Every Secret Thing

by Susanna Kearsley

  ‘Oh, hardly a garden. It’s just the one planter. I thought it might be nice to have some roses.’

  Roses…That was better than I’d hoped, really, because it seemed quite natural, then, to reach into my jacket, slung over the chair at my back, and take out the thick paperback mystery I’d carried to read on the plane. ‘I brought you something back,’ I said, ‘from England.’

  She glanced round from the chopping board, where she was wedging a lemon. ‘Oh, Katie, you shouldn’t be wasting your money on gifts, not for me.’

  ‘It didn’t cost anything.’ I drew a breath. ‘I went to Andrew Deacon’s funeral, Grandma, and I thought that since…well, since you couldn’t be there, you might like to have a little something, sort of a memento, from the grave. So here you are.’ I took a small pressed rosebud from the pages of the book, and held it out toward her on my upturned palm.

  She didn’t take it right away. She set down her knife, and stood a moment looking at the flower lying on my outstretched hand. And then she reached to pick the rosebud up, with something close to reverence.

  ‘Thank you, Katie,’ she said quietly. ‘That was thoughtful of you, very thoughtful. I…’ She stopped, and set the fragile flower gently on the window ledge before turning to busy herself with the lemon again, her hands making rapid and decisive movements. Head down, she asked, ‘What was the funeral like?’

  I was back on uncertain ground again, feeling my way, but I took my cue from the deliberately conversational tone of her voice. ‘Nice, I thought. It was in Hampshire, at a little village church, and the vicar gave a beautiful service.’

  ‘Were there many people there?’

  ‘Quite a few. I met his nephew.’

  ‘Little Jamie, yes. His sister’s boy. I had forgotten…’

  Which must have meant she’d been a young woman when she’d met Andrew Deacon, if his nephew, at the time, had been a child. I tipped my head, taking a chance with a straightforward question. ‘When were you friends with him, Grandma?’

  ‘Oh, years ago, Katie. I told you. We lost touch.’ Taking a half-empty jug of clam-and-tomato cocktail from the fridge she filled our two glasses and stirred in the vodka. Usually she rimmed the glasses, too, with salt and pepper, but this time she had either forgotten or simply not bothered. ‘Did he have any family of his own, there? Any children?’

  ‘No. He lost his wife during the war, I was told, and he never remarried. As far as I know, he was all on his own.’

  She didn’t turn; she kept her back to me, but I could sense the change. Her movements stilled. Head bent, she asked, ‘How did she die, his wife?’

  I’d hit a nerve, I knew, but since I wasn’t sure how I had done it I carried on, cautiously, ‘The nephew didn’t say. He told me no one really talked about her much. She was American, apparently. They married in New York, and she stayed there while Mr Deacon went to Portugal, to work. I think she died while he was there.’

  A long moment passed, and her silence was so like the silence I’d heard on the phone when I’d called her last Wednesday from London, that I couldn’t help but be curious. ‘Grandma?’ I said. ‘Did you know her?’

  A pause. And then she turned her head, and once again I had that feeling that I’d had when I had seen her planting flowers in the yard – the feeling I was seeing someone I had never truly seen.

  Her eyes, especially, were almost unfamiliar. They were smiling, but I thought the smile seemed sad. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘I knew her very well.’

  It wasn’t the first time we’d sat face to face at the old kitchen table with its cheery yellow gingham cloth, the afternoon sun slanting through the back window. But this time was different.

  Maybe, I allowed, the change was not in my grandmother, but in myself. My vision had matured, perhaps. Certainly I seemed to be seeing my grandmother through altered eyes, today – seeing her more fully, without prejudice.

  In all the years I’d known her she had always seemed the same, the constant point around which my own world, chaotic as it was, revolved. And with the selfish eyes of youth I’d only viewed her from the angle that applied to me – she was my grandmother, not Georgie Murray, woman in her own right. I supposed that she hadn’t been really allowed to be plain Georgie Murray for years, not since she’d been twenty-five, when she had married Grandpa. After that she’d always been somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother, someone’s grandmother. In fact, she’d always filled that role so perfectly I’d never stopped to wonder what she might have been before all that…when she was my own age.

