The Spy Game

by Georgina Harding

  'Why?'

  'I thought it might be nice to say a prayer.'

  I had only been into the church once or twice. I liked it from the outside, I liked the sandy warmth of its stone, but inside it was bare and white with long cold windows and an empty smell that must have been made of damp and limewash.

  'But we're Catholic. It's not a Catholic church.'

  So we walked by the gate and did not stop. Mrs Lacey's face was tight and like a mask with its painted points of colour.

  * * *

  'We've only got their word for it,' said Peter. 'We didn't see her, did we? All we know for sure is that she went away, we don't know anything else. We didn't even go to the funeral.'

  Peter was a boy and two years older. He had all the toughness in him of his age and of his time away at school. Peter sowed doubts and doubts were power.

  'When you think about it, we don't really know any-thing about her, do we?'

  'That's because of her being German, because Daddy met her in Berlin.'

  'Yes, but all the same, we should know something. We don't know her family. We don't know anyone who used to know her. We don't even know where she came from, or anything.'

  'Yes we do.'

  'What?'

  'Know where she came from. I know the name of the place. She told me. It was a big place, bigger than Cheltenham. It was called Königsberg.'

  'That's what she said, but it's not there. I checked. It isn't on the map. At school, I checked, and it wasn't there.'

  'That's not true.'

  'Look for yourself if you don't believe me.'

  We went to the sitting room and Peter took the atlas down from the big bookcase beside our father's chair. He laid it on the carpet and opened it where Europe began.

  'Find it then.'

  I looked until my legs ached from being bent on the floor. The afternoon was hot. There was a sort of hum that was a summer day outside but I stayed in and did not notice for a long time that the curtains were still drawn from the night before and that I looked by lamplight. Then I got up and put out the light and drew the heavy curtains back, and saw outside as if it was a foreign country off the map. It was bright, green, behind glass; I could not go there. I went back to my place on the floor. I used to sit on the floor with my legs folded flat, knees together and feet splayed out, but after a long time that began to hurt. I sat some other way. I looked across four wide pages: Central, Eastern Europe, the pale-blue Baltic, the tattered edge of Scandinavia curling above it, the solid blocks of colour beneath. My mother had said that she had lived close to the sea. You could see ships, she had said, from the attic window of her home. I looked at all the names that fanned out from the Baltic coast, in West Germany, East Ger-many, Poland. I looked at the names inland. Then Peter condescended to show me how the index worked and I put a ruler to the page and worked systematically down all the tight-printed columns of Ks.

  'Perhaps it begins with a C,' I said, and started again there.

  'No it doesn't. It can't. I know.'

  'How do you know? You don't know German.'

  Conico, Conimbriga, Coningsby, Coniston. He was right. It just wasn't there.

  'See.'

  I went home just briefly that day from the Laceys'.

  It was late in the afternoon. It was beginning to get dark and there were lights on in the house.

  'Somebody's there. Who's there?' When I saw the lights in the windows I knew that I didn't want anyone with me, not Mrs Lacey, not Susan, no one who had any words to them. I wanted to go in on my own, like always.

  'It's only the piano tuner.'

  I could hear the piano soon as the door was open: a note repeated, adjusted, played again.

  'Why's the piano tuner here?'

  To tune the piano, said Mrs Lacey, nothing strange about it. There was no point in sending the man away once he had made the journey. So she had told Margaret to let him in.

  We had come only to pack a bag. My father was coming home with Peter and then we were going away for a few days. He would be driving right now, fetching Peter from school.

  When we went upstairs to my room the sound was there too.

  'What shall I take?'

  The notes were insistent, distorting, dragging on the ear. I never liked the piano tuner coming. He made the world go out of shape.

  'You're going to the sea,' Susan said.

  When the piano tuner finished we saw him go before we turned off the lights, and Mrs Lacey double-locked all the doors. Later that same evening my father came and we drove away in the dark.

  I slept in the car. A transient security in sleeping on a journey, in being carried through the night, and when the motion stopped, being lifted, wrapped and still curled, and knowing that you were somewhere else and yet not having to open your eyes, and being safe and put into bed. When I woke the sea was there before me. I drew back the plaid-patterned curtains from a big window, and saw the sea in a straight line in front of the house. There were two beds in the room and Peter was still asleep in the other one. It was the room of some boy or boys who we did not know; school photographs of strangers on the chest of drawers and a dartboard on the wall.

  The sea was a dull pencil colour with white edges against the shore. I had never come to the seaside in winter before. It looked so cold, wide and silent beyond the fastened window. I did not hear it until I went out, soon as breakfast was over. I ran ahead of Peter, down the steps from the garden on to the narrow strip of the beach, and low waves came in and foamed at my feet, and I ran along that beach and over the wooden groin and along the next, until I came to a fence and a line of bare and tattered trees. I stood there and looked across the sea to the long smooth outline of an island. It was clear that it was an island because I could see each end of it, and the sea between was still grey, but scaly now that the sun had broken through to shine on it.

