by Paul Griner
Everything was in order, though that failed to cheer him. As he made his way down the alley behind the tidy backyards with their mounded Anderson shelters he felt furtive, and he was unable to shake off Winifred’s corrosive gloom.
At the Mahoneys’, an Irish family of ten whose father had been killed at Dunkirk and whose oldest had landed in Normandy the week before, he dropped half a dozen potatoes and several bent tins in the egg basket Mrs. Mahoney kept on the bottom step. Stealing, it would be called if he were caught, as he’d removed the tins from a bombed-out grocer’s, though he never thought of it that way. Wartime had blurred formerly clear lines, and he neither sold them nor kept them for himself. To Mrs. Mahoney he now gave baked beans, corned beef, and cherries, the last a luxury they probably hadn’t had in months. If she’d saved her flour rations, she could make a pie.
The other needy families about were mostly English, and he preferred giving to the Irish. Stick to your own, his mother had always said. No one else will. He’d have helped German families too, in honor of her, but they were all locked up; had been for five years. It was only luck that had kept him from being interned for the duration, or so it seemed at the time; now he wasn’t so sure.
In the park, he listened behind a sheltering yew hedge. This close to midnight, no one but police should be about, and he was familiar with their routines; still, it wouldn’t do to be careless. A chilly wind moving through the yew leaves like water, the steady whine of the all-clear signal, the dim, distant barking of dogs, but no human sounds, no loud footfalls to indicate a stranger’s approach. He pulled out his thermometer, unraveled the string, and swung it in a circle over his head, the most dangerous part of his night. How could he ever explain it if someone observed him? Yet it was foolish to be afraid. Who would be watching a warden?
Thirty seconds was long enough to ensure an accurate reading; he covered his flashlight with his fingers and switched it on, reading the mercury by the reddish glow of his skin. Forty-seven, an October chill in June. Even the weather seemed to have gone mad. He dampened his finger and gauged the wind—steady at about five miles an hour from the north-northwest—before rolling the string around the thermometer and slipping it inside his tunic, then heading back to the post. If he made it by midnight, he might still get the best watch.
June 16
THE VAGUE TINNY NOTES of a gramophone drifted through the walls from another flat. Mr. Morgan’s, probably, since Morgan was an auxiliary fireman and sometimes kept peculiar hours, and no one else was likely to be up at 6:00 A.M. Mrs. Dobson, their landlady, complained often about his hours and his soot-stained sheets.
Claus listened, able at last to identify one of Glenn Miller’s V-discs, and as the final romantic notes of “Moonlight Cocktail” gave way to the brassy opening tones of “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” the floorboards creaked in the hallway. Mrs. Dobson perhaps, up to ask Morgan to shut it off, and though he liked the music he wished it weren’t being played. He’d been careful to return home quietly himself, and once Mrs. Dobson was up she might come round unannounced.
Even with the door held shut with a sandbag—it was permanently misaligned from bombs earlier in the war—there was always the possibility she could push it open with a tray of tea, saying, Something special for a special tenant. He suspected her of snooping, but he might have been only imagining it, though of course he couldn’t ignore his suspicions.
The music went on, the floorboards fell silent; he had much to do and little time to do it. He keyed the lid from a cod tin and ate while rereading the just-written letter, careful not to spill any oil, and decided that it was fine except for one small detail. He put the tin aside and added, Isn’t it wonderful about the Allied landings? Five out of every six men is supposed to have survived. That would alert Madrid to the order of composition; this was letter fifty-six. The embargo on letters to the Continent, in place weeks before the D-day landings, had only just been lifted, and this letter might arrive with ones sent both far earlier and somewhat later, yet its news was more relevant and he wanted Madrid to decipher it first.
