The Spy Game

by Georgina Harding

  'How do you know?'

  'She told me so.'

  'It's got a name on its collar. Sophie Schwarz.'

  'That must be its name then.'

  'Suppose it must be.'

  Peter didn't like me knowing more about it than he did.

  'So what do we do now?'

  'The next thing is to write down what we can remember. I've got exercise books for us. I got them from school. We write down who she saw, what she did. How often she went out, and where, everything. You put down what you remember, and I'll do mine, and then we'll compare what we've written. That's what you do. It's important to do it separately, without talking about it first. If we talk about it we influence each other's memory, make the other one think they saw things they didn't actually see.'

  He got the books down from his room.

  'And don't think too hard first. Just go and start doing it and see what happens. Memory's strange. Some of it comes from the unconscious. You've got to let it come.'

  He was too serious, insistent. It scared me.

  'You know it wasn't true, what you said about her being undercover. You know you were only saying it.'

  He took my wrist and held it in a wrist burn.

  'Then what's it matter if you write this? You won't be doing anyone any harm.'

  So I took the exercise book back to my room and wrote. I put it beneath my clothes in a drawer. Every now and then I took it out and added something else as it came to me. I thought there was going to be a whole book but I covered only a few pages. You'd think there was so much to say about a person but when they're gone the record doesn't amount to much. It diminishes them. She took us to school, she had her hair done, she went shopping. (I was recording what she did. What she was didn't come into it.) Margaret came in the morning, she had a cup of coffee with Margaret, Margaret went. On Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday, the butcher's van came by, or the grocer's, or the laundry. Peter thought it especially important that we record things like that, the regular things, in case one was a contact. He said there would have been some regular contact, a way of passing material or messages.

  'It couldn't be the butcher,' he said.

  'Why not?'

  'Remember once he ran over a dog on the road? Mrs Jones's dog, that little terrier she had? He ran it over and it was dead. I saw. And he went to her and owned up. A spy wouldn't have drawn attention to himself like that.'

  The laundry came and went in a grey box with a leather strap around it. It would have been easy to put messages in, folded into the sheets or inserted between the lists on the pages in the laundry book. The laundry man had a funny twisted leg, as if it had been ironed in a crease. I told Peter he was wounded in the war.

  'How do you know?'

  'Mummy said so.'

  'How did she know?'

  The next day he came we greeted his van on the road and talked to him as he got down from it and limped to the house. 'Have you two got somebody looking after you now?' he asked, and Peter was quick and said yes, there was someone in the house all of the time, though it wasn't true just then, it was the afternoon and Margaret had gone and there was nobody else there. I knew he did it to make us safe, just in case, but it made me afraid of what might happen. When I went to bed that night in the clean laundered sheets I felt the coolness of them and smelled the starch, and they seemed too white. I could sense their whiteness even with my eyes closed, as if there was a bright light that would not let me sleep.

  Besides the tradesmen there was hardly anyone. It had not seemed to us before that this was odd and yet now we saw it. There was nobody from the past: no family, no relations, no old friends who came to visit. There wouldn't be, would there, said Peter, seeing where she came from? But there were no friends from the present either, from the time since we were born. She almost never had anyone come to the house. She went out. Sometimes she used to dress up and go out, to Cheltenham, Oxford, London even. Maybe she saw friends then. Who these friends might have been we couldn't begin to guess.

  'How about Mrs Lacey?' I asked. 'She was her friend.'

  'Mrs Lacey couldn't keep anything a secret.'

  'Mr Lacey then?'

  'He was with the Japs too. He's just as cracked as she is, but inside so it doesn't show. He looks almost all right, like a proper colonel, an old soldier, but he isn't, he's fake. They wouldn't use someone like that.'

  Of course we couldn't tell Susan. Sometimes I thought Peter liked that. He knew that all this spy stuff put the two of us apart from Susan and tied us to each other.

  Peter was brilliant with facts and systems but he couldn't deal with stories. He should have seen that making up stories was easy. If he'd done it more he would have understood that. You made up a story and then you could turn to it when you needed it, and sometimes it might be true and sometimes not but that wasn't what mattered the most. What was difficult was telling your story to some-body else. If you did that it got stronger and more real, and then you didn't have control any more.

  I tried to give the blue exercise book back to him.

  'I'm not doing this any more. We haven't found any-thing. We're not going to find anything. There's no point. It's only a game.'

  I said that to hurt him. I knew it wasn't a game.

  'You can't do that,' he said. 'Not now. You can't.'

  'Yes I can.' I threw it down at his feet on the kitchen floor.

  Peter may have been small and thin for a boy his age but he was much stronger than I was. He grabbed me, and took my arm and bent it up my back so it hurt like it would break, and forced me down over the table. There were glasses and knives and things on the table, hard, sharp things close to my eyes. I saw the edges of them shiny and glinting, too close to focus, and shouted at him to stop, and his grip was so hard I didn't know if he would.

  'All right,' I breathed, and again, 'Stop,' and, 'It's hurting,' and, 'I'll help you,' and there was a pause when he only held me and did not press any more, and then, slowly like a machine winding down, he unclenched and let me go.