  We stayed four or five days, long enough to learn that the island was the Isle of Wight and that the rocks that stood out in the sea beyond its tip were called the Needles, though they seemed too thick and solid for such a name. The house belonged to some people that my father said he had known before, before the war and before my mother, but I did not remember ever having heard of them. Henry and Madeleine, they were called. He never said which one of them was his friend, which one had known him first; only that they were kind and that their own children were away at school. I learnt to play darts and Peter shot a bow and arrows, and we played ping-pong on a table in the garage. One of the days my father and Henry went somewhere dressed in suits, and we children were left with Madeleine alone. Madeleine took us out for a walk with her two red setters that bounded with streaming hair along the shore.

  * * *

  'Will we go there again, Daddy?'

  'What, to Madeleine's?'

  'I liked it there. I want to go in the summer so I can go in the sea.'

  'Perhaps,' he said. 'If they ask us.'

  We never did. There was no sequential reality to add to this interlude, which came to memory later in disconnected images like snapshots or a dream. Later, I was to wonder who Henry and Madeleine were, and if they really did exist, and told myself that I would surely find them if only I were to go along the south coast, to sail say from Bournemouth to Southampton, and look in along all the shore with the Isle of Wight behind me. Henry and Madeleine I would not know again; they seemed quite indistinct; but I was certain that I would recognise the house. A safe house. I had the image of it clear: set just back from the beach, not old, probably Thirties, white, parts of the upper storey hung with tiles; wide windows and dormers in the roof above; all looking out to the sea. And hydrangeas. I had an image of them by the steps that led up from the sand, steps made of broad planks with pale sand scattered across them, and tall blue hydrangea bushes. Yet remembering it afterwards, it seems impossible that it could have been so: if we visited the place just that one time in January, then how could I have known the colour of the flowers?

  So little
that is known for sure, so much confused. The past seems sometimes mutable as the present, changing before my eyes. I had to learn to fix it about a constant, at least something near a constant. The house we lived in, that was fixed. Every piece of it I used to go over and fix about myself. For years I did this, when I was at school and again later, in other places after I had moved away. I would take myself around the house and the garden in my mind before I went to sleep: into the hall, through open doors and up the stairs and around the upstairs rooms.

  To my own room, with a picture of a rider on the wall and the tiny glass animals that I collected on the shelves. Peter's room, my father's with the yellow bedspread, the spare room that was just that, spare, with white airy emptiness, the little room where the ironing was done that had a round window where I used to hide away and read.

  Downstairs then, and out of the French windows into the garden.

  When we got home it was just the three of us. The house told us that, it was so clean and neat; the letters on the sideboard in the hall, all the loose papers and magazines in piles at the corners of the tables. Margaret must have come every day even though we were gone, polished the furniture and the silver and the brass handles on the doors, and left the smell of it behind her. Tidied and hoovered and dusted and polished, and erased. Something had been erased from the house, and so completely that I did not see at first that it was the presence of my mother. Her coat gone from its hook and with it her shoes, the fur-lined boots that she wore to go out in the cold. Her bag and her diary that she kept in the kitchen. Jars and bottles from the bathroom. From every room, her touch: the arrangements of things, the positions of cushions and ashtrays; the sense that she had been there.

  Yet this was more than Margaret could have done alone. I knew that someone must have been there with her, if not my father then Mrs Lacey or someone other who was strange to me. Some cold hands had been through and touched everything, systematically identifying, selecting things, taking out her clothes with the soft smell to them, lifting them up, folding them away, clearing her dressing table, gathering up the lipsticks and the nail polish and the cotton wool and the compacts, disposing of them, while Margaret went stolidly after and breathed on the glass and cleaned away the rings where the little bottles had stood and the spilled powder.

  Sometimes when I made a mistake in my schoolwork, my mother used to help rub it out. When I did it myself I left a shadow on the page, and sometimes crumpled it or took the surface off the paper. When my mother did it she held the page smooth between red-varnished fingertips and rubbed so gently with the other hand that, if the pencil had not been pressed too hard, the paper was left white and perfect and good as if it was never written on.

  The house was like that. There were no marks. You had to make an effort to remember where she had been.

  They had rubbed her out.

  The strange thing was that the space which spoke her absence most was not any of the rooms she had lived in, not her bedroom even with her dressing table by the window and the stool before it, none of these but my own room. Only there was there a sense of her, pressing in. She was in the walls, the curtains, in the dark slit where the cupboard door failed to close. There, or about to be there, known, immanent, her voice most of all, about to break through, almost recalled, so that I almost heard its tone, its warmth, its accent. And yet the silence held and there were no words. It held and quivered, like a note sung too long, until I felt that I could not breathe. I ran, gasping, to my father's room. See: my mother's room had already become my father's room. There was his bed and there was space in it. The sheets in the space were cold, but warm close up to him. A little later Peter came in too, and the other side warmed also.

  I have never come to Berlin before. In forty years I somehow never found the time.

