Authors: Robert Harris
My God, what has he done?
He starts to gabble his apologies. He hadn’t meant to frighten
her, let alone to hurt her. He goes across to the bed and sits
beside her. Tentatively, he touches her shoulder. She doesn’t seem
to notice. He tries to pull her towards him, to roll her over on
her back, but she has become as rigid as a corpse. The sobs are
shaking the bed. It is like a fit, a seizure. She is somewhere
beyond grief, somewhere far away, beyond him.
“It’s all right,” he says. “It’s all right.”
He can’t tug the bedclothes out from under her, so he fetches
his overcoat and lays that across her, and then he lies beside her,
shivering in the January night, stroking her hair.
They stay like that for half an hour until, at last, when she is
calm again, she gets up off the bed and begins to dress. He cannot
bring himself to look at her and he knows better than to speak. He
can just hear her moving around the room, collecting her scattered
clothes. Then the door closes quietly. The stairs creak. A minute
later he hears the click of her bicycle being wheeled away from
beneath his window.
And now his own nightmare begins.
First, there is guilt, that most corrosive of emotions, more
torturing even than jealousy (although jealousy is added to the
brew a few days later, when he happens to see her walking through
Bletchley with a man he doesn’t recognise: the man could be anyone,
of course—cousin, friend, colleague—but naturally his imagination
can’t accept that). Why did he respond so dramatically to so small
a provocation; The cheque could, after all, have been a reward for
anything. He didn’t have to tell her the truth. Now that she’s
gone, a hundred plausible explanations for the money come to mind.
What had he done to provoke such terror in her? What awful memory
had he reawakened?
He groans and draws the blankets over his head.
The next morning he takes the cheque to the bank and exchanges
it for twenty large, crisp, white five-pound notes. Then he
searches out the dreary little jewellery shop on Bletchley Road and
asks for a ring, any ring as long as it is worth a hundred pounds,
at which the jeweller—a ferret of a man with pebble-thick glasses,
who clearly can’t believe his luck—produces a diamond worth less
than half that amount, and Jericho buys it.
He will make it up to her. He will apologise. It will all be
right.
But luck is not with Jericho. He has become the victim of his
own success. A Shark decrypt discloses that a U-boat tanker—the
U-459, under Korvettenkapitan van Williamowitz-Mollendorf, with 700
tons of fuel on board—is to rendezvous with, and refuel, the
Italian submarine Kalvi, 300 miles east of St Paul’s Rock, in the
middle of the Atlantic. And some fool at the Admiralty, forgetting
that no action, however tempting, must ever be taken that will
endanger the Enigma secret, orders a squadron of destroyers to
intercept. The attack is made. It fails. The U-459 escapes. And
Donitz, that crafty fox in his Paris lair, is immediately
suspicious. In the third week of January, Hut 8 decrypts a series
of signals ordering the U-boat fleet to tighten its cipher
security. Shark traffic dwindles. There is barely enough material
to make a menu for the bombes. At Bletchley, all leave is
cancelled. Eight-hour shifts drag on to twelve hours, to sixteen
hours…The daily battle to break the codes is almost as great a
nightmare as it was in the depths of the Shark blackout, and
Skynner’s lash is felt on everybody’s back.
Jericho’s world has gone from perpetual sunshine to bleak
midwinter in the space of a week. His messages to Claire, of
entreaty and remorse, vanish, unanswered, into a void. He can’t get
out of the Hut to see her. He can’t work. He can’t sleep. And
there’s no one he can talk to. To Logie, lost and vague behind his
smokescreen of tobacco? To Baxter, who would regard a dalliance
with a woman like Claire Romilly as a betrayal of the world
proletariat? To Atwood—Atwood!—whose sexual adventures have
hitherto been confined to taking the prettier male undergraduates
on golfing weekends to Brancaster, where they quickly discover that
all the locks have been removed from the bathroom doors? Puck would
have been a possibility, but Jericho could guess at his
advice—“Take out someone else, my dear Thomas, and fuck her”—and
how could he admit the truth: that he didn’t want to “fuck” anyone
else, that he had never “fucked” anyone else?
