The Amber Shadows

by Lucy Ribchester

  They came to a halt by the mess door. Moira held it open.

  Honey yanked her back. ‘Who is Piotr Górecki? You knew him.’

  ‘I’ve never seen him before in my life.’

  ‘But you knew the name.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ She reached for the door again. Honey pulled her away.

  ‘Was he in the Cottage? Where do you know him from? What was he doing round the back of those buildings?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, Honey. Can we just dance?’

  Moira prised Honey’s hand, finger by finger, away from where it clutched her sleeve, and opened the door. The hard, frosted-glass face had turned once again, out of sight, out of reach. Heat and scent spilled from the hall. Honey felt the goosebumps rise on her legs and wasn’t sure it was just the cold.

  Moira disappeared as soon as they were back inside.

  Honey let herself be led in a waltz by a Welsh boy she knew from Bletchley, then danced swing with a couple of Americans who smelled divine but held her too stiffly for comfort. One of them tried to lindy hop but his rhythm was off and hers was distracted, and in the end he gave up and cut in with another girl instead. She wandered back among the wallflowers where she thought bitterly she must belong tonight.

  As midnight approached Moira had still not surfaced. There was a core group of dancers still going at it furiously, but most people had clamped themselves to the walls, the airmen pinning in the ladies they chatted to, or had led them outside, or had gone home, or were being sick in the ablutions block. The floor was sticky with spilled cider and sweat. Only now she saw that little American and British flags had been pasted to the front of the stage. Paper streamers and Christmas decorations hung limply off the damp walls.

  She thought she might finally hop onto one of the vehicles headed Bletchley way, Moira or no. There were plenty of people around. Moira would get home, if home was where she was headed. There was still the question of the egg under the flower pot too; she had not found time to deal with that yet, not with the Steadmans creeping round their cottage at every turn. The wee hours might be her best chance.

  ‘Keep ’em Flying’ played and the dance floor filled again but many couples could only manage half before they slumped off tired, rubbing their feet. The room took on the sudden sour atmosphere of the end of a party. The paper streamers sagged with moisture. A soldier with his uniform undone tripped and fell on the floor and cried out unnaturally.

  ‘Never going to beat Jerry like that.’ His colleagues yanked up his arms.

  As soon as Honey pushed the door to the outside she found that the smell of the hall had sneaked into her dress. She looked back over her shoulder and caught sight of Reuben MacCrae at the cider table, pouring Scotch into a blue-rimmed enamel cup. He looked up and stared right through her until her skin grew cold. Then he raised his cup to his bps, obscuring his eyes. The band were playing the raw, sliding melancholy notes of Harry James’s ‘You Made Me Love You’, a trombone carrying the heart of the sorrow in its lonely voice. Through the steam and the mulch of the party’s aftermath Moira materialised, walking towards Honey.

  They said nothing as they gathered their coats. Honey scoured the floor one final time but could see no sign of Piotr Górecki, or even Felix Plaidstow.

  Outside again they made for the line of people queuing to have their passes checked onto the jeeps. She didn’t dare look at Moira, whose cheeks were streaked with black lines where the wax mascara had run. Her lipstick was all but gone. Home Front Ammunition. The soldier checking passes whistled sharply and waved them on with a torch. Honey heaved herself up first, then Moira.

  Moira waited until they were in their seats before she began to cry, heavy, uncontrollable tears, a sorrow as big and lucid as the moon. Honey touched her arm and Moira let herself fall onto her collarbone. Stormy sobs wrung out of her, she had a child’s devastation that could move ships or stars. Honey looked up and wondered how many mothers, how many lovers, how many jilted and widowed and angry women were heaving their own burdens of grief to their hearthsides that night, from the cities of north Scotland to the sweating tropics.

  She put her fingers lightly on Moira’s hair.

  ‘He’s married.’

  Honey said nothing.

  ‘That’s who’s looking after his horse.’ Moira’s hands fell hard on her belly and her nails clawed the fabric of her dress.

  The open wagon rolled out past the barbed wire of the airbase gates and they headed into the blackout, through the hedgerows and the dense shadowed bushes back to Bletch-ley, not once looking behind.

