Worst of all, we suddenly find ourselves on the defensive. Two brown eyes and a big mocking smile peer in at us one evening through the leaves of the lookout. It’s Barbara Berrill. ‘You two are always playing in here,’ she says. ‘Is this your camp?’
I glance at Keith. His eyelids come down, and for a moment he makes one of his father’s faces of distaste. He says nothing. He hardly speaks to any of the other children in the Close, never to girls, and certainly not to Barbara Berrill. I feel my own eyelids descend a little. I say nothing, either. I’m stung by her humiliating suggestion that we’re merely ‘playing’ in a ‘camp’ rather than keeping watch in a lookout.
‘What game is it?’ she asks. ‘Are you spying on someone?’
Keith says nothing. I say nothing, either, but my heart sinks. Our shield of invisibility has been breached, our hidden purposes discovered. And by Barbara Berrill, of all people. She thinks she’s superior to us just because she’s a year older, but she’s not, she’s beneath our notice. Everything about her is soft and girlish. Her big brown eyes, her round face, her helmet of pudding-basin hair that comes curling forward on her cheeks. Her school frock, with its blue-and-white summer checks, and its little puffy summer sleeves. Her little white summer socks. Most girlish and irritating of all, for some reason, is the purse slung around her neck, in which she takes her bus and milk money to school each day. She’s wearing it now. Why? Keith and I aren’t wearing our school caps or satchels. Why are girls like this?
‘Who is it?’ she demands. ‘Not Mr Gort still?’
She’s a fine one to talk about spying, when she’s spying herself. And how does she know about Mr Gort? She must have been spying on us for ages.
‘Go on,’ she begs. ‘I won’t tell anyone.’
We sit it out in silence, our eyes on the ground.
‘If you don’t say anything, that means you are spying … Right, then, I’m going to tell on you.’
The brown eyes vanish. ‘Keith Hayward and Stephen Wheatley are spying on people!’ she says loudly. It’s impossible to know whether she has an audience for this announcement or not. She says it again, further along the street. We sit frozen with shame, looking anywhere but at each other. I know now that the whole thing – the disappearances, the secret marks in the diary, everything – was just one of our pretend games. Even Keith knows it. There’s nothing we can do but come out of hiding and creep home.
We know without discussing it, though, that we can’t come out until we’re sure that Barbara Berrill’s not around to see our humiliation. So we wait. And go on waiting because we can still hear her down the end of the street, laughing with the Avery boys. About us, probably.
The shadows grow longer. I’m going to get a terrible telling- off if I’m not home before eight. Keith’s going to get caned.
We sit, heads down, listening. There’s a sound of soft, hurrying footsteps. We look up; Barbara Berrill’s coming back.
But it’s not her. It’s Keith’s mother. She has her arms folded and a cardigan thrown round her shoulders – and she’s hurrying, hurrying down the road into the evening sunlight. She hurries up the path to Auntie Dee’s front door, hurries back again almost immediately, and hurries on to the corner. By the time we’ve collected ourselves and reached the corner as well … the street beyond stretches away through the golden air, empty all the way to the letter box at the end.
The hunt’s on again.
Only now we don’t know where there’s left to look or what there’s left to try. We run to the manhole and the loose board in the fence. We look hopelessly into houses and gardens.
Nowhere can we find the slightest clue to where she might have gone.
We whisper together, excited again, but more and more uneasy, more and more completely lost. We can both feel the evening getting later and later. In the end we simply have to head for home. I know what’s going to happen, of course. She’s going to emerge from Auntie Dee’s once again as we reach the Close, just as if we’d jumped back to the beginning of the evening, and everything was still in front of us.
And with a kind of dreamlike inevitability she does indeed emerge, only this time from a point slightly further back in time and space – out of the Haywards’ own house, exactly as she did before, with the cardigan still around her shoulders. Once again the eeriness of it chills my blood.
