The German Numbers Woman (24 page)

A few days ago she'd heard the hum and click of morse as she stood in the kitchen. He must have been sending for at least half an hour, and on asking him why, he responded in a tone of not liking to be asked, which she hadn't heard before. Then he admitted it was a tape letter to Richard, who sometimes wrote to him in that same way. They exchanged information about what each had heard on the radio and, if there happened to be nothing of interest, just what came into their heads.

She didn't therefore see how that could be the reason for his morose state, since they had been communicating for months. Nor did she think that if she knew morse she would gain any enlightenment by listening to Richard's tapes. Another reason for his moods could be that the year-in and year-out sameness of existence preyed on his spirit.

She laid the coffee before him. ‘Perhaps it's time we had another holiday.'

‘I'm happy enough here.'

‘I sometimes think you might not be.'

He put sugar into his coffee, the first time in years. ‘I'm as happy as you are, my love,' touching her wrist and joining thumb and finger around as if to gauge the span, one of his oldest caresses.

Today the gesture annoyed her, though again it was too strong a word, merely that together with his new remoteness he was shackling her into a situation he wouldn't explain. ‘I know, but I worry. Stupid, probably.'

‘I'm well, except that a shadow goes over me now and again. But it'll pass. It always has.' He wanted to get back to the radio, a drug impossible to do without, by day now as well as night. Judy might come on at any time.

‘Maybe we should go for you to have a check-up.'

The cat brushed his ankles, and he pushed it forcefully away. ‘That won't be necessary.'

He was putting on weight, but eating gave pleasure. No harm in that. He had so few, apart from her. Going on a diet would seem too regimented to put up with.

‘I don't want you to worry about me.' He laughed, his old self. ‘That would really make me ail. I'll go for a long walk after lunch, and it would be a pleasure if you'd join me.'

He stroked the cat, and its rattling harmonised with her agreement. ‘I'd love to. We can go to the Pot and Kettle on the front, and have tea.'

‘We will,' he stood. ‘In the meantime me and Ebony will listen to a few funny squeaks coming out of the wireless. Won't we, pussy cat?'

‘We'll get a novel on tape from the library later, to take your mind off things.' She watched him go, no diverting him from whatever it was, and feeling still more desolate, though she couldn't think why. There was no reason, except there must be. As he had often said, there was a reason for everything.

A shake of the hand as he readied himself for the search. She hardly ever came on during the day, being busy in the galley serving three-course meals for a boisterous and hungry crew. The waving bush of atmospherics on her frequency sounded like the wash of water around the boat as it plied tricky channels of the Dodecanese. He consoled himself with the weather forecast: ‘A moist and unstable air circulation is still affecting the eastern Mediterranean. Patchy cloud and moderate visibility. Outlook similar.' And so, he thought, is my future, though similar to what?

The ten-o'clock transmission from France was useful for honing his brain. Even when I'm close to dying, or halfway to being ga-ga, I'll still be able to take morse and work a typewriter. If my brain loses its sharpness for that it'll prove I'm going into a darkness greater than the one I'm in now, and I'll enter it quietly because there'll be no option.

The French station emitted a few score groups of letters, cunningly throwing in a figure now and again to fox whoever was taking it. Then came ten minutes of prose, which Howard got the gist of because he had taken the language for Higher School Certificate. Every little endeavour or event before the age of twenty had been drawn on to reinforce his life-long effort of survival.

Laura once remarked as a compliment that only the simplest people could live their lives to the full, but he had never known till now how right her observation was, recalling it because today's French transmission ended with: ‘…
l'homme le plus simple du monde, ce n'est pas assez dire, il est avec les autres comme il est dans l'obscurité silencieuse de sa demeure
,' which he rendered as: ‘The simplest man, needless to say, remains, when among others, in the silence and obscurity of his own soul.'

