I Can't Begin to Tell You (19 page)

Her mother slotted it onto a shelf and wrote in the notebook. ‘That’s good.’

Tanne whispered, ‘We’re deceiving
Far
. It’s not right.’

‘We can discuss whether it’s right or not after the war.’

‘But
Far
–’

Her mother raised her head and glared at Tanne. ‘Don’t you understand, it’s dangerous for him?’

Tanne digested the reproof. Looking up at the shelves glowing with colour, she said, ‘
Mor
, this won’t happen again, will it? I mean … you … doing things?’

‘No, darling. No. But we had to do something for Lippiman.’ She wrote a note in the book. ‘Are you here to help?’

At university, any analysis of war had been along conventional lines. As far as Tanne had thought about it, war was a male affair. Politicians sent soldiers to the slaughter. There was marching, men hunkered over campfires, supply lines and latrines. Afterwards, the politicians took over and everybody forgot about the men who died.

She had never imagined that women were fighting in this war discreetly and, she was beginning to understand, ruthlessly.

‘Tanne, darling.’ Her mother was back to her normal sweet and loving self. ‘Do me a favour and pass me that tin of beans.’

The strange, bewildering episode was over.

Mary Voss was on a bus to Northampton – which was a bit of a triumph. If Signalmaster Cripps had had his way she wouldn’t be taking this twelve-hour leave at all, despite Mary reminding him she had worked over Christmas.

Signalmaster Cripps was not unkind, merely overworked, and the situation wasn’t helped by the fact that he currently had a cold. No one was at their best with a beacon nose, a painful crack in their bottom lip and stuffed sinuses. In the end, he had conceded reluctantly that Mary must take what was due to her.

‘I will, sir.’

She had enjoyed the manner in which she had emphasized the words. Not too forceful, but sufficiently firm.

Having fought for them, she was determined to make her hours of freedom noteworthy and decided to go shopping for a new dress. Henfold did not have any of the right shops. To buy clothes therefore meant taking a bus to Northampton.

The bus was chilly and smelled of cigarettes and sweat. Avoiding the seats which were stained, Mary secured herself a window seat and it was pleasant enough rumbling along, letting her mind drift this way and that.

A couple of men in the row behind discussed the progress of ‘our boys’ and the German defeat at Stalingrad – which came as something of a shock. It made her realize that she had been too immured in her own corner of the war and had neglected to keep an eye on the bigger picture.

In fact she hadn’t kept up with events outside of work at all since the last time she had visited her mother in Brixton, when she had been shaken to discover that the terrace where she had
grown up had been bombed. Houses gaped like open mouths with so many broken, blackened teeth. Like a hot knife slicing through butter, the bomb had cut through the terrace exposing drunken staircases and cross sections of bathrooms with all their private arrangements for everyone to gawp at. One of the ruins still smoked.

She had prayed that no bodies were still in the wreckage, that no limbs were scattered about, and made herself concentrate on things she liked. A frilly blouse – a fanciful thought since no clothes were made with frills these days. A bunch of lavender. A pat of butter all to herself.

Mary had grieved. Tossed so casually out of a bomb bay, the bomb had pulverized coal scuttles, wooden spoons, rose-patterned china tea services and an array of life’s pots and kettles, each with its accumulated memories. Objects which the women who slaved away in these houses would have treasured and by which they measured out their lives.

The dust … the dust had nearly choked her. The bombing had released so much of it. It was everywhere – on surfaces, between the sheets, on window frames, sifting into everyone’s clothes, hair, nose and ears. When would they ever be properly clean again? When they came to write a history of wartime, historians must write about the dust, she thought. London was buried in the stuff and it hung in the air – minute particles of brick, stone, wood … and other more terrible things she wasn’t going to think about.

Altogether, that last trip had been a sobering one. Her mother was growing more immobile, her temper ever sharper. Undressing her for bed had taken all Mary’s powers of persuasion and of restraint. Wrestling with the buttons on the ancient liberty bodice, a ‘Whiteley’s best’. Much to-ing and fro-ing with hot water. Her mother criticizing its temperature. Boiling up a kettle and watching the steam paint out the vista outside the tiny kitchen window. The soft pop of gas under the kettle. Watching an expansive yellow moon shine over the roofs while
she waited for it to boil, Mary was reminded of the illustrations from a childhood book of fairy tales.

The smell of an elderly body was unmistakable. So, too, was the decay and neglect enforced by decrepitude … the creeping indignities of stiffening limbs, of toenails thickening and yellowing with age.

