I Can't Begin to Tell You (10 page)

Ruby replaced the encyclopaedia, wrote down the word
hygge
, which she liked the sound of, and went to catch the bus.

In the cipher room, the girls had divided themselves up into teams and were continuing to work flat out on the two indecipherables. You could feel, measure almost, the tension.

So far they had made five thousand attempts.

‘The crack teams haven’t cracked it,’ said Ruby taking her seat alongside the others.

‘Shut up,’ said Janet.

‘If you say so.’ Ruby reapplied herself. She checked the indicators, which would tell her which words of the poem had been chosen by the agent when he encoded the message, and focused on them. There were three immediate possibilities. One: the
indicator groups were mutilated by transmitting conditions and taken down incorrectly because poor reception meant the signals clerk had not been able to make head or tail of them. Two: the agent had been badly trained and was muddled. Three: the agent had been captured and the radio was being played by the enemy, who did not know to include the indicator groups. Yet. An ominous word. Ruby knew little enough about what was going on but enough to know that if a radio operator fell into enemy hands, it was probably only a matter of time before the indicators and codes were tortured out of him or her.

The first assault on the indecipherable proved useless.

Ruby massaged her fingers and settled down to the coding version of a long plod through the foothills before base camp even came into sight.

Depressingly quickly, she knew that this was going to be the equivalent of climbing the Himalayas without ropes.

Four hours later, shaky and exhausted, she waited by the bench of the duty officer in order to inform him that it was still a no-show. He was on the phone. ‘This is not the five loaves and two fishes affair, you know,’ he barked and put down the receiver. ‘We don’t have enough people.’ He glared at Ruby. ‘You’re to report to office thirteen,’ he said. ‘Third floor.’

Ruby didn’t move. Blimey, what was she wanted for?

‘
Now
, Ingram.’

The third floor was reserved for Higher Beings, where the lucky buggers benefited from the light. Generally speaking Ruby nourished a healthy scepticism about the Higher Beings. All the same, she wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t been curious to see what was up. More than curious.

However, it was Major Martin who waited by the window – and that did surprise her.

At her entrance, he turned round and she was shocked to see he had black circles under his eyes.

‘Sir, are you all right?’

He raised one dark eyebrow. ‘I could do with more sleep.’

‘Sorry,
sir. I didn’t mean …’

The eyebrow returned to base. ‘It’s all right, Ingram. You are allowed to demonstrate normal human responses.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Even if they remind us how awful we look.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘Yes, you did.’

She smothered a smile. Major Martin was nice. ‘Yes, I did.’

‘Good. Now we can exchange views without pretence. Sit down. We have twenty minutes precisely, and I want to talk to you about something.’

She was genuinely startled. ‘You want to talk to
me
?’

‘What’s so extraordinary about that? Don’t people talk to you, Ingram?’

She stifled a smile. ‘Sorry, sir. We are used to being treated like pond life.’

‘You shouldn’t accept that,’ he said.

What did he mean? Her? The girls? Had he singled her out? To Ruby’s astonishment, she felt a faint flush steal over her face.

He continued: ‘I don’t want you to think like that any more. I want you on side and I want some proper work and hard thought from you.’

A tiny flutter of triumph went through her breast.
At last
.

He had noticed her. He knew she had brains.

Office 13 was at the corner of the house and enjoyed the advantage of two windows, the clear light exposing the tiredness etched into their faces. Perhaps the murk of the cipher room had its uses after all?

Martin regarded her thoughtfully before pushing a piece of paper over the desk. ‘On this, there’s a message in code and another
en clair
. I’m going to give you ten minutes to decode and encode.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Ready.’

She decided not to be annoyed by this lapse into the schoolmaster. ‘I need something to write with, sir.’

He rootled around in his briefcase. ‘Why don’t you have a pen on you?’

‘Because …’

A pencil now balanced on the flat of his hand. She looked up into his face: a nice face, an exhausted face.

‘Come
on
,’ he said.

Ruby accepted it. ‘You’re right, sir. I should be carrying a pencil.’

She didn’t often back down but she could tell that he was a fair-minded person and fairness and a chance to prove herself was all she asked.

First off: take the frequency count. Think of it as feeling a pulse. The cryptographer’s pulse.

