The German Numbers Woman
Alan Sillitoe

To Ronald Schlachter

‘What then, if there were no Capacity existing in the Universe? – Impossible – But if these are all the Species of Physical Motion, it follows, that WITHOUT CAPACITY there can be no such Motions.’

James Harris Philosophical Arrangements, 1775.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One Observations from the Heaviside Layer

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

Part Two Spinning the Web

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

Part Three A Hero of the Code

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

Alan Sillitoe

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part One Observations from the Heaviside Layer

ONE

Gulls skirmished the sloping roofs and chimney pots, squabbled and reconnoitred, a noise like nothing on earth, or in heaven either. They’d been fractiously squealing before his birth, and would do so for ever after, Howard grinning that even the rank breath of Chernobyl hadn’t pulled the buggers down. Such sounds lifted the heart whenever he came out of doors, though sometimes they were heard inside as well.

He paused, envying their freedom – what luck! what style! – head back as if to find the cause of such worried belligerence. Disputing for air at the ends of their wing tips, they mistrusted each other with almost human cries, while performing exquisite aerobatics.

He closed the garden gate before going downhill, aware of how many paces were needed between each step, arcing the white stick before him. The news had said it was 15 August. They always told you the date, an item worth knowing because it meant that although there was one day less to live a new one had even so arrived, and as long as that process went on he would see no reason for complaint: To be halfway happy was to be among the happy of the world.

Someone coming up edged aside to let him freeway by. A woman, because of the perfume. She was youngish, but her breath was hard at the ascent, and two plastic bags of shopping rustled against her legs, someone who didn’t know him, and too puffed on her short cut over the hill to say a word.

Pottering his slow way down, the tall greystoned houses made gaps to let the wind through. His cheeks were wind vanes, he a perambulating anomemeter – a long-remembered word which caused a smile. It always did. He used it every day on his way into town, carefully noting the serpentine route towards the beach.

No need to beware of traffic, since only pedestrians came up and down. The breeze touching his cheeks was southwesterly, to a degree or so, and more than welcome for its balm. Such days couldn’t come too often, but they soon enough wouldn’t until next year. He’d expected tonic weather but had cheated a bit on the wind, having taken all details yesterday on his typewriter, straight from Portishead, words tinkling through at top strength on the new radio Laura had bought when her National Savings Certificates fell due.

‘Morning, Howard.’

That’s me, but no need to stop. ‘Morning, Arthur. Your bag’s heavy today.’

A laugh. ‘Not for long. Nothing for you, though.’

‘I can live without it,’ which, sounding harsh, called for another word or two: ‘It’s welcome when it drops onto the mat, except for the bills.’

Arthur opened a gate, the latch stiff from corrosion. ‘They all say that.’

No mail was good mail, as far as Howard was concerned, and he could take whatever news he wanted from the wireless, though even that was a case of here today and stale tomorrow. A man went by, in a hurry to go down, giving a whiff of sweat. Off to cash his giro, so he would be slower on the way up, especially with a pint or two inside him. That’s how a lot live these days, too many in a town like this, though there’s work in summer when the holidays get going.

Good when the sky and your wife look kindly on you, allied to sunshine which gave zest. Laura liked to read his weather printouts, never ceasing to wonder at his ability. Magic, he told her, to keep the priceless spirit going. And magic it was that bound them after so many years, for what man would grumble against Fate when someone like Laura had taken over his existence, and he’d let her do so because there had been no option?

The massive presence of the church was felt to the left, a bulwark flanking his darkness, the picture accurately grey. A door opened, and someone passed in, as Laura now and again did for Evensong on Sunday. She needed such musical platitudes to reassure and warm her soul, a satisfying dimension beyond dull life in the house, and continually looking after him. Last time in such a place was on church parade the day before his crash landing, and he’d felt no pull to go into one since.

The small Peugeot was parked at the bottom of the steps, and he touched the wing mirror, stooped at the door hinge and imagined he caught a whiff of Laura’s hair. Damned sure he did, on straightening his back and walking with more vigour.

He yearned to spring along with speed, swing his stick and cry them out of the way, but knew he couldn’t, must not, too many excursionist bodies dogging the way. All the same, nothing gives a straighter back than misfortune. The one-way High Street was all obstacles and pitfalls, so concentrate on the map o’ the mind and keep the dopplers going. Swing the direction-finding stick along the shop fronts, with smells of meat, bread, furniture, maggots and fishing tackle, hoping not to put his boots in any dogshit, such peril the shame and bane of his life, because Laura (forgive me, Lord, for I can’t know what I do) had to make good. Rare was the day in this dog-loving town when he didn’t feel that sinking and sliding sensation underfoot, and know she would have the job of wiping the mess away with newspaper, and scrubbing out the stink with Dettol. Sometimes on fine days he would sit in the garden and call for the cleaning kit to do it himself, before coming into the house.

Thinking on better things than churches and dogshit now that he was in traffic, he let the stick go in front, a left and right weave, rhythming a morse letter on the ground, tap-tap-tap-tapping at the kerb, a regular Gene Kelly but never, he hoped, an SOS. All the same, cars go too fast, often not stopping at [Hore] Belisha’s beacons. A shade of warmth from the sun, he unbuttoned his jacket, brown she had said though he knew already by the pockets, and a neat diamond darn after catching it on a twig while digging in the garden.

He laughed inwardly at life’s challenges. That lorry ought to get its carburettor seen to. The escarpment into the gutter was measured by his stick, a precipice out of The Lost World. Or he was a land surveyor in Lilliput, but it was there right enough, and he could only wait.

‘Come on, I’ll see you across.’ A stranger from the world of the seeing usually helped, but now and again he relished the life-and-death gamble of doing it alone, a trip as lethal as that last raid over Germany, should a rogue vehicle strike. He would count steps to the middle of the motor torrent and stand a few seconds testing his luck, or as if to get breath (hating people to think he was afraid, or didn’t know where he was going) but really to taunt God or Fate, and find out whether his number was on a ferocious little ginger-pink hatchback given by a thirteen-year-old who had just stolen it – though by that time the colour wouldn’t matter – swivelling like Ben Hur from the sea front and going mindlessly inland. In which case someone would pull the card from his inside pocket, find the home number inscribed by Laura, and phone for her to collect his remains in the biggest plastic bag she could sort out from under the stairs. Macabre, but tempting to think about in such a dull life. They had always brought their thoughts into the open, though this picture was a fantasy to be kept on the secret list.

‘That’s kind of you.’

She held his arm. ‘You’ll be safe with me.’

‘I’m sure I shall.’ Mostly women did this sort of thing, and he wondered what he would do if – on reaching the side closer to the sea and, talking in her angel’s voice, the small warm hand still firmly in his – she led him along meandering flower paths to a paradise only she knew about, to an utterly different life wherein he would be able to see.

No matter how well arranged a man’s existence he still must dream, secret dreams and unexpressed thoughts forming the necessary backbone for survival in a sometimes meaningless world. Noise hit the senses like blades as cars came and went. ‘You’re being very kind,’ he said to her.

‘I like to help. I would want to be, if I was like you, wouldn’t I?’

‘I hope you never are,’ he smiled.

‘Yes, but you don’t know, do you?’

‘I don’t think you do. What’s your name?’

‘Janet.’

He almost smelt the fact when people were embarrassed at doing a good deed, not seeing why they should be. Sensibility to another’s needs had many reasons, one being guilt at knowing they were so much better off – as indeed they were. Or did they sense his extra power because he had adapted to living in darkness? Inner light at least was more vivid, though power beyond his understanding wasn’t always what he wanted, and he would willingly have traded it for an occasional glimpse of street or seashore. Maybe people thought he had an ideal life in that his affliction would allow no other cares to gall him but, whatever mixture of guilt, fear or envy it might be, how could such deadly sins matter if a kindly action resulted?

She released her hand. ‘Will you be all right?’

‘You’ve been very kind.’ To sit over a cup of coffee with her would make a memorable day. ‘Off to do your shopping are you, Janet?’

‘No, I’m going to meet my boyfriend. He works in the arcades, mending the machines.’

‘Thank you, then, and I hope you have a nice day’ – for putting such notions into my head, though better not think so much, unless I want to get run over. Her light and quick footsteps were lost among others, crowding into the High Street, holidaymakers, mostly, out from boarding houses and hotels, or walking down from the station.

A poor kid got smacked for craving an ice-cream. There was a double stretch to cross where two streets merged. A dog barked, at what he would never know, but its throat grated, so it was on a lead, giving a shriek of despair at some minor loss, dragged from a rancid smell perhaps, or begrudged a tailwag with a possible companion. He stood, and laughed, dryly and alone, in tune with the animal’s moans of commiseration as it passed the pet shop.

The studs of the crossing made a wide enough runway, and the baker’s smell on the other side was a beam to draw him over. Ten times more traffic than forty years ago. A car stopped at seeing him, a big one this, station wagon maybe, certainly not a Mini. Here goes, and he went, a lift of his stick to the motorist, who pipped his horn – a vocal handshake. Another car stopped, this time small, all considerations shown, though he was glad to tap the lip of the kerb: the one-engined blind old kite had landed, the beam approach of studs and smell had worked, flying control had rolled out its expertise, just how he liked it.

Ozone caressed his nostrils from the one unmistakable direction, an endless horizon of green and blue, duck-egg blue maybe, a touch of turquoise, and the odd high cumulus above the line. A sail now and again might speck the water, anything from white to orange, though the fishing boats were already long back from their night’s work. He could smell that, too, another odour of eternal life, healthy as well, as he crunched over shingle and picked up the tang of tar from the tall huts called tackle boxes in which nets were hung to dry.

So it was easy, as always, to know where he was among the radar of aromas, familiar from years of living in the same place, gratifying that in nil visibility he could make his way at a sure pace to where he wanted to go. From rightwards came the shrill calls of children living out their lives on the boating lake and in the paddling pool, and the muted clank of the miniature railway making its slow way up and down, all sounds providing cross bearings to his navigation system, perfect cocked hats to fix his location from the constant rush of traffic behind.

At this point, between the huts and the broken concrete pier, he always thought of when Laura had led him here for the first time. Every day it came to him, as if there had been little progress in their lives since. Hands firmly held, he had smelled the tears before they came to her eyes, on him remarking that he could taste the salt water turning into spray from the sullen waves falling line by line onto the stones. A common observation, not one to make her cry, he would have thought, but she hurried him back up to the house, as if she found it too painful to be seen walking out with him, husband and wife at twenty-two, not a word from her on the ascent. Halfway, he assumed it was because of the summer rain that fell in plates and drenched them after a few yards.

Once in the door she put his stick away. He saw her as the young girl she was, how she threw the stick rather, though in those days people weren’t counted as young at such an age. The stick flew at the wall and bounced. She took off his saturated jacket and waistcoat, and sat him down, breathless from the climb though he was not, but he felt a light before his eyes as if about to get his sight back. She played Elgar’s Enigma Variations on the radiogram. He’d often told her how much he liked it, so she’d gone out the day before to get the records for his birthday, not for another month.

He heard the angry crash of the curtains sliding to, then – silence but for the duet of their breathing. She put on one of the records to hide whatever devastating emotion still blighted from the beach. ‘This is for you, darling’ pulling him roughly to his feet. ‘Only for you.’ Salt tears again, as they listened and held each other, mixing with his to run down both faces, an amalgam of happiness as much as despair for a plight that would lock more firmly than any marriage.

He couldn’t talk, blocked at the throat, a dumb tongue adding to his blindness. She had brought the records as a surprise, and the colours of music flared and expanded across white space, lighting every dark corner, his heart buffeted by the sweet strong music. Neither could she talk, didn’t want to, pulled and pushed, kisses of possessive disregard for that one time which her love had to go through, noises meeting with his, no words possible, a dull erotic burning conquering them both, taking them away from house and seascape and the downs behind. Each other’s clothes were clawed off, too hot in their passion to wait, that must have been it, they fell onto the carpet wailing and lost in a maelstrom of despair and pleasure that even now they hadn’t fully learned to separate, while knowing they had been made for each other even before birth.

More than thirty years ago. Kids, they might be called. He tapped a bigger stone than most, pushed a hump of seawrack out of the way. That’s what we were, yet it was all so dammed lucid still, and why did it come back every time he stood on this spot, the anchor stone of his life, and hers as well? Little more than twenty, how grown up we felt, and were, as if we’d lived a whole life already; and had, because there’d been no more since, not knowing we were set for an eternity of same days.

A gull came close, painted him with a rush of air from wing tips, slicing away the mark of Cain perhaps, or to stick two good eyes back beneath his lids as a gift from the gods, though even one would do. He envied Polyphemus at times and, hearing Laura’s divine and measured voice as evening by evening she read through the Odyssey from the other side of the fireplace, cursed the brutal Odysseus for taking a burning fire brand to gouge out that one sensitive solitary eye, while supposing he would have done the same to save his friends.

He swung his stick in case another curious gull thought him a piece of rock. Memories had ossified in him, since he’d stopped having them from the age of twenty. Cloud hid the sun, cooling the air, senses sharp enough to pick out the arrowing sloosh of incoming tide driving between the two halves of the broken harbour pier. The past was nagging even more than usual today. When he first met Laura at the station dance he’d seen her as a young rather severe girl, white blouse fastened to the neck, brown cardigan open to show her shape. She smelled sweet, hair freshened by shampoo. His aircrew insignia and sergeant’s stripes were newly sewn on, and he felt second to none, though slightly drunk from the cider.

They went around in the quickstep, and he knew it was polite to talk: ‘Would you like me to be your cavalier?’ Before she could answer he went on, pell mell to obliterate such a daft beginning: ‘Now there’s a remark to strike you, or it will when you wonder in the future how we first met.’

Nor had he ever needed to wonder, but why had he blathered such triteness when not really believing there could be any hope?

He had been blessedly wrong. She didn’t laugh or scorn. ‘Yes, you can be my cavalier.’

She had waited for him night after night to come back from raids, and then he returned a different person to the one who had set out, but in the hospital she took his hand and, through the confusion of his darkness, said once more that he would be her cavalier, forever.

There were days when he felt the bow was taut, as taut as before the arrow flies. No explanation, but a tightening of anguish which was there when it shouldn’t have been, making this day different though in what way from others he couldn’t know. A clock began striking, later beats muffled by car noise. Ten o’clock, in any case. His heart missed a turn, marked time, carried on. As always he would recross the satisfyingly perilous roads, trawl along the High Street to get Laura’s Guardian, and reach home in time for their morning coffee.

TWO

One day he’ll fall. Blind men do. He would fall a long way. Or would he hit the ground like a baby and not hurt himself? On the other hand, why should he fall? If he did maybe she would be there to see. If not she would hear about it. You could turn off a tap but not stop the invasion of your thoughts. One day either he or she would die, but who would go first was impossible to say. The time could be a long way off, but the problem was a cruel one to ponder, so she preferred not to, because wanting him to live long could mean she would drop dead first. There’d be no one to guard him then. Best not to think, since the future belonged to nobody. She watched from the front room window, as always when he set out. He would know what was in her mind. ‘And my life will be finished,’ she said.

‘Oh no it won’t’ – his tone a balance between humour and annoyance, the closest he would allow. ‘In any case, that’s as maybe, and good old maybe is always unpredictable.’

Why do I let such idiocies through my head? No one was steadier on his feet, and his health was robust. He seemed forty rather than sixty. ‘And so do you,’ he said when she told him.

He had climbed more steps and hills than she could remember. Choosing holidays, he opted always for inland, as far from the coast as they could get, somewhere in the Derbyshire hills, the Malverns, or Scotland. He was never happier than when they set out after breakfast from the hotel, walking a path between trees and bushes, into the open of higher land.

‘It’s like being in the clouds,’ he said. ‘It’s like flying in an open cockpit.’ Then his talk would stop, and he would go on, locked in for a while until: ‘At least I can feel the wind, and that’s worth a lot. There’s heather in it. Flowers and trees as well. The flowers are over there. Let’s look at them.’ He stroked the stalks, stamens and petals, bending down for a closer look, touching without damage.

The bed hardly needed making, they slept so deeply in their separate dreams, but she pulled it apart for freshness. The room was large and gloomy, backing against the cliff. She shook the sheets smooth, pulled blankets straight and folded them in, banged both pillows into shape. At least the little iron fireplace when filled and glowing took out the damp ofwinter, the room a delight to be in then, shadows on the walls at dusk. Howard couldn’t see them, though said he could, at the sparking of the flames, lying in bed with a three-day flu last winter. ‘The first days out of action,’ he said, ‘since the crash.’

Two people couldn’t be ill in the same house, so no debilitating flu or colds for her. Howard knew this only too well, and swore he would keep fit till his dying day.

After bumping the Electrolux around the living room she noted its bag was full. Hadn’t emptied it for months, so unclipped the top, lifted out the paper container bulging with dust, and walked through to thump it into the kitchen bin. Fitted with another, the nozzle sucked perfectly, though there was little enough to feed on.

She cleaned the house while he was out, easier than when weather kept him in, even though he sat in the wireless room, as he called it, listening to his eternal and mysterious morse. She liked him to go out because he was always more cheerful when he got back. He was like a baby to look after, but would die of shame if she told him. Which he might have assumed was why she hadn’t had any, not knowing the reason had been hers more than his.

She fought against tolerating vain regrets. Regrets poisoned the soul, and the soul seemed frail enough at times, Howard knowing he can’t – she thought – tell me how nice I look, though he was able to at the beginning and did so in such a way as to last me for life. But I always dress for him and look smart, so that people will think the same when I walk out with him. And I dress as well as I can when in the house because it makes me feel good, and there’s always the thought that if there was a sudden miraculous peeling back of his blindness, I would want him to see me at my best.

It was essential to tidy up so that he would know where everything was. If an ashtray or chair, or one of his three pipes was out of place, his system for getting about without knocking anything over would, he said, go for a burton, so she took care that nothing did. If he asked where something was it would be that even she couldn’t find it. The house was his universe, every object one of the innumerable stars that lit up in his darkness for guidance. As long as he could find the domestic radio, however, and the record player to put on a piece by Elgar or Gustav Holst, all was right in the world.

She cleared the plates, all shining and stacked. He would be back for coffee, the newspaper under his arm. ‘Read me whatever you think I might find interesting.’ There was usually one item or another, to be marked with a pencil and reserved for tea time or after supper.

She kept two pencils by the telephone, in case the point of one snapped off while writing a message. Sharpening both, though they had hardly been used, she threw the shavings into the bin. If she went out Howard could just legibly write the number of anyone who called and wanted to hear from her. Sometimes they descended the hill together, but mostly she let him go. He wandered everywhere, and came back happy, though occasionally exhausted. Or so it seemed. He always denied it. When she went with him he became irritated by the smallest thing, such as imagining she resented going slow for him. It galled him, but not her. When they got home he was burning with inadequacy, even after all these years, as if thinking he had failed to lead her to somewhere wonderful, or hadn’t brought her home to a heaven more alluring than the one they had left.

They talked about it. She never asked, but he volunteered. ‘The secrets of my blasted heart,’ he said, ‘are all I have to give you. I want to be more than your ball and chain of flesh. I want to lead you to I don’t know where. But it’s a yearning, you see, and it gets me at the heart every so often. I can’t think why.’

‘That’s silly,’ she said. ‘You’ve brought me there already.’ She proved it with a kiss, for it was true enough, had to be, after living so long in stasis, never moving beyond the vivid days of their youth. For his sake there was much loving she had to feel, yet did so with neither thought nor effort.

