I Can't Begin to Tell You (44 page)

Outside, the wind was stronger and a sleety rain slanted over the beach. Leaving the beach hut to its debris and decay, they headed for the car.

They drove in silence until Bror said, ‘I don’t feel right abandoning you, Kay.’

‘You must.’ Deliberately, she hardened her tone. ‘You
have
to.’

‘I want you to live more than anything.’

‘As it happens, so do I.’

‘I don’t know what’s going to happen. Or whether or not we will be here by the end of this mess. And it isn’t a question of forgiveness because there’s nothing to forgive.’ He negotiated a corner.

Bror’s sweetness made her cry. ‘Actually, I wanted to thank you.’

‘But I’m not stupid. I realize nothing will be the same,’ he continued. ‘Can it?’

‘No.’ She groped towards the answer. ‘I can’t give up now, Bror. I have to go back to what I am doing and you must go back to Rosenlund.’ She raised her hands. ‘I don’t feel there’s any choice.’

His hand searched for hers. ‘Was it the adventure that kept you going? I sometimes thought you were restless …’

Had
she been drawn to the fire because something hidden in her demanded it? Whipped her on?

‘Perhaps. Among other things. Among other important things.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Bror, I am so sorry for what I’ve done to you and what I’ve done to the family. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

The wind rattled the car windows.

She began searching in her pockets. ‘Oh God, I need a brush or a comb. My hair. I can’t look a mess.’

Bror stopped the car, reached over to the glove compartment and extracted the comb which had always been kept there for Kay. ‘Here. Sit still.’

They were back to long ago.

Carefully, tenderly, Bror combed Kay’s ruined hair. What was he telling her – the terrorist wife?

The slow, gentle strokes told her that he loved her. In the turmoil and confusion of loyalties and politics and violence, that was still true.

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

She looked down at her hands clasped in her lap and considered the answer which had been hovering. To keep whole in the face of fear was a colossal demand on anyone. Fear splintered the resolution and muddled the objective. It made one craven. Of all things, Kay continued to fear her fear, however hard she battled against it.

‘There is one thing.’ With a sense of profound relief, she leaned over and kissed his cheek. Bror let the comb fall to the car floor. Kay kissed the corner of his eye where the lines were being etched, then his chin, then his mouth. ‘Promise me something … ?’

Bror dropped Kay at Rungsted station and drove on to Rosenlund.

At the station, she sat down on a bench next to a man who was reading the daily paper. He looked nondescript
enough – but you never knew. The paper’s headlines were visible from where she sat. The mass escape of the Jews provided the main subject.

The man looked up as he turned the page – and, for a tense second, Kay thought she was in trouble. ‘Holger awakes,’ he murmured. ‘Holger awakes.’

Holger Dansk … the legendary Danish hero. A symbol of resistance.

She sighed with relief.

Communists, freedom fighters, the new Freedom Council … how and where these factions would unite into one effective force depended on people like Felix, Jacob and those such as herself.

What had brought them together? The question would never cease to fascinate her.

In København, Kay made for the safe house on the Ny Kongensgade. On the way she stopped at a couple of shops, and with the money Bror had stuffed into her pocket she purchased a comb, soap and cold cream, bread, and also sausage and a bottle of watery, greyish milk. At the hairdresser’s, she asked for dark-brown hair dye. ‘For my mother,’ she explained to the assistant. ‘She so hates being grey.’

At the safe house, she applied the dye and waited patiently for it to dry. Framed by the atrocious haircut, the face which looked back at her belonged to a stranger.

She ran a bath. Undressing, she discovered that her period had arrived unexpectedly and she had not made provision for it. The stains on her clothes were going to take time and trouble to remove.

In the bath, she regarded her newly thinned-out body. Was her system trying to recapture the days of marriage and maternity? Perhaps it had been love-making with Bror? The inconveniences of being female and on the run struck her as both funny and sad. How she ached to talk to Tanne about it and to ask her how she was coping with being female.

The
water was only lukewarm but better than nothing. Kay made herself sit there for as long as possible. In this new existence, being clean was not always possible.

Lying back, she closed her eyes.

Bror?

She cupped her hand and trickled water over her chest. Grains of sand sifted out into the water and sank to the bottom of the bath.

Bror?

