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Spies: A Novel
Spies: A Novel
Spies: A Novel
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Spies: A Novel

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

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From the bestselling author of Headlong, a mesmerizing novel about secrecy, imagination, and a child's game turned deadly earnest

The sudden trace of a disturbing, forgotten aroma compels Stephen Wheatley to return to the site of a dimly remembered but troubling childhood summer in wartime London. As he pieces together his scattered images, we are brought back to a quiet, suburan street where two boys, Keith and his sidekick-Stephen-are engaged in their own version of the war effort: spying on the neighbors, recording their movements, ferreting out their secrets.

But when Keith utters six shocking words, the boys' game of espionage takes a sinister and unintended turn. A wife's simple errands and a family's ordinary rituals-once the focus of childish speculation-become the tragic elements of adult catastrophe.

In gripping prose, charged with emotional intensity, Spies reaches into the moral confusion of youth to reveal a reality filled with deceptions and betrayals, where the bonds of friendship, marriage, and family are unravelled by cowardice and erotic desire. Master illusionist Michael Frayn powerfully demonstrates, yet again, that what appears to be happening in front of our eyes often turns out to be something we can't see at all.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 18, 2003
ISBN9781466822580
Spies: A Novel
Author

Michael Frayn

Michael Frayn is the author of ten novels, including the bestselling Headlong, which was a New York Times Editors' Choice selection and a Booker Prize finalist, and Spies, which received the Whitbread Novel Award. He has also written a memoir, My Father's Fortune, and fifteen plays, among them Noises Off and Copenhagen, which won three Tony Awards. He lives just south of London.

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Reviews for Spies

Rating: 3.676781061741425 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

379 ratings26 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I adored this. The writing was very powerful, it brought the story to life - I felt I could actually see, hear & smell the surroundings. The characters were strong, the story unwound at a great pace & it captured that strange place between childhood & teenage years really well. I figured out what the mother was up to fairly early on, but that didn't detract from the story.

    Having said all that, I wasn't too keen on the ending...it seemed a little rushed. But its definitely a keeper for the bookshelf.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Excellent.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a strangely compelling book written as an older man remembering events when he was a young boy during the war. He and a friend misinterpret adult behaviour, well actually almost fantasize about it. They get sucked into the adult world without understanding what is going on at all. The evocation of childhood and the times is excellent and the twist at the end unexpected.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I noted that this book is now on A-level English Literature reading list yet I had never heard of it which rather piqued my interest so decided to give it a go.Stephen Wheatley is an old man living in a foreign country when a smell rekindles some long buried memories so he decides to revisit his old childhood home back in the UK. During WWII Stephen and his best friend Keith decide to spy on Keith's mother whom they believe is a German spy. It is pretty obvious that she is not an enemy agent but does have secrets which she does not want revealed and it is also obvious,despite another a neighbouring child who is spying on Stephen and Keith that it is not a case of simple marital infidelity.In many respects this is a simple tale of childhood reminiscences but it is also a coming of age story that peoples private and public personas are not always the same. The author uses smells and senses as triggers as these are more reliable than emotions alone.The boys' ages are not even hinted at until very near the end and the first and third person are often used in the same sentence so that the memories belong to the young Stephen rather than the old one which is well conceived. However on the whole the book failed to really grab me and I found it rather ponderous at times. A good read but nothing special for me.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    The second Frayn book I've tried and failed to read. It's likely the first one prejudiced me against this, despite assurances from my family that it's good. I really couldn't get into it. The style seemed unnecessarily wordy and somewhat pretentious, but wasn't satisfying enough in itself to make it interesting. There was an early irritating touch in the protagonist finding out the name of a plant and refusing to divulge it to the reader, presumably an attempt to seem either interesting or mysterious, and achieving neither. After a prologue that was seemed as pointless as prologues usually seem, Frayn moved on to depicting the slightly unsatisfactory childhood of the protagonist through his own recollections. Deducing from the first few pages that the protagonist was likely to be miserable, his affluent older friend domineering, that nothing particularly fun seemed likely to happen, that the style grated on me, and - in short - that it read like a literary novel rather than a story of childhood adventure, I decided it wasn't worth my time.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    It may be that I dislike this book because it was forced on me, or it could be that I simply could not even like the protagonist, I'm not sure.