‘What in heaven’s name are you playing at, my precious?’ she says to Keith. She speaks calmly, but I realise, from the edge in her voice, and the way she keeps impatiently brushing at her hair, and slapping at something on the shoulder of her cardigan as she speaks, that she’s really angry with him for once. ‘You know the rules. You know when you’re supposed to be in. If you behave like a child then Daddy’s going to treat you like a child.’
All her overt anger seems to be reserved for her hair and her shoulder. She keeps brushing and slapping, as if she were unconsciously prefiguring the punishment that Keith’s going to get from his father. She and Keith turn to go. Neither of them looks at me.
The last thing I see as she goes is her wiping her hands against each other. The brushing of her hair and the slapping at her shoulder were evidently an attempt to get some substance off them. Now it’s on her hands, and it seems to be sticky and difficult to be free of.
And suddenly I know what it is. It’s not something sticky. It’s something slimy.
I know something else, too. I know where she’s been each time she’s disappeared.
I shiver. The little marks in the diary are true. The dark of the moon’s coming, and it’s going to be more frightening than we thought.
5
Everything is as it was; and everything has changed. The houses sit where they sat, but everything they once said they say no longer. The re-emergent greenwood has been uprooted and paved over. And Stephen Wheatley has become this old man who seems to be me. Yes, the undersized boy with the teapot ears, following his powerful friend open-mouthed and credulous from one project and mystery to the next, has become this undersized pensioner with the teapot ears, treading slowly and warily in the footsteps of his former self, and he has only this one final project and mystery left.
A surprising thought comes to this old man, as he looks at the district now from the perspective of the years: that in those days all this was new. These houses, these streets, those shops in the parade on the main road, the letter box at the corner – they’d been on this earth scarcely longer than Stephen himself. The whole district had been assembled like a Potemkin village, just in time for his family to move here, and for Stephen to discover it as his changeless and ancient birthright.
It was an outgrowth of the railway, of the line emerging from the cutting behind the McAfees on to the embankment behind the Haywards – the line that brought me here today. A few rough, potholed roads had been hopefully laid out around the little wooden country station; various small jobbing builders in nearby villages had bought plots and sketched out their crude private fantasies of rural life in raw brickwork and timber. A few young couples had got off the train at the weekends and looked around … paid deposits … had three-piece suites delivered and planted privet seedlings … needed writing paper and curtain tape … found shopkeepers opening up in the new Parade who could supply them. A pole was erected to show where the new bus service would stop, a letter box installed to collect the messages sent back by the settlers to the communities they’d left behind. The muddy tracks were adopted and drained, tarred and gravelled, so that the wives could push their high-sprung perambulators to the shops without jolting their babies awake, and the husbands could walk dryshod in their city shoes to the station each morning and dryshod back at night. The raw earth and bare bricks of the building plots were softened by a green screen that grew as Stephen grew, scarcely further ahead of him in life than his elder brother.
And here’s what I’m going on to consider as I look at it now: that this sudden new colony hadn’t appeared out of empty desert. A space had to be made fo
r it, bit by bit, in the long-established settlements that occupied the ground already. The new plots were carved out of the smallholdings that had supplied the city with vegetables, out of the orchards growing its apples and cherries, and the meadows that had kept its horses in fodder. The new Windermeres and Sorrentos replaced low timber cottages where the agricultural labourers who worked the soil had lived. The straight gravelled streets rationalised the irregular network of little lanes and paths along which the ploughmen had walked to work and the carters had driven their carts.
