The Whistle Blows

November, 1960

It starts with the whistle of a train, shearing through the cold, thick dusk of a November afternoon. Lily Callington hears it as she digs over her vegetable patch at the bottom of her garden in Muswell Hill. For a second she's startled, because the whistle sounds so close, as if a train is rushing towards her along the disused railway line at the bottom of the garden. She straightens and listens intently, frowning. The whistle goes through her, touching nerves so deep that Lily doesn't even know where they are. The children! They aren't here. She can't see them, touch them, keep them safe —

Stop it, you fool. They are not babies any more. Paul is ten, Sally almost nine. Even Bridget is five. They're at school. What could be safer than a primary school in Muswell Hill? She'll walk down there for three-thirty, and wait in the Infants' playground with the other mothers until the little ones spill out of the doorway. Always, there's a half-second when the appearance of Bridget startles her, as if the daughter in her head doesn't quite match the boisterous schoolchild whom her teacher calls 'a chatterbox'. Lily wants to kneel down and open her arms for Bridget to hurtle into them. She wants to fold herself around the sturdy little body. Of course, she never does. She smiles, and waves, like the other mothers. She smoothes Bridget's dark curls, and asks if she has remembered her PE bag.

They're not babies. She, Lily, is a married woman in her thirties with a house and a job. Her feet are planted in safely mortgaged earth. Lily smiles at herself, a little derisively, as the wind shifts and the noise of the train whistle is carried out of hearing. The train is far away now. She puts her right foot on the shaft of the fork, jiggles the handle slightly and eases the tines deep into heavy clay. Her heart steadies. You should drink less coffee, she tells herself. All those years and still the old panic blazing up in her veins. She looks down at the clods of London clay that cling to the fork. There's three-quarters of the patch left to do, and she likes digging. The soil must be opened up for the winter frosts to work on it. You are standing on your own patch of earth. Your name is Lily Callington. You are in England now.

Giles Holloway hears the train whistle too, as he mooches through Finsbury Park. He's close to the main line and the sound is clear. There it goes, getting up speed for the race to the north.

Giles wears a midnight-blue overcoat which might have been elegant on a more elegant figure, but even the skill of his tailor hasn't been able to overcome Giles's crude bulk of chest, shoulder and belly. In these streets, he and his coat draw second glances. He might be a landlord, in search of a couple more houses to cram with Irish labourers. Giles hears the train whistle, and to him it says, as it always does: Elsewhere. He knows exactly which train he will catch, if ever he needs to disappear. He won't go anywhere near the Channel ports. King's Cross to Newcastle, and then the ferry to Bergen.

Everything that surrounds him is provisional. It won't and can't last: history has already decided that. But it's decades since Giles was introduced to that way of thinking, and, like his overcoat, the cover of such thoughts doesn't quite fit over the weight of what life has done to him – or, to be fair, what he's done to life. From time to time, he stubs his mind against the solidity of this world that history has decided against, as they used to say in secret, smoky, ardent meetings all those years ago. They were so certain then. Nothing had touched them. What they believed was as fresh as a sheet of paper with nothing written on it. Fascism must be defeated, and be replaced by a new and better world.

Of course they had no illusions. They understood that omelettes couldn't be made without breaking eggs. Sacrifice – even the sacrifice of others – was heroic, correctly understood. How they struggled for the correct viewpoint, overcoming the handicap of their class origins and bourgeois culture. Actions that appeared grubby, even furtive, would be revealed in all their clarity once history had swept away the debris of capitalism. For the time being, there must be secrecy. Concealment was an art you had to learn, and then you saw it everywhere, although you'd never suspected its existence until you began to be part of it. Giles remembers Julian Clowde's rather cold, self-satisfied smile as he took stock of Giles and made him understand what was what.

It was passionately exciting, but you never showed it. An inner ring within an inner ring. If you didn't know that the inner ring was there, you saw nothing. It was there in plain sight, but camouflaged. You saw a group of friends on the summer grass by the river, laughing, and you passed on with a quick, ignoble pang because you were not one of them. You had to be beckoned in. Initiated. Julian had beckoned him in. Julian had watched Giles, got to know him, tested him as you test an inner tube in a bowl of water to see where the puncture is. Giles had had a lot to learn. First of all, he had to learn to become silent about his opinions. He became humorous about his young self and its ludicrous pronouncements on politics. Now he'd grown up and seen the world as it was. He knew that others were doing the same, and that they wouldn't necessarily even recognise one another for what they were. They had learned everything about concealment in the open.

Julian smoothed Giles's way, and Giles glided into place. Lunches were had in quiet clubs, overtures were made and accepted, and there you were, old boy, lodged in position, vouched for by men who had the ear of everyone who mattered. Have you come across Giles Holloway? I'd like you to meet him.

There you were, and no one knew what you were. Giles was a pirate then, flying his own flag under the very bows of the great ship of state. He'd always rather fancied that notion. And then there was the war.

Nineteen forty-seven. Back to London. Back to the Admiralty and back under Julian's wing. Older now, though. The years were going by. On it all went: those documents, those damned dingy documents, on and on. The sails of Giles's little ship hung limp.

Here he is still, after all those years. On goes the world, blithe and satisfied with itself. London is more grey and massive than ever, and it's tiered with chaps whose opinion of Giles Holloway is no longer as sanguine as it once...