    I usually love war fiction, no matter where it's set, but this just didn't do it for me.

    It was like reading a babbling eight year-old's story that he'd just made up, and I get a headache just thinking about it. It didn't flow right for me.

    I now can't walk past a privet hedge without thinking of this bloody book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I feel I should have enjoyed this more than I did. I am not sure I really bought the idea that Uncle Peter was hiding in the cellars on the other side of the railway underpass. Sorry.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    You wouldn't think that a story about two boys at play could turn into such a nail-biter, especially when neither child is ever in any real danger. Yet Michael Frayn's 2002 novel "Spies" reads like a thriller.Certain odors can take us back to faraway places and long-ago times, and it is a smell that causes an old man, Stephen Wheatley, to remember a particular summer during World War II when he was growing up in a new neighborhood in London. Stephen is a quiet boy, preyed on by bullies, whose only friend is Keith, also a loner. In their relationship, Keith is always the leader, Stephen always the follower. Keith invents the fanciful games they play. One day Keith announces, "My mother is a German spy." And so the boys, doing their patriotic duty, closely observe Keith's mother to try to learn her secrets.It turns out that his mother, if perhaps not a spy, nevertheless does have secrets, and what the boys discover shakes up their lives and the lives of others in the neighborhood. Frayn is marvelous writer, and "Spies" really is hard to put down.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I definitely expected something different from the title. This is seemingly a story about growing up in England during WWII, a story about two boys, seemingly friends, with big imaginations. One day, one boy tells the other boy that his mom is a German spy. And that starts a series of events that have very unpredictable outcomes. Very good book.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I liked the innocence of the narrator's viewpoint and the subtle way that the unpleasantries of that time were covered but not dwelt upon leaving the reader to fill in the pieces.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This coming of age story set in WW2 England, was well written and suspenseful. Well developed and sympathetic characters. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In this 2002 Whitbread winner, an elderly man returns to the street in suburban London where he grew up during World War II. As he wanders the street, he relives one of the seminal events of his childhood.As a boy, he was somewhat of a loner, but became friends with Keith, the boy across the street, who had similar problems fitting in. One day Keith says six words that will irrevocably change his life: 'My mother is a German spy.' The boys begin to monitor Keith's mother's movements, and indeed they find a lot of strange and inexplicable things going on. Their childish game, however, quickly develops into something much more sinister. The author brilliantly evokes the sensibility and reasoning of an imaginative ten year old boy. In reading the book, we are truly returned to a world of childhood where the world of adults is puzzling and illogical.Spies is similar to Atonement in that both explore the consequences of a child's misinterpretation of adult actions. The narrator in both books is the child looking back at these actions from the distance and wisdom of old age, trying to reconcile his/her childhood self with the person they have become. It's been a while since I read Atonement, but I think I liked Spies more than Atonement. It succeeds, where Atonement did not, in making a child's world very real to me.This book was both humorous and tragic and I highly recommend it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It was an easy read. The second half more compelling than the first.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An elderly man goes back to the English village of his childhood and looks back at events during WWII. He recounts and examines his friendship with Keith, another boy in the village and an only child (and he is basically Keith's only friend). Everything changes when one day Keith announces his mother is a German spy.This is a story that plays with perspective. It was interesting how the narrator sometimes referred to his childhood self in the 3rd person - distancing himself, examining this stranger's actions, looking back in puzzlement or dismay at who this person was. Other times he tells the story in the 1st person - bringing the reader in to the immediacy and urgency of the events, the importance that the boys gave them at the time, but also to keep the reader from fully knowing what is really going on (though we clearly know more than the boys). Frayn creates a tense atmosphere and mounting dread about what the truth behind the boys' suspicions is. He takes a fun child's game of spying on and tailing neighbors and makes it ominous, laden with layers & real dangers that the narrator only understands better in his adulthood. At the same time, he brings you in to his frustrations - those moments as a child when you want to do the right thing (or something other than what you actually do) but find yourself doing something else. Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Keith thinks that his family has been infiltrated by German spies, and he enlists the help of his friend Stephen to find evidence of the treachery. It's the second world war, and the two young boys discover that sometimes a game can have serious consequences.Frayn's novel explores that time in many literary characters' lives when they go from childhood to the first beginnings of adulthood; I say literary characters, because I don't know that many people who go through such a definable switch.'Spies' is also concerned with sights and smells in much the same way that 'The Virgin Suicides' is; and I found both books to be heavier than they needed to be, and also longer. I think 'Spies' would have worked better if it had been about fifty pages shorter, more like 'Cider with Rosie', for instance.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A clever creation of a story from a child's perspective. It is an adventure but the significant element is the unfolding of childhood into adulthood. How does a child slowly come to understand the world of adults? What makes them realise that actually they aren't so different from themselves after all.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    As the novel opens, the narrator, Stephen, returns in his old age to the neighborhood where he grew up during WWII England. Wandering around the old streets, certain sights, sounds and smells (especially the sweet smell of the flowers on the privet hedge) conjure up Stephen the boy, and what happened to him many years ago during his childhood. While the memories are slowly unfurled, Stephen the man often adds in his own questions about what Stephen the boy could and should have understood (or not) about what was happening at the time. What Stephen the man looks back on is a certain episode of his youth, when his friend Keith Hayward made the announcement that his mother was a German spy. He based his claim on observations he made about his mother's movements around the neighborhood. His bright idea was to set up surveillance so that he and Stephen could come up with proof of this allegation, and Stephen, who wanted so desperately to fit into Keith's world, went along with the plan. Yet, so many times what children see and think is actually a misinterpretation of what's really going on in the often-incomprehensible world of adults, and Keith and Stephen start down a path which leads to some tragic consequences. This book has been criticized by some readers for being too slow, but don't believe it. The author spends a lot of time placing the reader into Stephen the boy's neighborhood, complete with smells and other memory triggers, and this basis of place and time is very important. What really makes this book, though, are the characters. There's Stephen, of course, who is of "inferior" class to his friend Keith. Stephen understands that to remain Keith's friend, there are certain unwritten and unspoken rules that he has to follow. Keith is an odd boy, a bullying type who lives with his unemotional, stiff upper-lip, everything-in-its-place kind of father and a mother who is outwardly very charming but whose inner life is a question mark. Spies is not a passive read, meaning that a great deal of reader involvement is necessary, but when you've finished it, you'll want to read it again.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A simple, wartime reminiscence of the innocent childish betrayal of a family secret. This short book is so spot-on atmospheric that I can forgive its presenting simplicity and brevity. I'm usually not a big fan of narrative delivered through the eyes of a child, but this one so accurately captures the war years in suburban Britain that it fully redeems the novel for me. An entertaining short read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I enjoyed this book. The closely observed childhood world of Stephen Wheatley and his idol Keith was immediate and convincing, and the fairly gentle pace of the sad, inevitable story of the adults was cleverly offset against the urgency of Stephen's fevered imagination and burgeoning adolescent feelings. The world seen through a magnifying glass and felt with all the anguished helplessness of a child.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Opening with narrator Stephen Wheatley smelling a vaguely unpleasant smell that triggers the memory of a fateful time in his childhood, this story tells of boys Keith and Stephen, their friendship and what their curiousity during WWII cost them and others. As Stephen travels back to the Close he lived on during the war years, he remembers Keith as being the driving force behind all that the two boys did together and the catalyst for their fateful game of spying on Keith's mother whom Keith avers is a German spy. The two boys hide out in a thick privet bush, thinking they are unobserved, trying to mark Mrs. Hayward's comings and goings, and eventually tailing her as best they can. Older narrator Stephen interjects occasionally and the reader is comfortably sure that he or she knows more than young Stephen so when the denouement occurs, it is a somewhat unexpected twist (although we do know it a step ahead of Stephen). It is what our narrator casually reveals after the story of the imagination of young boys that somehow shocks the reader even more.Frayn builds tension slowly and inexorably throughout the narrative, skillfully adding a slight menace to every action observed or taken. As the reader, you are addressed in the second person, as if older Stephen is narrating his story directly to you and this technique serves to make you a confidante, an insider in the novel itself. Stephen is definitely a more sympathetic character than Keith, not surprising given that Stephen is our narrator. But Frayn also reveals enough about Keith for the reader to understand and feel somewhat sorry for the stoic, rather condescending and unpleasant boy he is. A remarkably surprising book, this is one that will probably stay with me for quite a while thanks both to an unusual plot