by David Boyle
THE ATHENS ASSIGNMENT
David Boyle
© David Boyle 2018
David Boyle has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2018 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
This edition published by Endeavour Media Ltd.
Endeavour Quill is an imprint of Endeavour Media Ltd.
For Penny.
Table of Contents
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Author’s Note
Prologue
Bletchley, April 1941
Xanthe breathed deeply, as she had been told to do. She blew out rhythmically, panting like a desperate steam engine, impatient to leave the station. Breathe, breathe.
She felt like she was being torn in two. It hardly seemed possible that she could survive such red pain. She gripped the bedpost ferociously and hated the doctors standing around as she lay, spreadeagled on the bed like a specimen on a dish. How long was this going to take? How much could she take? She had heard that sometimes it could take days and nights, and she doubted whether she could live through it and remain the same, down to earth, crossword puzzling, Cincinnati girl.
In the intervals between contractions, she let her mind shoot back to her weeks in Berlin, that she had spent as a foreign correspondent in the first months of the Nazi assault on the West, the year before, and her ordeal at the end of it, escaping from the country in disguise, chased by the Gestapo, and all the time feeling desperate about her lost lover – lost to the Nazis, in more ways than one.
Yes, she had escaped the prospect of her body being broken by the Gestapo torturers, but there was an irony here which she could not quite grasp – driven out now by another wave of pain. And here it comes again: remember, breathe, breathe, breathe.
“That’s right, Miss Schneider,” said the doctor patronisingly. “Nearly there. I can see baby’s head.”
She felt supremely sorry for herself. About five thousand miles from home in Ohio, in some kind of clinic in an alien landscape, missing her father and her friends in Cincinnati and missing, missing, missing Ralph, who had rejected her so publicly and had, in some ways, put her where she was now, trying to expel or extract his baby from her body. Where were they all when she needed them? She just wanted someone to hold her hand, not these clinical instructions and bright cheery midwives and the excruciating scarlet pain.
Why, why had she involved herself in a mission of such questionable sanity, a whim of a middle-ranking enthusiast in naval intelligence, and now look at her – breathe, breathe and now: “PUSH! There’s a good girl, now… yes, it’s coming! It won’t be long now. Ready…”
Once more, Xanthe had lost herself in the journey she had made through Berlin, on the night of Hitler’s peace offer to the British, having fought with her ferocious Nazi acquaintance in her small room in Charlottenburg – and apparently struck him such an unusual blow to the head that she escaped intact. The process of giving birth had put her into a semi-conscious dream where she relived every step of her journey across the blacked-out city, and down Unter de Linden, finally to the American embassy and another long and exhausting ordeal. Like this one, this tearing birth, it had been fearful and largely alone.
She summoned up all her strength again for a great heave. She gritted her teeth, imagined she was gripping the bag with the Enigma rotor once again, as she had that fatal evening, about to whack her attacker over the head for the second time. Then she pushed…
The English wouldn’t think this noise at all ladylike, she guessed as she groaned. But fuck them, she said, fuck them – SOD THEM ALL!
“There! The baby is out and, yes, you’ve got a little boy. Oh, and he’s absolutely lovely.”
Xanthe lay back, utterly drained, aware of the nurse bustling around with a pile of flesh in her arms. Would he look like Ralph, she wondered, too tired to find out?
“Do you want to hold him?” she heard the nurse say.
Xanthe ignored her, too exhausted to speak. She was not just physically exhausted, she was emotionally overloaded. She now had a son, for whom she was solely responsible, and – despite all British types wishing her all the best, as they put it, she was unsure what she was supposed to do now. Tied down in the prime of life. She had written to her father on the other side of the Atlantic, and begged his forgiveness for being pregnant for some months, without telling him – and explaining very little, and certainly not the full truth, that her lover had been in Berlin and had revealed himself as a Nazi rat and a traitor. Nobody seemed to tell the truth anymore, now that real war had taken hold – and she feared she only had a tenuous hold on the truth herself – and her beloved dad had sent no reply. Probably the U-boats had sent his loving letter to the bottom of the Atlantic. But whatever the reason was, she felt more alone than she had been in her life.
Then suddenly there was a burst of noise cutting into her reverie. The baby was crying, like a siren, and Xanthe emerged again into the present. She could hardly believe that out of her small and vulnerable body had come life. And now that it had done so, she felt the surge of an overwhelming need to protect it.
“Yes, yes, please, give him here.”
She no longer cared what the nurse thought of her, another unmarried mother among so many, a raucous swearing American reporter – involved in goodness knows what. Just a bit loose, perhaps. Well, really, who gave a toss any more what people said.
Her experience in recent months, and especially as an undercover agent in wartime Berlin, had convinced her – personally and politically – that you could not just wait around for things to happen. You had to act. Well, it was time to act again, starting with holding onto the new life that her love for Ralph Lancing-Price had somehow managed to create, in the sickness of the Nazi capital.
