The London Restoration

by Rachel McMillan

  She bunched her fist and pounded it on the table. Two steps forward. Eight steps back. She wasn’t frightened of him. How could she be?

  She wiped her eyes and focused on the cigarettes. Sure enough, in the flap, the eternity symbol was etched in light pencil.

  The logo on the dark-green box read Pall Mall. Diana opened the lid and retrieved a cigarette. Odd. The cigarette itself was a completely different brand. There were sixteen cigarettes in the pack. All the other brand. Two Brymay matchbooks were squeezed behind the row of cigarettes.

  She bit her lip when she heard the bedroom door open and tucked the packet beneath a fold in her nightgown. Brent raked his fingers through his hair into disruption and his face was ghost white. He tied the belt on his robe and surveyed her.

  “Have I . . . has that happened since you’ve been home?” His voice was so low she almost didn’t hear him.

  “You didn’t wake up before. Sit here.” Diana rose. “I’ll make tea. Brent, sit down.” She took the opportunity to put the cigarette packet at the back of a canister on top of the Frigidaire away from his sight and waited for the kettle’s shrill whistle. Neither Brent nor Diana smoked. Moments later she joined him.

  “You’re exhausted.” She studied his face. “I was so hoping you would fall back to sleep. You seemed to calm down after those . . . nightmares.”

  Brent ruefully studied his tea mug, then slowly sipped. His hand shook as he set the cup on the table. She stopped tugging nervously at the sleeves of her nightgown when she followed his sight line.

  “Let me see,” he said gently.

  “I don’t want you to be upset. This is far worse for you than it is for me.”

  “And I don’t want to hurt my wife,” he said bitterly. “But such is our lot.”

  Diana held out her wrists and Brent slowly peeled back the fabric and winced, fingers light as feathers at the heel of her palm, barely touching her. He shuddered at the bands of red around her wrists. They would certainly darken to bruising by the next day.

  He raised his eyes to hers and she blinked a tear away. “You’re very strong.”

  “I’ll sleep on the sofa again.” He ran his hand over his face. “I said I would and I should have stayed there.”

  “Brent. Not this again.”

  “I’m so sorry, Diana.” He set her wrists in her lap and touched her face. “You must know that I would never . . . I would . . . ,” he choked out.

  “Of course I know. You didn’t mean to. You didn’t know what you were doing. I wish you would tell me what you see in your dreams. Is it one specific moment, or is it just . . . everything? If you talk about it, then maybe it won’t haunt you anymore.”

  Brent stared at her deeply, then dropped his gaze to her wrists. Any temporary physical pain paled against Diana’s recognition that they weren’t advancing as she wanted. She wanted to be nestled in his arms, to taste his lips, to be back to where they were—so familiar with each other.

  Diana took a somber sip of tea. The night was catching up with her and she yawned.

  “Go back to bed, Di.”

  “Not without you.”

  “I won’t sleep. Not after . . .”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  Brent’s cup clanged with the saucer. “You were scared of me.”

  “I was a little startled. I’m not now. Shift over.” She waited several seconds before he reluctantly closed the space between them. Diana grabbed his arm and moved it over her shoulder, tucked her legs up under her knees on the sofa, and rested her head in the crook of his neck and collarbone. “There.” Her voice was drowsy, eyelids fluttering.

  “If I hurt you again—”

  “I’ll recover.”

  Brent shook his head, ran his good hand from her hair to her cheek into the curve of her neck. “I wouldn’t.”

  Diana’s smile spoke to the life she had dreamed of before the direction the war had spun her. The life that brought him back. A ruined church. Buttered sun melting over the Thames. Brent carrying her sloppily over their threshold. Never once setting a pace she couldn’t find a rhythm to. Not as long as he was leading and turning her: one hand at the curve of her back, the other hand in hers.

  Diana yawned and fell into him. “I’m fine.”

  Brent’s voice faltered. He stalled and attempted, then attempted again. After several moments and several beats, he whispered, “I love you.”