And beyond the surfaced streets, in the pockets of land left between this new settlement and all the others appearing at the same time around other stations along the various railway lines, the old world continued. You didn’t have to go far to find it. On the way to the golf course you passed abandoned quarries and clay pits, where the cottagers had dug the loam to make the bricks in their foundations and chimneys, and cut the chalk for the lime in the mortar that bound them. On the other side of the main road, just behind the shops, was Paradise, the tangle of mucky smallholdings where our neighbours went to buy unrationed eggs, or a rooster for Christmas. Paradise is now the Paradise Riding Stables and Country Pursuits Centre, and the lane up to it is a well-surfaced private drive. In wet weather then the mud was deep enough to suck your boots off. On our side of the main road there must once have been another lane that had been surfaced to form the Avenue, because if you went to the end of the Close and looked right instead of turning left to the shops you could see where it re-emerged, like a stream from a culvert. A few yards from the corner the new gravelled surface petered out – and there beyond it was the old muddy lane, patiently continuing as best it could, disused by this time and half-choked by encroaching undergrowth. The surface stopped because there were no more houses left for it to go to. This was where our settlement ended, its boundary set by the barrier of the railway embankment.
In the embankment, though, like a disused postern in the walls of a medieval city, you could make out a low brick arch, the entrance to a narrow tunnel grudgingly built by the railway company to preserve the old right of way. And through this humble hole the muddy lane crept slyly on, as it always had, to the unreconstructed world beyond.
I walk to the corner of the Close and look to the right. The rest of the lane has now been surfaced as well. The Avenue continues without drawing breath, and passes beneath the railway through a high, wide bridge, with well-maintained pavements on either side of the road. I walk under the bridge along one of them. On the other side the Avenue branches into a maze of Crescents, Walks, and Meads on an estate now beginning to look almost as venerable as the Close itself.
The familiar world has reached out, and sealed the underworld away beneath the well-drained and well-lit surfaces. Light has joined up with light, and the haunted darkness between them has been abolished.
I walk back along the clean grey pavement, under the clean steel bridge, to the corner of the Close. Behind my back I hear the familiar shifting sound of an approaching train on the down line, as it emerges from the cutting behind the McAfees on to the embankment behind the Haywards. The sound changes again as it crosses the bridge … and once again I hear the rumbling hollowness of the old brick tunnel as a train went over, and the never-ending returns of the high cries that Keith and Stephen uttered to test the echoes and show they weren’t afraid, as they made one of their rare ventures through that long, low darkness.
Once again I glimpse the perils that lay beyond that echoing ordeal, where the old world resumed after the brief interruption of our familiar streets and houses, as indifferent to them as if they’d never been. We called it the Lanes, though there was only one of them, and so narrow that it almost disappeared in summer into the gross greenery of the hedgerows on either side and the shadows of ancient, crooked trees. I see the Cottages, the sly tumbledown hovels lurking behind the undergrowth in a debris of rusty oil drums and broken prams. I hear the barking of the misshapen dogs that rushed out at us as we passed, and I feel the sullen gaze of the raggedy children who watched us from behind their wicket gates. I smell the sour, catty stink of the elders around the collapsed and abandoned farm where you could sometimes glimpse an old tramp holed up, heating a blackened billy over a little fire of sticks …
Beyond the abandoned farm was a desolate no man’s land half marked out as builder’s lots, where colonisation approaching from the next settlement along had been halted for the Duration. Between the line of the railway and the wasteland of the lots, preserved for a few more years by the shifting tides of history, the last pocket of the rural world pursued its ancient, secret life. Each of the rare excursions we made into it was a frightening adventure, a series of ordeals to test our coming manhood.
And the first of the ordeals was the tunnel itself. Once again I hear our uneasy cries drowned by the huge thunder of the train passing overhead. Once again I see the circle of unwel-coming daylight at the end doubled by its reflection in the great lake that collected inside the tunnel after rain. Once again I feel the awkward twist of my body as I turn to edge sideways along the narrow causeway left at the edge of the lake, and simultaneously lean away from the glistening, dripping wetness of the brickwork. Once again I feel the dank touch of the walls on my hair and shoulder, and brush at the foul exudations they’ve left. Once again I try to wipe the dark-green slime off my hands.