and to the masterful writing although I'm still not sure I particularly liked it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The story begins with an old man returning to a place from his childhood and beginning to reminisce, and then moves into a narrative of an episode in that childhood, in England during the second world war. A mixture of childish misunderstanding and childhood games turns out to have consequences that extend to the lives of both children and adults.The story moves deftly between the voice of the child, and its misunderstanding of what is taking place around it, the voice of an impersonal reliable narrator, and that of the adult reflecting on the child's story: not always remembering things correctly, and not always sure quite what his childhood self knew or understood at the time. This is reflected somewhat in what the reader knows and understands. Although we know more than the child does about what they are seeing, we still have to make guesses about much of it until all is finally explained in the novel's final pages.There are aspects of this book which are excellent: the portrayal of children's interaction with adults and with the space around them, and their ability to fail to see things which they don't explicitly decide to observe. But I found some aspects of the story didn't feel true to life. The awkward conversations between adult and child in which not much information passes between them do happen, but things are rarely left like that. In that respect, it wasn't a very satisfactory read. Interesting as it is, and as masterful as some of the writing is, I was mildly surprised by the end to realise that I was reading a winner of the Whitbread award.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Brilliant evocation of childhood. With compassionate insight into the mind and morality of a young lad a tale is unfolded steadily revealing the hidden life on a very normal road during WWII. There is real suspense in this engaging and totally believable story. A good read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An interesting novel although not Frayn's strongest writing.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Excellent. Short but immensely compelling and atmospheric. If you need a good page turner that also requires some thought I recommend this. It stayed in my mind for a long time after I'd finished it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A man called Stephen travels down memory lane, remembering his childhood in London during the Great War. He and his friend, Keith, lived out many adventures, their imaginations coming alive. Upon his friend’s words that his friend’s mother was a German spy, the two boys set out to spy on her. What Stephen discovers will change the rest of his life. The book has a slow start. Many times I doubted that I would like the book, however, by the end, I was glad I stuck to it. It’s a touching story about the innocence of a child who is put into a situation no child belonged in. His fear and confusion was real throughout the book, and perhaps the most honest account of someone in his shoes. His fear and confusion was real throughout the book, and perhaps the most honest account of someone in his shoes. He was an ordinary boy in extraordinary circumstances.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    A moving, intelligent and intriguing story of a wartime childhood in suburban Britain

Book preview

Spies - Michael Frayn

1

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?"

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 something 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-organized 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.

2

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 midafternoon main road, left toward 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 hack 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 homogenized 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 asphalt and cars. More cars queue silently along the curb. 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 vapor trails. There were the upraised fingers of the searchlights at night and the immense colored 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 rematerializing 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 toward 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 long 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 semidetached 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 cement, and the iron control exercised over its front garden by paving stones and impersonal-looking ground cover. Beneath the clean smoothness of the cement I can almost see the old cracked and watermarked gray. 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 then 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 gray flannel school shirt hanging out of the too long gray 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 gray—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 gray because he’s entirely monochrome, and he’s monochrome because this is how I recognize 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 silvery 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 gray 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 the 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 gray flannel shirt and gray flannel shorts. His shirt, though, is not too short, his shorts are not too long. His gray 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, shoehorns, and buttonhooks hanging from it, and a rack for sticks and umbrellas. Then, as you went inside, dark oak paneling, with two matching watercolors 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

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