The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (34 page)

Clément stands watching, a cigarette in his hand.

‘Is all this rather dangerous?’ he asks. ‘I imagine it is. Transmitting, I mean. I imagine they scan the frequencies …’

‘Of course they do.’

‘Directional aerials and a little exercise in triangulation to pinpoint the transmitter …’

‘You have to get your message through and get off the air as quickly as possible. They say you’ve got something like thirty minutes for your first transmission. Less for the subsequent ones. The Germans have DF vans out on the streets …’

‘DF?’

‘Direction Finding.
Radiogoniométrie
. Now be quiet because I’ve got to encrypt the thing.’ On a new sheet of paper she writes out her poem:

‘Tell me what you are doing.’

‘I’m arranging for you to go to England.’

She ignores his laughter and continues with her work, choosing five words from the poem –
whether, or, our, apart, heart
– and numbering their letters to give the key. Then she writes her message out beneath the key and begins to chase the letters through the double transposition to make the plain text appear mere nonsense, a string of random letters with no apparent meaning. When that is done, she adds her personal group to the start of the message, followed by an indicator code to identify the words of the poem, and then her two security checks. Finally she rewrites the whole message in groups of five letters, then checks them through for the slightest error, that single mistake that would shift the whole transposition by one letter and
turn apparent nonsense into total gibberish – an
indecipherable
. ‘Indecipherables are the bane of our lives,’ Marks warned her. ‘Make keying errors and we’ll sort things out. Get your ciphering wrong and it’s a complete SNAFU.’

‘What’s a SNAFU?’

He grinned. ‘It’s code. A technical term.’

Clément watches. She tries to block him from her mind. He shouldn’t be watching but he is watching. He shouldn’t be here alone with her, but he is. She has let her guard down and she knows it. This process – the whole rigmarole of composition and enciphering, the subtle intricacies of transposition keys – is as intimate as washing yourself, or peeing, or any of those bodily functions that you hide from prying eyes. And here she is, her cover abandoned, her defences thrown down, exposed to his gaze. She feels the guilt of transgression.

He asks, mockingly, ‘So what have you decided I’m going to do?’

She gathers up her papers, grabs the suitcase and pushes past him into the corridor. ‘I’ve decided what you
ought
to do. The rest is up to you.’

Outside the front door the landing and the stairwell are in darkness, as silent as a church. Access to the roof is through a door on the landing that she discovered just as she found everything else out, checking the place over for escape routes and alternative exits. She even discovered where the key to the roof door was kept, in the kitchen, beneath the eagle eye of Marie. A single bulb casts a pallid light as she lugs the suitcase up the stairs, feigning indifference to his following her.

At the head of the steps is a narrow closet that smells vaguely of soap. There’s a cement sink and a washboard and a wooden basket. She puts the suitcase down, opens the door to the roof and steps out. The rooftop is a place of shadows, of slopes and pyramids of slate and a dusty pond of glass through which you can peer down into the hall where they were a few minutes ago.
Above the neighbouring buildings the dome of the Panthéon is touched by the last light of the evening. Clément appears in the doorway watching her.

‘Does anyone else come up here?’ she asks.

‘It’s our access. Private. Where Marie hangs the washing.’

She lays the aerial wire out as best she can while he stands there, smoking and watching. Is he considering her proposal? It isn’t that she has forgotten how to read him, it is, she realises now, that she never could read him, never could understand whether he was talking seriously or not. His ideas of science always seemed fantastical, and his ideas about life concrete and reliable. But now everything appears in reverse. Now science brooks no doubt, and life seems riddled with contradiction and uncertainty. Only this procedure, the intricacies of encryption and transmission, drummed into her at Meoble and at Beaulieu, appears to have a purpose to it.

She finds a plug in the wall behind a mop and pail, plugs the wireless set into the mains and switches it on. There is the faint, nervous hum of electricity. The voltage dial flicks into life. She lifts the headphones and holds them to her ear, listening to the sound of silence rushing through the airwaves like a stream.

