The Spy Game

by Georgina Harding

  'Shall I play my pieces now?'

  'Why, yes. What are you playing? The Diabelli, wasn't it?'

  'No, that was ages ago. I did that for my Grade Three.'

  'Of course. You played it very nicely.'

  She didn't remember, though. I could see that.

  'You gave me something new to play. We started on it last week.'

  She tried to recall herself but she was restless - or maybe it was only that she was still too cold - and came and stood behind me as I played, and did not sit as she usually did, so that I felt ill at ease and the notes sounded hard and uneven.

  'Did we talk about the tempo? You have to be very precise here.'

  She took the metronome and set it, stood it on the top of the piano.

  There was the tock of the metronome, the sound of the fire, the metal stick of the metronome moving from side to side. I tried to concentrate, to loosen my fingers and play. Though I could not turn to see, I knew that she had wandered away again, across the room to look out on to the dark road. I played right through to the end of the piece. Usually she would stop me after a few bars or lines and correct me, and I had to go back over them. This time I did not believe that she was listening. I got to the end where the piece repeated, and started again at the beginning, and I knew but did not care that I had speeded up, that I should be stopped and held back.

  Then there was chocolate, a warm mug in my hands, but the kitchen was cold.

  'This weather, this winter, goes on and on. Even you children must be getting tired of it by now.'

  'Oh but we like it. I think all winters should be like this.'

  'Sometimes children go by on the hill. Do you go up there? I've wondered if you were one of them. When you're all wrapped up in coats and balaclavas I can't tell.'

  'Sometimes.'

  'We had much more snow than you do, when I was a child.' She spoke in a way that I remembered later as strange and sad - but perhaps that was only because of what happened later, perhaps I did not hear it so at the time but only a plain story about a city that had forests beside it, and lakes that froze and where they might skate if there had not been too much snow. Sarah Cahn said that she too had a toboggan, which she pulled along with a friend. Like you do, she said, when you go past on the hill.

  * * *

  My father's car outside. Sarah Cahn unbolts the door.

  'Look, the snow's falling again. Like feathers, do you see?'

  Where the light from the open door slants across them the big flakes do indeed seem like feathers, slow and swaying like feathers as they fall.

  'Sometimes I think there'll be so much snow that we'll be covered over, all those feathers pressing down on us.' She speaks lightly, with a little fragile laugh.

  I get into the car. I know precisely, with all my senses, what the words mean: the muffling weight of cold feathers, white and grey feathers piling up, lightness becoming weight, and not a comfort but a suffocation. Like when people are smothered with pillows. Sometimes people are killed like that. It is how people kill others that they love, the kindest way, how mothers kill children who are in pain and whom they cannot help, when the children are asleep and do not know. When Sarah Cahn speaks about the feathers, I feel that it is not a metaphor she is speaking, not an expression of what something looks like, but how it is, how she experiences it. When she says that about the snow I know that it is, indeed, suffocating to her.

  'I don't want to do piano any more.'

  I say the words before I have really thought them, and know as I say them that that is not precisely their meaning. It is not piano I want to finish with, not even Sarah Cahn either, not exactly. It is the things that the piano, and Sarah Cahn, make me feel.

  'Why's that, poppet?'

  'I just don't like it any more.'

  'But you play so well. Everybody says how nicely you play.'

  I do not feel safe in the car even though we are only in the village. The windscreen wipers groan, those big loose flakes of snow coming at the glass, stubborn ones holding to the blades and being pushed to and fro.

  'Keep it up a bit longer, won't you, Anna? You know your mother loved to hear you play.'

  'I don't want to.'

  'She used to play rather well herself once. Before you were born. After that she never seemed to find the time.'

  I persist, even though this information is new and at other moments I might have followed it up and the opening that it makes between us.

  'You let Peter give up the clarinet.'

  'That was only after he'd been away at school. You're going away in September. Let's talk about it at the end of the year, when you've seen how it is there.'

  'But that's ages away.'

  'It's not so long as all that.'

  'Then let me go now. I want to go there now.'

  The road before the headlights is like a tunnel, the tyre tracks that we must follow becoming whiter even as we drive into them.

  Look at the chords,' Sarah Cahn would say, 'and you can work out what key a piece is in. Look at the notes at the beginning, and then again at the end. Sometimes there's a note missing but you can work out what it is. You'll find it's all much easier then.'

  Music theory made little more sense than Peter's codes. Only I saw that it was like his codes, which also depended on patterns and keys, which worked once the keys were deciphered, which related to one another this way and that and changed accordingly. Intervals and thirds and fifths, and the same notes in each key but they meant something different, and sometimes the one note was a sharp and sometimes it was a flat as it switched from one key to another.

