Spies (2002)

The third week of June, and there it is again: the same almost embarrassingly familiar breath of sweetness that comes every year about this time. I catch it on the warm evening air as I walk past the well-ordered gardens in my quiet street, and for a moment I’m a child again and
everything
’s before me – all the frightening, half-understood promise of life.

It must come from one of the gardens. Which one? I can never trace it. And what is it? It’s not like the heartbreaking, tender sweetness of the lime blossom, for which this city’s known, or the serene summer happiness of the honeysuckle. It’s something quite harsh and coarse. It reeks. It has a kind of sexual urgency to it. And it unsettles me, as it always does. I feel … what? A restlessness. A longing to be over the woods at the end of the street and away, away. And yet at the same time I have a kind of homesickness for where I am. Is that possible? I have a feeling that something, somewhere, has been left unresolved, that some secret thing in the air around me is still waiting to be discovered.

Another hint of it as the summer breeze stirs, and I know that the place I should like to be off to is my childhood. Perhaps the home I’m homesick for is still there, after all. I can’t help noticing, as I do every summer in late June, when that sweet reek comes, that there are cheap flights to that far-off nearby land. Twice I pick up the phone to book; twice I put it down again. You can’t go back, everyone knows that … So I’m never going, then? Is that what I’m deciding? I’m getting old. Who knows, this year may be the last chance I’ll get …

But what
is
it, that terrible, disturbing presence in the summer air? If only I knew what the magic blossom was called, if only I could see it, perhaps I’d be able to identify the source of its power. I suddenly catch it while I’m
walking
my daughter and her two small children back to their car after their weekly visit. I put a hand on her arm. She knows about plants and gardening. ‘Can you smell it? There … now … What is it?’

She sniffs. ‘Just the pines,’ she says. There are tall pines growing in all the sandy gardens, sheltering the modest houses from the summer sun and making our famously good air fresh and exhilarating. There’s nothing clean or resinous, though, about the reek I can detect insinuating itself so slyly. My daughter wrinkles her nose. ‘Or do you mean that rather … vulgar smell?’ she says.

I laugh. She’s right. It is a rather vulgar smell.

‘Liguster,’ she says.

Liguster … I’m no wiser. I’ve heard the word, certainly, but no picture comes to mind, and no explanation of the power it has over me. ‘It’s a shrub,’ says my daughter. ‘Quite common. You must have seen it in parks. Very dull looking. It always makes me think of depressing Sunday afternoons in the rain.’ Liguster … No. And yet, as another wave of that shameless summons drifts over us, everything inside me stirs and shifts.

Liguster … And yet it’s whispering to me of some thing secret, of some dark and unsettling thing at the back of my mind, of something I don’t quite like to think about … I wake up in the night with the word nagging at me. Liguster …

Hold on, though. Was my daughter speaking English when she told me that? I get down the dictionary … No – she wasn’t. And as soon as I see what it is in English I can’t help laughing again. Of course! How obvious! I’m laughing this time partly out of embarrassment, because a professional translator shouldn’t be caught out by such a simple word – and also because, now I know what it is, it seems such a ridiculously banal and inappropriate cue for such powerful feelings.

Now all kinds of things come back to me. Laughter, for a start. On a summer’s day nearly sixty years ago. I’ve never thought about it before, but now there she is again, my friend Keith’s mother, in the long-lost green summer shade, her brown eyes sparkling, laughing at something Keith has written. I see why, of course, now that I know what it was, scenting the air all around us.

Then the laughter’s gone. She’s sitting in the dust in front of me, weeping, and I don’t know what to do or what to say. All around us once again, seeping unnoticed into the
deepest
recesses of my memory, to stay with me for the rest of my life, is that sweet and luring reek.

Keith’s mother. She must be in her nineties now. Or dead. How many of the others are still alive? How many of them remember?

What about Keith himself? Does he ever think about the things that happened that summer? I suppose he may be dead, too.

Perhaps I’m the only one who still remembers. Or half-remembers. Glimpses of different things flash into my mind, in random sequence, and are gone. A shower of sparks … A feeling of shame … Someone unseen coughing, trying not to be heard … A jug covered by a lace weighted with four blue beads …

And, yes – those words spoken by my friend Keith that set everything off in the first place. It’s often hard to remember the exact words that someone uttered half a century ago, but these are easy, because there were so few of them. Six, to be precise. Spoken quite casually, like the most passing of remarks, as light and insubstantial as soap bubbles. And yet they changed everything.

