The Enigma Game

by Elizabeth Wein

  Then the mantel caught fire.

  It went up all at once – the old wood just reached its flash point, and a curtain of flame stretched across the whole length of the hearth and up to the ceiling. For a few seconds, every one of us was too stunned to do anything – we just stared.

  Then Mrs Campbell screamed, ‘The ceiling! Phyllis! There’s a bucket behind the bar – fill it and help me!’

  She became suddenly modern and efficient, wielding a proper soda-acid fire extinguisher in both hands, fearlessly aiming it overhead and sending a jet into the flames licking at the oak beam over the bar. ‘Louisa, get Aunt Jane outside! Then come back and try to ring for the firemen at Windyedge! Get Jane a chair if you can—’

  Phyllis ran to fill the bucket. I hauled Jane over my shoulder by her good arm.

  I left her shivering against the stone wall out front, between the scorched pines on the ridge and the dancing orange light behind the deep windows of the Limehouse. I had time to dash in to make the Mayday call. But I didn’t have time to get a chair. Nan and Phyllis turned me out as I tried to step into the bar.

  Jane wasn’t where I’d left her.

  She lay on the gravel in front of the Limehouse. She’d tried to come back in by herself. What for? The records, her wonderful jazz collection and the Johanna von Arnim recordings – her faked British passport?

  I think she came back for me.

  It was much worse than her first fall. It was hard to tell what was wrong.

  ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,’ she moaned quietly, over and over.

  ‘Louisa, run down to the Torries’ and get a blanket and some brandy,’ said Mrs Campbell. ‘We can’t move her without help.’

  ‘Oh no!’ I cried. ‘I left her alone a minute ago and look! I’m not going now—’

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Phyllis.

  I knelt beside that wonderful old woman on the icy gravel with my arms around her, trying to keep her warm with my own warmth. The stones drove through my stockings into my knees like shards of frozen glass.

  Couldn’t I have stopped this, this one thing?

  But I’d had to ring for the firemen!

  ‘They won’t arrest me now,’ Jane whispered.

  ‘Nobody’s going to arrest you! Ever!’

  She clutched my sweater. ‘Louisa? Don’t go, my lovely Louisa.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ I said.

  Oh no, sang a panicked fugue in the back of my head, don’t do this to me, Jane Warner! Don’t leave me alone again, I like it here, I like it with you, this hasn’t been long enough, who will play duets with me? We haven’t finished the last lot of library books, we need to buy you a new gramophone, there’s no one else! Oh God, did Jamie feel like this, like this, when his best friend let go and sank in the icy black water? How did he bear it, how did he not let go himself?

  But he was there. He was there for Silver. And I was here for Jane.

  I didn’t let her know how I was panicking.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ I repeated. ‘You’re not alone.’

  I held her, while we waited for what would happen next, and I sang softly.

  ‘Jane and Louisa will soon come home,

  They will soon come home,

  They will soon come home;

  Jane and Louisa will soon come home,

  Into this beautiful garden.’

  Music. Right till the end.

  So proud of my girl, said my daddy’s voice in my head. A real voyager.

  Ellen:

  ‘Are you all right, Louisa?’ I whispered.

  We lay together one night later inside the dark-as-dark of an old-fashioned box bed, a thing like a huge cupboard in the big room of Morag Torrie’s cottage. It had a heather mattress such as I slept on all my life until I joined up, piled with quilts and blankets. Another box bed beside ours held Morag and her parents – Phyllis and Nan were in a different cottage.

  ‘I think I’m all right,’ she whispered back. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Och, no bother.’

  We lay among the lumps of dry heather staring into blackness.

  ‘You always say that. Really, “no bother”?’ Louisa asked.

  ‘Well, a mite done in.’

  I came back to Windyedge the day after the fire. I sat in the hospital in Aberdeen all night while Jamie had his fingers and toes chopped off, and then I stayed to comfort his mam the next morning while he slept off the sedatives and the morphine before the doctors let anybody see him.

  ‘I’m awfully glad you’re here,’ Louisa said. ‘I was by myself last night, and it was dreadful. Nan didn’t want to share with me and I was so worn out and miserable after the firemen left, I just gave in for once and let Phyllis sort things. But I hated being alone.’

