Silence.
‘Or was it a grown-up?’
Again I remain silent, and it occurs to me that I need never speak again.
‘
Where
did it happen? In the street? Or at someone’s house?’
‘
Please
, darling,’ says my mother. ‘You might have been really badly hurt.’
‘You could have been a goner, kid,’ says Geoff, coming back with the first-aid box. ‘Someone’s swiped all the emergency rations, by the way.’
‘Why can’t you tell us what happened?’ my father asks me, in his gentle, reasonable way. ‘Did they tell you not to say anything? Did they threaten you?’
Silence.
‘Stephen, what else happened? Did anything else happen?’
‘Maybe it was that sexual deviant,’ says Geoff. ‘The one who’s been hanging round at night.’
‘Stephen,’ says my father very slowly and carefully, ‘there are some people in this world who get a kind of pleasure out of hurting others. Sometimes they like to hurt children. They do things to them that the children find frightening. If something like that has happened to you, then you must tell us.’
‘He swiped the rations,’ says Geoff. ‘Then he slit Stevie’s throat to keep him quiet.’
My father paints iodine on the wound. It stings far worse than it did when the bayonet went in. I wince and cry out. He takes a bandage out of the box and begins to wind it round my neck.
‘Or was it
you
who took the rations, Stephen?’ he asks very softly.
I weep silently with the pain.
‘To play with in your camp?’ pursues my father. ‘Or perhaps to give to someone? Someone hanging around the street? Someone who asked you for food?’
‘That old tramp, probably,’ says Geoff.
‘I’m not going to be angry, Stephen. It would have been a kind thing to do. I just have to know.’
‘It’s that old tramp who hides out in the Barns,’ says Geoff.
‘I thought they took him away?’ says my mother. ‘I thought they put him in prison after that little boy was interfered with?’
‘Maybe he’s back. Maybe he’s the deviant.’
‘Was it the tramp, Stephen?’ asks my father.
I shake my head. I try to say, ‘Not the tramp. Not the Barns.’ But no words come out, only howling as infantile as Milly’s in her pushchair. I’m behaving just like that poor ghost in the grave – brave once, brave twice, but not brave for ever.
My father puts his arms round me. My mother strokes my hair.
‘Poor kid,’ says Geoff.
‘You’ll have to report it,’ murmurs my mother over my head to my father when I quieten a little.
‘Have we got the telephone number of the police station?’ murmurs my father, and at once I begin to howl again more hopelessly than ever.
Someone’s knocking at the front door. Terror silences my howling – the police are here already.
Geoff goes downstairs to answer it.
‘It’s Barbara Berrill,’ he says when he comes back. ‘Can Stephen come out to play?’
I resume my howling.
I’m woken from the depths of a deep and dreamless sleep by the uneasy feeling that something’s wrong.
I lie in the darkness, listening to the sound of Geoff’s breathing, trying to work out what it is.
The pain in my throat – yes. And when I put my fingers to my throat to investigate, I find the bandage round my neck. Now I remember –
everything’s
wrong: Milly’s weeping, Dee’s pressing her hands to her ears, Keith’s intent face in front of mine …
The policeman who’ll be coming in the morning to talk to me … The scarf that the policeman will find when he comes …
Yes, where is it? I sit up in bed in a panic. I can’t remember what I’ve done with it! I’ve left it lying around somewhere for anyone to find!
I scrabble under the pillow, my heart cold … No, there it is, just where I shoved it, smeared with dried blood, when my mother put me to bed and I at last opened my clenched hand. At once I see the policeman searching the bedroom, opening the toy cupboard, turning back the bedding … I’ll have to find somewhere better to hide it.
Is this what woke me? Possibly. Or is there something else wrong? Something I still can’t quite locate?
Something in the room? Or something outside?
I get up and put my head under the blackout blind. It’s as dark outside as it is in, and it takes me a long time to distinguish even the roofline of the houses opposite against the sky. What I’m peering into is what Keith and I were waiting for: the dark of the moon.