Mary dreaded the ageing process overtaking her. But it would, and in her case there would be no daughter to help her at the end.

What was she doing with her life? What purpose did she have on this earth? The questions slid under the defences of her common sense and unsettled Mary. And it was no use saying God would provide because, plainly, He didn’t.

Once in Northampton, it quickly became obvious that she didn’t possess enough coupons for a dress. However, the shop assistant informed Mary she could buy a pair of stockings with a single one so she invested in a couple of pairs, knowing they would have to last the year. Emerging from the haberdasher’s, she spotted a restaurant across the road and she treated herself to the one-and-sixpenny lunch menu and a cup of tea.

Afterwards, she walked back in the direction of the bookshop she had spotted close to the bus station.

Flunn’s Bookshop was enjoying a brisk trade. Stacked on a table in the centre of the shop were copies of a Penguin paperback entitled
Aircraft Recognition
and a cheap atlas. The piles of both were diminishing at a steady rate.

But it was the travel section to which she gravitated. Increasingly, that sort of book interested her because, even if it was a little late in the day, she craved to know more about the world. She knew so little, and regretted her ignorance. For all she knew, Europe might be shrouded in darkness – which, in a manner of speaking, it now was – and its natives went around with horns on their heads. Mary wouldn’t know if they did or they didn’t.

Her browsing yielded a couple of nuggets. Mary learned there were Baroque churches in Germany and a pope’s palace
in France. Back home from the Great War and his signals unit, her father had dropped hints here and there about his time in France. The natives were strange, he told Mary and her mother. They put garlic in stews and smoked strong tobacco. What is garlic? Mary had wanted to know. She wished now that she had made him tell her more. It would have been lovely, too, to have sat down with him and, as professionals, to have mulled over the more complex intricacies of Morse and of signalling. It would have been a companionship. Of course, she could never have let her father into the secrets of her work but there would have been a good chance that he would have guessed.

An hour passed and, soothed and stimulated at the same time, Mary was completely content. Finally, she drifted towards the poetry section and took down a volume of Wordsworth.

Its pages were particularly crisp and white and the words on them appeared very black. She rifled between the Preludes and shorter poems and then … and then Mary read:

Her voice was like a hidden bird that sang;

The thought of her was like a flash of light

Or an unseen companionship …

She knew of Wordsworth, of course, but not in depth. Yet that small piece of his verse told her that the poet, that grand old man, understood what she was, and what she was doing. It was a moment of pure epiphany, of excitement, of a kind of transcendence which, for a few seconds, lifted Mary above her life – her dull, obedient life – into an elemental being.

Unseen
. The description chimed in so many ways with her. For Mary regarded herself as unseen. From bitter experience, she had discovered she was the sort of person who was overlooked. At first, she had chaffed against being unremarkable, and there
had
been occasions when she had quivered with the injustice of being neither pretty, nor clever nor educated. By her late twenties, she had accepted her lot and rescinded on the notion of making a big splash in life. Not that she complained,
but there had been bad times when she imagined that it wouldn’t take much for the ties that bound her to life to snap.

Yet, as the years passed, Mary grew stronger and took pride in her expertise at ‘putting up with things’. It made sense to be a realist. The world was organized for men’s convenience. ‘Endurance’ and ‘submission’ were important words in the female vocabulary – she could transmit them in Morse in a flash. There were plenty of others in her position. Plenty were worse off, and she was fed and clothed and, from time to time, had a laugh with her friends and could, more or less, cope with her mother. She grew to understand that hope and anticipation were painful emotions. Unreliable, too, and she was better off without them.

Unseen companionship
…

A radiance seemed to be flowing through Mary.

She would never know Mayonnaise and Vinegar and the others in the obvious way but, as she now perceived in this moment of revelation, the obvious was not the only way. Not the only way at all.

How ridiculous – she realized she was crying!

Mrs Cotton forgot to check up on Mary – ‘Sorry, dear, I was busy getting Mr C’s tea’ – and the alarm clock from Woolworth’s had never kept good time.

It meant that Mary was late for her shift.

‘One more transgression and you’re for it, Voss,’ said Signalmaster Cripps. But he didn’t mean it. Not in the way Signalmaster Noble, the bully of the station, would have done. Noble he is not, ran the joke.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘But I am here and ready and willing.’

‘What are you waiting for, Voss? Get on shift.’ She turned to go but he called after her: ‘Voss, you’re a good worker. But don’t let it go to your head.’

