I Can't Begin to Tell You (9 page)

Fatigue had beaten her and Mary sat down with a thump on the bed. Reaching under her skirt, she unhooked a suspender. The evenings were mornings and the mornings, like this one, were midnight. She had never been an early riser at the best of times. She had been a girl who rebelliously drowsed and dreamed until her mother told her off. How many lie-ins had she enjoyed in her life? She could count them on the fingers of one hand. Once – Mary fumbled for the second suspender as she recalled the sweet and funny memory – once she and her cousin, Mabel, saved up and took themselves off for a night (in separate rooms, of course) in the splendours of a hotel in West Wittering. They had hung the ‘Do Not Disturb’ signs outside their rooms. From time to time Mary thought wistfully of that deep, unbroken slumber and the long, luxurious return to consciousness.

Her stockings were not glamorous ones, but precious even if the darn rubbed on the right big toe. She rolled them down and her flesh shrank from exposure. Experimentally, she pinched a bit of inner thigh, the area which rarely saw light of day. Still soft and silky.

Oh, Mary.

No one had ever felt its softness and silkiness.

‘Your fate is in the stars, dear,’ her mother had had a habit of saying whenever the vexed subject of marriage came up. ‘It’s no use wishing otherwise.’

As time went by, Mary knew her chances of marriage and physical fulfilment grew fewer and, worse, with each passing year she felt elements in her spirit wither and deplete. She strove valiantly not to allow that atrophy.

‘You can tell the difference between a woman who’s been
loved … and one who hasn’t.’ Her mother again, her beady eyes invariably fixed on her daughter as she spoke.

Wriggle out of suspender belt. Remove her one good vest on which – unfortunately – Mrs Cotton had launched some kind of military offensive, shrinking it into a felted garment of torture. Unfasten brassière.

Pour water from the ewer into the enamel basin. Wash face. Wash all over. ‘Strive for cleanliness, inner and outer,’ the vicar at their local parish had preached. ‘It’s marvellous, my brethren.’

Was it?

She glanced at the clock, a cheap buy from Woolworth’s. Housed in red tin it was the brightest object in the room.
Hurry, Mary
. It wouldn’t be long before she had to get up again.

Throwing back the sparsely feathered eiderdown and ancient blankets, she slid into bed. The cold sheets always gave her a bit of a shock but, forcing herself to relax, she lay back and closed her eyes. She had to be rested for the next shift.

No mistakes. Ever.

She began to drift.

In another life, Mary would be warm. Her underwear would be made from silk and the finest cotton and she would be able to buy books whenever she wished. Currently, her budget permitted only one a year. What else? Good white bread every day. A proper dentist, because her teeth were a problem, always had been, and her mouth housed a catalogue of aches, some dull, some excruciating …

There was half an hour to the end of the shift.

Mary and Nancy exchanged looks and, under the bench, Nancy tapped out a Morse rhythm with a foot.

‘Shut it,’ hissed Beryl.

Mary realized that, increasingly, and however tired she might be, she dreaded signing off. It was true. Because in that fizzing,
gurgling world to which she listened bubbled a wellspring from which she drank.

Check the clock.

There was one more sked to go. XRT, code name Vinegar.

Along with ZYA, code name Mayonnaise, he was one of her new agents, and therefore to be especially cosseted and nurtured and protected. She was the only one to know that Vinegar had been a bit iffy with his first transmission back to Home Station. In fact, more than iffy. Plain out of control. He had used the wrong sign-off and muddled up a frequency. But he had got the hang of it. Actually, she was surprised at how quickly Vinegar had turned into an excellent keyer. By his fourth transmission Vinegar had got the hang of it and
she
had got the hang of him by then, too – his Cs (pointed, regular mountain peaks), and his Ms (a tiny dunce’s cap).

It had bothered her a bit, that rapid transition. ‘He’s settled down very quickly,’ she confided in Nancy. ‘On those first transmissions he was so nervous. Next thing, he’s as smooth and confident as you could wish.’

Nancy shrugged. ‘Why are you so bothered about it? He just needed a bit of time, that’s all.’

Nancy was right. Even so, Mary brooded over Vinegar. Eventually, she brought up the subject with Signalmaster Noble, who told her that she was being fanciful and over-cautious. ‘Go and do your job, Voss,’ he said.
Get out of my sight
.

Vinegar. How did he manage, out there in the darker areas of the war?

She was sure Vinegar was a ‘he’.

