The Amber Shadows

by Lucy Ribchester

  Honey remembered Dickie’s descriptions of their father’s hands – it was as if he was a conjurer, Dickie said, and could make the music lift from the squiggles into something real. He would take nonsense and he would make something beautiful and understandable and real from it, and that made him a wizard or an alchemist, or a codebreaker. And Honey had felt proud.

  His alchemic hands, in exile; creating these hard amber images, bringing the memories to life. She felt certain, as she stood there, one hand on the imperfect rivulets of the firebird’s feathers, that he knew she understood the gift. He had carved for her this firebird. He had smuggled it past the censors. He was true. He was real. He was alive. And his gifts, his coded, enciphered gifts, had brought her here, to Bletchley. They said it was her stepfather’s connections. But it wasn’t. It was the gift for codes and ciphers and secrets that her real father had passed to her.

  The reverie snapped. She lifted her eyes and saw Felix Plaidstow.

  He was standing a little apart from Hut 3, looking towards the mansion. His clothes appeared dirty and unkempt as if he had been bent long over a messy desk. His blond hair stuck out in little feathers at the crown, and at the sides above his ears. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and he wore a knitted tank top but he didn’t look cold. His cheeks shone red. Staring at him she saw where sweat had pushed the tails of his fringe away from his brow.

  He turned his head in that instant. His eyes switched to her and she felt, for a second, as if she had been shot. She looked everywhere and anywhere; at the gravel stones, wheat-crunchy and fine, at the tennis courts where two old men were bashing out a match in greatcoats with cigarettes hanging from their mouths. She looked at the smoking door of Hut 11 where the loud, unpredictable machines still rumbled on. But eventually she could not help it and she looked back at him.

  He was still staring. If she didn’t already know his face it would have appeared to her very stony. But Honey was not foolish. She had seen that look in a man’s eyes before.

  She didn’t want to break the gaze. She thought she could see the green-blue streaks in his irises from where she stood. He was icy and yet he burned. His hands were loose by his sides, as if he had forgotten he had them. She could have kept staring, and staring, if she hadn’t remembered Fitzgerald’s line: ‘He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at.’

  It was a spear in her throat. Stubbornly she turned, because she did not want to be looked at. Not even by Felix. She felt filthy, a repository for his filthy thoughts. But when she turned back he had raised his hand in an avuncular wave, and was smiling. And she blushed then for a fool. It was strange how some moments seemed real only in the seconds for which they existed. They passed, and you didn’t know whether you had actually felt something, or imagined a ghost. The firebird was still in her palm, hoarding its secrets. And Felix was waving at her as if she were a new friend; someone he didn’t know very well. She heard a cheeping sound behind, turned and saw a robin on a tree branch, its blood breast swollen, and wondered if, for that moment, Felix hadn’t been staring at her at all; if in fact he had been staring at the robin, and was a little myopic.

  He turned and went back into Hut 3.

  ‘Where in God’s name did you get to?’ Beatrix’s voice came at her like a cannon. She felt a mauve-cardiganed arm pinch round her shoulders. ‘Didn’t you say something about fetching tea? Come on.’

  But Honey didn’t feel like tea. She felt instead the weight of the firebird pulling down her pocket.

  At lunch she took her cheese and piccalilli sandwiches from her plate, and buried them in a napkin.

  The manor hallway was busy and smelled of brewing vegetables from the cafeteria. She moved quickly past the door to Tiver’s office, watching it as if it might burst open any second and drown her in seawater or snakes. The sick bay was at the very rear of the building, past the cafeteria kitchens. The smell grew stronger, then became tempered with an ethanol bite. Immediately she thought of red splashes on hospital cotton and felt queasy. Whoever had fond memories of a hospital? Her own were limited to a broken collarbone and her brother’s ear abscess. She had always felt ashamed of her nausea at other people’s blood. Nursing was something young women were supposed to be good at.