  Diana felt it through her fingers and her toes, through the startle of their night together and the uncertainty of tomorrow. She relaxed into him and the words.

  Chapter 13

  January 1941

  Bletchley Park

  Diana read and reread Brent’s letters, finding that if she stared long enough, the sentences she thought she had understood could mean several different things, and the placement of a comma or arrangement of a phrase could change the entire tone. The longer she intercepted messages and searched for possible patterns and words, the easier it was to see any correspondence through the same filter.

  The green hills nearby divided Bletchley in equal distance from London, Oxford, and Cambridge, making it the intellectual center of the three. Diana translated messages for an operation inside the huts and stuck closely to Fisher Carne and Simon Barre.

  “Do you know the myth of Sisyphus?” Fisher had said her first day. “Who pushes the rock to the top of a hill only to have it fall to the bottom again?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sort of what it feels like here.”

  Diana shivered and felt at the chain around her neck holding her wedding ring. She was put straight to work with weak tea and cold fingers shoved into fingerless gloves and put her German to good use.

  “You just take it a day at a time. If you don’t, you’ll go mad thinking of all of your limitations and the magnitude of what we’re up against.” Simon rolled his pencil up and down the desktop. “You have to be able to section your brain and keep things in compartments so they don’t all spill into one another. And you can’t focus on what you cannot control.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We are one cog in the wheel that cannot know what the other cogs are doing. Which is why we see Villiers but we have no clue what she does.”

  While some girls kept pictures of their boyfriends or postcards from home at their workstations, Diana kept the sketch of all of the Wren steeples Brent had given her on their wedding day. She liked feeling something so familiar near to her.

  The messages were received through a sort of makeshift and rudimentary system involving a tunnel and a tea tray connecting Diana’s Hut 3 with the eastward Hut 6. The latter would receive intelligence, messages, and telegrams as well as process the German army and air force messages using the Enigma machine, encrypted by the Germans and constantly scrambling messages. The decrypted messages were passed to Diana’s hut for reporting and translation.

  It was always bustling. Diana used her German to the best of her advantage, thankful her academic father had ensured she had as many languages as possible under her belt. Did the messages she translated and processed about locations, artillery, and regimental movement have something to do with Brent? She felt closest to him when he included a sketch of a church or a countryside with his letters.

  At first she would leave her shift to catch the night bus to Leighton Buzzard where she billeted with the vicar’s family. They were kind and even had a radiator in her room. But Villiers wasn’t satisfied with the arrangement, especially when it cut her time short at the pub with Simon, Fisher, and Diana.

  “Leighton Buzzard of all places!” Villiers clucked her tongue and with her inimitable magic snapped her fingers, and soon Diana was housing with her in a shared flat a five-minute walk from Bletchley Manor. She asked Simon about Villiers’s influence, having early on deciphered that the two were either close from their time together or more likely had been acquainted before the war.

  At bedtime Diana turned off the constant noise and files and slip
ped into a memory like a sweater. To try to sleep she didn’t count sheep but rather listed London gates and Wren churches and Greek forms of love. Pragma. Philia. Ludus. Storge. Agape. Aldersgate. Bishopsgate. Newgate. Ludgate. Garlickhythe. Walbrook. St. Martin, Ludgate. St. Andrew Holborn.

  Diana crossed her arms over herself and tried to hear Brent’s voice, to feel his breath rumbling through her. But a picture was a poor substitute, and even the patched-through telephone calls made him sound as if he were meeting her through a tunnel. Nothing in his letters and sketches, rusty calls or memory, would bring him closer. Sometimes contact made him seem farther away.

  One night Sophie Villiers came home from a night shift to find Diana crying on the sofa. “I’m s-sorry.” She hiccupped. “I-I haven’t been able to stop.”