And in that blackness there’s some kind of lurking presence. A sound of some kind. A very small sound, but one that shouldn’t be there. I listen hard. It’s steady and unchanging, a faint, sustained sibilance, as if some creature were quietly and inexhaustibly exhaling.
I begin to shiver, because I know that I have to go out there into the breathing darkness to find somewhere to hide the scarf. I quietly put on my sandals and pull a jumper over my pyjamas, as I did before. I remember, almost wistfully, that earlier night when the moon was full, and my childish feeling that I’d need a knotted rope to climb out of the window. The difficulty in getting out this time, though, is not one that ropes could solve. The difficulty is the darkness itself and the sound in the darkness that shouldn’t be there. The difficulty is the shivering that won’t stop.
Once again I ease back the bolt on the kitchen door, then edge my way step by step through the confusions of the front garden, and stand at the gate in the perfumed and empty stillness of the street, wondering which way to go, as insubstantial as the darkness enclosing me. The sound’s more insistent out here. It seems to come from far off, and yet to be in the air all around me. For a moment I think I hear muffled, distant voices calling, but when I hold my breath and still my shivering so as to be certain, there’s nothing but the same long sigh as before.
Where am I going to find a hiding place? I can’t lock the scarf away inside the trunk, because Keith will find it there even if the policeman doesn’t. I think of each dark house along the street in turn. The Sheldons, the Stotts … Lamorna, Trewinnick … Each one’s a world closed against me.
The voices again … Again I hold my breath and try not to shiver … Nothing. Only that long, unnatural animal breath.
There’s only one possibility I can think of, and I stand there for a long time in the darkness before I can persuade myself to accept it. But if there’s nowhere else … I walk to the end of the street and turn towards the tunnel.
As I get closer my dread increases. The pitch darkness of the tunnel mouth is bad enough, but there’s something else about it as well – something that’s changed. The mass of the embankment towering against the darkness of the sky above me as I approach seems somehow wrong. I have the impression that there’s even more of it than usual pressing down upon the mouth of the brickwork. Something about its outline seems different, too. The horizon between the blackness of the embankment and the blackness of the sky above it is no longer even and level – it’s jagged and confused.
The whole sound and shape of the world has become in some way dislocated.
Now I’m enclosed by the hollow darkness beneath this strange mass … feeling my way along the slime through the huge echoes of my own breathing … and emerging into that same level, quiet breathing of the night. It reminds me, as I bend back the rusty links of the fence, of the level breathing of the unseen man behind me when I was here before, and once again I feel the cold prickling in the nape of my neck.
I climb through the gap, and fumble my way forward on my hands and knees through the stalks of cow parsley until I find the hollow behind the brickwork where the croquet box was hidden. I take the scarf out of the sleeve of my jumper, and bury it as best I can in the dark under the loose, dank earth and the rank vegetation.
A new sound makes me raise my head. Distant barking. There’s someone in the Lanes.
That poor sick ghost has risen from his grave. He’s coming to punish my betrayal of him – coming to catch me in the very act of burying the precious object he trusted me to deliver. I scramble out of the undergrowth, and through the gap in the fence. I run back towards the tunnel, then stop, because something’s entering it at the other end. Two dim grids of hooded light and their two reflections in the puddles come towards me, bucking slowly in counterpoint over the unevennesses of the track. The howl of an engine in low gear echoes around the wet brickwork.
A vehicle of some sort – and in the middle of the night, in a place where no vehicle has ever been seen before.
There’s nowhere it can be going except to the Barns.
I crawl back through the fence and wait behind the brickwork for it to pass. They’re coming for him. They’re coming for him because I let myself be bullied once again, even if this time I didn’t give in, and because I’ve been too weak and inept to conceal the fact from my parents. And there’s nothing I can do about it. All I can do is hide yet again.
I wait, sick at myself, for the murmur of the engine to die away.
It continues, though, as quiet and steady as that mysterious breathing.
