It was the winter of 1962-3, the great winter of my childhood, when the snow came in December and lay right through until March. Thousands of English birds died that winter, garden birds and songbirds that were caught by the freak of the climate. It was many years before their population would recover. Years before the time would fade from people's talk.
The snow came two days after Christmas. We were having a posh lunch at the Laceys' when the snow began to fall in big feathery flakes. We ran straight out as we were on to the lawn. The flakes fell waveringly and lay on our hair, and on the grass and on the hard leaves of the shrubs. It fell in a soft silence that made laughter tinkling and distant, made distant the banging on the window that was the grown-ups calling us in.
'Here, come back! Who told you you could get down? Come in and put on your coats at least!' And when that was done the grown-ups went back to their meal, looking like a picture of themselves sitting at the table through the long windows, with the snowflakes falling before them. There were candles on the table, in the silver candelabra that were wound with ivy, and glasses with wine in them, and crackers stacked in piles like logs.
It was one of those full moments that make a memory, when everything else falls away. People later classify childhoods as happy or unhappy. Best would be to tot up these moments when nothing else mattered. That was what childhood was for.
For weeks (or perhaps it was only days and memory has extended them) there was no school and Peter was home, and our father was home because he could not drive to work, and everything was strange and in abeyance. Each morning when I woke the window panes on the casements had frosted with the night's breath into patterns like coral, and I looked out through the white coral branches to the sea-floor whiteness of the fields.
We wore woolly tights beneath our trousers. I had a white knitted hat with coloured pompoms hanging from it. Susan had one the same as if we were sisters. We would go out with Peter and meet the village children on the hill, though usually we did not know these children or passed them only blankly because most of them were from the council houses beyond the playground. Peter and I had a proper toboggan made of wood, an old one that was seasoned and polished from use, but many of the others had only trays. We let some of them have a go on ours, and then for a time they seemed to accept us.
There was one boy who was big with thick black hair, and he was the same age as Peter though he was much taller. One day he went with Peter right to the top of the hill, the two of them pulling the wooden toboggan together up the steepness of the slope. The toboggan came down like a bomb with the both of them on it, and ran on and on over the flattening field until it overturned in a drift where they had begun to clear the road. When Peter got up and shook the snow from him his face was as red and shiny as the other boy's, and almost I would not have known him for who he was at home.
The boy was called Richard. Richard to us though some of the others called him Dick. His father was cowman at the farm, and sometimes I had seen him with a switch in his hand making a man's coarse deep calls to the cattle as he helped his father herd them into the yard, the sounds coming strange and alien from deep in the back of a boy's throat. He was rough. He climbed our wall and took apples from our trees and I had seen him smoke a cigarette. It meant something to have him for a friend.
Once Richard led a gang of us round the hill past the back of Sarah Cahn's. We were looking for new slopes but this one was no good because of the wall that crossed it. The snow was very deep this side of the hill, a drift piled high against the trunk of the big oak there, more snow piled into its crotch and along its branches, even in the creases in its bark. The wall itself was almost hidden, only we knew where it was by the pattern of the drifts, and Peter, who had begun to show off a bit, clambered up and found the stones beneath and started to walk along it. Richard came up behind him, and another boy, though they went thigh-deep in the snow trying to get up. Susan and I left them be and pulled the toboggan along the track, even if the boys said we were sissy. It was smooth on the track and we got on ahead, putting our prints into clean snow, and heard the boys fooling around behind us.
The lights were on in her windows as we passed, but this time there was no one to see in the house.
'Mr Kiss is still there, if that's what you want to know,' said Susan. 'He's snowed up like everyone else. Mummy said that he's a professional musician and that there was a concert that he should have given but he couldn't get there.'
'Does your mother know him?'
'No, it's just what somebody else told her. Anyway, when you think about it the concert doesn't much matter because half of the audience wouldn't have been able to get there either.'
None of it mattered so much in this moment in the snow. It did not matter what we were doing. If the man was there or not there. If he was who he was said to be or someone else. Who anyone was. Who I was, or Susan or Richard or Peter. Peter was only a boy for now, rosy-cheeked, swaggering, loud unlike his usual self, leading other boys along the wall. 'There's a place I found,' he was saying, 'Further on. And there's nothing at the bottom of it, nothing to stop you. No road or anything. It just goes on and on.' Richard threw a snowball and then he was jumping off the wall into the deep snow and they were rolling over and fighting and running on with the snow on their faces and down their necks but too hot for the moment to notice.
Later, when the moment had passed, it all began to matter again. It came back to us just as the cold got to Peter later, when he was tired.