Tonight up at Station 53d, an urgency surged through the ether. Mary couldn’t explain how she knew, but she did. Someone was on the run. Or there was a big operation on the go.
Whatever it was they, the listeners, got wind of something momentous happening in the shadowy areas of the war.

The frequencies were jumpy tonight, too. The call signs came and went. In between her skeds, she kept her earphones on, which helped the concentration.

ZYA calling. Mayonnaise.

Mary’s heart lifted.

QVR.
Ready to receive
.

Write the message down.

Don’t think about anything else.

The ‘handwriting’ was as ever. The dashing T, the emphatic M. Yet it was strange how Mayonnaise never spoke to her in the same way as Vinegar. Apart from those early, stumbling transmissions, Vinegar’s keying was so smooth and assured. Unflappable. She admired it very much. It was stoic in the face of the enemy and, in Mary’s opinion, stoicism encompassed everything: heroism, courage and, yes, imagination, too.

She sat back on the wooden chair to wait out the minutes until Vinegar was due.

Half dead with fatigue, Nancy slumped over her station and the sight of Nancy’s exhausted shoulders and mussed hair troubled Mary. One second’s inattention and a message could be garbled. In her old life as supervisor at the telephone exchange Mary would have told Nancy off. Looking back at her time there, she concluded she might have been harsh occasionally, but she would have defended herself by saying she expected no less from herself than from others.

Very gently, she nudged Nancy with her foot.

‘Go and sneak a cup of tea,’ she whispered. ‘Tell the Führer you have to, you know,
go
.’

They weren’t supposed to ‘go’, but sometimes they had to and the signalmasters had to put up with it.

Nancy sat bolt upright and sent Mary a feeble grin. ‘Good thinking, Voss.’ She heaved herself to her feet. ‘I’ll have his balls for dumplings if he tries to stop me.’

The
frequencies were weak. Storms were fouling the atmosphere. Yet the calls sang sweetly in her ear. Wherever they were coming from, she was there to listen to a steady stream of birdsong freighted with hurry or anguish, or with love and terror.

Tonight, Vinegar was late.

Where are you?

Bent over your set? In a field? In a church? Have you lost faith?

Are you sorry? Are you afraid? Are you lonely?

She thought of a future without the agents,
her
agents, of an existence shorn of the intensity of waiting and hoping. And dreaming … One day it would happen.

She would have to make do as she had always had to make do. And a little humour about it wouldn’t come amiss, she reminded herself.

The needle wavered. She adjusted the dial.

Liquid sounds.

Keep calm
.

Outer darkness.

Unseen companionship
.

Then … yes. Yes, here was XRT. Vinegar. Pulsing through the interference and static.

His was a strong signal tonight

Mary began to write.

Twenty minutes later the call finished. Mary glanced up at the clock. Twenty minutes almost to the second. One moment longer and Vinegar might have been in trouble.

Her finger hovered over the transmitter key. Could she break through the barrier of her natural reticence? Could she break through the upbringing which frowned on words such as this and send ‘shit’ … as a token of her feelings, of her empathy, of her
unseen companionship
?

She didn’t.

At the finish, she placed the paper into the basket. In a flash, Signalmaster Cripps was onto her. ‘All right, Voss? Anything to report?’

‘Nothing, sir. The fist seemed normal.’

‘Right, I’ll get it to the cipher room.’

She watched his retreating figure. She would have given much to follow ‘her’ message and to know what was in it. Just a couple of words would do. But that would never happen. It would never, ever be permitted. Secrecy between the departments was absolute.

At the end of the shift, she went to put on her coat. The other girls often complained how bulky their uniform was, but she was grateful for its warmth and relative smartness.

The lavatories were backing up again in what was laughingly called the Ladies Rest Room. They can’t cope with all the traffic, was the joke. Someone had filled a bowl with water and disinfectant to make the room more pleasant, but it wasn’t a place to linger.

A shoelace was flapping and she bent down to retie it – but her foot appeared to vanish down a dark tunnel at the end of which was a pinprick of light.

Fatigue. One of the effects of her constant exhaustion was to make objects appear insubstantial, or even hallucinatory, and for the hundredth time she resolved that she had to sort out her sleeping. Maybe a doctor could help? Otherwise she was going to be no good on shift.

Outside in the drive, Mary stood for a moment and closed her eyes. The incipient dizziness which occasionally attacked her at the end of a shift swirled at the back of her skull. This was the moment she always questioned herself. Had she made mistakes?