I raise my head an inch or two above the brickwork. There’s the vehicle, stationary in front of me, a vague, murmuring bulk outlined against the faintly illuminated patch of ground in front of the blacked-out headlights at one end and the small red glow from the hooded tail light at the other. A pair of doors stand open at the back, and two small splashes of light are dancing about over the retaining wall opposite and the embankment above it.
One of the splashes swings abruptly across to my side of the lane, and I drop below the top of the brickwork just as the dazzle of the beam reaches me.
I’m wrong. It’s not him they’ve come for. It’s me.
The torch finds the gap in the fence. I press myself face down in the hollow where I’ve hidden the scarf, as I did once before, and I hear the catch of the wire on cloth as someone squeezes through. A man’s breath. Then the snagging of the wire again, and the sound of a second man.
The rough hands are just about to seize me and drag me out into the blinding light of their torches …
The breathing and the breaking of undergrowth come closer … then move past me and grow quieter. I hear the scrape of boots on brickwork. The men have scrambled up on to the parapet, as Keith and I did the first time we came here, and they’re following it up towards the top of the tunnel mouth.
It’s not me they’re looking for, then. Or will they come back down if I move, and find me as Keith and I came back down and found the box?
I wait … wait …
The barking of the dogs has long ceased. Whoever it is coming along the Lanes is now well away from the Cottages. I can almost feel his approach … Or has he seen the lights of the van already, and stopped?
Still I wait. Still there’s nothing to be heard but the murmur of the waiting vehicle and the quiet, unnatural breathing of the night. I slowly lift my head above the brickwork …
And now I hear voices in the Lanes, and at the same time see torches approaching along the top of the embankment. Not two now but half a dozen of them, coming slowly along the ganger’s path beside the rails. Every now and then one of the beams swings sideways and lights up the wheels and undersides of the long train of stationary trucks waiting on the up line, all the way across the top of the tunnel and on towards the cutting. One of the beams swings upwards for a moment and catches part of the cargo projecting from them – the duck-egg blue underside of a shattered aircraft wing with its red, white and blue roundel, sticking up from a jagged tangle of scrap metal, a camouflage-painted tailplane with its red, white and blue flash.
I hide my head again as the men come scrambling and slithering slowly down the sloping parapet of the retaining wall above me. They’re breathing hard now, and uttering little grunts of warning and acknowledgement as they struggle with the weight and awkwardness of the load they’re carrying. They all wait, three feet away from me, breathing and shifting, as the wire fence is ripped off the concrete posts, and goes rustling back to allow the bearers and their burden to pass.
The voices approaching from the Lanes call out. ‘Got him?’ says one of them.
‘Most of him,’ gasps one of the bearers. ‘Want to look?’
A silence, and then, on the other side of the brickwork, the helpless groan and gagging of someone who’s turned aside to vomit.
The one thing I know for sure is that
I
did this. I wept and was weak and said nothing, and they went to fetch him. He fled before them on to the railway embankment, and ran down the line, home towards the houses in the Close, or up it and out to the great wide world. And there in the darkness, I suppose, he missed his footing. At once the terrible secret force hidden in the live rail leapt out at him, and the passing trains cut him in pieces.
The doors of the vehicle slam to. The murmur of the engine rises to a howl, then slowly, joltingly recedes, and echoes through the tunnel. The voices go echoing after it, some of them now raised in a cacophony of ghostly calls and answering laughter.
The noises die away, until once again there’s no sound left in the darkness but that same unsettling, long drawn-out sigh. I know what it is now: the hiss of steam escaping from the locomotive halted way up ahead in the depths of the cutting. The sigh gathers itself together into a single sharp exhalation. Another exhalation – a flurry of exhalations – a measured sequence of them – and the clanking of tightened couplings comes spreading back down the line of trucks. Slowly the train resumes its interrupted progress up the gradient.
By the time I’m back in my bed it’s dissolved into the remotenesses of the night, and the blackness is silent again.
