Spies (2002)

by Frayn, Michael

  ‘So he saw you,’ he says. ‘But you didn’t see him.’

  I’m choked by the unfairness of this. Keith doesn’t know how terrifying it was to be here, on my own, in the middle of the night! He’s not the one who experienced it!

  ‘It was dark,’ I explain.

  ‘It was moonlight. You said it was moonlight.’

  ‘Not then.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When he saw me. When I didn’t see him.’

  The weakness of this answer dawns on me even as I say it. Keith’s smile becomes even narrower, his voice even softer.

  ‘You weren’t really hiding, were you?’ he whispers. ‘You were just hiding your face.’

  ‘Keith, please – let’s go home.’

  ‘You were just putting your hands over your face. So you couldn’t see. Like Milly playing hide-and-seek. Like a little baby.’

  I feel the choking obstruction growing in my throat, then the shameful tears beginning to obstruct my vision. It’s the sheer unfairness of his accusation that undermines me, his grotesque concentration on my one moment of weakness after I’d demonstrated so much courage, his cruel rejection of the hard-won tribute I’d laid at his feet. But of course my tears are now the proof of his point. Through their wavering wetness I’m conscious of his smile slowly evaporating. He turns aside and shrugs. He’s lost interest in me. ‘Go on, then,’ he says. ‘Go home, if that’s what you want to do.’

  I crawl back to the gap in the wire fence, still whimpering, more humiliated than I’ve ever been. I struggle to push the wire aside, and in my distress I fail even in this.

  Then I stop. I try to suppress my sobs while I listen.

  From the tunnel, faint but echoing, comes the sound of approaching footsteps.

  I crawl back to Keith. ‘She’s coming,’ I whisper.

  We both look round for somewhere to hide. But already, even from where we are, we can hear the approaching footsteps … already they’re at the gap in the wire … And already I’ve bent down and pressed my face into the ground so that I can’t see the fate that’s going to overtake me. Like Milly playing hide-and-seek. Like a little baby.

  Then slowly the approaching footsteps fade away again. Slowly I realise that the world hasn’t ended, after all.

  ‘Quick!’ whispers Keith. ‘She’s gone past! She’s going up the Lanes!’

  I sit up. He’s already scrambling towards the wire. I scramble hurriedly after him, more ashamed of myself than ever. But I can’t help seeing, as he turns to squeeze through the gap, that there’s a green grass stain down his cheek. He was hiding his face, just like me. Two little babies together. For a fleeting instant I feel triumphant vindication. Then I’m running home – and realising, halfway back to the tunnel, that Keith’s turned the other way, towards the Lanes.

  We both stop in surprise. He’s going to follow her. Of course. I should have known.

  He waits for me to turn back and join him, but I stand my ground. ‘What?’ he says, smiling his little smile. ‘You’re frightened of the dogs?’

  I shake my head, but still I won’t move. I can’t! She put me on my honour! And I can’t explain.

  So there we stand – because he won’t move, either. He won’t go without me. And with a flash of pathetic gratitude I realise that he needs me to accompany him. Without me there’s no game. Without me there’s no one for him to be braver than.

  Slowly I walk back to join him.

  ‘Buck up, then,’ he says coldly, ‘or we’ll lose her.’

  He begins to trot to catch her up. I trot with him, half a pace behind. Cautiously we slow at every twist and turn of the rutted track, at every opening in the rank green hedgerows where she might be lurking.

  Then somewhere ahead of us the dogs begin to bark. Already she’s passing the Cottages. We hurry forward.

  All summer afternoons in the Lanes seem to labour under a kind of hot dullness and heaviness. Even the train I can hear on the embankment behind us hauls itself over the tunnel and up the gradient towards the cutting with a kind of weariness, as if it’s overcome by the same choking green torpor. On the few occasions we’ve explored along here before, I’ve always felt we were in another, more ancient and frightening land. As the lane twists left and right, I recognise the sycamore with a rotting length of rope hanging from one of its boughs … the sudden little field now choked with sorrel and dock … the long patch of nettles … a single mouldered and gaping boot … an overturned armchair lying in a pool of sodden stuffing … Then the Cottages are upon us. And the dogs.

