I Can't Begin to Tell You (8 page)

‘Quickly,’ he said, shutting everything down.

Working
in silence, they packed up the equipment in the case and Felix snapped the locks into place. He looked across to her. She was tense and absorbed in the task. What unexpected collusions this work had got him into. Apart from a few facts, he knew nothing about Freya – except for one thing. She held his life in her hands.

‘Can I stay here tonight? The safe house has turned out to be unsafe for the time being.’

Freya was dusting down her jacket and he detected a hesitation.

‘
Gestapomen
shot a young girl this morning in the neighbouring house. She’ll lose her leg.’

A flare of anger. ‘Poor girl.’ She was silent for a moment – clearly battling with the decision. ‘All right. I’ll bring … As soon as it’s properly dark I’ll organize food and a quilt. Otherwise you’ll freeze.’

‘Sorry to ask you.’

She gave him a straight look. ‘Don’t be.’ Again, he sensed she was gathering the resolve to drive herself further along a road. ‘You must ask if you need anything else done.’ She sounded husky with strain. ‘With the work …’

He showed his surprise. ‘I thought this was a one-off?’’

‘One gets sucked in,’ she said.

‘Not good enough, Freya.’

She breathed in sharply. ‘I’ve – I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think one can stand back any longer. I thought I should. I thought I
could
…’

‘Let me think about it.’

She nodded.

Freya left to fetch the food. Alone again, Felix inspected Hector’s cage.

The men and women who can do this work are not necessarily the obvious ones
.

What did he knew about her. Enough to trust?

The case for … He ran over it. The case against … ditto.

Fatigue
seemed to wrap his mind in wet felt. He dropped down onto the floor, propped himself up against the wall by the bench and set about decoding the incoming message. The task ate up the last of his current stock of energy. Checking his knife was still strapped in place round his leg and his Browning pistol was in his right hand, he allowed his head to drop onto his chest.

The footsteps invaded the safe and warm silence of his sleep. Light, purposeful, cunning.
Wake up
. Rolling silently to his feet, he took a grip on the pistol.

Where am I?

This wouldn’t do. He had to be sharper, quicker, more on the case than this.

Her voice sounded through the gloom. ‘It’s Freya.’

She proffered a bundle in both hands – rather as she might hold an offering in a temple. ‘Food and a quilt.’ She was wearing a scarf and strands of silky, blonde hair tumbled onto her shoulders under it.

He took the bundle and set it down.

She seemed to be waiting.

‘About what you said earlier …’ He couldn’t be sure because the light was bad but she seemed to pale and, again, she gave a sharp intake of breath. ‘I need a courier.’

She went very still.

‘You can retract the offer,’ he said.

‘No …’ she replied after a pause. ‘
No
. I mean, it’s clear to me … I can’t not act. I can’t retract. I have to come in with you. I
have
to.’

Her vulnerability was almost painful to observe and Felix abandoned every rule about not asking questions. ‘What about your husband? Children? You realize what danger you will be putting them in –’

‘Stop … I know.’

He was tempted to shake her to make her see sense. ‘You could just stay safe.’

‘Safe?
Yes, I suppose that is correct …’ Her voice was strengthening. ‘But not safe from conscience. Not safe from knowing for the rest of your life that you failed to act. Where does the family fit into this? I don’t know, Felix, but I believe in decency, the sort where a young girl doesn’t have her leg blown off for no reason.’ She shrugged and the fur edging on her jacket rippled with the movement. ‘Selfish? Perhaps it is but I’ve also discovered lately that I’m proud of what Britain is doing.’ She gave a quick, nervous smile. ‘Does that answer the question?’

Poking a finger through the bars of the bird cage, Felix experimented with a waggle. The bird observed him with a complete lack of interest. ‘I would have to inform London.’ He glanced at her. ‘Obviously you couldn’t go to England to train, which would be the best … the safest … thing to do. But I can teach you some of what I know.’ He fell silent for a moment. ‘Do you understand how dirty this business is? It’s dangerous … very dangerous. It will involve lying and almost certainly having to commit crimes. We have to eavesdrop and spy on people we know and sometimes love.’

‘I’m not stupid.’

‘Sorry.’

Extracting a scarf from her pocket, she handed it over to him. ‘You’ll need this.’ She sounded collected and businesslike. ‘And I do understand.’

‘Then I’ll do one more sked here. Any more and it’ll be too dangerous. The big problem is there’re not enough sets in the country. Pitifully few, in fact. I plan to ask London to drop in several. We’ll hide them in various places and I can move between them. Much better than using couriers to transport the sets. But until London obliges we have to –’

She anticipated him. ‘You want me to take this one somewhere.’