  Back in her bedroom she found that rather than the peace she had been looking for, she was more disturbed than ever. Guilt tugged at her: for the stolen egg; for being preoccupied with the wretched puzzle, even as she held Moira. The night still bounced around her head, dizzying the quiet in the room, and the ciphers ran round and round like a carousel until she could no longer make sense of her own thoughts. The further she dropped towards sleep the more urgently they seemed to shout to her; we’re waiting for you, they seemed to say. You won’t settle until you know what we stand for.

  Her ears still rang with the residue of the band. But when she fell asleep, it was not dancing that she saw. It was not the sodden Christmas flags from the mess hall, or Moira, or Reuben MacCrae, or his horse. It was not Felix Plaidstow, or Piotr Górecki, or Joan Fontaine, or even a person she thought she knew, miles away on the other side of an ocean with stolen amber stitched into his coat seams, running, hiding from the Nazis.

  It was a banquet of men: candelabras on their table, antique paintings behind them, pristine shrouds covering their heads. In the dream world the smell was fatty and rich and there were no panes on the window as she walked past, no panes at all, allowing her to stop, reach in deeply with her hand, take the corner of one of the clean white sheets from under a static, faceless chin, and pull.

  Chapter 9

  ‘Moira? She’s not here.’ Miss Mooden went back to typing. Honey wiped her neck with her polka-dot scarf and tried to keep a handle on her hot breathing as she removed her coat. The door back into the main corridor wouldn’t shut properly. She went out and gave it a good kick but the wood had warped. It would be the morning she was late.

  ‘Need to get the coffin boys to look at that one.’ Rupert Findlay was peering over her shoulder with a blotter in hand. He smelled of pencils.

  ‘Coffin boys?’

  ‘Yes, they get local coffin makers to build the partitions in these huts. No wonder they’re so bloody cold. Not meant for the living.’ He disappeared into the room opposite. She went back into the Decoding Room and gave the door a yank. It slammed, and when she turned round everyone was staring.

  ‘Sorry, queue at the post office.’ It wasn’t a lie. There had been a woman in a red hat complaining that her dog had been stolen from outside the butcher’s shop last week. She’d had to wait while the cashier made jokes about being on the lookout for rabbit pie. She wasn’t about to explain the reason she had been at the post office in the first place.

  But she had already seen that something was different in the room. The configuration of the desks was wrong. Beatrix now had her back to the door. The packet of workstations had been spread into a horseshoe, with Mooden at the head. There were a couple of new recruits, each buddied up to one of the other girls. And Moira was missing.

  Honey slipped into the remaining empty seat, keeping her eyes down.

  Something had happened overnight that she was not aware of. She grabbed the nearest intercept and began to type.

  That morning she had woken before dawn.

  It was very important that Mrs Steadman did not see the stolen egg, for though she did not like her neighbours, she also did not like thieves. There was a hierarchy of offences in Mrs Steadman’s book and being neighbourly was only minor. Honey didn’t have the energy to make up a story for it being in her possession, nor did she want to have to explain why after cooking the egg she was not about to
eat it.

  She found the little nugget of alum rattling away at the back of her pencil case in the shiny toilet paper it had been wrapped in many years ago. It hadn’t moved since she was at boarding school. With a candle in her hand she padded to the scullery in her stockings. The linoleum froze then numbed her soles. The kitchen windows let in damp and everything was icy-wet to the touch. She lit the gas stove, closed the door to muffle the hiss, then filled a kettle with a few inches of water and put the egg in the bottom. It still had specks of muck and a couple of down feathers clinging on. Tutting, she dipped her hand in the water to pick them off when a voice loomed from the corner, low and soft, ‘You’ll be up early. Early start.’

  Mr Steadman.

  He cleared his throat. He was always clearing his throat, he had a phlegm problem. She turned to see him sitting in a folding chair by the dead ashes of the fire. His bottom half was partially hidden by the Morrison shelter – a white metal cage that lay in their kitchen for the air raids, government distributed to all, but in the Steadmans’ case not yet used. A pillow was puffed behind his head, and at the table by his elbow was a pat of butter, a bowl of sugar and a glass cup with a spoon sticking from it. He coughed again. ‘Old girl made me sleep down here for the cough.’ He caught her looking at the butter and sugar. ‘Her remedy. Works.’ He coughed again, weakening his argument.

