The Amber Shadows

by Lucy Ribchester

  ‘Did you say he was RAF?’ said Floney. ‘Uniformed?’

  ‘Mmmm.’ Beatrix was dropping oil into the back of her Typex.

  ‘Can’t trust Raffles,’ said Moira. Beatrix looked up sharply and their eyes met. She was wearing the map scarf again. It was stuffed low under her cardigan but Honey could see it, they all could, ruffled at the base of her pale neck. The silk map she wore. Round her black hair, at her throat, threaded round her shoulders on top of her coat. Beatrix’s fiance had been an airman, shot down during the summer. He had given her the silk map of Italy, a memento of a previous trip, standard RAF issue, the silk being easier than tough paper to bunch up in their pockets. Moira looked away but didn’t apologise.

  ‘Did he . . . he didn’t have a dog with him, did he?’ Honey asked softly. A blush was creeping up her neck, along with a crawling shiver.

  ‘No idea. I only know what I heard, that’s it. But the point is, official or not, just . . . just don’t show your papers to anyone. Even if they say they’re official. They’re probably not or they wouldn’t ask for them.’ She added after a pause, ‘She’s being disciplined. By Captain Tiver.’

  There was a sharp bang down the corridor. Fist on wood. Raised voices began to filter through the walls. It meant another key was on its way to being broken. They didn’t have long before the rush of paper messages would come. Chatter changed rapidly to whisky and Americans.

  ‘One of the Wrens smuggled in a case, because of course they’re trained in the Scotch Highlands. They have a whole crate of the stuff at the Woburn Abbey billets, you really didn’t know? It’s common knowledge.’ Beatrix was baiting Moira now.

  ‘You’d brave the rats and the broken loos for a splash of whisky, would you? Woburn’s a dump.’

  ‘It’s a country manor, of course there are rats! It doesn’t mean they’re crawling over people’s laps while they take tea.’

  ‘Take tea, do they? The Wrens take tea? And I thought they were here to work.’ Moira stretched back in her chair and sucked on a Player’s. She leaned forward and dropped ash on the blotter in front of her, right on top of His Majesty’s Service. ‘I know this: they have a throne at Woburn on which to do their business. The toilet is actually raised on a dais.’

  ‘I heard they sunbathe naked on the roof,’ said Sylvia.

  Moira threw back her head and laughed. ‘Not in this weather. Your nipples would turn to rock. Honey can tell you all about that.’

  It was like this with Moira. ‘Honey can tell you . . . Remember when we . . .’ She was a great chronicler of activities; she remembered everything. And she remembered it so that you were both having as much fun as each other, or both in as much trouble as each other. That time we took off our clothes and swam in the quarry (Honey had been petrified). That time we got our knuckles rapped for having bicycle lights on in the blackout (it had only been Moira with the lights on). Remember last summer when the Wrens were sunbathing on Woburn Abbey roof and we all took our tops off and some of the Eagle Squadron flew low over. Honey hadn’t been able to look anyone in RAF uniform in the eye for a month afterwards. But Moira had roared with laughter, it had poured out of her red mouth.

  Moira had been in the Research Cottage in the Park’s early days, one of the original Dilly’s Fillies, the brainbox women Professor Dilly Knox had handpicked for his Bletch-ley Park staff. She was educated at St Hilda’s, Oxford, mathematics, top of her class, a grafter with a pub landlord for a father, a string of scholarships and a Northumberland accent. The rumour was that while she was working there she had made some breakthrough that saved a pack of merchant ships from German U-boats. But as Winman had said, ‘No one would believe a twenty-year-old girl could have saved them anyway,’ so it didn’t matter that the credit would never come. No one knew why she was working now in the Typex room with the decoding girls. It was one of the Park’s mysteries.

  A telephone rang down the hall. ‘Job up!’ The cry pierced through three walls’ worth of flimsy wood.

  ‘Want tea?’ Sylvia had scraped her chair back.

  Beatrix rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t put the kettle on the stink machine.’ She eyeballed the coke stove. ‘It takes on the flavour.’

  After a few minutes of shivering Honey decided she wanted her coat back on. She had just rucked it off the hook when the door slammed back.