No one knew better than Felix what he was asking of Freya. ‘Yes. I am. You’re a woman and the Nazis aren’t, as yet, so
suspicious of women. They’re stopped and searched less often. You would be a good cover. I imagine you visit København from time to time? Frequently?’ She nodded. ‘Good.’ He wound the scarf round his neck – and it felt like a noose. ‘When I give the word, get on the midday train to København and find the newspaper vendor by platform five. A contact will meet you there and tell you where to take it.’

She gave a half smile. ‘Any tips for the job?’

He glanced over to the spot where the set was hidden. His brain, starved of sleep and food, projected a pinkish-red aura over it.

‘Behave absolutely naturally – and that can take some doing. You must work out, too, how to react if you’re challenged.’

‘I’ll manage. You’re not the only one with a cool head.’

If that was a tease, it wasn’t funny, he found himself thinking. Sourly. Then, he felt ashamed and imparted a piece of news which he suspected would please her. ‘Apparently Achilles made it.’

Her face lit up. ‘I told him about the green fields and berries in the hedges, and the nice warm loft which was waiting for him. He got the message.’ She laughed rather delightfully at her own joke. ‘But Arne – I mean someone – told me that the Germans have orders to shoot anything that might be thought a homing pigeon.’ She placed a hand on the door latch. ‘You must eat your bread and cheese.’

‘Is there butter by any chance?’

‘There is.’

‘I’m in paradise.’

He came and stood beside her. Freya was a reasonably tall woman but, since he topped her by a couple of inches at least, he was forced to look down. Her face was half in the shadow. She shifted a little and he caught sight of a long neck framed by strands of fur.

Outside, there was a noise. A crack of ice, or hardened wood? Freya froze. He bent over and whispered, ‘Go.’

She
didn’t argue but vanished through the door.

Felix backed up against the wall and waited, pistol in hand, for a good twenty minutes.

Nothing.

So far, his war was playing out with alternating episodes of fear and pulsing adrenalin, then long cold stretches of boredom and – almost – dissatisfaction.

Not to mention the lack of a hot bath.

The Firm had commandeered Henfold House, which was a couple of miles from the small town of Henfold in the Midlands. Inviting its owners to take up residence elsewhere for the duration, they turned it into Listening Station 53d. It was promptly named Gloom Towers by its disrespectful staff.

That much Mary Voss knew. But not much else about the outfit for which she found herself working. No one did – certainly not Nancy or Beryl, who were the two girls to whom she mostly talked. The others, her fellow FANYs who worked alongside Mary on the shifts, tended to ignore her. At forty-one, Mary was considered far too old to bother with. Mary got that. But Nancy and Beryl were less blinkered by their youth and Mary often shared a cup of tea with them in the canteen. Their odd friendship, which had developed as the months went on, was, for Mary, one of the unexpected pluses of a war.

As usual, the signals room where they worked – the former laundry in the Victorian kitchen wing – managed to be both cold and stuffy. The small radiator fixed to the wall was worse than useless and the windows let in the gusty draughts.

‘They’ll be fixed. I swear by my mother’s milk.’ The corporal in charge of maintenance said that so often that no one listened any more.

‘We dream on,’ said Nancy. Even on the night shift, Nancy habitually wore bright lipstick and her hair in a complicated roll because ‘we need to keep cheery’. Mary admired that battle spirit.

She located Number 33, her station, and sat down. No one acknowledged her, nor did she expect them to. Right from the beginning, they had been taught total concentration on the job
in hand. The training had been hard. Sometimes she dreamed of the room filled with long wooden tables at which they practised Morse on the dummy keys. As a girl’s speed got better, she was shunted up to the next table, ever closer to the instructor. Most of them got stuck on one letter or another. Funny that. Her particular stumbling block had been the letter R, but she had fought to smooth out every last jag and imperfection.

Anyway, here she was with Morse flowing in her bloodstream – so much so that she found herself automatically tapping out odd words when they caught her eye. ‘Exit’ and ‘railway station’ being among the most frequent. It was, she often reflected, quite extraordinary how she could translate everyday objects into a dot and a dash.

Mary looked up. On the wall opposite was a large poster with the words ‘Remember the Enemy is Listening’. As if they didn’t think about it morning, noon and night.

The wooden chairs had been designed to torment the signals clerks, so uncomfortable were they – and so roughly finished off that the girls’ precious stockings snagged on them.

She embarked on her routines.

Check the clock.

Check the board on which had been written up the agents’ call signs, their code names, the frequencies on which they transmitted and their skeds.

In the next hour, she had two skeds. Shifting around on the unforgiving chair to find a more comfortable position, she put on the headphones. Immediately, she was immersed in a clicking, hissing, gurgling world.

Close eyes to let hearing adjust. This was one of the golden rules.

Tune the dial to find the frequency.

If only, Mary thought, and not for the first time, if only they had the bang-up-to-the-minute American HRO receivers with their pinpoint accuracy instead of the old dinosaurs the Brits were lumbered with … Then she would be there on the button
waiting for her agents. Instead, she was forced to keep one hand on the dial because the frequencies had a trick of melting away.