‘This is beyond a joke, Marian,’ he says.

She looks round. ‘It has never been a joke, Clément. Not for me. I’m risking my life to do this, and yours as well. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to concentrate. I’ll be down in half an hour.’

When he has gone, she upends the pail as a seat and props the wireless set on a collapsible picnic table that she found hidden behind some sacking. She glances at her watch, notes the time and puts the headphones on. Then she inserts the crystal, one of those crystals she carried inside her, switches to the five-megacycle band and takes up the position she tried to learn, with scant success, during training, fingers balanced on the knob of the Morse key. Cautiously she starts sending out her call sign, the hesitant dots and dashes vanishing into the wilderness of the evening like faint birdsong.

She pauses and listens.

In Brest and Augsburg and Nuremberg receiver stations will have detected that little flutter on the airwaves. Phones will be ringing, one station calling the other while their directional aerials will be shifting round the compass to nose out the bearing of this fragile new intruder. Lines will be drawn on a map of Europe, to intersect in a triangle over the city of Paris … and meanwhile in a country house in southern England, that manor house at Grendon Underwood, a FANY wireless operator may or may not be listening, may or may not be crying out, ‘It’s Alice!’ and calling her supervisor over and putting her hand on her Morse key to tap out a response.

She sends out her call sign again. She can picture the aerials turning, listening, like predatory bats detecting a new call on the night air, the song of a night bird who fears to be captured yet needs to be heard. She counts the seconds, praying to whichever deity might rule the airwaves. And then Grendon’s call sign flickers faintly in her ears and brings with it a small thrill of astonishment, as though she has murmured a prayer and God Himself has answered.

She begins her transmission, tapping slowly, knocking on wood, praying for accuracy, the stuttering letters filtered through lessons incompletely learned and inadequately followed. She shifts her backside on the pail and taps on, her words laboriously released into the rush of the ether. There is no such thing as the ether, Ned told her once: it was a figment of the nineteenth-century scientific imagination. And yet she can hear it in her headphones like the roaring of an ocean beating on some distant shoreline, a constant background to the small whisper of her message. She ends the transmission with
Love and kisses
. That is Marks’;s fault. Don’t sign off with ‘Message ends’, he warned her. Don’t do anything that someone might guess. Say ‘Cheerio’ say, ‘It’s been nice talking to you’ say anything except ‘Message ends’ or ‘Over and out’, or any of that stuff they tell you at signals school. Because if it’s a cliché to
you, then it’s just as much a cliché to the Germans. And if they guess it right, they’ll begin to unpick your knitting. Because your whole bloody enciphered message is no more than a glorious anagram of the original. And that’s the trouble with it.

Love and kisses
.

She puts the headphones aside and turns the power switch to
off
. The voltage dial dies back to zero. Another glance at her watch. Seven minutes thirty-five seconds. The prey’s call is no longer on the air and the aerials have stopped straining to hear. If the detector vans have put out from their lairs, they are left with nothing to seek.

She goes downstairs, imagining events in England, her message being hurried to the cipher section, one of the girls getting her poem from the file and starting to unpick the cipher, undoing what she so laboriously did just half an hour ago at Madeleine’s desk. Will coherence emerge from the nonsense?

Clément looks up questioningly as she comes in. She shrugs. ‘I’ll have to wait. I’ve given them an hour.’

They eat the paltry meal that Marie has prepared. They talk, of nothing, of trivia, of the past, of his father and what he is doing in Algiers, of his sister and mother. And then of Augustine, living a sequestered life in the house in Annecy with her mother-in-law and sister-in-law, knowing that she is a Jew and therefore somehow tainted. Like one of those isotopes he studies. Radioactive.