  I had a feeling I was going to find out now, to get a glimpse at least, because she started out with, ‘I suppose you never knew I spent a year in New York City, working, when I was a girl.’

  ‘I didn’t, no.’ So that, I thought, must have been how she’d come to meet Andrew Deacon, and his wife. I leant my elbows on the table, took a sip of my own drink and waited, knowing that with Grandma you could never rush the process.

  She was quiet for a moment, as though trying to decide where she should start the tale. I had no idea, not then, what was coming. Had I had any inkling, I would have stopped her, gone out to the hall, and fetched my tape recorder so I didn’t lose a word. In fact, I never quite forgave myself for not recording what she told me, afterwards.

  But then, I didn’t know.

  It started simply.

  ‘I went down,’ she told me, ‘with three other girls, in ’43. I knew them from here, in Toronto. We all worked together at a war plant, called John Inglis – they made refrigerators after the war, but during the war they made Bren guns, and we worked upstairs, in the payroll department. Well, one of the girls read an ad in the newspaper, and she asked me, how would I like to go work in New York? It didn’t say in the newspaper what the job was, it just said working for the British government, in New York City.’

  That, I thought later, was the point at which I should have started taping.

  She went on, ‘So, we wrote to them. It took a while, but finally we heard back, and they asked us to come for a typing test, to one of the downtown hotels. I remember I was nervous, but I only typed one line, and then they said fine, thank you, and that was that. I had the job. I had to have a medical, of course, and a note from my dentist, and the Mounted Police checked me out.’ She smiled. ‘My mother found out about that when a friend of hers wrote to ask what I’d been up to, because the RCMP had been round to our old neighbourhood, asking questions. Mother wasn’t a stupid woman – I’m sure she figured two and two was four, but she never said anything if she did. But my dad…when I told him I’d been hired for this job in New York City, he said no. No way. In those days you would never go against your parents’ wishes, and I thought the world of Dad.

  ‘Usually, he backed me to the hilt when I had set my mind to something, but this time… I think maybe it was because my brothers, both of them, were fighting overseas, and he just didn’t want me leaving home as well. I know that when my younger brother, Ronnie – you’ve heard me mention Ronnie, he’s the one who played the violin I keep up in my closet—’

  I’d heard his name a few times through the years, and I had seen the violin, but I felt suddenly ashamed that I remembered little else. To be honest, I had always thought he’d been her only brother, and although I knew he’d died before I’d come along, I didn’t know much more than that.

  ‘When Ronnie left,’ said Grandma, ‘Dad had a hard time of it. He kept saying how he couldn’t get used to the house being so quiet, with the boys gone; and of course he’d listen to the radio and go to watch the newsreels, and he’d worry. He’d been in the First War, the Great War. He knew what war was. And he knew what my brothers were up against, what it was like for them, how slim the odds were they’d both come home safe. So I suppose when I said that I wanted to go to New York, to him it just meant he’d be losing his last child, and that must have seemed like the last straw, to him.

  ‘Anyway, he said no the first time. And then, of course, I had t
o talk him round, because I really wanted to go. If I’d been a man, I’d have done what my brothers did; I’d have gone over to fight, but I couldn’t. I had to sit at home and watch all of them, all the young men of my neighbourhood, all the boys I’d played with, gone to school with, watch them all sign up and go off, and I felt like I’d go crazy if I didn’t do something, if I didn’t find a way to help the war effort. That’s why I took the job at John Inglis, to begin with, because they made the Bren guns and I thought maybe one of those guns might end up helping one of my brothers, you know? Or your grandfather. Not that he was fighting on the ground like they were – he’d gone over earlier, right at the start of the war, to join the RAF. I’ll never forget when he sent me that photograph of him in his uniform, he looked so handsome…’

  ‘Is that the picture in your room?’

  ‘That’s right. Oh, my friends were jealous when they saw that. He looked just like a movie star. And of course, we weren’t officially engaged then, but there was an understanding, and he’d write me all the time; I’d get a letter nearly every day. He told me what was happening in England…all the bombings, and the deprivations, and I wanted so desperately to do something that would help.

