by Eliza Graham
I blinked. ‘Please.’ I had no idea where Patrick was staying. He’d find it hard locating a bed for the night. I’d be safe from him at Lily Cottage because nobody outside our research unit was allowed inside.
But when I went upstairs to my room to pull down the blackout I saw Micki and Patrick in the garden, sitting on the bench where I’d been the night Beattie came to find me.
I thought of pulling the blind down and pretending I hadn’t seen them there, retiring for the night. Exhaustion had filled every cell of my body. But I brushed my hair. Automatically I reached for the pancake. I put it back. A touch of lipstick on my lips, but nothing to hide my face.
I went downstairs and out of the kitchen door into the garden, which smelled of spring flowers. Micki and Patrick lifted their heads as they heard me. I saw a small bottle of what looked like whisky on the grass. Each of them held a tumbler from the kitchen.
There was a narrow space between them. I hesitated. Micki moved along and patted it. ‘Here.’ She poured whisky into her glass and handed it to me. Beattie’s supply had certainly taken a hammering. I could almost feel him protesting from his grave.
Patrick and I were not meeting one another’s eyes.
‘Micki was telling me about her family,’ he said.
‘She was?’ She hadn’t opened up that readily to me.
‘Shouldn’t think I’ll hear much about them now,’ she said. ‘Last news I had, Jews were being sent east to Poland. That’s not a good place for us these days.’
‘Perhaps they’ve found work?’ Patrick said.
‘They haven’t any practical skills. My father was a businessman. My mother was an artist before they married. My older brothers are both artistic types, too.’
‘You’ll want to know about William, Anna,’ she said, after a pause. ‘An ambulance took him to London. Patrick persuaded the guards not to send for the police. That man in the smart grey suit turned up.’
I tensed.
‘It was all right. He made some telephone calls in the guard house and said William could go to a clinic if they kept him locked up.’
She looked at me. ‘What did William do, Anna? Was it Beattie?’
‘There was a skirmish near the pond but it was an accident.’ I hoped that Micki didn’t know about Beattie’s fear of water, that she wouldn’t ask what had happened to make him go up to the pond edge. I didn’t want to talk about my fountain pen and how Beattie had come to have it. ‘And I think William was following me for some weeks.’ I blushed, not looking at Patrick.
‘It was the medication for that back of his,’ Patrick said. ‘The mixture of pills he was taking. It knocked his sense of reality.’
I remembered what I’d been trying to recall in the pub just after the funeral: Schulte telling me about the combination of drugs some of the guests at his family hotel took. I’d never imagined that someone I worked with might be going through a similar chemical nightmare.
‘They’ll need to wean him off them all and start again,’ Patrick said. ‘Poor old Nat, it’s going to be bad.’
I felt some pity for William, mourned the loss of the companion he’d been. But I couldn’t forget Beattie lying in the pond. I couldn’t explain to Patrick why William had been so unhinged by seeing us together that night in my bedroom here. But I didn’t want to lie to him, either. I’d also need to talk to Grey-suit Man, tell him what I’d found out today. The scar tissue on my face burned.
The whisky filled me with warmth. Single malt, good stuff. Micki was watching me. ‘Don’t worry, nobody will know I took it. I think Becker had been at Beattie’s supplies, anyway. I’ll refill the bottle with weak black tea and put it back where I found it.’
Patrick shuffled on the bench.
‘Oh dear, another honest person,’ Micki said. ‘Just like Anna.’
I shuffled too.
‘It took you a long time to come after Anna,’ Micki told Patrick. I kicked her but she ignored me.
‘I didn’t know where you were.’ He looked at me properly, for the first time.
‘So how did you come to be outside the studio?’ I asked.
‘Nat – William – telegraphed me yesterday. Told me I had to come here. He’d already sent me some strange letters with a London postmark, asking me things such as the name of the scent I’d given you. I had no idea what was going on. Some of the things he said made no sense.’
‘But you still came?’
‘He was my friend. I owed him something for the many times he’d brought us safely home.’ He looked at me. ‘William told me there was a bicycle I could use and where to find it. He said to go to Milton Bryan and wait there, in the lane, for him to come out. When I arrived at the guard post, I met Miss Rosenbaum on her bicycle. We pieced together what William was planning.’
