Already Keith’s back behind the cover of the undergrowth at the edge of the tracks, and I’m a foot behind him.
We lie like terrified worshippers prostrate before a visiting god as the great dusty bogies fill the sky above us. It’s on the up line, right next to us, and the passing showers of sparks spray down on our heads. For carriage after carriage the mighty procession goes on. When at last the wall of noise recedes into the cutting, and we lift our heads to look down into the lane … yes, it’s her. She’s bending down by the hole in the wire fence – not climbing through it, but straightening up and walking back towards the tunnel, holding a letter in her hands once again as if she were going to the post.
Whatever she does here, she’s already done it.
We wait until the footsteps in the tunnel have died away to silence, and then a little longer until the beating of our hearts has subsided as well. We edge shakily back down the parapet, and I scramble back through the hole in the wire, leading the way for once, longing to be away from here before the police arrive, or Keith’s mother returns, or the dogs and raggedy boys from the Cottages come looking for us.
But Keith’s not behind me. ‘Keith?’ I query, trying not to sound as frightened as I am. ‘What are you doing? Where are you?’
There’s no response. I climb reluctantly back through the hole in the fence.
He’s kneeling in the undergrowth beside the low end of the parapet, where the footprints finish, holding back the cow parsley and gazing at something close to the brickwork. ‘What?’ I demand. He looks up at me; he has his father’s face on again. ‘What is it?’ I say. He silently returns to inspecting what he’s found.
Among the coarse stalks of the cow parsley, tucked into a hollow eroded by the rain behind the brickwork of the retaining wall, is a large tin box. It’s about four feet long, and dark green but beginning to go rusty. In embossed and chipped letters on the lid is the inscription: ‘Gamages of Holborn. The “Home Sportsman” No. 4 Garden Croquet Set.’
We gaze at it, trying to make some sense of it.
‘We’d better tell Mr McAfee,’ I say finally.
We go on gazing.
‘Or your father.’
Keith puts his hand on the lid.
‘Don’t!’ I cry at once. ‘Don’t touch it!’
He doesn’t withdraw his hand. It remains resting lightly on the lid, still undecided whether to explore further or not.
‘It might be the stuff for blowing up the train,’ I urge. ‘Or it could be booby-trapped.’
Keith puts his other hand on the lid as well, and gently eases it up on its hinges.
The box is completely empty. Its golden interior shines back at us like an untenanted reliquary.
No, there’s some small object at the bottom. Keith carefully lifts it out: a red packet, with a black cat on the front of it crowning a white oval that frames the words ‘Craven A’.
Twenty cigarettes.
Or is it? Keith opens the flap. Twenty cork tips gaze back at us. Keith slides the drawer out. The twenty cork tips have twenty complete cigarettes attached to them. A scrap of ruled paper from an exercise book comes into view. On it is written one single familiar letter:
X.
That single x haunts my dreams.
What is the value of x, I struggle to calculate, over and over again through the long confusions of the night, if x = K’s mother
2
…? X the unknown and the x’s in Keith’s mother’s diary elide with x the multiplier, and the value of x becomes even more mysterious if x = K’s mother x January x February x March …
Keith’s mother’s x’s elide in their turn with the x’s that my mother puts on her birthday cards to me. She bends over me in the dream, as she did earlier to kiss me goodnight, and her lips are puckered into the shape of an x. As she draws slowly closer and closer I see that it’s not my own mother but Keith’s, and that the x she’s offering is minus x: the Judas kiss, the kiss of betrayal. And then, as she comes closer and closer, and the kisses multiply themselves, she becomes the black cat on the cigarette packet, and the blackness of the black cat swells terrifyingly into the dark of the moon.
What do we do next, though? I have no idea.
I sit in the lookout next day after school waiting for Keith. He’ll know what to do. He’ll have a plan. The dark and shifting dreams will resolve themselves into the familiar secret passageways and underground headquarters. He doesn’t come, though. Probably he has homework to do, or he has to help his father. But somehow I can’t help feeling that it’s something to do with his mother. She’s bending over him to kiss him goodnight, her brown eyes shining, her lips pursed into an x …
I should go and ask if he can come out to play. But then I think uneasily of his mother bending to kiss him, and I feel somehow reluctant to go anywhere near his house. I start to think about how much harder all this is for Keith than for me. He’s the one who does actually have to be kissed good- night by her. He’s the one who has to live in the same house as an enemy agent – to do what she tells him, to eat the meals she prepares, to let her put iodine on his cuts and scratches – and to do it all without letting her suspect for a moment that he knows what she is. Every moment of the day is a further test of his strength, a further demonstration of his heroism.
