The Spy Game

by Georgina Harding

  * * *

  'He was lucky to get out,' Peter said to me later. 'It must have been a problem for him, for his contacts too. They have regular times to call in, you see, preset dates and times, and specific codes for each of them. If an agent misses one call he has to make the next, or they have some alternative plan, some fallback plan, with a special code to say if everything's OK. If he misses that one it starts to worry them. Moscow Centre wouldn't like it if he was snowed up here and disappeared from their radar altogether.'

  'You don't really know that. You're just saying things.'

  'At least I'm trying to work it out.'

  'I don't see why you have to. Why you can't just leave things be.'

  'Come off it, Anna. You saw. Like I did. Don't pretend you didn't see her.'

  I had started to walk away and he grabbed at me. I was quick though and he only got my sleeve.

  'Let go of me.'

  'But you did see, didn't you?'

  Everything was tight and going out of focus, like the moment before you cried.

  'Let go. You'll stretch my jumper.'

  And when he let go, I said, 'OK, I saw. But I only saw a coat. It could have been someone else. It could have been any woman. Lots of people have the same clothes, don't they?'

  Peter sulked back to his room then and I took the toboggan and went over to Susan's again, and we went out on our own to the big slope at the end of the village.

  No one there but ourselves. And the snow new again, powdery over the polished crust of the slope. Even Susan is brave, without the boys to see. On the toboggan we are flying, gripping on to each other, hair whipping each other's faces, flying over the white ground.

  Hold on. Hold on tight.

  Marie, Marie, hold on tight. Words come back. Something about a girl on a sled, and her cousin the arch-duke. The opening of 'The Waste Land', just a piece of a poem that we studied at school. When I get home I will look it out. It must be there somewhere on the shelves, but such a slim book slipped in among all the others that I have not seen it for years. I have noticed this before, that when you are out of England things come to haunt you, words, books, pieces of knowledge that were taken for granted at home. Memories. Once I spent a whole holiday with my husband trying to remember the name of some film we had seen, something quite un-important that it had occurred to one or other of us to mention - and this when we were young, before we had grown old and conscious of forgetting things. We were in Spain, travelling, inland where it was dry and wild and the plains stretched for hours before us. If we had met another person from England we would have asked, but there was no one to meet, only villages that were emptied with people hiding from the heat. Soon as we got home the name came back to us and we knew how very little it had mattered.

  I do not understand the references in the poem. If someone ever explained them to me, then this too I have forgotten. Who the people are who drink coffee in the Hofgarten. (And where is the Hofgarten? Not Berlin, I think it is somewhere other than Berlin.) Who is the girl on the sled? I will need to have someone explain all this. All I understand for sure, understand deep down as you should understand a poem, is the piece about the spring and the lilacs. April is the cruellest month. It is April now and in Berlin it is still cold.

  When my father died I went to his house alone and sorted out his things. Just me, no Peter. We spoke about it after the funeral. He'd flown back from Hong Kong. I hadn't seen him for a couple of years and he looked good, tanned and fitter than you would have expected for his age. Composed, slick even, every inch the successful lawyer. When he looked at me I knew he thought that I looked old. He offered to come to the house but I told him not to bother. No point his wasting time with all that, away from his family, away from his work. Anything he wanted, I said I would send. Partly I had done this out of considerateness and partly for myself, for distance, to keep the habit we had formed that kept the past at bay.

  'You're sure?'

  'I 'm sure.'

  Do what you want with the stuff, he had said. Take what you want and sell the rest. There would be nothing worth shipping all the way to Hong Kong.

  'Don't you want to keep anything? Not even for your family, your girls?' There was a Chinese wife I'd met a couple of times when she made trips to London, two daughters I knew only from a photograph he once sent of them playing on a beach. I supposed that they had grown now and weren't little girls any more but I didn't have any other way to picture them.

  'I think your girls should have something. I'd like them to. I'll look something out and send it.'

  'Fine,' he said, and the word had no meaning.

  The house felt strange, as if everything had been subtly moved. It should not have been so. I knew the place well enough. It had scarcely altered since we were children, and I had always been around, coming and going, particularly in the last months of his illness. Perhaps it was just that a house always feels different after someone has died.

  I began by going through the kitchen, a bit of practical housekeeping, throwing out what few pieces of food there were that would rot, putting into a box what I might take home and use myself. I even cleaned a little. I felt a temptation to clean it all, cupboards and shelves and corners, all the things that an old man's eyes would have become inured to, but satisfied myself with the work surface and the sink, and made a note to myself to call up the woman who occasionally came to clean for him and book her for a whole day to work through the entire house. I wanted that done before it was sold.