He moulded the daily aphorisms to the demands of his own mind, messages from God manipulated to distil the basic beliefs of his life, an innocent conceit, but supportive all the same. Some he recorded on tape for listening to whenever he needed to speculate on who he was, and ponder the reason for being on earth. They were more relevant than if coming through in English, for his imperfect French could suggest meanings that may not have been intended, or weren't there in the first place. They tested his wits, prompted him to formulate questions and search for answers, unable to deny that any disturbance elevated his often deadened mind into a higher state than boredom or the mere transcribing of morse.

He sometimes forgot the station for weeks until, one morning, without knowing that he needed to, he would give up his walk, and tune into the half-hour transmission, the hundred or so code groups inducing a mindlessness which prepared him for the gnomic utterance of the prose.

The older he got, merely inhabiting himself wasn't enough to satisfy his existence. The blister of discontent, there since birth, plagued him more because he was blind, an anguish of uselessness sometimes close to madness, as if he were an animal in the zoo and he the only member of the public looking on.

An undignified picture but maybe it would guide him towards making a better situation for himself. If he could take morse, he was still sane, which was good. If he told Laura of his lack of moral fibre she would say he was restless, needed to see a doctor, or could do with a holiday, so he wouldn't hint that anything was wrong because nothing was. Rather, in some ways, it was more right than since taking off for that last bombing raid over Germany. The flimsy covering of renewal was lifting with an effect as painful as when plaster was taken from a healing wound. He could only endure, knowing that uncertainty and discontent could be tolerated as long as you gave no sign to anyone else.

He pressed the radio button, and put on earphones. A crushing phase of interference, like a load of gravel sliding from the uptilted back of a lorry when a new road is being laid out, obliterated a few words of the weather forecast from the Gulf of Mexico. What electrical machine caused the disturbance was impossible to know, the noise not lasting long enough to give clues. He heard the voice of Judy, the tone as if she was in danger, though most likely from exasperation.

Judy:
‘Still don't hear you very well. I woke up at four this morning. I had a bad dream.'

Carla:
‘What it say?'

Judy:
‘Horrible. That's all I remember. Then I thought about you, and went back to sleep. It was bliss.'

Carla:
‘What do you do?'

Judy:
‘Don't be rude. It's you I want, not me. It's driving me crazy. Maybe it would be good if we didn't talk like this nearly every day. I'd feel more settled perhaps. I hate the radio sometimes.'

Carla:
‘If you want.'

Judy:
‘I don't want. It's you I want, but I can't have you. I want to be near you again. In two weeks I fly to England, and stay a fortnight at my aunt's place in Boston.'

Carla:
‘Boston in America?'

Judy:
‘No, silly.' (laughs) ‘Boston in Lincolnshire. That's where the people came from who went to America. So they called their town Boston. Don't you know about the Pilgrim Fathers?'

Carla:
‘Don't like fathers.'

Judy:
‘Nor me. Somebody will take my place here on the boat, then I can leave. Maybe you can come with me.'

Carla:
‘I can't. I work here.'

Judy:
‘Ask your boss for leave.'

Carla:
‘Maybe not possible.'

Judy:
‘I'll see you in Madrid then, on my way up.'

Carla:
‘Yes, I think. Two nights, I can. You meet old boyfriend in England?'

Judy:
‘Don't worry. I've only seen him once since I met you. He took me out to dinner but I told him he was wasting his time. It's no good, I said to him. Forget me. I only love you, Carla.'

Carla:
‘I'm jealous.'

Judy:
‘You needn't be. We should live together.'

Carla:
‘We can't. You don't understand.'

Judy:
‘I do. I know we can't live together. Anyway, I like this job, but only for a few weeks at a time. But why can't we live together, I should like to know.'

Carla:
‘We damn lovers. In autumn yacht go in dock. I have more time. Maybe we see more each other.'

Judy:
‘Yes, that'll be good. In September we're going to do things in the Azores. I can't say more.'

