The Amber Shadows

by Lucy Ribchester

  The woman’s brow furrowed even further, then Honey watched in slow vivid strokes as piece by piece it crumpled. Her cheeks burned violently. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t — with all of this, and that . . .’ She widened the door and pointed a hard finger at the wailing parlour.

  She put her hands to her headscarf, clutching the rollers, pressing them into her head. She pushed as if they were stoppers that could keep the madness in or the grief out, or whatever pain she was feeling she could transform into a simple physical sensation that was easier than the confusion of mental pain; nothing but a sharp scratching on the head. Her arms fell.

  Honey reached across the threshold and touched the fabric of her sleeve. Her own hand felt awkward and cold on the hot, damp nylon. Her voice when it came was woefully small. ‘Cup of tea?’

  ‘There’s none.’

  ‘All right, brandy. Where’s your brandy?’

  She took Moira’s landlady by the sleeve and guided her into her own little parlour where the neat furniture sat in a strange orange light behind blackout curtains. For a brief second the woman looked around her as though she had never seen such a place before in her life. She just stood in the middle of the room, on the middle of a round soft pile rug, gazing at her knick-knacks and her framed photographs, all the things she had acquired and built into the picture of a life. Honey closed and latched the front door.

  The baby was still howling in a wooden cot in the corner of the room. She didn’t know how to pick babies up, but under the arms seemed like the best way. She hauled it over to the woman.

  The landlady looked at her child with the same vacancy for a couple of seconds. Then instinct swam up in her and she lifted its head and began to rock it against her shoulder.

  ‘It’s just that I get no word from him for weeks,’ she sniffed. ‘Have to go on good faith from the British Army, but would you trust them with your loved one’s life? He’s in Africa somewhere, in a desert. I can’t remember the name. And now her.’ She gestured with her chin upstairs. Honey was scooting around the parlour sideboard, pulling the best crockery and stacked knitting patterns out of the way.

  ‘There was a song his daddy used to sing to him. I wish I knew the words, I wish I could remember it.’ She burbled a little tune, wordless, nonsense words, up and down, then gave up. ‘It was the only thing could get him to sleep.’ She looked up and saw Honey scrabbling in the sideboard. ‘It’s in the medicine box, in the kitchen.’

  The brown bottle was easy to find behind the breadbin on the kitchen counter top but there was only a finger left. Honey stood in the parlour doorway. The landlady waved it away. ‘Go on, take it to her if you like.’ She had wiped her tears on the baby’s burp flannel; there were splodges of wet on it and now she was sitting on the couch bouncing the child on her knees, her focus absorbed. He was still noisy but the crying had slipped into a more ambiguous scream now, happy on the high notes, uncertain on the low.

  Backing away from the room, the last thing Honey saw was the woman smothering the infant with kisses, from its pink and white cheeks to its feathery head. Her smile was restored as if nothing had happened.

  The depleted brandy bottle still in her hand, Honey crept up the stairs. Moira’s door was ajar.

  She knocked softly. There was no response so she pushed it open a fraction more. Inside, there was a peculiar smell, half-chemical, half-perfumed, all in a fug of unwashed cotton and hair. In the slice of room that came into view she could see the head of Moira’s bed, and the bedside table spread with stitching patterns, elastic and thread. Moira’s chestnut hair was spread out tangled over the pillow, her face obscured by the strands. She was lying on her side, facing the door. One arm dangled above the covers, the fingers fish-white and floppy.

  On the floor beneath the head of the bed someone had placed a zinc bucket. A glass of water and a brown bottle of little round pills sat closest to her on the table. She was snoring softly.

  ‘Mo,’ Honey whispered. ‘Mo, are you awake?’

  There was no response. Honey pushed the door a little further. Before she crossed into the room she hesitated.

  That panic downstairs when she had spoken shrilly to the landlady, the shiver in her spine; it had come rising up the staircase with her. Was she invading? What had Moira done to end up like this? She wondered why she had come. At the back of her mind she knew it was partly because she wanted to tell Moira about the firebird, and she felt a tingle of guilt.

  Looking at her friend now, Honey was pulled sharply back into reality. The room felt low and wet with sadness. It was cold despite a whimpering gas heater. The thick curtains fluttered in a draught. Moira’s hair looked damp with fever sweat and congealed tears.