On the final day of January, collecting a copy of The Times from
Brinklows the newsagent in Victoria Road, he spots her, at a
distance, with the other man, and he shrinks into a doorway to
avoid being seen. Apart from that, he never meets her: the Park has
become too big, there are too many changes of shift. Eventually,
he’s reduced to lying in wait in the lane opposite her cottage,
like a Peeping Tom. But she seems to have stopped coming home.
And then he almost walks right into her.
It is 8 February, a Monday, at four o’clock. He’s walking
wearily back to the hut from the canteen; she is part of a flood of
workers streaming towards the gate at the end of the afternoon
shift. He has rehearsed for his moment so many times, but in the
end all he manages is a whine of complaint: “Why don’t you answer
my letters?”
“Hello, Tom.”
She tries to walk on, but he won’t let her get away this time.
He has a pile of Shark intercepts waiting for him on his desk but
he doesn’t care. He catches at her arm.
“I need to talk to you.”
Their bodies block the pavement. The flow of people has to pass
around them, like a river round a rock.
“Mindout,” says someone.
“Tom,” she hisses, “for God’s sake, you’re making a scene.”
“Good. Let’s get out of here.”
He is pulling at her arm. His pressure is insistent and
reluctantly she surrenders to it. The momentum of the crowd sweeps
them through the gate and along the road. His only thought is to
put some distance between them and the Park. He doesn’t know how
long they walk for—fifteen minutes, perhaps, or twenty—until, at
last, the pavements are deserted and they are passing through the
hinterland of the town. It is a raw, clear afternoon. On either
side of them, semidetached suburban villas hide behind dirty privet
hedges, their wartime gardens filled with chicken runs and the
half-buried, corrugated-iron hoops of bomb shelters. She shakes her
arm free. “There’s no point in this.”
“You’re seeing someone else?” He hardly dares to ask the
question.
“I’m always seeing someone else.” He stops but she walks on. He
lets her go for fifty yards then hurries to catch her up. By now
the houses have petered out and they’re in a kind of no-man’s land
between town and country, on Bletchley’s western edge, where people
dump their rubbish. A flock of seagulls cries and rises, like a
swirl of waste paper caught by the wind. The road has dwindled to a
track which leads under the railway to a row of abandoned Victorian
brick kilns. Three red-brick chimneys, as in a crematorium, rise
fifty feet against the sky. A sign says: DANGER, FLOODED CIAY
PIT—VERY DEEP WATER.
Claire draws her coat around her shoulders and shivers—“What a
filthy place!”—but she still walks on ahead.
For ten minutes, the derelict brick works provide a welcome
distraction. Indeed, they wander through the ruined kilns and
workshops in a silence that is almost companionable. Amorous
couples have scratched their formulae on the crumbling walls: AE +
GS, Tony = Kath, Sal 4 Me. Lumps of masonry and brick litter the
ground. Some of the buildings are open to the sky, the walls are
scorched—there’s clearly been afire—and Jericho wonders if the
Germans could have mistaken it for a factory, and bombed it. He
turns to say as much to Claire, but she has disappeared.
He finds her outside, her back to him, staring across the
flooded clay pit. It is huge, a quarter of a mile across. The
surface of the water is coal-black and perfectly still, the
stillness hinting at unimaginable depths.
She says: “I ought to get back.”
“What do you want to know?” he says. “I’ll tell you everything
you want to know.”
And he will, if she wants it. He doesn’t care about security or
the war. He’ll tell her about Shark and Dolphin and Porpoise. He’ll
tell her about the Bay of Biscay weather crib. He’ll tell her all
their little tricks and secrets, and draw her a diagram of how the
bombe works, if that’s what she wants. But all she says is: “I do
hope you’re not going to be a bore about this, Tom.”
A bore. Is that what he is? He is being a bore?
“Wait,” he calls after her, “you might as well have this.”
He gives her the little box with the ring in it. She opens it
and tilts the stone to catch the light, then snaps the lid shut and
hands it back.
“Not my style.”
♦
“Poor you,” he remembers her saying a minute or two later, “I’ve
really got under your skin, haven’t I? Poor you…”
And by the end of the week he’s in the deputy director’s Rover,
being borne back through the snow to King’s.
