Enigma

by Robert Harris

  On the first floor a figure in a blue flannel dressing gown and white paper curlers hurried out of the bathroom. He nodded politely but the woman gave a squeak of embarrassment and scuttled down the passage. Standing at the basin, he laid out his toiletries: a sliver of carbolic soap, a safety razor with a six-month-old blade, a wooden toothbrush worn down to a fuzz of bristles, an almost empty tin of pink tooth powder. The taps clanked. There was no hot water. He scraped at his chin for ten minutes until it was red and pricked with blood. This was where the devil of the war resided, he thought, as he dabbed at his skin with the hard towel: in the details, in the thousand petty humiliations of never having enough toilet paper or soap or matches or baths or clean clothes. Civilians had been pauperised. They smelled, that was the truth of it. Body odour lay over the British Isles like a great sour fog.

  There were two other guests downstairs in the dining room, a Miss Jobey and a Mr Bonnyman, and the three of them made discreet conversation while they waited for their food. Miss Jobey was dressed in black with a cameo brooch at her throat. Bonnyman wore mildew-coloured tweeds with a set of pens in his breast pocket and Jericho guessed he might be an engineer on the bombes. The door to the kitchen swung open as Mrs Armstrong brought in their plates.

  ‘Here we go,’ whispered Bonnyman. ‘Brace yourself old boy.’

  ‘Now, don’t you go getting her worked up again, Arthur,’ said Miss Jobey. She gave his arm a playful pinch, at which Bonnyman’s hand slid beneath the table and squeezed her knee. Jericho poured them all a glass of water and pretended not to notice.

  ‘It’s potato pie,’ announced Mrs Armstrong, defiantly. ‘With gravy. And potatoes.’

  They contemplated their steaming plates.

  ‘How very, ah, substantial,’ said Jericho, eventually.

  The meal passed in silence. Pudding was some kind of stewed apple with powdered custard. Once that had been cleared away Bonnyman lit his pipe and announced that, as it was a Saturday night, he and Miss Jobey would be going to the Eight Bells Inn on the Buckingham Road.

  ‘Naturally, you’re very welcome to join us,’ he said, in a tone which implied that Jericho, naturally, wouldn’t be welcome at all. ‘Do you have any plans?’

  ‘It’s kind of you, but as a matter of fact I do have plans. Or, rather, a plan.’

  After the others had gone, he helped Mrs Armstrong clear away the dishes, then went out into the back yard to check his bicycle. It was almost dark and there was a sharpness in the air that promised frost. The lights still worked. He cleaned the dirt off the regulation white patch on the mudguard and pumped some air into the tyres.

  By eight o’clock he was back up in his room. At half past ten, Mrs Armstrong was on the point of laying aside her knitting to go up to bed when she heard him coming downstairs. She opened the door a crack, just in time to see Jericho hurrying along the passage and out into the night.

  2

  The moon defied the blackout, shining a blue torch over the frozen fields, quite bright enough for a man to cycle by. Jericho lifted himself out of the saddle and trod hard on the pedals, rocking from side to side as he toiled up the hill out of Bletchley, pursuing his own shadow, cast sharp on the road before him. From far in the distance came the drone of a returning bomber.

  The road began to level out and he sat back on the saddle. For all his efforts with the pump, the tyres remained half-flat, the wheels and chain were stiff for want of oil. It was hard going, but Jericho didn’t mind. He was taking action, that was the point. It was the same as code-breaking. However hopeless the situation, the rule was always to do something. No cryptogram, Alan Turing used to say, was ever solved by simply staring at it.

  He cycled on for about two miles, following the lane as it continued to rise gently towards Shenley Brook End. This was hardly a village, more a tiny hamlet of perhaps a dozen houses, mostly farmworkers’ cottages. He couldn’t see the buildings, which sheltered in a slight hollow, but when he rounded a bend and caught the scent of woodsmoke he knew he must be close.

  Just before the hamlet, on the left, there was a gap in the hawthorn hedge where a rutted track led to a little cottage that stood alone. He turned into it and skittered to a halt, his feet slipping on the frozen mud. A white owl, improbably huge, rose from a nearby branch and flapped soundlessly across the field. Jericho squinted at the cottage. Was it his imagination or was there a hint of light in the downstairs window? He dismounted and began to wheel his bike towards it.