On one level they lived beyond hope, but what loss was that? There never had been any after his crash, and being without hope was the unspoken compact, the firmest base there was, reassuring and reinforcing. To live without hope was less of a sin, and less cruel, because the peace it gave was the bedrock of an understanding which made them feel ageless to each other.

In the small room side on to the house she dusted his heavy black-cased wireless with its curving multicoloured window and thick control wheel for changing stations. The new radio she had sent for from Derbyshire lay by its side, a key pad in front, and the brass morse key which he played from time to time. ‘My therapy,’ he said, ‘for when I want to shift the black dog from my shoulders. The black dog hates the sound of morse. It terrifies him. He runs back to his hidey-hole and leaves me alone.’

When he sat with the door closed, earphones clamped on, he was in a world which nobody could share, a world in which ears were everything and lack of sight not an issue. Only his rounded back was visible through the glass panel, animally moving as he put what he was hearing onto the heavy sit-up-and-beg old capital-letter typewriter. The electricity of a modern one would, he said, distort the reception, and make it no easier to use.

Nothing needed to be touched, a stack of paper in its usual position, a silver propelling pencil by its side which he’d kept from his schooldays, maybe as a symbol of hope (no one could be entirely without it) that one day enough sight would come back for him to handwrite what he heard.

Once when he was out she’d polished the brass parts of his morse key to a brilliant shine, wondering if he would notice. He did: ‘I can see it glowing. Looks wonderful, I’m sure. Thank you, my love.’ But of course, he had picked up the Duraglit smell.

The ashtray needed emptying, dottle and match sticks overspilling. He often did the job himself, anything to help, but she took it to the sink for a scouring and brought it back. The wastepaper basket was usually full of discarded transcripts, mere formulae to her, ciphers and letter codes she would never ask him to explain, even if he could, but the last few days he had hardly been in his wireless room, a worrying loss of interest, as if no longer drawn by his alternative world, without which he could neither fuel nor sustain his own. Yet after such periods he always went back to it, and she wondered which was more real to him.

When the wireless didn’t hold him he brooded, though he would use a different word. Lassitude was obvious in every bone. He sat for hours, unable to move and then, not knowing how or why, he got up, took cap and stick, and set off down the steps, to walk for miles along the beach and about the town. When he came cheerfully into the house he said he hadn’t felt at all tired on his expedition, which at least proved that such lack of energy hadn’t been due to illness. ‘But then, it never would be,’ she said aloud, her palm pressing the grinder whose noise for a moment crushed out her thoughts.

It was as if a shadow had slid across the window and come into the room. She knew what it was. The heart was as fluctuating as the weather. Only a looking glass fixed its effects on the face, as much as anything could, just as the weather was still, only a moment before altering for better or worse. If you accepted such rhythms, as of course you had to, existence was tolerable, hardly ever unpleasant for long.

On first hearing the news of his blindness she said she would never look in a mirror again, because Howard could not, but there had to be one in the house otherwise he would wonder why, and she would have to tell him the reason.

The mirror showed everything she didn’t want to know about herself, so she avoided it as far as possible, only able to look by persuading herself that the image was of somebody else: easy with the small make-up used to treat a glass off-handedly, as if it had no ability to destroy her equanimity, as nothing must be allowed to since recovering from her abortion.

Her whole past with Howard, their entire life in fact, was connected to an event he was never to know about. The episode, forgotten for months at a time, had lately corroded her with haunting affect, the shadow almost meteorological – to use one of Howard’s words – in its unpleasantness. She didn’t see any justice in it, felt she had paid the price in dealing with the event all those years ago. Sensing the threat now, she let the murky pictures run through her mind so as to get rid of them sooner, though knowing they wouldn’t pass so willingly, having a power greater than her own.

The sciatic pain was as if a scalpel had gone through the nerves of her lower back. She sat by the Formica-topped table to reinforce herself, to stiffen her body like a box hedge against the wind. The colours were always dark from that time, but the day it happened had been sunny. She had called on him at his large gewgaw-strewn flat on Baker Street, passing while in town to say hello.

Dear Uncle Charles, she had known him from birth. ‘Let me show you around this rambling old place,’ he said. There was no reason to say no but if she had would it have been different? He had been watching her, and waiting. She was happy, and unknowing. In the bedroom she had no chance. He was a tall lumbering man, and she was too shocked to shout or scream. The bang across the head, and his cry – almost a shriek – that she should be ‘sensible’, made it impossible except to let him do what he wanted.

He babbled, while holding her in a maniacal grip, that he had needed her (his words) for as long as he could remember. He was incomprehensible. She had loved him as an uncle for his eternal kindness, though not in this way, if this was love, which he swore it was.

He said afterwards that she had encouraged him. The violence that was done to her was meaningless but meant everything. He had made her, and the blood proved it. Everything must be kept quiet, he said afterwards, a secret between them alone. He paid for the abortion, arranged it all, but only ever touched her that one time, terrified at what he had done. A prostitute would have been cheaper, but it was her he wanted. The operation (hard to say the real word) was so botched that she couldn’t have children even if she had wanted.

She ran the whole thing through, hoping it would be goodbye, at least for a while. Charles had died of cancer, brought on, she liked to think, by his guilt, and grief which often at the time seemed genuine enough, and reinforced by his suffering which she could hardly bear to watch when her unknowing parents took her to see him in the hospital, though nowadays she burned with shame at having felt such sorrow. How could it have happened so that no one in the family knew? He was so skilled, or frightened, and she so compliant at evading and avoiding all signs of distress. If there had been more than one side to her then, there was only one now.

She went to church occasionally, hoping to retrieve her faith, but none had come back as yet. Howard thought it was for spiritual comfort due to the isolation of their lives, and to vary her days. They had no secrets above the level at which she chose to live, and at which she had decided he must live. The shame and disgrace would never be told.

In his will Charles had made over the house for her to live in with Howard after they were married. ‘It’s a fit place for a hero,’ he said, laughing slyly as he sliced the seed cake on the tea tray when he told her. ‘And besides that, you might call it just one more bit for the war effort on my part. After all, I have this flat in town, and nobody needs more than one place.’ He had been in Whitehall throughout the war, so she didn’t see how he could feel guilty about that as well.

They stood in the rain by his grave side, and heard the panegyrics at the memorial service, Howard squeezing her hand at each remark about the dead man’s generosity and manliness. Even before death Charles had sent money to augment Howard’s pension, and then in his will left an income for them as well.

Not to accept anything would have led Howard to ask why. He reacted sensibly to their prosperity, and was grateful. ‘We must keep Charles’ photograph always on a table in the living room. He’s been marvellous, and deserves as much.’ And so they did, but she bought an identical frame for the blank side of the picture, a white sheet instead of a face, not wanting to see his staring grey eyes and bushy moustache (sheer black, though it must have been dyed) whenever she turned her head, a reminder too hard to bear. If visitors or any of the family called – rare events – she made sure to replace the real thing, in case comment was made. Not having a frame at all was impossible, because Howard could feel his way to every object in the room.

They lived just that much better by having the house and what Charles had given but, all the same, she was never free of the feeling that she had sold her soul to the devil by not having told Howard about the abortion before her marriage – there, she had said the word now – though if she had there might have been no Howard, such an event impossible for him to live with.

The recall passed at its usual slow rate, but her hands shook and she felt unsafe on her legs while flicking the kettle switch and pouring coffee grains into the pot.

THREE

Ebony the cat came into the wireless room, attracted as usual by squeals of morse, as if a flight of colourful and unheeding small birds had broken loose from their cage. Howard kept the door a few inches open so that he wouldn’t feel entirely cut off from Laura and the rest of the house. She liked it that way, though with earphones clamped on he was deaf to whatever might happen beyond his aetherised world.

Sometimes he took the phones off and pulled out the plug, let morse ring from the speaker and ripple through the house, telling the walls he was alive to their constrictions, though hoping such self-indulgent noise didn’t worry Laura.

He dropped an arm to compensate the disappointed cat, fingers riffling through fur, thinking he could tell the difference in texture while crossing from black to the small white patch near its nose, as the whorls of milk mixing with the coffee might, he imagined, be felt by a slowly stirring spoon. He could trace flowers on the wallpaper and notice where colours changed. No, it was all in the mind, except that sometimes his fingers had eyes.

She picked up the coffee cup. ‘Anything interesting this morning?’

He touched her hand. ‘I’m just trawling. There’s a liner called the Gracchi, calling Rome International Radio, and getting no reply. Then again there’s a Russian ship leaving England and heading for Lithuania with a hundred used cars on board. Wouldn’t like to say where they came from.’

She took the cat for company. ‘Come on, Ebony.’

His wireless room was at the weather end of the house, the wind a fine old comb-and-paper tune today. A slit of the window left open took his pipe smoke away. That’s how the music was made, a howling and forlorn oratorio playing from wall to wall. So much noise gusting would disorientate his senses if he went for a walk, so it was as well to be sheltered.

Headphones back in place, he tuned in to the German Numbers Woman, who spoke continuous numbers in a tone suggesting she was the last woman on earth, enunciating from a bunker in the middle of some Eastern European forest, her voice on the edge of breathlessness, as if fearful of an assassin breaking in: ‘SIEBEN – ACHT – EINS – NEUN – DREI – FUNF – VIER – ZWEI – SECHS – ACHT – EINS – SECHS – EINS – NEUN.’

On and on. She spoke in the ghostly tone of a person who might have a gun by the microphone, and Howard had listened so often to the deliberately mesmerising recitation of figures that he felt he knew much about her. The question was whether anyone else was listening, and taking down her endless numbers, and if so not only who, but what use they were making of them.

On this earth everything was for a purpose, but what hers was he could never know. Or could he? He could but go on intercepting, though he only did so now and again to check that she was still there, and she always was. She spoke on several frequencies simultaneously (he’d found her on eleven different ones already. Others he hadn’t bothered to log) so her equipment was not simple. She was no pirate of the airwaves prating for the fun of it, though if she had been a classical pirate he could imagine her making people walk the plank, counting them one by one down to the sharks in her deliberate, impersonal, cold-hearted voice.

And yet, and yet, perhaps she was misjudged. By eternally speaking numbers she was merely doing her job, and not for much money, either. Occasionally the frequencies were closed down, and she was off the air for a time. Then it could be she had caught the bus like any ordinary person, and gone home to feed her children – after shopping on the way to find what treats she could buy for their supper.

She bathed them and put them to bed and sang them songs and told them stories in a voice utterly unlike that with which she shelled out numbers on the air. Her husband had left her years ago because he couldn’t stand the numbers voice being used in their quarrels, the ruthlessly catalogued recriminations of his misdeeds. Life on her own was hard. With the children in bed she cleaned her tiny flat, darned and washed their clothes and, if there was half an hour to spare before sleep time, and she wasn’t too done-for (she never was) she would play some Mozart or Beethoven on the record player.

Family who would have helped in her lonely life had been killed, or sent off to camps by the Russians at the end of the war, or were maybe lost in one of those air raids Howard had taken part in, sitting hour after hour at his TR1154/55 Marconi on those cold and terrifying nights during the last winter of the war, the happiest moment when, driving through the flak, the tonnage went down and the bomber lifted, and they could turn for home.

And now someone called Ingrid von Brocken came on the air to taunt him with his guilt at having, albeit at some risk, unloaded the wrath of God on her family, though she would have been only a baby at the time.

The headset brought her clearly into mind, queen of the shortwave spectrum naked under a red plastic mac reading off numbers from a pile of sheets by her left hand, the voice as always loud and precise. Maybe there was no woman at all, only an endless leftover tape playing in a forgotten East German bunker transmitting instructions to various agents. No one had thought to switch it off, current still pumped so that it would go on forever, even when all the spies were dead.

The German Numbers Woman made him sweat, so he couldn’t listen for long; but she filled his darkness with Brünnhilde eyes, and a gleam of red hair which she tied back at work, though made into braids on Sunday. He couldn’t think she was all that fearful because she made him see, thought no ill of her because in his world she was real and he knew her well, his only fear being that she might become bigger and more immediate than Laura. But that’s another matter, he soothed himself, one between me and my conscience, letting me enjoy whatever secret compensations are available.

Somewhere she must exist, and could be utterly different to the way he imagined her, but that did not matter, because whatever he made out of the voice was solidifying grist to him. He switched on the tape recorder so that he could play the voice to Laura and ask what she thought of it.

She was knitting a beige cardigan for the winter, had been on it for weeks, the body and one arm done, halfway through the other. The work settled on her lap. ‘German, isn’t it? Numbers?’

‘Yes, but what does it suggest?’

‘I can’t say. She’s counting, by the sound of it. I’ve no idea what it can be.’

Ingrid would smile if she could hear this. ‘You don’t wonder what she looks like?’

‘Well, I can’t imagine. Ordinary, I suppose. Plain. Could be middle aged, but you can’t always tell from a voice, can you?’

He switched the machine off. ‘No, I don’t suppose you can.’ He had done his duty: no secrets between them. No secrets on the airwaves, either, even when items came through in morse. Someone was always listening, so who was the person, or people, writing down the text from the German Numbers Woman? What did her figures mean? Were they weather codes, or spy instructions? ‘There’s no way of finding out,’ he said when she asked.

‘Does it bother you?’

‘No, but I’d like to know. Two receiving stations can get a cross bearing on the transmitter to find out roughly where it is, but I don’t have the equipment to be one of them. If I knew another shortwave listener we could talk about it, and maybe rig something up.’

She held the knitting to her chest, and fetched a pattern from the other side of the room, thinking how often an advertisement for the local paper had gone through her mind: ‘Wireless operator, ex-RAF, blind, would like to meet similar with sight to send morse code and talk radio matters. Two hours a week. Terms, if necessary, can be arranged.’

A hint to Howard that she would put it in showed that he needed all his self control not to be angry. And she couldn’t think why, except that he saw it as a blow to his pride, an assault on his privacy which he prized above all else. She regretted not having strength enough to force the issue, put the ad in anyway, make up a story so that the meeting could take place – not having acted courageously and broken the barrier. Howard talked sociably enough to people in the pub whenever there for a pint – his maximum intake on a walk – because she had once met him as arranged, and even before pushing open the door heard his laughter and easy responses among the loud chatter.

Alone, he was king of his world, no territory of greater expanse than in his mind when assisted by varying and multiplying noises coming into the earphones. Aether sings, is never silent, indecipherable morse lost in vague ringing tones or a low roar as of the sea suddenly punctuated by a rogue whistle coming and going, the momentary growl of a button-message, arrowing from where to where? With such noises he could see, and the universe surrendered to him, at least that part between the earth’s crust and the heaviside layer, where no part of him was tied to the yoke of his blindness.

Mysterious morse signals, in plain language or in code, ragged beyond comprehension and impossible to grasp, suggested a ghost wireless operator somewhere, wild eyed and stricken with eternal panic, the shirt half flayed off his back by the wind, the only other man besides the captain still on the Flying Dutchman, sending messages on an ancient spark transmitter, the ship forever caught in savage gales south of the Cape of Good Hope.

Distress signals from the ship came and went into Howard’s earphones, mercilessly chopped by interference or atmospherics, weakened by distance, containing harrowing accounts of the Flying Dutchman’s plight but impossible to make sense of. Maybe lightning had shattered their eyes, but both captain and wireless operator thought they could see perfectly well, yet were unable to distinguish between dark and day in the howling torment of the waves. Signals from the ship turned up all over the spectrum, vague, hardly recognisable, trying to break through and make sense to someone with the superior knowledge, intuitive skill and power to release them from their spellbound circuits around the waters. Maybe they prayed for a Nimrod aircraft or a fast destroyer to rescue them from their plight. Masts gone, at times waterlogged, the ship struggled to stay afloat, and they couldn’t know that nothing would make it sink because the eternal powers of the universe would not allow it.

The captain in his travail had gone insane and, roped to the wheel, drove the ship on automatically with declining yet always-renewable strength, while the wireless operator in his cabin sat hour after hour tapping out his unreceivable messages of distress, hope and no hope fusing an addled brain that gave no rest.

At times Howard knew he was close to the wireless operator of the Flying Dutchman because nothing could be done for him either. His fate was settled. The vessel was adrift and could not make port, but the man persisted in his task, no thought of saving himself, because staying on was the only chance of survival, making life ordered even in damnation.

He never stayed long on one frequency, and in any case the Flying Dutchman’s signals always drifted away, impossible to follow, too painful to chase. Shrieks of static and dying whistles ate into the eardrums and conjured bad pictures, so he settled on the clear top-strength machine morse of the station giving the Mediterranean weather forecast, pulled over the typewriter and touch typed on his beloved elderly machine that, having only capital letters, made it easy to use for transcripts.

A seasonal low pressure area was what he noted, gales and thunderstorms at the beginning of September, southwesterly wind force four increasing locally, mainly clear but with increasing cloudiness, moderate visibility, generally changeable. The Adriatic was no better, or worse, the same with the Aegean and the Levantine Basin.

He took two pages, then changed band and swivelled the wheel onto a typhoon warning from Taiwan, said to be moving west at ten kilometres a minute, with sustained winds near the centre at 155 kilometres an hour. At least the Flying Dutchman wasn’t involved in that one, and nor was he, snug in his familiar listening post at what he could only think of as the hub of the world.

A change from the tinkling of morse, he went on to a telephone frequency, spun the wheel and heard a Donald Duck squawk, hard to know whether it would turn out male or female, till he tuned in sharply and with delicate fingers pulled a recognisable male voice out by the tail:

‘You’re not supposed to drink when you take that stuff, are you, Beryl?’

What stuff? Howard removed the earphones, plugged in the speaker, and flicked on the tape recorder, perhaps to amuse Laura later, an action utterly against the law, though he would obliterate such private talk afterwards. The Post Office regulations were severe: ‘Interception of communications is forbidden. If such communications are received involuntarily they must not be produced in writing, communicated to other persons, or used for any purpose whatever.’

Plain enough, but too much of a sacrifice to his existence to obey such rules. In any case his transcripts were used to make the morning fire, and all tapes rubbed out to leave space for other items. If he played them occasionally to Laura what matter? Weren’t man and wife supposed to be one person? He was sure there were villainous London thieves who used VHF scanners to keep track of police movements before doing a robbery, but he wasn’t in that league, and wouldn’t have been, even with normal sight.

He felt himself a snooper nevertheless when listening to personal telephone talk, though surely those who made calls from ship to shore must know someone might well be listening, no great feat these days, with technology coming on the market cheap, even for ordinary telephones to be tapped. Often he amused himself at midnight listening to two or three trawler skippers chatting at the fishing grounds, which he wouldn’t record for Laura because the dexterity of their bad language was astonishing to hear.

Poor husband, or boyfriend, stuck on shore. ‘You’re not going to remember this, are you?’

Howard could hear him but not the woman.

‘You all right?’

He was an American.

‘See you on Friday? Look, I think you’re loaded. Why are you crying? Phone you Thursday, at three o’clock.’

Perhaps he had sent her on a Caribbean cruise, when the last place she needed to be in was a vast floating boozer.

‘Honey, please don’t drink too much. I got a meeting at five o’clock. Listen, please don’t drink too much tonight. Damn, you’re really drunk.’

Howard wanted to hear the response, instead of filling in the details from his own heart.

‘What does that mean?’ the man said, a mixture of concern and exasperation.

How else to learn about life if you were blind?

‘All right, I’ll call you at five-thirty on Thursday. Can you write it down so you won’t forget? Why not? You’re drunk. It’s that stuff affecting you maybe. Please don’t drink anymore tonight. So you want to go, eh? OK. Love you. Bye.’

Operator’s voice: ‘It was twenty five minutes there.’

