But then what can we do, if she’s a German spy? We have to make sacrifices for the War Effort. We have to endure hardships for the sake of the Duration.
I hear whistling. Round the side of Keith’s house I catch a glimpse of his father, heading in the direction of the kitchen garden. I put all feelings of pity behind me, and open their garden gate.
‘You chaps have got things to keep you occupied, have you?’ says Keith’s mother, putting her head round the playroom door on her way to retire for her rest. We nod mutely. ‘Just try not to make too much noise, then.’
We never make too much noise. But now we make no noise at all. We sit on the floor in absolute silence, not looking at each other, straining our ears until we hear the soft, well- oiled click of her bedroom door closing. Then we creep downstairs, freezing at every creak of a board or squeak of fingers on banister. Very softly Keith takes down the looking glass from its hook, and picks up the torch from the hall table. Very slowly he turns the handle of the sitting-room door, then pauses again, looking back at the stairs.
The grandmother clock ticks. There’s no other sound. I wish I were back at home.
He eases the door open. Inside the room the silence is more absolute still. Every suggestion of sound is absorbed by the thicknesses of the pale green carpet, of the dark green velvet curtains and the matching upholstery. We glide across to the desk as silently as Sioux. The darkness of its polished surface is lit by the gleam of silver and its reflections: a paper knife, a table lighter, a pair of candle snuffers, and the various silver-framed photographs reclining at dignified angles on unseen elbows. Keith opens the two leather-bound wings of the blotter.
A virgin snowfield confronts us, with no trace of blotted mirror writing. He puts the looking glass aside and switches on the torch. He lays it down at the edge of the blotter, in the way that we’ve read about in various books, so that it casts long shadows like the setting sun, then bends down and peers through the magnifying glass from his stamp-collecting kit. Slowly, systematically, he inches his way from the centre outwards.
I look at the photographs in the silver frames while I wait. From one of them a girl of about the same age as Keith and myself gazes solemnly back at me, slightly out of focus. She’s standing in a garden dappled with sunshine, wearing long white gloves that cover her bare arms up to her elbows and a wide-brimmed summer hat several sizes too big for her. It’s Keith’s mother, I realise uneasily, and she’s playing at being the grown-up she has since become. She has a protective arm around another little girl, several years younger, who’s holding a doll and looking up at her, trusting but very slightly apprehensive. It’s Auntie Dee, playing at being her elder sister’s little girl. There’s something almost improper about the sight of them like this, stripped of their protective adulthood, caught out in a childish pretence, and something quite upsetting about Auntie Dee’s innocent ignorance of what her older sister will one day become.
Keith straightens up and silently hands me the magnifying glass. I bend over and imitate his methodical slowness. There
are
impressions in the blotting paper, but they’re very faint and confused. Some of them might be the shapes of overlaid words. I think I can make out a few odd letters, and perhaps even one or two syllables: ‘Thurs’, possibly, and ‘if you’.
Keith whispers in my ear: ‘Do you see it?’ He points. I peer at the area around his enormous fingernail. I think I can distinguish a figure 8 and a figure 2. Or else a figure 3 and a question mark.
‘Code,’ whispers Keith.
He makes a note of various letters and digits in the logbook, then closes up the blotter. I feel nothing but relief that the operation’s over and that we can get out of the room before his mother wakes up or his father comes back to the house. But Keith puts a restraining hand on my arm; he hasn’t finished yet. He softly slides open the long drawer beneath the desktop. His mother goes on gazing at us out of her silver frame as we bend down again to examine its contents.
Headed writing paper … envelopes … books of tuppenny-halfpenny stamps … Everything neatly ordered, with plenty of space … An address book …
Keith takes out the address book and turns over the pages. The entries are written in a neat, clear hand. Ashtons (cleaners), ABC Stationers … Mr and Mrs James Butterworth, Marjorie Beer, Bishop (window cleaner) … Who are Mr and Mrs Butterworth and Marjorie Beer? They may be code names, of course … Doctor, Dentist … There are no more than a handful of names under each letter, and a lot of them seem to be tradesmen. I notice ‘Hucknall (Butcher) …’ No one in the Close, so far as I can see, except Mr and Mrs Peter Tracey … Keith examines each of the entries through the magnifying glass, and transcribes a few of them into the logbook.
