’ She turns back to me and I feel another smile bent upon me. ‘Why don’t you go up, Stephen? He’s just tidying the playroom.’
I step into the hall, and the quiet, familiar order recom-poses itself around me once again: the hall stand with the clothes brushes and shoe horns … the rack with the sticks and canes … the Trossachs … the pagodas … From somewhere outside the house the endless solo for pursed human lips comes and goes as Keith’s father passes and repasses about his business in the garden. Keith’s mother watches me as I climb the familiar stairs, and the grandmother clock chimes the quarter.
Yes, everything’s back to what it was.
Keith’s sitting on the floor of the playroom sorting the elements of a construction kit into the appropriate compartments of its box. He looks up briefly as I come in. ‘Watch where you put your feet, old chap,’ he says.
I sit down on the floor opposite him. He goes on with his work, saying nothing, as if there were nothing surprising about my having been absent, or having now returned. I think this is what he means – that nothing unusual has happened after all. He’s telling me the game’s over. The question of his mother’s espionage, which once seemed so urgent, has turned out to be too difficult to resolve. It’s been put into the archives and forgotten, like so many other questions that seemed so urgent in their time. Neither of us will ever refer to it again. He has found the solution to all that stickiness and unease, just as I knew he would.
I breathe in the sweet, familiar perfumes of the room: the metallic briskness of the flanges and brackets in the construction kit and the shiny, cardboard cleanness of the box it came in; the sharp, nose-tickling intoxications of the spirit glue that holds the wings on the model aircraft, of the acetone solvent of their camouflage; the quiet seriousness of the light machine oil that lubricates so many well-maintained bearings in so many models and motors.
‘Shall we go on building the railway?’ I suggest. ‘Shall we do the viaduct over that gorge in the mountains?’
I’m telling him that I understand. I’m agreeing that we never strained our ears in terrible silence at the Barns, that the marks in the diary meant nothing, and that the dark of the moon will come and go without event. I’m promising him that I shan’t refer to these things any more than he will, that I gladly accept his solution, that I too know the game’s over.
He goes on putting struts with struts and flanges with flanges. The perfect tidiness of the room becomes gradually more perfect still. ‘I’ve got to pipeclay my cricket stuff when I’ve finished this,’ he says.
I watch him. He’s ignoring my dull suggestion about the viaduct, of course, since it came from me and not from him. He’s suddenly going to get a completely new idea into his head out of nowhere. He’s going to lead us into some new project, and I can’t wait to find out what it will be.
There’s a tap on the door, and his mother looks into the room. ‘I’m just popping round to Auntie Dee’s,’ she says. ‘You chaps will be all right on your own, will you?’
Everything’s back to normal; she’s popping round to Auntie Dee’s just as she’s always done.
After she’s gone Keith still says nothing. He keeps his eyes on the work in hand. He’s concentrating, like me, on the normality of his mother’s routine. He’s concentrating on seeing her walk up the path to Auntie Dee’s, and not round the corner at the end of the road, or through the tunnel, or into the Lanes.
Everything’s back to normal; but we both privately know that what’s normal has changed, and changed for ever. The game’s over because the normal has reached out to absorb the abnormal. The story has changed tack, like a ship altering course, and now it sails on as straight and level as it did before, but to a different destination – and we’re no longer aboard.
Keith puts the construction kit away, and gets his cricket pads and boots out of the cupboard. I trail downstairs after him, and watch him spread everything out on sheets of newspaper in the yard. The back door of the garage on the other side of the yard is open, and from it comes another range of familiar smells: sawdust, motor oil, swept concrete, car. His father’s huge shadow, cast by the low light over the workbench, moves around the walls inside, like an ogre in his cave, over the tennis rackets and the other neatly suspended mementoes of their pre-war life, whistling, whistling.
I watch the grey smudges and green grass stains on the pad disappear beneath the first stripe of perfect whiteness. It comes to me that there’s going to be no new idea, no new game. The new normality doesn’t include them. It’s not just the one game that’s over; all our games are over. I’m the accomplice in a crime which is as indeterminate as those smudges and stains, but which is now being painted out, and I along with them.
‘I’d probably better go home,’ I say miserably. ‘It must be nearly supper time.’
‘All right.’ Another moistly gleaming stripe of whiteness appears. Still I linger.
‘Are you coming out to play tomorrow?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know. I’ll have to see.’
He suddenly straightens up. The whistling in the garage has ceased. I turn round, and see his father watching us from the doorway of the garage, his lips drawn back in the familiar thin, impatient smile.
‘Thermos,’ he says.
He’s talking to Keith, of course. He’s given no more sign than he ever does of noticing my presence. I look at Keith. He goes red. He’s being accused of a crime, and already he’s feeling guilty – doubly guilty, because he knows he should be able to guess immediately what the crime is, and he can’t.
His father waits. Keith goes redder still.
‘Come on, old bean,’ says his father impatiently, and I feel a lurch of fear for myself as well as Keith. ‘Thermos flask. In the picnic hamper. Anyone say you could take it?’
Keith looks at the ground. ‘I didn’t take it.’
Another little smile from his father. ‘Taking other people’s things without permission – that’s stealing. You know that. Saying you didn’t when you did – that’s lying. Yes?’
Keith goes on looking at the ground. In the silence the words ‘Mummy must have taken it’ hang in the air unsaid, audible only to Keith and me.
‘Where is it, then, old bean?’
Another silence, three syllables long: ‘In the Barns.’
‘Don’t be a blithering idiot. Some game you’re playing? Best be a man and own up.’
The silence is heavy with the same explanation – twice over, unsaid by Keith and unsaid by me.
‘I’m disappointed in you,’ says his father. The smile’s worse now; there’s sorrow and pity in it. All at once I realise what he really sus
pects: that I’ve taken the thermos. That Keith’s protecting me.
‘You know what you’re going to get, old bean,’ says his father. ‘Wash that stuff off your hands. Dry them properly.’
He goes in through the kitchen door, wiping his shoes on the mat.
‘You’d better go,’ says Keith to me. He’s still red in the face, still not looking at anything except the ground. He follows his father into the kitchen, also wiping his shoes on the mat, and I hear the sound of the water splashing in the sink as he washes the white cleaner off his hands to prepare them.
I’d gladly leave, as Keith told me, but I can’t, because I have to go in and confront his father. I have to stop this thing happening. I have to tell him that he’s right – that I took the thermos.
I did, after all. In effect. I betrayed her trust. I made her go to the Barns. Something bad’s happening there, and I’m the one who made it happen. The game’s not over. It’s simply become a more terrible kind of game.
Silence from the house. I must go and tell him.
The silence goes on and on. I must.
Keith’s father comes out of the kitchen and goes back into the garage. He begins to whistle again.
Keith reappears. The redness in his cheeks has turned blotchy. His hands are pressed beneath his armpits.
‘I told you to go, old bean,’ he says shortly.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper abjectly. I’m sorry for not going, for not owning up, for seeing him like this, for going now and leaving him like this, for the stinging in his hands; for everything.
His father comes out of the garage again. ‘I’ll give you until bedtime to think about it,’ he says to Keith. ‘If it’s not back by then you’ll get the same again. And then again tomorrow. And so on every day until it’s back.’
He lingers in the doorway, looking at the ground, thinking about something else.
‘And your mother’s at Auntie Dee’s again?’ he asks finally, in a different tone. Keith nods.
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