The Spy Game

by Georgina Harding

  Beneath a trap door under the kitchen fridge was a makeshift cache containing more dollars, more lenses and cameras, including reducing lenses for making microdots, and a transmitter with a foreign plug.

  And in the attic space among Helen's carefully stored overwintering apples - stored on slats so they could breathe, no one of them touching another, the smell of them sweet and domestic beneath the roof - was a radio aerial seventy-four foot nine inches long.

  Tools, gadgets, evidence. That is what fascinated people so. There was the ordinariness of the people and then there was the evidence of the house, like an extraordinary game of Cluedo.

  That nice friendly middle-class woman Helen, who always has a smile for her neighbours, a bone for the dog or a present for the children, who will do errands for you or bring you fresh eggs from the local farm, connects the aerial in the roof to the transmitter beneath the kitchen floor, using the flex that was found in the bedroom, puts to her head the earphones that were concealed in the back of the radiogram, tunes in, calls Volga ya Axov, or Lena ya Amur, transmits to Moscow.

  Their names are Morris and Lona or Leontina Cohen. They are Americans, not New Zealanders, Communists and associates of the Rosenbergs. In 1950 when the Rosenbergs were arrested the Cohens had dropped out of sight, and somehow, somewhere, in some Soviet country, in the time between then and the time when they arrived in England in 1955, they had acquired the skills to run their own spy cell, learnt radio operation and the making of microdots, learnt to set up a convincing cover as antiquarian booksellers, learnt to be the Krogers.

  How did it feel to do that? Perhaps it was easier than it seemed. Perhaps you simply took up the role and smiled in it. You walked out and went to the shops in it, and gradually you became it or it became you.

  Or you wake in a hotel room in a distant city and shake off the sleep and remember, this is who you will be, and dress and go down the stairs and make yourself whoever it is as you eat your foreign breakfast.

  Perhaps it began to happen with the first response from the outside, the trust of a stranger, the first making of a friend. And what then? After a day, a week, a year, a life set up as someone else? Who were you then? Who were the Cohens, or Krogers, when they were alone? Who were they to each other? Was Peter Kroger the same man all through as Morris Cohen, the Bronx boy who won a sports scholarship to the University of Mississippi? He had kept Cohen's fitness and physique, an enthusiasm for sport that had transmuted into a love of cricket, and presumably Cohen had shared the same easy charm, though his hair had not been such a distinguished grey. And Helen? When the case was over it was known that Helen was Lona but that was even harder for those who had thought them-selves their friends to accept, for Helen had seemed so convincingly and warmly herself. Perhaps the different passports stood for nothing and she was one person after all, and a friend of Leontina Petka as she had been, the daughter of Polish immigrants to America, would be equally a friend of Helen the New Zealand housewife?

  I put down room key and guidebook on a table and go and dither before the hotel buffet. Other guests nod to me as I pass. Perhaps they guess that I am English. I can be whatever woman they see. I nod back, knowing they know nothing of who I am inside.

  There was a suggestion that the deception was hard for Helen. It came out in the course of the trial that people remembered her from the time when the Krogers had lived in Catford, before they moved to the bungalow at Ruislip. Women neighbours saw that she used to cry a lot. She would cry alone in the house and when she came out her eyes would show it. They assumed, knowing (as they thought) the sort of person she was, that the sadness in her life was that the couple had no children. It was a flaw in the Helen Kroger story, the thing that neighbours noted, and talked about, and pitied her for: the lack of the thing that rooted a woman, gave her purpose in that suburban daytime world.

  Yet why did she have no children? Was that too a part of the job?

  The woman who spoke in court never once appeared to diverge from character. She may have converted the bathroom in the Ruislip bungalow into a temporary dark-room for the developing of photographs and the making of microdots, but when she spoke she spoke as a housewife, so normal, so true to type, that other women who heard her could not help feeling that she was one of them. She liked the man Lonsdale, she said, Lonsdale who was arrested two hours before her at Waterloo, because he was helpful in the house. He brought in coal and helped her with the washing up, and sometimes he helped her with her hobby of photography. It rang true. Peter Kroger, by the sound of him, probably spent his Sundays doing the crossword or watching the cricket or deep in his books. Who wouldn't have appreciated a charming younger man like that as a weekend guest? It made spying such a homely sort of a thing.

  Then there was the moment of her arrest, when Helen had asked one favour before leaving the house: 'As I am going out for some time may I go and stoke the boiler in the kitchen?' She spoke in character, even then, and the only oddity of it was that she picked up her handbag to take with her - and whenever did a woman take her handbag when she went to stoke the boiler? When Superintendent Smith took it from her he found in it an envelope full of codes and rendezvous points and microdots.

  Godfrey Lacey swore when he saw the arrest of the Portland spies announced on the News that Monday. I noticed it because usually Mr Lacey was not a vehement man. He had the erectness to him of a former soldier but not the authority; his words hesitant, his eyes never quite direct, his moustache the most emphatic point on his face. But at this moment the anger in him was visible. He swore again, never mind that Susan and I were in the room nor that his wife was trying to get his attention. He took up his gin and swallowed, and I saw the chill disgust those of his generation felt for spies and traitors.

