The Spy Game Read Online Free PDF Page A

the world go out
     of shape.
    'You're going to the sea,' Susan said.
    When the piano tuner finished we saw him go before we turned off the lights, and Mrs Lacey double-locked all the doors. Later
     that same evening my father came and we drove away in the dark.
    I slept in the car. A transient security in sleeping on a journey, in being carried through the night, and when the motion
     stopped, being lifted, wrapped and still curled, and knowing that you were somewhere else and yet not having to open your
     eyes, and being safe and put into bed. When I woke the sea was there before me. I drew back the plaid-patterned curtains from
     a big window, and saw the sea in a straight line in front of the house. There were two beds in the room and Peter was still
     asleep in the other one. It was the room of some boy or boys who we did not know; school photographs of strangers on the chest
     of drawers and a dartboard on the wall.
    The sea was a dull pencil colour with white edges against the shore. I had never come to the seaside in winter before. It
     looked so cold, wide and silent beyond the fastened window. I did not hear it until I went out, soon as breakfast was over.
     I ran ahead of Peter, down the steps from the garden on to the narrow strip of the beach, and low waves came in and foamed
     at my feet, and I ran along that beach and over the wooden groin and along the next, until I came to a fence and a line of
     bare and tattered trees. I stood there and looked across the sea to the long smooth outline of an island. It was clear that
     it was an island because I could see each end of it, and the sea between was still grey, but scaly now that the sun had broken
     through to shine on it.
    We stayed four or five days, long enough to learn that the island was the Isle of Wight and that the rocks that stood out
     in the sea beyond its tip were called the Needles, though they seemed too thick and solid for such a name. The house belonged
     to some people that my father said he had known before, before the war and before my mother, but I did not remember ever having
     heard of them. Henry and Madeleine, they were called. He never said which one of them was his friend, which one had known
     him first; only that they were kind and that their own children were away at school. I learnt to play darts and Peter shot
     a bow and arrows, and we played ping-pong on a table in the garage. One of the days my father and Henry went somewhere dressed
     in suits, and we children were left with Madeleine alone. Madeleine took us out for a walk with her two red setters that bounded
     with streaming hair along the shore.
    * * *
    'Will we go there again, Daddy?'
    'What, to Madeleine's?'
    'I liked it there. I want to go in the summer so I can go in the sea.'
    'Perhaps,' he said. 'If they ask us.'
    We never did. There was no sequential reality to add to this interlude, which came to memory later in disconnected images
     like snapshots or a dream. Later, I was to wonder who Henry and Madeleine were, and if they really did exist, and told myself
     that I would surely find them if only I were to go along the south coast, to sail say from Bournemouth to Southampton, and
     look in along all the shore with the Isle of Wight behind me. Henry and Madeleine I would not know again; they seemed quite
     indistinct; but I was certain that I would recognise the house. A safe house. I had the image of it clear: set just back from
     the beach, not old, probably Thirties, white, parts of the upper storey hung with tiles; wide windows and dormers in the roof
     above; all looking out to the sea. And hydrangeas. I had an image of them by the steps that led up from the sand, steps made
     of broad planks with pale sand scattered across them, and tall blue hydrangea bushes. Yet remembering it afterwards, it seems
     impossible that it could have been so: if we visited the place just that one time in January, then how could I have known
     the colour of the flowers?
    So little