  He felt wonderfully calm. Above the thatched roof the constellations spread out like the lights of a city – Ursa Minor and Polaris, Pegasus and Cepheus, the flattened M of Cassiopeia with the Milky Way flowing through it. No glow from earth obscured their brilliance. You can at least say this for the blackout, he thought, it has given us back the stars.

  The door was stout and iron-studded. It was like knocking on stone. After half a minute he tried again.

  ‘Claire?’ he called. ‘Claire?’

  There was a pause, and then: ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It’s Tom.’

  He took a breath and braced himself, as if for a blow. The handle turned and the door opened slightly, just enough to reveal a dark-haired woman, thirtyish, about Jericho’s height. She was wearing round spectacles and a thick overcoat and was holding a prayer book.

  ‘Yes?’

  For a moment he was speechless. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I was looking for Claire.’

  ‘She’s not in.’

  ‘Not in?’ he repeated, hopelessly. He remembered now that Claire shared the cottage with a woman called Hester Wallace (‘she works in Hut 6, she’s a sweetie’) but for some reason he had forgotten all about her. She did not look very sweet to Jericho. She had a thin face, split like a knife by a long, sharp nose. Her hair was wrenched back off a frowning forehead. ‘I’m Tom Jericho.’ She made no response. ‘Perhaps Claire’s mentioned me?’

  ‘I’ll tell her you called.’

  ‘Will she be back soon?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, I’m sorry.’

  She began to close the door. Jericho pressed his foot against it. ‘I say, I know this is awfully rude of me, but I couldn’t possibly come in and wait, could I?’

  The woman glanced at his foot, and then at his face. ‘I’m afraid that’s impossible. Good evening, Mr Jericho.’ She pushed the door closed with surprising force.

  Jericho took a step backwards on to the track. This was not a contingency envisaged in his plan. He looked at his watch. It was just after eleven. He picked up his bicycle and wheeled it back towards the lane, but at the last moment, instead of going out on to the road, he turned left and followed the line of the hedge. He laid the bicycle flat and drew into the shadows to wait.

  After about ten minutes, the cottage door opened and closed and he heard the rattle of a bicycle being wheeled over stone. It was as he thought: Miss Wallace had been dressed to go out because she was working the midnight shift. A pinprick of yellow light appeared, wobbled briefly from side to side, and then began to bob towards him. Hester Wallace passed within twenty feet in the moonlight, knees pumping, elbows stuck out, as angular as an old umbrella. She stopped at the entrance to the lane and slipped on a luminous armlet. Jericho edged further into the hawthorn. Half a minute later she was gone. He waited a full quarter of an hour in case she’d forgotten something, then headed back to the cottage.

  There was only one key – ornate and iron and big enough to fit a cathedral. It was kept, he recalled, under a piece of slate beneath a flowerpot. Damp had warped the door and he had to push hard to open it, scraping an arc on the flagstone floor. He replaced the key and closed the door behind him before turning on the light.

  He had only been inside once before, but there wasn’t much to remember. Two rooms on the ground floor: a sitting room with low beams and a kitchen straight ahead. To his left, a narrow staircase led up to a little landing. Claire’s bedroom was at the front, looking towards the lane. Hester’s was at the rear. The lav
atory was a chemical toilet just outside the back door, reached via the kitchen. There was no bathroom. A galvanised metal tub was kept in the shed next to the kitchen. Baths were taken in front of the stove. The whole place was cold and cramped and smelled of mildew. He wondered how Claire stuck it.

  ‘Oh, but darling, it’s so much better than having some ghastly landlady telling one what to do …’

  Jericho took a couple of steps across the worn rug and stopped. For the first time he began to feel uneasy. Everywhere he looked he saw evidence of a life being lived quite contentedly without him – the ill-assorted blue-and-white china in the dresser, the vase full of daffodils, the stack of pre-war Vogues, even the arrangement of the furniture (the two armchairs and the sofa drawn up cosily around the hearth). Every tiny domestic detail seemed significant and premeditated.

