Life continued; but on a slightly different course. I never went to Keith’s house again, I never went back to the lookout. I don’t know what became of the bayonet any more than I do of the scarf. Perhaps that’s in a museum, too.
Every now and then I saw Keith cycling past on his way to school or back, but he didn’t notice me. I caught the odd glimpse of his father as he worked in the front garden, and heard him whistling a passage or two from the great cadenza that never ended. Sometimes his mother would smile at me as she passed carrying her shopping basket, or letters to post, a cravat still high on her throat long after my bandages had gone. Once she stopped and said I must come to tea again some time, but ‘some time’ was never any particular day, and very soon Keith went away, first on holiday with his family and then to start boarding school.
Auntie Dee always smiled at me too, as bravely as ever, but my mother told me that she was really terribly upset, because Uncle Peter had been posted missing, and because, just when she most needed the support of her family, she’d apparently had some kind of falling out with Keith’s mother. My mother sometimes tried to help with Milly and the shopping, until Auntie Dee moved out of the district a few weeks later, after which no one ever saw her again. My mother had been a little bit soft on Uncle Peter herself, she once confided to me – all the wives in the Close had.
I called at Lamorna several times, but Barbara could never come out to play. I began to see her across the road at the Averys. Charlie Avery had been called up, and Dave would be working on the three-wheeler on his own – with Barbara sitting cross-legged on the driveway watching him and handing him tools, her purse with the bobbly blue leather and the shiny popper still slung around her neck. I went through the first of the agonies which I was going to discover later were usual on these occasions.
The scent of the limes and the honeysuckle faded; the treacly, reassuring breath of the buddleia came and went; the raw, urgent reek of the privet faded.
There were many things that Keith had been wrong about, I realised gradually as life went on. But about one thing, and one quite surprising thing, he’d been right, though it took me several years to recognise it. There was a German spy in the Close that summer. It wasn’t his mother – it was me.
Everything is as it was; and everything has changed. Stephen Wheatley has become this old man, treading slowly and warily in the footsteps of his former self, and the name of this old man is Stefan Weitzler. That undersized observer in the privet, spying on the comings and goings of the street, has reverted to the name under which he was registered in the peaceful green district of the great German city where he was born.
I was reborn as Stephen when my parents left Germany in 1935. My mother was English anyway, and she’d always spoken English to us at home, but now my father became more English still, and we all turned into Wheatleys. She died at the beginning of the 1960s, and when my father followed her less than a year later I felt a great restlessness stirring in me – the converse of that same restlessness that’s brought me back now to the Close. It’s the longing to be elsewhere that in Germany we call Fernweh, which is in my case also Heimweh, a longing to be home – the terrible pull of opposites that torments the displaced everywhere.
Well, my life in England had somehow never really taken flight. My marriage was never quite a real marriage, my job in the engineering department of the local polytechnic was never quite a real job. I felt a yearning to know more about my father, about where he’d grown up, where he and my mother had fallen in love, where I’d first seen the light. So I went to take a look, and I discovered that my first two years had been spent in a quiet, garden-lined street that seemed to be a dreamlike echo of the Close in which I later grew up, which is no doubt why the Close itself always seemed to be a dreamlike echo in its turn.
I had a bleak few months in my rediscovered homeland, struggling with a language I’d only started to learn in my adolescence, too late to be ever quite at ease with, working in an environment I couldn’t quite understand. Of my father’s past scarcely a trace remained. His parents and two brothers had all been taken and murdered. His sister had for some reason been left, and instead had been killed in her own cellar, along with her two children, by Uncle Peter, or by his colleagues in Bomber Command.
And yet, and yet … I stayed. My temporary job somehow became a permanent one. I don’t suppose you’ve ever read the English-language installation and maintenance manuals for Siemens transformers and high-voltage switchgear, but if by any chance you have then you’re familiar with at any rate some of my work. The story in the manuals, it occurs to me, is once again somebody else’s, just as the story of the German spy, and all the other stories of my childhood, were Keith’s. Once again all I’ve done is play the loyal disciple.
And of course the day came when I met someone else, and as I began to see Germany through her familiar eyes, my perception of everything around me changed once again … Soon there was a house, in another quiet, tree-lined street … The house became a home … There were children, and many German in-laws to visit … And now, before I can sort out whether I belong here or there, or even which is here and which is there, my children are grown up, and we have their mother’s grave to tend each week.
Actually there were two German spies in the Close, now I come to think about it – and the other one was a serious and dedicated professional.