As words do.

I suddenly have the feeling that I should like to think about all this at some length, now I’ve started, and to establish some order in it all, some sense of the connections. There were things that no one ever explained. Things that no one even said. There were secrets. I should like to bring them out into the daylight at last. And I sense the presence still, even now that I’ve located the source of my unrest, of something at the back of it all that remains unresolved.

I tell my children I’m going to London for a few days.

‘Do we have a contact for you there?’ asks my
well-organised
daughter-in-law.

‘Memory Lane, perhaps,’ suggests my son drily. We are evidently all speaking English together. He can sense my restlessness.

‘Exactly,’ I reply. ‘The last house before you go round the bend and it turns into Amnesia Avenue.’

I don’t tell them that I’m following the track of a shrub that flowers for a few weeks each summer, and destroys my peace.

I certainly don’t tell them the name of the shrub. I scarcely like to name it to myself. It’s too ridiculous.

Everything is as it was, I discover when I reach my
destination
, and everything has changed.

Nearly half a century has passed since I last stepped out of a train at this little wooden station, but my feet carry me with a kind of effortless, dreamlike inevitability down the sloping station approach to the quietly busy mid-afternoon main road, left towards the muddled little parade of shops, and left again by the letter box into the long, straight,
familiar
avenue. The main road’s full of fussy new traffic arrangements, the shops have impersonal new commercial names and frontages, and the stringy prunus saplings I remember along the verges of the avenue are now wise and dignified trees. But when I turn the corner once again, off the avenue into the Close …

There it is, as it always was. The same old quiet, sweet, dull ordinariness.

I stand on the corner, looking at it, listening to it,
breathing
it in, not sure whether I’m moved to be here again after all this time, or whether I’m quite indifferent.

I walk slowly up to the little turning circle at the end. The same fourteen houses sit calmly complacent in the warm, dull summer afternoon, exactly as they always did. I walk slowly back to the corner again. It’s all still here, exactly as it always was. I don’t know why I should find this so surprising. I wasn’t expecting anything different. And yet, after fifty years …

As the first shock of familiarity subsides, though, I begin to see that everything’s not really as it was at all. It’s changed completely. The houses have become tidy and tedious, their disparate architectural styles somehow homogenised by new porches and lamps and add-on timbering. I remember each of them as being a world unto itself, as different from all the others as the people who occupied them. Each of them, behind its screen of roses or honeysuckle, of limes or buddleia, was a mystery. Now almost all that luxuriant growth has vanished, and been replaced by hard standing and cars. More cars queue silently along the kerb. The fourteen separate kingdoms have coalesced into a kind of landscaped municipal car park. The mysteries have all been solved. There’s a polite, international scent of fast-growing evergreens in the air. But of that wild, indecent smell that lured me here – even on this late June day not a trace remains.

I look up at the sky, the one feature of every landscape and townscape that endures from generation to generation and century to century. Even the sky has changed. Once the war was written across it in a tangled scribble of heroic vapour trails. There were the upraised fingers of the searchlights at night, and the immense coloured palaces of falling flares. Now even the sky has become mild and bland.

I hesitate on the corner again. I’m beginning to feel rather foolish. Have I come all this way just to walk up the road and back, and smell the cypress hedges? I can’t think what else to do, though, or what else to feel. I’ve come to the end of my plans.

And then I become aware of the atmosphere changing around me, as if the past were somehow rematerialising out of the air itself.

It takes me a moment to locate the cause. It’s a sound – the sound of an unseen train, muffled and distant at first, then bursting into the clear as it emerges from the cutting through the high ground behind the houses at the top of the Close, just like the train I arrived on twenty minutes earlier. It passes invisibly along the open embankment behind the houses on the left-hand side of the street, then crosses the hollowness of a bridge and slows towards the station beyond.

