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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?’
‘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.
