She heard brush crack. ‘Honey, this isn’t funny. Come back and we’ll . . . there’s been a misunderstanding. Come back and we’ll . . .’
She felt Felix step onto the ice, the extra weight. She slid a shaky step further to the centre.
The black shadow branches danced, slow and lethargic.
Felix took another step.
Sirens were sea women who led men from their ships to watery graves. In some myths they would sing. In other myths they were mermaids, and would comb their red-gold hair until the sailors were mesmerised, reached out to touch that hair, and only then they would be pulled down to the depths where bladderwrack grew and crabs lived in shells.
She took a step further into the centre of the lake. There were boys in the Atlantic tonight, in colder air, with harder, keener enemies. They were the ones Hut 8 worked to save. Even their typists – even their lowly woman typists – did their bit to protect them.
Felix’s arm was stretching towards her out of the darkness; his fingers caught the moonlight, fading backwards to the shadowed head and face. He took another step forward. Another inch of his sleeve came into view.
And then the ice could no longer bear his weight. It yawned and cracked in a great plate, rose up from the lake and like a see-saw pushed him down. She had to be quick. She found her own island of broken ice, but in leaping to it she tripped.
Her feet slid, and instead of hard ice rising up there came a flat black hole. Her face hit freezing water and she plunged. The cold seared into her lungs. She opened her eyes but the dirt stung. Her hands numbed so quickly it felt as if they had already disappeared below the elbows; all else was stumps.
She spun a roll, thrashed to the surface and stole a breath. In the bleary moonlight she saw on the surface of the water a breaking wave, looming forward, a spitting mouth, an arm beaconing the air.
‘Honey!’ Felix shouted her name. He was breathing – hard, rasping breaths. The water closed over her head again and for a second all was silent. Now her upper arms had ceased to feel. Delirium took away her neck, she thought she might be moving her limbs but couldn’t be sure, and then all of a sudden she was black in unconsciousness, dreaming, plunging down to frozen depths where she became a spoon in an ice she had eaten as a child; an ice made of nothing but water and sweet lemon, and there she was diving right to the bottom of the thick crystal that cupped the iced sweet lemon and . . . She felt a weight on top of her, pushing her lower. Above the surface, hollow cries, the spluttering of water. In her mind she saw Felix’s blue Fabergé eyes sinking on top of her, the water sealing them both in tight. And the panic was enough to send her breaching up.
Reaching out high above her head her hand hit something solid; mud and root. She pulled and grasped, feeling her wet fingers slipping, frozen, numb, fumbling for purchase. She heaved her stomach onto the mudbank and yanked her leg high. When she hauled herself out she saw she had come a small distance from where Felix was extending a sodden arm, Rupert pulling him free.
She squeezed the water from her skirt and ran.
‘There she goes.’
It was Felix. Footsteps and the slop of water closed on her over the mud. She kept running. Her feet had swollen in the cold, stuck fast inside her corkboard shoes which poured with every step. Still she ran. She ran as if she were running from fire. She discarded her wet coat as she struggled out of the bushes and onto the path that led towards the gate. The Military Police were her beacons but they were not her friends. She knew if she were to tell them what she knew, there would be questions: the amber, the ciphers, the wax, why had she not spoken sooner. No, she could not stop for the MPs.
She tore past them. ‘Sorry I forgot my—’
‘Slow down, miss, you’ll do yourself a mischief in those heels.’
‘Did you see her, she looked wet,’ she heard the other say as she flew past, spraying drips. Thank God for the blackout. Thank God they could not see her blue skin, her terror.
She came out onto Wilton Avenue, tearing past the construction site for the new cafeteria. Her feet slipped on gravel. But she heard heavier feet – two sets behind – and kept running.
A cloud had descended over the moon, blocking its glow. The end of the road seemed a void. She could no longer feel what was around her. She stopped and turned a circle, panting, searching for the right direction. But as soon as her bearings were abandoned, she couldn’t get them back. The blackout was too thick. She was lost.
