Yet I had never seen it worn, never seen my mother go to the theatre.
It was soft as Susan's cat, though the silver-tipped fur was longer, and it carried a scent that must have once been hers. Putting it on, feeling its weight and the coolness of the satin lining, was like slipping into water.
'You look like a film star.'
Susan had brought high-heeled shoes, too big. My mother's feet were smaller but all her shoes were gone. The shoes made us tall and the make-up we had put on made us old. We saw ourselves in the long mirror: a redhead, a blonde, red-lipped, high-heeled, lime green and fur and midnight blue. Susan stuffed her bodice with socks, pouted, posed. I stood in the slender mirror space beside her in the fox jacket and the dark-blue dress, and wondered if anyone could have said then that I too had a look of my mother, if not in my colouring then in the way I stood or smiled, or held my hand out to take an imaginary cigarette.
'You look lovely, darling,' said Susan, and proffered an imaginary case.
I mimed the taking of one and Susan lit it, saw the curls of smoke rising between us as Susan snapped the case shut.
'They're Russian,' Susan said. 'I always smoke Russian.'
We had glasses in our hands with cherries on sticks, raised them to our cherry lips.
* * *
I was not sure, afterwards, if that was the first moment that my father caught sight of us, or if he had been looking already for some time. Yet the intensity of his look struck suddenly like a blow.
The glasses were gone, our hands empty. We were children again, dressed like tarts in our mothers' clothes, and he was angry. His stare went to me, to Susan, back again to me. I thought that he would shout. I would have hated to hear him shout.
His voice when it came was soft.
'Take those things off. Right away.'
Once we would have, but we were older now. We were shy to undress in front of him. We stood, frozen in our dresses and our lipstick, and he looked at us as if we were ghosts. I saw that his hand had blood on it, his finger wrapped in a bloodied handkerchief. He had cut himself and come to fetch a plaster from the bathroom. He looked at us that one moment and then went on.
Later, when Susan had gone, he came in from the garden again and scrubbed the soil from his hands, and asked if I had put the clothes away.
'That's right,' he said. 'That's a good girl. And once things are put away they are best left that way. No need to take them out again, is there, poppet?'
* * *
'We can't ask Daddy. Not anything. He doesn't want to talk about it,' I said to Peter after that.
'Even if you ask him? You're always asking him things.'
'No,' I said. 'He doesn't want to be reminded.'
We went away that second summer to France. 'We'll go to the Brittany coast,' my father said. 'You said you wanted to go to the sea.' We went there on a ferry, and the sea was grey. I stood against the rail at the stern and watched the white V of the wake drawing away from England, and the gulls following in it. It was the first time I had been abroad.
I wrote in my diary that it rained in France. We drove down straight roads through grey sheets of rain. We came to long beaches and walked the tiring length of them in the sand to look at rusting tanks and debris from the war. The beaches had beautiful names, Arromanches, Omaha, Utah. This was where the Allies landed, my father said, tens of thousands of soldiers jumping into the cold waves off flat-bottomed boats with their guns held over their heads. He and Peter looked at everything, the machines, the signs, the maps, the photographs in the museums. I watched the waves and made tracks in the sand. Where the sand was wet and shiny close to the sea's edge, my footprints disappeared as if they were sucked away.
When we swam the water was cold. The beach was shallow so that we had to walk out a long way until it came to our waists and we could swim. There must be bits there, I wrote, on the sand where you cannot see it beneath the water. If there are bits on the beaches they must be in the sea as well. Things from the war. Guns, helmets, bodies. Soldiers who were killed. As soon as the water was deep enough, I swam and tried not to touch the ground again. Once or twice I swam out to where I could feel a pull on my legs, pulling me out, away, down the beach from where I'd begun. My father called me back, then came quickly and swam out. He said it was a current of water that pulled at me. It had a name, the undertow. It was the bottom of the wave going back out to sea.
I wrote about it in my diary. How there must be Americans down there beneath the sea. In the hotel where we stayed the sugar came in little printed packets with pictures of the beaches on them. I collected all the different ones I could find and stuck them in the book, and the tickets from the places we visited.
'What are you doing?' asked Peter.
'Making a record. So I can remember it all after.'
Peter played with the other English boys at the hotel. There were three of them, a noisy family whose presence dominated the restaurant at supper, laughing, shouting, spilling things. They were rowdy boys and I did not like them. I felt sorry for the old man who had the table next to them and who sipped his coffee in the mornings from his teaspoon. Poor Monsieur Alphonse, I wrote, giving him the name, knowing that Alphonse was a French name. He was a thin man and wore a hat whenever he went out so that his face was pale as paper. Once the boys let me join them on a raid to the kitchens, and we went down in the lift to the basement and sneaked around until a waiter chased us out, and everything was white and shining steel. On the way back up to our rooms Monsieur Alphonse got in, and we all laughed fit I thought to deafen him.
'Where's your mother?' asked one of the boys. Their mother was always in the lounge, in a chair at the window writing postcards and looking out to sea.
'She's a spy,' said Peter, 'working undercover.'