Peter was tired before Richard was, and Richard threw a snowball that smacked him in the eye, and in the shock of it Peter lost his temper and screwed up his face and his fists, and attacked Richard for real. Anyone could see what would happen, Peter so knotted and puny before the big boy, as if he was asking to be beaten, and he was beaten soon enough, crumpled and crying in the snow. His nose was bleeding; there was a thick dribble of blood running down, and he put a handkerchief to it but did not get up and only lay where he was, and for a moment none of the other children had the sympathy to go to him. We just watched for a moment as he lay in his temper and his cold and his pain and whimpered, and took the dirty hand-kerchief away to see how thick and bright the blood was, and put it back to his nose again; and then we all moved together, even Richard, and helped him home.
It was the same with the other thing. It had gone from my mind all of that afternoon and then as we walked home it came back suddenly like a shudder, as we dragged down to the road and to the village. Snow had begun to fall again. Richard and the other boy walked ahead, Peter behind but not so far behind that we could not hear him sniff now and then and feel his shame. Again we passed Sarah Cahn's, but by the front, with the car that must have belonged to Mr Kiss parked outside caked with snow. I did not look in. I knew how it was without looking, even though every-thing outside was changed and white. I felt his presence in the house there before we reached it, felt it in my spine falling back as we walked on.
Peter said the cold made it like Königsberg. Winters there were always like this.
The pond in the village had frozen up and some people cleared it of snow and went skating, but most of us didn't have skates and just slipped around in our boots and fell over. I'd never been on ice skates though I guessed it was like roller skating. It looked easy when other people did it.
Peter said that between Königsberg and the sea there was a great lagoon that froze beneath two foot of ice. When the city was under seige in that last winter of the war, the ice was the last way out.
'There had been big bombing raids in the summer, and the Russians had been attacking for ages, getting closer and closer. Everyone knew by then what was going to happen. For months, they'd been leaving, when there were still trains going and roads open back to proper Germany. They didn't believe Germany was so great any more, even if people in Berlin still thought so. They knew the Russians were winning. All that autumn, people had been going, and they went on going all through the winter. Even when the Ru
ssians had blown up the bridges and the railway lines and they couldn't get away by land any more, they got away by ship, but sometimes the ships were bombed by the British or torpedoed by the Russians. There was one ship that was torpedoed by a Russian sub, and sank with ten thousand people on it, all refugees, old people and women and children and babies, and they were all killed. Imagine that. And the Russians said it was a great victory and gave the submarine captain a medal. That was why the ice was such a good thing. It gave them another way out. They could walk out from the city over this great lagoon, safe between the land and the sea, where there weren't any tanks or any subs, and walk across, walk miles and miles in the snow and across the ice, and get all the way to Danzig, and that was still a German city. That was the way the last people got out. And the Russians finally captured Konigsberg in April, and by then the ice was melted and there wasn't any way left.'
In 1945 our mother was sixteen. I made a picture for myself of a girl of sixteen walking miles and miles through the snow. When snow was like it was now outside, deep and soft with dark clouds hanging right down over it so that you almost thought you could touch them. When walking made you warm at first but after a while you weren't so warm any more and bits of you started to hurt with the cold.
I pictured the girl walking all alone but Peter said that there were thousands of people escaping all together. So I saw a great flock of people, dark on the snow, spread across it like a picture of caribou in the National Geographic, and the girl in the crowd but alone. She has lost her family somewhere. I knew that she had lost her family. Perhaps they had been killed in Königsberg before she left or perhaps she just lost them in the crowd.
Then, but it is quite some time afterwards, she turns up in Berlin. She speaks good English so she gets a job with the British and our father is working there too and that is how they meet. There is a story that will be told between them, told and repeated by their children when they have them: how she was working in the same office and noticed one day that he had a tear in his trousers and offered to mend it, and how she had mended everything for him ever after. The story used to be told like a joke, as if he only married her because she was neat and good at sewing, when it was obvious that she was pretty and lively and so much younger than him, obvious that there would have been competition and that there was some better reason for them to have chosen one another.
'Do you think that was the way Mummy went, across the ice?'
Perhaps she skated. I was sure that she would have known how to skate.
'How do I know? Maybe she did. Maybe she went before.' And there was the other possibility, that she didn't leave at all and was captured by the Russians instead.
* * *
I am practising the piano. My father is home and he likes to hear me practise. Never before has he spent so many days at home with us, and days indoors, snowbound, the garden where he might have spent his time even in the winter smoothed over so deep in snow you could not see a plant in it.
There is time to talk in these long days. I am going to ask him about Königsberg, about how all the people got out. That's history. He cannot mind telling me that. I'll choose my moment, find a good moment when he's ready to talk. Just now he sits in his chair with his eyes closed. It is impossible to tell if he is really listening. I have played the new piece without an error, note perfect, like an armour without chinks. If he has noticed, he does not show it.
I am about to speak but he speaks first. He has been listening after all.
'It's time we had the piano tuned.' There is a cigarette burning in his hand but he has not smoked it. Delicately he lifts it and tips the intact column of ash into the ashtray on the table. 'When did we last have the piano tuner here?'
