The Cryptographer

by Tobias Hill

  ‘Yes, it did.’

  ‘So you know how I feel. It has been a shock to me, more than anyone. There are things I knew. The divorce, obviously. But not much, really.’ Her pianist’s hands move restlessly, as if to hide something. ‘Not very much. You must think I’m very stupid!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I am.’

  ‘You told me he was good with secrets, once.’

  ‘Not good enough,’ Anneli says. And then, as if only now remembering her name, ‘Anna.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were kind to me, at the Winter Ball. What did you think of us, the first time you came to Erith Reach?’

  She remembers. The children talking, easy in their own confidence, cryptic as John himself. Mister Coldhamsandwiches. There are midges under the trees. Something settles lightly on her neck and she brushes it away.

  ‘Did you think we were strange?’

  ‘I thought you were wonderful,’ she says, truthfully, and Anneli smiles.

  ‘Well, at least you believed it.’

  They fall into silence. It is not uncomfortable; for a few moments it is almost amicable. From beyond the house there is the sound of a ship’s horn, a flat sound echoing across flat land.

  She reaches down to her bag, extracts the photograph. John turning, the light above the trees. When she holds it up Anneli laughs.

  ‘That old thing! Is that what you came all this way to show me?’

  ‘Were you there? When this was taken?’

  She laughs again. ‘I was drunk, very drunk, but in a nice way. I was having a good time. We were having a really great time.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Oh, what does it matter? Put it away, will you?’

  Reluctantly she does so. ‘I just wondered if this was somewhere he might –’

  ‘Please.’ Her voice low. Her eyes shining; she shuts them. ‘I don’t want to look at him. I don’t want to hear about him, I don’t want to talk about him. Do you understand?’

  ‘Of course.’ She searches for something else to say, some means of circling back. ‘How is Nathan?’

  She regrets the words as soon as they are said. In the other woman’s eyes something vicious sparks and almost catches. Her mouth opens onto her teeth. Then the anger has passed. Her voice when she speaks is dull again.

  ‘How dare you.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. It’s not your business to be sorry. None of this was ever your business. Except you are here on business, aren’t you?’

  She doesn’t reply. It is not a question to which she is sure she has an answer to give. ‘I don’t know why I’m here,’ she says finally, and when she looks up Anneli is no longer listening. She is staring through her again, as if she is a screen giving onto something else.

  ‘He was a very organised man. Methodical. You must have noticed. I think when we married he hoped I would change. He always seemed to expect that something would rub off on me. Like the Romans in England. Straight roads, you know? But it never did.’

  Her voice low and quick. Feverish, Anna thinks. The birds call and call overhead. Beyond the picket fence lie acres of low dunes and sawgrass. Beyond those, the incoming white parallels of the sea.

  ‘You probably think I married him for the money. Everyone does! And in a way I did. He was so clever and handsome and generous. Have you seen pictures of him then? Of course, you even brought one with you. Well, he had more life in him than anyone I had ever met. No one ever said no to him. He said he was going to change the world, and – everyone believed him. And everything he said came true. The money was just something that happened. He was always giving it away. But you can’t imagine how exciting it was!

  ‘It was only later that he changed. After Soft Gold there was nothing left to do except – doubt, I suppose. He never enjoyed success. He never told me that, I had to work it out for myself. He kept it from me. Then one morning I looked over at him and … I didn’t know who he was. It was as if he had become a different person. There were secrets between us. It was the secrets that separated us. We were separated years before we were divorced. Did you love him?’

  The question comes out of nowhere, like the wind on the bridge, knocking her sideways. She answers defensively, the first thing that comes into her head. ‘You talk about him as if he were dead.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I thought everyone did.’

  ‘Then you were wrong. And that isn’t an answer.’ She watches Anna, amused and pitying, just as she used to. ‘Do you want him? You can have him if you want him.’

  She shrugs, abruptly wretched. ‘I want to find him.’