Such a long time for the poor chap to have been locked in a dead end debate with his wife or girlfriend. The catalogue of miseries was endless. Disasters also. A whistle went parabola through a blank frequency like an uncontrolled star across space – or a bomb making its way from a plane onto helpless people below. No knowing where it was coming from or heading for. Then the mixing warble of two oscillators made a noise like an angel drinking water.

The aerial blues were on him, which even the tom-tom telegraphist blasting through from a Soviet Black Sea tanker couldn’t penetrate. But you must never despair, he told himself, ever, and if he didn’t, no one should.

The man pleading with his wife wouldn’t leave him alone. Witnesses were as much in danger of despair as those involved, who at least had the umbrella of each other’s misery, as well as their own. The basic theory of magnetism instilled in the classroom was that ‘like poles repel and unlike poles attract’, but in human relationships if it went on too long the opposite would happen and both poles begin to repel. Iron filings as the uncontrollable grit of the human spirit are unpredictable in their behaviour, and nothing can save people from the unknown in themselves except endurance and understanding. Call it observations from the heaviside layer, for what they are worth.

To take the weight from his heart – that was one way he didn’t want to go – he reached for the morse key which Laura had found in the ex-service junk store at the bottom of the steps, and tapped out a condoling message to the man who would not hear it because no transmitter was attached, though maybe Someone in the sky would take heed and filter the comfort through:

‘I know more about you than you can know about me, though if you could read what I am sending you might know more about me than I am allowed to know about you. You are the hero of my evening, and your wife is the heroine, perhaps even the highlight of my week, and I am your only listener, who can know more about you in the beginning than you can know about me because I can hear you while you cannot hear me. You don’t even know I am listening to your voice coming clear enough through the aether by electrical impulses, but all I want is to wish you well.’

Four minutes at the key made his own arm ache. The vagaries of human contact were forever mysterious. Electrical impulses jump between terminals, make contact, but when communication goes on too long the power fades, and must either be renewed or stay dead. Current was low and frequency likewise between him and Laura, but the equilibrium was continuous and could never be damped. As social worker jargon might have it, they took each other for granted, but did so because they loved each other, and it was the only way to get by.

She had gone shopping in the car, and promised his favourite pizza for supper. Elaborate cooked meals came only a couple of times a week, and who could blame her? He mused on whether the man whose wife was an alcoholic would like to meet the German Numbers Woman, thought he ought to be glad to make the acquaintance of someone with a rigidly ordered life. He would see her, neat, clean, tall and dressed in a colourful frock, proudly leading her two children for a walk on Sunday morning. They would sit at a small table by the pavement in summer, coffee for her and cake and ices for the children. Our man at the next table would be captivated by their intimacy, which he did not like to break into. But a smile cost nothing, either for him or her, and after several weeks a word or two passed between them. Both came to look forward to their brief talk, and one morning he handed the children a plastic bag filled with empty tobacco tins (or perhaps cigar boxes) which he couldn’t bear to throw away, they were so neat and useful. The children accepted with alacrity, because no one but their mother had given them a present before, and played on a spare table as if they were precious toys given out at Christmas. The German Numbers Woman smiled with pleasure, and he knew what he had always known, that the way to a woman’s love was through her children.

More weeks went by before he asked this blue-eyed rawboned, though attractive, woman if she would come out for a drink one evening. Or did he invite her and the children to a show at the cinema? Hard to know what she would say, though Howard liked to think yes, but her previously open and youthful nature had made her a victim of predatory men, and she was wary. Yet she was also lonely, hungry almost, given her isolation with the children, and the secrecy of her work.

Howard worried about the matter for weeks, saw the relationship in all its detail. Her dedication at transmitting numbers was indefatigable. She was conscientious because her work was of life-saving importance. Without her numbers, someone would perish, lose all hope, face peril if not destruction and, as the analog of his receiver rested on a frequency unused except by caustic atmospherics, the answer came to him that her numbers were meant for the wireless operator of the Flying Dutchman who, when he wasn’t sending his melancholy and distressful messages, was tuned in to receive her strings of numbers.

There was no other solution, no answer, it made sense, fitted into Howard’s god-like manipulations. Her numbers were transmitted to give the Flying Dutchman hope, to keep the wireless operator and his captain from going finally into the deep, to warn them of the approach of the wildest typhoon weather, a life line to their ultimate survival. The tone of her voice, so hard to Howard, was like honey because the shade of absolute command and confidence kept them going, saying they were not alone, that they were not forgotten, that they had some link, however slender and uncertain, with the rest of the world.

Yet there was something else, a thought so outlandish, and for that reason absolutely convincing, as to chill the bones. He played with it awhile, doing shuttlecock and battledore with disjointed words, going into dreamland on Air Uterine and absent-mindedly flicking the tuning wheel to hear something which would divert him from a notion slowly forming, which was (for it could not be held back) that the German Numbers Woman’s outgoing peroration fed into a mechanism of the Flying Dutchman which prevented them ever seeing land, kept them at sea, going round in great circles, and helpless to escape any of the storms. The wireless operator spent all his time when not sending or receiving vainly trying to break the code of her numbers, lost in a cryptographic maze incapable of solution, but under the impression that if he did reduce it to sense their tribulations would be over and a calm tropical landfall come in sight.

While the wireless operator became demented in grappling with the codes, not knowing that the greatest brain of the universe would be unable to break them, Ingrid the German Numbers Woman sat with her children talking happily to the man at the café on Sunday morning. The benighted sparks of the Flying Dutchman sweated and swore as huge waves lifted and spray battered his cabin, while Ingrid put a chocolate into her mouth, and her new-found boyfriend lit a cigar, and the eternal trio stayed locked into the triangular and mysterious fix, held there by Howard – the only way he could disentangle himself of the German Numbers Woman and her codes and give himself peace.

Laura removed one of the earphones: ‘I got a video from town. Thought some entertainment together might do us good. It’s called Zulu. We can watch it after supper. I’ll tell you the landscape and what’s going on.’

He wanted to stay in the wireless room, but the treat was impossible to resist. To do so would be churlish. She had grown so perfect at describing scenery and action in films that he might as well not have been blind.

She called that the meal was ready. For the first course there was grilled herring fresh from the boats, and a bottle of cold white wine – straight out of the refrigerator. ‘You feed me too well,’ he said.

She took the headset off. ‘You need it, burning your energy at that wireless.’

‘I’ll get fat. I’m putting on weight as it is.’

‘You are,’ she laughed. ‘So much the better for me. Come on, silly.’

He clattered back the chair, stood to hold her for a moment, then let her lead him into the dining room.

FOUR

The field sloping up from the broad canalised river was opaque and dark compared to the luminous streak of water which looked set to run over the banks at the next visitation of rain. Little more than the roof tiles showed, until Richard got to the crest of the opposite rise, white overlapping planks of its walls standing out in the dusk.

Thick grass, rich food to fatten sheep and cattle, bent under his boots, and he wondered when the rabbits would feel the sting of hot shot from the twelve-bore carried by Ken who walked at his own pace behind. Clean Sussex air gusted over the wooded ridge and, closing the gate carefully, Richard paused as the last daylight melted in the meadows to either side of the river.

Ken drew level. ‘It ain’t dark enough.’ They walked along the lane to a position downwind, Ken’s wellingtons squeaking on the saturated grass. ‘Won’t get no darker, though.’

‘I don’t suppose it will.’ Richard’s leather Trickers squelched into ruts and potholes which couldn’t be dodged. He was glad, without knowing why, when a rabbit went shot-free in crossing the track. Last night one ran almost the whole length of the lane before the house, caught in his car beams, as if a jump to safety meant the drop of a thousand-foot cliff. Lit up by the chase, Richard wanted to run the bunny down, but it took the risk rather than be crushed under his tyres, and must have been relieved to find itself alive.

‘Flash a light,’ Ken said softly.

He steadied the eight-volt lamp, till a rabbit lifted its head in the beam, ears flattened. Water in his eyes distorted the image. Hard to make out what it was.

‘It’s something,’ Ken said. ‘Keep the torch on.’ His double-barrelled twelve-bore had been left to him by Group Captain Willis, for looking after his estate, a light and efficient killer of wildlife at seventy yards. Richard had looked at it, a new toy to handle. Daedalus the ancient artificer couldn’t have made one better – if it had been possible in those days.

Ken slid two plastic-coated cartridges primed with black shot into the breeches. In his sixties, he still had the best of eyesight, certainly better than mine, Richard thought. ‘What are you waiting for?’

‘It ain’t a rabbit, but blessed if I know what it is.’

Richard’s eyes were still blurred by the wind, and he focused them on Orion’s Buckle and Belt rearing over the wood like buttons on the cloak of an otherwise-invisible man. ‘So what can it be?’

Ken stepped forward and looked across the greying fields. ‘Darned if I know. I’m flummoxed.’ He had whispered in Richard’s kitchen one night over a glass of whisky about having grown up poorer than the poor. In the thirties his parents and four kids had been turned out of their tied cottage, to live in a tent most of one winter in Cotton’s Wood, till the father found another place. ‘I used to look at the stars, and say I’d never live like this again. And I was only ten. People don’t know what poor is these days.’ Which was a preliminary bit of hype for the cunning old rogue to suggest, a few days later, that Richard pay a higher rate for having his garden looked after. Hard to refuse after hearing such a hard luck story. He should try being at sea on a small boat with nothing but a wild gale as an overcoat. Still, he didn’t want to deny Ken’s truth about his appalling childhood.

A phosphorescent glow by a clump of reed grass might be the tail of a rabbit and, if so, Ken was sure to score. Sharp sight and country know-how had put him in charge of a Bren gun section in Normandy during the war, and he had been in some of the worst fighting. After five years in the army he rarely moved beyond a few miles from where he was born, as if the luck of surviving had unnerved him. The only mechanical transport he allowed himself was a bike, though he would go on a bus if his wife was with him. He didn’t smoke, and drank little more than homemade parsnip wine in his cluttered parlour.

A grunt as he fired. The flash and noise sent pigeons rattling in the trees, and Richard felt Ken’s reluctance to dash along the torch’s beam. He must have known there was no rabbit at the end of the light, but Richard’s presence had distorted his judgment. The wasted bullet had gone through a rectangular cake of cattle salt. Luminous in the dazzling light, it lay as if it had been manufactured with a hole in the middle.

Richard brought the gun to his shoulder, and Ken wondered what the silly so-and-so was up to. On his own, he’d have had a couple of bunnies for the pot by now. Not wanting to go home without having fired a shot, Richard squeezed the trigger, and the cake of salt disappeared.

An owl hooted from inside the wood, the letter R in morse. ‘Sounds a bit like them noises I sometimes hear coming from your attic,’ Ken said. ‘All them squeaks.’

Richard broke the gun, stooped to put the empty case into his pocket. ‘That’s just my hobby.’

Mud at the gate had been churned by cattle and tractors. ‘I often wondered,’ Ken said. ‘They used to be spies as did that, didn’t they?’

The wind was fresh, though not cold for October. Weeks of rain had left the fields spongy. ‘In war, they did.’ Richard decided to use earphones all the time from now on, in case the police sent a specialist to snoop in the bushes and listen to what he was taking down. ‘I don’t suppose there were any spies around here. They were caught early, so I read. They hanged them. Or maybe they were shot.’

He hadn’t noted such a vindictive tone from Ken before: ‘Serve ‘em right, as well.’

Out of Richard’s unease rose the question as to why he had decided to come out for a night’s shooting with his bumpkin of a gardener. Even harder to say why he was on earth, as if looking at the stars might bring back a long-dead sense of right and wrong.

‘No rabbits’ll be seen on such a night,’ Ken said, on the way up the gravel path to Richard’s house. ‘I’ll be off now, to see what the wife’s got for supper.’

‘I’ll drive you.’

Ken sensed that Richard didn’t care to. ‘It’s only a mile. A walk’ll do me good.’

He locked the garage, and saw him out of the gate, on the way to the back door noting his aerial slung between two willow trees, branches shaking in the wind. Must stop it going up and down like a yo-yo – though he was satisfied with the circular plate-like satellite dish clamped to the roof and beamed into planetary realms. In that respect it was a suitable house, up on a hill and giving good all-round reception.

He would have liked a smell of supper when he got in. Was it from spite, or indolence? She thought of everything, so it must be spite. He shook off his boots by the cloakroom door, set the guns in their cabinet, and put on slippers, unable to say what room she would be in. Couldn’t much care. Probably in the sitting room.

Roaming the fields made you hungry. Ken would sit down to his roast or hotpot, with jam roll and custard to follow, his fat wife slapping it down yet glad to see him eat; but Richard put a slice of smoked bacon in the pan and when it was halfway brown cracked in an egg, and two hemispheres of ripe tomato. A breakfast at night was enough to go to bed on, though he wouldn’t get there for some time. No need to watch his weight, being slim enough at forty. Pale hair, which Amanda always said resembled a toupee, was short enough to never need combing.

He ate quickly, a blob of yolk splashing the knee of his jeans, wiped with a paper towel. Smoke from the toaster came up, so he banged the side and trowelled butter on burnt bread. Amanda stood in the doorway: ‘You’re stinking up my kitchen with your fry-ups again.’ She pressed the switch: ‘Try using the extractor fan.’

The noise was like that of a plane taking off, and he relished silence now and again. ‘I forgot.’

Relaxed, or so you might assume, he was ready to spring, like a panther and as unpredictable, blue eyes turned on her, looking slightly mad, as always, and fully knowing the power of his expression. He was about middle height, less tall than she, but tight with violence, always to be feared, except when he was feeling northwest passage and midnight sugar rolled into one. Then she was as mad as he, but with love, so that was all right. ‘You always do forget. It’s there for keeping the smells of cooking down.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Well, you paid for it.’

The only way to let her have the last word was to keep quiet. He needed to mark the cessation of the day by a sanitary cordon of tranquillity, but she had often said that if she didn’t talk she felt like a waxwork and, he admitted with a smile (which could only annoy her) she certainly looked a pretty one, beautiful even. ‘Have you eaten?’

‘I had a salad earlier. Where were you?’

‘After rabbits, with Ken.’

‘All boys together, eh? Why didn’t you let me know you were going out?’

‘You were nowhere to be seen.’

‘I was at Doris’s. She did my hair.’

‘So I see.’ The treatment of her short fair hair had kept the aureole of curls tight to her head, and he liked that, but blue-grey eyes and smallish mouth gave her a desultory, hungry look, as if never getting enough of what she wanted out of life, whatever that might be. She wore a high-necked white blouse with a broad tie of equally white bands hanging between the folds of her small bosom. In her late thirties, she could at times look blowsy and haggard, but the glow of dissatisfaction had restored her to the younger woman he had first seen sitting in a park bench reading a book, and fallen in love with. ‘Your hair looks wonderful,’ he told her.

‘It’s always best if somebody else does it. When I help Doris in the salon though she pays me well. Says I’m one of the best hairdressers she’s ever had.’

‘I’m sure that’s true.’

She liked his compliment but wouldn’t show it, lit a cigarette and said: ‘You could have left a note when you went out.’

‘It didn’t occur to me.’

‘It never does.’

Being married, who needs enemies? He wanted to smack her around the chops, but what was the use? He once did so, and she’d walked out. Then she came back, by which time he had got used to living alone. Now he’d got used to living with her again, and didn’t want her to go. Maybe that meant she would. She was more of a mystery to him than he could be to her, whatever she thought. Perhaps he had been neglectful. All she’d wanted was for him to leave a note so that she would know he would be coming back. Whenever he went out she feared he might not (though that could be because she didn’t want him to) unless he let her know exactly where he was going, and that wasn’t always possible. So now and again he made up fancy little itineraries out of kindness, though he didn’t like having to tell lies, which they really weren’t, since no other woman was involved. He supposed their ten-year marriage had gone on too long, more and more memories neither of them could mention without spiralling into dangerous arguments, topics well recognised so that whoever brought one up knew very well what they were doing, thus breaking the rules, which happened when a seeming indifference on one side or the other caused boredom too painful to be endured.

She was bored now, with him, with life, above all with herself, and the glow of argument was in her.

‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘you’re too selfish. You’re too mean to share your thoughts with anyone.’

And that’s how it should be, yet to be called selfish riled him above all else, too proud to go through the list of what he had done for her, and though to be honest assumed she had done as much for him, he couldn’t think for the moment what it was. He only knew he’d helped other people, often, but such unthinking bastards hadn’t thanked him because they considered his money had come too easy.

‘I haven’t known you to do a good deed in your life,’ she said. ‘It just isn’t in you.’

He’d never told her, because if he did she’d say what a fool he had been to help such people. And so he was. But a pure good deed from the goodness of his heart to someone who would appreciate it out of the goodness of his? No, she was right. ‘Oh, pack it in, for Christ’s sake.’

His menacing tone didn’t scare her, though she knew it should have. ‘Of course, it could be there’s nothing there. I should have realised it from the first. The trouble with me is that I take so long to learn.’

Such painful denigration in her laugh he knew to be a sham. Silence was the only way to calm matters, though she would consider it a weapon. After pouring tea he sat without moving, though smoke from his cigarette signalled that at least he wasn’t a waxwork. The food boiled in his stomach, for there was nothing he could safely tell her. If he really told her what he did to get money, and described the state of his mind, she would scream herself to death, or bury him with scorn. No, she was as hard as nails. They both were, two worlds incapable of meeting on a human and tolerant level. She already suspected he did something crooked to get money, for how else could he have paid for the house from a suitcase of cash? He wasn’t the mortgage type.

She fished for the truth with barbed hooks, the last way to get anything. If one day they decided to kill him because he knew too much they might do away with her as well, and should the police pull him in he wouldn’t want them to think she had been involved. He lived such a life that the luxury of easy conversation couldn’t be for him, and so not for them. Everything cost something.

She sat and faced him. ‘Why did we have to buy a house like this?’

The same old question: a hilltop house with every comfort, only ten miles from the coast, and within a couple of hours of London. ‘It’s convenient. It has a good view.’

‘You mean for your aerials?’ She’d heard it before. Often was too often. She nearly died with worry when he went to crew a yacht back from Gibraltar, and listened to the dreadful weather forecast every day. He took off in the car one morning and said he was going to London, then no word for three weeks. ‘If I’d told you, the worry would have been far worse. If things had gone wrong you might have ended in the drek.’

He was, at best, lavish and fun to be with, so could you wish a man dead for habits which were as much part of his act as falling in love with you had been, though so long ago? One way or another he had made ten years seem like forever, which in a way she supposed she couldn’t fault him for, if she wanted to live that long, which she could never be sure about, with someone like him.

‘There’s nothing wrong with the house,’ he said.

She lit another cigarette, and puffed smoke at his face. ‘Nothing a bulldozer couldn’t set right.’

He blew smoke back. ‘What do you want?’

‘If I knew I wouldn’t be here.’

‘Where would you be? More tea?’

‘How the hell would I know? Please.’

The agreeable feeling of mindlessness he’d had while out with Ken had gone. Freedom and the spacious fields had taken away all worries – the sort of mood she couldn’t know about, or envied him for having. ‘I do what I can for you.’

Like pouring tea. Thank you very much. You know how I live for it. So much preoccupied him, and he wouldn’t or couldn’t tell her about it. He was indifferent to her, didn’t have the resilience to argue and break her boredom. All these years she had sat in the house trying to unravel what routes his blood ran on, but with so little evidence it was useless. He seemed not to care, and only reacted when she goaded him beyond endurance, not even then giving anything away. He would swear and bang his fist against the wall, and go off to sulk in the attic room, where he would either stare despairingly out of the window, or at the curtains when they were drawn. If it was daylight he would glare at the green hell of the countryside. Or he’d sit hunched up at his special wireless taking messages which he said were no business of hers. She might as well be living in a gorilla cage.

