The Cryptographer

by Tobias Hill

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘We’re different, then. I’m not greedy, I just think – imagine – it might make things so much easier. Never to have to think of money again. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?’

  ‘It’s not like that,’ Anna says. ‘He’s not like that.’ Her voice is soft: fervent, if she could hear it, so that on impulse Martha leans forward and strokes her sister’s face, meets her smile with her own more feral smile, curls the precious weight of Anna’s hair back behind her ear.

  From the dining room the male voice is audible again, calling out for more of something. It has an unfamiliar accent, Anna realises absently; West Coast American, not the Maine stolidity of Martha’s husband Andrew; and before Martha has lowered her hand the realisation has come to Anna that something is wrong. That there is an absence in the house, a hollowness she should have noticed much earlier. Like the hole that a shadow will cast in fog.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘That is your mother’s latest. She’s been dying for you to meet him. His name’s Max, he’s in Luggage. He can tell you things you would never have believed about suitcases. You’ll probably have to talk to him. Sorry about that.’ She pauses at the stove, her hands still working, working. ‘Not really much room for social manoeuvre, with only four.’

  ‘Four?’

  ‘I knew it,’ Eve says from the doorway. Anna wonders how long she has been leaning there, a Sea Breeze not quite spilling in each hand, observing her daughters, drily critical. ‘Of course I thought you might have realised. You spend all day understanding strangers, I thought perhaps you’d have understood your sister. But I guess not. And I did try and warn you, but you’ve been hard to get hold of. Silly girl.’

  Anna puts down the knife. She is picturing the icons on her computer, ranks of minute, unopened envelopes. Her avoidance of her own life, which is inevitably avoidance of the lives of others. ‘What’s going on?’

  Her mother tuts. Martha leans on the stove’s edge, her weight on her arms. ‘Andrew,’ Eve starts, and immediately stops, uncharacteristically hesitant. ‘Andrew and Martha –’

  ‘What Mum is trying to say,’ says Martha, ‘is that Andrew and I have been having problems for a few months. I’m sorry I never got round to telling you. I kept meaning to. Anyway, Andrew has decided to spend some time alone.’

  ‘Martha. When? How long?’

  ‘He was gone most of last month,’ Eve says. ‘He came back for some things two weeks ago. No one has seen him since.’

  ‘But his work –’

  ‘He’s left his job.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Anna says. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘Obviously, and you didn’t ask.’ Eve turns on her. ‘I rather doubt you’ve asked your sister anything.’

  ‘Stop,’ says Martha.

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Questioned my sister? No. I do enough of that all day.’

  ‘How are you? is usually considered a civilised enquiry.’

  ‘Stop,’ Martha says again, but her voice is quieter when it should be louder; she sounds like me, Anna thinks with an involuntary shudder. Her shoulders, so much broader and stronger than either Anna’s or her mother’s, have pulled protectively together.

  ‘Well,’ Eve says. ‘Congratulations, Anna. Would you like your drink now, or do you have any other indelicate surprises in store for us?’

  No one answers. She takes the drink. The lid of the turbotière chatters and settles. Martha turns the flame off, turns towards them. Her face raw in the wet air.

  ‘It’s done,’ she says. ‘It’s all ready. We should eat,’ she says to both of them, as if it could be a question.

  It is a disaster. For two courses no one talks except Max, Max who is in Luggage; and Max talks more and more, increasingly nervous of the silence, out of his depth before he knows it, his broad face damp with sweat above the vast piscine expanse of the main course.

  Afterwards there are still presents that must be given and received. From Eve Anna gets a designer belt of microscopically articulated chrome, a length of shining metal that looks as if it might conceal a weapon. From Max-in-luggage – to whom she gives the music chosen for Andrew – she receives a vanity bag made of real pony-skin. And from Martha there is a slim parcel containing T. S. Eliot’s 1936 Collected Poems, a near-perfect first edition, the pages ragged where they were paper-knived apart with carelessness, impatience or excitement almost a century ago. For my sister, last of the bookworms, Martha has written on the accompanying card. You do still read books, she asks, don’t you? Yes, Anna says, yes, she still reads books.

