I Can't Begin to Tell You (48 page)

She would never forgive Felix.

She hated him.

She loved him.

The war had to be won.

Her mother knew that.

Kay turned her head slowly, agonizingly slowly. Her gaze drifted towards Tanne, rested on her for an infinitesimal second and moved on.

Go well, my beloved daughter
.

You can’t cry, Tanne. You can’t cry.

Felix jabbed a finger hard into her spine. ‘Go.’

Tanne went.

The sergeant in the hateful
feldgrau
uniform bellowed at Kay and she forced herself to look at him.
Who are you?

She was growing faint. But it didn’t much matter because she knew she didn’t stand a chance.

The SS officer issued an order – and she knew that voice.

Her knees wouldn’t hold her and she sagged between the soldiers who were holding her up. The sergeant grabbed her by the hair so she was forced to look directly at
Hauptsturmführer
Buch.

‘Have you anything to say?’ he asked.

She remained silent.

‘We know who you are.’ He articulated the words very precisely. ‘This is the wanted terrorist, Kay Eberstern.’ His face loomed towards hers. ‘What are you carrying?’

She closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, it was to see Anton positioned behind Buch. Everything became clear. To give him credit, Anton had warned her in the København café: ‘Sometimes you have to surrender information in order to keep credible.’

Anton had sold them out because, on the run, she was no longer useful to him. Or rather she was more use to him as a sacrifice. It was the perfect equation.

‘Open it up.’ At the order, one of the soldiers, a skinny, underfed lad, undid the clasp and swung back the lid. Dials, crystals, the coiled antenna of the wireless.

Aladdin’s cave.

‘What’s this?’ asked Buch.

‘A gramophone,’ she managed to get out between icy lips.

The
soldiers were told to stand away and she was left swaying tipsily.

‘Stand up,’ he said.

Think of something to keep going, she told herself. Think of the grasses rippling in the fields at Rosenlund.

Again, the driver sounded the whistle – a harsh, despairing wail.

She was losing blood. It was running down her back and pooling in the waistband of her knickers. They would be ruined and she had only a couple of pairs.

‘What is it?’ he repeated.

The swimming sensation intensified. ‘It’s a gramophone.’

Buch pulled his pistol out of the webbing at his waist, levelled it and calmly shot her in the knee.

She went down flat without a sound.

Then, there was nothing.

No, there was something.

‘
There must be something I can do to help, Kay?
’

‘
There is one thing
.’
She leans over and kisses his cheek, the corner of his eye, then his chin, then his mouth
. ‘
Promise me something … Don’t let them take me
,’
she says
. ‘
Promise. You don’t know what they do to you. I do
.’

‘
Kay
…’

‘
Promise
.’
She rests her hand against his cheek
. ‘
Will you?
’

‘
It’s not a promise I can make
.’

She means to say all sorts of things. That she loves him.

Had Kay told him? She hoped so.

She became conscious of a singing in her ears. Through a slit in her eyelids a ribbon of sky appeared: the big, flat, white Danish sky at the periphery of which faces stared at her. One of them, a man, had eyes as round and terrified as those of a scared child in a cartoon. A woman had clapped her hand to her mouth.

The pain began in earnest. Waves of it, each wave mounting to a higher crescendo. She tried to control it by imagining
herself in the lake at Rosenlund. Freezing water numbed sensation.

Time became elastic. Each second expanded infinitely.

General Gottfried’s face swam into her vision. ‘Get up.’

Why wasn’t she surprised that he was here?

She focused on him. The intelligence that she had marked on first meeting him was obvious. So was anger. He was a man who knew he had been duped and didn’t like it. He would kill her whatever.

Enough. Why waste time on the general?

‘So,’ he said. ‘
Fru
Eberstern. I’m sorry to see you like this.’ He paused. ‘I’m sorry about a lot of things.’

He would be. It was a tiny grain of comfort to think she had run rings – or a ring – round him. She looked away.

‘Get up,’ he repeated.

Her limbs refused to obey.

The general was speaking in German. ‘You thought you’d got away with it? Yes? But you weren’t clever enough. We ran your colleague for months. London seemed wilfully blind. So many little things they ignored which we were sure they would pick up on. But no. The British are very self-satisfied.’

Security checks. Double security checks.