  Morag’s parents hadn’t wanted me under their roof, either, after she told them I was a Traveller. But Phyllis sorted that, too. Of course you must put Ellen up, she is a servicewoman! Louisa won’t mind sharing. Aye, throw the two outcasts together.

  Neither of us minded sharing, but it is not nice to feel unwelcome.

  ‘Morag said you walked the last ten miles to Windyedge from the rail station!’ Louisa said.

  ‘I like walking.’ It seemed a long time since I’d walked anywhere, really walked. ‘I like walking more than driving. It gives you time to think. My family walked all over Scotland when I was wee, following the work. It’s hard with the war on. The young people have all gone for soldiers or are in factories, and most of us hate it – so many flipping rules and regulations, and the same routines day after day, and having to kill. My brother hates it. I’m lucky at Windyedge … except when the planes go down. It’s like raising pet lambs, you give them daft names and watch them grow, and then when you send them to the butcher, you wish you hadn’t bothered.’

  Louisa sighed. ‘Yes, it’s awful. It’s awful.’

  ‘At the Limehouse I’ve been under one roof, the same roof, for longer than I’ve ever stayed in one place ever,’ I confessed. ‘Ten times as long. Fifty. I don’t know.’

  Louisa was quiet for a moment, and then launched one of her familiar well-aimed torpedoes at me. ‘That old man was quite rude to you when you were having your sandwich in the pub the other day, I thought.’

  ‘They’re always like that to Traveller folk, unless we’re digging their garden or mending their pots,’ I told her. ‘And of course Morag blethered about me to the whole village, so now everybody knows.’

  ‘But her parents weren’t so rude,’ Louisa said. ‘They were just … a bit like Nancy. They expected one thing, but they also knew you were the driver for RAF Windyedge and Phyllis’s friend, and they had to – open up their heads a bit to take it in. I suppose I do, too.’

  I was surprised to realise I knew just what she meant.

  ‘That is how I feel thinking about Jamaica!’ I exclaimed. ‘It seems a fairytale, not a place where ordinary people live and buy stamps and make whooping-cough mixture and burn the cooking when they’re weary. I wish I could see it.’

  ‘Well, you say you are a Traveller – it’s a good long journey!’

  She made me laugh.

  ‘You are so brave to have told everyone about yourself,’ Louisa murmured. ‘You knew the trouble it would make you.’

  ‘I couldn’t hide forever,’ I said. ‘But you can’t ever hide.’

  ‘No, but in Scotland I’m just one. People are often more curious than horrid if there’s just one of you. The villagers stare at me, but they’re not nasty.’

  I laughed again, more bitterly. ‘Would you listen to the pair of us – as if it’s easier or harder for one or the other! It’s different, but mostly it’s just hard.’

  ‘Jane said I had to fight,’ Louisa said. ‘She said the world was poisoning itself, and I was young, so it was up to me to make it better.’

  I heard her sniff. She loved that old woman.

  After a bit I asked her quietly, ‘What will you do now?’

  She sighed. ‘Mr
s Campbell asked me to stay and help her put the Limehouse right, and work for her when the damage is mended, at the same wages I had for looking after Jane. So I will be all right for a bit.’

  ‘Can the Limehouse be mended?’

  It looked like a great old smoking ruin when I saw it earlier the day.

  ‘There was a fire inspector round this morning. He says the building’s sound. The damage was mostly to the bar, and only Room One had smoke in it. They let us in to collect clothes and things! My flute and my passport and wages, and Mummy’s album of Jamaica photographs – all fine. Mrs Campbell is Jane’s next of kin, so she’ll have a little extra to pay for the repairs.’

  ‘I wish I’d seen the blaze,’ I said. ‘Poor old Nan. Poor old Jane.’

  ‘It wasn’t sad,’ Louisa said. ‘Or – I was sad, but Jane – she seemed ready. She was ready. And I was – I was so lucky to be there. I wasn’t there for either of my parents. I was—’ She grasped for the right word. ‘It was a blessing to be there with her. I was blessed.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ I said, and twined my fingers through hers to squeeze them tight.

