Sussex, 2004

By Andrea Johnson

As I sat under the ancient copper beech, reading "The Game," Laurie R. King's latest novel about my mother and father, I knew I had much cause for rejoicing. But my spirit was heavy.

I hadn't been sure I could come here again. My husband's death last year had made of my heart an echoing chamber where Gabe used to reside. How did my mother survive after my father's death? She too must have felt this gnawing ache, this confusion without her soul mate. I had missed my father too, but I didn't fully appreciate her loss until Gabe died. In those first months after the funeral, this cottage where we enjoyed so many holidays with my mother, our sons and grandchildren, provoked pain instead of peace.

After Gabe's death, I saw ghosts everywhere. They beckoned me to the other side of reality and I felt my own death uncomfortably near whenever I passed over the threshold of the cottage. Every time I entered the room that had been my father's laboratory I saw my father, wearing his stained white lab coat, bent over his bubbling, noxious chemical concoctions like a mad scientist. In Mary Russell's library, I envisioned my mother in one of her shabby chairs, books and papers surrounding her like the aftermath of a hurricane. When in this state, she was oblivious to anything but the printed page. I had found her like this thirteen years before. The shade of my husband too appeared. I seemed to see him at the top of the stairs late at night, telling me I looked tired and it was time I came to bed.

I tried to reject these maudlin impressions, which indeed my parents would have scoffed at. My mother died in her chair, surrounded by her books, with a smile on her face. It was precisely the death she would have chosen. Her favorite portrait of my father was propped against the lamp on the end table by her chair. I like to believe his face was the last thing she saw. Gabe died in the cottage garden as he mowed the lawn. There was no pain, the doctors assured me. No time for fear.

Now the cottage is a place of summertime frolics and children's laughter once again. I resisted the ghosts and came here for our annual summer holiday. I had no desire to leave it all yet, truly, but I was tired indeed. I thought that I could do worse than to pass away in this chair, my ears echoing with the laughter of my great-grandchildren.

"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight!" I heard little Miss Mary Wimsey count shrilly, as running footsteps exploded in my ears like a herd of stampeding American bison. "I'm going to find you, Peter."

"You're 'sposed to count to ten," a high, reedy voice admonished her from its hiding place. I deduced that he was behind a lilac bush at the back of the garden. Mary, nobody's fool, had also deduced this from the readily available evidence.

"Nine, TEN!" she said, as she tiptoed toward the east, her waist-length strawberry blond hair flowing behind her like Rapunzel's mane. I watched with interest as she parted the branches and scattered blossoms about them. "Ha! Ha! I found you, I found you..."

Four-year-old Peter emerged from the bush, his pale blond hair crowned with lilacs.

"How did you find me?" he grumbled.

Mary, aged five, set both hands on her hips, lifted a brow, and grinned at her brother.

"It's elementary, my dear Peter," she said provokingly.

"That's not funny," he protested.

Mary giggled.

"Yes, it is," she said.

"You hide," Peter said. "I'll find you."

"No, you won't, because I'll pick a better hiding place," Mary assured him.

I thought for a moment of warning their nanny. My great-grandchildren were no ordinary preschoolers. They were quite likely to find a hiding place so good that neither adult nor child would find them for the rest of the afternoon. But why spoil their fun, or their early experiments in the family business of detection?

The youngsters ran out of earshot. I laughed and returned to the wicker chair where I had left my book. The woman in the colorful Oriental-inspired dressing gown on the cover of "The Game" didn't look exactly like my mother. However, had she been an actress, I would have picked her to play my mother in a movie version of the book. She was very much my mother's "type."

I heard adult footsteps behind me and spoke without turning my head.

"Your young hellions are playing hide and seek," I told their mother. "I suspect they will soon discover the attic."

"As long as they're not near the cliffs," my granddaughter Amira said as she sat in the wicker chair opposite mine.

"Oh, no, they've gone nowhere near the Forbidden Land," I assured her.

The children had been admonished sternly to stay away from areas that could do them harm: the cliffs and the stretch of land where bees hovered nearly 90 years after a beekeeper met his apprentice. We did not know whether any of the children were allergic to bee stings, but such allergies were known to occur in my husband's family.

Amira looked at the book and raised a reddish-blonde brow.

"Have you ever revealed your identity to her?" she asked.

I shook my head and smiled.

"I think she has enjoyed our cat and mouse game as much as I have these past years," I said. "Telling her my identity might spoil it for her."

Amira laughed.

"I wonder if she ever figured out how Felix and I got the punt on the Thames," Amira said, her eyes sparkling with mischief.

Amira and her whimsical beau had been vastly inspired by my attempts to intrigue Laurie R. King with the mysterious lives of my parents. More than ten years before, they had singlehandedly created the mystery of the Oxford Punt. I suspected the mystery bedeviled the police and Ms. King to this day.

"It truly was a spark of genius," I said appreciatively. "I would never have thought of your method of transferring my parents' fingerprints to the sides of the punt. And the old clothes from your great-grandmother's closet, folded so neatly on the cushions? Brilliant."

Amira shrugged modestly.

"It seemed the least I could do for the cause," she said. Then she burst out laughing.

"Your talents have been wasted," I said. "Have you given more thought to MI-5's offer?"

"No," Amira said quietly and firmly. "I am an Oxford scholar. I'm a wife and mother. Not a spook. I don't want to do analysis for them, Grandmama."

