Enigma (15 page)

Three years says Jerico, she shouldn’t worry, it’ll get
better.

Ah she says, that’s easy for him to say, but surely he does
something interesting?

Not really he says, but then he thinks that makes him sound
boring, so he adds: “Well, quite interesting, I suppose.”

In truth he’s finding it hard to keep up his end of the
conversation. It’s distracting enough merely to walk alongside her.
They lapse into silence.

There’s a noticeboard close to the main gate advertising a
performance of Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer by the Bletchley Park
Music Society. “Oh, now look at that,” she says, “I adore Bach”, to
which Jericho replies with genuine enthusiasm, that Bach is his
favourite composer. Grateful at last to have found something to
talk about, he launches into a long dissertation about the
Musikalisches Opfer’s six-part fugue, which Bach is supposed to
have improvised on the spot for King Frederick the Great, a feat
equivalent to playing and winning sixty games of blindfold chess
simultaneously. Perhaps she knows that Bach’s dedication to the
King—Regis lussu Cantio et Reliqua Canonica Arte Resoluta—rather
interestingly yields the acrostic RICERCAR, meaning’to seek’?

No, oddly enough, she doesn’t know that.

This increasingly desperate monologue carries them as far as the
huts where they both stop and, after another awkward pause,
introduce themselves. She offers him her hand—her grip is warm and
firm, but her nails are a shock: painfully bitten back, almost to
the quick. Her surname is Romilly. Claire Romilly. It has a
pleasant ring. Claire Romilly. He wishes her a merry Christmas and
turns away but she calls him back. She hopes he won’t think it too
fresh of her, but would he like to go with her to the concert?

He isn’t sure, he doesn’t know…

She writes down the date and time just above The Times
crossword—27 December at 8.15—and thrusts it into his hands. She’ll
buy the tickets. She’ll see him there. Please don’t say no.

And before he can think of an excuse, she’s gone. He’s due to be
on shift on the evening of the 27
th
but he doesn’t
know where to find her to tell her he can’t go. And anyway, he
realises, he rather does want to go. So he calls in a favour he’s
owed by Arthur de Brooke and waits outside the assembly hall, and
waits, and waits. Eventually, after everyone else has gone in, and
just when he’s about to give up, she comes running out of the
darkness, smiling her apologies.

The concert is better than he’d hoped. The quintet all work at
the Park and once played professionally. The harpsichordist is
particularly fine. The women in the audience are wearing evening
frocks, the men are wearing suits. Suddenly, and for the first time
he can recall, the war seems a long way away. As the last notes of
the third canon (“per Motum contrarium”) are dying in the air he
risks a glance at Claire only to discover that she is looking at
him. She touches his arm and when the fourth canon (‘per
Augmentationem, contrario Motu’) begins, he is lost.

Afterwards he has to go straight back to the hut: he’s promised
he’d be back before midnight. “Poor Mr Jericho,” she says, “just
like Cinderella…” But at her suggestion they meet again for the
following week’s concert—Chopin—and when that’s over they walk down
the hill to the station to have cocoa in the platform bujfet.

“So,” she says, as he returns from the counter bearing two cups
of brown froth, “how much am I allowed to know about you?”

“Me? Oh, I’m very boring.”

“I don’t think you’re boring at all. In fact, I’ve heard a
rumour you’re rather brilliant.” She lights a cigarette and he
notices again her distinctive way of inhaling, seeming almost to
swallow the smoke, then tilting her head back and breathing it out
through her nostrils. Is this some new fashion, he wonders? “I
suppose you’re married?” she says.

He almost chokes on his cocoa. “Good God, no. I mean, I would
hardly be—”

“Fiancee? Girlfriend?”

“Now you’re teasing me.” He pulls out a handkerchief and dabs at
his chin.

“Brothers? Sisters?”

“No, no.”

“Parents? Even you must have parents.”

“Only one still alive.”

“I’m the same,” she says. “My mother’s dead.”

“How awful for you. I’m sorry. My mother, I must say, is very
much alive.”

And so it goes on, this hitherto untasted pleasure of talking
about oneself. Her grey eyes never leaving his face. The trains
steam past in the darkness, trailing a wash of soot and hot air.
Customers come and go. “Who cares if we’re without a light?” sings
a crooner on the wireless in the corner, “they can’t blackout the
moon…” He finds himself telling her things he’s never really spoken
of before—about his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage,
about his stepfather (a businessman, whom he dislikes), about his
discovery of astronomy and then of mathematics…

“And your work now?” she says. “Does that make you happy?”