Think of his cattle and pigs in the fields, the mounds of cheese and pitchers of cream. Think of fresh bread. Of the jewels she used to wear. Remember always the fresh colours and scents of new growth in the Rosenlund woods, the smell of paper-white narcissi in the garden, the duck-down quilts on the beds, Bror’s silk dressing gown. And always, always, the mesmeric moods and reflections of the lake. Its dreamy summer sparkle. Its frozen secrets in winter.

Ruby and Peter hadn’t spoken properly for months – and it was now October. And, no, she hadn’t counted the weeks.

In August, Peter disappeared. He had been seconded to The Firm’s headquarters in Cairo and wasn’t scheduled to reappear in the office until late September.

Ruby lectured herself that she didn’t mind his absence. Nor was she bothered that they had clashed so bitterly. There were other, much bigger, worries as the war lurched on.

Quite apart from anything else, she was half dead with fatigue. The agent traffic was building. With Peter absent, she had to cope with the situation on her own, which often meant working around the clock for days on end. Every brain cell had been squeezed dry.

But from time to time, she would raise her head from her desk and … there he would be, a ghostly Peter hunched over the desk in his office. She despised herself for it, for she didn’t wish to see him either as an apparition or in reality … but he was there. Ever wayward, even obstinate, her psyche disagreed.

Peter returned on a bright autumn morning, reclaiming his office with a slam of the door and a shout to Gussie. He was tanned but painfully thin as a result of a bout of dysentery.

Ruby sat at her desk and didn’t move.

Gussie enquired if he had fully recovered.

‘I was banged up in hospital with a lot of pretty nurses,’ he replied.

She offered him a cup of stewed tea. ‘Here’s a reward for all that deprivation.’

The routines slotted back into place. First, Peter and Gussie tackled the backlog. Only then was Ruby summoned.

She
walked into his office, closed the door and leaned back against it. Despite her fine intentions, her heart beat faster.

‘Things seem under control here,’ he said, shuffling through papers. ‘It’s to your credit that you and Gussie managed so well.’

‘Isn’t it amazing?’ said Ruby.

‘Just one or two things that need to be corrected.’

The old irritation stirred. Gussie and she had got on fine without him. ‘I know,’ she replied. ‘Gussie and I often said: “We need Peter to put us right.” ’

She had succeeded in gaining his full attention.

‘Oh Lord …’

‘Oh Lord?’

‘Don’t look like that, Ruby. It spoils it.’

She looked down at her feet shod in regulation lace-up shoes. ‘Spoils what?’

‘The image that kept me going in hospital. When my insides were threatening to dissolve and I couldn’t sleep, and it was painful, I thought of you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because when you smile, the sun, er … comes out.’

Ruby frowned. ‘And?’

‘Because I reasoned that, if I thought of someone as obstinate and bloody-minded and angry as you, then I couldn’t possibly give in.’

‘Fair enough.’

He got to his feet. ‘Can we start again?’ A pause. ‘Ingram?’ The last was said tenderly, like the private joke it was. The dark eyes raked over her face. ‘Now. Quickly.’

Were they … were they going to begin all over again?

She kept her voice brisk and professional. ‘I’ve thought of a way of trying to prove how unsafe the poem-code method is and it involves Vinegar.’

Peter sat down again. ‘Right,’ he said coolly and steepled his hands. ‘You think Vinegar is being run by the Germans.’

They
stared at each other.

She began: ‘As you know, I went through his back traffic and there are several things to consider about him. Or her. We know Vinegar is no good at coding and yet he has produced impeccably coded messages. At the very least, should this not be questioned?’ She shot a look at Peter. He was listening. ‘But we can do it, Peter. To test Vinegar, we could send a deliberate indecipherable to him. Not too difficult for a trained German cipher clerk to cope with, but too difficult for Vinegar. If he asks for it to be retransmitted, we can conclude that he’s still at liberty because, bad at codes as he is, he won’t be able to decode it. On the other hand, if he replies, we’ll know that an expert has worked on it.’ She paused. ‘And the expert is likely to be German.’

Break open a hypothesis and deconstruct it against every possible eventuality and consequence
.

That was what she had been taught at Cambridge. That was what Peter would be doing. He needed time to examine the idea. Rightly so.

Eventually, after a long week, Gussie jerked her head in the direction of his office. ‘Sir wants you. But, for God’s sake, keep him sweet this time. He’s been like a bear with a sore head.’

At Ruby’s entrance, Peter got to his feet, a courtesy which touched her.

