by John Lawton
“The NHS supplies pink specs? What happened to the endless shades of grey we’ve been hearing about since nineteen forty-five?”
“For children, Mr. Troy, for children. But if the specs fit . . . now, are we going to discuss my false teeth and my truss, too, or are we going to listen to Debussy?”
Troy said nothing. She turned her back, led off and he followed, through corridors measureless to man, down to a sunless office a couple of storeys below ground level—an office stuffed with electrical equipment.
“You’re in luck. The Concertgebouw recital was recorded on one of the new Ampexs we bought from the States. Brand spanking new. Amsterdam was its first outing. Thousands of pounds of license payers’ money. Fifteen inches per second. Sixty-decibel dynamic range. Fifty-to ten-thousand-kilohertz frequency response. Synchronous motors for minimal wow and flutter.”
Troy found himself looking at a large grey box with reels of tape a foot across and more knobs and levers than there were on the dashboard of his car.
“I didn’t understand a word of that.”
“Nor me. It’s what it says in the manual. All I can say for certain is it’s a damn sight better than anything else I’ve ever used. Now, I’ve set up the Debussy. We’ll have to change reels after the sonata. The concert doesn’t fit on one tape.”
“Oh. How do you manage the broadcast?”
“By having two machines synch-locked to one another just like projectors in a cinema. Or did you think Gone with the Wind fitted onto one reel?”
Troy had never seen Gone with the Wind. He might be the only person in the country who hadn’t, but he’d also never given a second’s thought to how any film reached the screen, or how any music reached the airwaves.
He took out his score and his pencil and tried not to look ignorant.
She worked the myriad knobs and levers, clunks and clicks louder than any note Rosen played—Debussy overheard on the factory floor—and he asked her to stop, rewind, and play back when he was certain he’d found a variation. He’d confirmed about a dozen, when she said, “You’ve missed one.”
“I have?”
“A mistake. You’re transcribing their mistakes, aren’t you?”
Troy would have had no problem lying to her but before he could, she said, “What am I saying? God, I’m such a clot. Viktor Rosen doesn’t make mistakes. Walter Gieseking might, but not Viktor Rosen. You’re not noting their mistakes . . . you’re noting . . .”
“What did you think they were doing? Improvising on Debussy? Poetic licence? It’s not jazz.”
“I didn’t follow the performance with a score. I had my wows and flutters to think about. But . . . I had thought the interpretation a little soft. A little florid . . . and truth to tell, until you forced me to consider the absurdity of it, I had assumed a few mistakes.”
“Sharps instead of naturals? A note too far? A chord instead of a single note?”
“I had noticed, yes.”
“Who else would have noticed?”
“Dunno . . . I’ll tell you that when the letters start arriving from the sad shires. Mr. Troy, I don’t know what’s going on here, but shall we do it together? I’m probably a damn sight quicker at it than you.”
He spread the score out so they could both follow it. It took two and a half hours to pinpoint every change, and when they had finished the sonata, they listened twice to Viktor playing solo the four pieces that made up Suite Bergamesque—but found nothing more.
Anthea said, “All duets are, as it were, a dialogue, wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Troy? The cello talks to the piano and the piano talks back. We, as the audience, are privy to this, we partake vicariously of the emotion of the music. Savage beast, soothe . . . and all that jazz. In this instance, they are both talking to a third party, through the score and beyond the score, and we are not privy. You think you’ve found a code, don’t you?”
“Yes. And I don’t have a clue what it means. Do you?”
She shook her head, worked her specs loose, shoved them back with one finger on the bridge.
“Not the foggiest. This isn’t music anymore, this is maths.”
As he was packing the score back into his music case, she said, “It’s all jolly exciting, but I suppose you’re now going to tell me it’s a secret aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And when Tone Deaf of Tunbridge Wells writes in to complain?”
“Then, Mr. Rosen was perhaps having an off night. A little too much poetic license. A little too much Armagnac . . . whatever. He can hardly suffer for his reputation now, can he?”