She sensed his eyes were on her lowered head but refused to be hurried or flurried. After a while, she forgot about Major Martin. Ten minutes later she put down the pencil. Silently, she pushed the paper back over the table to him.

He barely glanced at it. ‘Too simple?’

‘One should never underestimate the task,’ she said. ‘But, yes.’

‘How would you describe what you have just done?’

‘I suppose you could say that I corralled the letters and brought them to heel. Then I applied some intuition.’

‘How very female.’

‘From time to time it works, sir. So do educated guesses.’

‘That wasn’t main-line traffic,’ he said. ‘That was an agent’s message. It’s baffled quite a few.’

She nodded. ‘The first transposition had gone wrong.’

The light in the room had grown even more dazzling.

‘Agents’ coding and decoding require different aptitudes and casts of mind to the main-line coding activities. Wouldn’t you say?’ He smiled a smile which signalled one colleague’s acknowledgement of another.

She felt a visceral thrill. Major Martin had unearthed what she longed for – to be in on the discussion. He had spotted that this was her territory. Wrestling with problems was her meat and drink, and just as necessary.

‘Sir …
can I say something? I know it’s not my place but I think you should hear it. The indecipherables. I’ve been thinking around the problem. Why not dedicate a section of the cipher clerks to work solely on the indecipherables? Train us in the specifics.’

Major Martin sat back and interlocked his nice-looking fingers.

Had she gone too far? Had she been too quick to push her luck? Well, hell, Ruby didn’t care. He needed to know that people like her were not just ciphers themselves.

‘Actually, we’re on the same page,’ he said. He sent her a half smile of approval and she wondered what lay behind all this. Because something did. ‘Which doesn’t surprise me,’ he added.

Ruby took a deep breath. Something – the dark, expressive eyes, the sympathy reflected in them – told her that Major Martin was a man with whom she could take a risk. ‘Sir, can I ask something else?’

He looked at her long and hard.
Was he going to take a risk?

Yes, he was. ‘Go on, Ingram.’

She shut her eyes for a second. This might be the end of the not-so-glowing career. ‘The poem codes? Are they the most secure system?’

She had hit the nail.

For a moment, his expression was stripped naked, exposing a deep, harrowing anxiety. ‘And why would you think that, Ingram?’

Ruby held out both hands. ‘Even a fool, even …’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Even a fool,’ she rushed out, ‘can see that a poem, particularly a well-known one, can be got out of someone. The method isn’t – it can’t be – foolproof.’
Idiot
, she thought.
Shut your mouth
. But shutting her mouth was not Ruby’s way. ‘It’s wrong to send the agents off with something … so flimsy.’

She had trespassed. No one was supposed to discuss these things. Especially not the pond life that she was.

She
held her breath.

Major Martin leaned back in the chair. He was about to say something, checked himself and then decided to go ahead anyway. ‘As I see it, we have no greater duty laid on us than to give the agents a secure coding system. Not just for the sake of our country but to give them a chance of survival.’

He spoke passionately.

I knew it. I knew it. He’s worried sick
.

So that was it. Agents were dying alone in that darkness out there, hunted, cornered and tortured, and he minded if the reason was Home Station’s carelessness or stupidity. Major Martin minded very much – and so did Ruby.

There was a click. A connection. Emotional … intellectual … mathematical? She couldn’t say what precisely but it was there.

They were on dangerous territory and she knew perfectly well that they should not be discussing this subject.

Peter Martin beat a retreat. He got to his feet and said: ‘Shall I tell you what I think? You can’t wait to be running a show. Am I right? So, I would like you to take charge of the indecipherable team. Pick out the brightest, or rather the best, girls, train them and keep tabs.’

Disappointed that that was it, Ruby decided to make do with what she had been offered. Making a rough computation, she said, ‘We’ll need rotating groups of at least twelve.’

He whistled softly. ‘Fine. Personnel will go mad. Top brass will shout.’ His mouth twitched. ‘We’re due a little well-earned entertainment.’

Again, he checked his watch. ‘I’ve got you on board?’

She nodded.

‘About coding security … Keep thinking, as I will at my end. Say nothing. I don’t know what will happen. However, I think you have the kind of mind and aptitude which might be useful.’ He picked up his briefcase. ‘We’d have to sort out a promotion and you would have to come to London.’