  From a tear in the black sugar paper that had been pasted over the windowpanes a slate-grey strip of morning twilight washed in over the kitchen counter.

  Honey realised her hand was clutching her own throat. Mr Steadman smiled. ‘Make us a cup of tea too. Don’t tell the wife.’ And he winked as if making tea were a great secret act.

  ‘Of course.’ She found the loose-leaf tea in a counter jug. Mr Steadman was already on his feet, heading for the kettle with the egg inside.

  ‘I’ll grab that.’ She took it from his hands, a little roughly, and sprinkled in the leaves in just enough time to turn the water a concealing murky brown.

  ‘Tea leaves in the kettle. That how they make it in London? Don’t let her see you doing that.’

  He didn’t wait for a reply but pottered back to the table. Neither of them spoke as the water took its time to boil. Eventually Steadman got up, walked to the stove top, lifted the lid then put it back. He said, ‘A watched pot never boils,’ and winked again, then sat back down.

  When the popping sound of liquid on metal rose, he leapt to his feet. Before Honey could cross to the stove, he had seized the kettle. ‘This one’s my favourite.’ He plonked down a cup with porcelain flowers painted on it.

  She saw it in her mind very vividly; the egg plopping out of the kettle spout and into the rosebuds.

  ‘Let me do that,’ she said.

  But her voice distracted him, and as he poured he missed the cup. For a second scalding water flashed onto his thumb. He lashed back his hand. The kettle slipped, then rolled on its bottom edge, then landed with a smack flat on the counter. Honey’s heart seized. Another vision took shape – halfcooked egg white leaking out, congealing in the hot water. She blasted on the cold tap for Mr Steadman’s thumb, but he only grunted, ‘I’ve had worse. Once seared my whole hand to a drum of boiling oil.’ She wanted to say, this from the man who took butter and sugar for a cough. But she didn’t. She waited until he had taken his folding chair at the table and wiped his brow, and she brought him his tea with the tin of powdered milk.

  Quick as was polite she fumbled the egg into a cup, rinsed the kettle out, gathered the other things she needed and made haste to the door.

  ‘How on earth . . .’

  Just as she reached it she turned with horror already on her face, for she knew what she would see. Mr Steadman dipped his fingers into the porcelain cup and pulled out a small white dripping feather.

  Her mouth hung open for several seconds.

  ‘The swallows, they fly in,’ she said, and huddled the vinegar bottle she’d filched closer. By some miracle she managed to turn the handle of the door without dropping the lot.

  As it closed she heard him say, ‘Swallows? In winter?’

  When she got to her bedroom she realised she had left her candle burning downstairs. But the gas was switched on and the room was light enough.

  She heaved her chest of drawers over until it was beneath the lamp. The alum was old and crumbly and mixed easily with the vinegar. From her pencil case she removed a paintbrush with a nib as fine as a bird’s tongue. She dipped it into the mix. And then she began to paint.

  It had been a game of theirs, one they played every Easter time. A tree branch hung with painted and blown eggs. That year Honey’s one – her gift to Dickie – was designed in swirls like the waves of the sea. Purple, green, gold and blue. She could never do straight lines. She could never do the zig-zag patterns like the lady who owned the bonbon shop and had her own tree of eggs.

  She had waited for him to come in. The tree was lit with the coloured eggs, like a Christmas tree, but plumper, more fertile. Honey had always preferred Easter to Christmas.

  And then Dickie handed her the egg that was her gift. It was plain, brown, still speckled, with a faint overcooked smell to it. It was heavy too, like a picnic egg. He hadn’t even bothered to blow the whites. She had wanted to cry. It was a spiteful thing to do. But he’d stayed her hand as she fifted it to throw.

  ‘Peel it,’ he’d said. The anticipation seemed to steam from him. His green, animated eyes were wet with excitement to see her peel the horrid-smelling gift. Keeping her pride she had begun, slowly, chip by chip. The bum in her cheeks she could still remember. Shame and rage. What had she done to deserve this when she had painted him such lovely swirls on his egg? But as she peeled each crumb of shell away, beneath the surface was revealed the most glorious intricate world of curls, lines, dots, symbols, triangles and whorls.