  She knocked on the shiny wood and waited. The door was opened by the matron, thin but solid in a white slab of headpiece and flat cork shoes. She looked Honey very swiftly up and down — a quick, hard assessment of her state of health — then breathed out, satisfied. Honey had never had cause to see the matron, but people said she could smell both lies and pregnancy.

  ‘I’m looking for Moira Draper. I heard she was sent here this morning.’

  ‘She was.’ The words had a conclusive ring.

  ‘Is she still here? Can I see her?’

  ‘No to both.’ The matron’s spidery hand crawled in slow steps up the doorframe, blocking the view. Honey had the fancy that even if she were to slam the door right now, the matron’s iron fingers would deflect the blow. Her body filled the remaining gap.

  ‘Has she been sent home? I’m only asking because I’m worried.’

  Her tone must have softened the woman a little, because she glanced behind her then let her arm relax. ‘She’ll be all right. Just had a bit of a turn. All you girls are tired the morning after those airbase parties. I can’t imagine there’s a link.’ It seemed to Honey that making a joke was such an excruciating effort for the woman that it put her even less at ease. She scrutinised the matron’s face for signs of a twinkle but could find none.

  Honey sighed. ‘I suppose I can call at her billet.’

  The matron opened her mouth briefly, then whatever she had been about to say was tucked neatly back in. ‘Yes, try that.’ She closed the door and the sick-person scent dulled.

  Honey stepped outside. Despite the cold she could not face eating in the cafeteria. She could not face the small talk, the little conversations about Christmas and books and whoever was home on army leave and whichever weddings were happening this week. She tucked her skirt and coat underneath her bottom, and took a seat on the frosted lawn beside the lake. She pulled out the sorry-looking sandwiches from their damp napkin and looked across to the thicket of bushes. The spot was close to where she and Moira had first met.

  It had been very late spring or early summer, in what must have been 1941, because Honey had only just arrived.

  The warnings from her induction interview were still popping off at odd moments in her head, making her jump and flinch at noises. Things the Captain had said as he passed her that heavy pen to sign the Official Secrets Act had moulded together. Hanging, treason, firing squad. ‘And if I had my way you’d get your head chopped off.’ Had he actually said that, or was it one of the young guards at the gate, messing about with her afterwards?

  When she heard the scrabbling in the hedges behind the lake that day, her lungs had leapt. War made one jumpy enough anyway. But it must be pigeons, she told herself. There are pigeons at the Park. There are pigeons bloody everywhere. The cracking of the branches came again, too loud for birds. It was a heavy tread, a weighty animal stamping the earth. Human feet, red and shiny at the toes, flared into vision. And a curse. ‘Fuck.’

  It was a woman’s voice. ‘Look, you out there, can you help me? I seem to have snapped my heel.’

  Honey paused, then began prising back the blackthorn branches, raining fresh blossoms down into the mud. She saw at eye level the side of a curtain of chestnut hair. Strands had threaded upwards into the branches, and become caught on the thorns.

  ‘It’s all going to pot. My hair’s tangled, my feet are stuck. Who’d be a bloody woman. Hold these, will you?’

  She shoved a bunch of bluebells into Honey’s hand, and it was then that her voice struck Honey as incongruous. She looked, Honey thought, like one of the stars of the silent screen. Dark hollows ringed her eyes – but rather attractively, as if she were feeling sleepy or had drunk a little too much. Her lips were shiny, their bud shape li
ke small fruit. She looked well-fed and taut and sallow-skinned; slightly exotic. And yet she spoke like a woman who worked in a tea-room or pub.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ Honey asked.

  ‘What does it look like? Carpeting the cat.’

  ‘Are we allowed to pick the flowers here?’

  The girl threw back her head and guffawed. ‘You think they’re going to shoot me on sight. Not likely to get taken for a German parachutist. They favour the nun’s costumes, don’t have the legs for stockings. Come on, grab me.’