  ‘How is Jamie?’ Louisa whispered.

  My turn to grasp at words, though I’d known she’d get round to asking when she was good and ready.

  Truthfully, I didn’t know how he was. I’d seen him for five minutes when his mam went in, and he was barely awake, dazed and mazy. I’d felt like an intruder on his mammy’s grief, so I’d left them to it.

  ‘Not very well,’ I said at last. ‘In pain. Missing half his fingers and all his toes. Out of work. And blaming himself for seventeen young men dead. Which isn’t his fault at all, at all.’

  In the black quiet of the box bed, Louisa cried so silently I didn’t hear until she gasped for air.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Oh God, I think it’s my fault.’

  ‘Your fault?’ The words burst out of me as a sob. ‘It’s not your flipping fault, Louisa! What about those Messerschmitt 110 night fighters?’

  ‘I translated all that code.’

  ‘He gave you all that code to translate! Nor did I have to pass it on, which I did willingly! We did it together.’

  ‘But if he hadn’t flown to Norway—’

  ‘Och, you’re just as bad as he is!’ I exclaimed. ‘He had to fly to Norway. That’s what they do. It’s their war work. Sometimes they don’t make it back.’

  I tossed off the covers and scrambled to my knees in the inky black. ‘All right, I can prove to both you gumpuses it was an op just like any other.’

  Louisa:

  Ellen threw open the door at the end of the bed. The room beyond held a faint memory of light, red in the hearth, paler black around the curtained windows. Ellen climbed out of the box bed, felt her way to the door where her satchel hung on a peg, and brought the bag back.

  Back inside the closed box bed, she lit an electric torch. She gave me a square blue notebook, like a clothbound exercise jotter. She held her torch so I could look at the cover.

  Printed on the blue cloth in black ink it said Royal Air Force: Pilot’s Flying Logbook.

  Beneath that was a space for the owner’s name. In looping script like a schoolboy’s was written James G. Beaufort-Stuart.

  ‘He asked me to fetch it,’ Ellen said.

  I let the notebook fall open. It was a list of all the flights Jamie ever made with the Royal Air Force, right back to his first training flight, not much more than a year ago. I turned the pages carefully. His early operational entries, last summer as the Battle of Britain began, were like the casualty lists. He was supposed to log how long each flight took and where he’d gone, but he also noted every time anyone in 648 Squadron was shot down. Then there wasn’t room for that. So sometime in September he limited it to just his mates in Pimms Section.

  Then there was the entry for 7 November 1940.

  That night, men had died in A-Flight as well as B-Flight. Jamie had listed the names of six men in Pimms and added a note that said, ‘Also five lost in Madeira and thirteen in A-Flight.’ His pen nib had torn the page where he’d drawn a line under also for emphasis.

  Twenty-four men died that night – two-thirds of 648 Squadron, more even than last week.

  They’d died on a routine mission.

  And I knew then that Ellen was right. The Valentine’s mission had also been routine. The deaths that night didn’t have anything to do with me.

  But I also knew that I’d feel like they were my responsibility forever, all of us would feel responsible forever, even if there wasn’t anything Jamie or I or Ellen or Felix Baer or anyone could have ever done to prevent those deaths.

  I closed the book with a sob.

  Ellen dropped the torch. She rocked me like a baby, dropping little kisses on my head and crooning in a language I didn’t understand. She was crying too.

  Jamie:

  I fought my way up from the bottom of an endless cold black sea where the whole of me was frozen except my hands and feet, and they were on fire.

  After a bit I remembered where I was, and how I’d got here, and I opened my eyes.

  I didn’t recognise the room. I remembered vaguely that Mother had been there, though, and it was pretty obvious she had, because I was surrounded by snowdrops and daffodils. There was a colony of jam jars full of dainty white drooping blossoms on the stand beside my bed, and a forest of white and yellow flowers in jugs and medical beakers on a wheeled steel trolley at my feet, and tall spears of unopened green buds were stood in buckets on the floor all around the walls. There must have been a thousand of them.