  The telephone rings as she is almost home, bringing her awake from the road as if she has been sleeping. On the radio singer after singer has been singing about love, and all of them badly, or so it seems to her tonight. She turns them down almost to nothing and pulls into a lay-by before answering.

  ‘Well,’ Eve’s voice says. ‘Are you sorry?’

  ‘Of course I am. I didn’t know.’

  ‘I know, dear. Although in the circumstances I’m not sure gnorance is your best defence. Are you home? You don’t sound home.’

  ‘No.’ The car feels too close around her. She clicks off the belt, opens the door. Balancing the phone in the small of her shoulder. ‘I’m not there yet. There’s ice. It was bad, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Exceptionally bad, yes. I’ve never seen a Christmas dinner so like the Last Supper.’

  She gets out, stands under a bare canopy of trees. Beyond them the sky is clear, remote with stars. ‘Is it a woman?’

  ‘No. Do you know, I think I’d actually prefer that. A few years ago Martha thought he’d met someone back in Maine. It turned out to be nothing, or at least nothing important. But now I rather wish there was someone. I could understand that. And if she was in the States I could perhaps have tracked her down,’ she says mildly. ‘We all carry guns over there, you know.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘Money,’ Eve says, blunt as money. ‘He’s been very good to Martha, financially, but something went wrong these last few months. She knew there were problems, but not how bad they were.’

  There is a pause. The sound of a small room, of Eve alone in her daughter’s house. ‘I’m sorry,’ Anna says. ‘About tonight.’

  ‘I know you are. Of course you are. Not that I thought we’d all walk hand in hand into the new year. We’re family, after all. And when you get right down to it, it was Andrew’s fault. But I’ve been thinking about it since you left. I have something to ask you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I want to know if you’re seeing him again.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That man you were working on. John Law.’

  A car goes past, too bright and fast. Anna leans away. For a moment she feels breathless, as if her heart is racing. ‘You were listening, weren’t you?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t see any sign on the door saying Private Conversation –’

  ‘Well, it was.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it? Are you?’

  There is a low wall beyond the pavement. Beyond it steep undergrowth descends down a cutting into deep darkness. Anna sits down with her back to the foliage. She is beginning to shiver. Her coat is still in the car. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because,’ Eve says, ‘Martha said you got on very well with him. And that man has left your sister in trouble.’

  For a second she is confused, not only by the phrase but by the circumstances. As far back as she can remember, Martha has never been in trouble of any kind that matters, has never slackened or weakened. ‘What do you –’

  ‘Anna,’ her mother says, trying to be patient, foiled by the dual sharpness of frustration and embarrassment. ‘It’s not hard to understand. Andrew was a speculator. He speculated badly, he got it wrong, now there are debts to pay. The sums are impressively large by any standards, certainly big enough to swallow up the house, and Martha in it. She is a very good barrister, one day she might even
become a judge, people say, but she has never been good with money, and bankrupt barristers do not become judges. Neither of them lived particularly frugally, they were always remortgaging, I can’t imagine Martha would have an easy job digging her way out of debt at the best of times, and these are not the best. Andrew has taken most of their savings and done an uncharacteristically professional job of covering his tracks. Your sister needs help. She needs to buy herself some time. Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘Yes,’ Anna nods at no one, the trees, the cold road. ‘You’re saying we can help her. Both of us,’ but already she knows this is not what her mother is saying at all.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Us? You don’t care enough about money, and I don’t care enough about saving it. We have no money, Anna, it’s very simple. But there are people who do. There are people who don’t care about anything else.’

