The Amber Shadows

by Lucy Ribchester

  Moira smiled, her eyes lowered a fraction and she shook her head. A laugh escaped her. ‘All in good time. Not here.’ The canteen woman slopped teaspoons of powdered milk into their cups, displacing brown liquor onto the floor. Next to her a lady in slacks and a tabard with a bent back was brandishing a sugar spoon.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Six,’ Honey said.

  The woman widened her eyes.

  ‘I mean there are six teas. One spoonful in each.’

  ‘Toast? Jam?’

  ‘Is there jam?’

  ‘Marmite. Is there Marmite, Dolly?’

  ‘There’s Marmite. Just a scrape each, mind.’

  ‘No thanks.’ Honey shuddered.

  ‘Bring the cups back,’ Dolly, in her slacks, shouted.

  ‘They’re our cups,’ said Moira.

  Honey felt a jab in the ribs. ‘That,’ whispered Moira, drawing so close Honey could smell her face cream, ‘is Alan Turing over there. Do you know who he is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s—’ She broke off. Moira was in the habit of opening her mouth before thinking. ‘He used to work in the Cottage.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Yes. But mad as a fish. They say he’s buried treasure in the grounds of the Park. He’s taken his bonds out in silver and buried them. Because he doesn’t trust the banks any more. Do you believe that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Honey blushed again. The story had tripped a memory, and now things were beginning to materialise in an odd pattern in her head. Buried treasure. Things hidden.

  Moira continued towards the door. She was anxious and keen today, jolly. Her manner was putting Honey on edge. They were halfway across the room when a girl dressed in cat ears interrupted them, selling tickets for the Christmas Revue. She looked familiar. Honey remembered her doing a similar turn in the canteen when the auditions were on. She had singled Honey out: ‘Perfect for a Principal Boy with that chest.’

  Moira’s eyes were already gleaming. ‘Christmas Revue! What do you think? It’ll be a giggle. Are there songs? Do they sing? Do they do jokes about the Park? Has it been written specially? Is there Scottish dancing?’

  The girl tackled Moira’s questions like a batsman, wielding an iron sell in BBC English. Honey looked down and saw she was wearing Tudor pantaloons and tights stained carrot-tan. Katie Brewster, that was her name. She was a secretary. Well, they were all secretaries, officially. Moira delved into her purse. ‘We’ll take three.’

  ‘Three?’ Honey said.

  ‘You’re coming, I’m coming, and someone else is coming.’

  ‘Who? Beatrix?’

  ‘Beatrix.’ Moira snorted. ‘Not Beatrix. Someone else.’

  ‘Who?’

  Moira ignored her while she handed over the money and tore off the raffle-style tickets with printed numbers on them. When Katie had gone, she dropped her voice. ‘Do you believe in real, hard, smack-you-on-the-nose love? The kind of love in the flicks?’

  Honey was about to say, ‘Like Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine?’ Instead she said, ‘I thought you didn’t like the flicks.’

  Moira shook her head impatiently. ‘There is someone. Someone special. I think. I sort of know. If you know what I mean.’

  ‘Is he at the Park?’

  She thinned her eyes. ‘You’ll see.’

  For some reason, at that moment a terrible blow of anxiety struck Honey. She thought immediately, with no foundation and yet with absolute conviction, that Moira must mean the man she had met last night: Felix Plaidstow. And the thought winded her with an intensity she did not expect. She hadn’t even seen his face properly. He had only told her his name as he was leaving. And yet when she thought of him, when she thought of Moira’s secret, and when she connected the two – when she thought of the possibility that the two might be connected – it had a strange, dreadful effect. She felt as if she might be in the grip of fate, as if fate had placed Felix in her path for Moira to steal him. The room seemed to distort a notch, as if the world had been tilted very slightly diagonally, or she had crossed into another realm and was having a bad dream.

  Two women in WAAF uniform were standing there with a paper bag, offering something, and again Moira was laughing – by God she was jolly today. She had put down one of the mugs and was popping something into her mouth. She put her hand back into the bag and pulled out a sticky white lump then held it to Honey’s lips.