“Happy?” He warms his hands on his cup and considers the
question. “No. I couldn’t say happy. It’s too
demanding—frightening, even, in a way.”

“Frightening?” The wide eyes widen further with interest.
“Frightening how?”

“What might happen…” (You’re showing off, he warns himself, stop
it.) “What might happen if you get it wrong, I suppose.”

She lights another cigarette. “You’re in Hut 8, aren’t you? Hut
8’s the naval section?”

This brings him up with a jolt. He looks around quickly. Another
couple are holding hands at the next table, whispering. Four airmen
are playing cards. A waitress in a greasy apron is polishing the
counter. Nobody seems to have heard.

“Talking of which,” he says, brightly, “I think I ought to get
back.”

On the corner of Church Green Road and Wilton Avenue she kisses
him, briefly, on the cheek.

The following week it is Schumann, followed by steak-and-kidney
pudding and jam roly-poly at the British Restaurant in Bletchley
Road (“two courses for elevenpence”) and this time it’s her turn to
talk. Her mother died when she was six, she says, and her father
trailed her from embassy to embassy. Family has been a procession
of nannies and governesses. At least she’s learned some languages.
She’d wanted to join the Wrens, but the old man wouldn’t let
her.

Jericho asks what London was like in the Blitz. “Oh, a lot of
fun, actually. Loads of places to go. The Milroy, the Four Hundred.
A kind of desperate gaiety. We’ve all had to learn to live for the
moment, don’t you think?”

When they say goodbye she kisses him again, her lips to one
cheek, her cool hand to the other.

In retrospect, it is around this time, in the middle of January,
that he should have started keeping a record of his symptoms, for
it is now that he begins to lose his equilibrium. He wakes with a
feeling of mild euphoria. He bounces into the hut, whistling. He
goes for long walks around the lake between shifts, taking bread to
feed the ducks—just for the exercise, he tells himself, but really
he is scanning the crowds for her, and twice he sees her, and once
she sees him and waves.

For their fourth date (the fifth, if you count their meeting on
the train) she insists they do something different, so they go to
the County Cinema on the High Street to see the new Noel Coward
picture, In Which We Serve.

“And you really mean to tell me you’ve never once been
here?”

They’re queuing for tickets. The film’s only been showing for a
day and the line extends round the corner into Aylesbury
Street.

“I haven’t, actually, to be honest, no.”

“God, Tom, you are a funny old darling. I think I’d die stuck in
Bletchley without the flicks to go to.”

They sit near the back and she laces her arm through bis. The
light from the projector high up behind them makes a kaleidoscope
of blues and greys in the dust and cigarette smoke. The couple next
to them are kissing. A woman giggles. A fanfare of trumpets
announces a newsreel and there, on the screen, long columns of
German prisoners, an impossible number, are shown trekking through
snow, while the announcer talks excitedly about Red Army
breakthroughs on the eastern front. Stalin appears, presenting
medals, to loud applause. Someone shouts: “Three cheers for Uncle
Joe!” The lights come up, then dim again, and Claire squeezes his
arm. The main film begins—“This is the story of a ship”—with Coward
as an improbably suave Royal Navy captain. There’s a lot of clipped
excitement. “Vessel on fire bearing green three-oh…Torpedo track,
starboard, sir…Carry on firing…” At the climax of the sea battle,
Jericho looks around at the flickering of the celluloid explosions
on the rapt faces, and it strikes him that he is a part of all
this—a distant, vital part—and that nobody knows, nobody will ever
know…After the final credits the loudspeakers play “God Save the
King” and they all stand, many of the audience so moved by the film
they begin to sing.

They’ve left their bicycles near the end of an alley running
beside the cinema. A few paces further on a shape rubs itself
against the wall. As they come closer they can see it is a soldier
with his greatcoat wrapped around a girl. Her back is to the
bricks. Her white face stares at them from the shadows like an
animal in its hide. The movement stops for the time it takes Claire
and Jericho to collect their bicycles, then it starts again.

“What very peculiar behaviour.”

He says it without thinking. To his surprise, Claire bursts out
laughing.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” she says.