  Honey pulled across the rug, moved the bucket out of the way and knelt down. She touched Moira’s cheek. Her skin was very hot but the touch didn’t wake her. The cotton pillow was clogged with wet breath beside her mouth.

  ‘Oh Moira.’ She looked at the little prescription bottle. Bromide. A doctor perhaps, or the matron at the sick bay?

  Moira’s eyes pinged open. The hazel colour in the mess of her hair was startling. ‘It’s you,’ she said to the pillow.

  Honey’s tongue jammed. Everything that came into her head seemed trite.

  ‘They’re going to take me away, aren’t they?’

  ‘They’ll let you go home.’

  ‘I don’t know why I did it, Honey. I was just so sad. This morning when I arrived at the hut. Sad and tired and I don’t know what else. I can’t even organise my thoughts—’ She broke off and sighed into the pillow, but the sigh shook her head.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You know what happened,’ she said to the pillow.

  ‘You seemed all right last night.’ As soon as Honey said it she knew it sounded stupid; accusing. ‘You could have talked to me more.’

  Moira turned away, pressing her mouth and nose deep into the sheets. ‘You can’t talk about anything to anyone. It’s like acid, the secrets, all tainting you inside. I want to tell my mum what a shit he is, but then I’d have to explain what I was doing stepping out with an American — where did I meet an American? What are Americans doing in my office? Why are there Americans at the FO? You can’t say anything about the Park without opening a can of fucking worms.’

  She twisted her face and the words spat towards Honey. The muscles of her eyes were tight, pressed open; the eyes shone for a second.

  ‘Did you see a doctor?’

  Moira nodded.

  ‘Did he give you something to calm you?’

  ‘He was nice. He didn’t ask what was wrong. I think he thinks it’s work nerves. I don’t know what’s happening to my body. It’s as if my brain . . . but then it’s my body, not my brain going wrong . . . I don’t know why I did it,’ she said again.

  Honey paused. She wanted to know what Moira had done.

  ‘Shall I put the wireless on, or read to you?’

  The hair wriggled back and forth. Honey’s eyes strayed along the table and she saw among the dressmaking patterns and pots of kohl two slices of tissue paper, each with blue eyeliner rubbings brushed daintily over their surface. The carvings had come through sharp. Next to them, on two separate scraps of white paper Moira had scribbled equations, tables and blocks of letters.

  Moira stirred all of a sudden and Honey jumped.

  ‘Tell me something that happened today,’ she said sleepily.

  With her gaze still oh the fluttering, incriminating papers, Honey began to witter; nonsense about Beatrix and the new girl and how she’d asked a question about what went on inside Hut 11 and they’d all gone quiet with shock and had to explain to her you don’t do that. Miss Mooden’s face. All Decoding Room stories ended with Mooden’s face. She didn’t mention the explosion or the girl with the lipstick throat. It wasn’t Moira, but something in her own unease about that event that kept coming back. She wanted to whitewash it from her day. It had been horrible. She had believed in that moment
she was looking at a person about to fall on their knees and die. And she had hated it with a terror she had never thought possible. Christ, how it must be for the boys in the battlefield, where blown limbs and cut throats would never turn out to be lipstick. How could a soldier ever erase that from his mind? There were the dead she had seen lined up on the pavements in the London Blitz, the bloodied chorus girls at the bombed theatre; the memory made her shiver. But to see a person die, to see the blood turn from purple to livid . . . abdominal plug shot. . .

  After a while she heard Moira’s breathing slow. Loose snores came in soft bursts. She touched her brow. The forehead was wet, as if she had been running in her sleep.

  Two nights ago love had swelled her beau to enormous importance. Everything about Moira had been different then; her silky movements, her quickness. She had ballooned with Reuben, spilled with words about him. Now he was removed, there was only a collapsed shell. The silk flower was nowhere to be seen.

  Honey stood up. Her legs felt sore and stiff from the pressure of kneeling. She pulled the rug back to the middle of the room. Gently, in small short movements, she began to move the tissue slices with the rubbings and the little sheets of scribbled paper towards her. The first one slid like water over the mountain stack of make-up cases on the table. But the second snagged on a perfume bottle. Moira’s eyes stirred.