  He had no business here.

  He very nearly left at that moment. All that stopped him was the faintly pathetic realisation that he had nowhere else particularly to go. The Park? Albion Street? King’s? His life seemed to have become a maze of dead ends.

  Better to make a stand here, he decided, than run away again. She was bound to be back quite soon.

  God, but it was cold! His bones were ice. He walked up and down the cramped room, ducking to avoid the heavy beams. In the hearth was white ash and a few blackened fragments of wood. He sat first in one armchair, then tried the other. Now he was facing the door. To his right was the sofa. Its covers were of frayed pink silk, its cushions hollowed and leaking feathers. The springs had gone and when you sat in it you sank almost to the floor and had to struggle to get out. He remembered that sofa and he stared at it for a long time, as a soldier might stare at a battlefield where a war had been irretrievably lost.

  They leave the train together and walk up the footpath to the Park. To their left is a playing field, ploughed into allotments for the Dig for Victory campaign. To their right, through the perimeter fence, is the familiar huddle of low buildings. People walk briskly to ward off the cold. The December afternoon is raw and misty, the day is leaking into dusk.

  She tells him she’s been up to London to celebrate her birthday. How old does he think she is?

  He hasn’t a clue. Eighteen perhaps?

  Twenty, she says triumphantly, ancient. And what was he doing in town?

  He can’t tell her, of course. Just business, he says. Just business.

  Sorry, she says, she shouldn’t have asked. She still can’t get the hang of all this ‘need to know’. She has been at the Park three months and hates it. Her father works at the Foreign Office and wangled her the job to keep her out of mischief. How long has he been here?

  Three years, says Jericho, she shouldn’t worry, it’ll get better.

  Ah, she says, that’s easy for him to say, but surely he does something interesting?

  Not really, he says, but then he thinks that makes him sound boring, so he adds: ‘Well, quite interesting, I suppose.’

  In truth he’s finding it hard to keep up his end of the conversation. It’s distracting enough merely to walk alongside her. They lapse into silence.

  There’s a noticeboard close to the main gate advertising a performance of Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer by the Bletchley Park Music Society. ‘Oh, now look at that,’ she says. ‘I adore Bach’, to which Jericho replies with genuine enthusiasm, that Bach is his favourite composer. Grateful at last to have found something to talk about, he launches into a long dissertation about the Musikalisches Opfer’s six-part fugue, which Bach is supposed to have improvised on the spot for King Frederick the Great, a feat equivalent to playing and winning sixty games of blindfold chess simultaneously. Perhaps she knows that Bach’s dedication to the King – Regis Iussu Cantio et Reliqua Canonica Arte Resoluta – rather interestingly yields the acrostic RICERCAR, meaning ‘to seek’?

  No, oddly enough, she doesn’t know that.

  This increasingly desperate monologue carries them as far as the huts where they both stop and, after another awkward pause, introduce themselves. She offers him her hand – her grip is warm and firm, but her nails are a shock: painfully bitten back, almost to the quick. Her surname is Romilly. Claire Romilly. It has a pleasant ring. Claire Romilly. He wishes her a merry Christmas and turns away but she calls him back. She hopes he won’t think it too fresh of her, but would he like to go with her to the concert?

  He isn’t sure, he doesn’t know …

  She writes down the date and time just above The Times crossword – 27 December at 8.15 – and thrusts it into his hands. She’ll buy the tickets. She’ll see him there.

  Please don’t say no.

  And before he can think of an excuse, she’s gone.

  He’s due to be on shift on the evening of the 27th but he doesn’t know where to find her to tell her he can’t go. And anyway, he realises, he rather does want to go. So he calls in a favour he’s owed by Arthur de Brooke and waits outside the assembly hall, and waits, and waits. Eventually, after everyone else has gone in, and just when he’s about to give up, she comes running out of the darkness, smiling her apologies.

