by David Boyle
“Just for a few minutes,” she heard the nurse explain firmly outside the door. “She’s very tired.”
There was a knock on her door.
She tried to say, “Come in,” but almost nothing came out except for a kind of croak.
The door swung open slowly, and a small bunch of roses slid through, followed by a shy-looking man peering out from under his fringe.
Xanthe recovered her voice. “Alan! How lovely of you to come!”
“Well, you know…”
“No, it is lovely of you. I’ve no idea what the time is, but I know you ought to be doing something else. Well, something more important than seeing me.”
As she lay there, the feeling of gratitude to Alan Turing, for remembering her, began to grow. Tears sparked in her eyes. Get a grip, Xanthe…
“Not at all. Um, these are from everyone in Hut Eight.”
“They’re beautiful, Alan. Maybe…”
The nurse had come in soundlessly behind him, like Jeeves, and swept the flowers up into a vase and fiddled with them expertly, before putting her head on one side to look critically at her arrangement and plonk them down next to Xanthe’s bed.
“Is it a…?”
“It’s a baby!”
They both laughed.
“No, it’s a boy, of course.”
“Why of course?” said Alan, always able to ask a question that melts away social niceties.
“I don’t know. I always said it was going to be. Perhaps because of Ralph.”
“You mean, because his father’s a boy, then he has to be a boy? I hate to tell you this, Xanthe, but all babies have fathers – even the girls. Do you think we should tell him?”
“You mean, tell Ralph?” Xanthe lay back in exhaustion. She had forgotten that Alan was one of the very few people in on the secret. “Oh, let’s worry about that another time, shall we?”
“Sorry,” said Alan. “Not very tactful sometimes, um, I’m afraid.”
“Nonsense, Alan. You’re lovely. It’s just that…”
She paused, searching for the right word.
“Just what? I’m usually the tongue-tied one, not you.”
Come on, out with it, Xanthe…
“Well, I just feel sorry that I can’t help you any more. I’m going to have to look after Indigo.”
She indicated the bundle in a white shawl next to her bed.
“Indigo?”
“Yes, do you like it? I thought it went with my mood.”
“Really?” said Alan, humming a bar or two of Mood Indigo. “I don’t know, maybe. Um, maybe yes!”
“I have to look after him now, you do see that don’t you? I know we had plans and stuff, but I just can’t.”
She felt tears pricking the back of her eyes. Why was she feeling so emotional at the moment? She hated to let Alan down, and everyone else who had been so supportive – but she could hardly let Indigo down either…
She hummed a little to herself.
Always get that Mood Indigo,
Since my baby said goodbye…
1
London, November 1940
Xanthe walked into the small office off Fleet Street, six months before the birth, through the torn newspapers of yesterday’s editions, strewed across the alleyway. The windows were still broken from the raid a week before. The smell of burned brick dust and plaster hung in the air.
She had been working for the New Yorker’s London office since her return from Germany, and there was a great deal to be done. There were letters to answer on behalf of Mollie Panter-Downes about her column. There was A. J. Liebling to cajole into writing something about Paris, though he was now back in New York, and there was her own writing as an anonymous correspondent. She had been lucky to get the job, organised again with a little word from Commander Fleming at the Admiralty.
Yes, she was pregnant – as the handful of rather dusty staff were beginning to notice as they looked up from their ancient Victorian desks – and getting more pregnant by the day, but she desperately wanted to keep her hand in. More than that, she guessed that her brief period as a Chicago Tribune reporter in Berlin had been somehow a little compromised. She had loved the work but feared that she would have to give up to give birth and would therefore crash out of the assignment, just as she had crashed out of Berlin. The name Xanthe Schneider was no longer useful in that respect, and she would now continue writing – on the rare occasions they gave her a byline – with the identity she had been given in Berlin.
So as far as the readers were concerned, she was Shirley Johnson, a former clerk in the US diplomatic service. Because of all that, she felt she still had things to prove as a journalist.