  And my wee German-speaking sister was there, at work filling the window sill with more daffodil-stuffed jam jars, wearing her blue WAAF uniform and looking like herself again. She’d got rid of the operatic plaited crown of hair and the ridiculous fake eyelashes. Bit of lipstick, hair done up in that French-style twist our grandmother liked, still elegant. But more ordinary. Without the mask.

  ‘Oi, Sergeant Lind,’ I croaked. ‘People will recognise you.’

  She let go a handful of two dozen half-opened daffs, scattering bright yellow flowers all over the floor around her feet, and raised her head. She looked as if she’d been awake all night crying.

  ‘Jamie-lad,’ she breathed. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Och, no bother.’

  ‘Liar.’

  She dragged the one chair over by me and rested her chin on her folded hands on the bed next to my head. My own hands lay swaddled in bandages so that nobody including me could see what had happened to them, and my feet were under a little tent to keep the bedclothes off them. She was careful not to touch me.

  ‘Who’s the bloody liar?’ I accused. ‘“Sergeant Elisabeth Lind!”’

  ‘Lind is part of my name. And I borrowed Elisabeth from the Queen. Lots of people call me Queenie.’

  ‘Only Ellen does that,’ I disagreed hoarsely. ‘Why did you have to get assigned to Windyedge, of all places?’

  ‘I was supposed to collect a German coding machine for Intelligence,’ she hissed in my ear, ‘only some bugger from the RAF had stolen it and set up his own private special operations ring so he could go on submarine hunts.’

  God, my hands and feet hurt – that wasn’t a dream. I didn’t dare to move, and I didn’t want to think back to that last flight.

  ‘I thought you’d help me,’ she added petulantly.

  ‘We damn well did help you. It wasn’t easy, though, with you being in disguise as a Swiss milkmaid. Ellen and I had a job not to fall about laughing and blow your cover.’

  ‘I had to. I was told. That was for the Germans. So they’d take me seriously.’

  ‘They took Louisa jolly seriously, and she just goes about as her proud wee self.’

  ‘They’re coming to see you,’ said my sister. ‘Louisa and Ellen, I mean, not the Germans. They said they’d wait until you were more likely to be awake.’ She raised her head to plant a quick kiss on my cheek. ‘I couldn’t wait, though.’

>   It was nice to be able to talk to her properly, like coming up for air after thinking you were going to drown. A better painkiller than the morphine.

  ‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ I said.

  Louisa:

  Jamie was sitting up when Ellen and I got there in the afternoon. His pale skin was covered with scabs beneath the scraggly week-old beard, and his bandaged hands lay in his lap. The clear hazel eyes, unfocused in his narrow fox’s face, went bright and excited when he saw us.

  His sister was perched on the edge of his bed, and she also looked up as we came in. Without her painted face and plaited crown of hair, sitting next to Jamie and wearing the same expression of welcome and relief, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen right away how alike they were.

  I had to admire her for pulling it off.

  Ellen strode across the hospital room full of spring flowers, leaned down, and kissed Jamie on the mouth.

  ‘There you are, Jamie Stuart. You owe me that one from before.’

  Then she turned to the girl who wasn’t Miss Lind and they held each other so close and tight that the copper and gold hair tangled together at the sides of their heads.

  At last they all stopped cuddling. I felt like a bit of a gooseberry. I wouldn’t have dared to kiss Jamie, even on the cheek; I was still a bit in awe of him.

  Ellen saw, and reached one hand to pull me closer.

  ‘Show him the box of chocolates Nan sent,’ she said. ‘That’s good for a laugh.’

  I got them out of my school bag. ‘She’s been saving them since last year, and they’ve already survived a German bombing and a house fire, so watch out.’

  ‘Ta, Louisa,’ Jamie rasped. ‘Put them in the drawer as there are no surfaces left. Ruddy female relatives and their ruddy floral tributes.’

  ‘Here’s your logbook,’ said Ellen. ‘Which bit did you want to torture yourself with?’

  She sat in the chair beside him, holding it where he could see it, like a young mum reading a storybook to a small child.