The German Numbers Woman

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.