I once tried to gain a little credit with Keith by claiming that my father was a German spy. Well, so he was, I discovered later. At any rate he was a German, and he had some kind of job in economic intelligence, though he was on the British side, not the German. This was why he came back when he did from that mysterious ‘business trip’ of his to the North. They gave him an early release from his internment as an enemy alien in the Isle of Man because they needed his knowledge of the German optical industry, and his ability to understand decrypts relating to it. Someone who’d worked on the history of the Allied bombing campaign once told me that if it hadn’t been for the work of his department, the Germans would have been better supplied with gunsights, and Uncle Peter and his colleagues would have had a harder time still with German anti-aircraft defences.
I suppose I’ve got more and more like my father as I’ve got older. I hear myself saying the same irritatingly eccentric things that he used to say, that I never realised at the time were simply plain, ordinary German. I’d look into my son’s bedroom when he was a child and tell him off for the frightful Kuddelmuddel, and when he tried to offer some excuse I’d snap that it was nonsense, just as my father would have done: Schnickschnack!
Yes, we were the Germans, in a country at war with them, and no one ever knew it. No one except me overheard the pleas of the desperate fellow-refugees who came to my father for help. No one else guessed what language they were speaking together. We were also the Juice, in a juiceless district (the mysterious dark strangers at Trewinnick turned out to be Orthodox Greeks) and no one ever knew that, either. I’m no more religious than my father ever was, but I too have vexed my family with that same residual conviction that Friday evening, when the first star is ventured upon the sky, was a time for all of us to stay home and be together.
Why did my parents conceal all this? I suppose they wanted to make things easier for Geoff and me. Maybe it did at the time, too. Keith’s parents would probably never have allowed me inside their house if they’d known what we were. Later, though, when I found out, it made things harder. For me, though apparently not for Geoff, who was four years more German than me but four times more British. He knew where we came from – he was already six when we left. Or at any rate he sort of knew, he told me much later, in the way we sort of know so many things. Why didn’t he tell me at the time? I imagine because what he also knew from the reticence of my parents, and knew for sure, was that there were some things that must never be talked about.
No, I think it went deeper than that. I think that what he instinctively grasped was this: that some things must nev
er even be known.
Geoff Wheatley he remained, anyway, and never thought of going back to being Joachim Weitzler. He married, moved to a house much like our old one in the Close and less than a mile away from it, lived out his life as a local auctioneer and valuer, kept up his early interest in girls and smoking, got into various rather unappetising marital scrapes, and died of lung cancer, with much suffering but, so far as I know, no great anxieties about his past. Not, at any rate, ones that he ever confided to me. He’d even carefully forgotten all his German. Or so I supposed. Once, though, when I visited him in the hospice as he lay dying, he seemed to think in his confusion that I was our father. He took my hand, and when I bent close to his lips what he called me was not ‘Daddy’, which we’d always called our father in the time I remembered, but ‘Papi’. And what he kept saying, in a little frightened voice, was that he was frightened of the dark: ‘Papi, Papi, ich hab’ Angst vor dem Dunkeln.’
What happened to all the other children in the street? The McAfees’ son died in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Charlie Avery lost an eye and a hand in a training exercise two months after he was called up. I’ve no idea what became of Barbara Berrill. I think Keith’s a barrister of some sort. I saw his name on a doorway in the Inner Temple when I was getting my divorce. ‘Mr K. R. G. Hayward’ – there can’t be more than one K. R. G. Hayward, can there? I nearly went in and confronted him. Why didn’t I? Some last residual fear, perhaps. That was thirty years ago – he’s probably a judge by now. I can imagine him as a judge. Or perhaps he’s retired. I can imagine him retired, too, tending his roses and whistling.
Or else he’s dead. Can I imagine him dead? Not really. Can I imagine myself, for that matter, lying in my narrow grave, with that same terrible intensity as I imagined it then? No. The imagination ages, like everything else. The intensity fades. You don’t get as afraid as you used to.
I walk up the street once more, to get full value from my air fare. One last look before someone calls the police or the local social services. Lamorna, I see, is now simply No. 6. Would the murmur of ‘Number Six’ ever have got as confused with the scent of the privet as the soft syllables of ‘Lamorna’ did? The entanglement of wild roses in the front garden there has been replaced by a few small beds of pansies at the edge of the gravel drive, and a white-haired old lady is kneeling to weed them. She glances up at me, and I suddenly realise, with the most terrible jolt of recognition, of hope and dismay, that it’s Barbara.
She looks indifferently at me for a moment, and then returns to her weeding. It’s not Barbara. Of course it’s not. I don’t think it is.
In any case, what I’m really thinking about isn’t Barbara – or Keith, for that matter – or any of the others. It’s that scarf still. It keeps nagging at me. I should just like to know for sure what happened to that, if nothing else.