  There are three of them, with laid-back, torn ears and evil eyes as varicoloured as their coats, performing the familiar dance of alternating hatred and fear, leaping at us – cowering away – leaping again. At once any remaining differences with Keith are ended, and I’m at his side, or rather just behind his back, trying to conceal myself and the smell of my fear as he turns to face the dogs down, and moves slowly but firmly forwards, with me moving slowly and nervously in step with him.

  Our progress is watched expressionlessly by half a dozen children of various ages who are standing in front of the Cottages, in the lane itself or in the little front gardens full of rusting mangles and old mattresses. Their faces are dirty and they’re wearing dirty collarless shirts and dirty dresses five sizes too big. Everything about them is plainly laden with germs. They’re doing nothing – not playing, not calling off the dogs, not even enjoying our discomfiture – just standing absolutely still, as if they’d been standing there since the beginning of time, and watching us with wooden faces, as if we were members of some quite alien and incomprehensible race – Iron Age invaders in Stone Age territory, white settlers among aborigines.

  The uneasy thought comes to me, even in the midst of my fear, that these unreadable and unapproachable creatures hold the key to the mystery. They follow the comings and goings in the Lanes just as we follow the comings and goings in the Close. They’ve seen X on his way to the hiding place in the tunnel and back. They know what he looks like. They know where he’s hiding. But there’s no way in which we could ask them, because there’s no way in which we can communicate with them.

  Keith treats both dogs and children with equal disdain. He examines the Cottages with a slight, pitying smile as we pass, as if they were uninhabited. I pretend to examine them as well, struggling to appear equally condescending. I take in at any rate how low they are, and how grey and blistered their white clapboarding. I note the torn curtains at the windows, and the two small front doors. At either end of the Cottages is a densely cultivated vegetable patch, and at the bottom of each vegetable patch a little tumbledown shed: the privet.

  The leaden gaze of the sullen-eyed children weighs on me almost as oppressively as the attentions of the dogs. That same gaze, I realise, has rested a few moments earlier on Keith’s mother. An unthinkable thought, which has been lurking for some time now at the back of my mind, slowly takes a slightly more definite shape: that she’s here, in the Cottages. That this is the secret knowledge these sly faces are concealing.

  One of the front doors opens and a man in a grimy vest emerges. He watches us from the doorstep, chewing something with his mouth open.

  X.

  Is it?

  We keep moving forward, fending off the dogs. It isn’t because it can’t be. It can’t be because … because if it is, there’s no way in which we can proceed with the matter. Germans we might be able to deal with. These people we certainly can’t. We have to believe she’s gone further. We have to work on that assumption.

  We move slowly on, gazed at and barked at until we’re out of sight around the bend. I know that Keith has thought the same unthinkable thought as me, but neither of us makes any reference to it.

  We resume our search of every possible entrance into the green confusion on either side. We pass a half-dried-up pond where we once came for tadpoles, then a small, disused chalk pit and a place where the weeds are reclaiming a muddle of collapsed farm carts and bro
ken harrows. The lane peters out into nothingness. A great gap in the earth’s furnishings opens in front of us – acre after acre of land stripped bare of its trees and crops, marked out as building lots, then abandoned at the outbreak of war. Now a low savannah of rank weeds has reclaimed the land. The grid of avenues and cul-de-sacs, of roundabouts and turning circles, has disappeared, like the wheel nuts from Keith’s father’s car and so much else, for the Duration.

  ‘Which way now?’ I ask humbly, my voice still not much more than a whisper.

  Keith scans the wide horizon of this desolate sea. The only signs of life are tiny figures working on one or two distant islands formed by patches of allotments. Miles away on the other side, like the low cliffs on a far shore, are the last houses in the uncompleted streets where building stopped. What we have to believe is that, from somewhere over there, someone has been coming all the way across this moonscape every evening to check the contents of the croquet box, and that to the same remote destination Keith’s mother has now already made the same desolate journey in reverse.