Summoning every ounce of her strength, every wit which remained, she managed to say, ‘Are you sure they weren’t playing you, General?’

He frowned.

Fear threatened to sap what was left of her strength. Kay knew what lay in store. Where had they hurt her so far? Her shoulder? She tried to flex her right arm. Useless. Her left leg wouldn’t work either.

I’m going to make the fear go away
.

I’m not going to die riddled and rotten with it
.

She was dragged to her feet again. Nausea and pain warred with faintness.

She
looked up. Smoke from the train filtered across the sky. She looked down to her shoes, now splattered with blood.

The onlookers were murmuring, shifting. A child cried.

‘Shame,’ said a woman. ‘Shame on you.’

What did the woman mean? Shame on whom?

She longed for Bror.

Painfully, she turned her head away from the general and his men. From Anton.

Was it so surprising that human beings were untrue to each other?

Concentrate on the sky instead, the same sky which stretched over England and Rosenlund.

Her chin dropped onto her chest. The sergeant yanked her head up and her gaze was jerked towards the railings.

And there he was. Bror. Dressed in his hunter’s clothing with his rifle. Was he returning from the duck shoot? She ached to be there with him, ranging through the woods, matching his careful, loving progress and his delight in the land. She wanted to be beside him at the lake shore, watching the water as the sun set.

Her eyelids dropped down over her eyes.

He had kept his promise
.

He had tracked them
.

He was there … she was not alone … he would never abandon her.

With a monstrous effort, Kay lifted her head. Their eyes met.

They had shared their lives.

Do it, Bror. Please.

I can’t.

You can. You must. They will torture me until I am nothing.

I want you to live, Kay, live.

Life was sweet with you, Bror. Remember that. And I don’t want to die.

She watched him position the rifle and take aim.

Nils. Tanne.

She
watched the tears roll down his face.

Then she closed her eyes.

Thank you, darling Bror.

They were in the drawing room at Rosenlund playing Racing Demon. Both of them were laughing. Kay looked up and out of the window to the lake.

Mary battled her usual exhaustion.

The previous two shifts had been difficult, with shrieking atmospherics, and her ears were ringing.

Straightening her serge skirt, Mary glanced in the mirror. Was she dreaming it? Or was the face that looked back at her beginning to be the sort of face of which people might say: She looks good for her age? A face that looked as though its owner knew what she was doing.

She thought back to her training days – when everything had been alien and alarming.

‘Speed in Morse’, said the manual, ‘can only be achieved when one ceases to “read” individual dots and dashes and the groups of dots and dashes which make up individual letters. With practice, all these become subliminal.’

Mary had never thought it would happen, but it had.

Nancy looked up as Mary came into the signals room. ‘Okie dokie?’

She was trying out the new Americanism that was sweeping the country.

‘Fine,’ said Mary, and she took her seat.

‘This bloody, bloody war,’ said Nancy, and she regaled Mary with the story of a never-to-be-forgotten stay in a luxury hotel before the war. ‘The bedroom had a bathroom attached to it, with soaps and towels. And –’ Nancy’s voice lowered dramatically ‘– there was a basket of fruit, a crystal bowl for face powder and a huge mirror over the bed.’

Another life.

Some
of the girls were finding the snail’s pace of the war difficult to cope with. It was all very well listening to Mr Churchill’s speeches, which were designed to whip the heart into fiery resolution, but the truth was that when you were stuck into endless shifts, they had a limited impact. Patriotic and determined as the girls were, they needed encouragement sometimes.

She considered tackling her superiors and even rehearsed what she would say. ‘Some acknowledgement would work miracles. And we know secrecy is crucial, but not being told anything is hard for the girls and it can grind them down. Of course, they realize they can’t be told the real identity of the agents but they need to feel they’re trusted by you.’

Perhaps she would say something.

For she so longed to know what had happened to her agents, where they were. She wanted to know partly because they were part of her … partly because she needed to compensate for what she saw as her dereliction of duty towards Vinegar. Her particular Gethsemane.

Ruby had come to see her at the station, which was very kind of her. Mary had a premonition that it wouldn’t be good news.

‘Do you mind if I sit down?’ she’d asked Ruby.

‘Be my guest.’

Ruby lit a cigarette and, as she dropped her lighter back into her briefcase, Mary noticed a wedding ring. It was then that Ruby told her about Vinegar.