  It was raining, a heavy summer rain that made every-thing that was green go soft with a weight of water, leaves weeping from the trees, stems from the borders hanging over the lawn, plants splayed with the wet. It was a rain that fell straight and did not touch the window, so that you could stand with your nose to the pane of glass and see clear through, see it falling in fine lines that showed up where the trees were dark behind. A day like that was quiet and strange after so many days out in the sun.

  Susan phoned and I said I couldn't see her, I was finishing a book and I'd see her later.

  'Bookworm,' she said, but didn't seem to mind.

  When the rain stopped for a time a pigeon flew low across the lawn, slow as if the air was too wet for flying in. The pigeon's feathers were the same heavy grey as the sky. I didn't want to go out, or see anyone at all. I sat at the table in the kitchen waiting for Margaret to leave. Margaret did the washing up with heaps of suds and didn't rinse them off so that they bearded the plates that she put on the rack. My mother used to tell her to rinse them but she was a stubborn sort of girl who you couldn't expect to change. She stood there at the sink like the cows in the milking parlour at the farm. I wrote in my book that the yellow Marigold gloves she wore went on to her big pink fingers like milking teats.

  'What's that you're writing?' Margaret turned and suds dripped on to the floor from the plate she was holding.

  'My diary. It's secret.'

  'You two and your secrets. It's no good for you to be alone all day.'

  'I think it's fine.'

  'When I was your age there was five of us kids about, and the house not half the size of yours.'

  'We like it how it is.' I didn't see that Margaret had much ground to stand on. Everybody knew that Margaret's youngest sister was having a baby even though she wasn't married. Susan said that at least Joyce had had a boyfriend. Joyce was pretty. Margaret was plain and her acne would put any man off kissing her.

  When
the washing up was done Margaret took the gloves off and draped them over the taps.

  'Are you still there then? What are you waiting for?'

  'Nothing. I'm just sitting. Writing my diary.'

  'Well, you'll have to be off now out of here as I'm cleaning the floor.'

  'But you did it yesterday.'

  'And I'll do it again long as it keeps raining and it's muddy outside and you two traipse in and out without so much as wiping your feet let alone changing your shoes.

  That's what I mean, there's nobody here telling you what you should and shouldn't do.'

  And she pushed the sponge-headed mop right up to my feet, and I lifted them up so that it could pass beneath.

  'Come on, you know I need to go under the chair as well.'

  I took up the diary and locked it, and walked out where the floor was still dry.

  Peter was in the sitting room.

  'Has she gone?'

  'Not yet.'

  'I wish she'd get a move on.'

  He had a screwdriver.

  'What's the screwdriver for?'

  He hid it behind a cushion when Margaret came in at last and said she was going, and we both went to the door and watched her leave, putting on her raincoat and leaving her footprints in a pale track across the wet lino.

  'Here, you've got to help.'

  The radiogram ran across half the length of the wall behind the sofa. It was a piece of furniture almost like a sideboard, of some yellowish lacquered wood veneer and angularly modern, a block on tapered brass-tipped legs; ugly, which was why it lived behind the sofa, but our parents had chosen it not for its looks but for the quality of its sound. To move it out we had to move everything else first: the sofa itself, the chairs to make space for the sofa; then take the lamp from it, the books and records, the ashtray, lay them out on the carpet just how they'd been so that we could put them back right.

  'What are you going to do?'

  Peter began to unscrew the back panel. He took each screw and laid it neatly in the ashtray.

  'But it's still plugged in.' I pulled the plug from its socket.

  'It wasn't on, silly. I won't get electrocuted if it's not on.'

  He had all the screws out now, laid the back panel on the floor. There was more space inside than I had thought. There wasn't much there really, just the speakers, one on each side, and a kind of board with knobs and wires of different colours and blobs of silver solder. He poked around like he knew what he was doing, only of course he didn't.

  'The Krogers used a radiogram. They had it connected to a transmitter, and to an aerial in the roof. They had direct radio communication with Moscow. Their radio-gram was just an ordinary one, like ours, like anybody's, but it had a high frequency band so that it could get reception from anywhere in the world, and it was fitted for headphones, so they could listen just with headphones, and these were hidden in the back of it.'

  'Well, there's nothing hidden in this one.'

  'The Krogers did the communications for the spy ring, see. Lonsdale was liaison. He ran the spies, did the recruiting and made the contacts, fixed the rendezvous and the dead-letter drops and everything, and the Krogers did the communication with Russia. They made messages and documents into microdots and stuck them into the books that they sent abroad. They were second-hand book dealers, that was their cover. They sent books to Holland and Switzerland and places, places no one would suspect and where someone else would send them on to Moscow, and books came the same way back to them. Even when Lonsdale wrote letters home to his wife they went that way, in microdots. Most weekends he used to go and see them, like he was their friend, and he'd take them every-thing he'd got in the week and Helen Kroger made it into microdots. That was what they found in her bag when they arrested her, microdots, and when they magnified them they found out that they were letters to Lonsdale from his wife in Russia, and one that he had written back to her.'

