The German Numbers Woman

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘It sounds like you know her well.’

  ‘She’s a bit too stuck-up for that, but I always see her walking by the house, when she’s around. You couldn’t mistake her.’

  ‘She was nice enough when I met her in Turkey,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose she would be, out there.’

  ‘What sort of work does she do?’

  ‘I couldn’t say exactly. She goes away for a few months, then comes back for a week or two. Something to do with boats, I think. She’s always got nice clothes. Must cost more than she could afford if she worked here at the library. Last time I saw her she was walking along the street eating an ice-cream. I must get back to my work now.’

  He stood. ‘Can you tell me how to get to the street?’

  She explained, but he caught the tone of disbelief that he would find it, or get much satisfaction if he did.

  Success discouraged him, had taken the heart out of his search while making his slow way along. He was afraid. He didn’t want to find the place. He felt embarrassed, almost ashamed at being so close in his tracking, wouldn’t know what to say, felt an impulse to turn back, to leave the issue unresolved, in the air, so as to have something to regret for the rest of his life. If he met her he would have to confess to his clandestine listening, reveal himself as a snooper, a stalker, a dirty old flasher, a sneaking eavesdropper. He would invent a story. ‘You met me and my wife at a café in Antalya and told us to look you up.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes. We’d had a few drinks.’

  ‘I don’t remember. I meet so many people.’

  ‘Oh, well, sorry to have bothered you. Maybe I’ve made a mistake.’

  ‘No, it’s all right. It could have been me. Come in for a moment. Now I think about it I do remember meeting someone like you.’

  ‘I wondered if you might.’

  He smelled the mud of the river. A man took him to the gate saying: ‘That should be the house.’ Disembodied voices sometimes brought tears. Or they hardened the steel in him. The range could be unimaginable.

  He walked along a path between dead flowers, till his hand found the knocker. Anyone passing would think him a burglar, or a beggar – a bit of both. He let the knocker drop three times, holding onto the lintel to stay upright. A dog barked from the next house. He looked up, as if to see something, as if to sample the comfort of rain, his throat as if a cloud of wool surrounded his neck. Houses and traffic melted away, and he was alone in the middle of a plain, no human life for miles, only the ever renewing howl of the dog. Doing something alone made him feel more isolated, floating and unattached, his own island.

  Another hammering echoed through the house. Inside were chairs she had sat on, a bed she had slept in, a mirror she had seen her unsettled melancholy face in. Nobody in. She had gone shopping. She had gone to meet Carla. She had gone for a walk to the sea. She wasn’t there, and never would be. He knocked, called her name, couldn’t believe she wasn’t there. She was telling her aunt or whoever not to open the door, though why should anybody want to do that? Why should she be afraid of a knock at the door? She had turned the curtain aside and saw who it was. A man with a white stick and obviously blind couldn’t be dangerous, unless she thought he wasn’t blind at all, afraid it was the police come to talk about smuggling.

  He walked slowly away – inanity to persist. Having tracked her to her den was more success than he had hoped for.

  Waiting for their cod and chips, pot of tea and bread and butter, Laura said: ‘Howard, I want you to tell me what’s going on.’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘It hurts me to put it like that, but you’re up to something. I’ve never been so mystified in all my life. It’s making me miserable.’

  Understanding her plight – only too well – raised the level of his irritation, but he was adept at keeping it down. ‘I’m sorry you’re not enjoying the holiday as much as I am.’

  ‘Well, so am I. Which is why you must explain what’s going on. I feel I’m being driven mad since we came here. We only arrived yesterday, but it seems like years. I can’t take feeling that something’s wrong and not knowing what it is.’

  ‘Ah, here’s our meal. I’m as hungry as if I hadn’t eaten for days.’ He separated fish from bone, making a mess of it, batter spilling from the plate. ‘I suppose you’ll think it silly, if I tell you.’

  ‘Not as long as it makes sense. It won’t be silly to put me at my ease.’

  ‘It’s all to do with radio.’

  She sniffed. ‘I guessed as much. What else?’