The bundle of life, writhing a little, with its eyes closed, nestled into her, with a shock of untidy black hair and tiny fingers clutching at nothing. Xanthe’s heart went out to him. She felt his future pain, so alone in the world, so young, he had hardly lived at all. And yet somehow she had agreed, hadn’t she, and with some enthusiasm, to go back to the war.
But not now. She would call Commander Fleming as soon as she was up and about and would say that she could no longer help him. How could she leave her vulnerable, pitiable son, with his mewing and desperate hunger for the milk that was now filling her breasts?
From now on, she said, it was going to be somebody else’s war. It was quite clear where her duty lay, and it had nothing to do with codes at all. The only code she was prepared to help crack was the one which would help her understand her newborn son and his needs. It was going to be difficult, it might even take a lifetime, but she was going to work it out.
*
She woke with a start and for a moment she thought she was back in Berlin, with the constant underlying threat and fear. Where was the baby? She felt torn and bruised and exhausted beyond words. Her bottom hurt intensely. The fear was strong; what was she afraid of now? Had she dropped him already or rolled on him, or something awful? She looked around in the pale daylight, unsure what the time was, uncertain exactly where she was. The insipid April sunlight was falling across her face. There was the baby, asleep, next to the bed. She noted the good colour with a huge sense of relief. Yes, now she remembered where she was, at the nursing home in Bletchley. Yes, she had given birth. She now had a child to look after.
“Just for a few minutes,” she heard the nurse explain firmly outside the door. “She’s very tired.”
There was a
knock on her door.
She tried to say, “Come in,” but almost nothing came out except for a kind of croak.
The door swung open slowly, and a small bunch of roses slid through, followed by a shy-looking man peering out from under his fringe.
Xanthe recovered her voice. “Alan! How lovely of you to come!”
“Well, you know…”
“No, it is lovely of you. I’ve no idea what the time is, but I know you ought to be doing something else. Well, something more important than seeing me.”
As she lay there, the feeling of gratitude to Alan Turing, for remembering her, began to grow. Tears sparked in her eyes. Get a grip, Xanthe…
“Not at all. Um, these are from everyone in Hut Eight.”
“They’re beautiful, Alan. Maybe…”
The nurse had come in soundlessly behind him, like Jeeves, and swept the flowers up into a vase and fiddled with them expertly, before putting her head on one side to look critically at her arrangement and plonk them down next to Xanthe’s bed.
“Is it a…?”
“It’s a baby!”
They both laughed.
“No, it’s a boy, of course.”
“Why of course?” said Alan, always able to ask a question that melts away social niceties.
“I don’t know. I always said it was going to be. Perhaps because of Ralph.”
“You mean, because his father’s a boy, then he has to be a boy? I hate to tell you this, Xanthe, but all babies have fathers – even the girls. Do you think we should tell him?”
“You mean, tell Ralph?” Xanthe lay back in exhaustion. She had forgotten that Alan was one of the very few people in on the secret. “Oh, let’s worry about that another time, shall we?”
“Sorry,” said Alan. “Not very tactful sometimes, um, I’m afraid.”
“Nonsense, Alan. You’re lovely. It’s just that…”
She paused, searching for the right word.
“Just what? I’m usually the tongue-tied one, not you.”
Come on, out with it, Xanthe…
“Well, I just feel sorry that I can’t help you any more. I’m going to have to look after Indigo.”
She indicated the bundle in a white shawl next to her bed.
“Indigo?”
“Yes, do you like it? I thought it went with my mood.”
“Really?” said Alan, humming a bar or two of Mood Indigo. “I don’t know, maybe. Um, maybe yes!”
“I have to look after him now, you do see that don’t you? I know we had plans and stuff, but I just can’t.”
She felt tears pricking the back of her eyes. Why was she feeling so emotional at the moment? She hated to let Alan down, and everyone else who had been so supportive – but she could hardly let Indigo down either…
She hummed a little to herself.
Always get that Mood Indigo,
Since my baby said goodbye…
1
London, November 1940
Xanthe walked into the small office off Fleet Street, six months before the birth, through the torn newspapers of yesterday’s editions, strewed across the alleyway. The windows were still broken from the raid a week before. The smell of burned brick dust and plaster hung in the air.
She had been working for the New Yorker’s London office since her return from Germany, and there was a great deal to be done. There were letters to answer on behalf of Mollie Panter-Downes about her column. There was A. J. Liebling to cajole into writing something about Paris, though he was now back in New York, and there was her own writing as an anonymous correspondent. She had been lucky to get the job, organised again with a little word from Commander Fleming at the Admiralty.
Yes, she was pregnant – as the handful of rather dusty staff were beginning to notice as they looked up from their ancient Victorian desks – and getting more pregnant by the day, but she desperately wanted to keep her hand in. More than that, she guessed that her brief period as a Chicago Tribune reporter in Berlin had been somehow a little compromised. She had loved the work but feared that she would have to give up to give birth and would therefore crash out of the assignment, just as she had crashed out of Berlin. The name Xanthe Schneider was no longer useful in that respect, and she would now continue writing – on the rare occasions they gave her a byline – with the identity she had been given in Berlin.
