The Spy Game

by Georgina Harding

  Susan stood well away from the edge of the ha-ha.

  'Come back. Come up here. It's dangerous. If there's a snake I'll tell Daddy and he'll come and kill it. He knows how to kill snakes.'

  'That's cobras. We don't have cobras here.'

  'You're not supposed to be in the field anyway. You're trespassing.'

  * * *

  Some days later the snake was there again. This time it was my father who saw it. He said that it was a grass snake, not an adder, and that there was nothing to fear. You could recognise an adder by its markings, which were a kind of warning. The grass snake was basking, he said. Snakes didn't have warm blood like people and animals. If they wanted to be warm they had to come out and lie on warm stones in the sun.

  Later he called me.

  'Look ! '

  'Daddy, you caught it! I didn't know you could catch a snake.'

  'Nor did I.'

  He looked pleased as if he had won a race.

  There was a huge glass jar we had, that sometimes my mother had put whole branches of flowers in, of lilac or blossom in the spring. He had caught the snake in a sack and put it into the jar, just so that we could see it.

  It was trying to climb the sides and slipping down, again and again, as if it was writing lines of waves on the glass. The glass was clear and the underside of the snake was pale, whitish, pressing against it. I went so close I could see the golden rings about its eyes. But my father said that the most acute sense a snake had was touch, that it saw through vibration, that it could feel all along its body.

  I thought how the glass would feel: so cool and smooth, even where there were bubbles buried inside it, and all of the length of one's body becoming the same cool temperature as the glass.

  'I must let it go in a minute.'

  'Can I just show it to Susan?'

  'If you're quick.'

  I ran to Susan's and called her.

  'Ugh. I don't want to.'

  'But it can't hurt you. It's in a jar. And grass snakes aren't poisonous anyway.'

  So Susan came, and stood far back and didn't say a word.

  I went right up to it and touched the jar where the snake was moving on the other side of the glass.

  'See, it's fine.'

  Peter wrote a letter every Sunday. It arrived the following Tuesday. The post came while I was at school. The envelope was always addressed to Alec Wyatt Esq., as no doubt he had been instructed, so I did not open it but put it on to the kitchen table so we could could read it together when my father got back.

  We knew what it would say even before we read it. Dear Daddy and Anna, How are you? I'm all right. The film last night was Angels One Five. It was quite good but I thought The Dambusters was better. We played a rugger match yesterday but lost it 237. Not so bad because it was the other school's first team and we're only the seconds. Only two weeks till half-term. Love, Peter. That was his formula. There were things you said that were always the same and it didn't matter what they meant. All that mattered was their presence on the page.

  Sometimes I saw the letters that my father wrote back. Often they were two or three pages long, and his writing was small. Nothing formulaic to them, and that was to be expected. My father was so much better at writing things than at saying them. Sometimes he put drawings in his letters. This week there was one of the snake in the jar, and two figures of girls with enormous eyes running away. I thought that wasn't fair. Adults changed things to suit their purpose each time they told a story. I decided that I would write a letter of my own to say the truth. I wrote it in his code. 22 September 1692 Daddy caught a snate and put it in a jar. I touched it. At least, I had touched the glass just where its body touched.

  I was playing something when you came. It's Schubert. Shall I play it to you? There's a lovely passage I've been working on.'

  Sarah Cahn always carried a faint cloud of scent with her, carried it perhaps in the soft fabrics of her clothes as much as on her skin. I remember that. I remember how, when I sat on the piano stool beside her, I could sense her body like the snake, feel the length of her there, and yet I did not look but knew it unconsciously and saw only her hands, slender strong precise hands, that reached sometimes across my awkwardness and showed a fingering or how a phrase was played. And when the notes died there was the looking into her eyes again and a sensation of falling.

  She plays the Schubert, seated beside me on the stool.

  The score is held in a pool of light. The rest of the room has fallen into dimness. The wood of the piano glows, and the pages of the music are white, lit bright and so dense with notes that I cannot see where it is that she has begun to play.

  'Turn the page for me.'

  I catch the place in the music just in time, turn and hold the page, and look to see her eyes run on along the bars. Her cheeks are wet with tears.

  Her eyes are wells with water moving in them.

  I look away, out of the window where there is light still on the snow.

  I thought of her this morning, in Charlottenburg. I was going to the museums there, walking rather indirectly from the station. There was a little public garden that drew me, with lawn and benches and big trees and azaleas, and apartments looking down on it. I continued down a wide street lined with tall limes. The apartment blocks there were substantial bourgeois buildings, five or six storeys high, many of them still with nineteenth-century façades, iron balconies and tall pedimented windows. Most of them you could not see into. The windows on the ground floor were generally shielded by hedges, those on upper floors high, blank behind curtains and blinds. Only when one was opened, its glass flashing in a rare moment of spring sunlight, was there a glimpse of what was within. It was no more than a notion really, of a high ceiling and a piano and a brown sideboard, and on the sideboard the gleam of china and glass that were like Sarah Cahn's. I thought how she must have sought out such things in England, some-how, in those years after the war, she and her husband deliberately composing or recomposing in the foreign place they had come to the home that they had lost.