  I Peter came here as soon as he began to travel, a hunched student on a rail pass, and when he got home he spoke of the divided city's scars and its lack of beauty yet he seemed to have preferred it to Paris or Amsterdam or Rome. He was drawn back repeatedly in those years and again later, after the Wall came down. He made an effort to come and see me just after that, invited himself for a weekend as he had not done in years and brought me what he said was a piece of the Wall as a present. (And that was just what it was, a chunk of graffitied concrete, and I have no idea where it has got to. Perhaps my husband has thrown it away by now. My husband is a tidy man and has no place for what has no function.)

  'I don't know what you expect to find,' my husband said when I told him I was planning this trip. 'It was all a very long time ago.'

  * * *

  It takes getting used to, travelling alone. Life seems at some moments blank, as there is no one to share it with, and at others strangely vivid. Being without habit, husband, family becomes all at once like being without a skin, senses bared to every impression, to the sunlight, the morning, the bus ride from the airport, the confusion of catching a tram, buying and punching a ticket in a place where you do not speak the language. At least the hotel was not hard to find. I checked in and took up my case but did not unpack it and only sat there for a while on the bed. It is a tolerable room, more spacious than I might have expected, and it smells fresh. I have taken the bed closest to the window. The other one by the wall I will leave untouched. If it is clear that I have not used it then perhaps they will not have the bother of changing the sheets.

  I shall leave sightseeing for tomorrow. It is lucky that the route of the bus from the airport passed by so many of the famous sites. I have at least glimpsed the new dome of the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate, Unter den Linden, Alexanderplatz. I know where these things are.

  This first evening I thought I should stick to the streets by the hotel. I walked until I came to a triangular platz with trees and cafés about it. No one was sitting at the tables outside as there was a biting wind. The cold was getting to me even as I was walking, but with so many cafés and restaurants it was hard to choose where to stop. It was some time later that I found this one, a place much like any other with a menu board outside on the pavement, but a couple were just leaving, and the door they held open seemed like an invitation. The restaurant is cosy and there is white linen on the table, and lentil soup.

  I have a book to read. Isn't that what lone women are supposed to do when they travel: read books propped open with knives at restaurant tables? The Meaning of Treason by Rebecca West, the 1965 edition updated with chapters on the spy cases of the Sixties: Philby, Burgess and Maclean, Blake, Vassall, Profumo, the Portland Ring. I particularly mean to read the chapters about the Portland case, about Houghton and Gee and Lonsdale and the Krogers. I shall not begin to read it with concentration until later when I am back in the hotel room. Here in the restaurant the book is just for cover.

  It was the story of the Krogers that people were to remember long after everything else about Portland was forgotten. Houghton and Gee were understandable if despicable. Lonsdale was a Russian and a professional. The secrets they traded became obsolete. The Krogers re-mained an enigma.

  What was interesting about them was the completeness of the lie they lived. In person, they entirely convinced. They seemed perfectly nice, middle class, trustworthy, classifiable, the sort of people others liked: Helen and Peter, the nice New Zealand couple, who had seemed to fit in so easily to suburban living. British people rather expected that of New Zealanders, back then. New Zeal-anders were provincial in that special Commonwealth way; you trusted them almost more than your own people because places like New Zealand and Canada were thinly populated and a little behind the times, and kept to the old values that reminded you how good it was to be British.

  It was only when they were gone, when the police had taken them away, the evening of that same Saturday in January when the other three were arrested at Waterloo, that the things they left behind revealed who they really were.

  Their house was a bungalow on a suburban street in Ruislip, a house of such a common design, with its twinned bow win
dows and white cement, and brick edging to the porch, that anyone who passed it might think they could reasonably guess at the life that went on inside. It looked as predictable as a mass-produced doll's house, to which a child might add pieces bought in little packs, all made to scale, all with the safety in them of standardised design: a sofa for the lounge, a coffee table with a Ronson lighter on it, a Murphy radiogram, a bookcase, a bathroom suite, a kitchen cabinet with two drawers in the middle. At six-thirty on a wintry Saturday evening the lights should be on, and figures placed upon the sofa, Dixon of Dock Green on television - a scene to be glimpsed perhaps through the gap in the not-quite-yet-closed curtains.

  So it appeared, and yet it was not so.

  The Murphy radiogram had headphones fitted and concealed in its back, and was tuned to a high frequency band for the reception of foreign transmissions.

  The Ronson table lighter had a concealed cavity in its base containing negative films with dates and signal plans for wireless communications with call signs based on the names of Russian towns and rivers.

  The Bible in the bookcase contained pieces of light-sensitised cellophane to be used for the making of micro-dots.

  The tin of Three Flowers talcum powder in the bath-room sprinkled talc only from a central compartment and concealed a microdot reader in secret compartments along-side.

  Hidden in the bedroom were a box holding a micro-scope and glass slides, a magazine of 35mm film concealed beneath a chest of drawers, an extraordinary length of electric flex, thousands of US dollars. Elsewhere were cameras, tape recorders, photographic developing materials, black-out screens for the conversion of bathroom into darkroom.