He stood, and came to her. ‘Let’s not have a bust-up. I know life’s not easy for either of us.’ A warm tight hand on the back of her neck usually worked in bringing her to what they both wanted. He’d read in a book that the neck was one of the erogenous zones, and he supposed that was because the main cables from the brain ran through such constricted space to get to the sexual regions lower down. Also there was hair close to the neck, as in the other place. ‘You know there’s nobody else I love like you, nobody I care about, almost nobody else I know, in fact, except the people I have to work with, and I’d rather not know them most of the time.’

He was talking, not exactly motormouth, but it would have to do. She stood, and who kissed first was hard to say. His body was a stove. She was always amazed at the heat it gave off, how it warmed her into wanting him, or not being able to resist what he had to give, or thinking that to make love was the only way of quietening him, and herself, come to that. She wanted something, anyway, and at the moment it seemed to be a bit of all three, as long as neither said anything more but just got on with what she must have wanted all day, and what he needed as well by the feel of it.

Green hillside spread up the other slope of the valley, a panorama to calm him. A black and white cow was painted halfway, always the same though sometimes it moved, always when he wasn’t looking. Whenever he opened the curtain there it was, and who carried the animal to another position in the night he never knew. Maybe it wasn’t the same cow, a different one taking its place when the present cow had gorged itself sufficiently on succulent grass it didn’t even have to stand up and search for. Perhaps the cattle had a pow-wow as to who should have the hallowed spot the following day. Being so prized it had to be shared, the riches of the world passed from mouth to mouth. No one cow could be allowed to scoff too greedily at the trough. Well, he’d had more than a good patch in the last few years, and nobody had come to push him aside.

He put on the radio, a flip of the dial, and the only true music came from the stratosphere, a contemporary rendering of the heaviside quartets tinkling through clear sky and hitting cloud which sorted out the various rhythms. Every note he could get sense out of meant money in the mattress.

He’d made enough from a couple of Gibraltar trips to buy the house, and put something by. On the way he had taken down the weather in morse from Portishead Radio, and steered them from a storm that might have swamped the boat overloaded with the most head-banging powders on earth. He fiddled with a receiver which a crew member had bought for a tenner in a pub thinking it was an ordinary wireless. Near to home on the return trip Richard had heard jabber from the coast guards, so they knew what coves to steer clear of, which so impressed the Big Man (they called him Waistcoat) that he was promised money whenever he sent in a transcript from Interpol.

No problem, so it turned out. He was able to let them know when the police would be waiting at Frankfurt for a consignment from Colombia, so the bods on board were advised to come down in a different place, and all was well. The police waiting at Frankfurt had their names, dates of birth, what luggage they had, and how they were carrying the stuff. False bottoms of suitcases was the least of their ingenuity. Somebody must have put in a word for whatever reason, and Richard’s intelligence might indicate who and why, so he didn’t doubt that a few had been snuffed out for their try that went wrong.

After eight years as a radio officer in the Merchant Service he could get anything that was floating in the aether out of a radio. He was good at it and could do no wrong. Whenever anything useful came up he phoned it through, and they paid him well, money for old rope, just for sitting on his arse and trawling the short waves all day between looking at that picture-book cow noshing the best of green grass on the hillside – a gilded calf if ever there was one. He couldn’t understand why the Mafia and all big outfits of the criminal world didn’t recruit personnel to scour the communication systems of their law-enforcing enemies. It would have made sense and cost little.

Money unblocked the log-jam of one’s dreams, brightened the nights and days. All the sharp and clever people wanted their share, made a beacon out of themselves hoping money would home in and stick. He’d picked up a long signal from Africa, concerning Sambo Jean-Jacques who was a chauffeur and guard of the secretary of state for defence in Zaire – or some such place – and purloined a hundred million francs by forging his boss’s signature at the local bank when he was away on leave. Jean-Jacques was last seen heading towards Uganda with his girlfriend, false passports in their pockets. Richard hoped he had got clean away, after such ingenuity, and even worked out all possible routes on a Michelin map to see what his chances were, deciding they must be good, despite wireless signals going all over the place trying to stop him.

He was aware of such power, though often afraid to use it, except for prompt and spot cash. His French was good enough to pick up plain language in morse from the police network in France. It was interesting to hear vital statistics of criminals and their whereabouts. Some villain, he learned, had stolen a car in Nice (a good Mercedes, licence number given) and was on his way to his sister’s in Lille. Her name, address and telephone number were given, so Richard had the power to pick up the phone and in two minutes warn her that trouble was on its way. Schoolboy French would just about run to it. He would whisper that she should try to save her errant brother, except that to do so might be too risky. He was putting himself enough on the line as it was. How could he tell Amanda what he was doing? All she needed to know was that wireless listening was his hobby. A high-tension shock had gone through him only this morning, after a wonderful night of making love. She had even got his breakfast of coffee and rolls, butter and jam, and no one could have done it better.

‘The police called yesterday,’ she said.

The jam turned sour. ‘What the fuck for?’

‘Don’t swear, darling.’

Why not? It was too early for fear not to hit him. ‘Sorry. What did they want?’

‘It was about the football field at the end of the lane. Some vandals had sawn through the goalposts with an electric saw, and they wondered whether we’d heard or seen any of them driving away.’

‘I didn’t.’ His head had been down on more important matters. The jam tasted halfway good again. ‘Didn’t hear a thing.’

‘Neither did I.’

‘If I had, I’d have killed the bastards. They should be shot on sight.’

She poured coffee for them both. He wished she could be like this all the time, but knew he had to earn such brief interludes of care and attention. ‘I do wish you wouldn’t use violent language, though,’ she said.

‘I know. Sorry about it. But vandalism like that gets my goat. I hate it. The kids in the village play there a lot. I really would have liked to have caught them.’ He would, except they might have been the ones who did it. They’d have thought lightning had struck. His fists itched. They always itched, from knuckles to wrists, but the knuckles especially, though he resisted scratching. They had got at him personally, whoever had done it. Such destruction was purposeless, sheer spite, enjoyment of the lowest sort, done out of hatred against everyone and everything.

Apart from that, it put the shits up him to know that the police had called at the house. Maybe they had another reason altogether. ‘What else did they say?’

‘Nothing. They were very nice and polite. I almost fancied one of them.’

‘You bitch.’

She was in his arms. ‘But I fancy you most of all.’

He tuned in, and the signals came through loud and clear, right on cue. Sometimes you had to wait, or search endlessly through the megacycles, because they changed frequency often, maybe to catch you out. It was like watching for fish, but this morning the messages smiled through, every bright sing-song of morse a pound coin dropping into his greedy palm.

FIVE

Laura knew when the east wind cometh, when it was close, when it was blathering and grating in the here and now. It meant torment for Howard, but he tried to laugh off its advent, regarding it as inexorable, though devilish while it lasted.

‘When the wind is in the east a blind man dances with the beast,’ he said, and probably everyone else did as well, though in a minor key because they could see it coming by the writhing of leaves, as well as dust and rubbish peppering along the streets, while he only got advanced warning from Portishead.

‘The beast is on its way,’ he’d say, switching off the wireless, ‘but I’ll try not to let it get at me.’ Sometimes he lost all sense of equilibrium, felt that because he couldn’t see anyone no one else could see him. A gremlin turned the town plan around, making his morning walk as if through treacle, so he stayed at home. ‘Navigation all to cock,’ he would say. At the worst of times she heard him knocking his head against the wall. He thought she couldn’t hear, his door being closed and the morse loud, or everything drowned by the worst of static. But sound carried. There were vibrations, and they passed right through her. He wandered around like old blind Pugh in Treasure Island.

In one of his worst bouts she had driven him over a hundred miles to an air show at Duxford near Cambridge. He forgot the nagging wind on climbing into a bomber sat in during the war, and hearing a Wellington and a Harvard. She felt a shiver from his hand at the throaty roar of their engines. He looked up, no doubt saw the picture clear in every detail. Good to know there were things no wind could spoil. By the time they got back the dreaded easterly had veered or dropped.

Well, she couldn’t do such a trip every month, nor would he let her, half ashamed at having put her to the trouble, the other part consumed by his pleasure at exorcising two devils at the same time. Walking up the steps of home he said: ‘There are times when I can’t get under the make-up of the blind man to the real me underneath. It’s a horrible feeling. But today I could, and it’ll last a long while, thanks to you, my love.’

‘We must go again, in a year or two,’ she said. ‘I quite enjoyed it, as well.’

But this morning he had knocked two of her precious Yuan breakfast cups off the table. Such crockery came in sets, and a gap had to be made good, otherwise it was not only a slight to the eyes as they lay in the cupboard, but a disturbance was felt, as if a splinter of herself was missing, an opening for unwelcome thoughts to come through.

After coffee she made sandwiches for him to eat at lunch, set him at the wireless to get what solace he could, and walked down the steps to the car. At the China Parade shop near the edge of town she could buy replacements for the cups. She wondered why he had stumbled. Always careful, he must be even more upset than an east wind warranted. Was he getting worse? Losing his sharpness and care now that he was sixty? After the cups were wrapped and boxed she drove ten miles to Bracebridge and collected a replacement for the parlour stove. Her nerves weren’t at their best, either, from the buffeting wind, because she hit the kerb in the village and, hearing bumps under a front tyre, knew it was a puncture, the first since buying the car five years ago. A lay-by was close, and she trundled in to change the wheel.

A twin-tailed squarish combat plane in camouflage colours came low along the river. Two jet engines were centred on the fuselage between the greenhouse cockpit, either low flying practice or had they rumbled him and were trying to find out what stations he listened to? He didn’t think they had the technology, in spite of what Peter Wright claimed in Spycatcher.

Rain splashed the windscreen but the pint had been good, safe inside, and not to be got at. Two would have been better, three even more, but to be pulled up and breath tested would draw the eyes of the law on him, and should he be over the level, the misdemeanour might lead towards something bigger. Take care of the small, and no one would rumble anything worse. Anonymity was the rule, to be a fish in water.

He managed a cigarette without taking both hands from the wheel. An east wind was usually dry but this one had turned the trees jungle green, drizzle from Russia with love. Halfway along the straight he slowed on seeing a car in a lay-by, where a woman was trying to fix a wheel. Well, she had the jack in her hands, turned away, wondering what to do next, not imagining golden boy was homing in.

She would be alarmed, fear he was a predator with a rape-knife and unbreakable stranglehold. A hundred yards to walk, the view from behind was good, shapely legs, dark brown hair down to her neck, signs promising well for looks and, if not, certainly a presence. He had sometimes followed a woman with the most gorgeous hair, walking rapidly ahead then turning back as if he’d forgotten something, only to find a face like the back end of a tram smash, which phrase his father had often used. An article in the paper said that if you saw a woman walking down the street at dusk or in the dark you should reassure her by crossing to the other side. Give her a wide berth. He wasn’t that much of a gentleman, though neither did he feel himself a villain. He would talk his way in, and put her at ease.

‘I’m sorry to intrude. You seem to be in trouble with that wheel.’ Not many marks from Amanda for that, but she had gone to London, and he was his own man today. ‘It won’t take five minutes to change, and then we can both be on our way.’

This tall woman, seemingly in her forties, turned, put the carjack on the bonnet, a wheel hub by her feet. ‘I’m quite capable. I just can’t quite find the place to put the jack under the body.’

‘My wife used to have one of these cars, so I can show you.’ Amanda didn’t, but he felt around and found the place, glad to be helping this cool stately woman who gave him the most calculated weighing-up he could remember. Not much more behind her grey eyes than that, so he immediately felt calm at being near, especially since, in handing over the jack, she seemed to trust him. She needed the expertise, after all.

The nuts were so tight he had to stamp his shoes down on the spanner, kicking at each till they loosened and could be taken off, which brought on a bit of a sweat. She would never have done it on her own, but for him it was easy, and he slowed down because he wanted to stay a few more minutes near her. ‘Do you have far to go?’

She told him. ‘I’ve just been to that stove place near Bracebridge. I’ve never had a blow-out before.’

‘There’s always a first time.’ A touch of grey on darkish hair added to her dignity, and he could only wonder where it came from. Straight backed, nothing ambivalent about her, English to the bone, she was the type he had never been so close to before. Her sort were usually too knowing to clinch with him, so good behaviour was the order of the day.

She felt a fool but thought never mind, it would have been awkward struggling with the bolts, and he seemed familiar with such things, not put out either by drizzle and muddy pools around their cars. She considered herself lucky, and smiled, trying not to hover at each phase of the operation.

‘I live out near Benefield,’ he said. ‘My wife and I bought a house there two years ago.’

‘A nice village.’

He told her about the goalposts, and the police visit, surprised at rattling on in a way he rarely did with Amanda.

‘You seem very efficient at this type of thing,’ she said. ‘It would have taken me twice as long.’

At least, he smiled. ‘Part of my trade is messing about in boats, and a sailor can turn his hand to anything. Six months ago I went on a thirty-two-footer to Boulogne and back, and we had sails, but the engine broke down, and getting out of the harbour without it would have been tricky, so I set to, and got it going.’ He certainly had, driven by what they had on board, but he couldn’t mention that. He had made a special Consol lattice on the chart so they would know their exact position in poor visibility with regard to the coastguards. He didn’t think it worked, but at least the trip had gone off all right, and paid for a good bit of his BMW.

‘You were in the Navy, then?’

‘Merchant Service. Radio officer. But I came out. They didn’t pay enough for my liking.’

‘Oh!’

Her façade was broken. Maybe she’d had a brother in the Navy who had been drowned, and he’d touched a chord. She flushed as if he had come out with something embarrassing, so plain was she to read. Or had he shown himself as too mercenary and common? ‘You seem surprised.’

He had done her one favour, so she could hardly ask him for another, though perhaps that was all the more reason to. ‘No, it’s just that, well, if you were a radio officer, you must know the morse code.’

Now he was surprised. ‘Read it like a book.’

‘Of course,’ she said.

A funny question. Maybe she would ask him to teach her Brownie group or Girl Guide class. Or perhaps she was an off-duty policewoman, and wanted him to teach signals twice a week to the force – which would lead him quicker to his doom than being breathalysed. He’d often fancied himself as a teacher, but not that sort. No, she couldn’t be in the police, because she would at least be able to change a wheel, unless they had planted her as a decoy for swine who preyed on women in difficulty on the roadside. He looked at the trees, towards the hedge decorated with a plastic bag, at the ditch strewn with tins. ‘But why do you ask?’

She liked his trim efficiency, medium height, slim build, face with no fat on it, showing features clean and – well – hard in a way, tough you might say, certainly a sailor, now that he had told her. ‘My husband was a wireless operator, in the Air Force.’

No coincidence. There must have been tens of thousands trained in the old dit-dah. ‘Is that so?’

‘He got shot up, at the end of the war.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ He put the hubcap back in place, tapped it with the muddy toe of his shoe. ‘So he’s one of the fraternity.’

She liked the word. A fraternity. ‘He’s blind, but he gets around all right.’

‘I’m sorry to hear he’s blind.’ He was. Who wouldn’t be? ‘It happened to many, always the best people.’ That’s what she would like him to say. He wanted to keep her talking, hoped she wouldn’t leave, though they couldn’t stand forever in the mud and grit. ‘There’s a pub down the road. Would you join me for a drink.’

That damnable east wind blew against her coat. Howard might be taking a nap now, dreaming his dreams, which could never be remembered. No man had invited her for a drink since before her marriage, but it would be impolite to hesitate. ‘Are you sure?’

He held up his blackened hands. ‘Then I could wash these.’

Rain, unaccountably, made her thirsty. Strange, that. ‘Yes, all right.’

Another pint would go down well. Not too much to drive home on. He didn’t know what the attraction was, but he tried not to look at her too intently. Not entirely sexual, either. ‘I can’t go home like this. My wife might wonder what I’d been up to.’

She had said it, and felt the joy of being young again. ‘I can have a fruit juice, or something.’

He fastened his blue duffel coat and adjusted the naval-style cap to a sharper angle. ‘I’ll meet you in the parking place. You won’t miss it.’

In any case, she wanted to use the toilet, the effect of the rain, no doubt. ‘I think it’s only right that I should buy the drinks.’

He paused at opening the car door. ‘No, that won’t do at all. I’m inviting you.’

Perhaps she had offended him, difficult to recall the procedures from so long ago. It was too late to rectify, so a smile was called for. ‘Just as you say.’

She used language precisely, diffidently, as if not sure she would be understood, or maybe as if she had never been in a similar situation before, and in any case met very few people.

The car stayed in his rearward window, and he went slowly so as not to lose sight, or cause her to go at a higher speed than usual. They parked side by side, at more or less the same time, as if one car was then to take on board packets of drugs from the other. He laughed at such an idea while with her, and led a way to the lounge.

You had to be careful even what you thought with such a person, though he knew he could manage her, easy after the long hard school with Amanda. Oh, how she’d occasionally dug her own grave! Setting the drinks down, he saw himself in a mirror, a glance, glad to be wearing a jacket and tie under his coat instead of the normal shirt and jeans. ‘You must have married young, to be with a man wounded in the war.’

‘Well!’ Undoing her coat showed a nice rounded bosom under a grey sweater. Lines by her mouth, but the skin was otherwise pale and clear. Shapely hands with long fingers reached for her drink, to sip. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘I mean, for a woman in her forties.’

He liked her laugh also. ‘A tiny bit more than that, I’m afraid.’

This silenced him, for a moment. Better get back onto the topic of morse code – as she had hoped he would. ‘So your husband still listens to the music of the spheres?’

‘It’s good for him.’

She wasn’t the sort of person you should lie to, but he had no option. ‘I haven’t heard it for years.’

That wasn’t so good. ‘According to Howard you can never forget it.’

‘True enough. But you do get a bit rusty.’

‘He says listening to the wireless keeps lack of moral fibre at bay. His words, but I suppose it does. He listens happily for hours.’

‘He must be good at it.’

‘Oh, the things he gets!’

He would like to know. ‘Really?’

‘He sends morse to himself sometimes. He has one of those tapper things, a key, and says it keeps his hand in, though what for, I can’t imagine. But you can see what a good hobby it would be for a blind man.’

The pint was almost gone and he wanted more. Why was it ideal, even heavenly, to drink while talking to a woman? Actually, it was good to drink whatever you were doing, but he would hold back in quantity because a woman like her would think little of him if he took too much. ‘Sounds like a sort of therapy.’

‘That’s exactly what it is.’ She took another sip of her fruit drink. ‘Did you like doing it when it was your work?’

‘It was a good job, as jobs go. I’m Richard, by the way.’

‘Mine’s Laura.’

He wondered whether she’d been quite ready to give it, or as if she didn’t find his unusual enough. ‘It got me about the world.’

‘But you liked your work?’

‘Sure. It was enjoyable being at sea, but better still on land, eventually.’ So she was a lonely woman, full of unshed liveliness, looking after her disabled husband, a fate as dull as death. ‘But I’ve never had any reason to complain about my existence.’

‘Neither have I.’ She was a little too definite about that. ‘And neither does my husband.’ Talking so openly surprised and pleased her. Even with the vicar at church her conversation had been distant. It was hard enough with Howard at times, to unravel words from the stone within. What would he say when he knew she’d met such a pleasant man?

‘All the same, he sounds something of a hero for not complaining. People whine too much these days. They don’t know they’re born. I only hope I’d be the same as your husband.’

‘People have to be, when it comes down to it. He has his black moments, usually when there’s an east wind like today. He tries hard to keep it to himself, but of course, I’d know, wouldn’t I?’