  I knew so little about her. She was only a passing figure, one of those adults who passed by in your childhood, who you knew so partially. Who you loved for a moment, who you might have loved more, if you had not been the child you were. Who you began to understand only years later, when you remembered them and saw the meaning in their actions, and saw just how much they might have mattered.

  On one high balcony pots of tulips put up straight green shoots towards the sun. Sarah Cahn might have lived in such a flat. She was one of those people you could imagine in old age: deeply lined and white-haired but alert. If she lived up there, the sound of her playing would float out of the open window above the street.

  Autumn 1962, the Cuban missile crisis. No child could have missed the sense of it. My father came home and watched the News.

  The names of Kennedy and Khrushchev. The fear in grown-ups who perhaps expected war to happen because war was what had happened to them.

  He poured himself a glass of sherry when the News was over. Occasionally he had a sherry instead of whisky, and ate with it a little piece of fruit cake. He would give me a piece of cake too, and a token sip of sherry in a small glass. When Peter was away I became his privileged companion. In the days when it was still light outside we would walk at this time about the garden. He would say, 'What did you learn at school today?' or, 'Are you being nice to poor Mrs Lacey?' as if looking after me were hardship, and I would have some little story to tell him; and he would smoke a cigarette and when it was finished press its butt down into the soil so that it did not show. But it was autumn now. In the garden it had long been dark, and even the Michaelmas daisies were finished. When I came home from school I got wet brushing by them on the path, the long stems that had fallen under a weight of October rain. I could see what he felt, sitting there, how the length of the dark evening seemed to stretch and sag before him.

  He sipped his sherry and I saw the melancholy of the idle moment in
his face. It was an adult moment with a preoccupation in it that a child could not break.

  He put down his drink, picked the last crumbs of cake from his plate. He said that there was something special he wanted to hear on the radio, and I didn't know how to stop him. He went to the radiogram, switched on, tuned, turned the volume.

  Nothing.

  Again. Nothing.

  'Have you listened to this lately?'

  'No.'

  It was true. It was not a lie. And that was all. He didn't mention it again. That was like him. He didn't see or he didn't tell you off, and you felt guilty about it and the guilt went deeper.

  I went to practise at the piano. I think that it was a conscious act with a conscious purpose, to fill the silence. Piano practice filled the house with order, with a picture of family life. A child knows that instinctively, how to create a mood. I played my scales. First one hand, one octave; then two octaves; then both hands; arpeggios after; C major, A minor, and so on. Going up and going down steps. A minor in the melodic, and then the harmonic scale. I liked the strangeness of the harmonic scale. Sarah Cahn said that it had an oriental sound.

  'How about your pieces?' my father asked. 'Didn't you start a new piece last week?'

  There was a piece but I had not played it since I brought it home.

  'I'm only doing scales today.'

  'I don't think I've heard it yet. Won't you play it for me?'

  'Scales are important. Mrs Cahn says so. Scales teach your fingers things.'

  And leave your mind free.

  The thing about scales was, they didn't trick you into feelings. They were known and they were there, and once you knew them you could play them automatically, like a machine, only faster or slower. And your mind could escape elsewhere. Like a weaving machine, your fingers the shuttle. (Or like the girls I'd seen on television, girls my age who worked making carpets in Persia. What did those girls think of, all day long?) Black keys and white keys, hands, the reflection of them moving on the shiny inner curve of the keyboard cover. Sometimes when I was playing I had the sense that I could see the girl on the piano stool, as if I was in the ceiling looking down from above: a girl with fair hair falling out of its ponytail, a white sock slipped down towards her ankle, her hands playing and reflected back.

  Mrs Cahn told me that my scales were almost perfect. I need not spend so much time on them.

  'That's all right,' I said. 'I like doing scales.'

  'Shall I find you another piece, something that you really like?'

  She had shelves and shelves of music books but the spines were so thin that it was hard to read their names. She had a light like a tall desk lamp that pointed at the shelves, and some wooden steps that she used to get at the top ones. There is a special way that music books have of ageing, something to do with the softness of their paper covers, a way they have of yellowing like parchment or gently flaking and crumbling away. There is a dustiness to them, like old flaking skin, that makes it so surprising when you take one down and play what is inside.

  'Chopin. A dance. A waltz. That's one of his easiest ones, you could play that easily. Some of Chopin's very difficult.'

  She played it through and there was water in it as well as dancing, clear fresh water bubbling up out of the dusty books.

  'Then how about this?' She went to the shelves again, adjusted the lamp and the colours in her scarf flamed as she passed before it. She took out books of popular music, traditional songs, jazz, went back to the piano and played snatches of this and that.

  I did not know how to tell her that I really didn't mind doing scales. There wasn't anything I wanted to play.

  'Take this then.' A wafer-thin book from a bottom shelf; she had to kneel on the floor to find it. 'You're a dreamer. This is music for dreaming. Listen.'

  'OK, I'll play that one.'