The game’s finally over.
11
Everything in the Close is as it was; and everything has changed. The houses sit where they sat, but everything they once said they say no longer.
Not to me, at any rate. I walk up the road and back once more, stupidly, a stranger who’s beginning to make himself more than a little conspicuous, a confused old man wandering the streets. I turn the corner and walk under the railway bridge again, even more stupidly, since there’s nothing left of the Lanes at all. Where in this labyrinth of Crescents, Walks, and Meads was the sycamore with the rotted rope? Where was the dried-up pond, where were the Cottages? Was this dull service station next to the roundabout once by any chance the Barns?
I retrace my steps to the railway bridge. It’s still flanked on either side by brick retaining walls, as the old tunnel was. I walk along the smooth grey pavement, peering at the brickwork on the side where the croquet box was hidden. The walls must have been rebuilt when they replaced the tunnel and widened the road. Or is it possible that the old wall might have been kept on one side of the road for economy’s sake? The bricks here look well weathered … the gradient of the capping course seems familiar … At the low end of the wall now, where the rusty wire fence was, is an electricity substation, with a clean new galvanised wire fence boxing it off from the embankment beyond. There’s no way of crawling through it, and it’s too high for me to climb. I peer through the serviceable grey links. The bottom of the embankment behind the wall has been used as a tip, and it’s impossible to see, under the layers of ancient rubbish, whether there’s any gap behind the brickwork where something might be hidden.
I feel a small, unreasonable disappointment. I’m embarrassed to confess it, even to myself, but I think this may be why I’ve stopped to look at the bridge. It may even be why I’ve come on this whole expedition. Just to make sure. Just to check – and this is too silly to think, as soon as I put it into words – just to check that it’s not still here somewhere. The scarf. The one piece of material evidence there might still be that the whole strange dream actually happened.
I know perfectly well, of course, that it can’t possibly have survived. It would have rotted half a century ago. If it wasn’t found by somebody first. Other children, perhaps, pursuing some fantasy of their own. I wonder what they’d have made of it. Chemnitz … Leipzig … Zwickau … By the time it was found all three would have been in either the Soviet zone of occupation or the German Democratic Republic, and it might have suggested Communist spying rather than Nazi. I imagine them carrying it importantly off to the police, or taking it with proper scholastic curiosity for identification in the local museum. I might just possibly find it still preserved in some forgotten dusty box, or displayed in a glass case along with a dutiful assemblage of shrapnel and old ration books.
Why didn’t I go back later and recover it myself? Because from that night on I was in a different corridor of my life. A door had closed behind me, and I never opened it again. I never went back to the Lanes. I never walked through the tunnel. I put all those things out of my head. Until today. Squeezed in here between the substation and the galvanised wire fence, and thinking these ancient thoughts, I’m standing on this particular spot of ground for the first time in over fifty years.
So what did happen after that night? Nothing. Life went on. I got up next morning as usual, so far as I remember. I went to school, and struggled to keep my attention fixed upon the algebra and history exams. I refused to satisfy everyone’s curiosity about the bandage round my throat, and endured as philosophically as I could the hypothesis eventually offered by my friends Hanning and Neale – that I had attempted to hang myself, but had failed because I was too weeny, too weedy, and too Wheatley. To my parents I said nothing about the events of the night. They said nothing further to me about the injury to my throat, and no policeman came to question me. It seemed to be understood that somehow the problem had been solved, and that I needn’t be tormented further. I suppose there must have been an inquest on the body that had been found on the line, and there must have been evidence of identification, but I can’t remember hearing about it. Well, it was wartime. Not everything was reported or spoken about.
Life continued; but on a slightly different course. I never went to Keith’s house again, I never went back to the lookout. I don’t know what became of the bayonet any more than I do of the scarf. Perhaps that’s in a museum, too.