  ‘Got Vulture.’ A boy with sandy hair, extravagantly long at the fringe, thrust out a sheaf of fresh cold intercept papers. Blocks of capital letters, scrambled nonsense language, were scrawled in pencil across each foolscap gridded sheet. Coloured underlining – grey in this case – marked them in parts.

  Beatrix stood and reached across. ‘Thank you, Poo.’

  ‘Who broke the code this time?’ Sylvia still had the kettle in her hand.

  ‘Me.’

  The women made merry hell at him, rubbing his hair, scoffing and tickling his ribs until his pullover rode up to his belly button. He roared at them to stop. The new girl stood a few steps away, bracing a smile. Mooden pretended to be busy.

  ‘You lying scamp.’ Beatrix flicked his ears.

  Poo caught his breath. His freckled face burned. ‘All right, it was Geoffrey Bald. But don’t give him credit.’

  ‘It’s the pyjamas,’ said Moira.

  The tea was forgotten. They sat down at their desks, took a second to shake their shoulders and crack their necks. The Typex machines were unwieldy and stiff and one had to adopt a sort of hunched position to get any sort of purchase or speed on them.

  The intercept papers were distributed, settings were given out for that day’s Vulture key, correspondent to the Enigma settings that had just been broken. Poo helped Beatrix set her machine so she could pass it on to the rest. They shifted and clicked the cogs.

  Though the Typexes were British-built they had been set up to replicate the German Enigma machines used to encrypt signals by the Nazi army, navy and Luftwaffe. Enigma – the unbreakable cipher machine that, among others, the 20-year-old Northumberland girl next to Honey had cracked — could be set to any number of keys, each for a different campaign or regiment. Vulture was used by the military on the Eastern Front, named because they – at the Park — used a pencil the shade of a vulture’s plume to mark the decrypts in that particular key. There were also Red, Yellow, Light Blue and Green. They had run out of colours after that and called the next one Ermine.

  Honey had what she always told people was ‘poetry German’. ‘I have poetry German,’ she would say and even as she said it feel the little cringe inside because it was the kind of thing her mother would come out with. But she didn’t have any better way of putting it. Four years of studying Goethe and Nietsche and she still had only ‘poetry German’. But it meant she could read the plain text coming out the other end of her Typex, even when she didn’t want to. It meant that last year when Luftwaffe Yellows were being broken daily, she was one of two on her watch who knew what was coming to Britain before it happened. The coded intercepts went in, the decrypted plain text came out. That time it had been about supplies, manoeuvres, incendiaries, strategy. Sometimes they’d name the towns that were their targets. Korn, they all discovered too late, was code for Coventry.

  Sometimes she’d have to wait for the newspapers to find out if the messages she had seen had been passed on in time, and the bombings stopped. Sometimes they weren’t stopped and there would be photographs in the next day’s newspapers. The worst of it was connecting it back to what you had seen in the intercepted messages; when you noticed ‘ten kilos of gunpowder’ in one message, and then the next day the fish factory in Putney went up and the south of London stank like a chip shop for days.

  There were the wheels to shift, plugs to adjust, wires to be connected correctly. All was done quickly and quietly. Honey took one of the papers from the top of the pile and began to type. It was five past eight.

  After a few minutes she checked that the strip of type coming out the other end looked German. Poo — Rupert Findlay, his parents
had named him — was still hovering in the doorway. The cribsters always had a buzz just after breaking a day’s key. ‘How’s your mother, Honey?’ he shouted above the din. Her fingers faltered for a second.

  ‘Still too old for you,’ Beatrix shot back crisply.

  Honey turned her neck to show him she was smiling, a friendly smile, not a nasty one, and in return the boy’s face turned crimson. Surely it was she who should blush, she thought. All the boys, ever since she could remember, every single one of them had a fancy for Martha Deschamps. She turned back to the typing, picking it back up like a pianist who’d slipped a note, and saw Poo from the corner of her eye wriggling out of the room.

  It was an hour or so into the pile when a low gasp across the desk next pierced her concentration. Beatrix had stopped. ‘My God,’ she said. The clacks around them faded a notch. ‘Are you reading what’s coming out?’

  Honey could see the German but she wasn’t making sense of the words. It was tough to read when they were bunched into groups of five letters, regardless of the word breaks. She shook her head dumbly.