So when she was not chasing down details for Liebling or Panter-Downes, she had begun thinking up story ideas of her own, in the hope that it might impress Harold Ross, the proprietor of the New Yorker, enough that she might grace the pages alongside the names of Vladimir Nabokov, Dorothy Parker, James Thurber and E. B. White.
In search of a story, the strange English way of toilet paper had begun to fascinate her, especially during the crisis. And while the Blitz had begun, and London was thrilled to find itself besieged from the air, she began collecting anecdotes about how people wiped their bottoms in wartime and began thinking how to communicate this in an amusing way to her generally prudish fellow Americans.
In fact, toilet paper was getting increasingly scarce. People were reverting to using old newspapers cut into strips and hung in the loo – she was fascinated to see how often it was the Daily Mirror or the Daily Sketch. Failing that, there was always a roll of Bronco, shiny on one side, like wiping your bum with corrugated iron. “Deluxe tissue,” it said, “for the bigger wipe.”
The difficulty was writing it. It required a pen more deft than hers. She began to worry about it.
But by the time Xanthe had begun to grow and feel the baby kicking inside her, she had become adept at being a magazine sub-editor and writer, putting together or editing copy on her knees in Shepherd’s Bush underground station, out of the sound of the bombs falling but with the sound of so many babies echoing in her head, wondering at the same time what it would be like to be responsible for a small human life at such a moment in history.
It was a peculiar but exhilarating life. The disapproval with which people saw a pregnant woman struggling into the wreckage from the raid the previous night surprised her, the way people avoided her eyes – perhaps for fear that, in the face of danger, they would become responsible for rescuing her. People behaved unusually once the raids had begun, with great fortitude but also great care. But it was thrilling too; one of those moments in life when you look back and realise that suddenly, and despite all the carping, bitterness and disagreements, and all the doubts and anger about how the nation around her had been treated by its leaders, everyone magically seems to be on the same side – pushing away useless official jobsworths, making do despite the mess.
It was heart-warming, if only she could relax into it.
It was just that she was nursing not only a dislocated relationship with her family back home – she had been getting the occasional clipped and disapproving letters from her father, though she had not had a reply to any of her letters telling him she was pregnant – but also a broken heart. She had loved Ralph, or so it seemed to her, with everything she had. Though they had only acknowledged this towards the end, and she now had to assume – since he had stormed off in a rage after the rejection of Hitler’s peace offer – that he had not really loved her at all. It rendered the Blitz nights and the dogfights and the charred, dismembered bodies all the more difficult to bear, given that they were being delivered by Ralph’s new friends and allies.
She knew she should not take the bombs personally, but sometimes it was hard not to. There were days when she felt so miserable that she could hardly force herself out of bed, except for the sheer exhilaration of the battle in the skies that was going on overhead. Then, one day, just as she was leaving her
friend Moira’s flat, she suddenly noticed a man who, in the bright sunlight of a Double British Summer Time, looked exactly like Ralph.
She stood there, staring, not sure what to do.
“I’m looking for Xanthe Schneider,” said the apparition, who was in RAF uniform.
“Yes. I mean, that’s me.”
“Listen, I know this is an unfair question, but I’m on a mission for Lady Maidenhead – who, as you may know, is Ralph Lancing-Price’s mother. I was wondering if I could be very cheeky and buy you a cup of tea? I’m his cousin Hugh, and you may be the only person I know who can help me.”
Xanthe urged herself to keep her presence of mind.
“Really, why is that? I mean, how can I help?”
“Because I’ve been trying to find out where he is, on behalf of my aunt. I know that you knew him in London because I’ve talked to some friends of yours. I also know you have been a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in Berlin and wondered if it was possible that you could confirm that he’s there. We – the family I mean – think that’s where he is, but nobody will tell us anything. Perhaps not surprisingly.”