They stand on the pavement holding their bicycles, waiting for
an Army lorry with dimmed headlights to pass, its gearbox grinding
as it heads north along Watling Street. Her laughter stops.

“Do come and see my cottage, Tom.” She says it almost
plaintively. “It’s not that late. I’d love to show it you.”

He can’t think of an excuse, doesn’t want to think of one.

She leads the way through the town and out past the Park. They
don’t speak for fifteen minutes and he begins to wonder how far
she’s taking him. At last, when they’re rattling down the path that
leads to the cottage, she calls over her shoulder, “Isn’t it a
perfect sweetheart?”

“It’s, ah, off the beaten track.”

“Now don’t be horrible,” she says, pretending to be hurt.

She tells him how she found it standing derelict, how she
charmed the farmer who owns it into letting her rent it. Inside,
the furniture is shabby-grand, rescued from an aunt’s house in
Kensington that was shut up for the Blitz and never reopened.

The staircase creaks so alarmingly, Jericho wonders if their
combined weight might pull it away from the wall. The place is a
ruin, freezing cold. “And this is where I sleep,” she says, and he
follows her into a room of pinks and creams, crammed full of
pre-war silks and furs and feathers, like a large dressing-up box.
A loose floorboard goes off like a gunshot beneath his feet.
There’s too much detail for the eye to register, so many hat boxes,
shoe boxes, bits of jewellery, cosmetic bottles…She slips off her
coat and lets it fall to the floor and flings herself flat out on
the bed, then props herself up on her elbows and kicks off her
shoes. She seems amused by something.

“And what’s this?”Jericho, in a turmoil, has retreated to the
landing and is staring at the only other door.

“Oh, that’s Hester’s room,” she calls.

“Hester?”

“Some bureaucratic beast found out where I was and said if I had
a second bedroom I had to share. So in came Hester. She works in
Hut 6. She’s a sweetie, really. Got a bit of a crush on me. Take a
look. She won’t mind.”

He knocks, there’s no reply, he opens the door. Another tiny
room, but this one spartan, like a cell: a brass bedstead, a jug
and bowl on a washstand, some books piled on a chair. Ableman’s
German Primer. He opens it. “Der Rhein ist etwas langer als die
Elbe,” he reads. The Rhine is somewhat longer than the Elbe. He
hears the gunshot of the floorboard behind him and Claire lifts the
book from his hands.

“Don’t snoop, darling. It’s rude. Come on, let’s make a fire and
have a drink.”

Downstairs, he kneels by the hearth and rolls a copy of The
Times into a ball. He piles on kindling and a couple of small logs,
and lights the paper. The chimney draws voraciously, sucking up the
smoke with a roar.

“Look at you, you haven’t even taken off your coat.”

He stands, brushing the dust away, and turns to face her. Grey
skirt, navy cashmere sweater, a single loop of milk-white pearls at
her creamy throat—the ubiquitous, unchanging uniform of the
upper-class Englishwoman. She somehow contrives to look both very
young and very mature at the same time.

“Come here. Let me do it.”

She sets down the drinks and begins to unbutton his
overcoat.

“Don’t tell me, Tom,” she whispers, “don’t tell me you didn’t
know what they were doing behind that cinema?”

Even barefoot she is as tall as he is.

“Of course I knew…”

“In London nowadays the girls all call it a “wall job”. What do
you think? They say you can’t get pregnant this way…”

Instinctively, he draws his coat around her. She wraps her arms
about his back.

♦

Damn it, damn it, damn it.

He pitched himself forwards and out of the chair, sending the
images scattering and smashing on the cold stone floor. He prowled
around the tiny sitting room a couple of times, then went into the
kitchen. Everything was clean and swept and put away. That would be
Hester’s handiwork, he guessed, not Claire’s. The stove had burned
down very low and was lukewarm to the touch, but he resisted the
temptation to shovel in some coal. It was quarter to one. Where was
she? He wandered back into the sitting room, hesitated at the foot
of the stairs, and began to climb. The plaster on the walls was
damp and flaking beneath his fingers. He decided to try Hester’s
room first. It was exactly as it had been six weeks earlier. A pair
of sensible shoes beside the bed. A cupboard full of dark clothes.
The same German primer. “An seinen Ufern sind Berge, Felsen und
malerische Schlosser aus den dltesten Zeiten.” On its shores are
mountains, rocks and picturesque castles from the oldest times. He
closed it and went back out on the landing.