  ‘You’re just like the rest of them! You ask so many questions, but you can’t give any answers. Can you?’

  ‘I don’t – I’m not trying to – No one knows I’m here, I told you, not even the Revenue –’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. What about your co-inspector?’

  ‘My what? I don’t have a co-inspector, Anneli. This was my case. I don’t know what you –’

  ‘Don’t you?’ Anneli says, and then stops, staring. ‘Oh. I see. You don’t, actually, do you?’ And she laughs, leisurely and surprised, as if Anna has unexpectedly told a wonderful joke.

  There is the sound of the mosquito grille swinging back in the wind. Anneli’s mother stands in the kitchen doorway. Her daughter sighs and stands and turns to go.

  ‘I can’t help you,’ she says. Then, ‘You can’t keep away, you people, can you? You weren’t the only inspector who came for John, you know. Maybe you won’t be the only one who comes for me.’

  ‘Anneli, wait –’

  ‘I can’t help you,’ she calls back again, and then she is gone. Her mother ushering her away into the cool, dark house. Turning back to Anna, impassive, awaiting her departure.

  It is a warm winter, one of the mildest in decades. What would have been snow another year falls as rain, so that London becomes a parody of itself. A landscape reproduced in monotone, silver and grey as a lithograph. The drip of water everywhere, from trees onto pavements, from ceilings into buckets, from the braced vaults of the Underground to the tracks below, where over a hundred and sixty years the old leaks have formed stalagmites. It is like being in a city of clocks, Anna thinks. As if every street and corner is counting out the hours.

  Every day there is news. Every bulletin contradicts the last. In Macedonia two students of political science confess to writing the Dateline Virus. By the time they have been arrested, their hardware seized, their anarchist leanings reviewed, their claim is already one of many. A bankrupt in South Dakota, a widowed broker in Beijing, a mother of five in Amsterdam, the children confirming everything. This is just the beginning, James Seltsam, unemployed, writes to his sister from Anchorage. We’ve learned a lot from our mistakes. Just wait till Christmas. Ho! Ho! Ho!

  And still John Law is everywhere. The Wall Street Journal Online publishes the emails he sends each week, from London, Paris and Mustique, with faint, unlikely photographs. Two books loaned to a J. K. Law go missing from the Key Street Public Library in Singapore (The History of Forgery; Delia Smith’s Frugal Food). In Sapporo, a drunken Law visits a downtown hostess bar, sings karaoke, buys champagne, and leaves without paying the bill. The messages from Carl pile up unanswered on Anna’s mobile. Insistent, cajoling, ten deep.

  It is November before she goes to see him. For three weeks she has avoided him – has been back to the office only once – knowing with less doubt every day what meeting him again will mean.

  Nothing is new. She remembers the days in the wake of Soft Gold, when the Revenue briefly seemed a different place. Now it is no longer so. By imperceptible increments it has returned to its archaic routines and forms, as if by force of its recalcitrance the world outside could be unchanged. And perhaps it can, Anna thinks. Perhaps it already has been, as Lawrence has, adjusting to the unthinkable. The floors chiming past her, each one as institutionalised as the last. She only
knows for certain that it is not true of herself.

  Mister Caunt is in a conference, his secretary says, looking Anna over as if he finds her dubious. Only with the air of one doing her a favour does he let her wait in Carl’s empty room.

  The air smells of burnt coffee and prefabricated substances. For an hour she sits alone in the only chair, looking out over London. There are no cranes on the skyline; nothing new is being built, while there is no money to do so. The effect is one of stunned peace, as if the city is, for once, at rest.

  She waits and remembers the years she has been here. The endless procession of clients, dishonest, angry, terrified. Carl and Janet and Mister Hermanubis, all on one bench in Limeburner Square. Lawrence, teaching her. Twelve years. That’s a life sentence. She always thought it would be longer. She never thought it would seem so long.

  There is a noise in the corridor outside. A subdued murmur of male voices, Carl’s crass laughter. From her case she takes her computer and her letter of resignation. She places them together on the empty desk in front of her.