You poor woman, married to a wind vane and barometer rolled into one, sometimes the same with him, though nothing a few pints wouldn’t cure. He supposed they lived on a pension, and couldn’t afford to drink. She was modestly dressed, but attractive all the same. For a few bob these days you could get rigged out from an Oxfam shop. Amanda was wearing such stuff when he first met her, and she looked stunning. The handbag might have come from a charity shop, unless she loved the style because it reminded her of better days. ‘It’s certainly not the time to be at sea. Can I get you another?’

‘I ought to be going. Thank you again for fixing my wheel.’

‘I enjoyed a bit of work. You made my day.’ To touch her hand was definitely not on. He drew her chair back so that she could stand.

If I were married to a man who could see, this is what it would be like, she thought. ‘There’s just one thing I would like to ask you.’

He opened the door. ‘What’s that?’

They stood in the porch, looking at the rain, and wondering about each other. ‘I really don’t know how to put it. I’m not used to asking favours, not of a person I’ve just met.’

Such punctiliousness would have been irritating in someone else. He wondered what she wanted him to do, but decided he would do it anyway, though would it be obscene or obsequious? She obviously expected him to run a mile. He detected a layer of ice over the turbulent sea inside, but if he walked on it he would fall through. Did she know how icily charming she was, how flagrantly attractive? Married or not, he wanted her telephone number, but it would be stupid to ask. ‘All you have to do is speak.’

‘I know.’ She felt seventeen again, gauche, uncertain, too proud perhaps. ‘If it’s completely outrageous, just say so, and I’ll understand.’

He took time to light a cigarette. ‘What, then?’

‘You can imagine my husband is a desperately lonely man at times, though he wouldn’t agree. He wouldn’t like to hear me say so, either. But I wondered if you would call some time, and talk to him about wireless. Even send something on his little apparatus.’

He’d sensed what was coming. ‘I see.’

‘I told you it was a mad idea.’ She trawled the car keys from her handbag, knowing that indeed it was, though she felt no shame, rather glad at not having been too stiff-necked to ask, all part of the ease of meeting him. ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll be going now. It really has been nice talking to you. And you were so very good to help me with the wheel.’

He would, in the classic phrase, blow his cover. Or he might not, with so much experience in telling untruths. Amanda knew him as the epitome of slyness. ‘There’s no real you,’ she said. ‘What bit there might be you keep for other people. I don’t get a look in.’ No more you will, he had thought, but as always she was both right and wrong, which was what made her so maddening.

‘Of course I’ll come,’ he said to Laura. ‘I’ll be glad to. It’ll bring the old life on board back to me as well, though I may be a little slow on the key at first. My life in any case gets pretty dull at times.’ Except when malevolent sunspots suck away the vital parts of a message. ‘Though I do have to go to London from time to time. Or on a boat trip.’

‘It obviously would be whenever is convenient for you.’

She was as pleased as a schoolgirl. Charming. Amazing how soon you could make those happy whom you had just met – or who you hardly knew. ‘Give me your telephone number, if you like. I’ll call you when I can, to see if it’s a good time.’

‘It will be, I’m sure. Blast, I don’t have a pen.’

They stood apart, to let someone go inside. ‘Here’s one. I have to be off soon, though. I have a business appointment in half an hour. But I’ll be sure to call.’ He most certainly would, though it wasn’t easy to say when. ‘I’ll be very interested to meet your husband.’

SIX

Howard had many acquaintances on shortwave, except that while he knew them they didn’t know him. They could have suspected him but probably didn’t. They were recognisable by the text, and by the idiosyncrasies of the sending. He felt the spring in the wrist or the ache at their elbow. Those with speed and rhythm were artists at the game, whereas he spotted some by the slow and awkward delivery, though they weren’t necessarily inexperienced, merely taken over by a spirit of syncopation out of boredom, or they were drawing attention to themselves by showing off, and maliciously wanting to drive people halfway potty who had to take down their message. Operators by trade were often naive regarding the big world beyond, and neither knew nor cared what effect they had on others, all of which helped Howard in his recognition.

Sometimes they sounded as if touching two pieces of electrified wire together, a feat he remembered seeing in a film as a youth, when a train going into the far West was wrecked in an Indian ambush. The telegraph operator, who happened to be on board as a passenger, climbed up a pole by the line, cut a wire, and by touching the two pieces together to make morse, sent a message to get help from the US Cavalry. Howard couldn’t recall whether the man had been struck by an arrow at the end of his effort, and fallen from a great height, or whether he had survived for a hero’s welcome.

He knew the various radio operators also by the tone of their equipment, whether it came from the steely precision of the Royal Navy’s sublime telegraphists, or the bird-like slowness of machine morse giving airfield weather conditions from the RAF. He could tell Soviet operators on ships and at shore stations bouncing telegrams to each other by the ball-bearing quality of the transmitters and the record speed at which they were sent, too fast to write but not to read, though he suspected the messages were tape recorded on reception and slowed down at leisure for transcription. He knew the various nationalities from the language used, able to read (but not understand) Greek, Turkish, Romanian and German, though French was easy enough.

Fingers on the key called for a flexible wrist. The amount of energy pulsing from the elbow varied as much as a snowflake or thumb print. Energy was fed from the heart and backbone, an engine sending power to the hand, so that he could tell when a man (or, who knows, a woman?) was tired, or irascible, or lackadaisical, or slapdash, or indeed calm, competent, conscientious, and incapable of exhaustion. Maybe the latter played tennis, or went swimming, or sawed an uncountable number of logs to keep his fire going. The difference was minimal but always detectable. If a man was tired he might be unhappy, or at the end of his stint. If someone was easy and competent they had no worries, or they had just come on watch and weren’t yet jaded. Some operators had a natural sense of rhythm, and rattled on like talented pianists, while others, a minority, laboured in such a way as made them tiring to listen to, and he couldn’t imagine why they had taken up such a job, though it was certainly better than working on a motorway or building site. The behaviour of the fist was mysterious, but with earphones clamped Howard became a remote and all-knowing god, skilled in interpretation but, like a true god, unable to help anyone avoid their fate, even supposing he would want to.

He knew from experience that the most difficult place from which to send morse was an aeroplane. Though seated at a comfortable-enough desk, albeit most of the time cramped, your fist was at the mercy of vibration and turbulence, not to mention the vagaries of height and aerial. He had heard Chinese operators flying between Peking and Urumchi sending hourly position reports, a fluke of reception because after a few weeks the signals faded. The Russians also had radio men on board civil and military aircraft. He understood them because they used – as did the Chinese – the same international Q signals which he had used in the Air Force, detailing times of arrival and departure, height, speed and geographical locality.

The station most persistently monitored was that of the direction-finding system near Moscow, which he first came across during a morning’s idle trawl. The operator in a plane would tap out a request for latitude and longitude, and the man in Moscow would ask him to press his morse key for ten or so seconds of continuous squeak. This the man in the aircraft willingly did, and a minute or so later, Vanya (as Howard called him) on earth near Moscow, had worked his technological magic and the position was sent.

After recording each message Howard fixed a metaphorical pin on a map of the Soviet Union displayed in his mind. In the beginning he’d had to ask Laura for help in placing such coordinates, until he became familiar enough with the geographical graticule to do without her. The operator who communicated the result of his bearings did not have the lightning dexterity of his marine counterpart, and an aircraft would often have trouble making contact. The fist of Vanya on the ground was sometimes erratic, while his correspondent in the plane was occasionally affected by turbulence.

Such interceptions allowed Howard to play a game called ‘Spot the Bomber’, and if Laura came in to say lunch was ready he would laugh: ‘Shan’t be a moment. I have a bomber on the line.’ She read him an item about Soviet planes trying to manipulate the weather over the Arctic Ocean, and he heard some from that region asking for their position. Others were so far north they must have been on ‘Bear Patrol’, and he’d even heard the hesitant squeak of planes on the Vladivostok run.

The Moscow operator suffered from ennui, because in eight hours of keeping watch not more than a dozen planes would ask for their position, and each transmission did not last for more than a few minutes. Howard assumed that Vanya closed his eyes now and again, for a plane would sometimes call and get no reply. On the other hand either the plane didn’t hear the land station, or the land station didn’t hear the aeroplane, which could happen if the latter’s equipment was a few kilocycles off frequency. Cannier airborne operators would try to catch Vanya out by sending a single letter V, but he would invariably shoot back rapidly with:.’Who’s calling me?’ and contact would be made, with no evidence of sloth at all.

He pictured Vanya, at his direction-finder’s Consol, as a man with cropped fair hair and, of course, blue eyes. He was underpaid, and became more and more bored as the hours went by and the airwaves stayed empty. What kind of person was he? When a contact was made he displayed a very individual style, would start by sending with painful slowness and then, suddenly, maybe to fox or catch out the other operator, whom he considered to be an interloper till proved a friend because he had need of his services, speed along like a virtuoso, overall erratic but good even when bad, unwilling to be constrained by the age old parameters of Samuel B. Morse. Perhaps he even wished at times that the genius inventor of the telegraphic code had stuck to his painting and had not come up out of nowhere with his disciplined style of communication.

Laura had taken a biography of the great man out of the library, and read a chapter a night to Howard till the book was finished – the only entertainment she had known which had kept him away from his ‘precious wireless’. ‘More about Samuel,’ he would say after supper, knowing she smiled on reaching for the book.

Samuel B. Morse had been the white hope of American classical painting, and earned a fair living covering enormous canvases with the dignified faces of the worthy.

Returning from a tour of Europe on the steamship Sully in 1832, Morse conceived the idea of an electric telegraph, and a couple of years later he had devised a working model which sent letters from one side of the room to the other. As a concept it seemed to others a step into the white and empty spaces of the unknown, the blank future that their imaginations could not envisage, and certainly not colonise with science. But Morse had a practical mind and overcame the setbacks. ‘If we knew the how and why of such a brain even the secrets of the universe might one day be revealed,’ Howard thought, after the author of the book had said: ‘His inventive brain, nurtured by painting, putting what the eye can see onto canvas, helped if not actually propelled him to make the leap, art being ever the precursor of invention.’

From that point the narrative became thrilling, and Laura was sometimes persuaded to go on reading till nearly midnight, taking him through the inventor’s struggle to have his idea accepted by the US Congress, though it didn’t happen till 1843, by which time he had constructed the famous code ‘which will forever bear his name.’ Howard lived, as the code was put together, in the light of inspiration, Samuel no doubt making a chart so that he could alter and modify, until the perfect arrangements of dots and dashes for each letter and number was fixed for all time.

The triumph of the first transmission on a line between Washington and Baltimore, a mere thirty nautical miles, called forth the immortal phrase from the Bible, which Morse chose to send: ‘WHAT GOD HATH WROUGHT,’ because he modestly believed, like all artists, that neither praise nor responsibility could be accepted whatever was achieved in his name.

Howard used the phrase from then on as an exercise when his key was plugged into the oscillator, a way of flexing his fingers and warming his spirit, on no better concept than Morse’s chosen words.

The vision of Morse was of the earth being circled and criss-crossed by lines of more-or-less instant communication, and this eventually came about when cables were laid under the sea. A more complete girdling of the world – which Morse imagined but did not live to see – occurred when the equally great Marconi invented a method of signalling without wires. The ability to send news and save life at sea was achieved.

After Vanya had tapped out the plane’s position, thanks to Morse and Marconi (in some sort of homage, though he didn’t know it) boredom once more threw its woolly blanket over him. When no requests came for his assistance the sky must have been clear across the vastness of the Soviet Empire, all navigators knowing where they were by looking out of the window, only asking the radio officer to use the facility as a final resort, when cloud went from nought to forty thousand feet over Siberia and the Northern Ocean.

Most of the time Vanya sat with earphones around his neck instead of clamped where they should be, and brooded at not having any money in his pocket. He didn’t give a damn anymore, tilting his chair so far back and knowing that the legs would eventually break, but telling himself there were plenty more where that came from, and if not, so what? He looked boggle-eyed at the morse key and receiver needle, and hoped for another call on his expertise to stop him going berserk and breaking up the table as well.

Listening to the uninhabited wavelength was, for Vanya, like being blindfolded in a room with no roof. A hissing phase of atmospherics scribbled across the sky, and then for no reason – Howard tried guessing at the import of what came next – a rising crescendo of noise filling the earphones like being inside the thrust of a passing comet, gathering power until tipping into diminuendo, when its disintegrating tail vanished into the firmament, beyond all range, as if God had been about to say something but had changed His mind. He was coated with the irradiating and gaseous pitchblende of despair, when a quick whistle passed like a bird, mocking him in his blindness.

Behind the static, what seemed like a ghost plane would start sending morse, indecipherable, too distant perhaps, tinkling to someone on the far side of Moscow. He listened for a while, till he doubted anyone was there at all. Some wizardry of atmospherics was deceiving him, as a mirage would trick the eyes of one in the desert who could see. He thought, when the signals again floated towards him, that because he couldn’t read the message it must be one of the most important ever sent. Meant for him alone, it was unreachable, he had missed it, had not been sufficiently alert, or he had been maliciously deceived.

Vanya, leaning forward and putting his cigarette in the ash tray made by himself from an old tin lid, tapped the key, as if he had got the pip, you might say, sent a dot, one squeak into the aether which flitted over half the world, a single pulse liberated, picked up by Howard with a smile, the letter E, for Easy when he’d been flying, but now E for Echo in the modern phonetic alphabet.

Then Vanya went back to musing on the charms of his girlfriend (we’ll call her Galya, Howard decided) or he resumed reading his magazine until, fifteen minutes later, he tapped the key three times, three dots in a row, and artfully spaced, rhythmically plinked without reason but as if to show he was still alive, was impatient in fact, and craved to be communicated with.

His idea of heaven would be to have a dozen aircraft calling at the same time for their position, the wavelength sounding as crowded as if a big buck rat had gnawed a way into the parrot house at the zoo, but the most Vanya ever got was when one plane came on a few minutes after the other, and then he had to pay for the luxury by waiting more than an hour for the next client.

Goaded into action by an unquiet spirit he sent random dots, yet diffidently now because Big Brother (Radio) might be listening for such infringements. You couldn’t be shot for it any more, but might be posted to one of those remote mosquito-infested places in the Tundra which, from ten thousand metres above, he was occasionally called to give a pinpoint. Best not to take chances, however, by letting yourself go completely but, oh! if he could, what a tale Howard might hear! Such pips and squeaks were not necessarily proof that Vanya was an alert listener, though Howard assumed he was, but it seemed obvious that because the dots were so brief, albeit chirpy, he could be a very smart sender whenever called on to communicate.

Such operators were easily bored, and jittery when alone for too long. Having the spark gaps of the morse key only a foot or two from ever itching fingers, the temptation to give a tap now and again is more than flesh and blood can tolerate. Howard recalled flying over Germany as a long period of monotony, because radio silence had to be kept in case some German listener picked up the signal and beamed guns or fighters onto you. He had yearned to give a tap or two, even to call up a nonexistent station and send a fictitious message, but aircraft keys had a wider gap in case the bouncing should close the contacts and cause a ripple, and to tap the key meant a positive press, thereby discouraging the impulse.

Laura had read that every telegraphist in the Japanese fleet, on its approach to Pearl Harbor, was wisely ordered to put a slip of paper between the contacts in case an operator accidentally touched the key and revealed the presence of their ships before the surprise attack.

Vanya had received no such order because Russia wasn’t at war. Maybe he knew an operator in one of the planes, a woman perhaps, because the pattern of his dots, three in a row, like the tiniest of sparks, were as quick as if coming from a half-burnt log which had rolled off the fire. It was merely Vanya’s form of identification, to let her know he was on watch and thinking about her. Perhaps he would come out one day and make his statement of intent, go mad, in other words. No chance of that, so Howard had to do what he could by thinking for him, building a 3-D identikit picture, which could only stay in his world because no reciprocal chit-chat was either permitted or possible.

Every wireless operator lived in Ionosphere Gardens, and Vanya was no exception. Maybe he didn’t have an airborne sweetheart, but he sure had one, if not several, in the place where he was born. He goes there every month or so. At the bus station, having not quite shaken the radio dust off his feet, he drums morse with his fingertips on the window pane, scorched with impatience. If he’s lucky he can stay a few days in the village, where he earns extra roubles repairing the peasants’ broken radios, being a dab hand at finding valves and even transistors from street markets in town. With Marconi fingers he is seen as a young man made good, and everyone loves him. The aerial blues don’t get at him in the countryside, a magic bucolic heaven compared to the grim buildings near Moscow surrounded by aerials.

When the bus lands him back there and he sits down, and tunes in, atmospherics make sounds as if someone is sobbing far away, the breaking of a heart in deepest misery. You need earphones to hear the fully nuanced music of the spheres, so he puts them firmly on, even living out a pestilential itch in his groin to keep them there in case he should miss something. No distraction of family, neighbours, traffic or sweethearts until Grushenka, the station slavey in headscarf and baggy clothes, brings him, halfway through his stint, a slice of black bread and a glass of lemon tea. Whenever she does he manages somehow to touch her bottom, and she slaps his hand before going huffily out – though Howard couldn’t spill this part of his fantasy to Laura, because even the blind must have their secrets.

It took Vanya some time to get sense out of a plane with a faulty transmitter, a dull and rusty note, albeit sharp enough for him, fitful mews morsing from the outer world. He pinned it down like a butterfly in the specimen box and, still on a lover’s wavelength, sent a position report to set it free.

Laura tapped the shoulder of someone on a comparable wavelength, so he stood for a hug-and-kiss, glad to be released from his peculiar bondage.

‘You were a long way out,’ she said.

‘Too far, maybe. I’ve got you to thank for bringing me back. I often wonder where I’d end up if you didn’t.’ He would sit without food or sleep for days until he died, except that he would have to come away from wherever he was to go out to the toilet, she reminded him, as he followed her into the kitchen for tea.

‘I had a puncture coming back from Bracebridge, and a very pleasant man changed the wheel for me.’

Even when she only went to the bottom of the hill he would hear about all that was seen and heard, every incident no matter how minor or irrelevant, she decided, to keep his mind alive with things other than radio listening. Sometimes by a slight downward movement of his lips, he showed impatience at such trivialities, maybe thinking she ought to invent a few occurrences to make her revelations more interesting. But that kind of talent would be too close to lying, and common sense hadn’t equipped her for it.

The lid made a satisfying clunk onto the big teapot, then the sound of the cake tin being opened. ‘He was a gentleman, then, to help you.’

‘He was. It was a muddy lay-by. I’d never have got the wheel off. When he’d done he asked me to have a drink in The Foxglove, though I suspect he only wanted to wash his hands. He was about forty’ – she made a picture for Howard to see, of more details than she remembered. ‘We chatted over the drinks – I had an orange juice – and do you know, he told me he’d been a radio officer in the Merchant Navy. When I mentioned your hobby he said he’d like to meet you one day. I didn’t know what to say, but couldn’t really rebuff him. He’d been so kind.’

Howard, on his second cup of tea, decided that listening was thirsty work. ‘You should have said yes. Anyone who is good to you is my friend for life.’

‘Oh, I didn’t put him off. Couldn’t really. He said you and he belonged to a fraternity. I liked that. We exchanged telephone numbers. I suppose he could have some fascinating things to say.’

He assembled crumbs from around his plate. ‘What’s his line of work now?’

‘He didn’t say exactly. We weren’t in the pub for long. But I gathered it was something to do with boats.’

‘Would be, I suppose. Did he tell you when he’d call?’

‘He didn’t promise. Seemed uncertain, because of his work. But I think he was quite keen on it, because he said he would as soon as he could.’