  ‘Go on, go on,’ Moira was saying. She was holding her own expression very tightly. Her eyes were baited with sparkle.

  Honey opened her mouth for the sweet. It tasted foul. Chemical, nutty and sour.

  She felt her face sieze. They all guffawed.

  ‘It’s bloody horrible. You lot are trying to murder us’ Moira spat hers into her hand now.

  The women laughed, open-mouthed. Both had shiny scarlet lips that contrasted prettily with their khaki.

  ‘What is it?’ Honey asked.

  ‘Cobnut marzipan. We gathered the nuts ourselves. There’s hundreds of them around. Thought we’d be clever, you see, for the Christmas cakes. Now the government have outlawed icing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Marzipan on cakes. It’s illegal now. Too much sugar. This is cobnuts and saccharine.’

  ‘Tastes like nail polish and the custard they serve here,’ Honey said.

  ‘Inventive though, aren’t we, duck?’

  ‘My thumbs are burning from these cups. Honey, let’s get back to work. You hold this one for a sec and I’ll grab the door.’

  Outside Moira hurried back in the direction of Hut 6 in sure footsteps, steady on the frost. Honey’s skirt was too tight to keep up but she tried, in skating waddles. The lake in front of the manor was cut through with white ferns of frost; doilies floating on slate murk.

  ‘Can skate on that in a few days if it keeps up. God, you do like a dawdle, don’t you? Is it that skirt? I could put in a slit and widen it for you. No point dawdling in this weather.’

  They passed two girls on a bench in front of the lake, one of them trying to light a flimsy cigarette for the other. Honey didn’t recognise either. It was real then, it was true that you could see people every day here you had never set eyes on before. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t seen Felix Plaidstow here at the Park before, even though he said he worked in Hut 3. It didn’t matter that he had given her that strange gift. Why did she have this doubt in her mind about him? Why had she connected him to Moira, and why couldn’t she stop thinking . . .

  Suddenly she couldn’t take it any more. She began cata-strophising: his tilted head, his greyhound, Moira’s new beau. ‘This chap of yours,’ she said slowly.

  Moira stopped in the thicket of bushes that connected the lake to the cluster of huts. As she turned her eyes flamed. ‘Honey, I never thought I’d say it, never in a million years. But he’s . . .’ She paused and rubbed her lips together, then said the word quietly like it was the most secret part. ‘American.’

  ‘Really?’ Honey’s stomach sprang. ‘How . . . how lovely.’ She felt lighter almost instantly.

  ‘Do you like their accents?’

  Honey hadn’t time to answer, before Moira, turning the path and emerging first from the bushes, said, ‘That man over there is waving. Do you know him?’

  Honey recognised the shape of him before the rest. Something about seeing the uneven cut of the coat, the belt, the gait of the legs, sent her out of herself for a second. He was carrying an unwieldy black leather case. It dragged on his right arm. Shoving all the cups not very steadily into one hand she waved back.

  The relief caught her off guard; she realised then that part of her hadn’t trusted him at all when he said he worked at the Park. A tiny part of her was suspicious not just of that slab of glass, amber, whatever it was he had delivered, but of him. How silly; she must have Joan Fontaine on the brain. But there he was, unmistakable; here, giving her a light, polite smile.

  She smiled back, opening her mouth. He broke his first, an
d continued in the direction of the back of the manor, a place Honey was not permitted to venture.

  ‘Who is he?’ Moira asked. She was watching Honey carefully, the way she had outside the Index Room.

  ‘No one. I think he works in 3.’

  ‘Oh.’ This last bit interested Moira. She nodded, happy with the trade of secrets, then scurried on her way in dogged strides. ‘Handsome little scruffball, isn’t he?’ she called back.

  ‘What do you mean, scruffball? Do you think he’s scruffy?’ She had not considered Felix Plaidstow scruffy. He might have been louche, the greyhound vouched for that. Perhaps there was something a little unkempt about him. Weren’t they all like that in Hut 3?

  As she reached the door she accidentally bashed the trio of mugs against the frame and realised she was distracted, that her cheeks were still pinched with the heat of blushing.

  Chapter 4

  ‘Which of you ladies wants to find me a kiss?’

