The German Numbers Woman

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 (#ulink_8fb76fe3-c237-5189-9552-deff40a596a6)

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?’