So her disappearances are quite simple to explain. She’s tricked us. The letters she sets off with in her hand, or the shopping basket on her arm, are a camouflage. She’s turning not left at the end of the Close, towards the letter box and the shops, but right towards the tunnel. She’s passing through that gloomy gateway, edging her way between the water underfoot and the water on the walls, just as we sometimes nerve ourselves to do, and she’s journeying into the old world beyond, where there are no shops and no letter boxes, and where no one in the Close but Keith and me ever ventures.
What’s she doing there?
Keith and I edge round the lake, keeping our backs away from the slime, our ears ringing with the echoes of every scrape of our shoes against an exposed flint, every drop of water falling from the roof of the tunnel. Keith’s in front, of course, but I’m in a state of great excitement because this is all my idea. I’m also uneasier than ever about the terrors of the tunnel; although we waited for his mother to retire for her afternoon rest before we set out, I’m certain that we’re suddenly going to hear her footsteps echoing behind us. I keep turning to look at the circle of daylight and its reflection that we’ve come from, waiting to see the advancing silhouette that will cut us off from home, and drive us helplessly on towards the skulking dogs and children in the Lanes.
We emerge back into the humid afternoon at the far end. The track ahead of us disappears into vegetation standing head-high, and the air’s heavy with the buzzing of flies and the choking scent of cow parsley. We look around, uncertain where to begin.
‘She may have a transmitter hidden here somewhere,’ I whisper, feeling some obligation to offer suggestions in support of my original insight. ‘Or there may be some kind of secret research laboratory that she’s spying on.’
Keith says nothing. He’s maintaining an attitude of judicious caution about my proposals, to remind me that he’s still leader of this expedition.
‘She can’t be going very far,’ I point out, before he orders us any further into the terrors ahead. ‘She always gets back almost at once.’
We brush the flies away from our faces, and try to read some sense into the undifferentiated tangle of mud and greenery. Only one feature seems to have any distinct identity – the brick circle of the tunnel mouth itself, and the retaining walls that flank it.
‘She’s spying on the trains,’ announces Keith.
Of course. It’s so obvious now he’s said it that I can’t imagine why we haven’t thought of it before. Even if the dull electric trains that bear my father and so many of the neighbours off to work in the morning and bring them back
at night aren’t of any great interest to the German High Command, they’re not the only traffic on the line. There are sometimes ancient, grimy steam locomotives hauling long lines of goods trucks. We’ve seen trains of flatcars loaded with shrouded tanks and guns, and lines of fighters perched with folded wings like queues of resting crickets, from which a trained observer might be able to deduce a great deal of valuable strategic intelligence.
‘And she comes to this end of the tunnel …’ I reason slowly, so that Keith can overtake me and resume full control of the operation.
‘… so that no one sees her. She’s probably got some special place to hide.’
We examine the brickwork. The two retaining walls on either side slope upwards with the gradient of the embankment. At the low end of each is a rusty wire fence hung on concrete posts, and a corroded metal sign warning trespassers off. On one side the wire has come adrift from the bottom of the concrete, and you can curl it back. Keith crawls through; I follow him.
The stalks of cow parsley on the other side have been broken, and there are confused footprints in the mud. Someone has certainly been here before us, and recently. Keith looks at me and narrows his eyes. One of his father’s looks, but what it means this time is that he was right, as always.
‘Perhaps we should go back,’ I whisper. Because if this is where she comes, then she’ll come again – and it may be any minute now.
Keith says nothing. He follows the footprints and broken stalks back towards the parapet of the retaining wall, where they seem to end.
‘We don’t want her to see us here …’ I begin, but Keith’s already clambering on to the parapet, and edging up along it towards the top of the tunnel mouth. ‘She can’t have gone as far as that,’ I object. ‘She’s always back too soon.’ He pays no attention. Reluctantly I clamber up on to the parapet and shakily follow him.
Spies (2002) Page 8