She imagined him dark-haired, tall and perhaps very clever. Brave, anyway. Yes, heroic.

Was he alone?

Where
in the many possible countries was he?

She pictured him keying in from, say, a barn, the wireless transmitter propped on a hay bale and the aerial threaded up into the rafters. Again and again, the signals clerks were warned
not to speculate, and they weren’t supposed to know the ins and outs of clandestine transmitting. But none of them were stupid. They all knew one end of a wireless transmitter from another, and if the powers that be didn’t trust them, that was their look out.

She had never experienced extreme fear, only the dull thud of a vague but persistent anxiety about the future, and of how life would pan out for a forty-one-year-old spinster. Anxiety was trying enough, and sometimes in the past it had made her take to her bed with one of her headaches. But crippling, paralysing fear? She couldn’t, and didn’t, pretend to know about that.

The noise in her ears stuttered and faltered. She adjusted the dial and watched the needle swing.

This ugly, ungainly machine wove a secret network of sound. To use it was to risk death, and, worse, the demolition of body and spirit by torture. Yet maybe … maybe Vinegar knew that Mary was listening out for him, guarding him, pouring her reassurance down the airwaves. Maybe it made him feel better.

Foolish?

BRSTU XOSAR VOPYI …

She took down the message, basketed it and watched it being taken by the dispatch clerk in the direction of the cipher room.

They had been summoned up from the bowels of Gloom Hall for yet another endless lecture on security.

Did the powers that be never let up?

It was ten a.m. on a winter’s morning and the place was bloody freezing because no one, not even in the nineteen hundred and forty-two years since Christ was born, could work out how to keep a place warm, which, you might have thought, would not have been beyond the wit of man.

So reflected Ruby Ingram as, with a group of her fellow cipher clerks – not to be confused with the signals clerks with whom they were not allowed to fraternize – she trooped into the lecture room to which they had been ordered. There were forty of them. Girls with brains. Girls without brains. Girls from the Shires. Girls from the tenements. Some pretty, others not, some hiding behind the terrible spectacles which was all that seemed to be on offer these days. Average age: twenty-one.

Not surprisingly the noise was ear-splitting.

Ruby didn’t blame them. Talking at full volume helped the girls to ignore the calculated insult by the men in charge of failing to provide them with chairs.

‘Who do they think they are?’ said Frances.

Ruby eyed her. Along with salt-of-the-earth Janet, Frances had turned out to be a friend but she could sound as haughty as a duchess.

‘They think they’re men.’ Ruby was at her most wry.

‘They
are
men,’ Janet pointed out.

This was the Janet who, late one night, had posed the question: ‘Why should possessing a visible organ between your legs mean you rule the world?’

The
lecture room, which had probably been a dining room or, possibly, a small ballroom before the war, smelled of damp and chalk, and reminded Ruby of the bathrooms at Newnham College.

No, she mustn’t think about Newnham. Mustn’t think about Cambridge. Mustn’t think about the fact that, having achieved a brilliant Double First in Maths, she was not granted her rightful degree. Because? The answer beat out wearily in her brain. Because Cambridge University did not grant degrees to women.

Janet waved a hand in front of Ruby. ‘You with us?’

Ruby bestowed a rare smile on Janet, who was an oft-time saviour. On the bad days when Ruby was crippled with pain from migraine, Janet was always there. Somehow she obtained hot-water bottles and aspirin and told her to shut up when Ruby railed at her affliction.

Ruby’s chilblains itched. Frances shivered visibly.

‘Why are we waiting?’ sang Janet in her strong, confident soprano.

‘Because,’ a male voice announced from the door, ‘you are waiting for me.’

Silence fell as swiftly as a tropical night.

Flanked by a sergeant, a uniformed man walked the length of the room to the lectern. Placing papers on it, he faced the girls. ‘My name is Major Martin. Peter Martin. I’m sorry I’ve kept you waiting, but I did so on purpose. I had every intention of making you uncomfortable.’

That was one way of getting their attention. Ruby nudged Janet.

Major Martin was just above average height and slight. Late twenties? Possibly thirty? Dark hair. Dark eyes. Well-shaped hands. His uniform was pressed, his Sam Browne belt shone but, curiously, his shoes needed attention.

Balancing lightly on the neglected shoes, he leaned on the lectern. ‘I was having you recorded.’

A
collective gasp greeted this information and Ruby thought she saw a gleam of satisfaction light up the dark gaze.

‘Sergeant Walker here is going to play it back to you.’

