by David Boyle
“You promised what?” She thought of Neville Chamberlain’s famous line: No such undertaking has been received. “Sorry, Giorgios. I like you, but I can’t.”
“Ah well,” said Giorgios. Then he fell asleep.
*
She woke feeling cold and damp. It was still pitch black.
A whole army of “what-ifs” began to float through her mind. What if Daphne and Betty were both agents for the Nazis? What if they were working together? What if Daphne had been killed and had led them both down to this dank spot to die? What if nobody showed them the way out and she never got home to Indigo? What, in fact, if she had misjudged the whole thing, come to Greece ill-prepared, had messed up the message and the Bismarck was still at large in the Atlantic?
For goodness sake, she told herself. You are a foreign agent and a foreign correspondent. You might expect this kind of emotional turmoil – but you can also deal with it. She struggled to sit up, letting the blanket fall to the stone floor, and breathed deeply three times. Giorgios was stirring next to her. She was in with more than a chance if she kept her head and kept going.
Then she prayed for a little more strength of mind and body, and began to feel better. Yes, she really was feeling a little stronger.
Giorgios was dressed and on his feet above her.
“Miss Shirley. We must go. I can only find you a few plums, they are the best I can do. Are you ready to come?”
“Thank you, Giorgios,” she said, as she walked slowly on his arm along the stone passage towards the sunlit patch ahead. “I am so grateful to you and Daphne. I was just feeling sorry for myself.”
“You should also feel sorry for us. You can go home. We are here for many years of starvation and tyranny, I fear. For how many years? God knows.”
“I know. I am so grateful. Honestly.”
“I do not mean that. Do you not think we are also grateful to you for coming to our country to tell the world what is happening? Or whatever you came here for…”
Xanthe ignored the hint. They were now back in the cathedral, and in a moment she was outside in the early morning brightness, blinking, as if seeing it for the first time.
“And now we must walk,” said Giorgios. “For maybe five hours, if you can manage it.”
“I can manage. What do you mean ‘we’?”
“Because I come with you.”
Xanthe was suddenly overwhelmed with relief. She felt tears, unbidden and unwelcome, pricking the back of her eyes.
“Thank you, Giorgios.”
He looked embarrassed and reached into his pocket. Then he unfolded a canvas bag.
“I have brought you this. So you can look… real. As if you go to market. And this hat.”
More relief. She badly needed a hat.
“And if you are asked things, you don’t answer,” he said. “I will talk.”
*
The opportunity arose all too soon.
They were walking out of the outskirts of the city, full of overgrown market gardens and empty fields, when a German patrol marched out of a corner. “Halt!” said the officer. Giorgios and Xanthe stopped. The soldiers at the back leered excitedly.
“Wohin gehst du?”
Xanthe pretended not to understand. The soldier looked around at his colleagues.
“I go with my sister to our aunt’s farm. She is not well,” said Giorgios in German. Then he continued at length in Greek.
The officer waved them on. Xanthe breathed again.
“That wasn’t too bad. What did you tell him?”
“I told him my life story, starting with our journey to visit the farm of my aunt today, and going back from there. It seemed to bore them.”
“I can’t think why…”
Although this little escape was a relief, Xanthe was aware she was flagging. Her scar ached. The sun was swelteringly hot and high in the sky, and they seemed barely to have left Athens. Could she do it? Or was she anyway destined for some kind of swoop by the secret police? If Betty had really informed on her, she could expect to be picked up any time now. Or worse than picked up.
“Quick! Off the road!” shouted Giorgios. “Something’s coming.”
Using her remaining reserves of strength, Xanthe sprinted after her friend and into a small cleft in the wall where she slid down, light-headed, onto the ground.
An ancient lorry was moving slowly up the hill, spluttering and wheezing. The driver appeared to be looking for someone.
Was this it? Was this what betrayal looked like, she wondered, peering out? Why had she trusted anyone?
Xanthe was aware that one leg was showing, and possibly more of her. Sure enough, the driver stopped close to them and stared. He stuck an swarthy face out of the window and shouted something including the word “patrótis”.
“He is asking: are you patriots?” explained Giorgios, pressed close against her. “Yes,” he said, emerging brazenly from their cleft, “are you?”
“Come on,” he hissed to Xanthe. “This is our lift…”
“But how do you know?”
They climbed up and squeezed gratefully into the cab. The driver put out an unsavoury, hairy hand.
“How do you do,” he said. “Betty sent me. I am to drive you where you want to go.”
A great sense of relief flooded through Xanthe, and, for the first time that day and despite her exhaustion, she felt the welcome breeze in her dyed dark hair. So Betty had been true to her. Of course she had. Betty was a brick and a courageous one. And, as the old lorry rumbled over the broken road, there, glinting in the distance, through the ubiquitous scrub and mountains, was the sea.
“You know what, Miss Shirley?” said Giorgios, affectionately. “You are even beginning to smell like one of us.”
Xanthe began to laugh, and soon they were all three roaring with laughter.
Then they passed a peasant who made a sign with his hand and the lorry screeched to a halt.
“My friends, you must get out,” said the driver. “There is a checkpoint ahead. My friend here will conduct you over the mountain.”