Carla:
‘Tell when we meet. If long way away, in Atlantic, no radio talk, too far, maybe.'

Judy:
‘We'll have to write letters.'

Carla:
‘Difficult for me. Telephone could be. We find way.'

Judy:
‘You'll have to come to England.'

Carla:
‘No good for me.'

Judy:
‘I know. You'll be with your man. You never talk about him.'

Carla:
‘What the use? You know about him from start. No secrets.'

Judy:
‘I know. I love you. I don't want to upset you. Lots of mosquitoes in this place. I swat them. I see all the rooms we've been in, I go through the list of places we've been together in, every night I do it, over and over again, so that I can get to sleep. It always works.'

Carla:
‘I think of you. Much pain, though. I think of restaurants we eat in. But time to go to sleep. Siesta time for me.'

Judy:
(laughs) ‘You don't love me anymore.'

Carla:
‘I do. I prove it when we meet, OK? What about your crew, what they do?'

Judy:
‘Oh, don't worry. The captain's forty-eight years old, and he's got a girlfriend called Brenda. She goes back tomorrow. I can't hear you very well. Maybe I'll let you go. Let's talk at the same time tomorrow.'

Carla:
‘All right. I'm sleepy now. I call you.'

Judy:
‘We call each other. Love you, Carla.'

Carla:
‘Kiss, kiss, Judy.'

A Niagara of atmospherics scraped his eardrums to an itch. Able to hear both voices on the air, which neither of them could, he caught a tone in Carla's that Judy missed, and something in Judy's that Carla wouldn't notice. Judy was infatuated (you might say almost in love) to the point of destruction. Carla no doubt liked her, flattered to have her on the line, and proud to have such a compliant English girlfriend, though they met so rarely – and she may not be the only one. She's a sailor, after all. He speculated as to how long the affair would go on, and hoped not for much longer. They were near the end, but who would break first? He noted impatience in Carla's tone at Judy's importunities, which she couldn't control, or didn't care to. From his God-like position he felt the threads weakening, yet hoped they wouldn't break because he wanted to continue listening, keep them under control. On the other hand he would like them to separate so that he could have Judy to himself, at least in memory.

At lunch he said to Laura: ‘When I was young my parents used to take me to the Lincolnshire coast for holidays. Well, they did once or twice. A time or two we went to Llandudno, but mostly to Skegness. I had a vision of Lincolnshire just now while I was sitting at the radio, a place called Boston. I don't know why it came to me, but I'd like to have a sniff at the old place.'

‘Funny you should think of your boyhood.'

‘Isn't it? Maybe I'm getting old.'

‘We both are, if you think about it.' He had turned her down point blank at the mention of a holiday that morning, and now he was back on the subject, though in as courteous a fashion as he could manage. She would like to know what lay behind his change of mind, if anything did. Things often flashed into his consciousness, and into hers as well. Hardly a day went by without a glancing return of her horrible powerlessness under the sweating rage of the man she had trusted, who had ‘interfered' with her, and done what she still could not put the right word to. She used to think that every miscreant was somehow redeemable, but the older she got, and the more her torment grew rather than lessened, the more she believed that some people were damned even beyond the grave.

‘We could go there, perhaps in three weeks' time,' he said. ‘And stay a few days. Won't cost much, if we do it by car, and take a midweek bargain break.'

She wondered why now, and why the excitement in his voice. It wasn't something he had picked up on the radio, or heard on the street, since he hadn't even gone into town from the bottom of the steps, yet the insistence was too strong to have shot out of the past as he claimed. Nor was he merely agreeing to her suggestion that they take a holiday, and leaving her to say where they should go. In any case there was nothing wrong with the idea, they had the time, and could afford it. Paris was the last place, and Malvern before that, but now he stipulated Lincolnshire, and she was always glad to go along with him, to improve the life of darkness and boredom he fought so well. ‘Yes, I think I'd like that. It'll be a pleasant break.'