  It didn’t take long to work out who the American was.

  The new girl looked horrified.

  Moira sighed — a knowing sigh — and scraped back her chair.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said Mooden, beating her to stand. She patted down her brown wool skirt and tightened her necktie. ‘I’ll fetch it.’ The American looked as if he’d been slapped.

  ‘Kisses,’ Honey leaned over to the new girl, who was dabbing paste onto the latest decrypt, ‘are what you get when a message is duplicated. Sometimes two wireless operators in different stations take down the same message. If you find a gap in a message you’re typing when it comes out the German end, it’s worth looking to see if there’s a duplicate been taken down from a different Y station – wireless station — in the Registration Room. Otherwise . . .’ She gestured with her head at the man behind. ‘They come looking. The indexers mark them with an X. Kisses.’

  ‘The gentlemen in Hut 3 like their kisses,’ Beatrix said.

  ‘When they can get them,’ said Moira. She was avoiding the eye of the chap. He leaned against the wall. The clattering of fingers resumed.

  ‘Sweet music,’ he said.

  ‘Watch it.’ Moira flicked her neck round, making her chestnut set bounce. ‘How else do you get your decrypts?’

  ‘I wasn’t kidding. They’re changing the walls round in there. Got carpenters in from the local coffin works. This is sweet music compared.’

  Honey saw from the corner of her eye the man take out a Woodbine packet, slice into the foil with his fingernail and remove the first cigarette. He was wearing olive green serge with epaulettes — US Army Airforce. His hair was parted sharply down the side, grey and thinning on top. He blew the smoke towards the back of Moira’s hair and it hung in a cloud between them.

  When he left Beatrix muttered, ‘They’re a little bit coarse, aren’t they?’

  The bruising came on like clockwork, three p.m. every day, afternoon-tea time (seven in the morning if she was on night shift). Honey’s fingers were better now than when she had arrived, but the typing still brought an acid pain. She stretched her fingers, making a small crack along each knuckle.

  They must have battered out over a thousand intercepts between them; the majority of the day’s Vulture key. The keys changed at midnight every night, so there would be a new set tomorrow, and when they finished this lot they would start on Red or Yellow or Chaffinch, intercepts from Africa, France or the Netherlands. Honey caught Moira’s eye and they both blinked, then widened their eyes, then smiled blindly like they were sharing something.

  ‘There’s a dance Thursday night, isn’t there? Over Wavendon? The American airbase.’ The way Beatrix directed the question it seemed as if it was meant for Moira.

  The typing was replaced by a shuffling of papers. Mooden was rolling up a wad of messages. Connecting Huts 3 and 6 was a thin wooden bridge, with a pulley system operating a tray that slid along it. Usually when there were enough messages decoded, one of the decoders — Mooden more often than not — would bind up a load into a red leather tube, dump it into the hatch, tap with a broom handle and fire it through. She shoved through a roll now. But this time, after a few seconds, the wood tapped back.

  Mooden’s head snapped up. ‘They’re sending something our way?’

  ‘Maybe returning the kiss?’ the new girl ventured.

  ‘No, they usually bring them back by hand.’

  ‘Any excuse to get off their botties for a flirt,’ Beatrix said.

  For some reason Honey’s stomach lurched. The knocking seemed portentous. They all listened as the tray slid along the bridge, bumping on the wood knots.

  The trapdoor rattled and out crept the tray. Mooden was closest. ‘Deschamps,’ she said. ‘Is it your birthday or something?’

  ‘What is it?’ Moira craned her head.

  Honey had stopped listening. She was staring at an intercept, the last one of the day, hanging out of her machine, the words split as usual into five-letter blocks. She was staring at it because she couldn’t stand to look at the pulley drawer. She knew, she could feel it, what was in that drawer. It was all too strange. She thought she might cry or vomit or blurt out what she had been given last night.

  ‘Deschamps. Honey,’ Miss Mooden said again. ‘It’s for you.’ Mooden dumped the package on her desk, obscuring the pile of tape strips.

  ‘Is it your birthday?’ Beatrix asked.

  ‘You should have told us, we’d have baked you a cake with cobnut marzipan,’ Moira said.