  But where, on all that wide shore, is their landfall?

  ‘There must be a path somewhere,’ murmurs Keith.

  We cast about in the dust where the lane expires. Everywhere among the coarse clumps of vegetation the cracked soil shows through, like the bald pate among the tufts of hair on my father’s head, so that there are paths everywhere and nowhere.

  We’re at the end of the world here, and the same unthinkable thought has returned to both of us. We have to go back to the last place we’re sure she reached: the Cottages.

  We dawdle about, though, in the vague, nothingy terrain at the end of the Lanes. Still neither of us says anything about the Cottages, and I know Keith’s as reluctant as I am, because there’s nothing that even he will be brave enough to do when we get there.

  Everyone calls the place where we are the Barns, though there are no barns to be seen, only a desolation of overgrown brick footings and collapsed sheets of black corrugated iron, left over from farm buildings that must have fallen down years ago. Even these last traces are beginning to disappear beneath clumps of elder and a wreckage of old enamel bowls with their bottoms hanging out. There was an old tramp living in here somewhere last winter, but Norman Stott says the police took him away. We poke around among the old pots and pans, putting off our return to the Cottages. Keith picks up a flint and throws it at a blackened kettle lying near the low, tumbled brickwork among the elders. It rings out sharply in the silence. I pick up a flint in imitation and throw it, but the kettle remains silent. We’ve found something to do to keep ourselves occupied for a while. Keith throws another flint, and hits. I throw again and miss.

  There’s a movement among the elders.

  Keith, about to throw for a third hit, lowers his arm. ‘The old tramp’s back,’ he whispers.

  We wait. There’s no further movement. Keith throws his flint at the elders. It hits some other metal object – something larger and less hollow, by the sound of it. One of the sheets of old corrugated iron that are lying around, perhaps.

  Keith creeps closer. I creep with him.

  Among the few remaining courses of broken brickwork there seem to be some steps leading down into the ground, either to a secret passageway or to the remains of a cellar. Someone has laid a few sheets of corrugated iron on top of the brick footings so that they make a kind of roof.

  ‘He’s down there,’ whispers Keith. ‘I can hear him.’

  I listen, but all I can hear is the sudden, familiar rattle of a train somewhere behind the trees, where the line finally emerges from the long cutting it goes into behind the McAfees. There’s something about the offhand, everyday indifference of the sound that makes these dreary woods seem even drearier. I catch the sad, sour smell of the elders in my nostrils, as acrid as cat’s pee, and instantly evocative of the soft, pulpy uselessness of the elder’s wood, which won’t burn on a bonfire, and which feebly snaps if you try to make anything out of it. The hopelessness of the elder’s pretensions to be a proper tree – its humiliating position at the very bottom of the hierarchy of trees – seems curiously appropriate to the way the familiar world finally gutters out here at the end of the Lanes. We’ve come on a journey from the highest to the lowest – from the silver-framed heroes on the altars in the Haywards’ house; through the descending social gradations of the Close, from the Berrills and Geests to us; from us to the Pinchers; on down through the squalors of the Cottages and their wretched occupants; and then reached even lower, to an old derelict taking refuge under a sheet of corrugated iron in a stinking elder bush, without even a dog to speak up for him. Without even a privet to go to the lavatory in.

  Where does he do it? On the ground somewhere, like an animal. I can smell it, mixing with the smell of the elder. I can feel the germs coming off it.

  The sound of the train has died away. And now I do hear something. Coughing. Very quiet coughing. He’s trying not to let us hear him. He’s scared. Scared of Keith, scared of me. He’s that low in the table of human precedence.

  At once, after all my cowardice in the Lanes, I’m brave. I look around for an instrument I can use to make the old man a little more frightened still. ‘What?’ whispers Keith. I say nothing. I go across to one of the heaps of old pots and pans, and drag out a bent and rusty iron bar. I’m taking the lead for once. I’m showing Keith that he’s not the only one who can think of plans and projects.