  ‘This was what I tried to tell my dad, to make him understand, and in the end he said all right, that it was useless arguing with a redhead anyway, and that I might as well go if I’d made up my mind to. So then I told the other three girls, and a few days later the four of us left together and we went on the train to New York.

  ‘That was my first time away from home – people didn’t travel then, the way that they do now – and I cried all the way down on the train. I guess I looked funny to other people, but Dad had taken me to the station, and when I turned back he was tipping his hat to me, saying goodbye, and that got me going. I cried all the way to New York.’ She still looked half embarrassed to admit it. ‘I tell you, Katie, I was so homesick the first three weeks I thought I’d die. It’s a terrible thing, homesickness.’

  I’d never really felt it much, myself. Maybe if I’d had the sort of home she’d had – a father, mother, brothers – then the pull to home, for me, would have been stronger.

  Behind us, in the living room, unseen, the mantel clock chimed off the half-hour with a melody so delicate it sounded like a music box.

  She said, ‘They put us in the Beekman Tower Hotel, on First Avenue. We were allowed to stay there for a month, I think, and then we were supposed to go out and find apartments for ourselves. Well, I’d never been away from home, like I said. I didn’t have the first idea how to go about finding an apartment. But one of the girls I’d gone down with was older, quite sophisticated, and she found us a place. We lived in a brownstone, on East 54th. It was just what you see on TV – you could hear the garbage cans rattling and all, and there was a nightclub on the corner, it was really something else. But it was exciting, the time of my life.’

  I couldn’t help but call her on the contradiction. ‘I thought you just said you were homesick.’

  ‘Oh, only for three weeks. And then I fell in love with the city. There’s no other city in the world like it. I’ll never forget the first day we were there. It was spring, just a beautiful day, and the four of us thought we’d walk down for a first look at where we’d be working, and on the way down there we went past a bar. I can’t remember who suggested it, but somehow we got the idea to go in and each have a drink, to celebrate our arrival in New York. I didn’t know what to order – I’d never had alcohol – but they had a drink called a Manhattan. Well,’ she said, ‘I thought I’d die, it was so awful.’ Grandma had the greatest laugh; I’d always loved her laugh. ‘That was my first drink and I’ve never forgotten it.’ As if to erase the memory, she took another long sip of her Bloody Caesar. ‘Anyway, after that we walked on to Fifth Avenue, 50th and Fifth, to the International Building at Rockefeller Center. It had only just been finished a few years before, you know, and it was stunning, with that big statue of Prometheus outside. So we stopped, and we had a good look at the building, to see where we’d be going, and then the next day we started work.

  ‘We worked for BSC – British Security Coordination. They had part of the mezzanine floor. There were offices upstairs, as well, but the mezzanine floor was where they had the passport office, and that was the cover. Anyone coming in would have just seen the passport office; they’d never have known what was really going on, behind the scenes. Most of the real work went on in a huge room we called the TK room, a big open room filled with teletype machines, and blacked-out windows so no one could see that we worked round the clock.

  ‘You had to be a British subject to work there – that’s why they recruited so many Canadians, you know, because we all had British passports in those days. There was no such thing, then, as a Canadian passport. Most people working at BSC were Canadian – some Aussies, some English; the executive level were nearly all Brits. Aristocratic Brits…very aristocratic.

  ‘We reported to a British Major who had us sign the Official Secrets Act. I don’t know that it hit any of the other girls the way it hit me, but this Major said, “I don’t care if it’s twenty years down the road, and you’re working in an office, and someone asks you, ‘Who was the person at the next desk to you, when you were with BSC?’ – you know, casual – Don’t tell them!” He had me afraid to go out on the street.’

  ‘So it was pretty secret stuff, what you were doing?’

  ‘Well, we were working for Sir William Stephenson.’