Every now and then I saw Keith cycling past on his way to school or back, but he didn’t notice me. I caught the odd glimpse of his father as he worked in the front garden, and heard him whistling a passage or two from the great cadenza that never ended. Sometimes his mother would smile at me as she passed carrying her shopping basket, or letters to post, a cravat still high on her throat long after my bandages had gone. Once she stopped and said I must come to tea again some time, but ‘some time’ was never any particular day, and very soon Keith went away, first on holiday with his family and then to start boarding school.
Auntie Dee always smiled at me too, as bravely as ever, but my mother told me that she was really terribly upset, because Uncle Peter had been posted missing, and because, just when she most needed the support of her family, she’d apparently had some kind of falling out with Keith’s mother. My mother sometimes tried to help with Milly and the shopping, until Auntie Dee moved out of the district a few weeks later, after which no one ever saw her again. My mother had been a little bit soft on Uncle Peter herself, she once confided to me – all the wives in the Close had.
I called at Lamorna several times, but Barbara could never come out to play. I began to see her across the road at the Averys. Charlie Avery had been called up, and Dave would be working on the three-wheeler on his own – with Barbara sitting cross-legged on the driveway watching him and handing him tools, her purse with the bobbly blue leather and the shiny popper still slung around her neck. I went through the first of the agonies which I was going to discover later were usual on these occasions.
The scent of the limes and the honeysuckle faded; the treacly, reassuring breath of the buddleia came and went; the raw, urgent reek of the privet faded.
There were many things that Keith had been wrong about, I realised gradually as life went on. But about one thing, and one quite surprising thing, he’d been right, though it took me several years to recognise it. There was a German spy in the Close that summer. It wasn’t his mother – it was me.
Everything is as it was; and everything has changed. Stephen Wheatley has become this old man, treading slowly and warily in the footsteps of his former self, and the name of this old man is Stefan Weitzler. That undersized observer in the privet, spying on the comings and goings of the street, has reverted to the name under which he was registered in the peaceful green district of the great German city where he was born.
I was reborn as Stephen when my parents left Germany in 1935. My mother was English anyway, and she’d always spoken English to us at home, but now my father became more English still, and we all turned into Wheatleys. She died at the beginning of the 1960s, and when my father followed her less than a year later I felt a great restlessness stirring in me – the converse of that same restlessness that’s brought me back now to the Close. It’s the longing to be elsewhere that in Germany we call
Fernweh
, which is in my case also
Heimweh
, a longing to be home – the terrible pull of opposites that torments the displaced everywhere.
Well, my life in England had somehow never really taken flight. My marriage was never quite a real marriage, my job in the engineering department of the local polytechnic was never quite a real job. I felt a yearning to know more about my father, about where he’d grown up, where he and my mother had fallen in love, where I’d first seen the light. So I went to take a look, and I discovered that my first two years had been spent in a quiet, garden-lined street that seemed to be a dreamlike echo of the Close in which I later grew up, which is no doubt why the Close itself always seemed to be a dreamlike echo in its turn.
I had a bleak few months in my rediscovered homeland, struggling with a language I’d only started to learn in my adolescence, too late to be ever quite at ease with, working in an environment I couldn’t quite understand. Of my father’s past scarcely a trace remained. His parents and two brothers had all been taken and murdered. His sister had for some reason been left, and instead had been killed in her own cellar, along with her two children, by Uncle Peter, or by his colleagues in Bomber Command.
And yet, and yet … I stayed. My temporary job somehow became a permanent one. I don’t suppose you’ve ever read the English-language installation and maintenance manuals for Siemens transformers and high-voltage switchgear, but if by any chance you have then you’re familiar with at any rate some of my work. The story in the manuals, it occurs to me, is once again somebody else’s, just as the story of the German spy, and all the other stories of my childhood, were Keith’s. Once again all I’ve done is play the loyal disciple.
And of course the day came when I met someone else, and as I began to see Germany through her familiar eyes, my perception of everything around me changed once again … Soon there was a house, in another quiet, tree-lined street … The house became a home … There were children, and many German in-laws to visit … And now, before I can sort out whether I belong here or there, or even which is here and which is there, my children are grown up, and we have their mother’s grave to tend each week.