  The simple work was activity at least, an assertion of the present in the stillness of the house. I put the kettle on, laid out on the clean worktop the makings for a cup of coffee, black coffee it would have to be since there was no milk. I walked through the rest of the rooms where the dust had settled, and felt that I was walking outside of time and outside of myself. Recent events, my father's illness and death, and distant childhood ones, earliest memories, seemed all of a piece, and from all of them I was detached, as if they were only dust and you could trail a finger through and wipe strips of them away.

  It was with that sense of distance that I took the mug of coffee to his desk. I placed the mug with care on a loose paper though the leather was already ringed and marked and worn like old skin. I knew its surface well, the touch of the leather and the round wooden handles of the drawers, knew how I expected to find it, and yet it was different from that. It had all been rearranged. The papers of fifty years, which I had expected to find in their usual light chaos, had all been sorted and sifted and stacked.

  This was the first moment that I had felt moved since coming into the house. So this was what he had done when he was ill, preparing things for me in his mild, considerate way. I felt him sitting in the same chair in which I was sitting now, methodically sorting drawer after drawer, muttering and filling a wastebin and the floor about it with all that could be crumpled and discarded. I thought of all those times I had rung him to ask how he was and what he was doing with his day, and he had said that he was busy. He didn't tell me what with, but now I saw. He had organised himself at the last. He had put out will, birth certificate, whatever it was you needed to register a death. Other things he had arranged in specific drawers: letters, some sketchbooks he had had in the war, odd photographs that had not found their way into albums, receipts for whatever in the house was valuable, keys to clocks, a compass and a cigarette case. There was a sense of emptiness in these drawers, of too much space there where they had been crammed for years with so many things that had now been dispensed with, tidied or edited away before they might again be seen. Even the smell of the drawers when they were opened, before I touched them, the smell of papers and dust and bared wood, suggested recent disturbance.

  Many of these contents had been familiar all my life. I had looked in the desk before, officially and unofficially. Peter and I had gone through it, guiltily, in the days of our suspicion. Most of what I remembered was there. There was a game we used to play at children's parties, w
here we were shown a lot of objects on a tray and then shown the tray again, and had to remember what had been on it before and what had been taken away. I used to be good at that. I looked at the tray hard and tried to keep the image of it like a photograph, memorised it and fixed it tight behind closed lids, and opened them only when the next tray was put before us so that I could see in a flash how it was changed. Now I had the same feeling, only I could not have named any precise object which had been taken away. The odd thing was what had appeared which had not been there before, not when we had searched for it or any other time I had nosed through: our mother's diary. It was a blue Letts' pocket diary for 1960, with reminders and appointments neatly marked in blue ink, filled up right through into the few pages at the end that ran into the beginning of the January of the following year, right up to what appeared to be a doctor's appointment in Oxford the day she died.

  I found it in the lowest drawer, the last drawer I came to. I put it on the desk top and riffled through the other contents of the drawer, and finding nothing more of interest closed it, closed all of the drawers in the desk before I read, careful and deliberate, starting from the beginning, page by page.

  What Peter once would have given to see that. What I would have given. And now it had only pathos: the banality of it, of dentist's and doctor's appointments and beginnings and ends of term, the impersonal reduction of a life into a book hardly bigger than a cigarette packet. There was only one line written there that was personal in any way. That line. At the back, in the spare pages for notes, a phrase that I recognised at once: lilacs out of the dead land.

  What would he have made of that, if he had known? If he had been there, if he had come with me. If he was not even then on his flight home, flying away back to being whoever he had made himself.

  Look, Anna, see that!

  A boy, holding me there by the force of his feeling - not the man who had become a stranger but the boy I knew too well, picking through drawers and files and papers. Thin energy. Quick fingers. Burning eyes. See that. See the tidied desk, the evidence of the house. See. I was right, wasn't I? I was right all along. No random event but only conspiracy. Some other hand, always, some hand other than our own, our mother's, our father's, dealing things out.

  Even now, so long after, they had not forgotten. They had remembered, and come and searched and cleared and arranged. Determined what we would find and what we would not find. Made all this, the order and the empty space, a deliberate thing, arranged, composed, something more than the work of an old man tidying up for death.

  So there. Told you so. The thought came to me and there was no holding it back.

  I took the diary away with me that first day, and a cardboard box of food, nothing else. I loaded the box into the car and then went back and locked the door and felt the house behind it as it used to be, as if the rooms inside were still alive as they had been, and there was the smell of aeroplane glue in them and the coal fire burning.

  You have to remember these things, Anna. Don't write them down. You can't write them down anywhere but you've got to remember them always.

  As if we were followed, watched, liable at any time to interrogation. And I was a child and confused and could not get them straight, the codes and checks and fallbacks, systems of communication and operation, all that trade-craft he tried to teach me, that I understood only in fragments. How even the connections are concealed, how each agent is isolated, never knowing more than is necessary for them to know. How a single phrase, some quite innocuous phrase or a line from a published book, might identify them or hold the key to a cipher.

