The Cryptographer

by Tobias Hill

  ‘No more advice today, thanks –’ she begins, but as she does so she realises the line is wrong, too clear for longdistance, the caller closer than her mother will ever be.

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Lawrence … it’s late.’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s late.’

  ‘It’s the drink.’

  ‘I know. I know that. Anna,’ he says, and stops.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Will you talk to me? Just for a while. Until I can sleep again.’

  ‘You know I will,’ she says. And she knows that he does. That he always will, and he doesn’t even know why.

  ‘Oh, thanks. Oh good. You’re very kind. Well. Were you asleep? Did I wake you?’

  ‘No, I’m still up.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Talking to my mother.’ She begins to pace. More wakeful now, clear-headed. Nocturnal.

  ‘Eve is here?’

  ‘No, thank God.’

  ‘Oh yes. I tried you. You know, I always liked her.’

  ‘Funny, she was just saying the same about you.’

  ‘Was she? How very kind of her. So. And what are you doing now?’

  ‘Raiding the fridge.’

  ‘So late.’

  ‘For Burma.’

  ‘Lucky Burma.’

  ‘Actually, I still have work to do.’ She leans back against the window, tentatively relaxing. The cold against her shoulders. Sometimes, at nights – most times – Lawrence can be himself. Sometimes not. The rain taps, taps against the glass.

  ‘You work too hard.’

  ‘So everyone tells me.’

  ‘And you know what else people say.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘All work and no play.’

  ‘I do play, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Oh, I know. On what are you working, Anna?’

  ‘Nothing much.’

  ‘On him?’

  She can hear his voice beginning to alter. It always creeps up on her, the way his natural warmth intensifies beyond the threshold of comfort. It has happened before, this, more times than Anna cares to remember. And it would be easy to hang up, the easiest thing, to leave him to himself. But here she is. Still listening.

  Lawrence thinks it is because she still loves him. He has never said it but she knows. And she has never told him that whatever it is she feels – a kind of love, certainly, and at times more than one – is outweighed by guilt. There has never been a time to explain.

  It is years since the complaints against Lawrence, and his forced retirement. Anna remembers being called before the Board. The relief on finding she had not been found wanting herself. She tried to explain the drinking, the mood swings, and they knew it all already. She told them she felt Lawrence was losing respect for himself, and they nodded and looked up from their screens, as if they knew that too.

  And it was all true. Within the Revenue it was almost public knowledge. What Anna can’t recall is why she didn’t lie. It wouldn’t have been so hard. Instead there is only a recollection of her own certainty, a belief that she was doing the right thing. For Lawrence’s dignity and for the clients. For the Revenue and for herself. She was practising what Lawrence taught. Setting the record straight.

  Cowardice, she thinks. It was cowardice not to lie.

  ‘On him?’ he says again. ‘Are you working on your John Law?’

  ‘I am, yes.’

  ‘You know, I could almost be jealous.’

  ‘Don’t be.’

  ‘Ah. You’ll tell me when I should, won’t you?’ His voice thickening, whimsical. ‘You know, I never trusted him.’

  ‘You seemed to like him enough the other day. You told me to let him go.’

  ‘You should. That was why I was ringing, in fact. Anna, I do think you are being rather insistent with this. It would obviously be better if you let him –’

  ‘It isn’t obvious to me.’

  ‘Really, you could allow him the benefit of the doubt.’

  ‘What is there to doubt? And since when are you his guardian angel?’

  ‘Look, what I mean is. What I’m saying. People treat him like a god. A handsome, pecuniary little household god. They believe in his invisible money. And who am I to judge? He may be the best god they’ll ever have. But he isn’t a saint.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Oh, come on. He’s a money man, Anna, you’ve seen enough of them to know. John Law’s had his years of big-swinging-dickery. He’s the same as all the rest of them, he’s just acquired the taste to hide it.’