He went straight to the point. ‘The idea’s a good one,’ he said. ‘Suicidal but a good one. We just need to find a way to work it.’

Ruby hadn’t realized how strange she had been feeling – as if she had been holding her breath for weeks.

Moving a little stiffly, Peter sat down.

What was she going to do about her feelings for him?

He’s still very thin
.
He needs care
. Her guts twisted painfully and the question forced its way out of her: ‘Did you work through the night?’

His
expression lightened. With relief? ‘Are you worrying about me? And the answer is yes, I did.’ The old, wry Peter – and the old, sparky Ruby – were back and they welcomed each other with a big smile.

Enough. To the problem.

‘You realize the security protocols are draconian,’ he said. ‘Every message is logged and checked, both here and in the signals office. If one goes missing, or someone tries to send one that isn’t authorized, there’s an immediate witch-hunt. How we get our message transmitted is going to take some thought.’

‘In any defence, there’s always a weakness.’

‘True. But it’s bloody small in this case. But we agree, Ruby?’

‘We agree.’

‘Meanwhile …’ He pushed the message he was holding over to her. ‘Could you take this to the signals office? The night squad broke an indecipherable. It took over ten thousand attempts. I want to teleprint them my thanks.’

She looked down at the piece of paper. Running and fetching for Peter?

‘Please?’ His eyes danced. ‘I wouldn’t ask you normally, but there’s a war on and you look useful.’

‘Bugger off.’ She found herself stiffening.

‘Has nobody ever teased you, oh lovely Ruby? They should, you know.’

She glanced at it. Automatically, she began working away to disinter the words hidden among the letter groups – a Michelangelo chipping away at the block of marble to reveal the figure in its depths.

Oh, habit.

Up in the signals office, Ruby hovered by a signals clerk. He was young, frazzled and looked extremely anxious. He barely glanced at Ruby when she handed over Peter’s message. ‘Put it with the rest.’

Something prompted her to ask, ‘Are you having trouble?’

‘I’m not sure what to do,’ he confessed as he rifled through
a stack of paper. ‘Can you advise?’ He held up one of them. ‘There are new procedures for cancelling messages. I’ve orders to cancel this one but I’m not sure how to proceed. It’s message number sixty for Vinegar.’

The signals clerk could be in for bad trouble if she did this – but Ruby didn’t hesitate. ‘Give it to me,’ she said. ‘I can deal with it for you.’

Inside, she was shaking.

Later she and Peter faced each other across the desk in his office. Message number sixty to Vinegar – in reply to message number fifty-nine – lay on the desk between them. It had taken them an easy fifteen minutes to decode.

STAND BY FOR DROP ON TWENTIETH
stop
DZ AS SPECIFIED BY US NOT YOU
stop
LETTER K REPEAT K SIGNAL
stop
BBC MESSAGE CANUTE GETS HIS FEET WET
stop
ACKNOWLEDGE AND PLAY BACK BBC MESSAGE
stop

‘Why have they cancelled this?’ Ruby asked.

‘Maybe the section heads want to add something, but need to break it up as it is a long message.’

It made sense.

‘Let’s go over this.’ With each point, Peter tapped a finger on the table. ‘What do we know about Vinegar? He’s a rotten coder but turns out impeccably coded messages. He is also a highly relibable wireless transmitter operator. He keeps asking for money and more agents. He’s also been very specific about drop zones and won’t take London’s suggestions. Finally, despite requests, he omits to give details to London of any of the agents he says he’s recruited. But his bluff and real security checks are in place.’

‘Our argument, therefore, is that London is being played by the Germans, who are operating Vinegar’s set,’ said Ruby. ‘That is why he is never keen to answer their questions. It also means that it is possible that any agents and equipment dropped at
Vinegar’s request have been delivered straight into German hands. If that has happened, it would only be because Vinegar’s poem code has been tortured out of him.’

If ever a man looked at breaking point, Peter did then.

He had held off smoking until now but gave in. ‘Question: why haven’t our other agents noticed? Answer: there’re only two of our wireless operators in Denmark at the moment. One is Vinegar, who was allocated to Aarhus on Jutland. Mayonnaise, who is operating on Zealand, reported that Vinegar was missing from the initial drop when they all went in. But, when checked out, it appeared Vinegar was sending traffic regularly. London discussed it, dismissed the problem and informed Mayonnaise that all was well.’