  I tried to picture my mother with these people.

  I saw her in her big winter coat, a lipsticked smile in the fog. The fog made the background wash away like in a poster for a film. I don't know if it was the first time the thought had come to me, or if it had been there for days or weeks.

  'If she was one of them, then she was a traitor.'

  'No. She couldn't have been a traitor,' he said.

  'Why not? How do you know?'

  'She wasn't English. You can't be a traitor if you're not English.'

  Oh. Just that.

  'Like Gordon Lonsdale, he was a Russian. He was a spy, but he wasn't a traitor. So people didn't mind about Lonsdale. Some of them even rather admired him. His letters were read out in court and everybody heard how he had a family in Russia and he hadn't seen them for ages, like seven anniversaries or something, and his daughter was having a bad time at school, and his wife wanted him to buy her a dress, only he couldn't exactly send it as a microdot, could he, and he seemed like a normal sort of person, for a Russian, and a patriot. Like a soldier on the other side in a war. You fight him but you think he's OK because it's his country he's fighting for. It was the others who were the traitors, Houghton and Gee. They just sold their country's secrets for money.'

  'Did they get executed?'

  'People don't get executed in England any more. They're going to abolish it.'

  We moved the furniture back then and Peter plugged in the radiogram and switched it on. The radio made a little spit like it always did when you started it up but that was all. Not even a crackle.

  'It just needs tuning.'

  Peter turned the knob, pressed the buttons that changed the wavelength.

  'You've broken it.'

  Peter's face went very red as he went on working the switches and nothing came out.

  'What have you done?'

  'Let's play a record and check that.'

  It was opera, the first thing that came to hand. The volume was turned right up. A woman screamed and made us jump.

  'That works, anyhow.'

  Peter lifted the needle and clicked it back. Then there was only the sound of the rain outside. I had a sense that there had been a time when it had lightened, a little earlier, when the rain must have ceased and the sun almost broken through and the room brightened. Now it was dull again, the room a negative space filled with the pointlessness of the afternoon.

  'He won't find out for ages.' Peter spoke in a whisper that was like the rain. 'He'll never know it had anything to do with us.'

  'But he'll find out sometime, won't he? And you won't be here, you'll be back at school. What am I going to say?'

  'You don't have to say anything. Just don't admit it.'

  Before he went back to school Peter said, 'There's someone we haven't thought of, I only just thought of her. And she's Jewish. Lots of Communist spies are Jewish, like the Krogers, and the Rosenbergs in America. Why didn't we think of her before?'

  I hadn't mentioned Mrs Cahn because she was mine. I was the only one who knew her. I think even then I didn't want her touched.

  'You're talking rot. You always talk rot. Anyway, Mummy never even went into her house.'

  That wasn't quite true. My mother had gone in, the first time. I could remember her going into Mrs Cahn's front room and looking about it with approval. It wasn't English at all, that room. I think it felt like Germany. The piano was German, a Bechstein. My mother would have approved of that, would have put out a hand to stroke the polished wood. She was always touching things.

  Every Tuesday she used to take me, in the car or on foot if it was nice. There were always a few words with Mrs Cahn at the door, standing on the step or maybe just inside the hall if it was raining. How they got on to the subject of the seaside that time I could not recall. Perhaps it was the one time she went in and she saw the photograph of the beach. Or perhaps it was a fine day with a high blue sky and one or other of the women voiced a memory or a longing.

  'She didn't used to chat to her or anything. She just used to drop me off and go away.'
r />   'Didn't they talk German?'

  'I think they always spoke English. Probably because I was there.'

  'What did they talk about?'

  'Just about the weather and things.'

  'What things?'

  'How I was doing. What I had to do for practice. Nothing interesting.'

  Peter looked critical, as if I had missed something.

  'Really, Peter, that's all.'

  'I should have been there. There must have been some-thing.'

  'It'd be just the same if you were there. If anyone was there. Just ordinary talk.'

  'There are things like coded words, you know. Signals and things that spies use. You have to listen out for them though. You have to have an ear.'

  * * *

  'See who comes and goes from her house. See if there's anything odd, anything at all, anything that changes from one week to the next.'

  'There won't be anything. Nothing happens there.'

  She wasn't anything to do with Peter. I didn't want her to be a part of it.

  Yet he was very serious. His thin face was tight with seriousness, his eyes fixed. I said that I would do it because he was just about to go back to school and I felt sorry for him. His knees looked funny beneath his big school shorts and his hair was newly cut and bared a white stripe on his neck where the summer sun hadn't reached.

  'You will do it, Annie? And write to me if anything happens. You know how.'

  We sat close together on the bottom step of the stairs. His trunk and tuck box blocked the hall but the door was open to outside where Dad had gone to bring the car up to the gate. Peter's hands were fists. The skin on them was stretched so tight you thought you might see through it, like a rubber band you pulled too far. I was glad that I did not have to go away yet to school. We sat and did not move as Dad took the trunk, though it was heavy for him, heaving it up between his arms and lumbering with it down the flagstone path. Then he came back for the tuck box and took that away.