The silence turned into an embarrassed one as a babble of voices was released. It took a moment for Ruby to unscramble the sounds issuing through the speakers on the ceiling.

Janet’s voice sang out: ‘Why are we stuck in this piss house?’

That was plain enough.

Beside Ruby, Frances coloured violently at the replay of her plummy tones lambasting – in terms no lady should utter – the sergeant who had ushered them into the lecture room.

It didn’t take much for Ruby to be prodded into objecting and she spoke up. ‘That’s not fair, sir.’

Major Martin shifted. ‘No, it isn’t fair, Ensign … ?’

Didn’t he know that FANYs were only ever addressed by their surnames?

‘Ingram.’

He held up a hand for silence and got it. Forty pairs of eyes focused on him. ‘Thank you all for coming to see me in this … er, piss house. Your colleague here questions the fairness of the little trick that has just been played on you. A good challenge, but I’m going to demonstrate to you how fairness has nothing to do with it.’ His gaze, thoughtful and professionally sceptical, raked over his audience. ‘You lot have trained on pretty average material. The sort of stuff that streams in and out of base stations and embassies and is coded and decoded in relative safety. But you have a chance to progress.’ Again, he held up a hand. ‘Have I got your total attention? I hope so, otherwise you will be returning to your former, and almost certainly duller, lives. With one difference. Your tongues will have been cut out.’

Major Martin clearly enjoyed the stir
that
created.

A joke
. Ruby closed her eyes for one … two … three seconds. Well, it was something positive in their dull lives.

When she opened them, Major Martin sent her a look which suggested he was amused by her reaction.

He
continued: ‘We now know that you have all complained of the cold and discomfort in no uncertain terms. Let’s take a look at this pitiful situation. You have been made to stand up for … twenty minutes, give or take? Very annoying, I grant you. The room is unheated and we didn’t allow you to put on your greatcoats. Torture, you might agree.’

Frances muttered. ‘Get on with it, man.’

‘I want all of you to think about a different situation. You are hungry, cold and, worse, shaking with fear. You are on the run, and you have to get a message back to London. It’s dark. You have no light and no shelter. And the message you have to get back to London is one that
you have already transmitted
. Why?’

He looked around his audience. Frances’s handsome mouth had dropped open and a faint pink remained in her cheeks.

Audience enslaved, mission accomplished, Ruby concluded.

‘I’ll give you the answer. You are retransmitting the same message because we here at Home Station
have not got our act together
. So, I’m going to ask you the question: What is fair about being tormented by fear, sleeplessness, hunger and discomfort, and by being on the run, when you are required to retransmit a message that you have already risked your life sending previously? The joke being that with every transmission Jerry gets a better fix on you.’

He suddenly switched tack and threw a question at Janet. ‘Where were you before you fetched up here?’

‘Typing pool, sir.’

‘Well, I think I’d rather be in this piss house than a typing pool. And I’ll tell you why. You have a chance to do something. Instead of running around making cups of tea for your male superiors, you can be on the front line of, admittedly, a secret theatre of war, so you can’t boast about it, but what you do will make a difference. This is what I’m offering you.’

Now, why is he looking at me?
Ruby returned Major Martin’s scrutiny. No bashful avoidance.

‘Women
in particular should take their chance. They probably won’t be thanked for it but that’s beside the point.’

He can hold an audience
, she thought.
I’ll give him that. He can pull a stunt, too. I’ll give him that as well
.

The FANY tribe stood as acquiescent as anyone could have wished. Ruby knew that under many of the uniform-covered chests surged various difficult, even disobedient, emotions but they knew when not to misbehave.

Peter Martin checked his watch and held up a piece of the paper used for incoming signals. ‘Since ten o’clock last night we have received two indecipherables. The first is from an agent in France, code name Abel. His cover is blown, the Gestapo are after him and he needs to be picked up fast, but we need to know the map coordinates. However, they are trapped inside the indecipherable. The second indecipherable is from an agent in Denmark. Denmark, as you will all know, is small and flat. If you are an agent, it is even smaller and flatter. It’s easy to be spotted, particularly if you are walking around with a clandestine radio. In fact, you are about as inconspicuous as a lit-up Christmas tree. More radios are needed, therefore, to be dropped in and kept in hiding places so the agents can move unencumbered between them. Why? Because it is dangerous to transmit from one place only. The message contains details of a drop zone scheduled for tomorrow. Unfortunately, the agent was either bone tired, frightened or, possibly, under the influence of too much Danish beer and we can’t read it. I can’t go into any further details, but we can’t miss the slot.’ Major Martin paused. ‘Let me remind you, an extra radio could make the difference between a dead agent and a live one.’

