Enigma (26 page)

The school hadn’t wanted her to go. Her mother had cried. Her
father had detested the idea, just as he detested all change, and
for days beforehand he was filled with foreboding (“He shall return
no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more”
Job 7.x). But the law was the law. She had to go. Besides, she
thought, she was twenty-eight. Was she doomed to live out the rest
of her life in the same place, tucked away in this drowsy quilt of
tiny fields and honey-stoned villages? Here was her chance of
escape. She had picked up enough clues at the interview to guess
that the work would be codes, and her fantasies were all of quiet,
book-lined libraries and the pure, clear air of the intellect.

Arriving at Bletchley station in her second-hand coat on a
soaking Monday morning, she was taken straight by shooting brake to
the mansion and given a copy of the Official Secrets Act to sign.
The Army Captain who inducted them laid his pistol on the desk and
said that if any of them, ever, breathed a word of what they were
about to be told, he’d use it on them. Personally. Then they were
assigned. The two male finalists became cryptanalysts, while she,
the woman who had beaten them, was dispatched to a bedlam called
Control.

“You take this form here, see, and in this first column you
enter the code name of the intercept station. Chicksands, right,
that’s CKS, Beaumanor is BMR, Harpendon is HPN—don’t worry, dear,
you’ll soon get used to it. Now here, see, you put the time of
interception, here frequency, here call sign, here number of letter
groups.”

Her fantasies were dust. She was a glorified clerk, Control a
glorified funnel between the intercept stations and the
cryptanalysts, a funnel down which poured the ceaseless output of
some forty thousand different radio call signs, using more than
sixty separately identified Enigma keys.

“German Air Force, right, they’re usually either insects or
flowers. So you’ve got Cockroach, say, that’s the Enigma key for
western fighters, based in France. Dragonfly is Luftwaffe in Tunis.
Locust is Luftwaffe, Sicily. You’ve got a dozen of those. Your
flowers are the Luftgau—Foxglove: eastern front, Daffodil: western
front, Narcissus: Norway. Birds are for the German Army. Chaffinch
and Phoenix, they’re Panzerarmee Afrika. Kestrel and
Vulture—Russian front. Sixteen little birdies. Then there’s Garlic,
Onion, Celery—all the vegetables are weather Enigmas. They go
straight to Hut 10. Got it?”

“What are Skunk and Porcupine?”

“Skunk is Fliegerkorps VIII, eastern front. Porcupine is
ground-air cooperation, southern Russia.”

“Why aren’t they insects as well?”

“God knows.”

The charts they had to fill in were called either “blists” or
“hankies”, the filing cabinet for miscellaneous trivia was known as
Titicaca (“an Andes lake fed by many rivers,” said Mermagen
portentously, “but with no outflow”). The men gave one another
silly names—“the Unicorn-Zebra”, “the Mock Turtle”—while the girls
mooned after the handsomer cryptanalysts in the Machine Room.
Sitting in the freezing hut that winter, compiling her endless
lists, Hester had a sense of Nazi Germany only as an endless,
darkened plain, with thousands of tiny, isolated lights, flickering
at one another in the blackness. Oddly enough, she thought, it was
all, in its way, as remote from the war as the meadows and thatched
barns of Dorset.

♦

She parked her bicycle in the shed beside the canteen and was
borne along by the stream of workers to be deposited near the
entrance to Hut 6. Control was already in a fine state of uproar,
Mermagen bustling self-importantly between the desks, knocking his
head against the low-hanging lampshades, sending pools of yellow
light spilling crazily in all directions. Fourth Panzer Army was
reporting the successful recapture of Kharkov from the Russians and
the ninnies in Hut 3 were demanding that every frequency in the
southern sector, eastern front, be double-backed immediately.

“Hester, Hester, just in time. Will you talk to Chicksands,
there’s a good girl, and see what they can do? And while you’re on,
the Machine Room reckon they’ve got a corrupt text on the last
batch of Kestrel—the operator needs to check her notes and re-send.
Then the eleven o’clock from Beaumanor all need blisting. Grab
someone to help you. Oh, and the Index could do with a sorting
out.”

All this before she had even taken off her coat.

