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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 (#ulink_c2e3714b-6be3-512c-a7b9-bcefeb896307)
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.