If Keith’s not coming, then I suppose I should go through the tunnel again myself. I should look in the box again and see if the cigarettes are still there. If they are, then I should hide by the railway track and wait to see who comes to collect them …
Still I continue to crouch under the bushes, though, going through the motions of keeping watch as before, waiting for Keith to come with the bravery for both of us. After those dreams the darkness of the tunnel seems more fearful than ever. I know that I shall emerge to be confronted by x, the unknown, a dark figure with shrouded face, coming towards me out of the greenery of the Lanes … Or worse – I shall hear his footsteps echoing behind me in the tunnel …
So many things in life seem to be a test of some kind. Ten times a day, if you’re a boy and hope to be a man, you’re called upon to brace yourself, to make a greater effort, to show courage you don’t really possess. Ten times a day you’re terrified that once again you’re going to reveal your weakness, your cowardliness, your general lack of character and unfitness for man’s estate. It’s like the War Effort, and the perpetual sense of strain it induces, of guilt for not doing enough towards it. The War Effort hangs over us for the Duration, and both the Duration and the long examination board of childhood will last for ever.
I get the logbook out of the trunk. ‘1700,’ reads the last entry, from several days ago. ‘Goes into.’ I’ll complete this and bring the logbook up to date, at any rate. I’m still looking for the two-colour pencil, though, when I hear the reassuringly familiar sounds of Keith crawling in along the passageway. My heart leaps gratefully. Now things will be all right.
It’s not Keith, though.
‘I knew you were playing on your own,’ says Barbara Berrill. ‘I’ve got a secret way of seeing you in here.’
I’m so taken aback by the outrage she’s committing that I can’t speak. She sits on the ground with her arms round her knees, smiling her big mocking smile, making herself entirely at home. She’s wearing her school frock with the puffy sleeves, and her school purse slung across her chest. The purse is made of bobbly blue leather, and closed with a shiny blue popper. There’s something girlishly self-satisfied about the bobbliness of the leather and the shininess of the popper that offends me almost as much as her intrusion.
‘No one’s allowed in here!’ I manage to cry at last. ‘Only me and Keith!’
She goes on sitting and smiling. ‘You didn’t see me watching you, did you?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘Look, strangers can’t come in here. This is private.’
‘No, it isn’t. It’s Miss Durrant’s garden, and she’s dead. Anyone can come in here.’
‘Can’t you read?’ I point to the warning she’s just crawled past.
She turns round to look. ‘What – “privet”?’
‘“Private”.’
‘It says “privet”.’
I cringe with shame on Keith’s behalf. ‘It says “private”,’ I insist lumpishly.
‘No, it doesn’t. And it’s stupid to go putting up a sign saying it’s privet, when anyone can see it’s privet.’
‘
You’re
being stupid, saying things that don’t mean anything.’
‘What – “privet”?’ she says. She rests her chin on her knees, and gazes at me. She’s just realised that my ignorance goes deeper than a matter of spelling. At once I’m on my guard. ‘Privet’ does mean something, I realise.
‘You mean you don’t know what privet is?’ she says softly.
‘Of course I do,’ I say scornfully. And I do, just from the way she asked me. Or at any rate I know that it must be one of those things like bosoms and sheenies that ambush you when you least expect it, so that you suddenly find yourself surrounded by jeering enemies who know what they are when you don’t.
Privet
, yes … At the back of my mind now I have a dim, shameful recollection of something half-heard and half-understood.
‘You don’t know!’ she taunts.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘What is it, then?’
‘I’m not telling you.’
I’m not telling her because my faint recollection has hardened into certainty. I know perfectly well what privets are. They’re the secret little sheds they have behind the Cottages in the Lanes – lavatories of some sort, and of some particularly disgusting sort that’s full of germs, and that I’m not going to get involved in talking about.
