Bristol House (12 page)

“What did the Americans think of your German?” Annie could detect only the faintest traces of a non-English accent in Maggie’s speech.

“That it was fine, but they were also looking for code-breaking skills. Usually mathematicians and musicians score the highest. Donovan’s people figured if you could find Jewish children who spoke both English and German and also had natural puzzle-solving ability, you would have the complete package.”

“And you fit the bill.”

“Yes. I had in fact some musical ability, and unlike many of the
Kinder,
I was fortunate in my placement in ’39. I was taken in by a wonderful woman, a spinster as we called them back then. She helped me learn English and encouraged me to keep up my German. Also, she was a piano teacher and gave me lessons.” Maggie nodded to an upright piano in the corner. It was surrounded by so much furniture, Annie hadn’t noticed it. “That was hers. She died after Jack and I were married, and I’ve had it ever since. Geoffrey was seriously good when he was a boy, but his father insisted no footballer could play the piano. ‘It will make him a nancy boy,’ Jack said. So now my son is not a footballer, and he is also not a concert pianist.”

“I’m sorry I turned out such a useless good-for-nothing. You’re getting ahead of your story, Maggie. Forget about Portsmouth. Tell Annie more about Bletchley.”

“It was the most uncomfortable drafty barn you can imagine, but what was happening there was . . . marvelous. A few hundred people had worked on Enigma. When I arrived in January of ’45, I was one of nine thousand drones, all of us doing grueling, painstaking work, even boring sometimes, but desperately important. We monitored every word the Germans spoke over the airwaves, as well as all the data from the radio operators the Allies had behind Nazi lines. The Y stations, the listening posts, sent it all to Bletchley to be processed.”

Maggie turned away, ostensibly to put her teacup and saucer onto one of the room’s many tiny tables. Really, Annie thought, to drag herself out of the past. When she turned back to them, she was smiling brightly. “Why are we talking about this? Geoffrey darling, I don’t believe you brought Annie here to listen to an old woman’s stories. Tell me the real reason.”

“Annie’s seen a monk,” Geoff said. “In the back bedroom of the flat she’s renting in Southampton Row.”

Maggie’s eyebrows shot up, then settled back down. “I take it,” she said, “he’s not simply a lodger someone forgot to mention?”

Annie shook her head. “I know it sounds incredible, but—”

Maggie held up a hand. “Let me tell you the three things I took away from Bletchley. I can curse like a sailor in seven different languages. I know a fine claret when I taste one because we regularly raided Sir Hugh’s prewar cellar. And most of all I know that very often things are not what they seem. So what else do we know about your lodger?”

“Annie has only seen him once, but she made a sketch, and he looks exactly like me.”

“Annie, my son is a prize beyond price, at least in my view. But even I do not believe he’s a monk.”

Geoff did not rise to the bait. “We think Annie’s monk was alive in the early fifteen hundreds. Tudor London. That’s her period. Annie has letters after her name. She’s Dr. Kendall, and she’s an architectural historian over here looking for someone called the Jew of Holborn.”

“No Jews could officially be in London at the period,” Annie said, “but a few passed as Lombard traders and craftsmen. The one I’m after appears to have been identified but somehow managed to remain. And he had access to magnificent things. Ancient Jewish artifacts. I’m trying to locate the man, place him in history.”

“And the connection between this Jew and your monk?” Maggie asked.

“I don’t know,” Annie said. “I think there is one, but sometimes I’m not sure.”

Maggie had been sitting forward, listening intently. Now she leaned back. “I know nothing about monks and less about Tudor London. But puzzles? Those I know. There is always a connection.”

“Perfect segue,” Geoff said. The sheaf of translated German documents was sticking out of Annie’s tote bag. “May I?” he asked, and when she nodded, he passed them to his mother. “This is what we came to ask you about. I want to know how accurate the translations are. I think things may be left out, if not actually changed.”

Maggie took the documents and turned to Annie. “I take it you also want to know how accurate the translations are? This isn’t just my son thinking he knows everything and no woman can possibly have a valid opinion?”