  They made it so complicated. I did not see why things must need to be so complicated, why they could not simply be what they appeared to be. Like the spy thing. I did not want to believe it or not to believe it. I just did not want to think about it. I did not want to see how all the people connected, if they connected, if there was a pattern or if there was no pattern at all. I was not always sure if this was what Peter wanted even. Sometimes when I saw him I thought that he really meant it, but Peter always looked as if he meant everything. Peter looked earnest and tight even when he thought he was joking, which was why things he did, even his teasing, could hurt so. I could not know if he really thought it all through at school when he was away, or if he only thought of it at moments when he was on the edge of things, when he was falling asleep or waking, or when he was coming home, travelling between the school-boy that he was and the other boy that he was at home. I did not know if it was real for him or just a game, a distraction.

  Sometimes spy rings were organised with people called cut-outs, Peter said. There were agents in the field and there were spymasters who ran them and the agents and spymasters never met but there were people called cut-outs between them, who were go-betweens and nothing else. This meant that none of the agents knew anything but their own work and that, if one of them was captured and interrogated, the others were not threatened and the ring could not be broken.

  One thing I wanted to ask him. What if you cut out the cut-out? If you did that, wouldn't the connection die? Then the agent at the end of it might be left alone, just himself or herself again, just as they appeared to be.

  When Sarah Cahn rang to cancel a lesson, I was glad. I could go over to Susan's instead.

  Mrs Lacey was cooking sausages for tea.

  'You're early today,' she said. 'Did she let you out early?'

  'Mrs Cahn's ill,' I said. 'She's got a bad cold.' She hadn't given any reason but there were lots of colds going round and it was quite possible that she had a cold.

  'Oh, is that what it is? Oh I'm glad it's only that. I'd heard something about her. One of the women in the shop said that she'd come in and that she'd looked not at all well, and was rather odd, and went straight out again without saying a thing. I'd been thinking perhaps someone should go round and see her.'

  'I'm sure she's fine,' I said, not wanting to be sent. Once or twice I had been sent with Susan on a
n errand of mercy around the village. 'Except that she has a cold, of course. She said she just didn't want to see anybody. Not till she's better.'

  I drove by the house a couple of days later, driving somewhere with my father. The days were long now since it was March, but not bright, just dull and persistent like the snow. It was teatime when we passed and there were no lights on in the house yet I felt sure that she was there. It would have been just bright enough to see from inside, to see who was out on the road. As we went by I knew that Sarah Cahn was in there, no more than a density in the darkness, in there with the doors locked and the lights off, standing with that Indian shawl she had wrapped about her, seeing the car pass.

  When the next week's lesson came round, I decided not to go. I had never done anything like that before. I took up my music case and pretended I was going there but went another way altogether. The village was grey and quiet and there was no one to see me.

  It had been a bleak day with an iron sky but without wind, so that it was not so cold as it looked. The snow was soft and wet now, dirty everywhere it lay in the village. It was time that it was gone. We were used to it now, we had had our winter. Everything looked closed and forgotten. The smoke from chimneys merged too soon with the sky and even the lit windows looked barely alive. I walked past the playground and saw that the slide and the swings were bare now of snow, and went on the swing for a long time, back and forth, watching the roofs of the houses opposite coming towards me and going away; and then closed my eyes and saw the roofs again in my mind, coming and going.

  Then I saw my mother watching the roofs, watching in that same evening, that same twilight, that same thaw, only the roofs were higher and blacker and massed together, the roofs of a city. Sometimes I saw my mother like that, shut away somewhere in a dingy room, far away, somewhere in the dead land in the East - Europe of course, not Asia, but a kind of Europe that was referred to only like that, as the East. She was high up, in a room up flights of narrow stairs, and always looking out, standing at a window that was closed. The room varied a little each time I saw it, but it would have flaking paint or old scratched wallpapers (the colours of them drab, if colours could be seen) and the closed window and a musty smell. My mother would have hated rooms like that. She so liked light and air and pretty things. They were cold rooms also, and I knew this because my mother never took off her winter coat, wrapping herself in it and putting her hands deep into its pockets. She stood at the window and looked out over rooftops as it grew dark.

  Or perhaps she was wearing her coat not only because of the cold. Perhaps she had just come in, or she had just put it on, she was getting ready to leave. Yes, she is watching for a car to arrive, and has put her coat on. Soon as she sees the gleaming black roof of the saloon car moving in the street below, she goes to the door, opens it, starts down the unlit stairs.

  I kept on swinging until I felt cold and almost seasick, slowed then and dangled a foot to the ground, let it drag to and fro.

  My mother is in the car now, coming to a bridge. Morning now, but so early that it is the same as twilight. The bridge is a steel one made of thick girders and there is a mist about it, between the Meccano girders. The car stops some way before the beginning of the bridge and my mother gets out of the passenger door at the back of the car and shuts it heavily, so that it makes a clunk like the door of the fridge, and walks away. The driver of the car is only an outline behind the windscreen. He keeps the car's engine running and its sound comes like a vibration through the mist to the huddle of people who are waiting on the other, near side of the bridge.

  She walks briskly down the centre of the road. Her footsteps ring metallically on the asphalt. She has high heels, neat stockinged ankles, a thick coat that bells about her. She would appear to be dressed for an ordinary day in the city, a day's shopping or a visit to the doctor, not for this dawn walk across a steel bridge.