  She shifted across and I took my place again beside her on the piano stool. We worked through the first few bars.

  'You'll see as it goes along,' she said. 'You'll work it out. The left hand ties it together while the right hand dreams.'

  'What language are the directions?'

  'French. Lent et grave. That means slow and grave. But you don't need to pay too much attention to them. Some-times the directions in these pieces are little jokes, absurdities.'

  'What are absurdities?'

  'The man who wrote this was a little man, a Frenchman, rather odd, with a beard and a bowler hat and an umbrella. Think of that and you'll understand.'

  Sarah Cahn's hands reached across and played it again, all through. I watched the music.

  Lent et grave. Like a procession, men and women in black all in a line; but someone came and danced between them, someone in colour. A yellow butterfly among the mourners.

  Her kitchen was the kind of room that kept the rest of the world shut out, all but the piece of it you could see through the window: the steep rise of hill, a stone wall with a break in it, a big oak just a little off the centre of the view. There were no curtains on the window so that even in the dusk the field was there like a charcoal picture framed in the bare rectangle, a part of the room and not outside of it. There were other pictures on the walls, real pictures. No one else's kitchen had proper pictures on the walls. There was a small lively painting of a little house by the sea, and some drawings of men's faces that looked as if they been done quickly with long fast lines but that had probably taken far longer. I thought that one of the men in the drawings must have been Mr Cahn as he was like the man in the wedding photograph in the front room, only less stiff and more alive. He had a rather broad, lumpy face, not handsome at all. I guessed that Sarah Cahn must have got used to his being dead by now because the kitchen and all the rooms I'd seen in the little house seemed complete just as they were; no echoes in them, no empty spaces like at home.

  It had become a habit, after the lesson, to go into the kitchen for cake. I suspected that the cakes were baked especially for me since there was always one fresh and uncut the day that I came. They were rich and luscious, the sort of cakes you ate with a fork. Sometimes they were a little richer than I liked but I ate them to be polite. Sarah Cahn had something about her that made me feel that I should be at my most polite. Perhaps it was as a courtesy to her foreignness, which was unmistakable even though there was hardly a trace of it in her voice. I felt a need somehow to charm this woman, or perhaps it was only that I sensed that it was in my power to charm her.

  'You have a fire in the kitchen. Nobody else has a fire in their kitchen.'

  A cosy, closed house. As if it was her shell, and she curled within it, like the walnuts that went on the cake.

  It was there, sitting at the kitchen table after a lesson, that she told me how she had come to England. There was the coal fire in the grate, cake crumbs on the cloth. There was a direction in one of the Satie pieces, du bout de la pensée, which meant 'at the tip of one's thoughts', and often there were passages of time like that, with light words and the fire rustling. This day it happened that the thoughts were spoken.

  'It was because we were Jewish. A British charity said that it would take the Jewish children and find them homes to live in.'

  I wrote about it later in my diary. No one I had known before had told me a story about their life that was a proper story, like a story in a book.

  Sarah Cahn said goodbye to her mother in the waiting room of a railway station. It was in Berlin, a great station that I imagined like Paddington where the train came in when we went up to London. I pictured Paddington, the high arched roof, the great clock where we were told to stand if we ever got lost, pictured the platforms filled with a grey throng of children without their mothers, brothers and sisters leading each other hand in hand, and a waiting room like a great cave full of mothers weeping.

  She did not tell all that, only about the waiting room. That the authorities had said that they must make their partings there, to keep things in order. That there was to be no display of emotion on the public platfor
m.

  She was just a bit older than I was. She had on a new dress, and had new clothes in a little brown leather suitcase, in two sizes as she would grow, and her bathing costume because England was an island and she hoped to live near to the sea - that she said lightly, with a flick of the hand. There was a number hung around her neck. The same number was on her suitcase and on her rucksack. In the rucksack she had the things she had packed for herself and some that her mother and father had given her to take. One of them was that photograph on the dresser, the photo of her with her grandmother on the beach. Not the frame. The Nazis would not have let her take a silver frame. They had not let her take her stamp collection either. They said that it was too valuable.

  At one moment Sarah Cahn stopped to take a hand-kerchief from her sleeve and put it to her eye. I was astonished to think that an adult might cry about when she was a child. About what had happened twenty-five years before. I thought that she had told me the story because of my own mother, because she was without a mother. But it wasn't the same at all. Her story was entirely different.

  'We came to England across the sea, and it was grey and rainy. I didn't think I should ever come to like it!'

  'Didn't it rain in Germany?'

  'Yes, my dear, of course it did, but I was coming to a new place, a new life, and I didn't think you could start a new life in the rain.'

  I saw it then like a film: the girl Sarah, standing with her suitcase on the ordered platform. Arriving in the rain, feeling the English rain on her cheeks as she walked down the gangplank on to the dock where the strangers stared. Starting to live somewhere else in some other language.

  The first thing Sarah played on the piano when she got to England, when she was taken into a house by a family and found a piano there, was 'God Save the King'. Her father had taught it to her before she left. You will need this, he had said, in England.