Xanthe’s mind reeled. She could see how this man had managed to track her down from Simonetta College where she had been studying when she had met Ralph. She could see how he might have recognised her name in the Chicago Tribune and put two and two together. But, if so, it was a lucky shot. She dared not confirm too much.
“Listen, Hugh, I will certainly have a cup of tea with you, but I’m not sure I can go much beyond that. Yes, I knew Ralph in London before Dunkirk. As for the other rumours, I just don’t know. And if I did know, I’m not sure I would be able to say.”
Hugh stared for a moment, thinking and perhaps wrestling with himself.
“That’s good enough for me,” he said. “Have a cup of tea with me anyway. It’s taken weeks just to find you.”
Rather against her will, Xanthe found herself melting before this young man who looked so like the man she had loved.
“Are you a pilot? Where are you based?”
“Touché,” said Hugh with a grin. “Careless talk, and all that… Sorry.”
“Of course. Silly of me. Tell me, if you don’t mind, what you know about Ralph. I was as surprised as anyone when he… when he disappeared. To start with, I wondered if he’d been detained under the law which arrested Mosley.”
“No, he went before all that. Come with me and I’ll explain.”
They wandered up the Uxbridge Road. Xanthe noticed the looks of approval, even envy, as she walked alongside a man in RAF uniform, apparently next to his pregnant wife. That must have been what people must have assumed. It seemed poignant and touching. She saw people’s eyes soften at the sight.
They sat down at a table at a Lyons’ Corner House, and he told her how Ralph’s distraught mother had begged him to find out where her son had gone and why. Ralph had left a letter behind him, telling her that he was going away and that he would see her soon, but not explaining when or why. She had assumed initially it was on some kind of mission for the British government, but there had been rumours of a former British minister in Berlin, and hurtful remarks passed by her neighbours in Marlow. The whole affair had upset her terribly. And she missed her son too.
“Ralph was always the apple of his mother’s eye,” said Hugh. Xanthe looked to see a hint of irony. The English middle classes seemed quite immune to any reluctance to use clichés, she thought.
Hugh had promised his aunt to help, but then the Blitz happened – was still happening – and his squadron was on the front line, and he had been too busy to do more than send a few letters. But Ralph’s pocket diary had been left behind, and it had been found to include the name Xanthe Schneider, in an unknown handwriting – her own, she remembered. From there, it had been an easier journey, with help from a private investigator who had tracked her to her college in Cambridge, had turned up something about her crossword past, and from there, via her college friends, to Shepherd’s Bush.
Xanthe found herself warming to this duty-bound young man and reminded herself not to be too helpful. It would hardly do to say where and when she had last seen Ralph. Certainly not that, at that very moment, she was carrying Ralph’s baby.
“Sorry to go on about it, Miss Schneider, but I know you’ve been working in Berlin. I mean, can I ask? Did you happen to hear anything about him there?”
A surge of emotion went through her. Ralph suddenly seemed awfully close.
“Listen, Hugh. I can tell you I knew him in London. But I was in Berlin for a short time and I just can’t help you with that one. I have wondered myself, many times, what has become of him.”
That last sentence was so much the truth that it brought tears to her eyes.
Hugh looked disappointed.
“Very well then, can I ask you something else? When is the baby due? I hope you don’t mind me mentioning it…”
Not for the first time, Xanthe was taken aback by the strange middle-class English reserve – as if noticing she was pregnant was somehow tantamount to asking how it happened. Indelicate.
“Is your husband… I meant, what does he do?”
“He did, I’m afraid. He’s no longer with us.”
It was her standard explanation. It was an all-too-common situation, especially with RAF wives.
“I’m so sorry. Was he in the RAF? Where was he based?”
Xanthe apologised. Now it was her turn to mumble something about careless talk.
Hugh reddened.
“Of course, of course.”
“Listen, Hugh. I wish I could help you more. Can you let me know if you find out anything?”
She rose from the table.
“But you haven’t even drunk your tea. I’m afraid I’ve upset you.”