Easy now. Swivel the needle ever so slowly back and forth through the spectrum until the whole sweep had been covered.

‘I think … what do I think? It’s like searching the wireless for dance music on those foreign stations after the parents have gone to bed and Auntie BBC has shut up shop for the night,’ said Nancy. Maybe. Mary wasn’t sure she wished to consider something as serious as their work in Nancy’s light-hearted way.

Final time check.

Who the agents were she had no idea. The signals clerks were not given even a hint. They were told nothing apart from the bare operational facts of the call signs and the skeds, and they were instructed not to speculate.

That she found hard.

All the girls agreed this was misguided policy. It showed that the bigwigs did not trust them and, considering how hard and exhausting the work was, the lack of trust made the signals clerks indignant. The long hard slog during the nights, when they were forbidden to break, even for a cup of tea, was especially taxing. ‘If they didn’t have us,’ said Beryl. ‘What would they do?’

Mary concentrated. Often the signals were weak but she had trained herself to be receptive to the merest drift of sound.

A bubble bursting
.

Atmospheric music … the waltz of the wave bands
.

Time?

Pencil poised in her right hand, she made another foray into the frequencies with her left.

It was forbidden to get close to their agents. Those vulnerable, quixotic, brave pianists. The instructors had been precise. No little wireless exchanges. No sneaky transmission of the number 73, which meant ‘best wishes’ in any radio language
and could be taken to mean ‘keep your chin up’ or ‘we are thinking of you’. Mary wondered indignantly what difference it would make. What harm could there be in making a tiny human gesture across the ether?

When she had got to know them better, Mary talked it over one day with Nancy and Beryl as they sat drinking their tea in the canteen. The other two girls exchanged glances. Complicit.

‘Can you keep a secret?’ Nancy’s red mouth curled at the corners. ‘Sometimes me and Beryl slip in this …’ She knocked out the letters on the table.

‘My goodness!’ Mary was taken aback. The letters spelled out the word ‘shit’ – but, in a flash, she understood why. They were the fastest letters to transmit.

Over the teacups, which sported scummy rims because the water was hard, Nancy and Beryl were regarding her in the way that was now familiar to Mary: cut the old girl some slack.

‘We’ve shocked you,’ said Nancy.

‘No,’ Mary replied hastily. ‘No. Please don’t think that. It’s just rather a strange message of comfort.’

Beryl giggled. ‘Too right.’

What they were expected to do was to learn their agent’s individual style of transmitting. ‘Think of it as handwriting,’ the instructor said. ‘We call it the agent’s “fist”.’ During the training, it was drummed into them that they must listen out for even the tiniest variants. Oh, the pleasure, both visceral and deep, it gave Mary to know that she turned out to be particularly good at it.

‘Is your agent on the run? Surrounded by the enemy? Transmitting in fear, cold and darkness? Is he or she who they said they are?’

In her bones …
in her bones
Mary knew she could answer all those questions, and the more she considered and observed, the more she realized that the authorities didn’t possess her expertise. They didn’t have a clue. She and the girls
knew
their
agents and understood. If asked, she could have told the authorities a thing or two about themselves which they hadn’t dreamed of.

In some respects, she and the girls were operating just as subversively as the agents.

In the signals room, the intensity of the work had upped the humidity but it was still freezing. Mary’s feet were turning numb but it was of no matter. Goodness knew what conditions were like for the men and women for whom she was straining every ounce of concentration. Where were they transmitting from? Deepest France? Poland, perhaps? Surely not Germany? Some were hesitant, some impetuous, some sloppy. Only that last shift, for instance, the agent had been frightened. Don’t ask Mary how she knew. She just
did
. Anxiety burned over the airwaves and she had the oddest notion that it seeped into her bone marrow. His or her distress affected her, and she had been forced to marshal all her reserves to transmit Home Station’s message back.

Hang on
… She had willed her faith, her support, her care to pour through her fingertips.

On schedule a high-pitched sound drilled into her ears and she snapped to needle-sharp attention.

ZYA

The agent would continue to transmit the call sign at one-minute intervals until she answered.

What power Mary possessed between that moment of receiving the signal and the moment when she placed her finger on the transmitter key and responded to it. Yes, it was a brief interregnum, but during it she held total sway – which was quite a thought for someone who had never had significant control over her hitherto unremarkable life.

Her finger pushed down the transmitter key. QRK.
What is my intelligibility?

QSA4. Her signal readability was apparently four.

QTC1, tapped the agent.
I have one message for you
.

Mary’s
pencil travelled over the log paper.

QRU.
I have nothing further for you
.

After adding the sign-off from ZYA, Mary placed the paper in the basket from which it would be collected and taken to the decoders, and then, uncaring that the signalmaster might bawl at her, she slumped back against the chair.