  The others looked questioningly at Moira and as she explained about the WAAF girls in the beer hut Honey’s gaze moved onto the package. It was addressed the same way, London PO Box 222. All their post came through the London box. People had had all sorts delivered this way: food parcels, books, a grand piano. The handwriting was the same, and the Cyrillic letters on the postmark.

  She reached down, feeling the brown paper. The edges were soft and frayed as if they had been wet then dried again. Scribbles were drawn across it, faded by passage.

  The room seemed like one great tentacled creature watching.

  ‘What is it? Care package from home?’ Moira nodded at her lap.

  The blush rose fast. She slid the parcel to her feet. It smacked the ground. ‘Chocolate. From my brother.’

  ‘What does he do again? Is he out in the forces?’

  ‘No, he’s . . .’ She hesitated. This could go one of two ways. ‘He’s with ENSA now. He’s a ballet dancer. He was a CO,’ she added quickly, as if she had to admit to it so that no one could accuse her of lying. But saying the full words – Conscientious Objector — was too shameful. Dickie the pacifist had done his time, five weeks up in Wakefield prison, and now he was touring for the troops as part of a tribunal deal.

  There was a pause.

  Then Moira murmured, ‘Musical family.’ The door opened and the four o’clock back shift began to filter in.

  ‘Oh . . . I . . . think that I shall never see, a sight as curious as BP.’

  The revue cast were warming up. Blackout fabric had been draped between pillars in the hallway of the mansion, makeshift dressing rooms. As they passed into the warmth of the house, letting the front door slam, Honey heard a hefty groan through a gap in the curtains. A woman was shrieking, ‘Oooh, somebody’s not been using his ration book! Breathe in, they fitted you three weeks ago.’

  Moira was busy explaining to the American the point of British Revue.

  ‘So it’s not a review of other people’s shows?’

  ‘It’s . . . they must have revue in America.’

  ‘They have critics.’

  ‘Honey, help me out. Your mum’s a singer. What do they call revue in the USA? Vaudeville.’

  ‘Oh, revue. I thought you said review. Your mother’s a singer? What’s her name? We saw some singers at a base on the coast last summer.’

  The two men on the other side of Lieutenant Reuben MacCrae bent forward. One of them wore a dark twill suit and an old striped cricketing tie with a tight little knot
; the other was in brown wool, many shades.

  ‘Martha Deschamps,’ Honey said. The package she had received in the afternoon was weighing down one side of her coat, and she had to concentrate to keep herself balanced. She hadn’t had time to go home between ending her shift and the revue, and didn’t much like wandering around in the blackout on her own anyway. They had taken a light supper at the Eight Bells, watching through a crack in the curtains as a different kind of cast warmed up; the dancing girls limbering and rubbing face powder onto their legs. In the toilets, Honey had unpicked a small section of the lining of her coat and dropped in the parcel, unopened. But it was making her walk funnily, and she felt she must be drawing strange looks.

  ‘Martha Deschamps.’ The man with the cricketing tie was pondering. Both men were English. He had introduced himself as ‘Bugs’. ‘Oh, she’s wonderful. I saw her singing “White Cliffs of Dover” down on the Kent coast. Brilliant woman. Unstoppable.’ Honey thought it perhaps prudent not to mention that her mother had thrown a carriage clock at the wall when her agent suggested she should be singing Florrie Forde to the troops instead of Wagner.

  ‘They’re putting her to good use,’ she said.

  ‘Still, secretary work must be a bit different from singing, though?’ He posed the question the Bletchley way — the assumption that what you did was boring, manual, secretarial stuff.

  ‘I suppose,’ Honey said. She looked around her as they walked into the cafeteria. The tables had been taken away and the seats arranged lecture-style.

  ‘Still, it’s awfully valuable, being a secretary,’ he said with a twinkle. ‘What’s your name?’ They all shuffled along a row to the middle.

  ‘Deschamps.’

  ‘Oh yes, you said that, but I mean not that name, your Christian name. Ah, I see, you don’t want to tell me. Old-fashioned are you?’

  The woollen man spoke up. ‘She called her Honey.’