The Spy Game

by Georgina Harding

  I sat because Peter did, tight.

  'I 'm sorry, boy, we really must be going.'

  He was panting a little from all the carrying. There was a particular look he had when he was out of breath, his face drawn out and mask-like.

  'It's a fair old way and we don't want to be late.'

  Peter's knees went close together so that I thought that he would not go, but he put out one hand to the banister, and then the other, and sort of pulled himself up. It was as if he was not eleven years old but a much smaller boy.

  We went out in silence. Dad closed the boot of the car over the trunk. Peter got in the front because it was his journey. I would sit there on the way back. Usually it was dark when we came back from his school. We went in the daylight and came back in the dark so that I knew the way there much better, knew the roads and the turnings and the towns one way round and not the other. I sat in the back and pressed my face to the window, or sometimes wound the window right down and put my head outside so that the wind blew my hair along the side of the car, as separate from the two in the front as if there was a plate of glass between us, as if I was in a taxi or driven by a chauffeur. Like that I used to watch the trees and hedges pass, and sometimes I used to narrow my eyes and play a game in my head. I used to tell myself that it was indeed the hedges that were passing, the hedges and the road on the move like an endless tape being wound by, while the car itself and all of us inside it were perfectly still.

  His school was down a long drive, a tall house of reddish brick with a turret on one side and long windows. We said goodbye in the hall, standing close to the entrance and with the length of the room stretching away. It was a long room and high like a church, with a dark wooden staircase at the end of it and a floor of polished tiles the colour of dried blood. Peter vanished in it quickly. He was lost among the other boys, all of them dressed and seeming to look the same, and the hard space echoed so with their running about and shouting that I was glad to leave.

  2

  My father is on his hunkers in the herbaceous border. It has rained in the night and the soil is soft, so that the weeds come up in his hands and he hardly needs to use his fork, but only pulls at them and then chucks them on to the path in loose green heaps to be raked up and put in the barrow later. I had taken the rake and helped for a short time but that was boring and he didn't seem to notice, so I put the rake down and only looked, and now there is nothing to do.

  I start to pick some flowers to take into the house. There are almost as many flowers as in the early summer. There are roses still and other summer flowers in second bloom, and September flowers that have aged and heavy colours, like golden-rod and red and amber dahlias, and the tall purple monkshood behind them - and this I know that I must not pick because there is poison in it. Even if you only pick it, the poison could enter through the skin.

  I look at the monkshood close, see the leaves that are glossy like health, the narrow cowled flowers, the shadow in them.

  'Does a person die straight away?'

  And my father smiles, and he says no, that isn't how it happens, only that they would be sick, or sleepy, and very ill perhaps if they actually ate the plant.

  'You shouldn't grow it,' I said.

  The piano teacher's house was at the other end of the village on a street that led out towards the main road. It was a plain street squeezed up against the hillside, the houses all much the same, stone houses with narrow windows right on the pavement that you could see into, china ornaments arranged on the sills for you to see, empty armchairs in neat front rooms. Sarah Cahn's was set back from the rest by just a few steps, so that there was space for the plants that grew up the walls and hung close about the windows that time of year.

  Inside, the house felt quite apart from the rest of the village. I had always thought that it was like abroad. Now that I had been abroad I could say that, that it was like the Continent. The room where I had my lesson was the one at the front, where the sunlight fell in narrow streams in the late afternoon. There were lots of dark things in the room and they glowed: the shining wood of the piano, the paintings, the bowls of blue and red coloured glass that made spots of colour on the walls behind them. Sarah Cahn herself was a slim dark woman with a soft voice. There was a smile, a greeting, a question about how the holiday had gone.

  'OK,' I say. The light on the piano keys makes them look cool, like water.

  Daphne Lacey had driven me there in the car. She was going somewhere and she was late, as she always was, and we had left in a rush and now I was not ready to play. She had chattered all the way. Daphne Lacey was always turning her head as she drove and saying anything that came into it. I would have preferred her to keep her eyes straight and look at the road like my father did and speak in that impersonal, measured way in which proper drivers spoke as they drove. Or not spoken at all. Then there would have been time to separate the pieces of my brain, the music from all the words, Daphne Lacey's words, Peter's words before. Next time, I thought, I shall walk to my lessons, like we used to do, before. I shall walk alone; they'll let me do that now. I shall be a girl carrying a brown leather music case and the music will already be there in my head when I arrive, and nothing else. It will be close, and I shall sit straight down and play. If I do that, there will not be this horrid pause at the keyboard, this moment when I look down at my fingers and they seem stiff and separate, and frozen.

  'Wait,' says Mrs Cahn.

  Sarah Cahn has a soft voice, soft and composed. Peter does not know that. To Peter she is only a name.

  'Wait,' she says. 'Don't start yet. Come and have a piece of cake first. As it's the first day and we have not seen each other all summer.'