Ruby put up her hand. ‘You want us to crack these two?’ She allowed a beat to elapse before adding: ‘Sir.’

Twelve hours later Ruby missed the bus from her digs, where she had snatched four hours’ sleep, which meant she had to kick her heels for a good twenty minutes.

She
was paying for the five extra minutes in bed. But her sleep had been fretful, filled with the noise of teleprinters and jumbled letters and snippets of random information …

She’d woken exhausted, with a dry mouth and an incipient headache, knowing full well the duty sergeant would enjoy the tongue-lashing he would hand out. She’d fumbled for the remaining aspirin in the bottle and swallowed it down with a glass of water.

Now she was stuck here, in Henfold’s town centre. Such as it was. Apart from an unremarkable market square, there was a W. H. Smith, a chemist, a jeweller (fat lot of good in a war), plus a butcher with the inevitable queue outside it. At each end of the shopping parade there was a pub and, miracle of miracles, a library housed in confident, high-Victorian municipal architecture.

Head still faintly throbbing, she walked towards it.

‘Come on in …’ The pale, male, malnourished-looking librarian at the desk dug into his limited energy reserves to welcome her. ‘Please use us, but if you want to take out a book you will have to join.’

Ruby couldn’t say to him, ‘Can’t do that. Top secret.’ Instead, she gave him one of her smiles, designed to make the recipient’s day. Crossing over to the reference section, she hauled out the
D
volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

‘Denmark is a tiny country with a population of under 5 million …’ she read. For reference, she checked the publication date of the encyclopaedia: 1929. ‘It is spread over some one hundred islands …’

She skimmed through descriptions of ‘Northern Smorgasbord’ and ‘Southern Hideaways’ where it was possible to feel ‘you’re far away from civilization’.

On further inspection, the pages, foxed and musty, offered a grand tour through Danish geography – gentle inclines, neat, bright-coloured houses, barns and woodpiles, the glint of a pale sea – and a little of its history.

Who
exactly were the Danes?

Perhaps nothing encapsulates the essence of Danishness better than the idea of
hygge
, the companionship experienced by Danes when they gather together. To experience a sense of
hygge
is to retreat into a peaceful and cosy world …

The volume was heavy but she knew exactly how to balance it, an expertise acquired during the hours spent in the library at Cambridge.

She had learned wonderful things in that library.

Binary numbers make it possible to represent all computable numbers as infinite sequences of
os and Is alone
…

How excited she had been on first reading the theory. She’d been like a girl with her nose pressed against a window pane through which she could make out the sweet and glistening enticements of the new mathematics, a girl who thought she could bring the world to her feet.

She could safely say that interested her far more than any human being.

Back to the encyclopaedia.

Denmark was ‘very small and flat’. Given their work and what was going on there, the agents in place wouldn’t have much in the way of camouflage. She recalled Major Martin’s softly spoken and urgent injunctions. What a stunt he had pulled. He minded very much about those undercover men and women and was going to make the cipher clerks mind, too. Ruby liked that. There was none of that stiff upper lip, British-men-don’t-display-feelings kind of approach to the situation but, rather, passionate engagement. Nor had there been any of that barely concealed patronage and the run-along-and-leave-the-grown-up-stuff-to-us attitude displayed to women by the majority of men she had encountered.

As Major Martin said, agents over there were trying to get the wireless sets from London delivered safely. They needed all the help they could get. Help which she, Ruby, knew she could
give them because she was clever enough to do so. Granted, her contribution would be small but it would matter.

Think.

She stared at the books on the shelves and rehearsed the principles of encryption to refresh herself. Adding on and substituting letters were the simplest of the principles employed, the latter becoming more complex when a single letter was substituted with letter pair – but it was a process subject to mistakes.

Think, Ruby
.

‘In practical cryptography,’ she had been told in her early training, ‘part of the message transmitted does not make up the message itself but conveys instructions on how to decipher that message. The non-message letters are called indicators.’

All the basic stuff. Too basic for what was needed for the problem in hand? Perhaps she should consider the refinements and additional complications to encoding and decoding which had been thought up by fiendishly clever people.

Ruby corrected herself. Don’t go too fast. Agents in the field were not necessarily fiendishly clever mathematicians. They functioned on the basic applications and possibly a level above, but not that much above.