“So near and yet so far,” said Xanthe. “Look Giorgios, you leave me here and go back in the lorry. I’ll be safe enough.”
“No, Miss Shirley. Not leaving.”
The sun was lower in the sky as they finally picked their way through the scrub and olive trees into the harbour from the north. Xanthe and Giorgios seemed an unlikely couple. He unshaven; she in a strange hat, but looking for all the world like an adopted Londoner on a hike, lagging behind in the heat and dust, almost overwhelmed with exhaustion and pain.
Ahead, the peasant kept a sharp lookout. But although he looked like a man of the soil, he spoke near perfect English.
“Hold her hand,” he instructed Giorgios. “Betty has told me to look after Miss Shirley no matter what.”
Tears began running down Xanthe’s cheeks. These were clearly the hot coals heaped on her head that St Paul promised the faithless. Once more she had failed to judge someone correctly. It was all too difficult. Why had she ever suspected Betty and her friends? How could she have got it so wrong? This one really had to be her final trip. There was no way she would ever go into the field again, she promised herself.
A short while later, there was the harbour, and for a moment, the war dropped away, with the remaining sun glinting on the water and the small yacht, rigged for fishing, beside the wharf. It was invisible from the surrounding area, a tiny port, more like a fishing village, and she could see immediately why it was an excellent place for a clandestine departure.
“You wait here,” said Giorgios, “and I must go. When they hoist the Greek flag, it is a signal that it is safe for you to go aboard. Now, Miss Shirley, I kiss you goodbye. I don’t know who you are, but I wish you safe home. May we meet again.”
She kissed him, tears rolling down her cheeks, for herself, for Greece and its trauma, for her own shattered heart. She watched him go. A minute or so later, he and the peasant had disappeared.
Two crewmen emerged from deep inside the boat, took Xanthe’s arm and helped her below. She was led through a small hole cut in the cabin wall.
“Do not worry. There is little air, but it should not be for long,” she was told. “Just until we are at sea.”
She curled up on a couple of sacks. The soldiers were clearly being led elsewhere. The door was shut behind her and she was once more in darkness, with the little waves lapping against the side of the boat and shouts from above.
9
Alexandria, June 1941
“Miss Schneider? My name is Sub-Lieutenant Patterson, and I am here to conduct you to the airfield.”
A slightly crumpled young man in white naval uniform saluted her.
“Well, heaven be praised. Recognition at last,” said her friend Frank, the executive officer of HM submarine Rorqual, which had taken her from the yacht, together with two British soldiers and three airmen, and ferried them to Alexandria.
Xanthe had been escorted to the submarine rendezvous, just outside Turkish territorial waters, by the consul there, who appeared to be running his own informal navy.
Alexandria had been extraordinary. For all her involvement with the Royal Navy over the previous year, she had never visited a British dockyard – though she had been to Kiel, of course. There was the bustle of men coming ashore, and she could see the dark grey shapes of an old cruiser or two, lying at anchor next to the ancient walls and stones. But the welcome had left something to be desired. Nobody seemed to have expected her. Nobody knew who she was when she and Frank had gone from office to office to arrange her air transport back to London. They were met with blank faces – sometimes downright rude ones.
“I suppose it’s the heat,” said Xanthe apologetically.
“I’ll give them heat,” said Frank and proceeded to do so. His stubbled face and dirty shirt, after a month at sea, contrasted with the pristine uniforms of the desk officers they met around the dockyard.
“Listen,” he said. “Miss Schneider is an extremely brave woman. I don’t know what she’s been doing because I’m not allowed to know and neither are you. But my instructions are to deliver her to you for urgent despatch to London for debriefing. If you’re unable to organise that, please put me in touch with an officer who can.”
Finally, here was Sub-Lieutenant Patterson.
“About bloody time, if you ask me,” said Frank.
“My apologies, Miss Schneider. We have received instructions after all, and I’ve been told to take you to the airfield immediately. Can I offer you a drink? Water? I’m afraid we don’t have terribly long.”
“Where are all the big ships?” asked Frank as they strode out to a waiting car.
“Oh well, we can’t say, of course. But between you and me, they were sent to Gibraltar to replace Force H which has been hunting the Bismarck.”
The Bismarck. Of course! She had been so exhausted and had slept for so long on the submarine, that she had almost forgotten the reason she had come here in the first place. On board the Rorqual, she was still in the dark. But here, she could find out the end of the story.
“I’m so sorry, but I have been rather cut off. What happened to the Bismarck?”
“You don’t know? Oh well, we got her. The Home Fleet sank her last week. She was heading for France and nearly made it. Miss Schneider? Are you all right?”
Xanthe dissolved into tears.
“Excuse me for being a nuisance. But can I sit down, just for a moment?”
Patterson and Frank helped her to a battered chair, and for a few minutes, Xanthe wept uncontrollably.
She cared little whether her signal had made a difference or not. The Hood was avenged, Hugh was avenged. With or without her assistance, the navy had done it. The team, of which she was a minor part, had achieved it. They were tears of intense relief, for herself and for Indigo, in a peculiarly uncertain world.