Meanwhile I look at the photographs again. Three laughing figures in tennis whites: Keith’s mother and Auntie Dee, with Uncle Peter lounging boyishly between them, and beside them a fourth figure whose lifeless clipped grey hair and grimly ironic smile have already taken on the character I find so alarming. The same four on a beach, with Uncle Peter standing on his head, and Keith’s mother and Auntie Dee holding him by his ankles. Then a serious young bride standing in front of a church door, shyly holding her veil back from her face, the long white train of her dress tumbled elaborately down the steps in front of her: Keith’s mother, her arm tucked demurely through the arm of a grey tailcoat with an ironic smile above it.
Next to this last one, arranged beside it so as to make a pair, another bride, almost identical with the first, in front of what appears to be the same church door, with the same train tumbled down the same steps. This bride’s a little shorter, though, a little bolder looking, a little more up to date in some indefinable way, and the arm she’s holding is encased in a shade of grey that I know represents not grey at all but air-force blue, and that belongs to a bridegroom whose hair and smile are both still boyish.
Mother and father, aunt and uncle – all four of them watch us out of the past as we work to penetrate the secrets of the present and dismantle their future.
At the back of the drawer Keith has found a little pocket diary. I feel a fresh wave of alarm. We’re not going to look in her
diary
, are we? Diaries are private … But already he’s opened it, and already I’m looking over his shoulder as he turns the pages.
Again the entries are sparse: ‘Doctor … Milly’s b’day … curtains cleaned … wedding anniv …’ A few seem to be social occasions: ‘Bridge Curwens … Ted’s parents … Ted to OH dinner …’ A lot of them relate to K. ‘K’s term starts (blazer cleaned, cricket shirts) … K’s sports day … K to dentist …’
I don’t know how Keith notices the first of the secret signs. I realise that he’s stopped turning the pages, and brought the diary very close to his eyes, the magnifying glass forgotten. He looks at me. He’s wearing the special expression he has when something really important occurs. It’s the way he looked at me as the first of the vertebrae emerged from the earth at the end of Mr Gort’s garden.
‘What?’ I whisper. He hands the diary to me, and points to the space for a Friday in January.
It seems at first to be empty. Then I see that there’s some kind of handwritten mark, even smaller than the other entries, nestling inconspicuously in the little gap between the date itself and the current phase of the moon: a tiny x.
A strange tingling feeling goes through me. This is something quite different from what we’ve been recording up to now. Whatever this inconspicuous symbol means, it’s plainly something that’s not meant to be read or understood by anyone else. We’ve stumbled across something that’s actually secret.
Keith’s still looking at me with his special expression, waiting to see how I respond. There’s a certain light in his eyes that I don’t like. He can see that my courage is beginning to falter again, as it did when he held up the first of the buried vertebrae, and I didn’t want to go on digging. His expectations are fulfilled: my interest in continuing with the current investigation, I discover, has suddenly evaporated.
I put the diary back in the drawer.
‘We’d better just leave it,’ I whisper.
The corner of Keith’s mouth registers an almost imperceptible moment of superiority. I remember how often I’ve been humiliated by him like this in the past. Things start as a game, and then they turn into a test, which I fail.
He takes the diary out of the drawer again, and slowly turns the pages over.
‘But if it’s something private …,’ I plead.
‘Put it in the logbook,’ he orders.
He watches as I reluctantly scribble the date, and mark an x against it. I’m halfway to the door before I realise that he’s still by the desk, turning over more pages of the diary.
‘Something else,’ he says. ‘A different thing.’
I hesitate. But in the end, of course, I have to go back and look over his shoulder. He points to a Saturday in February. There’s a tiny exclamation mark next to the date.
‘Make a note of it,’ he says.
He turns the pages again. More x’s. More exclamation marks. As I record them, a pattern begins to emerge. The x, whatever it is, happens once a month. Sometimes it’s crossed out and entered a day or two earlier or later. The exclamation mark, however, has happened only three times so far this year, and at irregular intervals – on a Saturday in January, on another Saturday in March, and on a Tuesday in April. This last date, I’m somehow disturbed to see, is also marked ‘wedding anniv’.