  “‘FYDORROKATOV, WOOD, GOLD, OIL, CANVAS, KONIGSBERG, MELTZER, THIRTY-FIVE KILOS, WOOD, GILT, KONIGSBERG, TWO AMBER CLOCKS, TEN KILOS”. What does this remind you of, Honey?’

  Honey froze as the key clatters dropped away. She felt beneath her hands not the round lumps of the letter hammers but instead, growing slowly, one flat, tiny slab of amber, hard as burnt sugar, sticky as burnt sugar, leaving a glue on her skin that the others in the room couldn’t fail to see or smell. She looked down at her hands.

  They were empty.

  Beatrix was answering her own question, pleased with herself. ‘They’re looting more of Leningrad. Do you remember this time last year . . .?’ But Mooden had caught her eye and even now Beatrix was reaching over, slicing the strip of message in two and passing it on to the desk of the new girl with the jar of paste. ‘Grab hold of that one.’

  She started up again. The hammering of the keys throbbed at Honey’s temples. On her first day here, in the Decoding Room, Beatrix had told her that she was replacing the seventh girl who’d had a nervous breakdown over the noise. ‘The seventh!’ Beatrix had said, firing the words at Honey like cannon, like a challenge.

  They were looting around Leningrad. The palaces. The houses. Just like last year, just like the signals that came through this time last year, when they had looted . . . she knew she remembered.

  Her stomach dropped. She stood up. Mooden’s eyes flicked onto her.

  ‘I think I just need . . .’ she began to say, then the gazes of the workers around the table all trailed onto her one by one, each woman’s machine pulling to a halt. She looked down at her hands, imagining again the weight of the little slab. She felt its weight pressing on her, pushing her back down into her chair. ‘No, I’m fine.’

  ‘One of the boys,’ said Mooden without looking up, ‘got hold of some coffee. I’ll get you one — when it’s time for break.’

  As Honey threaded a new intercept paper into the front of her machine, she felt the warmth of a gaze on her, looked up and found Moira staring sidelong before returning to her own typing.

  Chapter 3

  The Index Room was on the right, close to the hut’s front door. As she walked the corridor, passing each chamber, little noises filtered out: pencil scrapings, hushed voices. The Typex racket was still audible even at the furthest end of the corridor.

  Honey smiled, then worried that her smile was frozen, as she asked the girl on the reception desk to find her the intercepts from last year, filed under the word she was looking for.

  It did not mean anything. It could not. How could anything have passed a Russian censor and made it as far as Britain without being intercepted? How could anyone have known to reach her at the Park’s London PO Box? Who would have told him she was here? Her mother? Unthinkable. Dickie then? But if Dickie knew he was alive, then Dickie himself would have told her. Dickie would have shrieked it down the telephone, he’d have turned up on her billet doorstep. He knew where she lived.

  The girl came back with a stack of files and slapped them down. Honey tried to focus on not sweating. Her forehead felt sticky despite the cold. Perhaps the coke stove was more powerful in this room. It certainly felt close, and acrid, and now, there, she had left a sweat fingerprint on the file’s card covering.

  She turned towards the corner of the room.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  She turned back. The girl cast her eye curiously up Honey’s face. ‘You have a lipstick mark on your cheek.’

  Honey’s hand shot up to rub it off, and she felt the burn spread across her face. Burn. The feeling became the word, and then the word became . . . burnstone. Bernstein. Amber. Once again, the fragment of smoked glass began taking shape in her hand. She could feel it. She looked down and saw the brown index folder in her palm shape-shift, its manila shade darken. It began to feel cool and brittle.

  ‘You have to sign for those.’

  ‘Oh?’ She looked down again. She was holding paper. Paper and card only. ‘I just want to check something for a second.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Rules.’ The girl chewed her pencil end and shrugged. ‘Thank you.’ She clipped the word as Honey scribbled her name in a register.

  ‘I don’t know who reads these anyway,’ the girl muttered, taking back the book. Behind her several women were bent over box files, raking through library cards, making notes. Honey retreated to the corner of the room and opened the file. There were six cards listed under the keyword. Bernstein.