  ‘John isn’t like that,’ she says. ‘Is that what you mean?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking, I just can’t –’ She bites down on her anger before it can slip away from her. In the back of her mind is a sensation of drift, half familiar. It is the slow-fast motion of her car in Erith Reach, with the child ahead of her. ‘Are you saying that John Law should give us money?’

  ‘Not should. Should is an awful word. Could. He could do it, if he wanted.’ Tetchy with defensiveness. ‘It’s not as if he can’t spare it.’

  She tries to think, half listening to her mother’s impatient breathing. ‘What are you suggesting we do?’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything. I’m telling you that the one time in your life when your sister actually needs your help, you’re lucky enough to be in a position to give it. It’s a fortunate coincidence that you know this man. I think we should make the most of it. For God’s sake, Anna, all you have to do is ask him. Is that so wrong?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, calmly, not quite calmly. ‘I could lose my job.’

  ‘But you won’t.’

  ‘Won’t I? Does she know you’re talking to me?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘She wouldn’t ask this.’

  ‘No. But she’s not the one asking.’

  She squeezes her eyes shut. ‘What about the banks?’

  ‘Martha already owes them nearly everything. I don’t really think asking them for more is going to work –’

  ‘Then how can I ask a client?’

  ‘It’s easy. You just smile, like a good girl.’ And then Eve sighs, as Martha sighs. ‘But I know you won’t. You’re too proud, just like your father. So. What I would like you to do is give this man of yours a letter.’

  ‘A letter?’

  ‘Yes, a letter, you know? A letter, on paper, made of trees, in an envelope, written in ink. He’ll like that.’

  She opens her eyes. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘People say. I hear things.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Anna says, but already she wonders if she is right, if the opposite is not truer. The argument is already old and sour in her mouth, as if speech could leave a taste, a residue of guilt, a silt of anger.

  ‘You don’t have to decide now. I’ll send it to you. You don’t have to read it. You don’t have to ask him. You don’t have to say a word. All you have to do,’ Eve says, her voice growing slow and measured, ‘is give it to him.’

  She has finished, Anna thinks. She has said her piece. And even as she thinks it her mother is saying Goodnight, and before she can answer the line has gone dead. Around her there is nothing left but the temporary grace of the empty road, the night dark as asphalt. The car open and waiting, the radio still on, whispering.

  Two letters. One from John but not from him, not in his own hand. The other to John, not from Anna, but to be given to him by her. It is not exactly a correspondence, this communication through and for others. Just as what there is between them is not exactly anything. Not an investigation nor an affair, not friendship, not not. Are you my enemy, Anna, do you think?

  The envelope with Mister Law in her mother’s writing – scrawny, out of practice – she leaves on the floor by the door, beside the coats and the shoes and the flotsam of green and colourless bottles she accumulates for recycling every week. She ignores the letter as if it is something to be taken out, or thrown away. And perhaps it is, she doesn’t know. It is not something she has decided, the choice is not something she is willing to make. She can’t give it, and can’t not. She doesn’t want to know what she will do with it.

  She has always liked the days between Christmas and New Year, the sense of waiting and completion. The nights fall early and the mornings come late, but this year the weather is often clear, the afternoons are frostily bright. There is nothing to do, and so she walks and meets friends and buys food on impulse in shops that she will never visit again, simple things, not only for the eating but for the look of them. A bowl of blood oranges. White eggs like flowers.

  New Year’s Day. She sits in the kitchen and reads Martha’s gift. Eliot’s desirably flawed brilliance. She likes it less than she remembers, the distaste for humanity reminds her too much of the Revenue, but she reads anyway, her sister’s anxious voice following her through the pages. You do still read, don’t you? And hers. Yes, yes.

  When the Stranger says: ‘What is the meaning of this city?

  Do you huddle close together because you love each other?’

  What will you answer? ‘We all dwell together

  To make money from each other’?

  O weariness of men …

  Exploiting the seas and developing the mountains,

  Dividing the stars into common and preferred,

  Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator.