As this familiar sequence of sounds unrolls, the whole appearance of the Close shifts in front of my eyes. The house on the left-hand corner here, the one I’m standing outside, becomes the Sheldons, the house on the opposite corner the Hardiments. I begin to hear other sounds. The endless clacking of Mr Sheldon’s shears unseen behind the high beech hedge, now vanished. The endless scales played by the Hardiments’ pale children from gloomy rooms behind the screen of neatly pleached limes (still there). I know, if I turn my head, I shall see further along the street the Geest twins playing some complex skipping game together, their identical pigtails identically bouncing … and in the Averys’ drive an oily confusion of Charlie and Dave and the constituents of a dismantled three-wheeler …

But of course what I’m looking at now is No. 2, next to the Hardiments. Even this appears curiously like all the other houses now, in spite of the fact that it’s attached to No. 3 – the only semi-detached pair in the Close. It seems to have acquired a name: Wentworth. It was just a number when I lived in it, and scarcely even a number, since the plate on the gatepost had been creosoted over. There’s still something faintly embarrassing about it, though, in spite of its grand new name, and its fresh white render, and the iron control exercised over its front garden by paving stones and impersonal-looking ground cover. Beneath the clean smoothness of the render I can almost see the old cracked and water-marked grey. Through the heavy flags sprout the ghosts of the promiscuous muddle of unidentified shrubs that my father never tended, and the little patch of bald lawn. Our house was made even more shameful by the partner it’s yoked to, which was in an even worse state than ours because the Pinchers’ garden was a dump for abandoned furniture warped by the rain, and offcuts of lumber and metal that Mr Pincher had stolen from work. Or so everyone in the street believed. Perhaps it was just because of the name, it occurs to me now. In any case the Pinchers were the undesirable elements in the Close – even less desirable than we were, and the terrible connectedness of our houses brought us down with them.

This is what I see as I look at it now. But is that the way that he sees it at his age? I mean the awkward boy who lives in that unkempt house between the Hardiments and the Pinchers – Stephen Wheatley, the one with the stick-out ears and the too-short grey flannel school shirt hanging out of the too-long grey flannel school shorts. I watch him emerge from the warped front door, still cramming food into his mouth from tea. Everything about him is in various shades of grey – even the elastic belt, striped like the hatband of an old-fashioned boater, and fastened with a metal snake curled into the shape of an S. The stripes on the belt are in two shades of grey, because he’s entirely monochrome, and he’s monochrome because this is how I recognise him now, from the old black-and-white snaps I have at home, that my grandchildren laugh at in disbelief when I tell them it’s me. I share their incredulity. I shouldn’t have the slightest idea what Stephen Wheatley looks like if it weren’t for the snaps, or ever guess that he and I were related if it weren’t for the name written on the back.

In the tips of my fingers, though, even now, I can feel the delicious serrated texture of the snake’s scaliness.

Stephen Wheatley … Or just plain Stephen … On his school reports S. J. Wheatley, in the classroom or the playground just plain Wheatley. Strange names. None of them seems quite to fit him as I watch him now. He turns back, before he slams the front door, and shouts some inadequate insult with his mouth full in response to yet another supercilious jibe from his insufferable elder brother. One of his grubby tennis shoes is undone and one of his long grey socks has slipped down his leg into a thick concertina; I can feel in my fingertips, as clearly as the scaliness of the snake, the hopeless bagginess of the failed garter beneath the turned-down top.

Does he know, even at that age, what his standing is in the street? He knows precisely, even if he doesn’t know that he knows it. In the very marrow of his bones he understands that there’s something not quite right about him and his family, something that doesn’t quite fit with the pigtailed Geest girls and the oil-stained Avery boys, and never will.

He doesn’t need to open the front gate because it’s open already, rotted drunkenly away from the top hinge. I know where he’s going. Not across the road to see Norman Stott, who might be all right if it weren’t for his little brother Eddie; there’s something wrong with Eddie – he keeps hanging around, drooling and grinning and trying to touch you. Not to the Averys or the Geests. Certainly not to see Barbara Berrill, who’s as sly and treacherous as most girls are, and who seems even more dislikeable now that his brother Geoff has taken to greasing his hair and hanging around in the twilight smoking cigarettes with her elder sister Deirdre. The Berrill girls’ father is away in the army, and everyone says they’re running wild.

Stephen’s already crossing over the road, as I knew he would, too preoccupied even to turn his head to look for traffic – but then of course in the middle of the war there’s no traffic to look for, apart from the occasional bicycle and the slow-plodding horses that draw the floats of the milkman and baker. He’s walking slowly, his mouth slightly open, lost in some kind of vague daydream. What do I feel about him as I watch him now? Mostly, I think, an itch to take him by the shoulders and shake him, and tell him to wake up and stop being so … so
unsatisfactory
. I’m not the first person, I recall, to have this itch.

I follow him past Trewinnick, the mysterious house where the blackout curtains are always drawn, with a garden decaying behind a cold northern forest of dark firs. Trewinnick isn’t shameful, though, like our house and the Pinchers’; its gloomy introversion has a sinister allure. No one knows the name of the people who live here, or even how many of them there are. Their faces are swarthy, their clothes are black. They come and go in the hours of darkness, and keep the blackout drawn in the light.

