The Spy Game

by Georgina Harding

  That was the last lesson I had with Sarah Cahn.

  As soon as Peter came home for the holiday he wanted to go out to see how much snow was left. It's not how it was, I told him, it's nearly gone now, it's no fun any more. He did not like that, that things changed while he was away at school, that things could not just hold until he got back.

  We went out on the Friday morning after our father had left for work. The air was still but cold and the sky was stark, the sun a hard luminous disc behind a thin screen of cloud. At the farm they were putting out new hay. The cows were still being kept in. Their black-and-white backs flooded out of the shed into the yard, spilling forward to the fresh hay. They would have to be kept in many weeks yet as there would be nothing for them in the fields.

  We went up the hill first. We could not see far. The view dissolved too soon, without distinction between earth and cloud. There was only the valley, the bare roofs of the village, the road winding away, a hint of distance. Every-where the white cover of the ground was worn thin, pricked through by dead stems, ribbed by the plough beneath. It was soggy walking on the tracks, easier in the open fields though we had to watch for dips where the snow still lay deceptively deep, and for the drifts against banks and hedges, though most of the paths were marked by now with the steps of walkers who had been before.

  'How's Dad been?'

  'Fine.'

  He always asked that and I always gave the same reply.

  'What've you been doing?'

  'Nothing much.'

  We started down, along round the backs of the houses. Peter led and I just went where he did.

  There was always this adjustment to his coming home, the getting used to each other again, the waiting to see what sort of person he was going to be now that he had come back. Some holidays we were quite close. Others we had nothing to say to one another as if we had grown apart. At the top of the hill he stopped for a time so I stopped too and stood beside him. And when we went down, he went first and I came behind, and he bent and made a wet dirty snowball and threw it at me, and I made one too and threw badly, but Peter had already turned away and I think he did not see that I missed by miles as I always did.

  It was habit to look in when we passed Mrs Cahn's house. I don't think that Peter had any particular intention. He was ahead of me and he looked casually down the slope, and then stopped.

  'Hey, that's odd.'

  The room was all moved round, the table pushed out of place. There was something on the cleared patch of floor before the cooker. Later I wondered if I had known from the first, if we had both known exactly what it was we saw, but really I think it was not clear, looking then. There was not much light, either outside or in. Nothing that morning was clear.

  'It looks funny.' Peter had got up on the wall, sinking into a wet drift as he had done so, so that his jeans were all wet. 'I'm going to go and see.'

  He jumped off and started down the slope towards the house. The covering of snow was still complete there and though the strip along by the wall was well walked, trodden so many times that it was a mass of tracks and holes, the stretch that ran down to the house was still clean and smooth so that each step Peter took in it showed clear.

  'Don't, Peter.'

  'Why not?'

  'She'll see. She'll see you coming. She knows we come up here. She sees us go by, you know. She'll see you coming or she'll see your tracks later and then she'll know that we've been watching her.'

  Perhaps I must have known, or I would not have panicked so.

  'What's it matter?' Peter hesitated, stamped, churned up the snow at his feet. The air really wasn't clear. I couldn't see his face that clearly. The sun was there behind the mist and it was all a blind hard grey.

  'Don't,' I said again. 'Just don't.' No why. Only, that I did not want him to go down there. 'Come back. Please, Peter.'

  He just stood a moment.

  'OK,' he said, and came back up.

  'Race you home,' he said, and we ran down to the village, getting there heated and hungry, almost but not quite forgetting what we had seen. The awareness of it was there beside the awareness of the tracks that we were making, even as we ran: the tracks of that morning stretching out behind us, passing across those of other days, out of the newly smashed drift beneath the wall, past the marks of earlier outings, past the snowed-over crater where Peter had fallen before; the tracks of our running and the fresh, obvious track that Peter had just made on the cleaner snow of the slope above the house, a track that went a little way down the hill directly towards the house and then faltered and turned sharply back - evidence, if any were to seek it, that someone had gone there and walked down towards the exposed window and gone no further, and gone back and joined a companion and moved on and left the house to its secret.

  I remember that Daphne Lacey had made shepherd's pie for lunch. Details like that lodge in memory among the big things. So I remember how she had forgotten that it was Friday and that we were Catholics and did not eat meat on Fridays, and how I was glad not to have to have fish and told myself that God would think it was less of a sin to eat the meat than to be rude and refuse the food.

  The pie had been made for Peter. She always did something special for him on his first day back. She cooked something he particularly liked, then bombarded him with questions and chatter and second helpings. It was kind. You could see that she was trying to bring him in, to make him feel at home. She was not as stupid as she looked. Only it was never quite easy, never relaxed. She could never settle a thought, as if settling a thought meant danger, as if looking fully at something might stop you altogether, freeze you in your tracks. Better to move on, flit on, keep warm. That's how you kept life going. Ask another question. How's school? Was it football this term? How did the scholarship exam go? When do you get the results? And Peter answered. He seemed bright and confident talking to an adult, the bright schoolboy that he was away from home, someone that I didn't really know, someone who surely couldn't have been out on the hill that morning. But he was brittle also, as if he, both of them, were actors in some clever play. School was fine, he answered, the exam was OK, and Charlie West had broken his leg.