  ‘He doesn’t see himself as a money man. He calls himself a scientist,’ she says, anticipating Lawrence’s snort of derision before it comes. And in the back of her mind is Carl’s appalling rumour. The story of human code. The dream of new potatoes, the figure waiting behind her, the pale flesh full of numbers.

  ‘Anyway,’ she says into the radio silence, ‘it’s a free world. He can be what he likes, I don’t have to like him.’

  ‘But there’s no such thing as a free world, is there? You should know that, you’re an inspector.’

  ‘Lawrence, I have to sleep –’

  ‘He’s nothing like you. How can he be? Nothing at all.’

  ‘I know that,’ she says, and she does, too well. ‘You’re imagining things.’

  ‘Am I? Code-writing. The ability to transform the world into numbers. People seem to think of it as the great mystery of the new century. A talent dropped from heaven, like poetry, or fellatio. Have you thought of his life expectancy?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’ll vacuum his gut every week. His diet will be balanced down to the trace elements. He’ll have more spare hearts than a multiple road accident. And you’re already ruined, my dear –’ The words coming thick and sour. ‘All those cheap drinks and filthy nights. They’ll do for you.’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘Forget him, Anna. Close the case. He’ll outlive you by fifty years, and he’ll drop you in a heartbeat, a New York minute –’

  ‘Stop.’

  ‘You’ll be an old fucker like me, while he’s still fucking like a trooper. Do you think of that, when you think of him?’

  She waits. I’m not crying, she thinks. Technically I am not crying. Nothing has left my eyes. And then she is, after all.

  She closes her eyes. There is nothing but the sound of Lawrence’s breathing, amplified by transmission. When he finally speaks again he sounds puzzled. He is a sleepwalker who wakes to the sound of weeping. ‘Anna?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, I thought –’ Unease, and the faintest bewilderment. ‘For a minute there I thought I’d lost you.’

  ‘It’s alright.’

  ‘No. Is it? What did I say?’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘No. I only rang to say –’ She waits for him to come to it, his voice messy with drink and incipient guilt. ‘– fuck it. I’m sorry. The things I say, I don’t mean them, you do know that. It’s the drink, Anna, the drink talking –’

  ‘I know,’ Anna says, and wonders, not for the first time, if she means it. ‘Lawrence, I’m tired. We can talk in the morning.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I am sorry, Anna. I am sorry.’ His voice grows fainter. ‘I wish I was better.’

  ‘I know.’ She is crying again. It isn’t the kind he will hear, not tonight.

  ‘I wish I was better for you.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight, my dear. Goodbye, Anna. Goodnight.’

  She dreams of human code and Lawrence Hinde and later still, in the smallest hours, of a house that is no longer her own. She closes the door on the world outside. There are the irises, tall as long grasses, the shelves of books, the photographs. All hers.

  Her hair is wet. She raises her hands and finds it braided. It is the way she sometimes wore it at twenty, at eighteen, an hour’s work every time. A Ren
aissance knotwork of shining black cords. She had almost forgotten the way it feels. The tautness against the skull.

  There is a sound ahead of her. Burma? she calls. She can hear him hunting, finding his way by sight or sound or echo location. He sounds hungry.

  She goes into the kitchen, opens the fridge. In the bright glare there is nothing. The refrigerator has no back. A corridor runs inwards, cramped as a ship’s passage. Some distance away it stops at the inside of a second refrigerator door.

  She closes the fridge. There is a tightness in her chest, a spreading excitement. One by one she opens the oven, the dishwasher, the cupboards. There are more than she remembers. Not all of them have passageways. Some have only wine glasses. Others open straight onto rooms. Not all of the rooms are empty. There are places full of childrens’ toys, low lamplight, well-loved furniture. There are windows where other nights wait against the glass.

  She thinks, where did all this come from? This isn’t all mine. Who owns these places? But she knows. They are the homes of her clients. It is like opening old books. She recognises them all, she is wrong to have thought any of them ever lost to memory. Their homes are just as she imagined them. She goes upstairs, opening wardrobes and medicine cabinets. Her house is full of houses.