Annie had gone for a run earlier. The Covent Garden route. A kid—hair as bright red as her own, maybe seventeen or eighteen—had fallen into step beside her on Kingsway. They ran in tandem for some ten yards, then he flashed her a grin, sprinted ahead, and got lost in the crowd. Back at the flat Annie filled three pages of a sketchbook with drawings of his retreating back. The images became smaller and smaller and he got younger and younger. Eventually it was a three-year-old Ari toddling in front of her, barely able to keep his footing but determined to try. She knew what it cost not to face up to the tough choices. “I want to know the truth,” she said.

Maggie looked at her intently and nodded, as if she were pleased by the answer. “Then I’ll see if I can tell you.” She put on narrow, rimless glasses and bent her head over the pages, quickly turning them, once or twice going back to look at an earlier entry.

Annie carried the tea things into the small kitchen at the back of the flat. It took no more than five minutes to wash the dishes—she couldn’t see a dishwasher—and leave them to drain beside the sink. When she returned, Maggie’s eyes were closed, the papers were on her lap, and the rimless glasses dangled from her hand. Geoff was sitting quietly, watching his mother. Annie took her place in the rose-strewn chair.

“Play something, Geoffrey,” Maggie said with her eyes still closed.

“I’m way out of practice.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s only to help me think. My Bletchley music.”

Geoff shoved a chair out of the way so he could pull out the piano bench, then flipped back the cover on the keys. He played a few notes of a 1940s standard, singing the lyrics softly in a pleasant if unremarkable voice: “‘Lovely, never, ever change . . . love you . . . Just the way you look tonight.’” He riffed a couple of more bars, then stopped. “More?”

“Not now,” Maggie said. “And you’re right, you are way out of practice. That was terrible, but never mind.” Then to Annie: “Sometimes it helps to hear the music of the old days, to remember how we did it then. In this case”—she shrugged—“I can’t say much about your papers on such a quick reading. Except . . . You’ve noticed that the numbers are all written out?” Annie nodded. “Well, they’re a little peculiar. But much of this is in very old German. You’ll have to leave it with me if you want more. One thing I can tell you, however. About your puzzle . . . you need a learned rabbi.”

“Don’t tell me you know one,” her son said.

“Of course I do.” Maggie was reaching for the phone as she spoke.

“Simon can see you Monday,” she said when she hung up. “Two in the afternoon. Don’t be late—he’s a busy man. One of the foremost Jewish scholars in Europe.”

“How in God’s name,” her son asked, “are you on first-name terms with a Jewish scholar?”

“Because when I met him in ’45,” Maggie said, “he wasn’t a scholar. He wasn’t even sure he was Jewish. Not the way he is now. Religion he got after the war. The brains he always had. Simon was a top-level code breaker, one of the clever blokes in what we called hut three. Their job was to look at the whole picture while the rest of us slaved over tiny details. If I tell you he was not quite twenty-one, you can guess how remarkable that was.”

“I think,” Geoff said, “it’s better if I don’t ask how a barely sixteen-year-old
Mädchen
drone got to know a top-level code breaker.”

“Not unless you want me to tell you,” Maggie said. “Now you must go home. All this talk has exhausted me.”

“I am so sorry!”

“My dear Annie, I have not had this much fun in years.” Maggie tapped the sheaf of papers. “Something to think about besides whether I remembered to take my pills, or should I have fish or chicken for my lunch. You can be sorry if you wish—I’m ecstatic.”

Then, with only a token attempt not to be overheard: “I like this one, Geoffrey. And I’m sure Emma would as well.”

***

Maggie’s flat was on Sharpleshall Street, a few steps from Regent’s Park Road. They turned left, then left again. Because according to Geoff, their best chance to find a cab was at the edge of Primrose Hill, a steep grassy rise he said they must someday climb. “There’s an astonishing view of London from the top.”

Her heart gave a little bounce at the casual assurance they would spend other times together. She thought of saying that Henry VIII had hunted deer and wild boar in what was now Primrose Hill and Regent’s Park. Instead she blurted, “I take it Emma was your wife.”

“Yes. Entirely too good for me, as she and everyone else agreed. But Emma and Maggie—now there was a match made in heaven. Sometimes I think Emma only married me so the indomitable Maggie could be her mother-in-law.”

“Maggie is lovely,” Annie said when they were in the cab Geoff had hailed, heading up Regent’s Park Road. “Tell me what happened to her after the war.”

“Pretty much what happened to so many who had been dragged out of childhood into Armageddon. When it was over, Maggie was just another young woman in a place where too many young men were dead.”