It’s the house next door that he’s on his way to. No. 9. Chollerton. The Haywards. He opens the white wicket gate on its well-oiled hinges and closes it carefully behind him. He walks up the neat red brick path that curves through the rose beds, and lifts the wrought iron knocker on the heavy oak front door. Two respectful thumps, not too loud, dampened by the solidity of the oak.

I wait outside the gate and discreetly inspect the house. It’s changed less than most of the others. The mellow red brick is still well pointed, the woodwork of the window frames and gables and garage doors as flawlessly white as when Mr Hayward used to paint them himself, in white overalls as clean as the paintwork, whistling, whistling, from morning to night. The red brick path still curves through the rose beds, and the edges of the beds are as geometrically sharp as they used to be. The front door’s still unpainted oak, and still pierced by a little diamond-shaped window of spun glass. The name discreetly announced by the weathered copper plate beside the door is still Chollerton. Here at any rate the past has been preserved, in all its perfection.

Stephen waits at the front door. Now, too late, he becomes aware of his appearance. He pulls up the sagging sock, and bends down to tie the untied tennis shoe. But already the door’s opening a foot or two, and a boy of Stephen’s age stands framed in the darkness of the house beyond. He, too, is wearing a grey flannel shirt and grey flannel shorts. His shirt, though, is not too short, his shorts are not too long. His grey socks are neatly pulled up to half an inch below his knees, and his brown leather sandals are neatly buckled.

He turns his head away. I know what he’s doing. He’s listening to his mother ask who it is at the door. He’s telling her it’s Stephen. She’s telling him either to ask him in or else to go out and play, but not to hang around on the doorstep, half in and half out.

Keith opens the door completely. Stephen hurriedly scuffs his feet over the metal bars of the shoe scraper, then again over the doormat inside, and the sock with the failed garter slips back down. The door closes behind him.

This is where the story began. At the Haywards. On the day when Keith, my best friend, first pronounced those six simple words that turned our world inside out.

I wonder what it’s like inside that front door now. The first thing you saw then, even as the door swung open, was a polished oak hall stand, with clothes brushes, shoe horns and button hooks hanging from it, and a rack for sticks and umbrellas. Then, as you went inside, dark oak panelling, with two matching watercolours of the Trossachs by Alfred Hollings RA, and two china plates covered with blue pagodas and little blue rice-hatted figures crossing little blue footbridges. Between the doors into the living room and the dining room stood a grandmother clock that chimed the quarters, in and out of sequence with the clocks in other rooms, filling the house four times an hour with ethereal, ever-changing music.

And in the middle of it all, my friend Keith. The picture’s no longer monochrome, evidently, because now I can see the colours of our belts. Keith’s, also fastened with a metal snake curled into the shape of an S, has two yellow bands on the black background, mine two green bands. We’re socially colour-coded for ease of reference. Yellow and black are the colours of the right local preparatory school, where all the boys are going to take, and pass, the Common Entrance exam to a public school, and where everyone has his own cricket bat, his own boots and pads, and a special long bag to put them in. Green and black are the colours of the wrong school, where half the boys are gangling oafs like my brother Geoff, who have already taken Common Entrance and failed, and where we play cricket with splintered communal bats – some of us wearing brown gym shoes and our ordinary grey shorts.

I was acutely aware, even then, of my incomprehensible good fortune in being Keith’s friend. Now I think about it with adult hindsight it seems more surprising still. Not just his belt but everything about him was yellow and black; everything about me was plainly green and black. He was the officer corps in our two-man army. I was the Other Ranks – and grateful to be so.

We had a great many enterprises and projects in hand, and in all of them he was the leader and I was the led. I see now that he was only the first in a whole series of dominant figures in my life whose disciple I became. His authority was entirely warranted by his intellectual and imaginative superiority. It was Keith, not me, who’d devised the overhead cableway that connected our two houses, along which messages could be catapulted back and forth, like bills and change in the local grocers, and who’d gone on to develop the amazing underground railway, operated by pneumatic pressure, like another cash system we’d seen on expeditions to a nearby department store, through which we could ourselves pass swiftly and effortlessly back and forth, unobserved by the rest of the neighbourhood. Or, at any rate, the cableway and pneumatic tubes along which we and our messages
would
pass, as soon we put the plans into effect.