Actually there were
two
German spies in the Close, now I come to think about it – and the other one was a serious and dedicated professional.
I once tried to gain a little credit with Keith by claiming that my father was a German spy. Well, so he was, I discovered later. At any rate he was a German, and he had some kind of job in economic intelligence, though he was on the British side, not the German. This was why he came back when he did from that mysterious ‘business trip’ of his to the North. They gave him an early release from his internment as an enemy alien in the Isle of Man because they needed his knowledge of the German optical industry, and his ability to understand decrypts relating to it. Someone who’d worked on the history of the Allied bombing campaign once told me that if it hadn’t been for the work of his department, the Germans would have been better supplied with gunsights, and Uncle Peter and his colleagues would have had a harder time still with German anti-aircraft defences.
I suppose I’ve got more and more like my father as I’ve got older. I hear myself saying the same irritatingly eccentric things that he used to say, that I never realised at the time were simply plain, ordinary German. I’d look into my son’s bedroom when he was a child and tell him off for the frightful
Kuddelmuddel
, and when he tried to offer some excuse I’d snap that it was nonsense, just as my father would have done:
Schnickschnack
!
Yes, we were the Germans, in a country at war with them, and no one ever knew it. No one except me overheard the pleas of the desperate fellow-refugees who came to my father for help. No one else guessed what language they were speaking together. We were also the Juice, in a juiceless district (the mysterious dark strangers at Trewinnick turned out to be Orthodox Greeks) and no one ever knew that, either. I’m no more religious than my father ever was, but I too have vexed my family with that same residual conviction that Friday evening, when the first star is ventured upon the sky, was a time for all of us to stay home and be together.
Why did my parents conceal all this? I suppose they wanted to make things easier for Geoff and me. Maybe it did at the time, too. Keith’s parents would probably never have allowed me inside their house if they’d known what we were. Later, though, when I found out, it made things harder. For me, though apparently not for Geoff, who was four years more German than me but four times more British. He knew where we came from – he was already six when we left. Or at any rate he sort of knew, he told me much later, in the way we sort of know so many things. Why didn’t he tell me at the time? I imagine because what he also knew from the reticence of my parents, and knew for sure, was that there were some things that must never be talked about.
No, I think it went deeper than that. I think that what he instinctively grasped was this: that some things must never even be known.
Geoff Wheatley he remained, anyway, and never thought of going back to being Joachim Weitzler. He married, moved to a house much like our old one in the Close and less than a mile away from it, lived out his life as a local auctioneer and valuer, kept up his early interest in girls and smoking, got into various rather unappetising marital scrapes, and died of lung cancer, with much suffering but, so far as I know, no great anxieties about his past. Not, at any rate, ones that he ever confided to me. He’d even carefully forgotten all his German. Or so I supposed. Once, though, when I visited him in the hospice as he lay dying, he seemed to think in his confusion that I was our father. He took my hand, and when I bent close to his lips what he called me was not ‘Daddy’, which we’d always called our father in the time I remembered, but ‘
Papi
’. And what he kept saying, in a little frightened voice, was that he was frightened of the dark: ‘
Papi,
Papi, ich hab’ Angst vor dem Dunkeln
.’
What happened to all the other children in the street? The McAfees’ son died in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Charlie Avery lost an eye and a hand in a training exercise two months after he was called up. I’ve no idea what became of Barbara Berrill. I think Keith’s a barrister of some sort. I saw his name on a doorway in the Inner Temple when I was getting my divorce. ‘Mr K. R. G. Hayward’ – there can’t be more than one K. R. G. Hayward, can there? I nearly went in and confronted him. Why didn’t I? Some last residual fear, perhaps. That was thirty years ago – he’s probably a judge by now. I can imagine him as a judge. Or perhaps he’s retired. I can imagine him retired, too, tending his roses and whistling.