The Company of Strangers

‘How do people fit into the equation?’

‘There are infinite possibilities in maths. Every number is a complex number. It can be real or imaginary, and real numbers can be rational or irrational. Rational like integers or fractions, irrational like algebra or transcendental numbers.’

‘Transcendental?’

‘Real, but non-algebraic.’

‘I see.’

‘Like π.’

‘What are you saying, Miss Aspinall?’

‘I’m talking to you in the simplest way possible, at the most basic end of mathematics, and already there are things you don’t fully understand. It’s a secret language. Only very few people know it and can speak it.’

‘That still doesn’t explain how people fit into your world.’

‘I was just showing you that numbers can be complicated in the same way that people can be. And something else…I’m a person, too, with all the normal human needs. I don’t always speak in algorithms.’

‘Numbers are more stable than people, I’d have thought. More predictable.’

‘I haven’t come across an emotional number…yet,’ she said, her hands feeling huge at her sides, flapping like albatross’s wings, ‘which is why, I suppose, it’s possible to get things to work out…every so often.’

‘Are solutions important to you?’

Andrea studied him for a moment, the question carrying interview weight. His eyes didn’t flinch from hers. She lost the match.

‘I do like to solve problems. That’s the reward. But it’s not always possible and working towards something can be just as satisfying,’ she said, not believing it, but thinking it might please him.

After this string of parties her tutor sent her over to Oriel to talk to someone about ‘matters pertaining to the war effort’. He sent her to a doctor who gave her a half-hour medical examination. She didn’t hear anything for a week until she was called back to Oriel and found herself signing the Official Secrets Act, so, it seemed, that they could give her a course in typing and shorthand. She thought she was headed for a code-cracking centre, where she’d heard lots of other maths graduates had been sent, but they gave her some additional training instead. Dead-letter drops, invisible ink, using miniature cameras, following people, talking to people while pretending to be someone else to find out what they knew – role-playing, they called it. The minuscule arts of deception. They also taught her how to fire a gun, ride a motorbike and drive a car.

They sent her home at the beginning of July to wait for an assignment. A week later she was contacted by Rawlinson, who told her he was going to come to tea to meet her mother. It was important to establish normality at home, her mother had to be given something official about what her daughter would be doing but not, of course, the reality.

‘Andrea!’

Her mother shouted up the stairs from the hall. She dabbed the coal of the cigarette out on the wall, put the butt back in the packet.

‘Andrea!’

‘Coming, Mother,’ she said, ripping open the door.

She looked down the stairs to her mother’s moon-white, but not so luminous, face at the curve of the bannisters.

‘Mr Rawlinson’s here,’ she said in a stage whisper.

‘I didn’t hear him arrive.’

‘Well, he’s here,’ she said. ‘Shoes.’

She went barefoot back to the bedroom, put on her mother’s horrible shoes, laced them up. She sniffed the air, still smoky, still behaving like Mother’s little girl. Definitely not a spy.

‘She’s very young, you know…’ She overheard her mother in the drawing room. ‘I mean, she’s nineteen, no twenty, but she doesn’t act it. She went to a convent…’

‘The Sacred Heart in Devizes,’ said Rawlinson. ‘Good school.’

‘And out of London.’

‘Away from the bombing.’

‘It wasn’t the bombing, Mr Rawlinson,’ her mother said, without saying what it had been.

Andrea braced herself for the tedium of her mother behaving properly in front of strangers.

‘Not the bombing…?’ said Rawlinson, feigning mild surprise.

‘The influences,’ said Mrs Aspinall.

Andrea rattled her heels on the tiles to announce herself, to stop her mother talking about ‘goings on’ in the air-raid shelters. She shook hands with Rawlinson.

Her mother’s bra creaked as she poured the tea. What rigging for such a tight little ship, thought Andrea, feeling Rawlinson’s bright, nearly saucy eyes on her neck, which heated up. Teacups rattled, raised and refitted on to saucers.

‘You speak German,’ he said to Andrea.

‘Frisch weht der Wind / Der heimat zu, / Mein Irisch kind / Wo weilest du?’ said Andrea.

‘Don’t show off, dear,’ said her mother.

‘And Portuguese,’ said Andrea.

‘She taught herself, you know,’ said Audrey Aspinall, interrupting. ‘Pass Mr Rawlinson some cake, dear.’

Andrea had been sitting on her hands and now found that the ribbing of her dress was printed on the back of them as she passed the cake. Why did her mother always do this to her?

‘You have secretarial skills,’ said Rawlinson, lifting the cake.

‘She just did a course, didn’t you, dear?’

Andrea didn’t contribute. Her mother’s porcelain face, still beautiful at thirty-eight years old but unyielding, turned hard on her. Andrea hadn’t told her mother anything about what had gone on at Oxford other than what they’d told her to say.

‘It’s my job to find suitable staff for our embassies and high commissions. My department is very small and when we find someone with a foreign language we tend to snap them up. I have a position for your daughter, Mrs Aspinall…abroad.’

‘I’d like to go abroad,’ said Andrea.

‘How would you know?’ said her mother. ‘That’s the thing about young people today, Mr Rawlinson, they think they know everything without having done anything but, of course, they don’t think. They don’t think and they don’t listen.’

‘We’re relying on youth in this war, Mrs Aspinall,’ said Rawlinson, ‘because they don’t know fear. Eighteen-year-olds can do a hundred bombing missions, get shot down, make their way through enemy territory and be up in the air again within a week. The reason they can do that is precisely that they don’t think, you see. The danger’s in the thinking.’

‘I’m not sure about abroad…’ said Mrs Aspinall.