  Once she is on the bridge the sound of her steps softens. There are no walls to harden them now but only open air. The river runs below, wide and cold and dark, but you cannot see it. You know it is there because of the mist that rises off it, that spills up about the skirt of her coat, that carries with it the raw waking breath of the land beyond the city.

  And now the figure of another woman, slender and dark and darkly dressed, detaches itself from the group on the near side of the bridge and starts to cross in the opposite direction.

  The swing was almost still now and I was cold, but the daydream held me. The notion that the two women might be exchanged, one for the other. Because one had a family and the other didn't have anyone and wasn't needed, and wasn't happy anyway. It didn't seem so unfair really.

  I saw it happening: my mother coming closer; the back of the other woman receding, her red scarf a last point of colour in a grey distance, going wherever it was that my mother was coming from. Peter said that the spymasters were ruthless. Most of their agents were expendable but sometimes, if one was especially valuable to them, they would do things, even sacrificing one of the others, to get that agent back.

  I left the playground and did not know what to do then so I went into the church. That seemed a good enough place to wait until the time when the lesson should be over. The churchyard still looked quite beautiful where it had not been trodden, snow still white between the graves and pelts of it coating some of the stones. Inside the church it was also white and just as cold, but there were dark oak pews to sit in, pews like boxes with tall backs, and doors at the side that closed a person in. I opened a door and latched it shut, and with its wooden walls about me I read the book that I had brought with me, that I had had the sense to put into my music case.

  I read so hard that I did not at first hear the Vicar coming to lock up. When I did, when I heard the steps of a man walking up the aisle, I moved suddenly in a panic, and the music case fell to the floor.

  'Well I never, aren't you cold?'

  Of course I was cold, and my mind was all numb.

  'I know who you are. You're Alec Wyatt's little girl.'

  'I just came in, I was at my piano lesson. I was walking along. I just came in to see.'

  'That's all right, my dear, you can come in here when-ever you like. That's what the church is for. But you're lucky I didn't just lock the door and go away. I might have done that. You might have been locked in all night. I was just checking there weren't any birds inside. Sometimes a bird gets in, you see, and gets shut in, and flies against the windows and makes a mess everywhere.'

  I knew the Vicar by sight. He turned up at school Etes and things, and he was always gardening so that you saw him from the road whenever you went by the vicarage. He was bony and grey and a little bit awkward.

  'I'll go home now.'

  The Vicar smiled rather abruptly and brought out something from his pocket. It was a sixpence.

  'Here, have this, I found it on the floor. I'm sure the church can do without it.'

  I felt guilty taking the coin. I would put it into the collection in my own church that Sunday when we went to Mass.

  It was just as it would have been those other times, if I had gone those other times. The weather had not changed. The sky was just the same. There was that same static iron-greyness to everything in the day, to the morn-ing when I had woken to it behind the curtains, to the classroom and the journey home. Only there was a little less snow. The road was clear and black. The hedges showed bare where the snow had come off them. There were some patches of pale grass now in the fields. And the day seemed too long, wrong, because you should not have had so much snow with that length of daylight.

  'I haven't done any practice.'

  She had a little cough. Perhaps she had been ill after all and she hadn't minded about the missed lesson. She didn't say anything about it. She just said well, let's ignore your grades today, let's just start a new piece, shall we, and turned to the shelves of music and started picking through the books again, choosing and discarding. There was so much music written there, whole days
and years of music to be played, but on this day, this particular grey day when it was almost no longer winter but not yet spring, none of it suited. It had been played already, or it was too loud or too sad. There were only a couple of pieces that Sarah Cahn thought worth taking down and trying out, and she sat and played them through, and one was too loud and one was too sad, and I saw that she could not fix on anything and that she too wanted only to waste the hour away.

  'This is something I play to arrange my thoughts. It's not hard, but it can be played very beautifully. You could play this if you tried.'

  It was some Bach. Sarah Cahn went through it first and explained the harmonics, marking the score with the finely sharpened stub of a pencil, explaining how Bach could see all these patterns, what a mind he had, how clever he was.

  'That's like Peter. He's clever too. He does Latin and Greek and he can make up codes and things.' Suddenly I wanted to talk, tell it all, ask if she knew, what she knew, if she was anything to do with it; knowing all the time that she wasn't, that there wasn't anything there to be found out.

  She was demonstrating the piece and did not seem to hear. Not a piece of her face showed that she heard. The music was like fountains, crystalline, rising, falling, con-trolled. If only it was all like that, no words to anything. If you listened, closed your eyes, then opened them again and looked about, you saw the room more richly than before, the polish of the furniture, the glow of the lamps, of the glass on the shelves, the vividness of its lit colour. The woman at the piano was suddenly vivid again too, as if some veil, some dull greyness which had seemed only an extension of the greyness of the day, of the protracted late winter, had dropped away.