It had taken a while for Mary to respond. How could she – the best listener and one who loved her agents – have failed to see that Vinegar was being run by the enemy?

She
should
have known – and the knowledge that she had failed ate into her. It was bitter bread to eat. But that was the price of this war. And it was the price of life.

What had happened to him? Vinegar was almost certainly dead … but did he die knowing that someone back home was
listening out for him? Could he have possibly intuited that she cared for him? That the Morse whispering and bouncing over the earth’s curve carried her blessings?

If so, he might just have thought – a brief, flickering comfort – that his death would not be lonely, and certainly not in vain.

‘Thank you for taking the trouble to tell me,’ Mary said. ‘No one else would have done.’

‘This is strictly out of order.’ Ruby smoked thoughtfully. ‘But something you said when we first met, about how you felt about your agents, affected me. You’ll be pleased to know that the coding system has finally been changed to a much more secure system.’

‘That’s good news.’

Ruby flicked ash into the ashtray. ‘You do understand that, if anybody finds out I’ve told you, I will be shot.’

Mary nodded. ‘Understood.’ She fixed on Ruby’s ring. ‘Forgive me, but have you just got married?’

A curious expression flitted across Ruby’s face. Exasperation? Joy? ‘Yes, last month.’

Later Mary wondered whether that last meeting with Ruby was linked to another encounter. A short while after Ruby’s visit, on being ushered into an office at the station that she hadn’t known existed, Mary was informed that after the war ‘they’ wanted to offer her a job. Somewhere near Pinner. ‘Eastcote, actually,’ her interviewer said. ‘The country needs listeners like you.’

That was all she was told, but she had accepted the job nonetheless.

‘Jamming’s bad at the moment,’ said Nancy. ‘Never know where they get the sugar.’

A familiar bad joke. It helped with the exhaustion.

As usual the room was filled with benches, unwieldy wireless sets, people. Signalmaster Noble was on duty. The old joke – ‘Noble he is not’ – kept on running. His power complex made him far more energetic than the decent Signalmaster
Falks. Noble made a point of patrolling between the desks. Every so often he would bend over a clerk’s shoulder to check her progress.

‘Bloody perv.’ Nancy wrinkled her nose. ‘Hasn’t he had enough of looking down our blouses?’

Mary swept the frequencies, meticulously checking each one as well as the skeds. She had a new agent: BTU, code name Jelly. Dead on time, a message came in from him. She handed it up to Signalmaster Noble.

Nancy was frowning at the letters written on her log paper. Some of the girls were adjusting their dials, the precise and delicate articulation at which Mary excelled. Others were slumped over their benches, gathering their energy.

The hours limped on.

Sniffs. A cough.

‘Oh, my lord!’ Anne on Number 14 tore off her headphones and leaped to her feet. ‘Listen to this.’ She began to read, her voice young and hopeful, shaking with excitement: ‘ “
Vive la France! Vive l’Angleterre!
” ’

It took fully ten seconds for the listeners to understand that the message had come in
en clair
and not in code.

‘My God!’ screamed Nancy. ‘It’s begun. Our boys must have gone in.’

The room erupted as Anne waved the piece of paper aloft and hurried off to find Signalmaster Noble.

Tears streamed down Mary’s face.

She wept for the deaths, for the violence and for the darkness that had gripped humanity. Inexplicably, she wept for the pigeons who, carrying their messages and regardless of storm and flak, battled through to come home.

She wept for the sacrifice.

Nancy stood over her. ‘For God’s sake, Mary, the Allies have gone into France. Buck up.’

With a supreme effort, Mary wiped her face with her handkerchief and tucked it back into her sleeve.

She
checked the clock. Time for the search.

Where are you?

Summoning her skill, she swept the dial.

The whisper of the sea in a shell
…

As she checked and adjusted, the upheaval in her heart subsided for the time being.

The needle quivered. She steadied it.
The professional
. She owed her agents everything she possessed.

Time? It was time.

And … there he was. Mayonnaise. Tapping with his usual fluency. There they were: the upward slope of Z; the jagged pattern of Y; the simplicity of A …

The rush of emotion was anything but professional, but it was pure and sweet.

Do you read me?

We read you, Denmark
.

I am here.