It was two o’clock before there was enough of a lull for her to
get away and talk to Mermagen in private. He was in his
broom-cupboard office, his feet up on the desk, studying a handful
of papers through half-closed eyes, in a terrific man-of-destiny
pose she guessed he’d copied from some actor in the pictures.

“I wondered if I might have a word, Miles.”

Miles. She found this insistence on first-name terms a tiresome
affectation, but informality was a rigid rule, an essential part of
the Bletchley ethos: we, the civilian amateurs shall defeat them,
the disciplined Hun.

Mermagen continued to study his papers.

She tapped her foot. “Miles?”

He flicked over a page. “You have my completely divided
attention.”

“My request for a transfer—”

He groaned and turned over another page. “Not that again.”

“I’ve been learning German—”

“How brave.”

“You did say that not having German made a transfer
impossible.”

“Yes, but I didn’t say that having it made a transfer likely.
Oh, bloody hell! Well, come in, then.”

With a sigh he put aside his papers and beckoned her over the
threshold. Someone must have told him once that Brylcreem made him
look racy. His oily black hair, swept back off his forehead and
behind his ears, glistened like a swimmer’s cap. He was trying to
grow a Clark Gable moustache but it was slightly too long on the
left-hand side.

“Transfers of personnel from section to section are, as I’ve
told you before, extremely rare. We do have security to
consider.”

Security to consider, this must have been how he turned down
loans before the war. Suddenly he was staring at her intently and
she realised he had noticed the make-up. He couldn’t have looked
more startled if she’d painted herself with woad. His voice seemed
to drop an octave.

“Look here, Hester, the last thing I want is to be difficult.
What you need is a change of scene for a day or two.” He touched
his moustache lightly and gave a faint smile of recognition, as if
he were surprised to find it still in place. “Why don’t you go up
and take a look round one of the intercept stations, get a feel for
where you fit into the chain? I know,” he added, “I could do with a
refresher myself. We could go up together.”

“Together? Yes…Why not? And find a little pub somewhere we could
stop off for lunch?”

“Excellent. Make a real break of it.”

“Possibly a pub with rooms, so we could stay overnight if it got
late?”

He laughed nervously. “I still couldn’t guarantee a transfer,
you know.”

“But it would help?”

“Your words.”

“Miles?”

“Mmmm?”

“I’d rather die.”

“Frigid little bitch.”

♦

She filled the basin with cold water and splashed her face
furiously. The icy water numbed her hands and stung her face. It
trickled down inside the neck of her shirt and up the sleeves. She
welcomed the shock and the discomfort. She deserved it as a
punishment for her folly and delusion.

She pressed her flat stomach against the edge of the basin and
stared myopically at the chalk-white face in the mirror.

Useless to complain, of course. It was her word against his. She
would never be believed. And even if she was—so what? My dear, it
was simply the way of the world. Miles could ram her up against
Lake bloody Titicaca if he liked, and put his hand up her skirt,
and they’d still never let her go: nobody, once they’d seen as much
as she had, was ever allowed to leave.

She felt a pricking of self-pity in the corners of her eyes and
immediately lowered her head back over the basin and drenched her
face, scrubbing at her cheeks and mouth with a sliver of carbolic
soap until the powder stained the water pink.

She wished she could talk to Claire.

“ADU, Miss Wallace…”

Behind her in the cubicle the toilet flushed. Hurriedly, she
pulled the plug out of the basin and dried her face and hands.

♦

Name of intercept station, time of interception, frequency, call
sign, letter groups…Name of intercept station, time of
interception, frequency, call sign, letter groups…

Hester’s hand moved mechanically across the paper.

At four o’clock the first half of the night-shift began drifting
off to the canteen.

“Coming, Hetty?”

“Too much to do, unfortunately. I’ll catch you up.”

“Poor you!”

“Poor you and bloody Miles,” said Beryl McCann, who had been to
bed with Mermagen, once, and wished to God she hadn’t.