From her right came sounds of traffic, a vehicle roaring close then receding, then another. She was near the main road. She took a step towards it then stopped.
A gravel stone had slid very close behind her. A foot was correcting itself on dry turf. She heard the heavy slow drip of cold water falling from fabric; raw, hard breathing.
She chose a direction and hurled herself forward, hoping for the main road into town.
A machinery shriek ripped into her left ear. Wheels displaced gravel; an engine fired to life, a vehicle came searing round the bend, travelling at breakneck speed. The slatted blue dip of headlights appeared with just enough time to see Felix and Rupert Findlay standing frozen in the middle of the road, caught in twin beams. The glow threw light onto their legs. They raised their arms to block the blow.
The last thing Honey saw before diving to the gravel was a pair of solid silver angel wings, shining in a halo of white on the car’s bumper. There was a terrifying crack and thump, then rubber stank as the vehicle skidded to a halt. For a few seconds there was only the sound of her own panting.
Then the car door clicked open.
Petrified and stunned, Honey tilted her face up from where she was pressed prone to the road. She had an unsavoury throbbing in her mouth; she had bitten her tongue. The blue light from the headlamps streaked a diagonal line in front of her, so that when two high-heeled feet slipped out of the vehicle and down onto the gravel she could for a moment see nothing above the stockinged legs, nothing until they came further towards her, into the light. As they hurried forward, the centre of the glare began to pick out the full figure, and she saw a hand clasping a hat to its owner’s head. A single feather fell down into the road; peacock blue, pheasant gold.
‘Dear God, what have they done to you? You’re soaked.’
As the woman leaned close the familiar lines of her face blurred into recognition. Beatrix. ‘What were you . . .?’
‘You didn’t think I’d drop you off at a dark house after that panic you put up, and bugger off home for Christmas, did you? I got as far as the edge of Bletchley and then I felt guilty, so I came back, ate my powdered egg sandwiches – rotten things – and when I saw you running for your life towards the Park I drove round the corner. I was about to head in and check you were all right when you came running out again, with them. God, it’s Rupert Findlay. I’ll fetch a doctor.’
‘How did you see me running? You didn’t have your headlights on.’
She saw Beatrix shrug. ‘Carrots, I suppose? You can tell me later what happened. Hang on, I’ve got a blanket in the car.’
She crunched back off over the gravel and returned brandishing a thick Scottish woollen rug, which she wrapped around Honey. Almost at once Honey felt the water on her skin begin to warm. She shivered to her senses and struggled to her knees. She crawled over to where the two bodies lay.
Felix was still gurgling but Rupert was silent.
Beatrix placed her hand on Rupert’s chest. ‘Still breathing. He might make it. I’ll telephone for an ambulance. Wait here.’ She took off towards the Park gates, her legs melting away out of the silvery beam.
Honey looked down and saw Felix’s eyes flick open. He rolled his head from side to side. She stayed kneeling at a safe distance.
‘You would have killed me.’
‘It wasn’t my choice.’
‘But you would have. Just like Dickie.’
‘You can’t . . . my temper . . . You can’t understand what it would mean, if those men thought I’d betrayed t
hem . . .’ He craned himself up onto one elbow. ‘I say, you couldn’t roll me a cig, could you?’
Honey looked up at the stars; so many stars at Bletchley, all over Britain, a side effect of the blackout. In another life they could have been star-crossed lovers. But he had taken it on himself to direct their path. He had murdered her brother out of greed, out of idiocy.
She reached forward into his pocket, took back her wet identity papers and made to stand up. She wanted his face to fade away from her, back into the dirt, back into the shadows of the street from where he had come that first night after the film at the Ritzy. But he reached out and grabbed her leg.
‘Honey . . . you said that wasn’t your real name. What is your real name?’