She said what Rod had said, almost word for word.
“And the girl? Mademoiselle Voytek?”
“Quite,” said Troy. “You see my problem.”
“Is there nothing I can do? This is the most fun thing to come my way since VE night. All been a bit ‘back in my box’ since then.”
“You could stop the BBC from broadcasting the concert again.”
They said good-bye on the doorstep of Broadcasting House, beneath Eric Gill’s reliefs—a rare example of what Troy always thought of as British Soviet Realism. He had got as far as Great Titchfield Street when she came hurtling after him.
“God, I’m so scatty. I should have thought of this at once. Shostakovich!”
She was hopping from one foot to the other, almost dancing with excitement. Thirty become thirteen once more.
“Shostakovich?”
“Well, you recall he was declared an enemy of the state about ten years ago?”
Loosely, Troy did. Somebody had mentioned this to him at some point. Probably his father.
“He had to scrap a ballet he was working on and come up with something that pleased the commissars.”
“His Fifth Symphony.”
“Quite. Hardly journeyman stuff, is it? I rather think it’s his masterpiece . . . anyway . . . he sticks his tongue in his cheek, if not actually straight out at the thought police . . . he works in D, E-flat, C, B as a motif . . . and, of course, if you know the Russian alphabet . . . you could read it as . . .”
“D, D+, S, V . . . Dimitri Dimitri+yevich ShostakoVich. Although SH is a single letter in Russian. ”
“Quite. Does this help?”
Troy told her that it did, but he knew damn well that Viktor and Voytek were far from sticking their tongues out at the thought police, or from signalling themselves quite so obviously. At most, they might have got the idea from Shostakovich’s prank—but this wasn’t a prank. She had been right the first time. It was mathematics—now he needed a mathematician.
§138
He called Anna.
“Ages ago, towards the end of forty-four, I’d been shot, I was recovering out at Mimram. You came to see me and you chatted about your family. Angus . . . your parents . . . and a cousin who did something very hush-hush out in Bletchley Park that’s still very hush-hush.”
“You mean Jimmy. Yes . . . he was a codebreaker. And if what they did out there is still hush-hush they’ve forgotten to tell him. I think he’s physically incapable of keeping a secret.”
“What became of him?”
“Oh, he’s back in civvy street. Downing College, Cambridge. He has a chair in maths. Why do you ask?”
“Do you think he’d invite us to tea on Saturday?”
“If I so much as hint, he’ll invite us for the whole weekend. Apart from your brother I’d say he’s the most gregarious man I’ve ever met. The donkey’s arse isn’t safe once he starts nattering, let alone the hind legs. I’ll call him, but take it as read he’d love to see us. And it’ll kill two birds with one stone.”
“Eh?”
“You’ve forgotten your mother’s car? It’s still parked outside my house. In fact, I’ve rather gotten used to it. It has oomph. You were quite right—I don’t know what V12 means, but I got it up to a hundred and two on the way back from Devon.”
“You’re not buying petrol on the black market, are you?”
“
What is this, a copper’s naïveté? Troy, everybody buys dodgy petrol! The war didn’t do it to us, some sort of patriotism just about sufficed, but the peace has turned us into a nation of petty fiddlers. The doorman at a hotel has hooky clothing coupons, the barrow boy down the market has condemned pork under the counter . . . I would imagine if you were to bump into Queen Mary at a palace do, she’d offer to sell you nylons!”
§139
Troy had never liked driving. He would far rather somebody else did it. An initial surge of terror as Anna behaved like Malcolm Campbell going for another world record soon subsided and as she settled into a ninety-mile-per-hour cruise up the Great North Road to Cambridge, he nodded off.
When he woke, the car had stopped and he found himself in the driveway of a Victorian rectory.
“Where are we?”
“Grantchester.”
“Stands the church clock at ten to three?”
“It’s just past noon.”
“Forget it.”