Micki glanced from one of us to the other. She gave a yawn. I’d seen better pretences at sleepiness.
‘Long day. I might turn in. Good to meet you, captain.’ She waved him down as he stood up.
Patrick and I sat in silence. I ran a hand over the bench seat, picking at the loose bits of wood.
‘Burn victim reunited with wounded pilot lover,’ I said.
He winced. ‘Hollywood would love it.’ He leant towards me. ‘I didn’t have a clue what Nat was up to until Miss Rosenbaum told me he worked at some secret organisation behind the guard post, and you did too. It was only then I knew he was trying to . . . Well, make us see one another again.’ He looked down at his whisky.
‘Bit of a shock for you,’ I said coolly. ‘And quite a lot of effort for you to go to.’ Patrick might have been seeing someone else, and feeling horribly embarrassed about this.
‘When you ran towards me behind that gate . . . Well.’ He shook his head. ‘And then Nat, so pale and shaking.’
I didn’t know what to say.
‘If I’d known I’d have prepared a bit better.’ He swallowed. ‘I think I understand a bit more now about how you felt after the fire, Anna. Though it’s my arm, not my face. And obviously I’m not a woman and so really, what could I know?’ He groaned. ‘I’m making a complete mess of this.’
‘You didn’t try to find me before?’ I’d made it hard for him, admittedly, fleeing to East Anglia without a word to anyone except my father and then coming here.
‘I’d actually been trying to track you down before I lost my arm. The trail went cold when you left Bentley Priory.’ He looked around. ‘But I probably would have found you myself eventually if you hadn’t come here. This place might as well not exist.’
‘It’s like falling down the rabbit hole,’ I said.
‘Writing letters and making telephone calls took ages with this.’ He twisted his left hand. ‘It slowed me down. But I rang the vicarage a few times.’
‘Did you?’
‘Your father answered. I chickened out. Thought he’d tell me you were married to someone else.’
‘Married? Me?’ My scar was there for Patrick to see, at its worst because it was the end of a long day and I was tired. Dusk enveloped us, but he would see enough of it.
‘And then Nat’s letters started coming.’ He moved closer, so our shoulders were touching. ‘I can’t believe you’re really sitting here with me.’
‘This is who I am,’ I said. ‘The real me.’ I took a deep breath. ‘I miss you. Always have done. From immediately after I . . . ended it.’
‘I used to be a good batsman,’ he said, taking my hand with his left one. I’d forgotten how small my hands were in his, how easily he could cover them. His left hand had been the weaker of the two, now it had to do everything for him. ‘And I liked driving that little sports car of mine.’
‘I remember your car.’ I smiled at the memory of how Patrick had once procured petrol in some illicit way, picked me up from my lodgings and driven me into the West End to see a Laurence Olivier play.
‘I was a good pilot.’ He said it musingly, without conceit. ‘A natural, they said. Switched from Fighters to Bomb
ers, didn’t find it hard. I pretend to my family and friends that I don’t miss those things, but I do.’ I saw a steeliness in Patrick I didn’t remember from before. ‘I asked myself why someone like you would want a damaged specimen.’
I started to say something, but he cut me off. ‘I have dark moods – William isn’t alone in that. But I’ve been lucky as far as the drugs go – my doctor was a bit cruel about taking me off some of them.’
Mine had been too. Thank God. ‘Nights can be the worst,’ I said. ‘When you wake at two in the morning because the wound hurts and your thoughts . . .’
‘Aren’t good ones,’ he finished for me. ‘And you know if you drop off again they’ll turn into bad dreams.’ He swallowed. ‘We’re not supposed to talk about this kind of thing, are we? We’re supposed to be stoic, keep our pain, our fear, to ourselves – move on, do our duty.’
I’d been holding my breath while he talked. I released it now. It sounded like a sigh.
‘Is there anything left for us? Be honest, Anna.’
‘I haven’t been honest for a long time. After the fire I lied,’ I said. ‘When I told you I didn’t love you.’
‘I know.’ He blushed. ‘That sounds as if I’m boasting, but I did know that.’