Not that there’s much chance it would offer many surprises, even if I could somehow get my hands on it and unfold it at last. I know exactly what I should see printed on the silk: a map of Germany, and the rest of Europe as far west as the Channel coast – not the landscape that any German might want to spy on, or to bomb, or to parachute into. It was the escape map that all British aircrew routinely carried in the pocket of their flying jackets, in the remote hope that if they were shot down they might somehow try to find their way home.
Did I really not know at the time that the broken man in the Barns was Uncle Peter? Of course I knew. I knew as soon as he called me by name. No, before that. As soon as I heard him behind me in the moonlight. Or much earlier still, even. From the very beginning, perhaps. Just as he himself had always known that she was really the one. Always her … From the very beginning … When was the very beginning, for him and her? Perhaps from the afternoon when he and the nice jolly girl he’d just met at some local tennis club found themselves making up a foursome for doubles with her composed and tranquil elder sister and her sister’s unsociable, middle-aged husband. Always her. Even as he’d stood in front of the church door in his RAF uniform later, with the wrong sister on his arm.
And yet probably he hadn’t known at all, any more than I did about him. I went on thinking, even after I’d heard him speak, that he was a German. This was what I clung on to – that he was a German. His Germanness hung in the air, as pervasive and as transforming as the scent of the privet or the sound of Lamorna. Whatever I secretly knew, and whenever I knew it, I also understood that it was something that must never be known.
I look up at the sky, as I did when I arrived; the one enduring feature of the street. I think of the uncontrollable terror seizing him, ten thousand feet up there in the dark emptiness, and five hundred miles from here. And I think of the terror that must have seized my aunt and her children, too, as the unbreathable gases from the burning house filled their dark cellar ten thousand feet below him, or someone like him.
I think of the shame that pursued him afterwards, from which he fled into that dark pit. At least my aunt and her children were spared the shame.
What we did to each other in those few years of madness! What we did to ourselves!
Now all the mysteries have been resolved, or as resolved as they’re ever likely to be. All that remains is the familiar slight ache in the bones, like an old wound when the weather changes. Heimweh or Fernweh? A longing to be there or a longing to be here, even though I’m here already? Or to be both at once? Or to be neither, but in the old country of the past, that will never be reached again in either place?
Time to go. So, once again – thank you, everyone. Thank you for having me.
And, on the air as I turn the corner at the end of the street, a sudden faint breath of something familiar. Something sweet, coarse, and intimately unsettling.
Even here, after all. Even now.
Author biography
Michael Frayn was born in London in 1933 and began his career as a journalist on the Guardian and the Observer. His plays include Alphabetical Order, Clouds, Donkeys’ Years, Make or Break and Benefactors. Noises Off won the Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy of the Year and the Laurence Olivier Best Comedy of the Year. His more recent plays include Copenhagen, which won the 1998 Evening Standard Award for Best Play of the Year and the 2000 Tony Award for Best Play (USA), and Democracy, which opened to great critical acclaim in 2003. His latest play, Afterlife, opened in 2008.
He has also translated a number of works from Russian, including plays by Chekhov and Tolstoy. His films for television include First and Last (1989), for which he won an Emmy, and an adaptation of his 1991 novel A Landing on the Sun.
His novels include Headlong (1999), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Spies (2002), which won the Whitbread Novel Award.
He is married to the biographer and critic Claire Tomalin.
By the Same Author
fiction
HEADLONG
THE TIN MEN
THE RUSSIAN INTERPRETER
A TOWARDS THE END OF THE MORNING
A VERY PRIVATE LIFE
SWEET DREAMS
THE TRICK OF IT
A LANDING ON THE SUN
NOW YOU KNOW
non-fiction
CELIA’S SECRET: An Investigation (with David Burke)
plays
THE TWO OF US
ALPHABETICAL ORDER
DONKEY’S EARS
CLOUDS
BALMORAL
MAKE AND BREAK
NOISES OFF
BENEFACTORS
LOOK LOOK
HERE
NOW YOU KNOW
COPENHAGEN
ALARMS & EXCURSIONS
translations
UNCLE VANYA (Chekhov)
THREE SISTERS (Chekhov)
THE CHERRY ORCHARD (Chekhov)
THE SNEEZE (Chekhov)
WILD HONEY (Chekhov)
THE FRUITS OF ENLIGHTENMENT (Chekhov)
EXCHANGE (Trifonov)
NUMBER ONE (Anouilh)
film and television
CLOCKWISE
FIRST AND LAST
REMEMBER ME?
opera
LA BELLE VIVETTE
(from Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène)
Copyright
First published in 2002
by Faber and Faber Limited
3 Queen Square London WC1N 3AU
This ebook edition first published in 2008
All rights reserved
© Michael Frayn, 2002
The right of Michael Frayn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
ISBN 978—0—571—24920—6
Spies (2002) Page 21