‘Wonderful,’
she said.

Major Martin’s smile was a wintry one. ‘Some people might not like it but I imagine you could more than deal with office politics. This is not a good time for the Allies … and we just have to put up with that sort of stuff.’

Ruby liked the ‘we’.

On København’s Bredgade a van shuddered to a halt and four Danish policemen threw themselves out of it.

They were armed.

Neither Tanne Eberstern nor her brother, Nils, paid it much attention.

Muffled up against the cold, the two of them were heading to a bar for a beer before Tanne went on to meet her friend, Grete, at the ballet.

A cigarette butt in the gutter caught Tanne’s eye and she bent down and hoiked it up. A scavenger. But, these days, tobacco was like gold dust and, oh joy, she had discovered a stationer on the Bredgade who kept a stock of Bible paper which doubled up nicely for the roll-your-owns.

‘Disgusting,’ said Nils, his hand slapping in brotherly fashion onto her back. ‘Stop it.’

Then she felt Nils’s hand ball into a fist.

‘Tanne … look up. Trouble.’

He shoved her against a shop window as policemen scythed through the pedestrians in the street.

‘Stop.’

A youth in a navy-blue cap and worker’s overalls had been heading towards Tanne and Nils but, at the sight of the police, he spun round and beat a retreat. Too late. A couple of the police seized him from behind and shoved him against the wall.

The majority of the onlookers shrank back – an animal reaction. None of them protested.

The youth looked wildly from side to side.
Help me? Patriots?
Tanne caught his expression: determined, full of hatred, on the brink. One of the police shouted at him. He shouted back. A
second policeman, big and burly, stepped forward and hit him on the jaw with the butt of his gun.

There was a low mutter, a collective groan, from the onlookers.

Blood streamed.

His cry of pain was also one of protest.

Shameful
. The thought tore through her.

The policemen squared up to their victim. Breathing heavily, some flecked with sweat.

‘Name?’

‘
Fuck off!
’

‘Your papers?’

One of the policemen dug into the pocket of the youth’s overalls.

It was then she noticed the
Gestapoman
sitting in the front of the policemen’s van, watching events. He was smoking.

My God
. Tanne realized with a flash of comprehension that the police were enjoying their new licence to unleash violence. The presence of a
Gestapoman
whipped them up. The victim’s arms were now spread out in crucifixion, the tendons in his wrists stretched like string under the pale skin. Blood dripped onto his collarless shirt.

Here was an especial shame. Danes were perpetrating war on fellow Danes.

‘Let him go,’ she shouted and Nils’s hand clapped like a trap across her lower face.

‘Shut up, Tanne.’

An alley ran down to the left of the shop they were standing outside. A cyclist emerged from it at speed. Poising at the junction, he readjusted his balance, put his head down and rode directly towards the knot of police. Wham! His wheel slammed into the legs of one policeman. The man bellowed and slumped to the ground.

The diversion gave the youth a chance. He wrested himself from their grip and took to his heels.

Run,
run, Tanne willed him.

Weaving in and out of the shoppers and pedestrians, he pelted down the street and out of sight. One of the police gave chase. A second yelled at the onlookers to stand back while he attended to his fallen colleague.

The fourth?

The cyclist swung the bicycle round and pedalled furiously towards Tanne and Nils. Oh God, she thought. He was aiming to go back the way he’d come.

No.

In horror, she watched as the fourth policeman drew his gun, dropped to his knees. The gun jerked. There was a whistle – almost musical – and a tearing sound.

Tanne was standing a little in front of Nils and the blood spray hit her first, pattering over her feet, pooling onto the road. It was then she smelled it. Hot. Rank.

His head smashed in by a bullet, the cyclist hit the ground. Wheels spinning, his bicycle fell on top of him.

Inside her leather shoes, Tanne’s feet were slippery, and a red stain oozed over her stockings. A single rivulet of blood ran down her left leg.

The scene burned into her vision.

The onlookers seemed frozen. Terror? Outraged and disgusted at the behaviour of their own police?

Shock made her incoherent.
His blood is on my legs. His blood is on my legs
.

The felled policeman cried out and cursed as his colleagues tried to move him.

‘Don’t get involved,’ hissed the woman who was standing beside Tanne. She was clutching her shopping basket to her chest.