  “Really. Stiff upper lip. It’ll seem better in the morning. And so on and so forth.” Villiers rocked on her heels, her tone and flippant words belied by the sparkle in her eyes. “What? I am not good at this sort of thing. You’re missing your young man and I have little to do with the opposite sex. Unless they’ll buy me a drink.” She cracked a smile, which Diana slowly returned.

  Villiers was a woman Diana wasn’t sure would become an easy friend had they not been thrown together by circumstance. Many debutantes were at Bletchley Park: women with the same history and pedigree as Villiers, who came from a long line of dukes, duchesses, and titles that made Diana’s head spin. Just as the Government Code and Cipher School preferred unmarried woman, so it preferred to recruit women from good families believed to be innately trustworthy.

  Sophie, despite her name and her habit of drawing every gaze as she entered a room with her height and erected shoulders and signature lipstick, never connected with the other women from similar affluent backgrounds.

  More often than not, she merely intimidated them.

  “I suppose you think I am silly.” Diana rubbed at her nose.

  “I mostly think you’re silly when I hear you whispering all manner of strange church names under your breath and—”

  “They’re a safety net. I told you.”

  “You’re a funny one.” Villiers stretched her arms. “But this is more than just your missing him. This is a new level of melancholy.” Villiers put her hand to her chest. “You didn’t get a telegram, did you?”

  Diana shook her head. “No. More just feeling sorry for myself.”

  “Well, it’s your day off. We should do something.”

  “I wanted to catch up on my wash and take a nap. Listen to the wireless.”

  “Dull. Dull. Dull.” Villiers clucked her tongue, settled beside Diana on the sofa, and crossed her legs. “You’ll worry less about your young man if we’re thrown in with a lot of rowdy people. And there’s some sort of pantomime. Come.”

  They entered Hut 2 at a fast pace to find it, as usual, filled with uniformed men and women sipping tea and the dark pints of ale whose inclusion firmly established it as a daytime social hub. Men and women were chatting in groups or slumped exhaustedly over tables, trying to turn off their brains for a few hours without getting inebriated enough to mar their performance or, worse, spill any secrets.

  “Simon Barre!” Villiers saw him before Diana did.

  “You seem to have a sort of radar for finding him, Villiers. This is not the first time this week that—”

  “Hush, Canary.”

  Villiers parted men and women like the Red Sea to approach Simon’s table and cut through his conversation with a pretty young woman.

  Simon looked up at her casually and slowly flicked ashes from his cigarette. “By all means, Villiers, don’t stand on ceremony.”

  “I need you a moment.”

  Simon responded with a smooth smile, though it never reached his eyes. He dismissed the young woman before him. “Mary, a pleasure.”

  Mary shot Villiers an incensed look as if to say, “How dare you take me from this handsome man and not recognize how under your spell he is!”

  Villiers straightened her trousers and crossed her legs with a fluid movement before Diana dropped beside her.

  “Yes, Villiers. What do you need me for?”

  She took up the half cigarette Simon had discarded and lifted it to her lips. Its effect was subtle to Diana but an absolute bell clang to Simon. She took a quick draw. Blew it out easily. Villiers offered the cigarette back to him through her pinched fingers.

  Diana opened her mouth to say something, but the silence was too palpable. Watching these two face off was dizzying.

  “We’re bored.”

  “Very well.” Simon made a long show of pressing the cigarette to his lips. “I was on a date.”

  “That was not a date.”

  “How would you know?” Simon asked.

  Diana twinkled. “Yes, Villiers, how would you know?”

  “Because I’ve been on a date with Simon.”

  Diana sputtered at how blatantly she offered this information.

  “And it was an unmitigated disaster, wasn’t it?” Villiers arched an eyebrow at Simon.

  “This was not an unmitigated disaster, Villiers. We were having a nice drink and—”

  “Exactly.” Villiers tapped her nails on the table. “Which is how I know it wasn’t a date.”

  * * *

  March 1943

  Diana was moved from translating to listening to air signals. The Air Section produced intelligence based on the patterns of day and night fighter reactions. The intelligence and information gleaned from listening for German interception through the airwaves was at once redundant and fascinating. In an age of innovative communication, Diana was never sure what signal she would pick up.