Hester bent her head lower over her desk and continued to write
in her careful schoolmistress copperplate. She watched the other
women putting on their coats and filing out, their shoes clumping
on the wooden floor. Ah, but Claire had been so funny about them.
It was one of the things Hester loved in her the most, the way she
mimicked everyone: Anthea Leigh-Delamere, the huntswoman, who liked
to come on shift in jodhpurs; Binnie with the waxy skin who wanted
to be a Catholic nun; the girl from Solihull who held the telephone
a foot away from her mouth because her mother had told her the
receiver was full of germs…As far as Hester knew, Claire had never
even met Miles Mermagen, yet she could impersonate him to
perfection. The ghastliness of Bletchley had been their shared and
private joke, their conspiracy against the bores.

The opening of the outside door let in a sudden blast of
freezing air. Blists and hankies rustled and fluttered in the
chill.

Bores. Boring. Claire’s favourite words. The Park was boring.
The war was boring. The town was terrifically boring. And the men
were the biggest bores of all. The men—my God, what scent was it
she gave off?—there were always two or three of them at least,
hanging round her like tomcats on heat. And how she mocked them, on
those precious evenings when she and Hester were alone together,
sitting companionably by the fireside like an old married couple.
She mocked their clumsy fumblings, their corny dialogue, their
absurd self-importance. The only man she didn’t mock, now Hester
came to think of it, was the curious Mr Jericho, whom she had never
even mentioned.

“ADU, Miss Wallace…”

Now that she had made up her mind to do it—and hadn’t she always
known, secretly, that she was going to do it?—she was astonished at
how calm she felt. It would only be the briefest of glances, she
told herself, and where was the harm in that? She even had the
perfect excuse to slip across to the Index, for hadn’t the beastly
Miles, in everybody’s hearing, commanded her to ensure the volumes
were all arranged in proper order?

She finished the blist and slotted it into the rack. She forced
herself to wait a decent interval, pretending to check the others’
work, and then moved as casually as she could towards the Index
Room.

§

Jericho drew back the curtains to unveil another cold, clear
morning. It was only his third day in the Commercial Guesthouse but
already the view had acquired a weary familiarity. First came the
long and narrow garden (concrete yard with washing line, vegetable
patch, bomb shelter) which petered out after seventy yards into a
wilderness of weeds and a tumbledown, rotted fence. Then there was
a drop he couldn’t see, like a ha-ha, and then a broad expanse of
railway lines, a dozen or more, which led the eye, at last, to the
centrepiece: a huge Victorian engine shed with LONDON MIDLAND &
SCOTTISH RAILWAY in white letters just visible beneath the
grime.

What a day in prospect: the sort of day one waded through with
no aim higher than to reach the other end intact. He looked at his
Waralarm. It was a quarter past seven. It would be dark in the
North Atlantic for at least another four hours. By his reckoning
there would be nothing for him to do until—at the
earliest—midnight, British time, when the first elements of the
convoy would begin to enter the U-boat danger zone. Nothing to do
except sit around the hut and wait and brood.

There had been three occasions during the night when Jericho had
made up his mind to seek out Wigram and make a full confession, on
the last of which he had actually got as far as putting on his
coat. But in the end the judgement was too fine a one to call. On
the one hand, yes, it was his duty to tell Wigram all he knew. On
the other, no, what he knew would make little practical difference
to the task of finding her, so why betray her? The equations
cancelled one another out. By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully,
to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of
every question.

And it could all still be some ghastly mistake—couldn’t it,
just? Some prank gone badly wrong? Eleven hours had passed since
his conversation with Wigram. They might have found her by now.
More likely, she would have turned up, either at the cottage or the
hut—wide-eyed and wondering, darlings, what on earth the fuss was
all about.

He was on the point of turning away from the window when his eye
was caught by a movement at the far end of the engine shed. Was it
a large animal of some sort, or a big man crawling on all fours? He
squinted through the sooty glass but the thing was too far away for
him to make it out exactly, so he fetched his telescope from the
bottom of the wardrobe. The window sash was stuck but a few heavy
blows from the heel of his hand were enough to raise it six inches.
He knelt and rested the telescope on the sill. At first he couldn’t
find anything to focus on amid the dizzying crisscross of tracks
but then, suddenly, it was filling his eye—an Alsatian dog as big
as a calf, sniffing under the wheels of a goods wagon. He shifted
the telescope a fraction to his left and there was a policeman
dressed in a greatcoat that came down below his knees. Two
policemen, in fact, and a second dog, on a leash.