  ‘For the last few weeks I’ve been listening to a couple of boats in the Mediterranean talking to each other – by voice, not morse – and I’m sure they’re up to their necks in smuggling. A woman talks to another woman, and one of them comes from this town. The other’s Spanish, and I’m not sure what place she’s from. Anyway, I thought I’d play detective, and look the Boston woman up. The last thing I heard she was supposed to be here on a fortnight’s leave. I wanted to hear her voice, confirm that she existed, listen to what other people might say about her, see if I could dig up any clues, get another angle on the puzzle as to what she’s up to.’

  He used his hands more while talking, but as if to calm his excitement. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ she said. ‘We could have been in it together. I would have helped.’

  ‘I wanted to concentrate my own mind on it, accomplish something by myself.’

  She thought there had been too much of that lately. ‘And did you?’

  ‘I found out where she stays, but when I went to the house, no one was in.’

  Hilarious and pathetic. He was biting on the sky of nowhere. The right words wouldn’t come, but she let what cared to, which could be the right ones after all, though none she would reveal. There was a vein of slyness in him, worst of all, but was she being repaid for that quality in herself? ‘That’s quite a feat, to do so much. I wondered why you wanted to go to the library. Where do you intend to go from here?’

  ‘I don’t know. Seems there’s nowhere else. I might have to leave it, listen to the radio when I get back and see if any further light comes from that. It’s my only hope. The whole thing may be a fantasy, about the smuggling especially, though I don’t think so.’

  She should have been glad of his independence, and in a way was, but secrets from each other had never been expected in their life together. The singularity of his quest led her to wonder whether he was telling the truth, that it wasn’t a smokescreen hiding something else, but common sense told her that though he might be sly he was in no way subtle. The two never quite went together. In any case it was so bizarre a notion, to imagine he could ever catch anyone smuggling, though if it made him feel part of the world then she must admit and appreciate the good it might do. On the other hand he seemed a little too far in the land of obsession, which was most unhealthy, to do all he’d done unbeknown to her, unless she was going too far in the same direction by thinking so. ‘You must keep me up to date on your investigations.’

  ‘I’ll have to now, won’t I? I don’t suppose I’ll really learn anything up here. Enjoying your meal? I know I am.’

  She poured tea for them both. ‘It’s a pleasant change.’

  ‘It’s just that my mind is rather taken up by trying to track her down.’

  ‘So it seems.’

  ‘Whether I like it or not is beside the point.’ He enjoyed talking to someone else about Judy, though without giving anything vital away. ‘I’m just going where my inclination leads me.’

  ‘Do you have any feeling that you should resist it?’

  ‘Since there’s no possible harm,’ he said, ‘I don’t. It’s like a game, and I’m enjoying it.’

  ‘Well, of course, it’s all right listening to the wireless out of interest, as a hobby, and even making up stories from what you hear, but trying to fit something into a reality you can only imagine strikes me as a little unhealthy.’

&nbs
p; ‘You can hardly say I make a habit of that kind of thing.’

  She was going too far. ‘I didn’t mean to imply you did.’

  ‘Wouldn’t your curiosity have been aroused?’

  ‘It might have been. I can’t be sure. I would have waited for more information before coming up here.’

  He spooned hot apple tart and custard. ‘We needed a holiday, as you said, so I suggested we come.’ Their talk was embarrassing now that she had decided his venture was weird and futile, not fit for her approval, but he saw no way to convince her, especially since the quest was peculiar even to him. He controlled an unfamiliar annoyance, though spoke as openly as possible. ‘I didn’t tell you why I thought we needed a holiday because I assumed you would see the reason as a bit daft, and I’d get discouraged.’

  A response would lead into the unusual territory of a quarrel. He had wanted to do without her, even to deceive her. If she hadn’t asked he would have told her nothing. He was suggesting it had been a mistake to ask, and perhaps he was right. Rules in such a marriage had to be made up as you went along. Because every day was the same there was always the danger that one day would be different. ‘What shall we do this afternoon?’ she said, after the silence.

  ‘I’d like to walk the town a bit more.’