  ‘Shhh,’ Honey whispered. ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘I tried. Really I did. I didn’t forget them.’

  ‘It’s all right, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It’s a Vigenere.’

  Honey stopped.

  ‘Your cipher. It’s . . . I haven’t managed to crack it yet. But I think it’s a Vigenere square. An old hand cipher. Leave the papers and I’ll . . .’

  Honey’s hand loosened on them. What were these, if not her own silk flower, her own trinket to cling on to that stood in for someone who wasn’t there? She let the tissue rubbings fall back onto the table. The two little pieces of paper dropped from her hand to the floor. She bent to pick them up, then Moira sighed and it seemed she was a little more content, and Honey let her hand fall again and let the papers rest where they were. She stood back up, then left quietly, without saying goodbye to the landlady.

  Chapter 11

  As soon as she hit cool air she felt the tears come quickly. It was a hurried sobbing that rose and just as swiftly vanished, the same feeling as being sick after holding it in. Afterwards her face felt washed, her mind cleaner.

  She took the same path she had taken back from the revue a few nights ago. The roads had cleared. Families were inside and grilling smells filtered through chimneys, under doorframes.

  It was hard to picture in the sparks of frost that shone now through the shadows of trees, this time two years ago. Christmas 1940 she had been at home in London when the barrage balloons rose, great bloated sheep into the sky. The aeroplanes had come ripping through the clouds, dropping fire, blasting whole neighbourhoods, turning rubble molten red, while all she could do was peep through the blackout blinds at her mother’s house.

  ‘Safe in Kensington,’ her stepfather had said. But then, ‘Safe in the theatre,’ he had said too. And the Empire had taken a direct hit when her mother was on stage, and forty people in the stalls had died. Their limbs were buried with painted stars and cloth woodland and bits of gilt plaster from the boxes. The chorus girls, the show’s baritone, they had died onstage. It had made Martha Deschamps more determined than ever to sing.

  ‘But what else,’ she said every time to Honey, ‘could I do for this war?’ There was a part of Honey’s mother that truly, wholeheartedly believed the role of an opera singer during wartime was a political one, as essential as a nurse or ambulance driver. And sometimes when Honey saw the men in uniform crowding the back of the Bletchley Ritzy or sitting in the front rows of the ENSA concerts where they sang Purcell and Bizet — anything that wasn’t German — she would wonder for a second if there was something in what her mother said.

  She turned past the church and onto the lane where that large thatched building squatted next to the road, where the blackout blind had fallen and she had seen the shrouded men. Curiosity couldn’t stop her looking sidelong as she walked, as if it might happen again. She stared hard at the ghost outline of the whitewashed stone and then at the window frame. She imagined if she stared hard enough she could bore through those heavy black wool curtains and see again those figures draped in white.

  And then, she reasoned, she would probably see that they were not in fact people round a dinner table at all, but furniture draped in rags. She would see that the candelabras on the table were just for a caretaker to lift as he checked the room, as he checked the loose blinds. And she began to wonder what the house was at all. It didn’t look like a dwelling. It had the feel of a village hall, a meeting house. It had an old-world spirit that made her uneasy.

  Of course, she reasoned, she was only lingering over it because it stopped her from confronting the other things, like Moira and like the lump of amber that sat now in her pocket, still making her cardie hang on one side. She would be home soon. Then she would have to fit the firebird into its slot, look at the damned thing goading her with carved letters and curling vines, and try not to dream of it when she went to sleep.

  She remembered with a jolt the shift change she had agreed to tomorrow. Time to double-up on sleep. It was the custom to slip onto back shift for a week after days so she had never gone straight to nights before. Night shifts were a terrible place. The brain tangled easily; sleep came only in distorted clouds during the day and then the brain was cloyed even more by the next nightfall, until reality felt unreal. After some time you would reach such a state of disconnection that phrases from the Typex machines would begin to drum and repeat in your head. Last time ‘KEINE BESONDEREN VORKOMMNISSE – nothing to report’ had stuck, and the waltz from The Merry Widow, lilting round and round as if it would spin her mad.