  I drove back home and did not have the strength to get the box out of the car. I would get it in the morning and sort everything then, tins of tomatoes, stale coffee, outdated herbs, half-used bags of sugar and flour that would hang about and sadden the larder for months. I only took the diary in.

  My husband and daughter were in the kitchen.

  'What's that?' my husband asked.

  A slim blue book, a frayed blue ribbon hanging from it. An object of such familiarity that I did not really need to say.

  'You OK?'

  'Tired. I'm just tired.'

  He opened a bottle of wine, scrambled some eggs for our supper. I put the diary away in a drawer.

  Soon afterwards I happened to see there was an old film about Violette Szabo on television. I had nothing better to do that day so I drew the curtains and sat down and watched it in the afternoon. The film was made in 1958 but I had not seen it before. I had read the book when I was a child but I had not seen the film.

  There was a recognition code Violette used when she met a member of the Resistance.

  Violette: It's good that spring is here at last.

  French garage mechanic: It was a long winter.

  Violette: And now the days are drawing out.

  Virginia McKenna did not look like the Violette I had imagined.

  I would have to put the pieces together, I saw then. For myself, if the past was ever to make sense. Go back over the stories, the stories I carried in my mind and the stories that were real. Visit the places where they happened. When there was time, I would go and find out for myself whatever was to be found.

  When my daughter came back from school she was surprised to see the curtains drawn. You've been watching telly, Mum. Then you can't stop me from watching now.

  There was something I had to see, I said. Something that reminded me of when I was a child.

  It was so very long, that winter, longer than any other winter that I have known. The winter of the Great Blizzard. In the first weeks it was an event: pictures on television of Gurkhas breaking through to the snowbound, helicopters making air drops, factory workers sent home, farmers pouring away milk that could not be collected in warm white streams across frozen white yards. And then the snow did not go. Temperatures did not rise. The cold, the snow, the shovelling happened every day. And when milk was delivered it froze on the doorstep if you did not bring it in. The cream froze up through the top of the bottle and pushed off the silver lid.

  A hard winter. Hardest of all on Sarah Cahn. I would not have known the term depression. I think people did not use it so much then. I made my explanation from the one piece of her life I had seen, and that piece only, which was the affair and the man's leaving, and some melodrama about it. I might see it differently now, knowing the history, having some idea of her experience. What I knew then with certainty, with a child's sure empathy, was that for her the winter was longer than for anyone, alone again with the snow outside and the village cut off sometimes for days on end, living through it day after day, weeks going by, and each day as still and lonely as the one before, and the loneliness intense because the man who had been there was gone.

  When my father was home he liked to walk with me to my lesson. We had to walk some of the way along the road where the pavement was piled up, walked in the tracks of the few cars that might have gone through the village that day. When we got to the house there might be no more than a single set of footprints before us on the path up to her door, going and returning in a loop so that you knew that it was only the postman or the milkman making his delivery, or there might be none at all, those of previous days filled up, new falls of snow covering over where it had been cleared before. No sign of her going out at all.

  One time she was playing the piano when we came so that she did not hear us, and we were kept out waiting in the cold.

  'I didn't know,' my father said, 'that she could play so beautifully.'

  'She came from a musical family, in Berlin. Her father was a conductor.'

  'Your mother said that we were lucky to find her here.'

  We had to wait until there was a pause - now and then she paused, went back, repeated a difficult or unsatisfactory phrase - then knock again, hard, and when she came to us at last she looked at us for a moment as if she did not know us, or as if she had come from very far away. I thought that that was how she must have looked when
she first arrived, when she came off the ship and saw that everybody was a stranger speaking a strange language.

  'I 'm sorry,' she said. 'I'd forgotten the day.'

  'I understand,' my father said, 'it's all a muddle since the snow.' He stood a moment and looked uncomfortable and then went away.

  'You shouldn't knock so hard,' she said, after he had gone.

  'There's no need. I am just here. You knocked so hard that I thought it must be someone else.'

  At some point during that winter I noticed that she had begun to lock the door even when she was in the house. That was strange to me. People didn't do that in the village. At home you just walked in and out, and didn't lock the door even when you went shopping, and when you went to someone's house often you just walked in the back door and called. Yet at Sarah Cahn's now there was a delay, the sound of unbolting and a key turning, sounds of boxes and secrets. And once I came inside she went back and locked it again, and pushed a rolled blanket up to the bottom of it. She said that it was on account of the draughts, and that made sense of the roll of blanket but not of the locking. Locking the door didn't keep you warm.

  Then it's not only that he's gone, I thought. She's frightened of him, that he might come back.

  It was cold in the house, and dark. The only light that was on was the one at the piano. Even the passage that she had come down to the door was dark, and the fire had gone out. I began to play my scales as Sarah Cahn fetched kindling and coal and remade the fire, and then wrapped herself up in her coloured shawl and fed the fire as it began to burn.