  She folded her paper napkin, and reached for the bill. Only one thing was on his mind, which it seemed nothing could move. ‘It’ll be tiring, you know, and boring for me.’

  ‘I’d be happy to go alone.’

  More than happy, no doubt. ‘What I mean is that it will be boring for me without you.’ The girl took the twenty-note. ‘I have some ideas about our holiday as well, and I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’ll go to a place called Somersby. I read in the guidebook that Tennyson was born there. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. I know I will. We can both walk around the town some more tomorrow.’

  Such negotiations over disputed territory brought them closer, gave something to talk about at least, laced with the unfamiliar frisson of infighting. He would relent, allow chance to operate in the hope of it bringing unforeseen results. ‘Fair enough. We’ll do it your way.’

  She gave him his stick. ‘Not my way entirely. If you aren’t going to like it, we won’t go.’

  ‘Oh,’ he smiled, ‘I’ll enjoy it.’ Judy must know about Tennyson, and it was more than possible she would want to show Carla his birthplace.

  ‘And tonight,’ she said, ‘you can try to get the east coast stations on your radio.’

  Between tea and dinner he lay down to sleep. So did Laura, on the other side of the bed. Somersby, embosomed (a word she used) in early greenery had exhausted them. ‘All those Tennysons,’ she recalled, ‘half mad, and doped on laudanum!’

  ‘I want to hear his poems again,’ he said. ‘“Tiresias” is the one I like, but it would be, wouldn’t it? How did it go?’

  ‘Like this, I think.’ Years ago she had thought it apposite to learn:

  ‘I wish I were as in the years of old,

  While yet the blessed daylight made itself

  Ruddy thro’ both the roofs of sight, and woke

  These days, now dull, but then so keen to seek

  The meanings ambushed under all they saw,

  The flight of birds, the flame of sacrifice

  What omens may foreshadow fate to man

  And woman, and the secrets of the Gods.’

  ‘I forget the rest, though it is rather long. What a pity I didn’t bring the book. I could have read all of it.’

  ‘I can’t wait,’ he said. ‘Maybe we’ll leave the day after tomorrow.’ If he couldn’t find Judy by then he would conclude she’d gone elsewhere, maybe taken Carla to Scarborough, or Blackpool, or to the Derbyshire hills.

  After dinner Laura stayed in the lounge with a couple telling her about their holiday in Israel. Upstairs Howard put his radio on a chest of drawers under the window, threw out a length of wire, and plugged in, using earphones so as not to disturb anyone next door, leaving him alone with the ionosphere hissing and crackling, talking and morsing as the needle swivelled through scores of stations.

  A hotel bedroom was more clandestine than his own mock radio shack, and the last two days of speculation were erased by the streaming of bird sounds into the brain, a relaxing therapy never known to fail.

  The east coast transmitters, loud, brash, and a delight to listen to, nevertheless gave out little of interest. Messages from tankers requested pilots to guide them to their berths, sounding so close he had to decrease the volume. He soothed himself for half an hour with North Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico weather, such clear and easy to read rhythms transferred to his hand held tape recorder in case anything was worth putting onto the typewriter at home.

  Switching to short wave, he trawled the usual frequencies and fancied, with a shock that went through his whole body, as if he had touched a naked cable, that he heard Carla calling her girlfriend. He twitched the needle, to go back slowly over an arc of almost silence. The aether played party tricks to bemuse and deceive. There were footpaths, bridleways and lanes through the static, no terrors or lack of navigational know-how for a blind man. Distant laughter on the half wane mocked him to return and look for it, but he was adept at playing ring around the moon, went up wave and down wave, waited on the edge, smoothed in and came out again, sneaked as slowly over the frequency as if a voice he wanted to hear, and which knew he wanted to hear it, could feel him changing kilocycles, each one passing like the clanging of a door.

  Carla must know something I don’t know, or she’s calling another boat and another woman. Maybe a man, because you couldn’t always tell with such people. A Slavic voice poached on the wave but didn’t stay, and Carla’s urgent requests fell into the silence, then came clear enough from the whirlpool: ‘’Ello, Daedalus, Daedalus, this is Pontifex. You hear me now, over.’