  They were only actors, hollow, speaking lines. I listened to them and their voices echoed as if I too were hollow inside. When they stopped talking even the silence had an echo.

  'Are you feeling all right, Anna? You've hardly eaten a thing. You look a bit flushed. You're not coming down with a cold, I hope, not at the start of the holidays?'

  Daphne Lacey put a hand to my forehead to see if it was hot. (Her hands were long and pale and slightly freckled, and clammy from the cream she used; she was always putting cream on them, taking off her kitchen gloves or washing them at the sink and standing there rubbing the cream into them before she put her ring back on.)

  'I'm fine.'

  'Perhaps you'd better stay in this afternoon, just in case. You were out an awfully long time this morning.'

  'I'm fine,' I repeated, but did not argue. I thought of the kitchen down there, the stillness and the silence within it, the woman on the stone floor and the voices of two children that carry down from the hill and through the closed window. No. Don't. Come bact. Please. The voices carry thinly across the distance. I saw suddenly what I should do. I should go out there again and check, without Peter. I should think of some pretext and go right up to the door and knock on it. Only I did not have the courage.

  All weekend I tried to forget. My father was working outside for the first time in weeks. There was a tree that had come down in the blizzards and he took out his chainsaw to clear it and to cut the torn stump clean, cut it into sections and piled the big pieces for firewood, taking the rest down to the bottom of the garden where he might when it was drier have a fire. I stayed in and watched television. There was only the sport and an old film but I sat all afternoon huddled in a blanket on the sofa. The work made my father happy so that when he went past the sitting-room window he put his mouth and nose to the c
old glass and made fish faces. His skin was smeared with dirt off the wood. Come on out, he mouthed. Later he came in and tried to persuade me again. He said that it was lovely outside, bright, it felt like spring at last. Even Peter was in the garden, working with him dragging branches to the site of the fire. We might go for a walk, go up the hill even.

  'I m not coming,' I said. 'I'm staying here.'

  I would not go up there again until I knew that every last piece of the snow was gone.

  I can't help thinking about it,' Margaret was saying. It was Monday. Margaret had come to clean and Mrs Lacey had come to talk to her and stopped to have a cup of coffee. Peter and I were in the hall and the kitchen door was open. Margaret was cleaning the silver. I had seen her get the things out earlier and spread newspapers across the kitchen table. The strong smell of the silver polish spilled into the hall.

  'That poor lady, sticking her head in the gas oven like that.'

  'She's dead,' Peter whispered.

  It was such a small word once it was spoken. No more than a pebble dropping.

  'She was lying there a day,' Margaret was saying, 'before they found her.'

  His eyes looked at me like they could see inside.

  'My sister Joyce was talking to one of the neighbours and she says they knew something was up when they didn't hear any piano playing all day Friday. They're right next door, see, and they'd hear the piano all day long, and in the nights too, sometimes she used to do that, they say some-times she'd get up and play in the middle of the night, like she'd never sleep, poor thing. Anyhow, this friend of hers comes round Saturday morning and can't get her to answer the door, though there's a light on, and goes to the other neighbours, the ones at the other side, and they went round the back and got in.'

  How did they get in, if the doors were locked? They must have looked in the window, close to from the garden, and seen, and then they would have broken in, wouldn't they, for sure? I pictured it all. It was easy to make the picture because I knew precisely how it was laid out.

  Peter was still staring at me.

  'It wasn't me made it happen.' I spoke the words in my proper voice, loud and clear, so that they heard inside and stopped talking right away.

  I helped Margaret clean the rest of the silver so that I did not have to be with Peter. I liked doing the silver anyway. I liked the pink polish, the way it clouded on the metal, the way it came off so easily and left the silver beneath so bright. I sat beside Margaret and polished the spoons one by one, polishing them with precision and laying them when they were done on their sides, the bowl of one nestling in the bowl of the next. I worked until the spoons were all done, teaspoons, dessertspoons, tablespoons, and Margaret had done the forks, then I went to fetch the cigarette box that was a wedding present to my parents, and the little silver boxes from my mother's dressing table, and polished those, and the silver was cool and hard and bright.

  Margaret hummed a pop song. She did not like to work in silence.

  'You're quiet today.'

  'Umm.'

  'That brother of yours getting you down? Something he said, is it?'

  'No. Nothing like that.'

  I could see that she wondered if I had overheard. She knew it wasn't her place to tell me. She should have kept her mouth shut.

  'Sometimes a person just doesn't feel like talking, that's all.'

  Even when I was cleaning I could imagine things. I imagined the bridge again, in a mist. The mist was thick, so that you could not see from one end of the bridge to the other, so thick that the woman seemed to be walking only along the yellow tunnel of light that was made by the headlamps of the car that brought her, that waited now before the barrier on the near bank. She walked away with delicate steps that made no more than the slightest sound. You listened for the steps of the other woman who would come towards you, coming from the unseen distance; but she did not come. The dark woman walked on and the mist began to envelop her, taking away first colour - the red of her scarf, even the black of her coat - then form, until she had vanished entirely. After that, there was only mist, and the visible end of the bridge, and the girders slung into nothingness, and still the other woman did not appear. Now both of them were gone.