§
The smells and sounds of an English Sunday breakfast curled up
the staircase of the Commercial Guesthouse and floated across the
landing like a call to arms: the hiss of hot fat frying in the
kitchen, the dirge-like strains of a church service being relayed
by the BBC, the muffled crack of Mrs Armstrong’s worn slippers
flapping like castanets on the linoleum floor.
They were a ritual in Albion Street, these Sunday breakfasts,
served up with appropriate solemnity on plain white utility
crockery: one piece of bread, as thick as a hymn book, dunked in
fat and fried, with two spoonfuls of powdered egg, scrambled and
slopped on top, the whole mass sliding freely on a rainbow film of
grease.
It was not, Jericho had to acknowledge, a great meal, nor even a
particularly edible one. The bread was rust-coloured, flecked with
black, and obscurely flavoured by the kippers that had been cooked
in the same fat the previous Friday. The egg was pale yellow and
tasted of stale biscuits. Yet such was his appetite after the
excitements of the night that, despite his anxiety, he ate every
scrap of it, washed it down with two cups of greyish tea, mopped up
the last of the grease with a fragment of bread, and even, on his
way out, complimented Mrs Armstrong on the quality of her
cooking—an unprecedented gesture which caused her to poke her head
around the kitchen door and search his features for a trace of
irony. She found none. He also attempted a cheerful “Good morning”
to Mr Bonnyman, who was just groping his way down the banisters
(“Feeling a bit rough, to be honest, old boy—something wrong with
the beer in that place”) and by seven forty-five he was back in his
room.
If Mrs Armstrong could have seen the changes he had wrought up
there, she would have been astonished. Far from preparing to
evacuate it after his first night, like so many of the bedroom’s
previous tenants, Jericho had unpacked. His suitcases were empty.
His one good suit hung in the wardrobe. His books were lined along
the mantelpiece. Balanced on the top of them was his print of
King’s College Chapel.
He sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the picture. It was
not a skilful piece of work. In fact, it was rather ugly. The twin
Gothic spires were hastily drawn, the sky was an improbable blue,
the blob-like figures clustered around its base could have been the
work of a child. But even bad art can sometimes have its uses.
Behind its scratched glass, and behind the cheap Victorian
mezzotint itself, laid flat and carefully secured, were the four
undecrypted intercepts he had removed from Claire’s bedroom.
He should have returned them to the Park, of course. He should
have cycled straight from the cottage to the huts, should have
sought out Logie or some other figure of authority, and handed them
in.
Even now, he couldn’t disentangle all his motives for not doing
so, couldn’t sort out the selfless (his wish to protect her) from
the selfish (his desire to have her in his power, just once). He
only knew he could not bring himself to betray her, and that he was
able to rationalise this by telling himself that there was no harm
in waiting till the morning, no harm in giving her a chance to
explain.
And so he had cycled on, past the main gate, had tiptoed up to
his room and had hidden the cryptograms behind the print,
increasingly aware that he had strayed across whatever border it is
that separates folly from treason, and that with every passing hour
it would be harder for him to find his way back.
For the hundredth time, sitting on his bed, he ran though all
the possibilities. That she was crazy. That she was being
blackmailed. That her room was being used as a hiding place without
her knowledge. That she was a spy.
A spy? The notion seemed fantastic to him—melodramatic, bizarre,
illogical For one thing, why would a spy with any sense steal
cryptograms? A spy would be after decodes, surely: the answers not
the riddles; the hard proof that Enigma was being broken? He
checked the door, then gently took down the picture and dismantled
the frame, working the thumbtacks loose with his fingers and
lifting away the hardboard backing. Now he thought about it, there
was something distinctly odd about these cryptograms, looking at
them again he realised what it was. They should have had the thin
paper strips of decode produced by the Type-X machines gummed to
their backs. But not only were there no strips, there weren’t even
any marks to show where the strips had been torn off. So, by the
look of them, these signals had never even been broken. Their
secrets were intact. They were virgin, None of it made any
sense.
He stroked one of the signals between finger and thumb. The
yellowish paper had a slight but perceptible odour. What was it? He
held it close to his nose and inhaled. The scent of a library or an
archive, perhaps? Quite a rich smell—warm, almost smoky—as
evocative as perfume.