"A woman can do more than one thing," I said, regretting her rejection of the family business. "In this post 9/11 world, your knowledge of the Middle East and your affinity for languages would be of particular value."

Amira shook her head.

"I'd prefer to use my talents to further academic knowledge, not to help my government to wage war," she said. "Don't try to recruit me."

"Your Gram may well have agreed with you," I said softly, thinking of my mother's hatred of war. World War II and the Holocaust had infuriated me and fired my enthusiasm for Israel. Never again would my people be victims, I said in 1948.

War had affected my mother in ways I still wasn't certain I understood. Her personal losses had been greater than mine to begin with; her connection to Palestine complex. She had felt differently than I had.

"YOU miss the Game," Amira said, almost accusingly.

I thought about this for a moment. Gabe and I had spent much of our adult lives in the service of the agency that developed into MI-5. I had reveled in the adrenaline rush, in the thrill of the chase, of living by my wits. I had two sons, and I loved them well, but they spent much of their time in boarding schools or with their grandmother while their father and I chased across the globe.

We never told our families precisely what we did or whom our work impacted. For many years we were engaged in behind the scenes work in Jordan, in Egypt, in Syria, in Israel. I'd expected to lose my husband to a terrorist bomb, or to see him taken hostage, not to lose him to a heart attack. I had expected to die violently myself, not to idle away my days in a rocking chair.

Did I miss the Game? I had witnessed a great many terrible things in the playing of it. I had done my best, but my best had not prevented wars or terrorist attacks or broken peace treaties, Palestinian suicide bombings or Israeli cruelty against Palestinians. This life had swallowed my son, my reckless, courageous Michael, who had followed us into our alluring world. Even now he was somewhere in Afghanistan, doing work that was officially classified, though I could hazard a guess as to what it was. His wife and his young son Jonathan missed Michael dearly and feared the knock on the door and the news it might bring.

Amira's father Gabriel, now the Duke of Beauville, was made of more cautious, stable, English stock. He and her brother Adrian would carry on the family line through the twenty-first century and safeguard Justice Hall until it was passed down to a new generation. Amira had inherited genius and a passion for the Middle East, but something in her recoiled in horror from it as well.

Perhaps she was wise to do so. The Middle East I had fallen in love with as a young woman was a place of horror and devastation, though still possessed of a terrible beauty.

"Don't you miss it?" Amira said.

I smiled wryly.

"Yes and no. I am grateful for the time with my family, but the adrenaline rush is as powerful an addiction as cocaine or heroin," I acknowledged. "And that was why my father sought out replacements for it when he was bored. I think I understand him a little better now, now that I am old. Ah, Amira, I don't miss the Game. I miss your grandfather."

I felt Amira rise and touch my shoulder. Her gray eyes were bright with sympathy.

"We love you," she said. "Does that help? Even a little?"

"Yes," I said, squeezing her hand. "More than you know. I suppose I just feel old and tired."

The sound of a toddler in full throated tantrum, screaming "I want it! I want it!" interrupted us. I turned and saw Amira's husband, Felix Wimsey, approach with his youngest daughter struggling in his arms.

"An aged man is but a paltry thing/a tattered coat upon a stick," he chanted, even as he dumped his youngest onto her mother's lap. "Unless soul clap its hands and sing and louder sing/for every tatter in its mortal dress."

Amira tickled little Iris and ruffled her pale blonde head. Eventually the tears turned into guffaws and the gray eyes shone with mirth instead of irritation.

Her grandfather's lungs, I thought, admiring their strength. She laughed as loudly as she cried.

"Stop tickling," Iris pleaded. "Put me down. I want to play hide and seek."

Amira let her daughter slide off her lap and watched as she ran towards the house on sturdy little legs.

"What was it she wanted?" I inquired.

"Hmmm," Felix said. "Any number of impossible things, all of which she shall have forgotten by breakfast."

I smiled. Impossibly, I felt the reawakening of energy, of happiness, of the urge to live on and to see how Iris and her siblings developed.

"What was that you were quoting from, my beautiful?" Amira asked Felix. "Was it Yeats?"

"It was indeed," Felix said, plopping himself on the grass. He lifted Amira's bare feet into his lap and began to massage her pink-painted toes. She practically purred under his clever hands. They made a pretty picture in the bright morning light, he with his sharp-featured, cat-like face and her with her rosy hair unbound and carelessly arranged about her shoulders.

"Sailing to Byzantium," Felix said.

He looked straight at me.

"Sing, Grandmama-in-law. Sing for every tatter in your mortal dress. All of it has made you beautiful."

For a moment only a moment I saw the ghosts of my father and my mother staring out of his face.

"What is this, Judith? Moping about when there is work to be done?" my father drawled. "Our people need you, Judith," my mother said, in her British tones with the wisp of San Francisco, California. I twisted my wedding band around my finger. "I am with you, love," Gabe whispered in my head. "Always."

Of course, I thought. Of course they are all with me. They are not calling me to the other side. They are calling on me to live. How could I have thought I was alone?

I laughed a little. Felix and Amira looked at me quizzically.

"You are a true poet and a true grandson of Lord Peter Wimsey, Felix," I told Amira's husband.

I collected my book and rose from my chair.

"I believe I will join the children in their game of hide and seek," I said.