  I reach out with the bar and tap gently on the corrugated iron above the old man’s head. The quiet coughing ceases at once. He’s prepared to suffocate rather than let us know he’s there.

  I tap again. Silence.

  Keith looks round and finds an old, grey piece of wood that seems to have split away from a fence post. He taps on the corrugated iron with it in his turn.

  Silence.

  I tap. He taps. Still no response. Still the old tramp’s holding his breath down there.

  I bring the bar down on the corrugated iron as hard as I can. Keith does the same with his piece of wood. We rain blows down, until the iron begins to dent. The sound fills our heads so that we don’t have to think about the inconclusive end of our expedition, and the prospect of going back to the Cottages. It fills the great desolation at the end of the Lanes with human purpose and activity.

  If it’s as loud as this out here, what must it be like underneath the corrugated iron? I can’t help laughing at the thought. I can’t wait to see the comical terror on the old man’s face as he finally comes rushing out and we run off into the Lanes.

  He doesn’t emerge, though, and in the end we have to stop, panting and laughing too much to continue.

  No sign of him. No sound, either, apart from our own commotion, and another train rattling indifferently by behind the trees. It’s swallowed up in the depths of the cutting, and the great silence returns.

  I remember the time when Dave Avery and some of the boys from round the corner shut poor Eddie Stott up in the dark in the Hardiments’ garden shed, and then beat on the roof. I remember the unearthly animal sounds of Eddie’s terror.

  The silence from under the corrugated iron is even more unearthly. Not a cry, not a curse, not a breath.

  Our laughter has ceased. I feel a sudden chill finger of anxiety touch my heart, and I know that the same sensation is afflicting Keith.

  The old man’s not dead, though. How could he be dead? People don’t die from a bit of teasing!

  They die from fear, though …

  Keith throws down his piece of wood. I throw down my iron bar. We don’t know quite what to do.

  Why don’t we go down the steps and look? – Because we can’t.

  And suddenly we both turn and run, neither of us leader for once, neither of us led.

  We run and run, until first the dogs rushing at us and then the children staring at us force us to slow down. Even when we’re past the Cottages, and the last of the barking has died away behind us, we say nothing to each other. We walk on
past the mouldering boot, past the nettles and the little field of dock and sorrel, past the sycamore with the rope hanging from it, until at last we are out of that skulking, ancient land beyond the tunnel.

  We walk silently up the Close. We’re silent now because our panic has subsided, and we’re both thinking about the old tramp. About the unseen, unheard presence who’d die rather than show his face or let his voice be heard. The unknown who remains unknown. The value in the equation that’s yet to be determined. X.

  Keith’s father is standing at his gate in his Home Guard uniform as we approach.

  ‘Mummy’s still not back from Auntie Dee’s,’ he snaps at Keith. ‘I’ve got a parade this evening. Early supper. She hasn’t forgotten?’

  So his mother’s not back. It takes a moment for the implications of this to sink in. Then my stomach turns over. I glance at Keith. The same thought has occurred to him; his face has gone white. He catches my eye for a moment and looks away. His gaze becomes filmy and vacant. His grey lips twist into one of his father’s mirthless smiles.

  ‘Run down the road and remind her, will you?’ says Keith’s father.

  I can’t look at Keith. I can’t let myself think about what he’s going to do, or what he’s going to say.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ says his father. ‘Here she is.’

  We watch her come up the Close from the corner with her shopping basket. She’s hurrying for once, almost running.

  ‘So sorry, Ted,’ she says at last, out of breath. ‘Your parade – I know. I went to Paradise. Tried everywhere for a rabbit for the weekend. No luck. Ran all the way back.’

  Keith turns away in silence and walks towards the house.

  ‘Supper on the table in ten minutes, then, old girl,’ says his father. ‘All right?’

  He follows Keith into the house. The famous bayonet bounces in its scabbard on his khaki buttock.

  Keith’s mother looks at me as she turns to close the gate behind her. For a moment she stands absolutely still, considering me as she gets her breath back. ‘Was it you two?’ she says softly.