  Without thinking Honey had reached out her hand. The woman’s palm was cool and slightly moist. Her heel creaked off clean as Honey yanked her onto the path, and yet she had insisted on turning back around, squatting down and scrabbling in the muck to retrieve it. They stumbled out of the briars onto the gravel. The sun was scorching the lake, blinding harlequin blue and gold diamonds on the surface.

  The woman patted down her hair. The mats and tangles made flat lace against the rest of her lacquered wave.

  Honey said, ‘You do go to extraordinary lengths to make your billet room nice. I mean mine is horrid but—’

  The woman cut her off. ‘I’m Moira.’

  ‘Honey.’

  They shook clumsily as Honey handed back the flowers. ‘I was just thinking I might fancy myself some—’

  ‘They’re not for me.’ She was brushing herself briskly down. Crumbs of dead foliage were sticking to her wool skirt. The way she said it was like the end of the conversation. But it made Honey keener to press. ‘Lucky boy. Does he like bluebells?’

  ‘I’ll find out, won’t I?’

  She saw Moira again and again that week, tangled in the bushes, picking up flowers – azure, mauve and white – and when the bluebell patch was bald she took to the hedgerows outside Bletchley station to cut down armfuls of blossoming green twigs.

  Honey couldn’t remember how she found out, but on some canal of slow-moving BP gossip it came to light that Moira was gathering wildflowers for the Park chef. They had brought him up from the Savoy Grill in London, but he had taken ill with the strain of cooking for codebreakers with fussy appetites and was on sick leave. No one was sure whether Moira’s interest in him came before or during that leave, but she brought him flowers every day, until he tried to hang himself and was taken back to London.

  After that Moira had changed her style for a little time. Honey noticed her, for she was hard to miss, striding into the Research Cottage, round the back of the manor house in flat men’s shoes and cornflower slacks. The lipstick vanished; it was as if the chef and the bluebells had never existed.

  After weekend leave in autumn of that same year Honey had come back to find Moira working in Hut 6. No one made mention of it; it was as if she had always been there, like the coke stove in the corner, only no one had noticed her until now. The clothing ration had just come in and the chatter from her was nothing but rayon and ribbon and raiding grannies’ wardrobes at garden fetes for the most elaborate Edwardian hats.

  There were lots of rumours about Moira: about her work, about her personal life, about how she had won a scholarship to Oxford, about how she had to beat the dons away from trying to seduce her, about her fragile mathematical mind. But she had an air about her like an unexploded bomb that stopped you from asking. Even in their most private picnics, even when they talked about corns, sanitary towels, how to notify a man politely that he was sticking his fingers too hard into your intimate parts, how awkward it was to have to go to the toilet in a tiny outdoor hut when you didn’t know who was waiting outside the door — even then you could not ask Moira about the chef. You could not ask about what had happened to bring her from the Research Cottage to being a typist in plain old Hut 6 Decoding Room. She was candid, she was intelligent and she was vulgar, but she alone decided what secrets she told.

  At four the shift change arrived. Mooden murmured instructions for takeover to the new Head of Room while the women picked up their cigarettes, shoved stray magazines into handbags and gathered their belongings.

  ‘Honey, you’ve dropped something.’ Beatrix bent down, then stuck out her hand. In it was a scrap of brown paper, torn around the edges, raggedy. Honey took it without thinking. It was only when it was in her palm that she saw the Cyrillic writing stamped on the brown paper, and in the centre the little picture punctuated by frilly marks round its edges, beneath the postmark.

  ‘Must have fallen from your pocket. Can I look at that?’

  Her heart jumped and a wash of horror rinsed her from head to toe. Beatrix straightened out the brown pulpy wrap, then frowned at the stamp. It had a picture of a carriage on it, pulled by black horses. It was faded and cracked. Honey waited for the question to come at her: What is this? Where did you get it from? Instead Beatrix broke out a curious smile. ‘Very cute,’ she said, taking her hand away, and shoved her bag further up her shoulder and moved towards the door.