“Did she move back in with the piano teacher?”

He shook his head. “No, she was demobbed in London, and she stayed. But code breaking wasn’t much in demand in peacetime. For a while she played piano in a variety of Soho clubs.”

“Is that where she met your father?”

“No chance of that. He wasn’t a Soho type. The way she tells it, the gigs dried up as she got older. When she met Jack Harris, she was working in a souvenir shop on Brighton Pier, and he’d come for a day at the seaside.”

“Oh dear,” Annie said.

“Oh dear indeed. She says she figured by then she was too old to get pregnant, so they weren’t cautious. Next thing you know, I was on the way. Enter grubby old Portsmouth and the grocer’s shop. She hated it from the first minute, but as she saw it, she had no choice.”

They pulled up in front of Bristol House. It was in Annie’s mind to ask him to come up. They were, after all, consenting adults who obviously liked each other. A little no-strings-attached sex would be good for them. Hell, it might even be terrific.

They got out of the cab, and Geoff leaned into the window of the front seat and handed over the fare. Annie pulled a five-pound note out of a pocket. As usual, Geoff refused to take it. “I’m on three hundred a year. You’ve spent the last four years teaching in a girls’ school.” Then: “I’ll come up with you. Just to make sure everything’s okay.”

She opened her mouth to say she’d like that. What came out was: “No need. I’ll be fine. You’re sure you want to go with me on Monday?”

She thought she saw a flash of disappointment, but he recovered quickly. “Are you mad, woman? A chance to meet one of the many who knew Maggie in the old days? A learned rabbi, no less. Wild horses couldn’t keep me away.”

He leaned a bit forward, and it seemed he might kiss her, even if just on the cheek, but it didn’t happen. “See you Monday,” he said. Was she only imagining a new coolness? “I’ll call that morning so we can set it up.”

Annie watched until he turned the corner into Cosmo Place, then she went into the newsagent’s next door. Among their postcards was a view of the gigantic Ferris wheel on the Thames known as the London Eye. According to the tiny print below the picture, it had been taken from the top of Primrose Hill. She bought two the same and wrote them at the counter. The first was for Ari.
Isn’t this the biggest Ferris wheel you’ve ever seen? Love, Mom.

The second card was for Sidney O’Toole.
Miss you. Hope you’re not still angry with me. I am really truly fine. Annie xxxxx.
She had to fish in her bag to come up with Sidney’s snail-mail address, near MIT in Massachusetts. Usually they communicated by e-mail, though since she’d quit her job—Sidney had put his own painstakingly rebuilt reputation on the line to get the Davis School to hire her—they weren’t communicating at all.

After she’d dropped both cards into the mailbox on the corner, Annie allowed the obvious question to surface in her mind: Why had she let Geoff leave like that?

It was, she decided, the no-strings-attached part she wasn’t sure of. She had a feeling strings were sprouting from every inch of her.

***

Among the many tomes on church history her father had published, there was one small thin volume called
On Scholarship.
It had originally been written as a magazine article, but it had proved so popular, it was reissued in hardcover. Today, Annie thought, it would simply have been put online, or published as an e-book single. Essentially
On Scholarship
was a love poem to the joy and exhilaration of leaving no stone unturned.

Maggie Harris’s story had made her think of it. Maggie had called what she and thousands of others did during the war “grueling, painstaking work, even boring sometimes, but desperately important.” Her eyes had been alight when she’d said that. John Kendall would have understood.

Annie was sitting at the dining room table. In the background the BBC was murmuring about the Vatican denying the pope’s failing health. Duplicate copies of the documents she’d left with Maggie were spread out on the table in front of her. She picked up a pencil and underlined the names of each of the congregations that had one of the Jew of Holborn’s treasures. She hadn’t been given street addresses, only the names of the towns in which the congregations were located.

Before she left for London, she had made a copy of a map of the Rhenish Palatinate as it was in the early 1500s and circled the places where the gifts were found. They formed a slightly rippling north-south chain between Strasbourg, which was today in France, and Freiburg, across the river Rhine in the foothills of the Black Forest mountains of southwestern Germany. The distance between them was some sixty miles, and using modern roads and bridges, you could drive it in a little over an hour. In the early sixteenth century it would have been a treacherous journey across rivers and through forests involving many perilous days, perhaps weeks.