Then she blew her nose, took a deep breath, brushed herself down and got up. The two naval officers offered her a hand and looked a little embarrassed.
“I’m very sorry. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m recovered.”
Good grief, she said to herself as she headed across the naval tarmac towards Patterson’s car. She had felt so exhausted that she had wondered in Athens whether she was suffering from some kind of post-natal infection, but she felt physically better, and now she was pretending to be recovering mentally too. Is my upper lip now stiff, she asked herself? Have I actually become one of them?
*
The homecoming in London was almost as disconcerting. Nobody met her at the airfield in Buckinghamshire. She had been driven into London and was dropped at Euston, where she caught the train to Bletchley.
“Shh! He’s asleep,” said Sister Agnes, smiling. “Oh, it’s you! How lovely to see you, Xanthe. Little Indy will be so pleased to see you too…”
Indy? She thought the diminutive had been hers alone. Why was anyone else using it? She put her small bag down by the cot.
“Do you think he’s missed me?”
“Of course he’s missed you! He was only just asking, ‘When’s mummy coming home?’”
For a moment, Xanthe wondered if this could be right. Had she been away so long that Indigo could speak? No, she was more tired than she realised – this was one of Agnes’ fund of little jokes.
A moment later, he was in her arms, still sleeping, and she began to sleep too, the sleep of the depths of her relief. “But this isn’t home either,” she murmured as she fell asleep. “I need to go back to Ohio.”
*
When there was a knock on the door, she was unsure whether she had slept for five minutes or five hours, except that Indigo slept on, much as before, giving little twitches as he lay there, breathing deeply.
“Come in?” she said, as quietly as she could.
Whoever it was came in.
“Oh, um, um. So sorry, I’ll… I mean, I’ll come back later.”
“Oh, come in, Alan, for goodness sake. I haven’t got a breast out or anything to frighten the British horses.”
He grinned sheepishly.
“I know this may be hard to understand, but not everyone shares this obsession with breasts, enjoyed by so many of my male colleagues.”
“Really? Oh well, I thought you all did.”
For a moment, her thoughts drifted to Giorgios in the cavern under Athens cathedral. What was he doing now?
“Ah, um, well…” said Alan. “Has anyone said thanks to you?”
“No. I haven’t seen anyone.”
“Honestly, what a shower! Well, er, Fleming asked me to say thanks from him.”
“Thanks for what?”
“Because your message got through and it got a reply.”
“It did?”
A huge electric charge of jubilation pulsed through Xanthe, and she gave a great whoop of triumph. Then she checked herself – and then the baby, stirring uncomfortably beside her.
“Oh, look, don’t make me too excited, Alan. I need Indigo to sleep.”
“Yes, amazing, wasn’t it? The message from Jeschonnek got a reply, saying that Bismarck was heading for Brest.”
“So I did help?” she said in a whisper.
“Yes, I gather you really did. Officially, Bismarck was spotted heading in a circle by a plane from Coastal Command. But thanks to you, we knew far better where to look. The Home Fleet did the rest. Thanks to you.”
“Oh Alan, that is absolutely fab!”
“Fab? What’s that when it’s at home?”
She laughed.
“Just means good, right. Fab?”
*
All that he
ld back her jubilation was the peculiar sight of someone she knew in the crowd on Euston station. She felt absolutely certain it had been Hugh. But why had she seen him? Was she so exhausted that her imagination was playing tricks on her? Or was he actually alive – that seemed impossible, given the descriptions she had been given about his death. Had it actually been some kind of ghost, sent to welcome her home? Yet, if it was, it hadn’t seen her.
She had shouted across the heads of the crowd of soldiers and sailors on leave – “Hugh! Hugh! It’s me! Over here!” But there had been no reaction. Had she gone completely doolally?
As soon as she had slept, she would contact his friend, Tug and find out if there was any possibility, any mistaken identity that would have allowed Hugh to have survived.
In the meantime, she was going to sleep.
PART THREE
THE SWISS APPOINTMENT
Prologue
Bletchley, October 1941
It was a cold, damp and windy autumnal day as Alan Turing and Xanthe Schneider met on the platform of Bletchley station with day return tickets for Cambridge, one hundred and twenty-six minutes of sooty slog up the line. It was Sunday morning, the steam was swirling around the engine and the church bells were silent.
“A bit sad. No bells,” said Turing as the train drew in, snorting and puffing.
“Oh, I’m not sad at all,” she said. “Indy is six months old today. That’s half a year. How can I be sad? It’s going to be time soon to leave the nest.”
“If you mean leave Bletchley Park, I’ve never thought of it as a nest,” he said. “I’m not sure anyone ever has done before. This may just be a historic thought!”
The train was not as full as it sometimes was, and they managed to find seats next to each other in a smoke-filled compartment, with a couple of obvious cryptographers and two sailors heading – where? To Lowestoft or Felixstowe perhaps. The cryptographers had climbed in at the same time as Alan and Xanthe, presumably going on leave in the same direction.
They fell silent with the rhythm of the train and the telegraph wires along the track as they seemed to swoop up and down hypnotically. They had been reminded by Fleming that they must not talk about their mission on the way. Careless talk and all that.