What are you doing, Mary Voss?

I’m listening.

To the cries and whispers.

Of those I am forbidden to know.

Those in the dark.

Out there.

Hours later – and the end of the shift was in sight.

Her energies burned up, Mary was woozy and depleted, which meant she would need to take extra care not to make mistakes. All too aware that the present shift pattern was wreaking havoc with her constitution and her sleep, she felt permanently askew, as if she was sailing with a broken compass. Her dreams were particularly bad – vividly disruptive and alarming – and she awoke battered and exhausted.

The dreams were almost certainly her mind registering its protest at the upheaval to her body. Seven days on days. Seven days on nights. But she wasn’t about to repeat the mistake of discussing the problem of sleeplessness to the others. When she had mentioned it to Beryl some months ago, Beryl had shrugged as if to say that working nights didn’t bother her, which made Mary feel even older than she was.

Yet the fun she had in the canteen made up for a lot. To be united in camaraderie was a novel experience for Mary. In her previous job as supervisor at her local telephone exchange, she had had to respect the boundaries and keep herself to herself. But here she couldn’t help overhearing the chat and the free exchange of opinions. Oh, how they disliked the bosses, the predatory men, the rotten conveniences and the endless spam,
but their collective admiration and loyalty for Mr Churchill gave them a nice warm glow. Before they went on shift there tended to be lots of jokes and chat at the tables. Post-shifts were more subdued occasions and the girls regarded each other through glazed eyes or stared at the exhortations pinned up on the canteen walls.

YOUR SILENCE IS VITAL

WALLS HAVE EARS

IF THE ENEMY DISCOVERS US THEY WILL BOMB US

Mary often wondered who it had been at the telephone exchange who picked up that she knew Morse. Whoever it was must have had connections and Mary found herself being interviewed by a woman in a severely cut suit in a vicarage in Kensington, who asked her all sorts of questions, including how she had learned Morse. The answer was simple: her father, who had been in Signals during the Great War, had taught it to her to help Mary out before she joined the Girl Guides.

The woman in the suit had looked very grave. ‘Miss Voss, if you were instructed to keep a secret, and to keep it for the rest of your life, could you do it?’

Her answer must have been convincing because, before she knew it, Mary had joined the FANYs and signed the Official Secrets Act.

The shift ended and Mary fetched her coat from the room which in a previous life had had been designated for the house’s vases –
an entire room for vases! –
and now did service as a cloakroom. She glanced in the meanly dimensioned mirror propped up on the windowsill. Hair still neatly rolled up. Tie straight.

It was eight o’clock in the morning and her day was ending.

When she stepped outside, figures were drifting up and down the drive, their faces pallid and ghostly in the quasi light of a December day – probably, like her, suffering from too little
sleep. There were a couple of WRAAFs, an army sergeant and a stream of cipher and signals clerks.

Nancy came out behind her. ‘Lucky sods,’ she said. ‘At least they can get to the pub when they come off duty.’

The sergeant from provisions, the one with a ridiculous handlebar moustache, passed them on the steps and gave a thumbs-up.

‘I think he fancies me …’ Nancy took her time to smooth her gloves over her hand. ‘He can think again.’

A car drew up in front of the main door. A chauffeur sprang into action and a uniformed figure with many pips and braids emerged from its interior.

‘Bigwig,’ said Nancy. ‘I could put up with him for the car.’

Mary focused on the bigwig, who was ruddy and portly with a mean little moustache. ‘No, you couldn’t.’

Mary’s digs in Locarno Avenue were at number eight. Letting herself in, she placed the key on ‘Lodger’s Hook’ and went into the best parlour, where Mrs Cotton left out a cold meal and a thermos.

The tiny room was unlived-in and felt it. Of symbolic status, it was rarely used and kept in aspic, while Clan Cotton huddled around the stove in the back kitchen and kept themselves to themselves. Mary knew that Mrs Cotton took enormous pride in the room’s overstuffed furniture and starched antimacassars. Taking care, as always, not to drop a crumb, she ate her sliver of Woolton Pie and half a sliced carrot and drank the tea in the Thermos. Having finished, she stacked her used crockery on the tray and left it on the table. As soon as Mrs Cotton heard Mary go upstairs, she would dart out and deal with it.

Station 53d personnel were allocated only basic rent. Mrs Cotton’s back bedroom contained a narrow bed, a chest and a chair. The single wall adornment was a grim picture of the martyrdom of a saint called Sebastian, about whom Mary knew little, but his death looked nasty. However taxing it must have been, Mrs Cotton kept the house spotless. ‘It was what I
was put on earth for,’ she said when Mary complimented her. Hers was a life dominated by scruple and scrubbing, a life in which she fought against the odds to produce fresh laundry and provisions. Mary admired the stoicism.