Cousin Jimmy came out to meet them. A bear of a man in capacious corduroy trousers and a tattersall shirt. A man from much the same mould as Angus. Perhaps this was why Anna had married Angus. He seemed familiar.
The bear’s paw extended.
“Jimmy Coburn. No relation.”
“Frederick Troy. No relation to whom?”
“Forget it. Now, you chaps have half an hour to scrub up. Then it’s a glass or two of Pouilly-Fumé on the verandah followed by a spot of lunch.”
Much to Troy’s surprise, Jimmy had put Anna and himself into one room—one room with a four-poster so capacious it would accommodate a troop of boy scouts.
“He’s never married,” Anna said. “It wouldn’t occur to him to think. He doesn’t mean anything by it. He just hasn’t thought. Besides, you heard him—we’re both ‘chaps.’ We’ll just have to make the best of it.”
“Fine,” said Troy, wondering what the best of it might be.
After lunch, Jimmy said, “What’s it to be? A bash at croquet or out to the shooting range?”
Anna and Troy looked at one another.
“Actually, Jimmy,” she said. “Troy’s come to you with a bit of a conundrum.”
“Bingo,” said Jimmy.
Troy said, “Do you by any chance read music?”
Jimmy smiled, almost giggled, “I think I can safely say that the only man on Earth more likely to be able to annoy you with a turn on the violin is Jack Benny. I love my violin, I love music. I’m just bloody awful at it.”
He led the two of them into what he called his music room—a baby grand piano, a drum kit, a cabinet-sized wind-up gramophone, one of the new-fangled electric radiograms, a mountain of discs, and his violin.
“Now what’s it be? “My Old Man Said Follow the Van” or a quick burst of Paganini?”
Troy handed him the annotated score of the Debussy Cello Sonata.
“Ah. Know it well, old man. Now, what’s puzzling you?”
Troy sat at the piano, explained as clearly as he could about the extra notes, the flattened notes, the sharpened notes, the unwritten arpeggios . . . and as he played the piano part, Jimmy deftly picked up the cello’s role on his violin. No mean feat, Troy thought, for a man who professed little talent.
It was gone four by the time they had worked through to the end, with Jimmy studying, playing, and jotting down every alteration. At the end he had a page of letters, that, to Troy, meant nothing.
Jimmy scratched his head. Troy did not find this promising.
“Any joy?”
“Need to put my thinking cap on, old man. Let’s get out of here for half an hour. I say again—croquet or the shooting range?”
“I feel I could shoot something,” Troy said.
A couple of hundred yards from the house was an old barn. Inside, Jimmy had lined the rear wall with sandbags and set up targets.
“Took this up during the war. I find it sharpens the mind. And I think the spook stuff out at Bletchley left me a frustrated soldier. Never got into uniform. Never fired a shot at Jerry.”
“Me, neither,” said Troy. “In fact, I couldn’t hit the barn door until I took lessons after the war.”
“Really? Well, let’s see how good you are.”
He handed Troy a BSA .38 and hefted one himself. A bit big, a bit clumsy.
Then he banged off six rounds into his target.
Two outers, three inners, and a bull’s-eye.
It was Troy’s turn.
Two inners, four bull’s-eyes.
“Bloody hell!” said Jimmy. “Took lessons you say. Mind if I ask who from?”
“Bob Churchill. He seemed to think I wouldn’t live long if he didn’t teach me how to shoot.”
“Could you teach me? I don’t mean the whole damn thing. Just improve my shot.”
“We could give it half an hour,” Troy replied. “While you put your thinking cap on.”
Troy knew Jimmy was doing two things at once, and that he had reached some conclusion when he lowered the gun with a round still in the chamber and said, “Half a mo’.”
He stared at the target, but Troy knew he was seeing notes on staves not concentric circles.
Then he said, “Back to the joanna, old man.”