The injured policeman was manoeuvred into the back of the van, where they laid him flat, and the body of the cyclist was thrown in beside him. The van drove off in the direction of the hospital.

The
street looked normal.
No, it didn’t
. People moved in slow motion. The cobbles were hemmed with blood, which was trickling into the gutter. An echo of the bullet’s whistle, and the crump as it hit the skull, remained in the air. A life had been snuffed out.

She spoke through lips that didn’t want to obey her. ‘I must wash my legs.’

They were standing outside a well-known sausage bar. Nils hustled her inside it and they found a table. He asked for a bowl of water and helped Tanne to clean herself up.

A waitress, pale and on the verge of tears, slapped a menu on their table. There was a nervous clatter of cutlery. The phone by the till rang and was answered. The last rays of sun slanted in at the window, seeking out the shock and shadows on the diners’ faces. The massy block of the Dagmuhaus building across the square was as ever, and the traffic in the street had returned to normal. Yet all was different. Witnessing that scene had changed her.

Nils nudged over a glass of beer. ‘Drink.’

She steadied her hand. ‘Do you think he was a communist?’

He shrugged. ‘Possibly.’

‘He was someone’s son, brother.’ The beer was good and she sucked in a second mouthful, then searched her bag for her tobacco stash and cigarette papers.

‘I know.’

‘Terrible things are happening in Denmark.’

‘Yes, they are.’ Nils was calm and matter-of-fact. ‘But we have to carry on as best we can.’

Tanne shrugged. How come Nils was so … untouched? Clumsily, she resumed the task of rolling the cigarette and lighting it. ‘Here, want one?’

‘No.’ Reaching over, he stilled the fingers that seemed to have lost their control. ‘Don’t take on. Don’t let it get to you. Don’t let anyone get to you.’

Blood. Brains on the road. Death.

‘Aren’t
you upset about what we’ve just seen?’

‘Of course. But you mustn’t think about it. Otherwise it weakens you.’

‘But we have to think about it. Nils, you can’t not have an opinion.’

‘I disagree.’ Nils was his customary, infuriating, detached self. Her brother had a hide inches thicker than most and she could never make out if this was genuine or, for some psychological reason, he had cultivated imperviousness, and very successfully, too.

She and he were chalk and cheese. Nils was considered something of a mathematical genius, and his strengths, such as they were, could not be more different from Tanne’s talents. He had taken his first degree at eighteen. Since then he had been sequestered at the university, adding a master’s in symbolic logic, plus a PhD, to his academic achievements. So highly did the university rate him that they had given him a set of rooms overlooking the main quad and told him he could occupy them for as long as he wished.

The alcohol was working its way through Tanne’s system – soothing and steadying. ‘What’s the latest project?’

Normally Nils brushed aside questions about his work because he knew most people didn’t begin to understand. On this occasion, he was prepared to humour her. ‘Electronic communications,’ he said. ‘We are working on a small revolution. Actually, a big one.’ He grinned.

She flicked a shred of tobacco from her finger. ‘Do your new German masters at the university know about it?’

Very soon after the Nazi takeover of the country, German academics from Heidelberg and Munich arrived at Nils’s department at the university and muscled in on the research.

Nils glanced around. ‘You mean my new
esteemed
colleagues?’ He lowered his voice. ‘Even I know you must watch what you say.’

Squinting
at him through the cigarette smoke, she murmured, ‘Your new and esteemed colleagues, then.’

‘My brilliant German colleagues know all about me. They made it their business.’

Looking at Nils, she was struck by his innocence – his mad faith that everything could carry on regardless – and shivered. ‘Nils, you will be careful?’

‘Why wouldn’t I be? I intend to stay in my rooms doing my work for the duration of the war, and I won’t be prised out.’

She sent him a quizzical look. ‘You really, really are not going to take sides? You are not going to say the Germans are right or wrong?’

‘No.’

‘Not even after –’ She stubbed out the cigarette. ‘Not even – ?’

‘No.’

There it was: the shutter rattling down and cutting Nils off from the rest of humanity. It was an excellent tactic, giving him freedom to pursue his thoughts without the muddle and fuss of other considerations. It never occurred to him, nor would it have mattered to Nils, that others had to carry the can for a lot of things as a result.