His eyelids were heavy, his concentration waning, even his bones felt tired; he wished he could put off the last part of his task but that would only worsen his workload—Lisbon and Oslo were waiting to hear from him too, since he was currently unable to broadcast—so he bent over the table and wrote out on another piece of paper the crucial news: all leaves for American troops in the Hastings area had been canceled and train service there interrupted, indicating the imminence of the long-expected second series of landings near Pas de Calais. This was the real invasion of France, he emphasized, adding Winifred’s information on the loss of grain and the naval department’s worry over convoys, details on American supplies, and specifics of London bomb damage. Lord Hamilton’s unhappy rumblings about ships removed from convoys for resupply of the Normandy troops also went in, a report he’d lucked upon because the speech had been cleared through the MOI, news that would thrill Madrid, and he followed that with scraps of overheard conversations on buses and trams concerning the badges of American and British units now passing through the city. The Americans had large black As on their sleeves; he didn’t know what that meant, but he promised to try and find out. He wrote steadily, and though it was dry work and the bone of resentment showed through, weariness was not a reason to quit.
He suggested Madrid discount some of the troop movements because he’d gleaned the intelligence from his fellow warden Herbert after too much stout, Herbert beating Claus repeatedly at darts and not having to pay for a single drink; by the end of the night, Herbert’s memory might have been unreliable. Yet Claus thought it wise to include it as the Germans were hungry for news, and it was always better to have too much than too little. The last bits were about the disappearance of the post–Normandy invasion elation with the advent of the V-1s, and a third request for a new radio crystal; without it, he was effectively silenced. A request for money, too. He’d been spending so much on reports and getting gossip that his financial situation was precarious.
Encoding all of this involved a columnar transposition of double substitution, a type of math, really, that in the end to anyone else would look like a meaningless scratch of letters but that demanded great concentration. When he was done, his head throbbed and his neck was stiff and he wanted to break again, but he refused to, as the Glenn Miller interruption had already put him behind schedule.
He ground the antipyrine tablets into fine white powder with the pestle and stirred the powder into water, careful not to let the swirling spoon strike the glass, then strained it through cheesecloth while he gathered a match, a pin, and tape. An organic secret ink from lemon juice would have been far simpler and certainly preferable, but lemons were often hard to come by, and vinegar and ammonia gave off too distinctive a smell, something all Londoners had been asked to look out for in suspicious concentrations. Mrs. Dobson and her sensitive nose would be sure to notice, and the analgesics at least had the advantage of being odorless.
He taped the pin to the matchstick, dipped the pin in the solution, scraped it dry on the glass rim, and at last began writing the encoded material between lines of the letter. The lightest of pressures, the smoothest of motions, since even the tiniest mark raised censors’ suspicions. Beginning with the third line he slid a heavy golden ruler under his work, and each time he looked away to dip the stick he memorized his location by inch marks: two, three and a half, six and a quarter; then he always knew where to start again. He’d been at it for ten minutes when he heard the Home Guard tread in his alley and marked his spot at eight inches and stopped.
Without observing the lightening sky or looking at the clock he knew it was six forty, because—foolishly, and against regulations—the local Home Guard unit always ran its patrols at the same time. When they were gone he bent to write again, ignoring his sore fingers until a few minutes later when the Glenn Miller music stopped abruptly, which caused him to look up and listen. He waited; five min
utes, six, seven, making sure no one was outside his door listening to him listen, as the last thing he wanted was to be discovered by some overeager Home Guard. The Manchester papers had recently splashed one of the guards across the front page for just such an exploit; he’d discovered a spy in his lair and shot him. That it turned out the man he’d shot was no such thing was of little comfort. At last, certain no one was around, he bent again to his task.
His stomach hollowed and his hands began to tremble. What had he been doing? And more to the point, where on the page had he been doing it? He had no idea where he’d been writing. He’d pulled the ruler down to his lap when the music stopped, instinctively trying to hide it, and though he stared at the page hoping a visual memory would come to him, none did.
He sat without moving, as if by sheer force of will he could turn time backward, and then began to move swiftly, holding the paper up to the light and shading sections with his hand, looking for the faintest trace of the pin’s passage. But he’d been too good; not the slightest mark showed. At last, in despair and disgust, he tore the letter and its encoded news into pieces over the sink, careful not to let a single scrap fall, and when they were small enough to be illegible, he burned them.