  There is a glimpse of space inside the hearth. Anna kneels to peer in. It is a study, longer and deeper than her own. There is the flicker of the fire. The walls are faced with glass. There is music playing. It is nothing Anna knows. A man sits with his back to her. She crawls through. The flames lick along her belly and her thighs.

  She stands, and finds Carl beside her. He nods as if he has been expecting her. Together they watch the man in the chair. He has his head in his hand. His eyes are closed. He could be asleep, or listening. Anna thinks he is listening.

  What’s he like? Carl asks, and Anna says

  I don’t know. I really don’t know him.

  Come on, Carl says. I’m not asking for the colour of his knickers.

  She looks at the Cryptographer. His eyes are open now, staring through the music into nothing. He has been working on paper, the sheets are arranged in some meaningful order at his feet, as if he is playing a gigantic game of patience. There is writing on his right hand, something noted down in haste, the ink blurred into the lines of his skin. Numbers in flesh.

  There is a sensation at the edge of her mind, ticklish, near understanding. She reaches for it, hard, and in doing so feels herself begin to wake.

  What is he like? she thinks desperately. What is it? And then she knows. He is like the figure with outstretched hands. He is like a man who is afraid of nothing. A man who no longer has anything of which to be afraid.

  The Central Revenue of Limeburner Square is not a beautiful building, but then the premises of the Revenue never are. This isn’t always the fault of the buildings themselves. There have been handsome tax offices, or at least places that were handsome until the inspectors moved in. After that the brightness goes out of them. There is an atmosphere that settles into the stone, a cheap accretion of anxiety and the minute observance of law. It is the smell of information kept too long. Of money gone sour. It is the last week of November, and the sky has fallen on London. Anna’s Revenue looms through the mist like a bulwark of limestone.

  Her office is on the thirteenth floor. Because of her seniority it is larger than average, five thoughtful paces long and four wide. Because people are still superstitious she also has the luxury of a window, a real one that opens. There are books, because she likes them. There are flowers when she can afford them. There are four items of graceless office furniture – one desk, three chairs – which is as much as she can stand and the least she needs to operate. There is an internal wall of sea-green frosted glass through which the shapes of people move, inspectors and clients going on their separate ways, anonymous and insubstantial as shadows.

  Today is pay day, therefore there are flowers. Anna unwraps them, puts them in water. An inspector’s ransom of red parrot tulips. Genetically natural. Or if not natural, exactly, then at least familiar. These are flowers her mother would buy. There are mornings when the man on the stall sells nothing Anna recognises herself.

  She puts the vase on the desk and stands back. Her shoulders ache from driving, the road under mist, ordinary and dangerous, and she stretches, working the blood into the muscles.

  The blinds are still drawn, and she goes to the window and fingers them open. At the Revenue’s foot, the back streets of Amen Court and Pilgrim Lane are faint in the white air. The City is an abstract of lit and unlit offices. Upriver, the illuminations of the micro-city of Westminster are the brightest landmarks, distant circuses and squares laid out in faded neon and halogen.

  Bright lights, she thinks, big city. She imagines their sum, the giant video screens and tiny glass-bulbed filaments. The delicate glass reservoirs of coloured phosphorescent gas. Electricity running through all of them, surfacing briefly as illumination. Soft Gold is different, she knows, but it is just as omnipresent. They might almost be the same thing, it would be easy to think so. The money and the power.

  It is a fortnight since the dream of hidden rooms. Lawrence has been lying low, and will continue to do so for some time yet – Anna knows from experience – his shame eventually manifesting itself in a vastly overpriced delivery of roses, a lunch invitation on a tiny white card hidden somewhere among the buds and blooms. Carl has been conferencing in Paris, and his absence, coinciding with that of Lawrence, has left Anna in less familiar company. In a bar in Bow Sukhdev Hermanubis has taught her the rudiments of backgammon, a game in which losing can be a strategy, his voice becoming less laconic over tulip-glasses of sweet tea and dishes of good Turkish lokum. In the West End she has gone dancing with Janet and Janet’s friends and has liked it, has enjoyed seeing the older woman’s face light up with laughter, the anger worked out of her under the cover of shadow and machinery rhythms. But she misses Lawrence just the same.