He had wondered why she was so long away, often did, though in this case the adventure was worth it if he could one day gab with an ex-Merchant Navy key-basher. He often had the dread that Laura would go out and never come back. Just like that. She would be spirited away forever. Hard to know why he should think so, though if you’d had one disaster another was always possible. Maybe that was it, no other reason at all. To make it unthinkable he told her about his fear, and they laughed at such an impossibility, an evening taken up with speculation as to what he would do if left alone in the house with no money. The fantasy enthralled them through twilight and into supper. He was inventive, as if he had heard the solution suggested by a message on the radio.

‘If I was alone, and had to get by, you know what I’d do?’

‘Can’t imagine,’ she said.

‘Nor me. But it’s just come to me. I’d take my morse key and oscillator, and a groundsheet, which I’d sit on outside the big supermarket. I would have a notice on a bit of cardboard beside me, having got Arthur the postman to write it, saying: “GOOD LUCK AND LONG LIFE TO YOU ALL.” I’d sit there, and send it in morse at maximum volume over and over again, my cap in front for passers by to drop money into. It’d be such an original way of begging that I’d be bound to make several pounds a day for my food, especially if I went into the supermarket at closing time to scoop up stuff that had passed its sell-by date.’

‘A brilliant idea,’ she laughed. ‘You wouldn’t be a beggar, though, you’d be a busker, an entertainer. Perhaps you’d be spotted, and you’d make a tape, and get into the top ten. You’d be interviewed on the radio. You might even go on television.’

‘Well, you never know, do you? Maybe I should do it anyway. It wouldn’t be a boring life, because I’d hear some very interesting remarks from people as I sat on the pavement. Children with pretty young mums would be the best givers. They’d be spellbound at the music from my morse machine, and have to be dragged away screaming because they wanted one to play with as well. Maybe an ex-service wireless op would be so intrigued he’d drop me a quid, and even stop for a chat. What a life it would be, as long as the police didn’t move me on.’

‘You could go somewhere else,’ Laura said, ‘couldn’t you? Outside the church, or the library. I’d certainly put something in your cap. In fact I might be so amazed by your act that I’d fall in love with you and carry you off.’

‘And we’d soon be back where we started,’ he said, ‘which is no bad place to be.’

‘I do hope that chap calls,’ she said.

A careless and wayward signal came like a fly into his web – VIP from Lux Australis. He asked Laura to look the call sign up in his manual. Sensitive fingers were for splitting kilocycle hairs so as to get aircraft captains giving their position crossing the North Atlantic, a constant coming and going.

The cannon shell that had swept through the Lancaster over Essen smashed the radio and blinded him. The smell of metal and burning wires in a cold darkness threw him to the deck, on hands and knees looking for his eyes, for a place to see and cool the heat of his flesh, to find a window to the outside and discover what happened. He wanted to know where he was, even to leap from the plane and find out on whatever part of the earth.

Under his radio desk, locked in a box which Laura might know about but had never asked him to open, were his training manuals and discharge papers, the last resort to riffle through, as he used to, though no longer necessary. They lay there, best left alone in the hope of being forgotten. A life of action was no longer open to him, had been over from the age of twenty, but you didn’t complain. It wasn’t done. Life in an aeroplane had been all he wanted, made for no other, and when it was taken away he no longer felt any connection with his past or himself. For a while he was drowning in black space, happy that no one could realise his pain. He seemed normal, but the clock had stopped, pendulum and mainspring gone. Like others no doubt, he smiled when tea was brought, or his bed was made, or the MO asked how he felt.

‘Fine, Sir. Never felt better.’

‘Good chap.’

It was the only answer. Wanting to die was lack of moral fibre, and when he thought of Laura he craved even more to float into extinction and never come back. Yet when she came, and he heard the gentle plain words she had to say, he decided to live. Her tone suggested that a similar disaster had happened to her, and there could be no greater sympathy than that. He couldn’t but want to live with a young woman who had such miraculous powers of empathy that she would match herself so equally with him.

Even so, the mind was too often in turmoil, though no matter, as long as he kept it to himself. The Flying Dutchman was ever at the helm. What would he have done and been if he had led an ordinary life? The question hadn’t popped up of late, meaning that his existence had become normal. One less architect or clerk in the world made no difference. He could have been anything, but now he was everything because he was himself again, had been for a long time. Put your hat on in the House of the Lord, and say how do you do to the German Numbers Woman.

Perhaps it was her day’s break, but trawling the higher reaches of the shortwave spectrum, he put his fingers to the typewriter and recorded that: ‘The Indian Government has produced a macabre plan to clean up the polluted Ganges where hundreds of corpses are brought each day and floated down the river on makeshift funeral pyres. Now three thousand soft shelled turtles are to be introduced into the waters around the Holy City of Varanasi (which he assumed was Benares) where they still feed off the corpses.’

Such a gem made his day, better than taking down screeds of gobbledegook which blighted dreams and damaged otherwise untroubled sleep. The scriptures of the aether shape the heart. He tapped that too onto his typewriter, as if it had come through in morse, though what government would send that out? – signing off with: ‘What God hath wrought.’

SEVEN

Richard focussed his Barr and Stroud 8 x 30 binoculars on the block-like radio and television detector van parked in the lay-by at the end of the lane: two straight aerials to one side, and a Bellini-tosi system above the driver’s cabin. Windows blacked out, the only identification mark, apart from licence plates which he could not see, was a POLICE sign on the side.

He looked down on a grey stone wall, covered with ivy and overgrown grass. The wooden lattice fence at the end of the kitchen garden had gone mildewed. It was a bloody disgrace, the whole plot surfaced with a thin layer of dead leaves, and a few upright stalks of etiolated currant bushes. Green-trunked trees beyond were tangled with last autumn’s twigs, and made a silhouette between him and the neighbouring hill. Ken was supposed to keep the place tidy, but was only interested in growing vegetables they didn’t need but he did.

If they were searching for a transmitter they wouldn’t find one, but he switched off the communications receiver in case a microphone was beamed at the open window. He passed the time sending a few paragraphs from The Times on his morse key, after disconnecting the oscillator, just the rhythmical clicks to keep him occupied while wondering what the hell the car was doing there. After five minutes his wrist ached, and he was making mistakes. It wasn’t easy, without half an hour’s daily practice.

He supposed the van was parked so that the crew inside could rest from their work of looking for clandestine television sets. They were no doubt eating sandwiches, and drinking coffee out of flasks. On the other hand maybe they were investigating him. Perhaps his more-than-ordinary aerials had attracted their attention, or some local snooper had reported hearing suspicious noises. Well, it was a free country, and you could tune in to what you liked in the privacy of your home. As long as you didn’t write what you heard or show it to anybody else. Some hopes of that. Anything sent in plain language was fair game as far as he was concerned. Reception would be just as good if he dismantled the main aerial and threw a piece of inconspicuous wire out of the window.

They drove away ten minutes later, so he returned to his work on the highly forbidden frequencies, reflecting that they had nothing on him. He was always careful to renew the television licence.

He opened a manual from the United States which gave the police and security frequencies, and checked them one by one on the radio. They were silent for a while, or mere oddments on short wave bounding up to the heaviside layer and coming down and leaping up again, invisibly around the world and diminishing in potency to vanishing point. Then one of the Interpol frequencies became active, allowing him to pull in a choice item of a ship that had departed from a port in Turkey. The message queried its load of phosphates, and gave the boat’s appearance: ‘Structure just aft of midships, twin funnels aft of bridge, hull dark blue with bright green bulwarks, fore and aft funnels dark grey with black top. Keep a sharp look out. Thought to have destination Trieste.’

To prove he was earning his keep he took the weather for that part of the Mediterranean: ‘Aegean and south of Crete sectors, northwesterly wind, Force 5, increasing. Scattered showers, moderate visibility, slight sea, outlook changeable,’ and so on for another half sheet. If the ship was known about, its progress could be realistically monitored. Should any message be due from its master he would keep watch on the maritime channel. Maybe the ship had nothing to do with them at all, but every scrap of information had to be passed on in case it was useful. He phoned the signals through, then posted them for confirmation in the box at the end of the lane.

Back in his room he thought it hard to know how long his spying could go on. Sooner or later an astute organisation like Interpol would wonder if their plain-language signals were being intercepted. Didn’t they know someone was always listening, and that hand-sent morse wasn’t secure? Seemed not. Maybe they were being cunning, running fictional texts so as to fox people like him, plotting to lure the mob into a trap. What a web of deceit he would have spun in their place, the best and neatest spider in the business, purely on the offchance, so subtle, so complicated, so certain to get the drug smugglers to a pre-arranged spot where launches and armed helicopters would be lurking on red alert – with an alacrity that chilled his spine.

Circumstances and accident had put him on the opposite side, because his intelligence reports were better paid, not to mention the boat trips. Working for law abiders would have been more permanent, possibly more absorbing, not to mention – he laughed out loud – there being a pension at the end. Well, they could stuff their perks and pensions. All he knew was that drug running would go on forever, and the money was better for whoever got involved.

The trouble was that sooner or later Interpol would modernise its communications, though he would try to keep up with them. They would go radio teletype, or send a message in a single burst which couldn’t be deciphered, but he would be ready for them because the clever and enterprising Japanese already had decoders on the market, and one was on its way from a shop in the north of England. He would only be defeated if they came up with a cipher he could not break, one-day message pads impossible to disentangle. It would be little enough trouble for them, and he was expecting it at any time. Five-letter groups would rip across the screen of his decoder, money spent for nothing, bugger-all left but to confess to his contacts in London that their spy branch would be closing down, at least on the telegraphy spectrum.

For a month or so he might pass on messages out of his imagination, based on the knowledge he’d so far acquired. He would tell them about phantom boats heading for secret coves, and ghostly small aeroplanes alighting on disused airfields, or the arrival of teams from Colombia about to flood the airports of western Europe with false-bottomed suitcases stuffed with the latest paradise powders.

The chaos would set them to hunt him down and kill him, unless he never went to sleep and sat at the window with his two-two rifle beamed in the lane. Boys’ Own stuff. He would explore the aether for other stations. There was always something to pick up, with scanners coming on the market.

Trouble was you couldn’t tune in to every frequency at once, though maybe the blind man who had been doing it for far longer had stumbled on a few items Richard didn’t know about, wavelengths or stations providing priceless gen he couldn’t have found by himself. Blind Howard might be someone who, in his innocence, would boastfully babble on about what he had alighted onto like a cloth-footed fly in his darkness. Any signals fed to the boss would keep the pay-cheques coming, so it might be the best idea he’d had for a long time.

Amanda came in with cups of tea.

‘This is my lucky day.’

‘You can say that again, though I don’t know why you sit all the hours God sends at that bloody silly radio.’

‘I’m hoping to find out how long I’ve got to live.’

‘Tell me if you do. I’ll want to know.’ She laughed, and sat in the large padded armchair, balancing her cup. His table was laden with books full of figures and letters she didn’t understand, notepads, and three (three!) radio sets. He had placed the table in front of the window so that he could look out while listening. The floor was covered with a tough grey cord, though the strands were shining through under his table at the wear from his nervous feet. The windowless wall was taken up by a chart of the radio facilities of the British Isles, a map of northwest Europe, and a chart of the Mediterranean. He liked playing captain on the bridge, between his yachting trips. ‘I expect you’re going to live forever, anyway, so why bother to find out?’

He faced her, hoping not to miss anything good on the waveband while talking. ‘Is that what you want?’

‘I love you, don’t I?’

‘Do you?’

‘I must, if I say so.’

‘I love you, too.’

‘There’s nothing like hearing good news.’

She often threw at him that he never talked, so he disproved her now by dredging up the incident while driving back from Bracebridge. ‘I saw this woman in a lay-by. Her car had a flat tyre, so I pulled in and changed it for her.’

‘Your good deed of the year. Was she pretty?’

‘I suppose she had been in her time. She was still good looking, but a bit over forty.’

‘A really good deed, then. I’ll bet you didn’t know she was that old before you pulled in.’

‘No, but I was glad I helped her. We went to The Foxglove afterwards for a drink. It turned out that she was married, to a man who’s been blind since the war. He got shot up in a bomber. Sounds a lonely old cove, but the coincidence is that he’s also an ex-wireless operator, and spends all his time listening to morse. She begged me to call on them when I could, and talk to him. I’d cheer him up, no end, she said.’

‘Another good deed?’

‘I might do it.’

‘Why not? Before your next trip, I suppose.’

‘I don’t have one lined up at the moment.’

‘As long as you let me know when you have.’ She stood, kissed him on the lips, as if in thank you for the story. ‘I must be off now. I’m going to call on Doris in Angleton.’

‘Have a nice time.’

‘I’ll try.’

In such a good phase she was bound to.

‘Love you,’ she called.

What they got up to he couldn’t imagine. Probably went to a pub and had a jolly time. His mood for eavesdropping had misted away. The front door banged. Her car bumped over the ruts on the lane. He liked being alone, not listening to the radio. Strange, though, that all his best transcripts came when Amanda was in the house. Maybe she provided the electricity that gave persistence and brought luck. When she was out he was dilatory, got up too often and looked mindlessly at the charts, or switched on the wireless for music, and wondered why the hell he was where he was and doing what he did. Much better to be crewing one of the mob’s small boats, in at the sharp end with all the risks of getting caught, the beer cans going overboard like confetti for a fish’s wedding, and banter to keep you amused on changing watch.

If anyone asked where he came from he always answered ‘Shithouse-on-the-Ouse.’ You don’t have that sort of accent, they might reply, and he would tell them that’s because I was brought up properly, meaning mind your own business, which they usually did. Where Shithouse-on-the-Ouse was he had no idea, but it must have been a seaport somewhere because the old man had been a pastry cook on a liner, and they were always on the trek from one place to another.

His father had seen no greater success in life than for Richard to become an officer in the Merchant Service, but Richard could only get as close to that heavy level by going back to college and training to be a radio operator, with which the old man had to be satisfied, and more or less was, since it gave him officer status on board. Poor old sod thinks I’m still connected with it, and would walk off the end of Southport pier if he knew what I was up to.

His first job was on a trawler, but he had to give a hand with the catch now and again, and didn’t like the smell. Then he worked on a series of superannuated tramp steamers that took him around the world, each billet varying from poor to awful, nothing to do but call it experience. As second radio officer on tankers he enjoyed dodging pirates in the Far East. He carried a service revolver, but they were ordered to offer no resistance and just hand over cash, cigarettes and whisky to any cutthroats who got on the ship. He would often lie in wait, a one-man ambush, and regretted that no Lascar mob had ever thought to climb on board in the night, so that he could shoot them down.

He went from ship to ship, but didn’t get far enough, or quick enough, up the so-called ladder of success. For him there seemed to be no such thing. Maybe there was some defect in his character that others saw but he did not. He wasn’t unhappy. He could wait. Life up and down the Gulf Stream on his last ship was cushy enough, until one evening in Maracaibo, after they had loaded, someone approached him behind a shed on the quayside and offered five thousand pounds if he would take a bundle to an address in England. He hadn’t imagined it to contain soap, and that was a fact, but so much money never came amiss, and he got the packet through without being stopped, the first indication in his life that, while not cut out for honesty, he must have an honest face. He liked the bright light in his head, and the rhythmical buzzing that marked time with his legs as he went through the customs, an experience more intense than any to be got from a taste of whatever the parcel in his kit contained.

Honesty and naivety went together, he had to suppose, because when asked to do the same again he turned the proposal down. The young thug in dark glasses made it plain that if he didn’t take another consignment they would shop him for the first transgression. Richard let the man know he had only refused because he needed a hefty upping in the pay. The man swayed off to use the telephone, which brought a higher up from across the street. To them Richard played a normal hand, merely business sense, showing they dealt with someone hardening to the realities of the trade. Because he seemed no fool they paid half as much again. After the third trip he said let’s be cunning. Nobody’s luck lasts. Let’s find other ways, other routes. From then on he was in too far to either get out or want to.

He never knew whether being frightened came first or feeling guilty at taking drugs into the country. Success made the query irrelevant. Kids had no self control, or they wanted to see how close they could get to auto-destruct, or they needed to get drunk quicker and travel further out than was possible on half pints of bitter; or they had to blast a way with the dynamite of coke, crack, hash or acid to a part of themselves they wouldn’t understand or very much like when they got there – a method towards self knowledge which, once tried, or even more than twice tried, would stop them ever getting there by normal means such as jogging or swimming forty lengths in the swimming pool, or holding their breath for five minutes. Maybe they ought not to splash out their giros, dole, wages, pocket money, or fat salary from the bank, or corrupt handouts gained by public office, on something so disagreeably lethal. It was a free country, however, so forgive them, Lord, they know only too well what they do.

But there was no excuse for what he did, nevertheless, plenty of articles in the papers to put him right, should he need it, with such money rolling in. No use telling them anymore that he wanted out. He didn’t. If it wasn’t him it would be someone else, never a shortage to volunteer as a pack mule from the poppy fields. He was up to his neck in it, thousands every trip being good enough reason to carry on.

For the captain to call him to his cabin had been an out-of-the-ordinary command. He stood up from his table, all six feet four of him, as if he might come forward for the pleasure of throwing him overboard. ‘I want you off, as soon as your contract’s up, which it will be when we get to Southampton in two days.’ The matter was so important he even paused halfway through filling his pipe. ‘You can go to hell in your own way.’

Richard never knew how he had found out. A response wasn’t called for. The captain was a bastard, straight as they came. No beard or moustache for him, all clean shaven, and no damned nonsense either. One of those menacing peepholes glared as if finding him no better than a dung beetle that had crawled up a hawser to spatter his immaculate ship, too low to shop, though he might have given him to the hangman if he’d had sufficient proof, and if that was the regulation punishment for the crime.

‘You heard me. Out of my sight!’ in a tone suggesting he would bark at someone afterwards to mop the floor where his shoes had been placed – and who could fault him? Such a man wouldn’t act without a picture of Richard taking the parcel from his contact. He’d been shopped all right, maybe a couple of times, which finally set the captain onto him. ‘Clear out.’

A hard spark in the old man’s eye indicated relish for the play whilever he stood there. Better a yes sir, not even that, only an about turn and head on fire with chagrin at his stupidity at having been caught, wondering how many seamen and officers the captain had thrown off ships during his lifetime.

That was it. No more Merchant Service for him. The more occupations you had, the longer life seemed. There was a lot to learn, so he went into the game full time, and nobody had made the connection with him yet. Few got caught out of many who did it, and he soon gave good if not plenty of unique service, especially with his intercepted wireless material. The only way to get caught – apart from redhanded, which would put him down for twenty years if the consignment was a big one – was if whoever moved the pieces wanted to get rid of him, and put a few words in the right direction. But he would never be such a one, having built up his own intelligence file, and should they ever pull that kind of stunt he’d tear such a large part of the fabric down that the sound of ripping would be in their ears forevermore. He wasn’t the naive tourist recruited in Bangkok or Turkey. If and when he got out of the trade it would be under his own terms, and in safety, the only assurance on his side that he would keep his lips tight forever.

Called to the flat on Harley Street, where the crew assembled before a trip, Richard caught a glance of deference from Mr Waistcoat, looking like a prosperous surgeon who had made pots of money pulling the tonsils out of rich Arabs. Richard called him Mr Waistcoat because he wore such a garment of the fanciest design. Richard would like to ask where he got them, except he wouldn’t be seen dead wearing one. In any case, it was best to act as if you knew your place, which at crisis time would be a more rarified locality than such a ponce could ever know about.