  'You're sure everything's all right, love?'

  'Of course. Why shouldn't it be?'

  It wasn't my fault. You don't dream a person dead.

  'Nothing I can help with?'

  'No, nothing.' Airily. I heard my voice prim and posh, child to servant. I made up my mind that when they asked me I would not do piano any more. At my next school I would learn to play a different instrument. Clarinet, like Peter. Or flute. Flute was nice.

  I went on with the polishing. I could see my face in the teapot, long-nosed like a gnome's in the distortion of its side. My fingers were grey with polish. The grey would wash off but the smell would stay for ages.

  'Well, that's done now. That's a good job done.'

  'Isn't there anything else? Anything more we can clean?'

  'Not as I can think of.'

  Margaret gathered the dusters together and put the lids back on, folded up the spread papers. 'You can help me put it all back if you like.'

  Peter had been upstairs in his room all that time. I had heard him clumping around up there, shifting things, walking to and fro. When Margaret had gone he came down with a wastepaper basket full of exercise books and papers.

  'What were you doing?'

  'Just sorting,' he said. 'Things are going to be different now.'

  'Aren't those your code books and things?'

  'I don't want to leave them lying around.'

  He went out to the incinerator in the garden, which was a big rusted metal barrel with holes in it, and made a fire and tore up the books and fed the papers to it sheet by sheet. He was out there for ages. I watched from the big window on the landing that had a view right across the garden. The incinerator was down by where they had been building the bonfire. We didn't use it much. It was there from the people who had lived in the house before and in summer it was almost hidden in a clump of stinging nettles tall as itself, but the clump was dead and flattened now where it had been heaped with snow, and the incinerator stood out very black with the orange flames rising from it.

  I wondered if this meant that the game was over, if we could begin to forget about it now.

  When Peter came back in he stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked up, waiting for me to say something.

  'Well?'

  'So you burned everything.'

  'Yup.'

  'So?'

  Later, when I had the television on, he came into the sitting room and sat in the armchair.

  'Don't keep looking at me like that.'

  'I'm not looking at anything.'

  'So look somewhere else.'

  He was looking at the television but he wasn't watching it.

  'Do you think the rest of her family died the same way she did? If she left them behind in Germany like you said, and came to England, then they probably died in the concentration camps. Then they were all gassed.'

  'I don't know anything about it.'

  'It was probably just the same stuff.'

  'Shut up. I don't want to know.'

  'The same kind of gas.

  It's coal gas,' Peter was saying. 'It's made from coal and it's poisonous. It's a heavy gas so it gets you if you lie on the floor, like in the gas chambers where people climbed on top of one another to get the last of the air. Soon we're not going to have coal gas any more. We'll have natural gas and then people won't be able to kill themselves like that.'

  'You could have done something if you wanted. You don't always need me to go along.'

  'No, that's right. I don't, do I?'

  This time our father thinks that we are old enough to know. He tells us before supper that Monday evening. He has something just heating up in the oven and he is wearing the apron he puts on for cooking. He makes the two of us sit at the table we have just laid and say
s it in a few straight words.

  'There's something I have to tell you. Mrs Cahn died on Friday. I'm afraid they think she committed suicide.'

  I like the plainness of the words. They steady your thoughts. Words like that can be arranged neatly like the knife and fork beside your plate.

  'You're old enough now to know about things like this.'

  Then like an afterthought he says, 'You should both say a prayer for her tonight. She had a very sad life. She lost all her family I think in the war, and she lost her husband after that.'

  'Yes,' I say. 'She was very sad.'

  That's it. Peter doesn't give any reaction at all. You might almost think that he has not heard. In the moment of silence that follows I feel tears coming, but coolly, without shudders, as if they are only water.

  There was a girl on a train. Slight, dark, a little older than I was. The train was full of children.

  There were only children on the train and they talked as long as the train was moving, but when it stopped adults came into the carriages and the children did not speak any more. The place where the train stopped was empty, in the middle of nowhere. The children clung on to themselves and the little cases they had with them, and repeated to themselves who they were inside and what they remembered until the train started going again and repeated it back to them.

  Dad looks from one to the other of us, standing before us at the laid table, his apron on, his hands hanging down oddly spare. He always looks slightly out of place when he is cooking, slightly lost. Does it come to him in this moment what he had not said, before, what he can never bring himself to say?

  4

  Peter must have intended it from that same moment he decided to burn his things. It was a calculated operation, equipped and timed in advance. Nothing in his behaviour gave any indication, through those last couple of weeks of holiday, of what he had in mind. If there was anything different in him it was only that he seemed more grown-up, as if his resolution had separated him from us. He threw darts at his dartboard and he listened to Radio Luxembourg, and while he was doing this he put his plan together and worked out his route: from school to Oxford, to London, to Harwich, to wherever he meant to go from there. East.