  Honey listened to Beatrix’s footsteps cracking over the wood in the corridor and then the rush of cold smoked air and the silence as the outer door slammed shut. She waited for a few seconds before making her own way towards the door. Miss Mooden caught her arm. ‘Honey.’

  She jumped out of her skin.

  ‘Gosh, are you all right? I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

  Her nerves were in tatters; her heart drummed. ‘I’m fine. I just need a little rest perhaps after last night, the dance . . .’

  Mooden interrupted. ‘I was going to ask if you wouldn’t mind awfully swapping with Sylvia? She’s on the rota to switch to night shift tomorrow, but we’re a girl down. I know you usually go day, back, night, but we’re in a bit of a fix.’

  Honey breathed out. ‘Is that all? Of course. No problem, I’d love to help.’ The words came out of her mouth before she realised the weight of them. Agreeing to flick straight to night shift without warming up on back shift wasn’t a good idea for an unquiet mind.

  At this time of evening the other Bletchley workers were clocking off shifts and the streets were busy. Shoulder bumps and trips in the dusk were followed by jollity. ‘Gosh, I’m sorry’; ‘Never thought the war would bring you this close to your neighbours’: ‘Good job it’s a blackout and not a soundout, if Jerry was using his ears he’d hear this town seven miles away.’

  There was good nature in the frosty air. Christmas was coming and folk were making the best of it. You could orient yourself on the high street by the smells: the oily blood of the butcher’s, the vanilla yeast of the baker’s, the motor grease of the mechanic’s. But even now it felt so temporary, a game of blind man’s buff, after which the lights would be switched back on and the world could breathe out again. Honey couldn’t quite believe, didn’t want to believe, that this was now their reality; this blacked-out life was the foreseeable future, this was the present and could go on for ever.

  Outside the newsagent’s she heard two people talking about the headlines: ‘Struggle in Stalingrad’. The borders of that country were bleeding. She had thought that the worst horrors that could ever have been reported had happened in the last war, and now she didn’t want to look at the stories. She’d heard it on the wireless. Bread running out. Fields frozen to a crumb. Nothing came of the last harvest. People were melting down lipsticks to spread on bread. Little girls in red sashes were leading the charges. Hunger was spreading as the Nazis bombed grain mills, and meat plants, and sugar and tea warehouses. They’d starve them out. When London’s sugar wharves were torched the streets around them had run with rivers of treacle. When the food was gone it was gone. One journalist had said at the time they’d make cannibals of Blighty before they’d invade, and then we’d submit to them for shame.

  And in Russia, he was there, somewhere, running, hiding, a speck in her imagination. But she could see him, as if she was flying high above a blackout and he was the blue flame of a cigarette lighter.

  You didn’t have to have met someone to know them. You didn’t have to have held their hand or held their
gaze to feel what kind of person they were. Objects and stories and artefacts were as much the building blocks of a person as what they told you about themselves when they stood in front of you. Honey knew that. She knew her father, though she had never met him. Sometimes she felt that through Dickie’s stories she knew him better than either of them knew their mother.

  Moira’s landlady was slow to the door. Honey could hear the baby inside the front room, crying, a one-note dirge. When she did finally pull open the door, she did what the matron had done and cautiously placed her arm in the frame as if she had no intention of letting anyone in. Her face was pricked with blotches of red and she had coal dust on her brow beneath a patterned band. Strands of her hair poked free, and the lumpy outline of rollers made her head look huge and misshapen. She kept looking back over her shoulder in the direction of the crying.

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s just . . .’

  ‘Is Moira all right? She was sent to the sick bay, and then the matron said she’d gone home. We were together at the dance.’

  The landlady looked uncertain. Her forehead puckered. From over her shoulder there was a milk-pudding smell.

  ‘Is she here?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  Honey’s patience slipped. ‘I’ve come all this way in the blackout. I mean, I haven’t got anything to bring her, but – what’s wrong with her? No one will tell me.’ As she heard the words detach from her mouth they took on a shrill quality she hadn’t intended.