‘I’ve been on the telephone to them,’ he tells her. ‘It’s not easy talking on the phone these days. Of course you can’t say anything openly but I gathered that they’re trying to get into Switzerland. It should be possible to arrange a visa. We still have friends there …’

‘So she’ll be all right, then.’

‘That sounds like an accusation.’

‘Well, what about the thousands that won’t be all right, who can’t cross the Swiss border and be looked after? Tell me about them?’

‘I don’t know about them, Marian.’ His tone is weary, as though he has exercised this argument over and over. ‘I can’t take responsibility for them any more than you can. They have to get by as best they are able.’

‘But you can do something about it, can’t you? I’m giving you the opportunity. I’m doing that because I believe in what I’m doing. I haven’t believed in God for years, but do you know what? I think I’ve come to believe in Satan. And the only way to combat Satan is to be as ruthless as he is.’

In the cipher room at Grendon her words will be emerging from the blur of nonsense, like a photographic image appearing in the developing tray. The cipher clerk will be signing off the message in clear and dashing with it to the communications room. Teleprinters will chatter between Grendon and London, flimsies will be rushed into offices somewhere in Baker Street. Buckmaster and Atkins will meet up to discuss their response.

And Fawley? The self-effacing Fawley will be informed.
Mechanic may be compliant
. Will he ponder over the meaning of that careful subjunctive?

She gets up from her chair. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be,’ she tells him. ‘Don’t wait up for me.’

Listening-watch at the top of the stairs, with the receiver on but the transmitter disconnected. The rush of the ether in the headphones, punctuated by muttering and stuttering. Cold seeping into her limbs and her backside growing numb from sitting on the unyielding pail. She blows on her fingers and listens to the empty music of the spheres. Exquisite boredom, inaction underpinned by tension like a bowstring that is never released.

And then comes the small whisper of intimacy like a lover’s voice in her ear. Her starved fingers begin to scribble down the twitterings, the dots and dashes, a thin trickle that signifies that someone somewhere is thinking of her.

The message is repeated. She turns on the transmitter and waits for the valves to warm up. A moment’s acknowledgement,
a few taps of the Morse key and the thing is over, the message received, the fragile moments of contact sundered. She turns the set off and waits for it to cool. There is the housekeeping to do, all those tasks you have to complete: reeling up the aerial, gathering up every scrap of paper, replacing things exactly as they were, removing all the evidence that she has been there. Back downstairs she retreats to her bedroom to decipher Grendon’s reply.

Dry acknowledgements, understated praise, all the things one might expect. They want to know more, of course, more about
CINÉASTE
, more about
PROSPER
, more about the disaster that has struck the Paris circuits. But she isn’t going to tell them. Every minute on air is a minute off your life. She takes a large glass ashtray and carefully burns all the leaves of paper, every scrap of message and code, then goes to the bathroom and flushes the ashes down the lavatory. Feeling exhausted, feeling the damp in her armpits and the sweat on her brow, she goes into the
salon
and finds Clément still up and waiting for her.

‘There,’ she tells him. ‘I’ve done it.’

Her hand is unsteady as she takes the glass of cognac he offers. He brushes a strand of hair from her forehead. ‘You look exhausted.’

‘I am.’

‘You frighten me,’ he says. ‘I’ve never seen you like this. Driven. Obsessed.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve got a job to do, that’s all. I’m not a child any more, Clément.’

‘You keep saying that.’

‘It’s true.’

He puts his arms round her. She feels comforted by the contact. She doesn’t want to feel that, but she cannot deny it. She remembers watching the children playing in the
impasse
near Yvette’s flat, a little boy falling on his hands and knees, the tears that welled up inside him as he looked for sympathy. But there was no sympathy for him then, and there can be none for her
now. Tears are the last thing she needs. Carefully she detaches herself from his embrace.

‘It’s not safe for me here,’ she warns him. ‘We can’t do anything until the next moon, and I can’t just hang around waiting. I’ll have to go tomorrow.’