She giggles. ‘Your face has gone all squidgy,’ she says.
I say nothing. ‘Squidgy’ is a girl’s word that I shouldn’t condescend to respond to.
‘It’s because you’re telling fibs,’ she teases. ‘You
don’t
know.’
‘Look, just go away, will you?’
I glance in the direction of Keith’s house. At any moment he’s going to come down the garden path … cross over the road … come crawling along the tunnel … and find our private place full of Barbara Berrill in her school purse, with her school skirt tucked primly over her hunched-up knees, and her knickers on display beneath. He won’t blame
her
, of course, or even speak to her, any more than his father ever blames me or speaks to me. He’ll hold me responsible for her, just as his father holds him responsible for me. He’ll catch my eye and smile that little mocking smile of his. I think of the sharpened bayonet, locked away inside the trunk beside me, waiting for Keith to draw it across my throat to punish any breach of my oath of secrecy.
Barbara Berrill somehow follows the bearing of my thoughts. ‘What’s in that tin box?’ she asks.
‘Nothing.’
‘It’s got a padlock on it. Have you got secret things in there?’
I glance in the direction of Keith’s house again. She turns to see what I’m looking at, then turns back and smiles that mocking smile of her own, because she’s understood what’s worrying me. I seem to be trapped between those two smiles – this one so large and unruly, that one so small and discreet, and yet as sharp as the edge of a sharpened blade.
‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘I’ll go away as soon as he comes.’
She continues to sit there, hugging her knees, and looking at me speculatively. But now she’s tucked her chin down into the tautened material of the dress, and I can’t see whether she’s still smiling or not. Below the hem of the dress the fine golden hairs on the brown skin of her legs catch a little of the evening light.
‘Is Keith your best friend?’ she says softly. ‘Your really
really
best friend?’
I say nothing. I’m no more prepared to talk to Barbara Berrill about Keith than I am about bosoms and privets.
‘Why do you like him when he’s so horrible?’
I go on looking at Keith’s house.
‘He’s so stuck-up. Everyone except you really hates him.’
She’s being spiteful just because she knows he doesn’t like her. All the same, I can feel the words ‘horrible’ and ‘hates him’ taking hold somewhere inside me like germs, in spite of myself, and I know the infection from them will gradually creep through me like the sour dullness of a low fever.
She knows from my silence that she’s gone too far. ‘Shall I tell you who
my
best friend is?’ she says, her voice soft again, trying to make up. ‘My
really
really best friend?’
I keep my eyes doggedly fixed on Keith’s house. Something’s happening there. Someone’s coming down the garden path and opening the gate. It’s not Keith, though. It’s his mother.
‘I’ll only tell you if you tell me something secret back,’ says Barbara Berrill.
Keith’s mother walks unhurriedly down the street. No shopping basket, no letters. I know that Barbara Berrill’s turned to look at her as well. She disappears into Auntie Dee’s house.
‘She’s always going there,’ says Barbara Berrill. ‘Funny having your relations living just down the road, and going to see them all the time.’
For some reason the picture of the box that had contained the Gamages croquet set comes into my head – and another one, too, that’s been struggling to surface for some time now: the rusting croquet hoops almost lost in the grass on Auntie Dee’s back lawn. Yes – Auntie Dee
is
involved in some way.
Keith’s mother re-emerges almost at once. The shopping basket is on her arm once again.
Something brushing against my shoulder makes me glance round. It’s the curled end of Barbara Berrill’s hair. She’s crouching next to me, also watching.
‘She’s always doing Mrs Tracey’s shopping for her,’ she murmurs.
I watch in growing agony as Keith’s mother walks unhurriedly away into the evening sun, towards the end of the street. I should be out there after her, watching from the corner as she enters the tunnel, from the near end of the tunnel as she reaches the far end … But how can I, when I’m being watched myself?
‘Funny going shopping in the evening, though,’ says Barbara Berrill. ‘When all the shops are shut.’
‘She’s a German spy,’ I explain.
No, I don’t say the words. Do I? They’re filling my head, struggling to burst out of me and quench that mocking smile for ever in astonishment. But I don’t actually say the words. I don’t think I actually say them.