I was glad he did not say that she was dead.
When I was older and looked over the photographs I realised how difficult the trip must have been for my father. He read his books and saw all the beaches but it rained and we complained that we didn't like the food.
The weather changed just before we were due to leave. Soon as I woke that last morning I knew how good the day was even before the curtains were open. The sky was bright and the sea was shining under the sun. We went into the town and bought lunch, a long golden loaf of bread, cheese, tomatoes, peaches, and drove out a long way along the coast. The road seemed to ride the coast, up and down, with views coming and going of the sea. Then we stopped and walked, out along a strip of sand with the sea on either side, to a rocky point, and there we had our picnic, where there was no one else and only a view with nothing between us and America. I remember how I bored my eyes into the horizon as if I might see it, if I were to look hard enough. Where those soldiers came from. How far was it? How long did it take to float there? Had the undertow by now taken them home?
It was hours later when we walked back, and the tide had come in and covered over a section of the causeway.
'Alec,' my mother would have said. My mother had a special way of saying Alec, an inflexion no one else ever used. 'So clever, but always so impractical.'
The stretch of sea where the causeway had been was like all the rest of the sea, nothing to distinguish where the land lay beneath. It was not wide but it was growing, as the waves lapped up to where we stood. My father took the blanket I was carrying, rolled it tighter and crammed it into the bag with the picnic things. Follow me. And tentatively the three of us started to walk into the water, and I saw us as we walked, the tall man leading, treading delicately, feeling for ground, the girl behind and then the boy.
The water was alive, rushing in. It reached up my legs and above my waist.
'I can't, Daddy.'
And all three turned and went back.
Then the boy was left on what was now the island, and the man began to cross again carrying the girl on his shoulders.
The water came to his chest, over my feet as he carried me. I looked back. Peter was left on the island. Th
e sea was washing against it, rising towards him, making the distance longer, the distance stretching in both directions as we walked away.
'When the tide comes in, it doesn't all go under, does it?'
'No, I'm sure not. There are grasses there.'
Then the water was lower and we were coming out of it. He put me down and went back for Peter. I was alone now, on the mainland, and he was in the stretching water and Peter was on the island. There was an interval of time when each of us was separated from the other by the moving water, and I saw that was how we were, the three of us, each separated, surrounded by a dark sea that moved across and covered over the ground. But then he came up out of it, on to the dunes and the grass, up to Peter where he stood, so still, and he turned, and Peter climbed on to his back.
He carried Peter across piggy-back, and Peter carried the picnic bag high so that it was above the level of the water.
At dinner that evening I felt bold. I suppose that it was because of the day, because of the sunshine and because of our adventure, because it was our last day also.
'Where Mummy went to the seaside, was it like this?'
'That would have been in Germany. The Baltic. It's a very different sea.'
We were eating crabs. The hotel kept serving up crab. I didn't mind the meat but I didn't know how to get it out so he was breaking the claws for me and putting what was edible on my plate. He was not looking at me as he spoke but focused on the claw in his hands, and his answer was precise and yet it quite deflected the question.
'This is the Atlantic Ocean. The Baltic is just a sea hemmed around by countries. It only connects to the ocean by a narrow sound. There's hardly a tide. And the water's different even, with much less salt in it than other seawater because of all the rivers that empty into it.'
'What does that mean?' asked Peter.
'It's almost like fresh water. Lovely to swim in even if it's cold.'
A dark sea like a lake. People in it, swimming, floating. There was a picture of the place where she went at my piano teacher's house, a photograph on the mantelpiece, but the picture was just of people on the beach there, and you had to imagine the sea in the distance.
'Mrs Cahn has a picture of it.'
'Of what?'
'Where Mummy went.'
'Did she go there too?'
'They talked about it once.'
'Some of those Baltic resorts were very popular. Still are, probably, though I don't know now.'
Then Peter butted in.
'Mrs Cahn's Jewish.'
'No, she's not,' I said. 'She's German. She came here from Germany.'
'That's right. She's Jewish and German. Both.' And a moment later he said, just for the hell of it, just because he was Peter, 'Do you know what happened to the Jews who stayed in Germany, the ones who didn't leave like she did?'
'What?'
'The Germans killed them all. They stuffed them into chambers one on top of the other and gassed them and made them into soap.'
My father was saying, 'Peter, there's no need for that.'
'Well, it's true.'
'That's enough.'
I could see the 'but' beginning to form on Peter's lips. It did not come out. My father stopped him. He slammed his hand with the crab claw in it down on the napkin, so hard that the glasses shook. He did not speak again but only looked Peter in the eye.
Silly Peter. Anyone knew that soap wasn't made out of people.
There were so many things that adults did not seem to see, even when they heard them spoken, even when they were there before their eyes. There were things I saw that my father did not see. I went out for walks with him, that summer when we were home. It did not rain when we were home. Possibly it had not rained, he said, it had rained hardly at all, for all the time that we were away in France, since the lawn when we came back had barely grown and the ground was very hard. We walked through the fields on the edge of the village where the wheat had just been harvested, down tracks through the stubble, and I saw between the golden stalks where the soil had dried and cracked. I thought of what I knew about earthquakes and it seemed to me then that each crack showed where a chasm might open beneath our feet, but my father walked on, his dry hand holding mine lightly when I reached for it, unaware of any danger. He did not see that the hard harvest land was dead land, cracking open. He did not see that in Peter also there were cracks.