So as far as the readers were concerned, she was Shirley Johnson, a former clerk in the US diplomatic service. Because of all that, she felt she still had things to prove as a journalist.
So when she was not chasing down details for Liebling or Panter-Downes, she had begun thinking up story ideas of her own, in the hope that it might impress Harold Ross, the proprietor of the New Yorker, enough that she might grace the pages alongside the names of Vladimir Nabokov, Dorothy Parker, James Thurber and E. B. White.
In search of a story, the strange English way of toilet paper had begun to fascinate her, especially during the crisis. And while the Blitz had begun, and London was thrilled to find itself besieged from the air, she began collecting anecdotes about how people wiped their bottoms in wartime and began thinking how to communicate this in an amusing way to her generally prudish fellow Americans.
In fact, toilet paper was getting increasingly scarce. People were reverting to using old newspapers cut into strips and hung in the loo – she was fascinated to see how often it was the Daily Mirror or the Daily Sketch. Failing that, there was always a roll of Bronco, shiny on one side, like wiping your bum with corrugated iron. “Deluxe tissue,” it said, “for the bigger wipe.”
The difficulty was writing it. It required a pen more deft than hers. She began to worry about it.
But by the time Xanthe had begun to grow and feel the baby kicking inside her, she had become adept at being a magazine sub-editor and writer, putting together or editing copy on her knees in Shepherd’s Bush underground station, out of the sound of the bombs falling but with the sound of so many babies echoing in her head, wondering at the same time what it would be like to be responsible for a small human life at such a moment in history.
It was a peculiar but exhilarating life. The disapproval with which people saw a pregnant woman struggling into the wreckage from the raid the previous night surprised her, the way people avoided her eyes – perhaps for fear that, in the face of danger, they would become responsible for rescuing her. People behaved unusually once the raids had begun, with great fortitude but also great care. But it was thrilling too; one of those moments in life when you look back and realise that suddenly, and despite all the carping, bitterness and disagreements, and all the doubts and anger about how the nation around her had been treated by its leaders, everyone magically seems to be on the same side – pushing away useless official jobsworths, making do despite the mess.
It was heart-warming, if only she could relax into it.
It was just that she was nursing not only a dislocated relationship with her family back home – she had been getting the occasional clipped and disapproving letters from her father, though she had not had a reply to any of her letters telling him she was pregnant – but also a broken heart. She had loved Ralph, or so it seemed to her, with everything she had. Though they had only acknowledged this towards the end, and she now had to assume – since he had stormed off in a rage after the rejection of Hitler’s peace offer – that he had not really loved her at all. It rendered the Blitz nights and the dogfights and the charred, dismembered bodies all the more difficult to bear, given that they were being delivered by Ralph’s new friends and allies.
She knew she should not take the bombs personally, but sometimes it was hard not to. There were days when she felt so miserable that she could hardly force herself out of bed, except for the sheer exhilaration of the battle in the skies that was going on overhead. Then, one day, just as she was leaving her friend Moira’s flat, she suddenly noticed a man who, in the bright sunlight of a Double British Summer Time, looked exactly like Ralph.
Sh
e stood there, staring, not sure what to do.
“I’m looking for Xanthe Schneider,” said the apparition, who was in RAF uniform.
“Yes. I mean, that’s me.”
“Listen, I know this is an unfair question, but I’m on a mission for Lady Maidenhead – who, as you may know, is Ralph Lancing-Price’s mother. I was wondering if I could be very cheeky and buy you a cup of tea? I’m his cousin Hugh, and you may be the only person I know who can help me.”
Xanthe urged herself to keep her presence of mind.
“Really, why is that? I mean, how can I help?”
“Because I’ve been trying to find out where he is, on behalf of my aunt. I know that you knew him in London because I’ve talked to some friends of yours. I also know you have been a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in Berlin and wondered if it was possible that you could confirm that he’s there. We – the family I mean – think that’s where he is, but nobody will tell us anything. Perhaps not surprisingly.”
Xanthe’s mind reeled. She could see how this man had managed to track her down from Simonetta College where she had been studying when she had met Ralph. She could see how he might have recognised her name in the Chicago Tribune and put two and two together. But, if so, it was a lucky shot. She dared not confirm too much.
“Listen, Hugh, I will certainly have a cup of tea with you, but I’m not sure I can go much beyond that. Yes, I knew Ralph in London before Dunkirk. As for the other rumours, I just don’t know. And if I did know, I’m not sure I would be able to say.”
Hugh stared for a moment, thinking and perhaps wrestling with himself.
“That’s good enough for me,” he said. “Have a cup of tea with me anyway. It’s taken weeks just to find you.”
Rather against her will, Xanthe found herself melting before this young man who looked so like the man she had loved.
“Are you a pilot? Where are you based?”