  She had just passed the house when the rain came on. At first it was only a spattering. Then very quickly a powerful downpour began, slanting on the wind, hitting window-panes and turning the ground to sludge. It hadn’t rained so hard since November. Apart from afternoon drizzle or flurries of snow the weather these past weeks had been cold and bright, good air fighting weather with strong moons. Now the sky took its revenge.

  She was into the wooded thicket that ran between the building and the entrance to her own lane by the time it properly set in. She huddled for a few moments, stranded, heavy drips shooting down either side from the branches. From her shelter she could make out the side door of the thatched house. Then suddenly from nowhere a man was there, running across the lawn, his arms at full stretch by the size of whatever he was carrying. He looked huge, roguishly huge behind a flat rectangular slab, and he glanced around him as he went — which was probably what made him slip on the lawn. He didn’t fall, but the thing he was lugging, wide and unwieldy, skidded from his grip and bashed its corner in the muck.

  ‘Christ,’ she heard him curse.

  ‘Mr Plaidstow!’ It flew out of her mouth, and before she knew it she was running towards him in the rain; him, in his blackout material coat with the belt pulled tight round his skinny waist. He had no hat. The rain had pushed his hair down flat to his brow and it splashed off his nose as he turned to her.

  ‘Can you take that corner?’ He gestured to the bottom of the slab. It was sheathed in an oilcloth, running channels of rain down to pools where the folds lay. Her fingers were already icy from the walk. They slipped a little on the cloth and the piece shot back down into the mud. She caught it just as it cracked the ground.

  ‘Oh, blast it.’ Felix craned over, pulled up the oilcloth and examined a small crack. Virgin wood had appeared in a straight fissure, beneath gold paint. It looked like a flesh-wound. ‘Thank God it wasn’t the painting itself. What are you doing running around in the blackout?’ He fidgeted with the oilcloth while the rain continued to fall. The wood frame slippe
d from his palm, and Honey saw one of the upper comers of the cloth fall away, revealing a crackled canvas, the topmost quarter of a beautiful intricate web of flowers, spectral in the moonlight, shining under a spidery varnish glaze.

  ‘Could ask you the same question, Mr Plaidstow.’

  He caught her eyes on the painting. ‘I’m waiting for someone. Come here. Let’s haul it in here. I was trying to get under the eaves. Blasted fellow’s late. Said he’d meet me down by the kerb but I can’t wait there. It’s far too wet.’

  ‘Where are you taking it?’

  ‘It’s heading to . . .’ He broke off, peering towards the house. When he glanced back down at Honey’s expectant face he relaxed into a grin. Bracing the bottom of the frame with one arm he lifted the top edge of the cloth. ‘Stunning, isn’t it? It’s a van Dael, you know? Do you know who he was?’

  The prickle for some reason stung deeper this time than it usually did when a man assumed she was stupid.

  She looked down at the part he’d exposed. The finish was so luminous it looked almost greasy. She could make out the frothy bloom of a crimson carnation. After a couple of seconds she looked back up. Felix was staring at her. ‘What do you think?’ The way he asked, the frisson in his voice, it was almost as if he had painted it himself and was waiting for her judgement.

  ‘It’s . . . I’d need to see the whole thing, but yes, he’s a lovely painter. Where is it from? What are you doing with it?’

  ‘Oh, taking it to hang up somewhere. Someone’s country digs.’

  She snorted and the cold rainwater sprayed through her nose, making her cough. He laughed at her, then the hand that had unsheathed the oilcloth reached around and rubbed gently the part of her back between the shoulderblades. He patted her until she stopped coughing. ‘You should be more careful when you laugh.’

  ‘I’m sorry but it’s just the sort of thing you Hut 3 fellows would do.’ There was so much that was strange and beautiful about Felix she thought it would not have surprised her if he had produced a Faberge egg from underneath one of the church chickens and given it to her with a wink. She imagined him lugging priceless family paintings into his Bletchley digs on the grounds that it might ‘help him to think better’. But then, why at night, and why in the rain? She remembered the sight she’d caught of him a second ago, against the backdrop of the thatched building, the rain lashing at his coat and his face. Had there not been something monstrous, something furtive in the way he lugged the thing? Who moved paintings around the country, at night, just before Christmas?