  Judy couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or she wasn’t anywhere but in Boston, which Carla seemed not to know. Again and again she called, as if convinced Judy was somewhere waiting – pleading for her to answer. He felt angry at such importunity, at such clamouring for Judy when she knew she couldn’t possibly be there.

  But she was. ‘Pontifex, Pontifex, this is Daedalus, this is Daedalus. Now I hear you. My receiver wasn’t tuned in properly, but I found the trouble.’

  Her voice was nowhere as loud or clear as on the larger receiver two hundred miles further south, but he heard enough, wanted to bang his head against the wall because they had conspired to deceive him as to where in the universe they would be.

  Carla:‘I thought you in England.’

  Judy:‘I should have been, but they stopped me. I couldn’t go. The other woman didn’t come out to replace me, and they had to do a job which was urgent. I lost my airline ticket, but it means nothing to them. They’ll pay. I cried when they told me. It’s getting too much. I sometimes want to die.’

  Carla:‘You no die.’

  Judy:‘I know. But I feel like it. I wanted us to go to Boston. I wanted you in bed with me.’

  Carla:‘Me, as well. What we do?’

  Judy:‘Don’t ask me.’

  Carla:‘I do. Who else ask?’

  Judy:‘I know, but not yet, please.’

  Howard felt their pain overwhelming whatever had been in him, and could hardly bear to listen. Their plan had misfired, been smashed. What was fate playing at?

  Judy:‘I can’t wait for the Azores, though. Big thing.’

  Carla:‘You no say about that.’

  Judy:‘Yes, I know, but I only say it might because I want you to come as well.’

  Carla:‘I don’t think it possible.’

  Judy:‘Love you, Carla, but I can’t help this situation. It’s killing me.’

  Carla:‘No kill. We meet soon.’

  Judy:(as if she will weep) ‘But when?’

  Carla:‘Soon. In London maybe we meet.’

  Judy:‘I long for it. But I have to go now. The skipper’s found out about me using the radi
o, and he’ll be back soon. He doesn’t like it. I’m for the big chop if he catches me. I’ll call you tomorrow, but only for a minute. Nobody will notice that.’

  Carla:‘I listen, then. Call you anyway.’

  Judy:‘And I’ll pick up your wonderful voice, even if I can’t answer. Love you a lot, Carla.’

  Carla:‘Love you, Judy.’

  At least he knew what she looked like, had enough details to sketch out a vivid comic-book picture. Tall and well built, with fine features, shiny blonde hair ponytailing down her back, a loving woman who liked a good time with her girlfriend. She wore pale grey trousers and a white blouse with a colourful silk scarf casually knotted, leather sandals on elegant feet, a gold buckle the colour of her earrings. After signing off with Carla she would smoke a thin black Turkish cigarette, and pensively wonder what direction her life could take now that their plan to meet had gone for a burton. Perhaps the cigarette made the roof of her mouth hot, and called for an ice-cream – another human touch to her appearance.

  He couldn’t deny how slipshod she was to think nobody could overhear her conversation. She used the radio like a telephone, with no notion of its vulnerability. Most people were similar in their faith, if they weren’t wireless operators, and knew nothing about radio, looking on the phenomenon as a kind of magic, and as if their words went securely from one ear to the other. No wonder the skipper had told her not to do it, though such carelessness with regard to radio could only make her more interesting.

  ‘We’re wasting our time in Boston,’ he said. ‘I heard her on the radio. She’s still out there. Something went wrong with the crewing arrangements, and she couldn’t make it.’

  He was infatuated with her, though she supposed detectives often were with their prey. Stalkers would be certainly. ‘Shall we stay on, then?’

  ‘I don’t see any point.’

  ‘Let’s have another night,’ she said, ‘and then we’ll go back. We can drive to the Wash tomorrow, and hear the birds. We brought the binoculars and the book so I’ll tell you what they are. I’ve also been looking at the map. There are some curious names for sandbanks – whole families of them.’