  ‘You must be mad,’ her sister says. They meet in an upstairs room in Chinatown, the table too small for the food, which Anna protests is too much, and Martha says is not enough. Dumplings pale and smooth as eggs, clear soup flavoured with abalone. ‘What were you thinking of?’

  ‘Funny. That’s what Carl said.’

  ‘Not quite so nicely, I should think.’

  ‘Not quite. He said I must be out of my microscopical cunting fucktarded mind,’ she says, and Martha guffaws and coughs and gropes for water and an empty glass.

  ‘I’m glad I’m not eating with him.’

  ‘You don’t have to. And nor do I.’

  ‘But it’s not to do with him.’

  ‘Not really. Of course not, no.’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  A waiter stops to pour them drinks, Chinese rice wine in china cups. Anna waits until he leaves. As if he’d even care, she thinks. It is quiet, business is slow, and the staff stand by the walls, uneasy with the lack of work. When she looks back her sister is waiting, hunkered forward, staring at her over the half-eaten meal.

  ‘I think you blame yourself.’

  For what?’

  For what happened to Law,’ she says, and as she placidly refills her bowl a flush of anger goes through Anna.

  ‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous.’

  ‘I don’t mean all of it. Calm down. I just think what happened to him, to him and his family, I think you were very close to it. Not that I’m not grateful.’

  ‘You think too much.’

  ‘So tell me, then.’ Bowl full and raised to her mouth. Her eyes above it waiting, poised. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just to do with me,’ she says, but her sister doesn’t reply. The answer sounds thin in her own ears, disingenuous. She remembers Anneli, amused, pitying. You ask so many questions, but you can’t give any answers. Can you?

  She eats. Fish, rice, fish-and-rice. The early diners come and go. Martha finishes the last of the dumplings and starts equably on the remaining prawns.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll find something.’

  ‘Of course you will.’

  ‘I was thinking I might catalogue Dad’s books for a while. Some of them are quite rare now. Would you mind if I had to sell some?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, of course not. Sounds like a good idea. Healthy.’ She leans forward. ‘You look after yourself, alright? Otherwise I will. Now, can I pay? It’s the least I can do,’ she says. ‘The least. Don’t you think?’

  There are no jobs to be had. It is a bad time to be out of work, the worst of times, people say. There is little for those still in employment, let alone for an ex-inspector of the Inland Revenue.

  The worst of times. In the days she walks when the rain allows, or sits and listens to music, trying to comprehend it in the quiet ways her father did. She cooks whatever the shops have to offer, enjoying the need for experiment: soybeans, black kale, scabbardfish. She sits and reads her unread books, unpacking boxes of those texts that never interested her before, the ones she can sell, if it comes to that. Engels and Marx, the histories of Israel and gunpowder. The several lives of Albert Einstein. The secret codes of Sparta, the city that turned its back on money.

  The nights, too, are her own. At first her friends are insistent, anxious and not to be refused. But their questions are all the same, and she has no answers for them. She spends Christmas with Martha, just the two of them, Eve ringing, full of gin-fuelled cheer, in the company of her luggage man.

  It is January before her belongings are forwarded from the Revenue. She signs for the crate – marked Personal Effects, as if reports of her life have been greatly exaggerated – and carries it through to the kitchen, hushing Burma to one side. Inside, a note from Goater apologises for ‘the tea’ and for there not being more to send. There is, in fact, surprisingly little. She wonders how her office looks, and who is there now, in her place.

  Three mugs. A slew of books. A sheaf of paper records over which Goater appears to have spilt the apologised-for tea, hastily bundled and still damp. A laser disc in a cracked jewel-case holding those of her files deemed declassifiable. An unopened packet of cigarettes.

  She no longer owns a computer to read the disc. She keeps it with some vague idea that it might make a decent coaster. The books she stacks beside the study shelves. The mugs – the ugliest she owns, fit only for the office – she returns to the crate, adding a broken garden chair, to be carried later to the waste transfer station. With the papers and the cigarettes she goes back to the study and sits in the only armchair, unbinding Goater’s stained bundle.