‘I did love you. I do love you. But since then, there have been . . .’ I didn’t know how to phrase it, how to explain about Beattie, about that intensity of feeling for him and its aftermath. ‘So what now?’
‘We could try again,’ he said. ‘It’s risky, though.’
We might be setting off on a path leading to shadowy country, where inky-feathered birds pecked over dead things.
I put my other hand on top of his, sandwiching it. Night approached. Patrick had to catch a train down to London. I needed to write notes on the destroyed Clara script so I could rewrite it first thing tomorrow. For a while we were still a team, Micki and I. While we still had our evening airtime, we would carry on.
For now I’d just sit in the gloaming, enjoying the feel of my hand inside Patrick’s.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND NOTES
I really could not have written this book without the help of my critique partner, Kristina Riggle, who pushed me through it at a time when life was throwing up some serious challenges: Kris, thank you!
I’d also like to thank my editorial team at Lake Union, especially Sammia Hamer, for bearing with me. My developmental editor, Arzu Tahsin, pushed me into refining the novel into the best version of itself, so my thanks to her. Thank you also to Victoria Pepe, Bekah Graham and Nicole Wagner for their support during the writing of this and earlier novels, and to Laura Gerrard and Melissa Hyder.
Writing a work of fiction about an operation that was both clandestine and riven with internal disagreements and turf wars makes for a complex research process. Sadly the interior of Milton Bryan radio studio was dismantled after the war, but I visited the village and stood at the guard house next to the locked gates, imagining what it must have been like driving here to broadcast.
Much of what I have written about operations inside the studio and in the nearby village of Aspley Guise has been gleaned from accounts written by (the real-life) Sefton Delmer and others, including the novelist Muriel Spark who worked there during the war, as well as from some very useful historical books and other resources listed in the bibliography. Naturally contemporary descriptions tend not to offer step-by-step technical guides to making a ‘black’ broadcast, so I scoured descriptions of more official 1940s radio stations and studios, examining old photographs to get a sense of what broadcasting then was like, using my imagination to fill in the blanks. Any inaccuracies are my own.
In 2013, before interviewing her for a literary festival, I was lucky enough to read Alicia Foster’s beautifully written Warpaint, which includes a storyline set in Aspley Guise during the Second World War alongside its main storyline of women war artists. I purposefully did not reread Alicia’s novel when I was writing this book in 2018–19, but recommend it for its painterly descriptions of the local countryside and portraits of some of the people, real and fictional, working there.
For the sake of a reasonably cohesive storyline I have simplified and condensed elements of ‘black’ operations, in particular the use of various radio frequencies, masts and transmitters. It’s certainly true, however, that in the small Bedfordshire village of Aspley Guise, houses of German Jews, Czechs, Poles and many other foreign nationals worked on manipulating their German radio audience. If these teams had been able to use Twitter, Instagram and Facebook in 1943, it’s not hard to imagine how they would have exploited the opportunity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Stephen Bunker, Spy Capital of Britain
Edward Stourton, Auntie’s War
John A. Taylor, Secret Sisters of Bletchley Park: Psychological Warfare in World War II
Sefton Delmer, Black Boomerang: An Autobiography, Volume Two
David Garnett, The Secret History of PWE
Muriel Spark, Curriculum Vitae
Tessa Dunlop, The Bletchley Girls
Ronald Weber, The Lisbon Route: Entry and Escape in Nazi Europe
Neill Lochery, Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, 1939–45
Fiction
Alicia Foster, Warpaint
Websites
Psywar.org
Mkheritage.co.uk
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2018 John Graham
Eliza Graham spent science lessons reading Jean Plaidy novels behind the textbooks, sitting at the back of the classroom. In English and history lessons, however, she sat right at the front, hanging on to every word. In the school holidays she visited the public library multiple times a day.
At Oxford University she read English literature on a course that regarded anything post-1930 as too modern to be included. She retains a love of Victorian novels. Eliza lives in an ancient village in the Oxfordshire countryside with her family. Her interests (still) mainly revolve around reading, but she also enjoys walking in the downland country around her home.
Find out more about Eliza on her website: www.elizagrahamauthor.com, Facebook: @ElizaGrahamUK or Twitter: @eliza_graham.