  Her clothes were dark like the things in the room but she wore a scarf with rich colours in it that glowed like the pieces of glass. No one else dressed like that in those days. No one wore black in the country. It was a smart, urban, Continental colour. People probably thought that Sarah Cahn was beautiful, but in an uneasy, unconventional way. Her eyes were dark pools. Her face and hands were always on the move but her eyes were still. Sometimes, when she played something on the piano and stopped, and I looked at her, I had the feeling that I might fall into them.

  'I like your kitchen.'

  A girl's voice coming out clear and poised as if she was acting, as a grown-up woman might speak when she visited another's house. As my mother might have spoken, as she had trained me also to act. With my mother there were always words to fill a space, smooth words that passed the required time with a shop assistant or a taxi driver or a piano teacher, and carried no meaning beyond them. Yet I meant what I said. I did like Sarah Cahn's kitchen; it was the nicest kitchen I knew. It was small, so that if someone sat at the table you could hardly get between it and the cooker, but it had a fireplace in it which was cosy, and the window looked straight at the green hill slanting up close behind.

  'Has your brother gone back to school? You must be lonely when he goes.'

  'So-so.'

  Then no more words for a while but only cake.

  Find out about her, Peter had said. Ask her things. Maybe they met some time when you weren't around.

  She had her back turned, busying herself about the kitchen. Mrs Cahn was not like Margaret or Daphne Lacey. She understood that there were times to leave a person be, when a person did not want to speak. Almost, because of this, I felt that she was the one person to whom I might have spoken. And my mother might have spoken to her also, might have been friends with her even, and not just because of where they came from but because of the sort of people they were, because of something they shared, because they were both different from everybody else; but there had never been anything more than politeness. There had been only the coolness of my mother at the open door, and Mrs Cahn's eyes turning a little aside from her, or somehow looking down, looking to me.

  On the mantelpiece was the photograph from the beach. You could hardly see that it was a beach really, just an old photograph of t
he little thin girl who was Sarah and a fluffy-haired woman who was her grand-mother, sitting side by side, big and small, in a funny kind of basketwork chair with a hood. The child looked as if she had been plonked down like a doll, her legs too short to reach the ground. There was no sea in the picture, just grey space behind where the sea must have been.

  'You know the place you went on holiday, the seaside, the place in the picture? Did you ever see my mummy there? '

  'Oh I shouldn't think so. Anyway I was so young when I was there, I wouldn't have known. That photo is from the last time we went. 193I. We couldn't go there after that.'

  And then later I asked, 'Is it still there now, that place?'

  'I imagine so.'

  'Is it through the Iron Curtain?'

  'Yes, it's behind the Iron Curtain.'

  'And do people go there?'

  'I'm sure they do, just like we always did.'

  That wasn't what I meant. I meant English people, people like us, going behind the Iron Curtain. I asked if people could go through the Iron Curtain to live, if anyone defected because they wanted to live there instead of here. There was a famous dancer that summer who had defected from Russia. He was in Paris with the Russian ballet, touring, and instead of going home he had run away at the airport and asked if he could stay and dance in the West. I asked if it was possible for people to defect the other way.

  'I imagine they could, only nobody does. Only spies who are afraid of getting caught. Nobody else would want to.'

  * * *

  In the room with the piano were other, newer photo-graphs. There was a wedding photograph of Sarah Cahn and her dead husband. Mr Cahn looked happy but so thin that I thought that he must have been sick already. And there was one of Sarah, quite grown-up, with the people who she said were her second, English family.

  This time when I sit down to play it is easy.

  'See. That's lovely,' she says. 'Even when the mind thinks it has forgotten, the fingers remember.'

  There were spies in Peter's mind, and others in mine. There was a book I had about Violette Szabo, who was a spy in the war. Peter hadn't read it. He thought it was a girl's book because it had a woman on the cover.

  I had read the book that summer that was gone. I had read most of it in a day, lying on my tummy under a tree in the orchard, moving round when the sun got too hot or too bright on the page. I liked the book so I read it again. It told you how a woman might become a spy.

  Violette was a London girl but French because her mother was, and she had a daughter but it was the war so she left her daughter behind and was parachuted into France to work with the Resistance. The first time she went to France she brought back a dress for herself from Paris, and another for her daughter that was too big because she could not tell how much her daughter would have grown while she was away. The second time she went, she didn't come back. She was ambushed by the Germans and captured in a gun battle and taken to a camp. Just before the end of the war they decided to execute her.

  They took her and two other English women who were spies and lined them up and shot them.

  Violette had violet-blue eyes, it said in the book. She was a tomboy and brave, braver than her brother. She showed that when she went to do her training, training with men and doing as well as them even though she was smaller. She trained to do soldier's things, to use a gun and fight with her hands and to operate a radio transmitter, but also she trained to be someone else because in France she was to have false papers and a false identity. Her name and everything she wore even would be different, everything French and nothing connecting her to who she really was.