  She leafs through the pages like a photograph album. There is more pleasure than she would expect in them. A letter from an eccentric client, an old man then and perhaps dead now. Another – the only one she ever received – sent in thanks. Notes to herself in her imperfect shorthand, indecipherable now even to herself. A card from one of Lawrence’s bouquets. See me soon. I have missed you.

  It is still light outside. There is music playing, an old and much-faded recording, her own for once, not her father’s. The broken machine sounds of Tom Waits. A bottle of wine already opened on the desk.

  Children are playing at the end of the day

  Strangers are singing on our lawn

  It’s got to be more than flesh and bone

  All that you’ve loved is all that you own –

  Nothing has been erased. The papers seem unedited. She would have been more careful, she thinks, if she were forwarding them herself. But then she is not dismissive of paper, as many are, and there is little in these which would be of value to the Revenue. There is little in them that matters even to her. Still she goes on reading them, dutifully, as she would an inheritance.

  She is almost through when she comes to the third letter. It is unopened but deeply stained, discoloured as a treasure map. The posting date is a few weeks old, the place of origin blotted out. The writing is not familiar. It is not John’s. The stamps are American.

  She sits forward to steady herself. Her hands and forearms trembling.

  Dear Anna,

  How are you? I am – well. It is cold here now, however, they say there is better weather on the way. The island is full of birds which have flown too far or not far enough. Nathan adopts them one after another. He would bring them all home if we let him.

  It must be two months since you were here. You said that, if I talked to you, then you would tell no one. Though you didn’t really say it, did you? And I didn’t believe you anyway. But no one has come, and I am beginning to wonder if I was wrong. So I am writing.

  I was unkind to you. I felt, I think, that I was owed a little revenge. Can you understand, I wonder. You seemed to represent all those who blame us for what has happened, all the vultures who come after us. Hopping and flapping. But I remember – you told me you weren’t representing anyone.
And I said things which you didn’t deserve to hear. I am sorry.

  Still, I am taking a chance, writing to you. You may have changed your mind. Maybe you will tell them everything after all. But I would like to help you. It’s all over with anyway, and you came a long way to see me. It was brave of you to come after me.

  The other inspector was an old man. He came three times but I was there only twice. The first time he visited was before I met you, before you came. John told me you were co-inspectors and I believed him. One thing you should know about my husband. I never knew when I could trust him.

  They spoke together in private. Never for long. John did so much of his business in private. I don’t think I ever heard the man’s name (but I am not good with names). I felt that John didn’t like him. When I met you I thought you knew. Certainly he seemed to me like a tax inspector.

  Now John. I know you want to see him again. I always knew what you were thinking. You are not so good with secrets, Anna. You were always a little obvious.

  You showed me a photograph. That was a shock for me, because it was clever of you. I think you will still find him there. He went there for the same reasons I am here. Do you know where his mother lives? I think you do. It is quite like this place, although closer to home for all of us.

  When he asks, tell him we are well.

  A.L.

  Coll. She had almost forgotten the article, years old and only half believed. She wonders if Carl remembers it too, and if so, how far ahead of her he is already. She has no car, the Revenue having come long ago for that. Nor are there flights, the regular services cancelled, the website says, for the duration of the immediate situation. In the end it is the train she takes north, a standby booking on the sleeper and local connecting services. The landscape slipping by outside, her head slipping against the glass every time she tries to rest.

  It is evening by three o’clock. The sub-cities beyond London go on for mile after mile and then are suddenly left behind, as if the train has passed over some continental shelf into darkness. She sleeps a little at a time, dreaming that Lawrence is drinking again. Each time she wakes there is the same rise of uplit heath and firs, the same blur of track and cutting, and when she dreams the train comes with her, not letting her go, its rhythms insistent and questioning.