A gathering sense of mystery begins to overwhelm my uneasiness. I look at Keith’s mother smiling shyly out at us from behind her veil. I can’t take it in. She actually
is
a German spy. And not in the way that Mr Gort is a murderer, or that the people who come and go at Trewinnick are members of some sinister organisation. Not in the way that anyone in the street might be a murderer or a German spy. She is quite literally …
a German spy
.
We go once again through the list I’ve written in the logbook. There’s something she does once a month. Something she has to keep track of. Some secret thing. What is it?
‘She has meetings with someone,’ I suggest. ‘Secret meetings. They’re all planned in advance – only then sometimes the person can’t come, so they have to change the date …’
Keith watches me, saying nothing. Now I’ve got my brain started, it’s racing faster than his for once.
‘Then every now and then something else happens,’ I go on slowly. ‘Something surprising, something that wasn’t planned …’
Keith’s smiling his little smile, I realise. He’s not behind me at all – he’s somehow ahead of me again, and simply biding his time to tantalise me.
‘The meetings with x,’ he whispers finally. ‘When are they supposed to happen?’
I feel the skin prickle on the back of my neck. From the sound of his voice there’s something eerie coming, but I can’t guess what it’s going to be. ‘Once a month,’ I whisper helplessly.
He slowly shakes his head.
‘Yes – look. January, February …’
He shakes his head again. ‘Once every four weeks,’ he says.
I’m lost. ‘What’s the difference?’
He waits, smiling his little smile, while I go through the diary again. I suppose it’s true. Each month the date seems to be a little earlier. ‘So?’
‘Look at the moon,’ he whispers.
I go back to the beginning, looking at the phases of the moon next to each of the little x’s. Yes, the x’s are approximately keeping step with the lunar calendar. Each month the x is close to the same sign, the full black circle. I look up at Keith.
‘The night of no moon,’ he whispers.
The hairs rise on my neck again. I can see the possibilities now as clearly as he can – the unlit plane landing on the fairway of the golf course, the parachutist falling softly through the perfect darkness …
I turn over the pages of the diary. The last x was two nights ago. The next is in twenty-six days’ time. After that – nothing. No x’s, no exclamation marks.
One last meeting, then, in the dark of the moon …
And suddenly the whole house is full of cascading, tangled fairy music. All three clocks are chiming simultaneously.
At the first shimmering tintinnabulations we’ve already jumped out of our skins, thrown the diary back into the drawer, slammed the drawer shut, and got halfway to the door.
And there’s Keith’s mother, standing on the threshold, as shocked to find herself face to face with us as we are to find ourselves face to face with her.
‘What are you doing in here?’ she demands.
‘Nothing,’ says Keith.
‘Nothing,’ I confirm.
‘Not taking something out of my desk?’
‘No.’
‘No.’
Did she see us? Does she realise? How long has she been watching us? All three of us stand our ground, not knowing quite how to resolve the situation.
‘Why have you got such funny looks on your faces?’
Keith and I glance at each other. It’s true – we do have funny looks on our faces. But it’s difficult to know what sort of look would be appropriate for talking to someone who we know has just had a secret rendezvous with a German courier. And when we mustn’t let her know that we know.
She puts the library book she’s holding down on the desk, picks up another, then hesitates, frowning. ‘Isn’t that your magnifying glass?’ she demands. ‘And what’s the torch doing in here? And the looking glass?’
‘We were just playing,’ says Keith.
‘Well, you know you shouldn’t be doing it in here,’ she says. ‘Why don’t you go outside and play?’
Silently Keith puts the magnifying glass in his pocket. Silently we replace the torch and the looking glass. I look back as Keith opens the front door. His mother’s still watching us thoughtfully from the sitting-room doorway, almost as curious about our behaviour as we are about hers.
And everything in the world has changed beyond imagination or recall.
*
So now we’re playing outside, as we’ve been told.
It’s just possible, it seems to me as I look back on it down the corridor of the years, that this was another turning point in the story – that everything thereafter would have followed a quite different course if Keith’s mother hadn’t made that simple, offhand suggestion – if we’d gone back to his playroom and discussed our shattering discovery there, in the serene and well-ordered world of his official playthings. But outside the house there’s only one place where we can talk without being observed or overheard, and once we get there we’re across the frontier into another country altogether.