‘This would be because the Germans had got the bluff and real security checks out of Vinegar and so all seemed to be normal?’

Peter twisted a pencil round and round.

‘But why didn’t Mayonnaise check up on Vinegar?’ asked Ruby.

Peter leaped to his feet and consulted the map on the wall. ‘Getting between Jutland and Zealand is not a doddle. Probably impossible at times. The Germans will have mounted watches on ferries and sea traffic.’

‘Couldn’t they get messages to and from? The couriers?’

‘Who knows?’ said Peter. ‘London is relaxed about it because the chiefs are convinced that their coding methods are foolproof and that the enemy can’t possibly be reading our traffic.’

Ruby raised her eyes to his. ‘So … we go back to the initial proposition. We arrange for this message to be sent, but this time we encode it in such a way that only a very experienced cryptographer could read it. If Vinegar replies, it suggests very powerfully that an expert, who almost certainly won’t be Vinegar and is probably a German, is working on the decoding. We can present this as evidence to your chiefs.’

‘But
if
Vinegar isn’t in German hands, he’ll reply asking for
a retransmission and then the balloon will go up, and we’ll be found out.’

Ruby was feeling sick enough as it was. ‘What would they do with us?’

Peter raised an eyebrow. ‘I gather there’s a cooler in the remotest part of Scotland. Odds and sods are sent there. If they don’t kill us, that is.’

He opened his drawer and produced a piece of paper. ‘Vinegar’s poem. Taken from “Helge”,’ he read. ‘Vinegar insisted on a poem he knew from childhood, which doesn’t help one bit. Oehlenschläger is the national poet and everyone knows his poems.’

She trembled inwardly.

‘Are you ready?’ he asked. ‘… Ingram?’

They chose ‘late’, ‘heart’, ‘night’, ‘more’ and ‘begin’, and wrote them out with a couple of spelling mistakes, since tired cipher clerks were sometimes guilty of that, and numbered the letters sequentially underneath. Next they made the first transposition with four of the columns in the wrong order: hatting, as it was known in the trade, and chicken feed to an expert cryptographer to correct.

They argued – almost pleasurably – over the deviations in the second transposition.

‘Final question,’ said Ruby. ‘If it’s an indecipherable won’t they just ask us to repeat it?’

‘Fritz won’t want to hold up a drop. It’s rich pickings.’

‘And if it is Vinegar who’s transmitting all along?’

‘Trust you like haggis and turnips?’

As she left the room with the message, he said, ‘Ruby …’

She turned back.

‘Ruby …’

Her heart jumped and fluttered.

He looked at her with love. Oh God. And with tenderness. And openness. Ruby returned his look but her previous treachery – so lightly done – felt as heavy as lead.

If
Peter ever found out it would hurt him, and hurt him deeply. Equally, her discovery that her strongly held beliefs on sexual liberty lacked staying power troubled Ruby not a little. The payback from the Tony episode was to realize that she would be haunted by it for a long time – and that was stupid, time-wasting and ran against her grain.

But she loved Peter.

And that was the price.

Handing over the message to a different signals clerk, she lied: ‘The chief encoded it himself.’

Twenty-four hours later Peter sent Ruby a note: ‘He’s missed a sked.’

Another day crawled past.

They met in the corridor and whispered to each other.

‘Would it be an idea to talk to Signals Clerk Voss while we wait?’ she asked.

A third day.

Nothing.

For much of the time, Ruby couldn’t eat. She relied instead on cups of stewed tea which turned the inside of her mouth to cotton wool.

Eventually, Gussie took a telephone call. She tossed her head. ‘There’s a car outside and the orders are that you are to join His Majesty. You’re going down to the listening station. Bring writing materials.’

Listening Station 53d looked picture-postcard perfect as they swept into its drive. The trees were just beginning to turn and the unspoiled areas of the garden were full of shrubs and creepers.

‘Ready?’ asked Peter.

Ruby ran her tongue around her mouth, wishing she could brush her teeth, and that she didn’t feel so nauseous.

She nodded. ‘As I’ll ever be.’

After Security had done their bit, they were shown into the
signals room and found Signals Clerk Voss, headphones on, at her station.

‘Sir.’ She acknowledged Peter by pushing back one ear of the headphones but kept the other in place.

Save for the necessary equipment of sharpened pencils and sheets of paper, her station was immaculate. Propped up against the transmitter was an encoded message from London, ready to go.