She hesitated. Did he deserve to know? Then she said it plainly, and as the word fell from her mouth she realised it meant as little to her as ‘Honey’ or ‘Kurtz’ or ‘Deschamps’ or ‘Kitts’ ever did. ‘It’s Honor,’ she said. Honor. ‘You’re not just some little Honey. ’
She stood up fully. Her own feet were still numb to the ankles; beyond them her wet calves had started to thaw. She walked a few paces then looked back over her shoulder. Felix was sitting up, hugging his knees. She kept walking until she reached the gates. She held up her wet pass for inspection.
Beatrix was busy harrying two uniformed men down from the mansion house. Honey caught her eye, and she stopped running. Slowly her hand raised; she called across, ‘Go to your shift. They’ll take care of this.’ She had a blind trust, Beatrix. She didn’t need to break into any codes of behaviour to know what was the right thing to do.
Honey walked carefully over the gravel path, minding each foot until she had reached her hut. Her hair had almost frozen dry. Outside the door she towelled it on the blanket and rearranged the pins so it was tighter on her head. She clenched her puffy fingers just enough that they melted to be able to turn the hut’s handle.
In the nauseous light of the corridor she shook the cold out. She went straight to the Decoding Room and held her hands above the stinking grate of the coke stove.
Winman, Head of Hut, caught sight of her through the open door and stopped. ‘Dear God, is it sleeting out there? With the bloody blackout curtains up you’ve no idea what’s going on in the outside world. Get warmed up, you could have caught your death.’
The voice of the night shift’s Head of Room, Miss Roache, came laconically out of the dark corner, without stopping the slap and paste of her brush. Fresh decrypted messages were being prepared for the pulley; she was rolling them up into the tube to be sent to Hut 3 where they would be actioned for the lives of any number of chosen young men, the lucky ones.
‘You’re early, duck. But that’s just as well. Those bloody eager beavers in the Machine Room have broken the Red already. Something about wanting to be home by Christmas and wanting their homes intact this time round. So you’d better get to work.’
Epilogue
She doesn’t feel the sun rise inside the hut. It comes with a shift in the pace of work, a feeling of light at the end of a very long and very dark tunnel, a rising from a sea bed.
It’s only when the morning shift arrives and the paper pile is depleted that she knows the work is done. The coded intercepts, handwritten in red pencil, cut and stuck in strips on pages, motorcycled in from the listening stations, have now been passed through her channel of the Park: through the cribsters, the menu-makers, the bombe machines in Hut 11, through the Typex operators. Now they sit snug in their red leather tube to be pushed into the pulley and taken to the intelligence agents. There they will be logged by the indexers, and the secretaries who register each callsign, every unfamiliar word, every name. The burden they all carry; the names of the dead, the names of the killers, every typist, every secretary will carry them with her to her own grave.
At some point during the night talk had turned to the flicks. Suspicion was coming back to the Ritzy. ‘Did you know,’ said one of the American Machine Room men, leaning in the door, ‘did you know that the studio made them change the ending of that film? Apparently Cary Grant was the killer after all. But the studio thought that the good people of Blighty and Uncle Sam wouldn’t stand for it. They thought a story about a neurotic suspicious woman and an innocent man was more plausible. Sorry, did I just spoil the ending for anyone?’ He laughed and left.
‘Done.’ Roache, Head of Room, dusts her hands and holds them open. They’ve finished the pile just in time to hear the cry of ‘Broken the Light Blue,’ from the crib room. But that is for the morning shift to deal with.
Outside the hut the sun is frightening. The Military Police shift has changed and the men who stopped her at the gates the night before have gone.
There is no evidence of the night before. The whole world feels like a murky dream. The ice has re-formed in the night. Maybe one day, she thinks, maybe one day the lake will be drained and they will find a shoe, something from the men’s pockets, and their story will come out.
On the dirt path just down from the lake lies a single red velvet mask, edged with gold. Its ribbon is torn. The eyes are black holes. In the daylight it’s plain to see that the ribbon was made from old knicker elastic, dyed and streaky.
At the site of the car smash there is nothing but some disturbed gravel and broken branches. Soon the news will come filtering back and she will have to hear it; Rupert Findlay is injured, or gone, a terrible accident, one of two hundred blackout road accidents this year, another terrible waste, and Beatrix, one more young person to bear the burden of killing or maiming another.