  Last year, she had blocked it out while it was happening. It was too much to think of. But while the siege of Leningrad raged on through encrypted messages – calls for ammunition, troop commanders, names of the dead, names of the captured — there was another list that had slipped through, and she held it now. Creased from the Park hands it had passed through, the men who decided how to act upon it, the typing at the crease was almost rubbed blank, just as one day the contents the message spoke of had been blanked out, removed from the Pushkin Palace, the Detskoye Selo, the old Catherine Palace in Leningrad.

  ‘BERNSTEIN SECHS TONNEN. FUNFUNDDRE-ISSIG PLATTEN, VERGOLDET UHR’. Amber, six tons. Thirty-five panels, gilt clock . . . She had remembered. A year ago, after blazing into Leningrad, the Nazis had dismantled the Amber Room from the Catherine Palace and shipped it to Konigsberg in Germany. The Times had run a piece. ‘Eighth Wonder of the World: Suspected Looted.’ Their special correspondent had seen a goods train piling out of the palace complex, and the messages that came intercepted to the Park confirmed it. Six tons of amber panels, forty-seven chairs, eight kilos of bronze and gilt, all stolen and relocated to Konigsberg Castle.

  The Nazis had it. The Nazis had the pieces of the Amber Room. She turned the thought over in her mind, trying to turn it backwards, trying to wipe the sticky stolen sugar feeling from her palms. Why was it sticking in her mind, the idea that was what it could be? That small flat piece of brown gemstone. Could it be amber? Could it be stolen amber? If the man she was thinking of, the man who had once worked for the Pushkin Palace, if he was still alive, had he taken it before the Nazis came? Where had he sent the piece from? And what was it to her? A keepsake? A memento of something that had been destroyed? She had to talk to Dickie.

  ‘The index? What are you doing in the Index Room?’ Honey hadn’t realised she was standing in the doorway, the back of her head visible from the corridor. She felt a cold rinse over her skin. ‘Moira.’

  ‘Did I startle you? I am sorry. You don’t look well today, if you don’t mind my saying.’

  ‘I needed to find a duplicate, for one of the messages.’

  Moira’s eyebrows pulled back a little. ‘Gap in one of yours, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, you might be better trying the Registration Room first. If it’s one of today’s intercepts they won’t have indexed it yet.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Registration’s that way.�
��

  ‘Yes, I know, I might just try . . .’

  Moira started to move past her, then looked back over her shoulder. On her lips was a faint friendly smile. ‘Name of a soldier, is it? I’m sure he’ll be home for Christmas. Don’t worry too much. You can put your head in all sorts of spins here looking out for those boys. By the way . . .’ She broke off. Her face was an opaque mask. Behind it hovered some mischief or excitement trying to slip through. ‘No, nothing. I have something to tell you. Have to go for a jimmy riddle first. But I’ll see you across at the beer hut.’

  Honey’s arms were shaking as she pressed shut the door to Hut 2. She spied Moira already ahead, hanging from her fingers six empty blue-rimmed mugs like enormous rings. Pasted to the door was a notice: ‘Crockery shortage — bring your own. Mrs Crisp.’ She took a moment to acclimatise to the sweaty air and entered the squeeze bubbling outwards from the serving station.

  On the gloss green paint on the walls, condensation had gathered in thick dribbles. Men in tatty woollen jackets were clustered, debating the rules of backgammon. When she caught up with Moira, Honey was trembling so hard she thought it must be visible. Every piece of her wanted to shout out her secret, what she had been given, what she had discovered. The only way to plug it was with small talk. ‘That’s a nice blouse. Did you make it?’

  ‘This?’ Moira pointed at her red silk. ‘It’s my mother’s. Well, mine now. Here.’ She shoved three of the empty mugs into Honey’s hands.

  To her annoyance Honey began to blush. ‘She’s got nice taste in blouses,’ she said, struggling to get her fingers through the handles. The queue moved forward and she felt the pull of Moira’s fingers on her sleeve. ‘You were miles away this morning. Someone special?’

  ‘Could say the same to you.’

  Across the hut wall, behind the serving lady, was a picture of a woman in a knotted turban with black lashes and scarlet lips. The words ‘Beauty is your Duty’ floated beneath her in pink, then it listed all the things you could do for the war effort. Wear rouge. Put your hair in a silk scarf or glamour band to save washing it. Buy ‘Mitchell’s Stockingless Cream’.