Done, he allowed himself the perverse luxury of looking at the clock; he’d wasted two and a half hours. Headache worsening, he drank the rest of the antipyrine solution, certain that his planned-for half-hour of sleep wasn’t going to happen. With it he’d function poorly, without it barely at all, but he was too upset to do anything now but toss and turn. He couldn’t tackle the letter again, let alone begin the ones to Lisbon and Oslo, since he was too agitated to work cleanly; no, it would be better to do that later, when he was back from his next round of inspections and his hands were calmer, his emotions under control. Better still, of course, not to have to write them, as the strain of doing so was making him old, and with the invasion accomplished it seemed pointless. Yet Bertram insisted.
He decided to bathe early—not caring that it wasn’t his scheduled bath day or that the rumbling pipes might wake others—to at least begin his day clean, and in a fit of surliness drew a full bath, ignoring the black line painted low around the tub indicating a properly rationed one.
June 21
HYDE PARK WASN’T directly on his route, but he made a point of passing Speaker’s Corner every few days, as it was a good way to gauge public opinion. This morning the crowd was larger than normal and more vocal; through the damp air, raised voices reached him at a hundred yards. About the V-1s, probably. The Ministry of Information had kept news of them from getting into the papers, but that didn’t stop people from talking. Recent rumors had 250,000 Londoners dead, Churchill’s daughters among them, both of which were equally incorrect and incorrigible.
It was another damp chilly day, scraps of rain and clouds, though oddly the Bradford pears along the perimeter were blooming for a second time, looking bridal against the gray buildings and grayer sky, so white they were tinged with blue. Pollen filmed the pathways, the air smelled of pine pitch, and even the birds seemed confused; only a few were singing throughout the park, as if afraid of what their songs might conjure up. The year without summer, people were already calling it: the explosions, the unusual cold, and the endless rain; nature seemed not to know what to do in the face of a disintegrating world.
He slogged closer through puddles and realized he’d mistaken the day’s topic. Evidently someone had been arguing about the French, saying they were weak and of little service during the invasion; the speaker—French himself, from his accent, and fitted out with the requisite black beret—brought up 1914 and the Miracle of the Marne, when the all-but-beaten French had stiffened and stopped the Huns. “Where were the British then?” he asked. Younger, he might have shouted; now, older and stooped, it seemed all he could do to make himself heard.
A nurse in a white cap and scarlet cape stepped forward. Her face wasn’t visible, only the unusually healthy shine of her hair, but she had a strong voice.
“Smartly, on the sidelines,” she said. “And the French themselves would have been better off losing that battle”
“What?” said the man on the soapbox. Aghast, he wobbled and looked in danger of falling. “Lose the Marne and let the Germans roll into Paris?”
“Yes. Then all of that wouldn’t have happened.” She gestured to the wiped-out buildings stretching down Oxford Street beyond the Marble Arch, the crumbling trenches that had been dug before it in the grass. “Hitler wouldn’t have happened.”
“You disgrace the memory of the heroes of the Marne,” the man said.
“Heroes of the Marne?” She wasn’t at all flustered by his anger. “They’re nothing more than dead fools, and the victory of 1918 was a senseless one. It served only to make the French suffer more a generation later. Those deaths brought this life,” she said. “What kind of life will this war bring?”
A few in the crowd called for her to quiet down, and one stout woman, speaking in strongly accented English, threatened her with a furled umbrella. Claus slid between her and several others, the lot of them smelling of damp wool, and pulled the nurse away with him. “There have to be easier ways to commit suicide,” he said quietly, leaning close to make sure she heard him as they walked. He caught a whiff of her perfume—real perfume, blackberries and vanilla—which he didn’t know but liked, and instantly was on guard: Myra had been the last person he’d responded to as a woman rather than as someone who might help or harm him, and that had been a terrible mistake.