  She floored me with that single, simple statement. Sir William Stephenson – the Canadian millionaire hand-picked by Churchill himself to control British secret intelligence out of New York in the Second World War, and whom Churchill had code-named ‘Intrepid’. The Man Called Intrepid. There’d been a bestselling biography written of Stephenson, under that title, some years ago, and a television miniseries too. I’d read the book, and seen the movie – real exciting cloak-and-dagger stuff, as I recalled, if not always entirely accurate. His business had been training spies and saboteurs, and intercepting enemy messages and breaking codes. My grandmother, on her teletype machine, might have been passing on the secret location of a German submarine to the navy so the sub could be destroyed, or she might have been relaying the instructions being given to a Japanese commander.

  It made me view her wartime job in quite a different light.

  I think she understood. She said, ‘We didn’t know, you realise that, what we were going down to. We had no idea we were going to work for such a wonderful man, for Sir William. He was like nobody I’ve ever known. Not then. Not since.’ The living-room mantel clock chimed its light melody into the pause as my grandmother searched for the proper description. ‘He was a small man, physically small. You could pass him in the street, you wouldn’t know him. He had a way of making himself almost invisible, really. A curious thing. He would stand very still, and he wouldn’t make eye contact, and honestly, you wouldn’t see him; wouldn’t know that he was there. I know – I shared an elevator with him, once, and I nearly jumped out of my skin when he spoke. I’d thought I was alone, you see.

  ‘I only met him – face to face, I mean – one other time, and that was when I went to a cocktail party at his penthouse. I was working on the thirty-sixth floor, then, the floor that Sir William was on, and he gave this party and I went to it, but other than that our paths didn’t really cross. He was really on another level, someone to admire. Nobody up on the thirty-sixth floor ever used his name, that I recall. He was always called DSC – Director of Security Coordination. It was a mark of respect, really – we all respected him. At times he seemed almost superhuman. I don’t know how many times he crossed the Atlantic, during the war, but I read somewhere, I think, that he made more than forty crossings, and he was always back and forth to Washington. And the things that he did…

  ‘I didn’t know everything at the time, mind you, but I knew more than most of the girls. They were downstairs, most of them, in the TK room, with
the teletype machines, and everything down there was in code. No one knew what messages were coming in, what details they were passing on, but up on the thirty-sixth floor it was different. All the things I saw upstairs were in English. So I knew, then. I knew what we were doing.

  ‘It’s a powerful thing, to know that you’re helping save lives. I really felt, at last, that I was helping to fight the war. Not in the same way my brothers were, of course, but in a way that was important.’

  More important than most people knew, I thought. I wondered how many women like my grandmother there were across the country, still – living anonymous, ordinary lives; rubbing shoulders with people who had no idea of what they had done in the war.

  ‘It was interesting work, on the thirty-sixth floor,’ she went on. ‘I was the assistant to the secretary for one of Sir William’s top men. But my friends were all down in the TK room, and it was hard to get together, so I asked for a transfer and I went down there. In some ways, it would have been absolutely fantastic to have stayed upstairs, but they were mostly private-school girls, upstairs; they didn’t laugh as much as we did. And, actually, the way things turned out, we couldn’t have had more fun.’

  She smiled again, recalling, ‘We worked shifts. There were three shifts a day, and our group stayed together, we rotated round all together, fifteen girls to a shift. We used to go out at four o’clock in the morning, over to Hamburger Heaven – they served cakes like you wouldn’t believe. Oh, the butterscotch! You would have died, Katie. It was the best. And we’d go to the movies… I remember after one midnight-to-eight a.m. shift, a few of us went to the Paramount. I don’t remember all of what we watched – there was one movie with Robert Cummings in, I do recall that. That was sad. But anyway, we got there at eight o’clock in the morning, and we left at eleven-thirty at night and went back to work – we’d spent nearly sixteen hours at the Paramount! And in the summer, we used to go right from our eight o’clock shift to Jones Beach. It got so hot in the city, in the summertime, really hot, so we’d go to the beach, and one time I went I got sunburnt, I’ll never forget…I fell asleep, I guess. That night I stayed off work because I was so badly burnt, and a nurse came to the apartment. I thought I’d get all kinds of sympathy, but no, I got reprimanded, for not taking care, because there was no one else to relieve us. So I didn’t do that again. But oh, how I did love to go to the beach. I remember I had a two-piece bathing suit…’