  His absence throws her back on her own thoughts. More than that, it throws into relief what she might otherwise have hidden from herself for a little longer. That she is ready for John Law again. There is no more preparation to be done. She has been putting off the second meeting for some time.

  She tells herself that it is the dreams, and this is true. It is years since her sleep has been so disturbed or the disturbances so vivid. She has never been so occupied with a client. She tells herself it is the thought of Lawrence, and this is also true to a point, because she knows that he knows her too well. He watches her too much, hurts himself in the watching. Sometimes he will divine sexual desire in Anna before she has even seen it coming herself. But not this time.

  She doesn’t tell herself it is the thought of Law’s wife or child. She is not so ready to flatter herself with guilt. As if she would mean anything to a man as frequently desired as John Law. But she tells herself that she doesn’t want to see him again, and this is a lie. It is an inversion of the truth.

  She removes her hand from the blind. What light there is in the room falls away. She pulls back a chair and sits in the gloom. Her mobile is in her briefcase and she takes it out and sets it square on the desk, then leans forward, gazing down at it.

  Lawrence, she thinks, if only you could see me now. Sitting here in the dark, squaring up to my telephone. You would laugh at me and make me laugh. Laughter would be a help with this. But Lawrence won’t answer her, she knows, and there is another call to be made. She picks up the phone and dials. The voice that answers is masculine, mechanised, and smooth as glass.

  ‘Good morning, and welcome to the SoftMark Corporation. You are currently being held in a queue and will be dealt with as soon as possible. Please choose from the following options or you may hold –’

  Anna chooses. A musical interlude begins. It is the Goldberg Variations, a recording used recently in SoftMark advertising, so that the thought of the company is there like an itch as she waits. She holds the mobile away from her ear, her eyes
resting on the flowers until the line clicks open. The new voice is female, American, and rattled, as if it is already having a hard day.

  ‘Hello, you’re through to SoftMark. I need a name.’

  ‘Anna Moore, from the Inland Revenue.’

  ‘Anna. Moore. Revenue.’ The voice ticks off the words as if they are on a checklist. ‘Welcome, Anna Moore. How may I help you?’

  ‘I’m looking for John Law.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘John Law.’

  ‘Oh, Mister Law.’ The voice laughs, abruptly softening. ‘Sorry, my mistake. We don’t actually get a lot of calls for him, apart from crazy people. But you can’t be crazy, can you, if you work for the Revenue? I’ll just put you through to Senior Security.’ And before Anna can protest the line gives way to another tier of music.

  She closes her eyes. Behind the lids she sees the morning drive again. The road under fog. She thinks of desire, ordinary and dangerous. Then the music has stopped, and someone else is talking.

  ‘Anna,’ says the third voice, and this one she almost knows. It is mild, mellowed by a perpetual smile. ‘Anna Moore, is it? We never got a proper chance to say goodbye.’

  She opens her eyes. ‘Terence?’

  ‘That’s right.’ He sounds inordinately pleased to be recognised. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine,’ she says, no longer sure whether she lies. ‘I’m fine. And you’re Senior Security?’

  ‘Among other things, yes.’

  ‘I thought you were –’ and she tries to remember what it was she thought he was. A receptionist or a doorman? Or something more archaic. A butler or a commissar? ‘I’m sorry,’ she finishes, trailing off.

  ‘What are you sorry for, my dear?’

  ‘Nothing. How many jobs do you do, Terence?’

  ‘One or two. We keep the core staff here very small. Very small. It makes things easier that way. It’s a question of security. You’ll be looking for Mister Law. He said you would.’