§140
“It works like this. You could create a basic code if the piano or the cello simply gave you the material. Piano plays F-sharp instead of F, cello plays B-flat instead of B—and the listener takes them down as a sequence. But you can create a more complex code this way. Piano plays F-sharp instead of F, cello B-flat instead of B, but not as a sequence. The cello plays far fewer changes, but what it does play is the modifier for all that’s preceded it on the piano.”
“So it is a code?”
“Yep.”
“Do you have any idea what it means?”
“Haven’t a clue, old man. I can tell you how it works in more detail if you like, but I doubt I could crack it. What I can say is this: it doesn’t tell the listener much, but however little it does tell might be vital.
“You may well be able to convey a mathematical formula this way, but language? It’s too brief. This would never translate into syntactical language. There simply isn’t enough data. The most it could be is a mathematical key to something else. The chap who takes down these changes probably has a much larger document. But it’s gobbledygook without this. Until the people who play this give him the code, he might as well try and read Martian.
“You’ve part of the puzzle here, Troy—not the whole jigsaw. It’s like a one-time pad—useless if you don’t know which page you’re supposed to be using—or the settings on the rotors on an Enigma machine—useless without the printed code book, the key that will tell you the positions for each day.”
“The what?” said Troy. “Enigma?”
“The German encoding machine they used throughout the war. We cracked it very early on. But if the Germans switched codebooks, and the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, and the Navy all had different codebooks, we’d be stuffed until we could get hold of one. We’d have no idea of the position or setting of the rotors or of any of the plug-in cables. What I think you have here is the codebook that tells you the settings you need to use to decipher the code on something much larger. I must say, if it is, then it’s an advance because it does away with paper altogether. Once they’ve worked out what they’re playing, the only place it need exist is in the head of the player.”
“Why so complex?”
“Because it’s near-as-dammit foolproof.”
§141
Troy’s head buzzed with notes and numbers. He could not sleep.
The church clock, as if to prove it was not stuck at ten to, struck three. Anna stirred.
“You know, Troy, Monty crossed half Europe quicker than you’ve made it across this mattress.”
§142
It was a Sunday. Nothing in London opened on a Sunday—nothing in England opened on a Sunday except for the churches, the chapels, and a street mark
et in Petticoat Lane. The theatres were shut, the cinemas were shut. The bookshops would be shut. Collets bookshop in the Charing Cross Road would be shut. Mr. Gibbs, reluctant custodian of the affairs of the late André Skolnik and shop assistant at Collets, might well be at home at 101 Charlotte Street. Even good Communists get a day off.
The good Communist showed no willingness to open the door any wider. His head peeped out and he told Troy that he’d “already told the other young copper everything I could,” in the accents of received pronounciation. His spectacles were held togther with Elastoplast, his clothes were frayed—the shirt shot to pieces at the collar and cuffs, the knees of the green corduroy trousers balding—but the voice and the hauteur were pure Oxbridge. Troy wondered for a moment at which point Mr. Gibbs had given up a life of privilege to fight the good fight. Had the road to Damascus been the Iffley Road or the Cherry Hinton?
“I need to get into the studio,” Troy said.
“Too late. It’s gone. Let.”
“And the contents?”
“What do you mean, contents?”
“His paintings.”
Gibbs slowly pulled back the door.
“See for yourself.”
A long, exasperated gesture, one hand on the door, the other pointing down the corridor to the foot of the stairs, past the piled up, cumulative works of André Skolnik.
“Be my guest. They’re everywhere. I wish they weren’t, but nobody’s laid claim to the estate. The landlord had a willing tenant for the studio . . . so they’re here because they’re here.”
“And his flat?” Troy asked.
“Let,” said Gibbs. “Could be let twice over. After you printed the address in the papers, if we had one young couple banging on the door asking for it, we had a dozen, two dozen, I should think. That’s how you get a flat nowadays. You read the death notices in the papers and you nip in between the undertaker and the furniture van.”
If this was the moment at which Gibbs was going to tell him that the USSR built flats while Britain built castles in the air, Troy wasn’t going to argue with him, but he didn’t much want to hear it, either.