The Spy Game Read Online Free PDF

that is known for sure, so much confused. The past seems sometimes mutable as the present, changing before my eyes.
     I had to learn to fix it about a constant, at least something near a constant. The house we lived in, that was fixed. Every
     piece of it I used to go over and fix about myself. For years I did this, when I was at school and again later, in other places
     after I had moved away. I would take myself around the house and the garden in my mind before I went to sleep: into the hall,
     through open doors and up the stairs and around the upstairs rooms.
    To my own room, with a picture of a rider on the wall and the tiny glass animals that I collected on the shelves. Peter's
     room, my father's with the yellow bedspread, the spare room that was just that, spare, with white airy emptiness, the little
     room where the ironing was done that had a round window where I used to hide away and read.
    Downstairs then, and out of the French windows into the garden.
    When we got home it was just the three of us. The house told us that, it was so clean and neat; the letters on the sideboard
     in the hall, all the loose papers and magazines in piles at the corners of the tables. Margaret must have come every day even
     though we were gone, polished the furniture and the silver and the brass handles on the doors, and left the smell of it behind
     her. Tidied and hoovered and dusted and polished, and erased. Something had been erased from the house, and so completely
     that I did not see at first that it was the presence of my mother. Her coat gone from its hook and with it her shoes, the
     fur-lined boots that she wore to go out in the cold. Her bag and her diary that she kept in the kitchen. Jars and bottles
     from the bathroom. From every room, her touch: the arrangements of things, the positions of cushions and ashtrays; the sense
     that she had been there.
    Yet this was more than Margaret could have done alone. I knew that someone must have been there with her, if not my father
     then Mrs Lacey or someone other who was strange to me. Some cold hands had been through and touched everything, systematically
     identifying, selecting things, taking out her clothes with the soft smell to them, lifting them up, folding them away, clearing
     her dressing table, gathering up the lipsticks and the nail polish and the cotton wool and the compacts, disposing of them,
     while Margaret went stolidly after and breathed on the glass and cleaned away the rings where the little bottles had stood
     and the spilled powder.
    Sometimes when I made a mistake in my schoolwork, my mother used to help rub it out. When I did it myself I left a shadow
     on the page, and sometimes crumpled it or took the surface off the paper. When my mother did it she held the page smooth between
     red-varnished fingertips and rubbed so gently with the other hand that, if the pencil had not been pressed too hard, the paper
     was left white and perfect and good as if it was never written on.
    The house was like that. There were no marks. You had to make an effort to remember where she had been.
    They had rubbed her out.
    The strange thing was that the space which spoke her absence most was not any of the rooms she had lived in, not her bedroom
     even with her dressing table by the window and the stool before it, none of these but my own room. Only there was there a
     sense of her, pressing in. She was in the walls, the curtains, in the dark slit where the cupboard door failed to close. There,
     or about to be there, known, immanent, her voice most of all, about to break through, almost recalled, so that I almost heard
     its tone, its warmth, its accent. And yet the silence held and there were no words. It held and quivered, like a note sung
     too long, until I felt that I could not breathe. I ran, gasping, to my father's room. See: my mother's room had already become
     my father's room. There was his bed and there was space in it. The sheets in the space were cold, but