Waistcoat sat on the mock-Jacobean Harrods sofa and, by continuing to manicure his nails and not inviting Richard to sit down, showed his origins as rather different to those which would have led him to becoming an eminent Harley Street surgeon. Neither did the timbre of his voice suggest as much, and Richard wondered how many years in jail had been necessary to make the transformation. He was no longer a person who would feel at ease weaving through the crowds on Oxford Street, but the sort to grow pettish if a Rolls wasn’t waiting to ferry him from place to place. He was one of those who looked as if he didn’t need to shave yet shaved twice a day. As for his age he could be anything between forty and fifty, forty because he had spent twenty years inside, and fifty because he had struck it rich too young, with the canny ruthlessness never to get caught. He put his well-cared-for hands in the pockets of his open navy-blue smoking jacket so that you couldn’t see how short his nails or how burnt his fingers were.

Either way, he could be tricky and dangerous to argue with, though Richard, strengthened by years in the navy, when he hadn’t given a toss for anyone since he felt indispensable and therefore untouchable, and because his work at the wireless gave him a certain mystery (and due also to the natural power of his self-esteem) felt no need to argue. He stood, waited, and listened out of habit as much as desire, an attitude in no way allowing Waistcoat to think that not being asked to sit down meant anything to him at all.

Even so, he wasn’t surprised, or didn’t show it, when a chair was pointed out to him. ‘Take a pew.’

He didn’t care to sit when Waistcoat stayed on his feet. ‘I’d rather stand. Naval habit.’

‘I like that.’ Waistcoat leaned against the mantel shelf. ‘I like it.’

He would have to like silence as well, till he explained what he wanted. The other man, whom Richard hadn’t so far met, sat four square on an upholstered chair, by a mahogany corner cupboard whose shelves were laden with old pewter mugs and plates. Across the room was an oak chest, and an oak cupboard above containing the same sort of pewter but behind glass. Against another wall was a dwarf chest of drawers with an oval mirror on its top, the whole place like an antiques clearing house, confirming his assumption that Waistcoat had done a course or two in collectables while banged up. He felt an impulse, couldn’t think why, to come in one day with a sledge hammer and take such relics to task, half of which were no doubt fakes, the only way to get confirmation as to what sort of person Waistcoat was.

A foolish fantasy, of course. Times were good, and the future impossible to imagine, so you hoped it would go on being good, which gave no alternative except to live in the present, and since that was the only way he had ever been able to live, it posed no great difficulty.

‘It’s a short boat ride he’s got in store for us this time,’ the other man said, ‘but it ain’t through the tunnel of love.’ Richard thought if that was the case he should size the man up, who introduced himself as Jack Cannister: long greasy hair tied back in a tail, a dark three-day growth, and a ring in his left ear – steel rather than gold. He was in his late thirties, and Richard wondered where he had been dredged up from, though he had worked with worse on the boat jobs so far done. The fairly lavish payment was for sailing with such people, as much as for the quantity of stuff he helped to deliver – whatever Waistcoat might think.

‘It’ll be a little boat,’ Waistcoat said.

Cannister gave a slit-mouthed laugh. ‘Saving on petrol, are we?’

‘Shut up, prick!’ Waistcoat snapped. ‘It’s a big job for us. Simple, though, if you listen to me.’ He opened the chest of drawers, and took out a chart of the Eastern Channel, spread it on a rosewood folding table in the middle of the room. ‘Your skipper will be waiting in Rye. And he won’t be bringing back baccy for the parson nor brandy for the squire. The goodies are scattered a bit more among the population these days, if they go thieving and mugging to pay for it.’

Richard waited for him to say that England this day expected every man to do his duty, but maybe he was saving it for another time. He walked to Victoria, liking the exercise, a hundred and twenty paces to the minute. Good to rattle the limbs and test the breath, knowing he could coax some of it back on the train going home.

The mission would be an easy one, Waistcoat had said, a piece of piss, though it didn’t do to think so till it was over. Three men on a thirty-two-foot boat sailed out of Rye Harbour, set for a weekend of pleasure in Boulogne, where they would pick up a consignment and come back as if on the last leg home. When the motor got them clear of the canalised river Cannister hoisted the sail, and the skipper, whose name was Scuddilaw, gave a course. The sea, fair to calm, made progress pleasant if not easy. Richard felt sufficient apprehension to know they would bring the job off, though the others, half tanked up even when coming on board, fetched a crate of lager and sent empty tins flying over the stern.

Visibility was soon a bit off centre, when they needed to cross two lanes of Channel shipping, but Richard found the beacons on the radio, separated Boulogne from the rest, and called a course to set them straight. Scuddilaw scoffed at his fancy position system from the Consol beacon in Norway, and said he didn’t need it. He could get there blindfold. ‘And as for beacons, you can stuff ‘em. Just keep your eyes skinned for the light. My glasses aren’t as good as they used to be.’

Cannister altered course towards the wake of a tanker without being told. The weather worsened, the boat chopping up and down, but at the entrance to Boulogne harbour, nearly four hours from Rye, Richard felt obliged to do things by the book and put on the courtesy act, which meant getting on deck to haul up the French tricolour on the starboard halyard. He thought the Jolly Roger would suit them better, but the rain was horizontal, and the rope tangled, became stuck halfway, so he brought it down again and went through a clumsy unthreading with wet hands. Scud called that he should wipe his arse on it, but he reduced time into slow motion and threw back the hood of his anorak so that he could at least see, till rope and flag slid up the mast without hindrance.

They found a berth in the yacht harbour and tied up. Cannister went loping into town for a few flagons of red wine, to drink while in port, as well as get fags and booze for their duty-free, while Richard and Scud sorted out the galley to produce a fry-up and brew tea. The French harbourman called to collect their dues. ‘We’ll have to stay up all night,’ Scud said when he’d gone. ‘They could bring the stuff any time, and we have to be on hand to stow it safe.’

Richard took the weather forecast in morse from Portishead, the paper on his knee, legs twisted at the chart table so that the others could get up and down. They didn’t like his news, that by tomorrow the wind would blow up to five or six, maybe on to gale. ‘Whatever it is, we’ve got to clear out.’

While steering outward bound across the harbour Scud was suddenly aware that an Enterprise cross-Channel ferry was coming straight at them – and not too far off, at that. Richard, cursing the French flag down, heard Cannister shout through the squall: ‘Wipe the wet off yer glasses, Skip. We’ve got a visitor at the door.’

The huge white building, all lit up and merry, came head on for the crunch, and Richard thought, well if this is how it’s got to end, so be it. The life jacket might just keep him afloat, but at least he could swim. People fishing at the end of the pier looked on, as well they might, laughing at such stupidity, or misfortune.

How they missed it he would never know – God protect me from such shipmates – but Scuddilaw jeered as the escarpment went by, comic-book passengers with big eyes and red hands looking at them through the murk – and as welcome a slice of luck as Richard had so far known.

Bracing themselves for the wash, the boat went up and down like a piece of balsa, though it was nothing to when open sea struck them beyond the harbour walls, a prelude to the leg back, which was the worst small-boat journey he’d ever put up with, eight hours of corkscrewing through high waves, when the next was always hungry enough to tip them over and under.

After four hours edging way from the French coast Scuddilaw set the engine going while Richard pulled down the jib and put two reefs in the main sail, but left it up to steady the yacht under power. They stayed by the wheel, leaving chaos below deck to look after itself: better to be in the open than go down and sick your guts up, which didn’t stop Cannister spewing before they were halfway across. Richard, who boasted guts of concrete, said it must have been the meal they had in town – when Scuddilaw went to the rail as well.

Under the lee of Dungeness the sea was quieter, all of them happy to reach the welcoming arms of the river mouth that had been in sight for over an hour. The tide took them neatly between the red on port and green on starboard, and suddenly into calm water. ‘We won’t stop for the customs,’ Scud said. ‘We’ll do a Lord Nelson, and go straight on into town. Let the bastards come for us.’

The neat concrete walls to either side, holding the mounds of shingle and sand beyond, channelled them reassuringly back into nanny England, though adrenalin beat through Richard at the thought of what they carried. Even before reaching the berth a man from the customs post followed them along the straight road on his low-powered motorbike.

Tying up was quick and efficient, slotting in without trouble. ‘Here he comes,’ Scud said. ‘Let me talk.’

‘Didn’t you see my signal? You should have stopped at the harbour,’ were his first tetchy words.

‘Come aboard. To tell you the truth, we didn’t. We’ve had one hell of a bloody crossing. I think none of us had eyes except for the berth. We’re just about done for. It took eight hours from Boulogne. Some pleasure trip that was. I thought it was going to be the last.’

He looked down into the saloon, and Richard could have laughed: a mass of dirty bedding, food, pots and pans, radio, charts and logbooks, all Swiss-rolled into a disgusting mess. ‘What do you have on board?’

‘Our duty-free’s somewhere down there,’ Scud told him.

‘I’ll get it.’ Cannister jumped up. ‘If you like. It’s in them plastic bags.’

The customs man was halfway down. Let him cut into it if he was in the mind to. He’d need a sharp knife. Going the rest of the way, he opened a cupboard or two, and came back up. He might have been suspicious, but couldn’t take the boat to pieces on his own. ‘Next time, stop at my signal.’

When the noise of his half-stroke put-put bike diminished along the road they brought out the bundles. Rain came warm and wetter than wet from seawards, but they had something to sing about as they took them under their coats to Cannister’s Land-Rover so that he could set off for London.

‘He’d never have found it, anyway,’ Scud said when he and Richard sat down to a meal in the galley after a quick tidying. ‘I’ve never known such weather for this time of year.’

‘Maybe that’s what saved us.’ The thought of surviving another such trip put him in a low mood, yet they were all the same, and none exactly alike. As the spaghetti and rich meat sauce went down, helped by two bottles of wine, he could only look forward to collecting his pay. Hard to know how Waistcoat had been so sure they would accomplish what he’d sent them to do in such foul weather.

‘Bad trip, I hear?’ Waistcoat said the next afternoon.

‘It was all right.’

‘Smoke, if you want to.’ He offered a cigar. ‘I’m glad you were with them. You might not think you’re essential, but you are. You keep them in order, just by being there.’

So that was it. Thank you very much, fuck face. Without him they might run off with the stuff.

‘Or do something silly,’ Waistcoat said. ‘You never know.’ He flashed the gold lighter under Richard’s cigar. ‘But a chap like you, well, they feel safe. Anyway, it’s good to have a radio officer on board.’ He took an envelope from the pocket of his smoking jacket – plum coloured this time. ‘I hope this keeps you happy.’

Best to be a man of few words. Make him think he’s got a bargain. ‘Thanks.’

‘The next trip will be in a bigger league altogether. Much larger boat. All engine power. We’ll fly to Malaga, and bring it back from Gib.’

‘I’d like a date.’

‘Don’t know myself yet.’

‘As soon as you can, let me have it, then.’

Meeting over. The next stage was to face Amanda’s righteous anger for not having told her where he was going and how long he would be away. He brought that one off as well, in spite of them screaming at each other that there was nothing else to do but end the marriage.

‘Next time,’ he said, a shake in his hands as he fitted the corkscrew into a bottle of wine from Boulogne, ‘and for me anyway it’ll be hemlock before wedlock.’ Which made her laugh, the crisis over, leaving him to wonder how many more times he would get away with it.

He sat again at the radio and checked all frequencies. Nothing was coming through that could be used. At half-past six everyone had signed off, so he picked up the phone and dialled Laura’s number from his address book. She had a young woman’s voice, and seemed more than happy when he said his name. ‘If it’s all right with you I’ll knock on your door tomorrow evening, sometime after supper.’

‘About eight o’clock? You’ll be able to have coffee. Howard will be thrilled when I tell him.’

EIGHT

Sunspots had given so much trouble that Howard hadn’t heard Moscow for a week, no sound of Vanya on his usual qui vive. A wobbly-wobbly note, like the noise of a bathtub eternally filling, might turn into his reappearance, but the sound died, though he listened assiduously and long for anything intelligible. Ionised gases and the sun’s ultraviolet rays in the upper atmosphere, bending the radio beams back to earth, were troublesome at dawn and dusk, and solar flares played havoc for days.

The magician’s cabin was full of complications, a test bed of patience needed even from the most devoted. He became angry when things weren’t perfect, always hoping for something, maybe a signal from God’s miracle department saying that the application in triplicate to get his sight back had been approved. Neither the in-tray nor the out-tray held any such plan. The condition had been so long with him that he was beyond that kind of hope, more an animal longing he ought not to need anymore, but necessary for him to go on living.

You could always hope, because sunspots altered by the hour. A special radio station devoted to news of them morsed out periodical bulletins from a place called Boulder:

‘FORECAST SUN ACT LOW TO MODERATE. MAG FIELD ACTIVE TO WEAK STORM. HF CONDITIONS NORMAL TO MODERATE,’ followed by a long dash from the beacon.

Atmospheric conditions varied with the equinox, yet he doubted this was the reason for Moscow’s demise, because certain random whistles and occasional taps at the key were beginning to come back, or the tuning-up of transmitters (that fizzled to nothing) or muffled voices too far out to identify.

Either there was no work for Vanya, or no planes were flying because of bad weather, or everyone was on holiday, or the system had been discontinued for lack of use, or the frequency had been changed for security reasons, or the transmitter had broken down and Vanya had gone back to his village till a telegram arrived by landline saying the equipment had been mended.

Whatever the reason, Moscow came back, and Vanya was his unmistakable, competent, idiosyncratic self. Howard’s typed log soon filled with latitudes and longitudes, and the serial numbers of Russian aircraft grew into a column on his typewriter. He recalled kids on street corners before the war writing on penny jotters the number of each car that passed, a futile pastime he’d laughed at, but which he now seemed to be following with his collection of Russian plane numbers.

Last year at the end of the tourist season Laura had taken him to Paris, and he resisted the temptation at both airports of asking her to note the numbers of any Aeroflot planes she might see on the tarmac. At London Heathrow, going through the security screen, the man took the morse key and oscillator from Howard’s bag and asked what it was for.

‘Looks like one of them little tap-tap things,’ the girl assistant said.

Howard explained that indeed it was, and gave a demonstration to prove it was no part of a secret terrorist weapon.

‘I’ve always admired blokes who can use one of them,’ the man said. ‘It must be wonderful to send messages like that.’

Howard was gratified at being wished a good journey.

‘He’s blind, as well,’ he heard the girl say. ‘Did you notice?’ as Laura led him away for coffee.

At evening in the hotel he took out his key to send an item or two to himself. Rich days of different air and unusual food, and going around galleries with a hired commentary plugged into his ear – perfect for a blind man – demanded some therapy before going to bed, a few paragraphs of impressions:

‘Light comes out of darkness as I see the paintings, according to colours conjured up by myself. The shapes, too, face and bodies, seascapes, buildings and sunsets and harvest fields. I smelled petrol but we leaned over the bridge and caught an odour of water. I touched the stones of Notre Dame, their surface like the sides of a well-used matchbox. Inside, the world of peace expanded in all directions.’

Sitting in a tearoom on the rue de Rivoli, after a couple of exhausting hours in the Jeu de Paume, he heard the German Numbers Woman counting in her precise and authoritarian voice. He flushed red and felt a thudding beat of the heart. How could she be in Paris? Her employers were so happy with her year-in and year-out duty at the microphone that she had been awarded a special excursion to France. They even paid a woman to look after the children while she was away.

Laura was frightened when he half stood for no reason, clattering his cup, a spoon falling. ‘Oh, it’s her!’ he cried, then sat, because the recitation of numbers had stopped, the bell of the till rang her off. ‘Does she have children?’

She couldn’t think what he meant. ‘Who?’

‘The woman going out.’

‘She’s only a German tourist.’

‘What was she like? Tell me.’

‘There was a man with her. They were deciding what tip to leave. I hardly saw her. Tall and blonde, I think.’

His hands shook. Something had upset him, the heart pounding through his shirt. Her happiness was in knowing he couldn’t see her tears, surreptitiously dabbed with the napkin. ‘What was she wearing?’

‘I’m not sure. I only saw her in the mirror. A red see-through mac.’

‘Did she have a hat on?’

Such holidays were difficult, but she wouldn’t give them up. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Weren’t you sure?’ He turned his head in the direction of the door, hard to stop himself blundering out to follow her. Perhaps she was in Paris with the American boyfriend he had given her, and someone in her small German town was taking care of the children as a favour, without payment. From then on he imagined her a few paces behind, or one room in front of them in a museum. Where had she gone? Useless and hopeless. He would never catch her in the crowds. The darkness grew more sombre than it had for weeks.

Laura noted that for the rest of the holiday he was edgy, moody, and apologetic about his behaviour, which upset her even more. Back home he couldn’t find the German Numbers Woman on the airwaves for a week, proof if he needed any that she was still in Paris.

Hearing Vanya again was like resuming touch with an old friend. Maybe he hadn’t been off the air at all, simply that his services were so infrequently needed that Howard hadn’t tuned in at the right time. As simple as that. He often lost patience while waiting for transmissions, moving from atmospheric emptiness to a search for equally interesting items, of which there were still many. But here was Vanya, bouncing out his wares with the usual alacrity.

Astute due to his aircrew training, Howard made guesses as to where planes were going to and coming from. If a plane received two positions within a certain time he could, with Laura’s help (though he called for it as little as possible) calculate the airspeed and work out the plane’s direction, and speculate on what was being carried if it was not travelling on a usual airline route. One vector suggested a flight to Tripoli in Libya, taking God knew what, then Vienna, to bring back vintage bottles of the Blue Danube maybe, another to China for chopsticks and tinned dog, one over the Himalayas to India for tea, and one to a place in Afghanistan, no doubt a bit of private enterprise for drugs.

He plotted one to Archangel, and one to Spitzbergen, while still another was on its way to Yakutsk for a cargo of smoked reindeer meat. The speed of one plane was calculated as so fast, at 1175 miles per hour, that it must have been the Konkordski, going from Rostov to Samarkand. Another plane trundled along so slowly it could only be piston engined – or the wind was so strong it almost stood still. Or was it going in circles? Or it had landed somewhere and taken off again between the two calls. Or Vanya’s mechanism had got the second position wrong, which sometimes happened.

He went into the wireless room instead of waiting for Laura to read him the newspaper he had just brought back, and picked up stations so far west they were still belting out good mornings. With others it was good afternoon, so by knowing the time zone of their messages he could guess the longitude. The radio officer of a ship coming up Channel fixed his oscillators to tinkle out the first bars of ‘My Darling Clementine’, a ruse to wake the coast stations. Another ship’s operator was sending ‘Three Blind Mice’ to get himself into a social mood. Howard decided to concentrate on the eight-megacycle band. Let the spectrum live for me. I don’t care when I die. Short wave will go on pulsating after I’m dead, and even then my soul will find a home between the earth and the heaviside layer.

At tea Laura told him that the man who had changed her wheel in the rain had phoned to say he would call after supper tomorrow night. ‘I’m glad he kept his promise, aren’t you?’

In one way yes, in another no. ‘Of course. There’s a lot to thank you for.’

A stranger in the house on such a pretext would highlight his disability, bring it to mind in relation to the non blind outside his wireless room. ‘It’ll be nice to have a chat.’ Laura helped him to be king of himself, but he was a Lord of the Universe when concealed within his earphones. He felt no excitement at meeting someone with the same radio aptitudes as himself but who had his sight as well. ‘It’s marvellous you’ve fixed it up.’

He listened until ten o’clock to chatter among the stream of cargo planes coming over the Atlantic, then turned the wheel slowly through the static till alighting on a recognisable voice. Lighting a cigarette to take his ease, he heard a woman calling someone who couldn’t hear her. She was on a boat by the name of Daedalus, and her friend was on the Pontifex. Hearing both, he willed them to come together. Loud and clear, they called through space. The woman with the gruff voice and heavy foreign accent suggested they change to another channel, but as the English and younger woman, who sounded as if she came from somewhere north of London, couldn’t hear there was no complying, but she persisted in calling: ‘Pontifex, Pontifex, can you hear me? Over.’