Xanthe was, it was true, afraid she was about to break down. The juxtaposition of this man, who looked so like Ralph but was not Ralph, at the same time as knowing herself to be carrying Ralph’s child, was nearly too much for her. One day, one day, she told herself, I can tell this sweet man the truth. But not now, not given what she had been asked to do. Right now, the truth could only hurt both of them – all three of them…
She stumbled out and down the street, struggling towards Shepherds Bush. Hugh followed behind.
“Miss Schneider, I’m so sorry I upset you – may I see you again?”
She nodded, unsure what else to do, and then he was gone. She went back to the flat to weep on her pillow, where only the barrage balloon hanging outside the window could see, as she had done so many times before.
*
She cried herself to sleep, aware that so many real pregnant widows were doing the same, those who had not been stupid enough to fall in love with people with divided loyalties or people with doubts, or semi-fascists, as she had done. People who had not been there for her when she really needed them.
And yet, and yet, meeting Hugh, so like Ralph physically and yet not him, had made her imagine that she knew him after all. It had brought back some of her precious, overwhelming feelings for the man she had loved and lost and left behind.
The next morning, feeling bleary-eyed and exhausted, she had to force herself to go to work, because otherwise, she feared she would just stay in her bed until a bomb “with her name on it”, as they said, fell, and that would have been that.
Then it was down to the Central Line, and out at Strand station, and then over towards Aldwych, a quick walk down towards the battered City, and into her office. There was Bob, rocking back on his chair, its legs bowing under his considerable weight.
“Hi, honey,” said Bob. “You look like you haven’t slept much. Was there a raid last night? I must have slept through it.”
The New Yorker office was still preening itself on the success of Joe Liebling’s articles, though Joe himself had now gone – first to Paris and then, via Lisbon, home to New York. That left Bob and sometimes Xanthe to man the office, plus the occasional grand arrival of Mollie Pan
ter-Downes, up from Surrey for the afternoon.
“Say, what’s up today, then Shirley?” Bob asked, since she was now using that as a pen name for anything she wrote.
“Blitz damage for Mollie,” she said. It was always fact or atmosphere collecting for Mollie, for her to weave into her famous phrases – was it not Mollie who had coined the phrase “Phoney War”? All that seemed a little uncomfortable given that there was now nothing phoney about the war at all…
In fact, if she had seen the war from the point of view of Mollie Panter-Downes and the New Yorker office, she might have understood it all in a way different to how she understood it now. She might have imagined it to be a clash of civilisations, as Churchill’s rhetoric suggested. She might have seen it as a huge battle between the Luftwaffe and the people of London and the other European cities. But actually, she was beginning to see it instead, as a clash between competing signalling systems, between coders and cryptographers. Because at weekends, she took the train down to Bletchley Park.
2
London, November 1940
On Friday afternoons, Xanthe would pack up the office, take a small holdall she had packed that morning and make her way to Euston Station, through the great classical arch, streaming in alongside all the Tommies and Jacks in their uniforms, and the Johnnies in the grey colour of the RAF.
It was astonishing, she thought to herself, how the status of the RAF had risen in just a few months. From the nearly men of Dunkirk, failing to protect the troops, they had become the semi-mystical “Few”, the saviours of the nation, the fabulous weavers of a whole new wizard slang. Perhaps she should write about it.
From Euston, she took a train to Bletchley, usually along with a number of other dusty, nondescript academic types, who studiously ignored each other on the train, such was the secrecy of Station X.
She had begun going to Bletchley at Alan Turing’s invitation, after her full debrief following the Berlin adventure – the Berlin debacle, she called it herself. Turing used to collect her from the station, but she had recently offered to take the bus, which deposited her along a leafy walk, now in the wintry last of the sunshine. It always invigorated her to wander up to one of the ugliest red-brick country houses she had ever seen, past the somewhat lax security of the gatehouse, showing her pass and identity papers. She was now recognised as a habitué and her entry was a little easier every time she made the journey.