  They had appeared by miracle on the globular shiny white. She tore carefully at the membrane, lifting away the remnants of the cracked brown crust. In the centre, on one side, the words ‘Happy Easter Honey’ were scrolled elaborately, chubby and wonky.

  ‘Ignore that bit, I couldn’t get it quite right.’ He pointed to the final Y, which had curled too long into the pattern below it.

  Honey was too dumbstmck to speak. She turned the egg in her hands. It was like the Faberge eggs she had tried to copy in her own designs. It was the most perfect thing she had seen.

  Dickie’s face was tight with the fight inside himself; to tell or not, how he had done it. He looked as if he was itching to. And yet, ‘You see the priest’s not the only one who can transubstantiate,’ was what he said, and then cackled.

  She was caught too: she knew, even at that age — she must have been seven or eight — it was a trick. Dickie was not God or magic. But she didn’t yet want to know how it was done. She had kept the egg not on the hanging tree — there was no string to hang it from — but in her best Beatrix Potter eggcup, on the windowsill inside the nursery. She had kept it there for the best part of a week until it began to stink and the pattern started to fade, until one day she watched from the doorway as her nanny took it, lifted the window sash and threw it out to the birds.

  She painted slowly and carefully, watching the wet slime trail of the brush, making sure the letters were thick enough to trickle through the shell. Once they’d soaked, they would vanish completely from the outside. ‘IH (in haste)’, she wrote. ‘Bletchley Station. Please come. PS. Stravinsky. Know anything about amber?’

  She had no talent for the lines. But at least if the egg was unlucky enough to be intercepted the message wasn’t damning and it wasn’t in cipher. She wrapped it carefully in the tissue paper from the amber, then in brown paper, then in a clean, undarned stocking, and placed it inside an old pastille tin. She addressed it to the theatre. She hoped it wouldn’t be censored but if it was, there was no reason to crack into an egg — they were valuable commodities, weren’t they? Worth posting. And after all, someone had once had a piano shipped to Bletchley Park
.

  By the time she was done, the sun was up and the air was bitten with a hard bright frost.

  ‘SGT SHOT THROUGH JAWBONE AND NECK, PVT LURZ SHOT STOMACH. CO AND 1 PVT WOUNDED. PANZER ONE SET ON FIRE, TWO WELL PLACED CHARGES. URGENTLY REQUEST SURGEON’S ASSISTANCE. 80 CBM. TRADE WEATHER.’

  They had broken both Light Blue and Vulture for the day and an inventory of Nazi boys with punctured organs was bleeding onto their tape rolls. ‘PVT BRAUN MISSING. PVT LUTZ ABDOMINAL PLUG SHOT. SURGEON CONSIDERS IT URGENT THAT CO EVACUATE HIM FROM FIELD.’

  ‘CONGRATULATIONS TO PVT SCHMIDT. HE HAS A SON.’

  Honey kept her head down and typed, and tried not to translate the German in her head and tried not to wonder where Moira was. The faint noise of instructions being issued to the new girls carried beneath the tumult of the keys. A woman from the Machine Room came through to ask for a moment’s peace while they worked on something.

  It was nearing lunchtime but she didn’t feel like eating. She took a moment’s break to go over to Beatrix’s desk.

  ‘Have you seen Moira?’

  Beatrix hesitated. Her eyes caught the door first, then the look of Mooden.

  ‘I think she’s in sick bay.’ Beatrix went back to her typing.

  Honey felt the dance mess seeping in at her through the walls of the hut; the whine of muted trumpets soaring around the tight wood; Moira’s cold hand in the wagon. She had seemed lucid when they had said goodbye. She wasn’t drunk or slurring. She must have wept enough tears to wash and wring out every drop of alcohol in her stomach. ‘Tea?’ Honey asked.

  ‘I think one of the boys has coffee. I just want to keep going.’ Beatrix pulled her mauve cardie closer round her shoulders and picked up a fresh sheet.