Frayn Spies

With IGCSE and A Level study guide
Education Auflage
ISBN: 978-0-571-33582-4
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten

Reihe: Faber Educational Editions

Designed to meet the requirements for students at IGCSE and A level, this accessible educational edition offers the complete text of Spies with a comprehensive study guide. Highlights of Andrew Bruff's guide include: - detailed analyses of character, setting and theme;- close examination of the novel's plot, structure and narrative techniques;- key quotations and activities both for the student working alone and in the classroom. In the quiet cul-de-sac where Keith and Stephen live the only immediate signs of the Second World War are the blackout at night and a single random bomb site. But the two boys start to suspect all is not as it seems when one day Keith announces a disconcerting discovery: the Germans have infiltrated his own family. And when the secret underground world they have dreamed up emerges from the shadows they find themselves engulfed in mysteries far deeper and more painful than they had bargained for.

Michael Frayn was born in London in 1933 and began his career as a journalist on the Guardian and the Observer. His novels include Towards the End of the Morning, Headlong, Spies and Skios. His seventeen plays range from Noises Off, recently chosen as one of the nation's three favourite plays, to Copenhagen, which won the 1998 Evening Standard Award for Best Play of the Year and the 2000 Tony Award for Best Play. He is married to the writer Claire Tomalin.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Frayn, Michael

Leseproben

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 mid-afternoon main road, left towards the muddled little parade of shops, and left again by the letter box into the long, straight, familiar avenue. The main road’s full of fussy new traffic arrangements, the shops have impersonal new commercial names and frontages, and the stringy prunus saplings I remember along the verges of the avenue are now wise and dignified trees. But when I turn the corner once again, off the avenue into the Close …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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