***
'J. Edgar Hoover says the Communists have three hundred thousand spies hiding all over the West. That's a whole secret army, everywhere.'
'Who's J. Edgar Hoover?'
'He's the head of the FBI. In America.'
That was the sort of thing Peter talked about. The FBI and MI5 and Moscow Centre. He didn't talk about normal things. I wrote that in my book. I wrote that he was thin and that his hair fell across his face, probably because he was always looking down, at a model or a book, looking at the ground, looking away. (That's how he is in the photographs I have; he's looking the wrong way or he has a hand across his face at the wrong moment, or he's squinting because of the sun.) I understood him because he was my brother but still he was strange to me. He was clever. Everybody said he was clever. He read fast, he remembered facts and figures, and could repeat them to you any time. But there were other things, simple things, that he didn't seem to see at all, as if facts were easier for him than reality.
His books told him whatever could be known about the various secret services: where their offices were located, how they were run, the hierarchies and procedures. He drew a diagram to show me how spy rings were organised. He said that Moscow Centre excelled at this. There was the director of operations at the heart of it all, and then separate arms reaching out, like a spider, but there could be an infinite number of arms stretching a great distance, sometimes with one, two or three joints away from the central body. At the tip of each arm was the field operative, and at each joint a liaison agent, and the operative knew no one but the agent, neither the director nor any of the other operatives in the ring. Sometimes the operative never even met the liaison, but communicated by messages at pre-fixed drops or by radio signals. All the messages were coded and recoded. Each operative had one code name in the field and another code name at the centre. No one knew more than it was absolutely necessary for them to know, so no one could tell. So every operative was separate, in his own cell, and yet the whole thing was also like a spider's web, and when something touched it, the vibrations ran all through but only the one operative might be affected; and if that operative was captured or something, then that operation could be wrapped up and left, quite separate from the rest.
'Don't they save them?' I asked.
'It's more important to save the system.'
He said that we should have our own code, so that when he went away to school nobody could read our letters.
'But you don't write me letters. You always write to Daddy, not to me.'
'But if I did, if I needed to, we'd have the code. We've got to have the code first.'
Such urgency in the way he talked, head down, eyes moving on before I could catch them.
'Can't I just write ordinary writing?'
'Of course you can, for ordinary things. The code's for emergencies.'
He said we would have some words for a key. I must remember these words, and then I would put the letters of the alphabet beside them and switch them, in order, cutting out the ones that repeated, and switch the letters when I wrote. He didn't like any of the phrases I suggested so he gave me his own, Winston Churchill. Where Churchill ended, the code continued, the alphabet running on in the usual way. If people didn't know where we'd started from, they'd never work it out.
'You'll have to write it down each time, and destroy the paper after so no one can find it.'
He made me practise it and write him notes so that I had it straight before he went away, message after message encrypted, folded and double-folded and slipped into a pocket or left beneath a cereal bowl. Can you read th
is? If you can, put an orange in the fridge. Watch Margaret till she goes then come and find me. It got easier as you began to remember the transpositions and didn't have to work them out each time.
Later he added a refinement.
'We need to have a security check, when you write. So I know the message really comes from you.'
'Who else would it come from?'
'What you do is you have some other secret sign embedded in the message.' (If I did not understand 'embedded' I wasn't going to ask.) 'Preferably something nobody else would notice. It should be something very simple, and something that's very easy to remember. Like putting the date the wrong way round, like Americans do, with the month before the day. Or put in the year but put it wrong. Put 1692 instead of 1962. They'd think it was only a mistake, see?'
'In this book I read there's this man, Richard Hannay. He breaks a spy ring. He knows how to be a spy. You should read it too. Anyway, he learnt from hunting in Africa, from watching the deer he was hunting, seeing how they freeze on the spot and merge with their surroundings. Perfect camouflage. So even when you know they're out there, you can't see them. That's what spies do. They merge, blend, try to be like everyone else. To be indistinguishable from their surroundings.'
'It's not like that here. It's not like your story. It's just ordinary here. Everybody's ordinary.'
'That's it, silly, that's just the point.'
He said that we should write everything down. If we wrote it all down a pattern might emerge.
'Write what?'
'Start with the evidence. All the things in the house that we know were hers.'
'That's hardly anything.'
There were the clothes that I'd tried on with Susan, the jewellery box - or not the box, that came from Dad's mother, but the things in it, the good things that he'd given her and the cheap things that she'd bought, and a few other things like a rosary that came from one of Dad's aunts who was very holy, and a funny little black cat that she brought all the way from Germany. I knew about the cat. Peter didn't. It was made of fur and wire, with pale bead eyes and a frayed ribbon about its neck. I told Peter she brought it from Germany in her pocket.
The Spy Game Page 5