'Ages ago,' I say. It has been two years, precisely.
'I'll call him straight away.' He gets up to find the number.
I'll have to ask him later, another time. I play the piece again. Mrs Cahn would want me to pay attention to tempo and dynamics now. Play it again, she would say. She would set the metronome. Listen, till you hear the pulse inside you.
'When will he come?'
'I don't know. I haven't called him yet.'
The idea sets off a tremor of possibility. The piano tuner came the day after it happened. They let him in and he spent some time alone in the house.
'Will it be soon?'
'I shouldn't think he's doing any calls at the moment because of the snow.'
There was no need for him to hurry, it was hardly an emergency, but he came the very first day that the road to the village was open, appeared at the door like a successful explorer flushed from the cold, with his little brown bag and stories of the depth of the snow at various points along the road. A man must work, he announced, and made a joke with a nervous laugh. A man could not just hibernate the winter through. Yet I thought that was just the sort of thing a man who looked like him should have done. He seemed even mousier now than the other times: a shabby brown man, his eyes exaggerated like those of some nocturnal creature behind the lenses of his glasses. He unravelled himself, shedding hat, scarf, coat in the hall, and under his great coat he had on a thick beige cardigan, and fingerless gloves that he kept on and that I thought somebody must have knitted for him, unless he had knitted them himself. There was something rounded and feminine to him that meant you could imagine him knitting.
It was like before. The tuning fork, the same systematic discordance, the same corrections, working down and then up the keyboard. The piano open, all its ribs and innards bared.
'How does it work?' I asked. 'How do you know when it's right?'
'I listen how the sound is made up,' he said. 'The whirring within the note, the frequency, the beats per second. Do you hear it?'
'Yes,' I said, but I didn't. I heard only jarring, tensions like lies, meanings withheld.
And he went on, insistent, precise, sound by sound jarring through me until I thought I could not listen any more, and then suddenly he was finished and he raised his hands, high wrists as if the fingerless gloves were gone and there were instead the black sleeves and white cuffs of the concert pianist, and played, at last, something fluent, fluid like Chopin.
'Lovely,' he said. 'A lovely little instrument. But you need a new string. You've a broken string on the low B. It's all right, there are two strings, it still plays, but I don't have one with me. I'll have to order you another one. I'll bring it round when it comes. Tell your mum that for me, will you? Tell Mrs Wyatt 1'11 be round with it, in a week or two.'
Two whole years gone by. How did he not know?
'You can tell Mr Wyatt,' I said. 'Mrs Wyatt's dead.'
His eyes seemed ever bigger behind the glasses. He fumbled with the tuning fork.
'Oh I'm so sorry, dear, I didn't know.'
'But it's ages ago now. Not last year but the one before. Just the day before you came.'
It was a kind of test: as if the sudden words might make his disguise drop off, all his shabby oddness, which might only have been a costume put on with his role. Only it didn't drop off, and he looked more embarrassed than ever, and put all his outdoor clothes back on and shambled out.
The piano tuner came that day, and the milkman and the post (the postman late, with so many days' worth of letters that they didn't fit through the door) and the delivery van from the shop. And when I went down to the shop with Susan that afternoon, I saw Mr Kiss go. Already we knew that there would be more snow coming. Even if you had not heard the forecast you could see it in the sky.
He was at the counter buying cigarettes, trying to buy his brand but they didn't have it so he had to buy some other - some plain English Virginia tobacco, but in a little village shop you cannot expect much choice. He looked hurried, annoyed, and brushed by us without seeming to see us; and soon as he had gone out he came back in to buy some matches, and bought them over our heads while we waited with Mrs Lacey's list. But when we went out with our basket he was just sitting there in his car. He had the engine run
ning but he sat quite still before the steering wheel, smoking and staring straight ahead. It was just beginning to snow by then. The clouds that had lightened that morning and lifted away were weighing down again, hanging over the hills heavier and darker than the land. We had walked to the end of the road before the car drove off.
Such a pity he had gone, Daphne Lacey said. The blizzard had lasted all night and once more everything was clear and white, and the drifts had piled back across the roads and the village was closed off. Such a loss, when you thought about it. Why, if only he had not been in such a rush to leave, the snow would have kept him longer, and they could have had him give a performance in the Village Hall. That was what they used to do in Malaya, if anyone interesting ever came, they would put something on, at the Club, though the Village Hall was hardly the Club. And it was so cold besides. If only they could heat it properly. Those little heaters they had put in last year had scarcely any effect at all. Apparently the man was really quite a famous violinist. Surely that was proved by the way he had to dash off the moment the road was open. What a pity that Sarah Cahn had been so selfish with him. She could have shared him a little. There was nothing for her to be so cagey about. What an odd woman she was really, keeping herself to herself the way she did.
The Spy Game Page 11