She has to pass the House of the Ortolans on her way to Church Green Road, and at first she thinks she might be too afraid to look. But then she does, just sidelong, a single glance. And no monsters rise up, no sea-serpents come tumbling from the windows to swaddle her. And she looks again, more carefully this time, and the sun is shining on their winter cabbage patch and she wonders what has become of Felix, whether he made it out of the hospital.
It doesn’t take long for her question to be answered. On the doorstep of Yew Tree Cottage there is a package. At first she thinks it might be a basket of eggs.
But it is too heavy for eggs. She doesn’t hesitate before tearing the old newspaper away.
In sunlight the completed thing is tawdry – laughable – and she realises she has not looked at it in pure sunlight before. Its panel surfaces are far too shiny; they look greasy. She sees it now, the streaks, the staining. Later on, much later, after she has napped and listened to the wireless, she puts it back in its basket and heads to the forest.
There are patches of scrub that line the routes in and out of Bletchley. Perhaps it’s here that the great Professor Turing from Hut 8 has buried the silver treasure Moira told her about. Or perhaps that is inside the Park walls, she can’t remember. One day someone – a child – will dig it up, she is sure. And then people will speculate and guess what it is, what it means; pirates, plundering, a dead drop for a secret lover, a lost father leaving treasure for his children to find.
She takes the music box and puts it in a nest of brush while she scrapes a little hole in the dirt with her hands.
In the view of the town that waves in and out of the moving trees, she can see the chimney stacks of the brickworks, the steam of the station. But now there is something new that she hadn’t noticed before. A small factory building, set apart down a lane, near the funeral parlour with its black horses; the place where they found Dickie. Smoke is rising gently from the chimney and the whole building is shrouded in pale dust. That’s it, she thinks, the coffin works. And where would we be without them in the middle of the war?
She thinks about burying the music box, but it won’t do.
Instead she takes matches from her pocket and strikes several, dropping one at each corner, one in the middle. It doesn’t take long for the Bakelite to catch. Bitter chemical ribbons rise and stench the air, and the plastic liquefies. It melts in rivers and waves, lava channels that cave in on themsel
ves and bring fire to the insides. Even the gold of the little cage eventually bends and buckles and tumbles.
But the firebird stays. The firebird is curious in the face of the flames. Instead of melting, it waits until the heat surrounds it like a blue blanket. It sizzles as its sugars burst, and it sends out the sweetest scent, one that knocks the burnt Soir de Paris fumes of the plastic away. This real, true perfume does not erode as it bums; it is brought to life by fire.
She watches the amber burn, and thinks of the plundering Nazis inside the Amber Room in Leningrad, ripping panel by panel, thieving the ancient resin. And though it is not her father who is stealing shards from them to preserve and send to her, she hopes that somewhere, someone else’s mother or father is.
She stays until the face of the firebird is unrecognisable. She doesn’t wait to see it vanish.
On the way back to her billet she has to cross Church Green Road. It’s only because the traffic is heavy with military vehicles that she has to stop. And that’s when the familiar eyes blink at her from across the street. Like wet pebbles -that was what she had thought the first time, but in daylight his eyes are hazel brown. She follows the line of his collar up, up the small ribbon to the hand of the woman she’d seen in the post office. And then it all becomes clear.
Felix stole him.
He was part of the lie. He was the reason she had tmsted Felix in the first place. Nijinsky, the ballet name, no coincidence. And her grandfather did use to race them.
That’s the thing I like about dogs. They’re quite incapable of lying. Quite incapable of telling the truth.
‘Nijinsky,’ she cries. And hearing her voice, a familiar voice – like anyone in the war hearing someone they know – he steps out into the road, takes a pace towards her, wagging his long tail. The woman yanks him back just before an army vehicle comes blasting past, and as he trips back onto the pavement it enters her mind how like Dickie he moves, how perfectly like a ballet dancer.
The Amber Shadows Page 32