  I dreamed that, the strangeness of being someone else. I dreamed it for myself, and I dreamed it for my mother. When Violette was trained she had to learn her cover story down to the finest detail: the whole life history of the other person she was to become. She was drilled in it by her instructors so that she might convince even under interrogation. Again and again she must repeat to them where this other woman was born, the memories of her childhood and of every year of her life. I did this also. I made whole constructions of invented identities and drilled myself in them. I had all the details worked out: names, places, schools, friends, incidents, favourite colours, clothes, bi-cycles owned, things the person I was liked or didn't like to eat.

  When I dreamed the story for my mother it was set not in France but somewhere cold beyond the Iron Curtain. It had to be there because that was where people disappeared. Sometimes she was working for one side, sometimes for the other; or she worked for both, first one and then the other, doubling layer upon layer until even I was unsure which one came beneath. But whichever the variation, the place did not change: a flat, dead land; bare earth like plough with a layer of mist upon it; tracks running into the distance; then a city that rose up suddenly out of the land, a flat cityscape with apartment blocks, all the same, one after the other, down long streets, and blank figures in a fog. There was no sound to the city, not many cars but no sound even to those that there were, and no colour.

  I was staying the night at Susan's. If my father went out late I stayed there, or sometimes I did out of friendship, because we had decided that we could not be parted. A friend like Susan was easier than a brother.

  Susan's room was very plain, quiet like Susan herself so that if she was not in it you would not have seen that it was hers. Her bed was in the middle of the room with a pink candlewick bedspread on it and a pyjama case in the shape of a cat, and because the room was big there was another bed just like it against the wall. On this bed a real cat slept, the Laceys' soft grey Persian. If I went into the room in the daytime I would often see it there, and it would uncurl itself and stalk away at the intrusion. When I stayed the night I would hope that it would return and curl up at my feet or on the blanket before my stomach. I used to wait for it, eyes open in the dark, listening for silent paws.

  'Do you have daydreams, Susan?'

  'Everybody has daydreams.'

  'But, do you think you're someone different?'

  'Sometimes I think I have other people in my family, lots of sisters doing things. I'd like to have lots of sisters. Four. Or maybe three so I'd be the fourth.'

  'You don't ever want to be someone different yourself? Like a boy?'

  'Why would I want to be a boy?'

  'Because they can do things. People let boys do more than girls.'

  Susan yawned.

  'Do they?'

  'I think so. Don't you think so?'

  Susan didn't answer but it did not matter because I could hear the cat's claws snarl in the bedspread where it hung down to the floor, anticipate its weight about to drop on to the blanket.

  'Do you ever think your parents might be someone else? Do you ever dream that?'

  'I don't know. I'm sleepy.'

  I stayed awake a long time. The cat was so close that I could not distinguish if its purr was sound or vibration. I would not move or turn to sleep until it was gone. Susan's breathing was steady in the other bed. What did it mean to be Susan Lacey? Quiet Susan, sleeping in the closed circle of her family. The Lacey history was known. It lay about the house in carved knick-knacks and ivory figures, pictures of tigers on the stairs, photo-graphs of rubber trees and tiger hunters in the downstairs loo. The Laceys were rubber planters in Malaya. Daphne Lacey's family had been planters too. In the war, Godfrey and Daphne had had a terrible time when they were prisoners of the Japanese. Susan was a Lacey. She had red hair and white skin that burned as soon as she went in the sun. She had left Malaya when she was too small to remember it but she was a Lacey all the same. Planters transplanted, growing in England. My father said that there were lots of plants that liked to grow in England because it was a gentle place. They came wrapped in newspaper from the nursery and he planted them in their beds and told me where they came from, and it seemed that he named every country in the world. Sometimes they had soil of another colour sticking to their roots, red soil or peaty black soil. If the soil an
d the roots were dry, he would put them into a bucket of water overnight before he planted them. Peonies came from China and rhododendrons from the Himalayas. Laceys came from Malaya. Even if they lived almost next door and Mr Lacey drove every morning to work in an office like everyone else.

  I asked Susan once if she planned to go to Malaya.

  'Why?'

  'To see what it's like.'

  'But it's all changed. It's not the British Empire any more.'

  Susan had no curiosity. Susan wasn't brave like Violette.

  One weekend there was a snake in the garden. It was a brownish-greenish colour and stretched out on the stones of the wall at the bottom of the garden, where the lawn ended and there was a kind of ha-ha, the wall holding back the side of a ditch before the field. I thought at first that it was a stalk, a long and bendy stalk, but then I knew.

  When I went towards it the bright sun threw my shadow ahead of me across the grass. Just as it was about to touch, the stalk moved, like a streak of oily liquid, and was gone between the stones.

  I climbed down into the ha-ha and looked at all the gaps in the drystone wall.

  'What are you doing?' asked Susan.

  'I saw a snake. I'm looking where it went.'

  I had an idea of what I was looking for: some round, perfect, snake-sized hole with edges polished by its body.