“I wasn’t in danger,” she said. “Those French weren’t going to fight.”
“I was a bit more worried about some of the English,” he said.
“Ah, but I’m a woman.”
“I’m not sure that would have mattered, had it gone on longer.” He looked back. A few of the crowd were still eyeing them though none had followed, a good thing for him as well as for her: it would be difficult explaining what he was doing sheltering a woman with antiwar sentiments. He released her arm, but she walked beside him as they passed the looming bulk of the Marble Arch, near enough that their elbows bumped. “You want to be careful,” he said. “You’ll end up martyred like Edith Cavell.”
“Please. No more propaganda.” She looked at him directly for the first time.
He stopped, flustered by her pretty but pained face. “She was shot by a German firing squad,” he said.
“Yes, I know the story. I’m a nurse too.”
He turned away, determined not to stare, and started off again. “I wouldn’t have guessed. Given that you seemed intent on starting a riot, I thought the outfit might be for a party.”
“Sarcasm,” she said. “The refuge of the defeated. You brought her up, not I. Yes, she was a nurse, but she wasn’t a martyr, any more than soldiers were. Are. Spies know the risks. She understood that if she was caught, the penalty for helping English soldiers escape Belgium would be death, which means she’s not quite the victim the English like to believe.”
“You certainly know your German propaganda.”
“Just because I’m English doesn’t mean I approve of everything they do. And you?”
“Me?”
Her glance flicked over him, her deep green eyes marvelously clear. “Despite the uniform, you’re American, not English. Do you approve of civilian bombing?”
“In the abstract . . .”
She stopped and another gust of perfume drifted over him. He knew he’d touched a nerve because even in the midst of being shouted down she’d shown no physical signs of fear or anger; now her cheeks reddened as if they’d been slapped. It gave him an obscure pleasure to have discomposed her when an angry crowd hadn’t.
“There’s nothing abstract about it,” she said. “It’s done nothing to shorten the war, only provoked a general misery.”
She started off again, a bit stiffly as if arthritic, the color cooling in her cheeks, like a woman who’d just come in from a brisk chilly walk. He had the odd wish
that she was returning to an apartment they shared. Dangerous to succumb to loneliness—the more profound it was, the more potentially disastrous—and yet it had come to him so quickly he found himself nearly defenseless before it. He had to make a conscious effort to enter his usual mode of attention: half fastened on what was happening, half fastened on himself, checking and rechecking to be sure he wasn’t giving too much away; he resented how easily this habit came to him. The strength of his desire not to give in to it, this once, surprised him.
“So,” he said. “Do you really believe all that you said? That we’d have been better off if Germany had won at the Marne? That France—and England—would not now be at war if we’d let the Germans win the first time?”
“Certainly.”
“And you blame England for this, then?” he said, waving at a ruined apartment building with two names and an address chalked on the remaining brick wall.
“No. I blame England for Hitler.”
“We didn’t vote him in”
“‘They,’” she corrected. “You’re not English, remember? And in any case, the Germans wouldn’t have either if they hadn’t been starved. I saw it. Berlin 1919, the signs were all there. A few fools were blaming the Jews as soon as the treaty was signed. The rational ones wanted no part of it until we starved them”
She had full lips and beautiful teeth, and he forced himself to look away, lest he be obvious. “Ah, the innocent Germans,” he said.
She sighed, making a visible effort to control herself. “Look. We were innocent before the last war, but not before this one. Let’s not pretend otherwise. The Germans themselves thought the first war a grand thing, at least at the beginning. Have you read Mann?” She quoted from memory. “‘We knew that world of peace, that can-can culture, horrible world, which now no longer is, or no longer will be, after the great storm passed by. Did it not crawl with spiritual vermin as with worms?’ The war was to be the end of disgust, of the boredom and lassitude that were sapping their culture’s strength. Please. None of us should be so foolish now. Slaughter isn’t virtuous.”