Their powerful transmitters, especially the Englishwoman’s, brought them together. ‘Where have you been, Carla? What were you doing with your radio? I could hear you all the time.’

He didn’t get the answer, because Carla was talking on one frequency and the Englishwoman on another – working duplex it was called. When they occasionally changed to get better reception Howard decided to stay with the Englishwoman. ‘I miss you a lot. The others on board joke about when I was with you. I’m happy when I’m with you. When I got back on board everybody said how happy I was, but I was ready to cry when I said goodbye to you. They were watching me saying goodbye so I said goodbye quickly because I didn’t want them to see me cry.’

He wouldn’t make a typescript in case of missing something, and cursed the static that threatened to diminish her voice.

‘Carla, I want to stay with you forever. I want to do everything with you. Whenever I go on shore alone I imagine you’re with me.’

‘I love you too, Judy,’ Carla said, now using the same channel, ‘but I must go on the bridge.’

‘I could talk to you forever. I’d love to be able to talk your language. We’ve known each other for over a year and haven’t been together more than one month. I can’t tell you over the radio how much I want you.’

Howard couldn’t wheel off it, though knew he should. Eavesdropping on a private conversation was different to recording impersonal morse. It wasn’t a ship-to-shore telephone line either, only a boat-to-boat chat, which didn’t diminish the sensation of excitement and theft. Maybe Judy did most of the talking because it saved her friend the effort of trying to be fluent in a foreign language. ‘I phoned you at home, but your husband answered.’

‘He not my husband. Boyfriend.’

Judy laughed. ‘Don’t you know?’

‘I no tell.’

Dynamite if whoever it was had a communications receiver and knew how to tune in. The airwaves were public property, after all. Maybe he knew already, or at least suspected. Could even be he didn’t mind, different if it was another man.

‘I’m hungry,’ Judy said, ‘so I’ll take some bread to my cabin, with sausage and an orange. I can’t talk tomorrow evening because we don’t sail till one o’clock. We’ll talk on Wednesday, though, the day after tomorrow. Don’t forget. I know it’s difficult, but we’ll try at eleven, though wait till twelve because other crew sometimes come in the cabin where the radio is and I don’t want to talk with anyone listening.’

‘What about skipper?’

‘Oh, he’s in bed, and the others have gone to a disco. They heard me last night and said why do you want to talk to a Spanish woman? She doesn’t understand you. And I said: “She’s a very nice person.” But they only laughed. They tease me, but I don’t care. I love you very much. My hand is painful when I have to press the button to you. When I have a chance I’ll bring my camera to the radio corner and take a picture so you’ll know where I am. The men on board say: “Why have you got a woman lover?” And I say: “Haven’t you heard how nice Spanish women are? She’s fantastic. I see her every two months, and I’m more happy than if I see an English person every day.” I tell them you’re married, and we’re just friends. Oh, my finger’s gone to sleep. Can you hear me now? Say again? It was good to see you in Valencia. I was happy.’

‘We meet again soon, then?’

‘It’s very difficult, and a long way to come. Maybe we’ll meet next in Barcelona.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why not? When you’re with your boyfriend you forget me, I know. I’m going to my cabin now to eat French honey. Then I’ll have a drink, and one cigarette. I’ll be on my own. When it’s dark the reception’s better on the radio, isn’t it? The frequency’s clear.’

‘I want to go to sleep.’

‘Typical! I could talk all night, even though I have to get their breakfasts at six in the morning. I don’t like to get out of bed either. After lunch I have to be on again at four.’

‘Must go now,’ Carla said. Howard thought she sounded weary.

‘OK, speak to you on Wednesday. Love you, Carla. Goodnight.’

He heard the sound of kisses.

The voice of Judy enchanted, went deeply in, he couldn’t say why. The tone spoke to him, more he hoped than to her lover. Though they had signed off he waited for more, a forlorn hope that she would come back. Laura came in to tell him it was time for his drinks before going to bed, so he plugged in the tape recorder in case there was more talk on the wavelength, not wanting to miss a word of their conversation.

NINE

Richard downhilled into town towards the sea, the morse key squeaking intermittently in its box. Contacts were too close, no hidden message made out of such electrical dribble. He smiled that if it went on much longer he would feed its canary spirit to the cat, or cut down the ration of birdseed for breakfast. He had practised using it during the afternoon, testing for digital dexterity and the flexibility of his wrist. It was a little ex-post office model, all shining precision of brass-made parts except for the Bakelite thumb and finger hold.

Lights spread along the front and, parking by the church, he unscrewed the key to stop the contacts mewing, unwilling for the battery to waste. Stars pushed from ragged cloud, and he knew he needed a drink when half a dozen lucky youths rocketed from a pub and went singing towards the amusement arcades. He climbed steps between the houses, undrawn curtains showing dolly-mixture coloured screens ogled by those who had nothing better to do.

Drizzle blew from behind, kept at bay by his trench coat and cap. No bell, but a solid knocker on the door of a Queen Anne house, no more than a glorified cottage, windows curtained though blades of light whitened the edges.

The television went off, an outside bulb glowed on him, and Laura opened the door. Her tenseness made him wonder why he was here. Perhaps the most important actions are done for no apparent reason, in spite of or even unknown to yourself, whether for ill or good. He recalled Amanda’s laugh at his intention to do a charitable deed, her remarks seeming irrelevant, even spiteful.

Laura’s poise and superb figure told him that if she had been twenty years younger he would have regarded her as the love of his life, and even now he felt regret at seeing what he had lost. Maybe I’m here to find out, which says something about me, though I should be too old to wonder.

She took his coat and cap, surprised at how vacant he had looked for a moment. He handed over the plastic bag with his morse key, and took the bunch of Dutch roses from its swathe of white paper. ‘Some flowers for you.’ He enjoyed her blushing amazement. ‘I couldn’t come empty handed. It was kind of you to invite me. Not much, but they’re all I could find. I hope they keep for a while.’ He supposed he had little chance of staying favourably in her mind after the flowers had wilted.

‘You shouldn’t,’ she said, though liked him thinking he was under an obligation. In the living room there was an air of long-lived domestic comfort. A black cat sleeping its length on top of the still-warm television didn’t stir as he came in, though the man got up from his armchair by the fireplace and strode so quickly that he was ready to step aside in case they collided.

Howard stopped a couple of paces off, and put out a hand. ‘I’m pleased you could make it. I’m Howard. Laura’s told you about me, I expect.’ The horizontal voice makes him about my height, not a bit puffed after climbing the hill, so he’s in fair condition, though he smokes, and obviously likes his tipple. He sensed the uneasiness at being in a strange house, and though not able to see, and never would, fixed a face to match words and gestures. Fair, neat hair, alert features enhanced by a small clipped moustache maybe. A curious and enquiring face, intelligent and perhaps devious, a bit like the bomb aimer in the kite that was crippled. Beyond that he couldn’t go. Have to check with Laura.

Richard felt an intruder into their long-fixed relationship, but since he was there he’d have to relax and be at his best. At least he could stare at Howard for more than long enough to take him in, though not too intently with Laura looking on. ‘I’m sure you want coffee,’ she said.

He did. Howard sat down, pointing to a chair as if the plan of everything was firm in his mind. ‘It’s a lousy night. Did you come far?’

Pots rattled in the kitchen. ‘Only from near Bracebridge.’

‘It was good of you to help Laura with the car.’

‘If you don’t mind me saying so, I’d do the same for any woman. For a man as well if he was having difficulty.’

Howard thought about this, then went on: ‘Is your house up, or down?’

‘I’m on a fair hill.’ He’d imagined Howard to be tallish, but he wasn’t much above medium height. The solid arched forehead looked as if much was packed behind, but whether profitable grey matter or as a result of suffering it was hard to tell. With glazed eyes and seemingly dead much expression was gone, but he felt a central all-seeing eye somewhere. The chin jutting beneath full curving lips suggested a temper well controlled. He wore a polo-neck fisherman’s blue jersey, corduroy trousers, and carpet slippers.

‘Good for the antennae,’ he smiled. ‘Do you get much time to listen?’

‘I do a bit most days,’ Richard said.

Howard passed his silver cigarette case. He’d filled it himself. ‘You can’t keep away from the wireless gear, eh?’ Going to the table in the middle of the room, he put an ash tray on the arm of Richard’s chair. ‘I know I can’t. There are so many interesting things. You’d think the whole system was designed for a chap like me. It makes a pattern in my universe.’

Richard wanted to encourage him. ‘And mine, you might say.’

‘I suppose you believe in Fate, then? Predestination, and all that.’

Richard examined the large coloured print of a Lancaster framed on the wall. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Looking at the old bomber, are you?’ Howard said. ‘I got my comeuppance in one of those. Over Essen. Twelfth of March, in ‘forty-five. Beware the Ides of March! I should have known I’d get the chop, especially with the number 12.3.45. Easy enough to remember.’

‘Nice plane,’ Richard said.

‘Roomy,’ Howard laughed. ‘For bombs.’ He visualised the plane as if with the power of both eyes, even more clearly, the twin tail and sturdy Rolls Royce motors, long camouflaged body and angled wings (dihedral they called it), gun turrets and greenhouse cockpit, a strong craft to look at, but he remembered it feeling as flimsy as paper among the flak. He saw it right enough. The last home before the dark. Nothing more vivid. He also took in the photograph of Laura in its silver frame close by, every feature responsive to the fingers he now and again ran over them. He would pick it up, saying to himself, or aloud if she wasn’t close: ‘What a lovely young woman you are,’ then wonder in what way age had altered her, which he could confirm as he touched her actual face.

‘Fate, you said?’ Richard turned. ‘Predestination? If I think about it I suppose I do. You have to in a way, don’t you?’

‘Life’s treated you all right?’

The abrupt change of topic showed he had to be alert in dealing with him. He hadn’t expected to talk on such matters, and the older man seemed to be guiding him, as if he thought being blind gave him the right. ‘Yes, certainly.’

‘Not that you’d complain, eh?’ Howard laughed. ‘You’re not the type. Nor am I. I’m a lucky man in many ways, having something to cope with which shapes my life. No arguing there. The eternal test of ingenuity keeps me alert.’

And young, as if both man and wife had stopped dead in their tracks. Richard took in the portrait of Laura, a palimpsest of youth. You could see from where her present beauty came. ‘I hope listening to the wireless does that in any case,’ he said, wanting to escape the topic.

‘That’s a bonus for me.’ Howard opened the door for Laura to come in with the tray, and Richard marvelled at his sharp hearing.

The cat slid from the telly to lap up a saucer of milk. ‘I hope I’m not butting in on your conversation.’

Richard took his cup. ‘We’re only on generalities. No shop yet.’ Behind the Lear-like aspect of the blind telegraphist was a lot waiting to be said, and Richard wondered how much he would be able to salvage from his long-stored accretion of radio clutter to meet it.

Laura enjoyed the accomplishment of having brought them together, already as familiar to each other as acquaintances who had met after some years. Their uncommon hobby had cemented two people who on the street would have seemed utterly different – and passed each other without thought. Yet a whispered word of mutual interest, and they would stop and talk. ‘What generalities, though?’

Richard laughed. ‘Oh, Howard happened to mention predestination, though I’m not too sure what it means.’

‘I always thought it had something to do with God knowing every step of your fate,’ Howard said. ‘It’s written out even before you’re born. And whatever you think might happen, or would like to happen, when you’re young, there’s nothing you can do about what will happen. You just do your best, enjoy life if possible, and get on with it.’

‘He sounds a rather indomitable old God.’ She came around with the milk, not altogether liking the subject, Richard thought, who didn’t know it took her back to the hospital where Howard lay wounded and blinded after the raid, when he had said much the same thing. They hadn’t talked about it since, so his ideas had altered little in all those years, though why had such talk come up at this moment?

‘No one can kick against Fate, in any case.’ Richard drank his coffee, hot as it was, even if only to have something to do in putting the cup down. Faced with a man who had been more in its grip than most he didn’t feel predestination to be the right subject so early on. Or maybe it was best to get it out of the way.

‘True,’ Howard said dryly. ‘Funnily enough, though, I dwell on it every day. Not for long, but I do. A survival exercise you might call it. Still, it’s strange the subject came up.’

‘Maybe it’s the common denominator of those who have a life long attachment to wireless,’ Richard suggested. ‘You can’t help but feel everything is foreordained, every dot and dash sparking the details of somebody’s fate into your ear.’ He turned to Laura. ‘Now we are talking shop. Didn’t take long, did it?’

She liked his levity of tone, as well as skill and diplomacy in keeping the chat going. ‘I’ll leave you both to it. I must put those lovely flowers in water, and tidy up the kitchen after supper.’

Richard tapped the rim of the cup with his spoon, as if she had taken their talk with her. Howard looked, if he could be said to, at the door through which she had gone, then lowered an arm to stroke the cat which, though silent, he knew to be there.

Richard saw him as being all the time alone in a place Laura could never reach. When they weren’t together Howard was somewhere on his own, unreachable and curled into himself. It was the only way he could get by, but even if he had never been afflicted he might still have been an unreachable loner. You couldn’t tell, though he imagined Laura got into his spirit and lodged there for her solace as well as his.

‘You sound as if you’re trying to send me a message.’

He lay his spoon in the saucer. ‘Same old restless fingers.’

‘Like all of us. The French call wireless operators “pianistes”, so I hear, because they play at the key and make a peculiar rhythmical noise. I suppose it does sound weird to other people, but to us it’s like listening to plain language.’

Richard thought it charitable to let someone do the talking who lived a virtual hermit much of his life. Which is good as far as I’m concerned because he’ll have little to judge me by, though it could be I’ll learn more from him than he will from me.

‘You might call us the high priests of morse. Funny how I sometimes feel one myself,’ Howard said. ‘We’re members of a secret society because we have access to spheres which let us clip into their traffic – unknown to those who are communicating. I often envy the way they go on so blithely, not suspecting a thing.’

He spoke slowly, yet a subtle urgency lay behind his words, sometimes as if he would stumble over the next, though he never did, choosing each phrase as if rehearsed beforehand in the darkness of his mind. Perhaps Howard thought he was speaking to someone who lacked one of the many senses developed through being blind, or who was without at least one extra sense which a man with sight couldn’t have. At the same time he seemed unaffected by Richard being a stranger, unselfconscious to an extent that he was on his own, or talking to a mirror in which he couldn’t see himself. Though finding it a peculiar experience Richard was neither offended nor embarrassed, simply standing to one side while Howard did the talking. He assumed he would get used to it, if he came to see him again, and for Laura’s sake, after another glance at the photograph of her as a young woman, he very well might.

‘For instance,’ Howard went on, ‘there was a time when I heard Chinese operators on the Peking to Turkestan run. Very peculiar morse they sent. Most had no idea of the rhythm, and it was hard at times to make sense of. Then Laura read me from the newspaper that when a Chinese airliner was hijacked the wireless operator killed the terrorist with an axe!’

Richard laughed with him, saw the smile lift his cheeks, an extension of the lips, the sound unnerving, like a hand scraping on cardboard. ‘Served the bugger right. Hijackers will become the unacknowledged legislators of the world if we’re not careful.’

‘It’s wonderful that the sparks did it,’ Howard said. ‘It must have made his day, after being bored so long at his key. I wish I’d been tuned in at the same time, when he sent his SOS. I’m always on the line for learning something new about the human soul. A peculiar wish, you might say, because I don’t suppose I’ll ever be able to, at least until I’ve learned all there is to know about my own – assuming that’s possible, which of course I have to doubt. I’m not even sure I would want to know myself completely, though the wish is always there.’

Richard sat again, resisted taking up the spoon in case he tapped out something incriminating. ‘I don’t imagine it would do much good to either of us.’

‘It might make me a different person, and that couldn’t be bad, under the circumstances. The thing is, that all the time I listen at the wireless I feel myself changing, but so subtly I don’t really notice at the time. That’s what keeps me going. Though it can be disturbing it’s also like a balm, twenty years measurable only in micro units. I tune in on the wavelengths we used in the Air Force, hoping to hear something vital, but there’s nothing there anymore, just silence, or atmospheric mush.’ He was quiet for a moment, and for Richard to fill it would seem too brusque an interruption. Then he decided: ‘Let’s have a whisky. We can take our glasses to the wireless room.’

The cat followed them. Howard switched on to the French merchant marine station, a call sign endlessly repeating. ‘Such a noise would send most people mad, if they were forced to listen.’

‘Me as well,’ Richard said. ‘Maybe they used that sort of thing in Northern Ireland, to get people to talk. A chap went mad from hearing it when I was at radio college. It can be a good weapon. For instance I was in a hotel room once, and a party was going on next door. It was after midnight, and I couldn’t get to sleep. Luckily I had a portable shortwave radio I was taking with me to join a yacht, so I plugged it in and held the speaker against the wall. It only needed two minutes, with the loudest possible morse belting away. Cut their jollity dead. Didn’t hear a murmur after that, though I did get a few funny looks at breakfast.’

The room was neat, custom built for the purpose, a narrow table from wall to wall, and a small window for taking the aerial outside. The wall was covered by a coloured Mercator map of the world, and a plotting chart of Western Europe similar to his own. Maybe Howard liked to feel the paper.

He was put in the spare chair while Howard fiddled with the controls of an old RAF Marconi, to the left of his typewriter and the modern equipment. A morse key was screwed into the table and wired to an oscillator. Richard imagined him being helped into his flying jacket, hitching on a parachute, and sitting hunched at his wireless as in the old days, re-living the trip of his final devastation over Germany. He might also wear a suit and beret, and play a resistant pianiste in occupied France, keeping a loaded and cocked revolver by his sending hand should the Germans break in, aiming to kill them but reserving the final bullet for himself. Such people were taken alive if possible, tortured to make them spill codes and contacts before being killed. ‘Been hearing anything interesting?’

The magic eye of his twenty-quid junk-shop radio was a button of green flame created out of electrons and neutrons, which produced a small circle of living light held to a constant glow, not an identity button for the blackout but one for the overcoat of a wandering wizard – fixed into the left side of the wireless. If the magic eye dimmed out the circuit would go dead, the world stop, all movable animal and geological life be sucked into space. Every morning Howard put his finger close to make sure it was at his bidding, and thanked the Deity – whoever or whatever that might be – for keeping him healthy and well provided for, except that he couldn’t see the green glow in the same way as everyone else, didn’t need to, because there was a greener eye inside him, an eye that could penetrate everything, which he now turned on Richard.

‘A fair amount. It’s hard not to, if you’re persistent. I’m at it all my spare time.’ The first rule in the procedure book at radio school was: ‘Intelligent cooperation between operators,’ but to share what he heard would be like leaving a hole in his body never to be closed. All he heard was his alone. To betray Judy and her friend, or the German Numbers Woman, or Vanya in Moscow, or the Flying Dutchman, or any other character culled from the network and allowed to grow and become real in his mind, wasn’t part of his wish. At the moment they were beholden to him for their secret existence. On the other hand, perhaps Richard already had them in his books, and to mention them would make no difference either to their fate or his. But he was taking no chances.

Richard sensed his reluctance. You only got what you gave, nothing more and nothing less. ‘I still have the speed to take everything, even the Italian news at twenty eight words a minute. It’s amazing how it stays with you. The Italian weather comes in pretty fast as well. It’s good practice, and keeps the brain sharp. That’s the reason I do it.’ He wondered at the red pins scattered across the Russia of Mercator’s World,

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