  Just as he spoke the second time, Daphne called again from the hall. Though she had a voice that could be piercing, he did not seem to hear it. She held her hand over the receiver and called him, then when he did not come she returned to the conversation she was having. She was standing at the table in the hall where the telephone was kept. The telephone was for information still in those days, not a social instrument, and was kept in the hall without even a chair beside it.

  I remember the simultaneous occurrences: Godfrey swearing, the television, the gin glass taken up from the Burmese side table, Daphne on the telephone, Susan and myself playing cards. It was as if some some electrical event had occurred, a charged moment, and each random piece of it was crystallised. Yet the meaning of each piece was not initially clear, or if any one were dependent upon the others. At first the Portland case, and Godfrey's anger, seemed to be no more than a part of the adult background, something to be absorbed vaguely like other news stories, like the Congo, like Algeria, like Macmillan or de Gaulle, so many names and places that my father and the Laceys and their friends and my friends' parents turned about.

  It was Peter who made the connection. Peter's fault then. Peter who was so clever but did not know where you divided stories from reality.

  A year on. Again, summer. Loose days. Open doors and windows.

  Peter's school broke up before mine did. He was at home for a week, more, on his own. I do not know what he got up to. I suppose that he stayed in his room, brooded, read, made models, watched the cricket, went next door for lunch, did what he always did at home, and that it did not make much difference to him if anyone else was there or not.

  There was a Test match. When the Test match was on the curtains in the sitting room were drawn when I came home from school and there were men in white on the screen and a lull of voices and he sat rapt and might as well have not been there at all. Then it was over, or rained off, and he read a book about spies. He had progressed from war to spies.

  'Look at these dates, Anna, in my book.'

  It was a book that he had been given, a big book with a glossy cover and black-and-white photographs in it like those in the newspapers.

  'That's just after my birthday.'

  'Not o
nly that.' Peter was so insistent, always getting cross. 'Not just the day, silly. The year as well.'

  'Of course, I know. I knew that all along. It's just before Mummy died, isn't it?' The words were big, when I spoke them. I think I may not ever have spoken them before.

  'That's it, exactly, that's the point.'

  I did not see why he was so excited. A day in January, two days before that day, some people arrested, men and women. Snapshots of them smiling, looking like anyone else. Like people we might know, not criminals.

  'So what?'

  'Don't you see? The arrests were made on Saturday evening. It wasn't in the news until Monday. She would have found out, seen the headlines when she got to Oxford or heard it somewhere on the way. Maybe she heard it on the radio.'

  'What's it got to do with her anyway?'

  He looked at me as if I was a fool, not seeing that events must have a cause. In Peter's world a thing did not just come out of nowhere. There must be before and after, reasons why.

  'Did she crash on the way there or on the way back? Did they tell you?'

  'I don't know.'

  I had always thought it happened in the morning. It happened in the fog, on the way. The car went off with its red lights fading into the fog and it happened on an empty hill somewhere, just the car and the fog, and black ice. I had not thought that it could be anything but that. Now I saw that it might have happened anywhere - on the main road, in the traffic, in the afternoon.

  'Think. We should know. It might be important.'

  'Well, we just don't.'

  Daphne Lacey is calling from the phone.

  'Darling!'

  Godfrey is not listening to her. His eyes are still on the screen.

  'Come here a minute. There's something I have to say to you.'

  We are playing beggar-my-neighbour. Susan turns up a king, wins three; a jack, wins one, and with it the pack.

  'Buggers!' says Godfrey Lacey, and it is not clear now whether this relates to the news story or the fact that his wife is calling him. The man on the television is saying that five persons have been charged under Section One of the Official Secrets Act and are being held at Bow Street Police Station.

  'Buggers,' he says again.

  The television moves on to the weather, unwatched, as Godfrey Lacey crosses the hall and goes into the kitchen and closes the door. A band of high pressure reaching the west by morning. The fog clearing overnight. Frost and a clear day to follow.

  'I don't know, Peter. I don't know anything!'

  I screamed at him. I didn't even know that I was about to scream. I screamed so loud that if someone else, some adult, had been in the house they would have come running as to danger, then when they saw that there was no physical danger things might have been said, an explanation given, and just possibly it might all have stopped there, right then at the beginning. But there was no one save our two selves to hear.

  'I don't know anything and anyway it doesn't matter. None of it matters. None of this means anything. It wasn't as if she knew those people or anything.'

  Whatever else Peter knew about it either he was pretending or he wasn't going to tell. He was fixed back in his book.

  'How can you be so sure?'

  It must have been after that day that we began to watch. Or perhaps it was not. Perhaps it did not begin at any point. Perhaps we had always watched, as children always have, watched our adults; children wide-eyed, the adults like to think, but seeing so much more than the adults could or would like to know.

  We had always watched but we became conscious of it only once we began to think that there was something to be discovered, some secret or some story there. From that moment on the watching became deliberate, more intense.