  Three o’clock. The light is going. She puts the book away and goes upstairs. In the bathroom she undresses as quickly as she can and then showers as slowly as she is able, letting the warmth settle into her, loitering under it, the water coiling over her limbs and belly, the world vanishing into condensation, vaporised. There are children playing in the gardens outside, she can hear but not see them. Snow! The smallest voice of them is shouting again and again, though there has been nothing but frost for days. Snow! Snow!

  She turns the water off, pads wetly to the mirror, wipes the glass. Her skin is pallid. Her hair needs cutting. Her eyes and muscles have settled into her default expression. She looks as if she thinks she has just misheard a question, and is too proud to ask for it again.

  The invitation from John Law waits for her downstairs, still unopened. Anna doesn’t need to read it. When it arrived she felt its thickness, embarrassed to be needing to do so. She held it against the light. And it is New Year’s Day, after all, a hard date to forget. In a few hours it will be New Year’s Day’s night. She thinks there is still time to get ready. She raises her hands to her hair, begins to braid.

  She gets out of the car and the air is warm. It is January, London’s coldest month, midwinter even in this century of climate change, but here it is April. She has driven twelve miles across the city, and it is as if she has stepped off a plane that has been flying south all night.

  She realises it with her first breath, so that the second comes more sharply. It is not often that she finds money unexpected. She has examined its achievements too often, the repetitive ways people will try to put distance between themselves and the world. Now it surprises her, though, shocks her, a little, as if it could be wrong, and she wonders if it is, and why.

  She thinks, it’s only technology. In a year it will no longer seem like something supernatural, in five it will pass unnoticed. And as she stands there it comes to her that there is, in fact, something cheap about it: an old-fashioned, fair-groundish trickery. John Law’s Marvellous Greenhouse Effect. It is false and delicious as good perfume. She breathes again, more tentatively, tasting the air, its odour of wet earth and thaw.

  It feels
like the proof of something. That money can do anything, change whatever it touches. Like Midas, she thinks. The king who changed the world to gold. The gold that changed the king. She wonders if that is true of money, after all, though it is not what she has always believed. It is not what she sees in her own world, where people are not immutable but are, still, stubborn-hearted, born into themselves. Ungolden. Where winter, despite everything, stays winter.

  Here and there in the grounds she can make out torches, the flicker of flames; and guests, small groups, voices and laughter. Beyond the last curve of the drive the house shines intermittently, the crowds inside casting long and mobile shadows. The river is lined with lanterns and their reflections. There are vessels in harbour, a dozen or more, their rigging decked out with illuminations.

  She has stopped on the verge where the drive opens out into its final arch of gravel. There are cars behind her and ahead, beautiful things in their way, all of them many times more expensive than her own. It is not something she usually takes the time to notice – it isn’t something that occupies much of her thought – but nor is it usually so obvious. Impossible not to see that these transports – sculptured statements of intent, enamelled, chromed, fluid with intermittent light – will always be out of her reach.

  She has never liked cars.

  He’s nothing like you, Lawrence said, weeks ago. And although Anna is no longer sure he was right in the ways that he meant, she knows it is true in the most mundane sense. In possession. She can see it now. The cars are a gentle reminder, an unspoken agreement of which she is not a part. She is different here.

  No one is parked. The owners stand like Anna, leaning on their rooftops, or wait in the lit privacy of their seats. Uniformed figures move along the cavalcade, bending at doorways, courteous. Anna can’t make out if they are armed. She reaches back into the car, hunting for her card, the proof that she is admissible.

  It isn’t until one of the figures stops beside her – an impossibly beautiful boy in white driving gloves – that she understands: she has never met a parking valet before. It would be more pleasant in other circumstances; now it only leaves her with the sensation that there is no going back. She stands watching as her Revenue car is driven away from her with more skill than she is capable of exercising herself, and only when it is out of sight does she turn towards the house.