  A daily analysis of activity and patterns would often reveal how much time a bomber would spend over a target or even the sequence in which pilots would complete their missions. Diana became familiar with call signs, patrols, and traffic characteristics. She was attuned to how the weather could change an operation and how the slightest mission might be unsuccessful if a message was interrupted by a warring sequence.

  Fisher Carne was also assigned on account of his pitch-perfect hearing. They shared smiles every time the scrambles, shrill signals, and static wavered at the interference of a daily musical program from a radio station in France. Some nights it was clear over the channel and others not. She was sure he got a near-honorary degree in the architectural facts she gave him as she did in music. He was a mathematician as a course of research, but music was his passion. It just happened to overlap.

  “The same part of my brain that solves complicated equations takes into consideration the measures and beats,” Fisher had told her. “The same part of my mind that enjoys a particularly complicated measure of Mozart is the same that tackles a nearly unsolvable line of algebra. So my passion and my work are neighbors. But I cannot spend my whole life in research, Diana. Neither can you. Your brain has a wonderful capacity for patterns, given your education and your passion. But step outside of yourself. Listen. Truly listen.”

  Fisher’s workstation didn’t host the usual knickknacks. Instead of a portrait of a sweetheart or a wife or a sister, there was a framed portrait of Mozart. There was also a favorite piece of tackle and a carved insignia of a mathematical symbol.

  Diana loved the romantic notion that arduous hours of straining her ears for any modicum of intelligence might be worthwhile and the daily analyses and logs that Strauss might funnel through. Or Bach. And Fisher’s favorite: Mozart. He had told her about the Köchel Catalogue. The more Diana listened, the more she appreciated it. There was a pattern in music just as he said. She began to anticipate where a movement would begin and where sequences would repeat until she could hum along and anticipate a phrase.

  “There.” She looked up to find Fisher watching her closely.

  “What?”

  “Your face. It changes now. You’re a Mozart lover, Diana,” he said proudly.

  * * *

  The more she spent time with Simon, Villiers,
and Fisher, the more her mind stretched and the further she felt from her old world.

  She was fighting to get back to it, of course, just as they all were. But part of her knew she would never forget that the war had taken her beyond herself—just as it had taken her from Brent. The hardest was recognizing that the longer she spent away and the more she learned, the bigger the barrier she was building between them.

  “Secrets seem easy, don’t they, Diana?” Simon said. “You tell a few like we do here. Say we make radios. Lie to those billeting us. Refuse to let our family know the extent of our work here. It seems easier to just keep a secret. To tell the lie. But secrets often overstay their welcome. You tell one lie for the right reason and then another and you layer them one on top of the other and soon you cannot tell where the secrets and lies begin and the truth ends.” Simon lit a cigarette and took a long inhale.

  At first Fisher hated his job. But somehow Simon worked his magic and continued to convince him he could treat it as a hard-to-solve equation or a complicated line of music, and soon Fisher Carne was willing to do the best he could. He also evidently started to enjoy Diana’s company.

  “Farthing for your thoughts, Diana?” he had said on more than one occasion. Sometimes accompanied with a toss of the coin. “You’re a smart girl.”

  “Everything in my life is Christopher Wren,” Diana told Fisher on one of their many nights at the pub. Fisher was a bit of a mystery to her. His demeanor wasn’t as suave as Simon’s, and even Villiers’s proud façade could be penetrated by the promise of true friendship. She assumed his standoffish manner was one of his oddities. He was pretty much a genius, handpicked by Denniston himself on account of his winning several nationwide chess championships, though Simon could give him a run for his money, and often did, and Fisher’s mathematic proficiency broke many previously uncontested theorems.

  “You were studying at King’s, weren’t you, Diana?” Fisher asked as she set her pencil aside. “I was mates with a chap named Mariner back in the day.”