  MI5 kept the Krogers' house under surveillance for two months before their arrest. Each day agents came to the house of some neighbours just over the road, where there was a bedroom with a window at the side overlooking their frontage. The agents were women generally, since the visits of women were less likely to be remarked upon in a district where husbands went to work and wives had coffee and arranged charity collections and events at the local arts society. Mrs Search, who lived in the surveillance house, considered herself a friend of Helen Kroger's and continued to see her and have her to visit throughout this period. It was revealed later that she found the experience deeply troubling.

  There was no one I watched more closely than my father. In those days I was aware of him sometimes as if my nerves reached into him and felt his moods - his occasional pleasure, his sadness, his irritations - from the inside.

  Alec Wyatt. Linguist, speaker of five European languages. He was ten years older than my mother and he used be a teacher. Then when the war came he was too short-sighted to be a proper soldier so he had done some-thing in codes instead, sitting at a desk with a pencil in his hand. Peter was ashamed of that, the idea that his father had chewed a pencil all through the war. Even if he had been to places that sounded good, like Baghdad, and Italy, and Berlin.

  When I started a diary I wrote what I had done and thought each day on the correct dated page. I kept the blank undated pages at the back for other people. I wrote notes on how they looked and what they did. The diary was a stiff book with embossed gold lettering, My Diary 1962 on the front, and a lock to keep it private. I must have kept it up for half the year, and then tired of it, or left it somewhere, and never wrote in it again.

  The first description was of my father. Fairish hair, a little bit grey. Grey-blue eyes, soft behind the glasses. Tall. I thought how I would describe him if I was a stranger and put 'a little woolly but kind'. I set myself to observing his actions, his movement, his face. When I grew up there was proof of the closeness of my observation in the fact that I seemed to know how to garden soon as I had a garden of my own. The tasks were familiar as if I had always performed them, and my fingers knew as if they had always done it how to plant seeds, how to sprinkle the compost, thin, plug out, how to hold the secateurs and at which bud to prune the roses, though I could never recall having been taught these things or done them before, but only that I had watched them done. Almost better than his face I could recall his hands, his fingers dirty with soil, unusually broad thumbs, distinctive so that I would have recognised them anywhere.

  At any time I supposed that I might have asked him what we needed to know. I might have asked him most easily when he was gardening, when I was standing close by and he was working and it was easy between us, his hand on the fork, the tines breaking the soil, the fresh green weeds falling back on to it. There were so many questions a child could ask her father at a time like that.

  Why does the Queen say 'we' instead of 'I'?

  Which way up does a pineapple grow?

  What is a mushroom cloud?

  I might have asked about Königsberg, and I might as easily, almost as easily, have asked if he or Mummy knew the Portland people. He worked for the Government anyway, we knew that, speaking languages; and there was something secret in it so he might reasonably have known some spies. Yet I did not ask. I stood by and I learnt only the root forms of weeds: how white and brittle were the roots of bindweed, which broke when you pulled them and left bits that grew again from deeper down than you could dig, or the red hairy obscenity of nettle roots that snaked this way and that just beneath the surface of the soil. And when he straightened himself and rested he smiled and ruffled my hair, and I was happy then that I had not spoken.

  One day when he was gardening Susan came round and we played at dressing up. We must have been nine or ten by then, and we didn't dress up so much. We had used to do it often when we were smaller. Sometimes my mother would help, fixing our hair and tying turbans and sashes, making us into witches and princesses and sultans with fine moustaches that she drew with a burnt cork. Now we did it all ourselves. Because we were older we did not dress as make-believe figures any more but as the women we might become.

  Susan had brought over a dress that she said came from
Malaya. It was a flimsy thing of lime-green silk. In Malaya her parents drank cocktails and went to parties. She said that the parties went on late into the night and the moon was bigger than in England and the nights were hot. The spaghetti straps and low-cut bodice showed up the paleness of her skin and her gawky body's lack of form, yet the dress, the idea and the colour of it, made her bold. Susan was normally quiet and self-effacing, pale, freckled, red-haired, always a little stooped with shyness, yet all of a sudden she put up her hair and strutted like an actress and became a flattened version of her mother.

  'Don't laugh. What are you laughing at?'

  'You look funny, that's all.'

  'There's another one you can wear. Mummy said I could borrow it too.'

  'No. There's something else. I know where it is.'

  We went to my father's room. He was outside, mowing the lawn. I had just heard the mower start up. He wouldn't come in before tea.

  In the wardrobe, at the very back of the wardrobe behind all of his clothes, was a dress. It had been left behind when everything else was cleared. Whoever it was that cleared the house had by intention or error left me that one dress, zipped up in a bag as it had come from the dry-cleaner's. There was that dress and there was her fur jacket, and a drawer of folded silk scarves and her jewellery in a velvet-lined box. The dress was a very dark blue, not so glamorous as Susan's, but I had a notion that I had seen my mother in it, once for some distant occasion. I took off my clothes and put it on, there in my father's room before the tall mahogany wardrobe, and then took out the fur on its silk-covered hanger.

  'It's silver fox,' I said. 'It came from Berlin. Daddy bought it on the black market.'

  'Did your mother wear it?'

  'Of course she did. She wore it when she went to the theatre.'