  The concert is better than he’d hoped. The quintet all work at the Park and once played professionally. The harpsichordist is particularly fine. The women in the audience are wearing evening frocks, the men are wearing suits. Suddenly, and for the first time he can recall, the war seems a long way away. As the last notes of the third canon (‘per Motum contrarium’) are dying in the air he risks a glance at Claire only to discover that she is looking at him. She touches his arm and when the fourth canon (‘per Augmentationem, contrario Motu’) begins, he is lost.

  Afterwards he has to go straight back to the hut: he’s promised he’d be back before midnight. ‘Poor Mr Jericho,’ she says, ‘just like Cinderella …’ But at her suggestion they meet again for the following week’s concert – Chopin – and when that’s over they walk down the hill to the station to have cocoa in the platform buffet.

  ‘So,’ she says, as he returns from the counter bearing two cups of brown froth, ‘how much am I allowed to know about you?’

  ‘Me? Oh, I’m very boring.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re boring at all. In fact, I’ve heard a rumour you’re rather brilliant.’ She lights a cigarette and he notices again her distinctive way of inhaling, seeming almost to swallow the smoke, then tilting her head back and breathing it out through her nostrils. Is this some new fashion, he wonders? ‘I suppose you’re married?’ she says.

  He almost chokes on his cocoa. ‘Good God, no. I mean, I would hardly be –’

  ‘Fiancée? Girlfriend?’

  ‘Now you’re teasing me.’ He pulls out a handkerchief and dabs at his chin.

  ‘Brothers? Sisters?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Parents? Even you must have parents.’

  ‘Only one still alive.’

  ‘I’m the same,’ she says. ‘My mother’s dead.’

  ‘How awful for you. I’m sorry. My mother, I must say, is very much alive.’

  And so it goes on, this hitherto untasted pleasure of talking about oneself. Her grey eyes never leaving his face. The trains steam past in the darkness, trailing a wash of soot and hot air. Customers come and go. ‘Who cares if we’re without a light?’ sings a crooner on the wireless in the corner, ‘they can’t blackout the moon …’ He finds himself telling her things he’s never really spoken of before – about his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage, about his stepfather (a businessman, whom he dislikes), about his discovery of astronomy and then of mathematics …

  ‘And your work now?’ she says. ‘Does that make you happy?’

  ‘Happy?’ He warms his hands on his cup and considers the question. ‘No. I couldn’t say happy. It’s too demanding – frightening, even, in a way.’

  ‘Frightening?’ The wide eyes widen further with interest. ‘Frightening how?’

  ‘What might happen …’ (You’re showing off, he warns himself, stop it.) ‘What mig
ht happen if you get it wrong, I suppose.’

  She lights another cigarette. ‘You’re in Hut 8, aren’t you? Hut 8’s the naval section?’

  This brings him up with a jolt. He looks around quickly. Another couple are holding hands at the next table, whispering. Four airmen are playing cards. A waitress in a greasy apron is polishing the counter. Nobody seems to have heard.

  ‘Talking of which,’ he says, brightly, ‘I think I ought to get back.’

  On the corner of Church Green Road and Wilton Avenue she kisses him, briefly, on the cheek.

  The following week it is Schumann, followed by steak-and-kidney pudding and jam roly-poly at the British Restaurant in Bletchley Road (‘two courses for eleven-pence’) and this time it’s her turn to talk. Her mother died when she was six, she says, and her father trailed her from embassy to embassy. Family has been a procession of nannies and governesses. At least she’s learned some languages. She’d wanted to join the Wrens, but the old man wouldn’t let her.

  Jericho asks what London was like in the Blitz.

  ‘Oh, a lot of fun, actually. Loads of places to go. The Milroy, the Four Hundred. A kind of desperate gaiety. We’ve all had to learn to live for the moment, don’t you think?’

  When they say goodbye she kisses him again, her lips to one cheek, her cool hand to the other.

  In retrospect, it is around this time, in the middle of January, that he should have started keeping a record of his symptoms, for it is now that he begins to lose his equilibrium. He wakes with a feeling of mild euphoria. He bounces into the hut, whistling. He goes for long walks around the lake between shifts, taking bread to feed the ducks – just for the exercise, he tells himself, but really he is scanning the crowds for her, and twice he sees her, and once she sees him and waves.