The stains on Tanne’s stockings seemed to her as bright as burning beacons. ‘One day I might begin to understand what symbolic logic is.’

He looked at her with that contemptuous but affectionate look that she knew so well. ‘There’s no need.’

‘I’m supposed to be at the ballet,’ she said, after a pause. ‘Grete will be waiting.’

Before they parted Tanne insisted that Nils returned with her the following day to Rosenlund, for dinner and to stay over for a night. ‘The parents fret about you. You don’t see enough of them. Let them check that you are all right.’ She added, ‘We are a family.’

Nils
had a way of pushing Tanne into sounding so much older than was necessary. A hundred years older.

‘The condition of being a parent is to fret. It doesn’t mean anything. Anyway, I don’t want
Far
going on at me.’

‘Nils, he doesn’t. You choose to see it like that.’

The contemptuous but affectionate Nils was back. ‘
Far
and I don’t understand each other, never have. I think he’s blinkered. He thinks I am a peculiar species who has the misfortune to be his son.’

Aha, thought Tanne, picking up a touch of regret and resentment in Nils’s tone. It wasn’t all as cut and dried in her brother’s mind as he would have her think.

‘No need to look like that, Tanne. As the inheritor of his sacred Rosenlund, you get the special treatment.’

She frowned.

‘And
don’t
tell me that you find it a burden. You love the idea.’

Did she?

Despite all this, Nils allowed Tanne to persuade him and, the following day, they caught an early afternoon train to Køge.

Thick with cigarette smoke, the carriage was crowded but they managed to commandeer the last two seats. ‘
Mor
…
Mor
…’ wailed a child, wanting the attention of its exhausted-looking mother, who couldn’t rouse herself to respond. She wore a hand-knitted jersey in bright green which had been patched and re-patched. Her husband ate his way stolidly through a meat pie wrapped in greaseproof paper. Every so often the mother’s gaze rested on the diminishing meat pie but her husband did not offer her even a crumb.

The train eased out of the station and, almost immediately, came to a halt. Tanne glanced at her watch. Stop-go. Stop-go. This was the way trains functioned in the war. Thank God, the child cried itself into exhaustion.

Yesterday’s street scene had played, and replayed, in her head a thousand times – every small detail starkly etched. The
blood-splattered cobbles. The splintering of bone. The tense huddle of spectators.

Horrible.

Wrong.

Nils dozed. Tanne diverted herself by looking out of the carriage window. She thought about the dress she had ordered from
Fru
Nielsen. Powder blue: designed to complement the ashy tones of her hair.

Bloodstains
.

She concentrated on
Sleeping Beauty
, a ballet she knew inside out. A fragile Princess Rose, whose ankles looked as though they might snap at any minute, had been kissed passionately awake in a scene which usually evoked shivery, warm feelings. Not this time. Death in a street had shaken Tanne’s assumptions and she was now beginning to understand that she had been living in ignorance of the realities – gulled by an upbringing in the innocent wilderness of Rosenlund.

As arranged, Arne was waiting at Køge station with Loki harnessed into the pony trap. Nils seized Arne’s hand and shook it. Arne was the one person to whom he showed obvious affection. ‘How are you, Master Nils?’

‘All the better for seeing you, Arne.’

Each ran a check on the other – her slight brother and big, burly Arne. They were friends: the sort who went fishing together and sat in contented silence for hours, firm in that friendship. Nils climbed up beside Arne. ‘I’ll take the reins.’

At Rosenlund, Tanne stopped in the hall to admire an arrangement of hothouse flowers. She checked the card beside the vase: ‘To Kay, with love from Cousin Anton’.

Running up to her bedroom, it was impossible to miss the family tree placed at the turn of the stairs. No inhabitant of Rosenlund, no visitor, could ever be in doubt as to the Eberstern pedigree.

In 1777, Bertel Eberstern had been granted a patent of
nobility. In 1798, his son, Carsten Eberstern, married Princess Sophia-Maria of Westphalia. And so it went on.

Those dead forebears, many of them German, still had the power to mould her existence. As the elder child she would one day step onto the estate and kneel to accept her future. Being the younger, Nils would not inherit, and from time to time he needled her about it. ‘I can choose my own life,’ he pointed out. Flatly. Unsympathetically.