The Athens Assignment Read online

  “Touché,” said Hugh with a grin. “Careless talk, and all that… Sorry.”

  “Of course. Silly of me. Tell me, if you don’t mind, what you know about Ralph. I was as surprised as anyone when he… when he disappeared. To start with, I wondered if he’d been detained under the law which arrested Mosley.”

  “No, he went before all that. Come with me and I’ll explain.”

  They wandered up the Uxbridge Road. Xanthe noticed the looks of approval, even envy, as she walked alongside a man in RAF uniform, apparently next to his pregnant wife. That must have been what people must have assumed. It seemed poignant and touching. She saw people’s eyes soften at the sight.

  They sat down at a table at a Lyons’ Corner House, and he told her how Ralph’s distraught mother had begged him to find out where her son had gone and why. Ralph had left a letter behind him, telling her that he was going away and that he would see her soon, but not explaining when or why. She had assumed initially it was on some kind of mission for the British government, but there had been rumours of a former British minister in Berlin, and hurtful remarks passed by her neighbours in Marlow. The whole affair had upset her terribly. And she missed her son too.

  “Ralph was always the apple of his mother’s eye,” said Hugh. Xanthe looked to see a hint of irony. The English middle classes seemed quite immune to any reluctance to use clichés, she thought.

  Hugh had promised his aunt to help, but then the Blitz happened – was still happening – and his squadron was on the front line, and he had been too busy to do more than send a few letters. But Ralph’s pocket diary had been left behind, and it had been found to include the name Xanthe Schneider, in an unknown handwriting – her own, she remembered. From there, it had been an easier journey, with help from a private investigator who had tracked her to her college in Cambridge, had turned up something about her crossword past, and from there, via her college friends, to Shepherd’s Bush.

  Xanthe found herself warming to this duty-bound young man and reminded herself not to be too helpful. It would hardly do to say where and when she had last seen Ralph. Certainly not that, at that very moment, she was carrying Ralph’s baby.

  “Sorry to go on about it, Miss Schneider, but I know you’ve been working in Berlin. I mean, can I ask? Did you happen to hear anything about him there?”

  A surge of emotion went through her. Ralph suddenly seemed awfully close.

  “Listen, Hugh. I can tell you I knew him in London. But I was in Berlin for a short time and I just can’t help you with that one. I have wondered myself, many times, what has become of him.”

  That last sentence was so much the truth that it brought tears to her eyes.

  Hugh looked disappointed.

  “Very well then, can I ask you something else? When is the baby due? I hope you don’t mind me mentioning it…”

  Not for the first time, Xanthe was taken aback by the strange middle-class English reserve – as if noticing she was pregnant was somehow tantamount to asking how it happened. Indelicate.

  “Is your husband… I meant, what does he do?”

  “He did, I’m afraid. He’s no longer with us.”

  It was her standard explanation. It was an all-too-common situation, especially with RAF wives.

  “I’m so sorry. Was he in the RAF? Where was he based?”

  Xanthe apologised. Now it was her turn to mumble something about careless talk.

  Hugh reddened.

  “Of course, of course.”

  “Listen, Hugh. I wish I could help you more. Can you let me know if you find out anything?”

  She rose from the table.

  “But you haven’t even drunk your tea. I’m afraid I’ve upset you.”

  Xanthe was, it was true, afraid she was about to break down. The juxtaposition of this man, who looked so like Ralph but was not Ralph, at the same time as knowing herself to be carrying Ralph’s child, was nearly too much for her. One day, one day, she told herself, I can tell this sweet man the truth. But not now, not given what she had been asked to do. Right now, the truth could only hurt both of them – all three of them…

  She stumbled out and down the street, struggling towards Shepherds Bush. Hugh followed behind.

  “Miss Schneider, I’m so sorry I upset you – may I see you again?”

  She nodded, unsure what else to do, and then he was gone. She went back to the flat to weep on her pillow, where only the barrage balloon hanging outside the window could see, as she had done so many times before.

  *

  She cried herself to sleep, aware that so many real pregnant widows were doing the same, those who had not been stupid enough to fall in love with people with divided loyalties or people with doubts, or semi-fascists, as she had done. People who had not been there for her when she really needed them.

  And yet, and yet, meeting Hugh, so like Ralph physically and yet not him, had made her imagine that she knew him after all. It had brought back some of her precious, overwhelming feelings for the man she had loved and lost and left behind.

  The next morning, feeling bleary-eyed and exhausted, she had to force herself to go to work, because otherwise, she feared she would just stay in her bed until a bomb “with her name on it”, as they said, fell, and that would have been that.

  Then it was down to the Central Line, and out at Strand station, and then over towards Aldwych, a quick walk down towards the battered City, and into her office. There was Bob, rocking back on his chair, its legs bowing under his considerable weight.

  “Hi, honey,” said Bob. “You look like you haven’t slept much. Was there a raid last night? I must have slept through it.”

  The New Yorker office was still preening itself on the success of Joe Liebling’s articles, though Joe himself had now gone – first to Paris and then, via Lisbon, home to New York. That left Bob and sometimes Xanthe to man the office, plus the occasional grand arrival of Mollie Panter-Downes, up from Surrey for the afternoon.

  “Say, what’s up today, then Shirley?” Bob asked, since she was now using that as a pen name for anything she wrote.

  “Blitz damage for Mollie,” she said. It was always fact or atmosphere collecting for Mollie, for her to weave into her famous phrases – was it not Mollie who had coined the phrase “Phoney War”? All that seemed a little uncomfortable given that there was now nothing phoney about the war at all…

  In fact, if she had seen the war from the point of view of Mollie Panter-Downes and the New Yorker office, she might have understood it all in a way different to how she understood it now. She might have imagined it to be a clash of civilisations, as Churchill’s rhetoric suggested. She might have seen it as a huge battle between the Luftwaffe and the people of London and the other European cities. But actually, she was beginning to see it instead, as a clash between competing signalling systems, between coders and cryptographers. Because at weekends, she took the train down to Bletchley Park.

  2

  London, November 1940

  On Friday afternoons, Xanthe would pack up the office, take a small holdall she had packed that morning and make her way to Euston Station, through the great classical arch, streaming in alongside all the Tommies and Jacks in their uniforms, and the Johnnies in the grey colour of the RAF.

  It was astonishing, she thought to herself, how the status of the RAF had risen in just a few months. From the nearly men of Dunkirk, failing to protect the troops, they had become the semi-mystical “Few”, the saviours of the nation, the fabulous weavers of a whole new wizard slang. Perhaps she should write about it.

  From Euston, she took a train to Bletchley, usually along with a number of other dusty, nondescript academic types, who studiously ignored each other on the train, such was the secrecy of Station X.

  She had begun going to Bletchley at Alan Turing’s invitation, after her full debrief following the Berlin adventure – the Berlin debacle, she called it herself. Turing used to collect her from the station, but she had recently offered
to take the bus, which deposited her along a leafy walk, now in the wintry last of the sunshine. It always invigorated her to wander up to one of the ugliest red-brick country houses she had ever seen, past the somewhat lax security of the gatehouse, showing her pass and identity papers. She was now recognised as a habitué and her entry was a little easier every time she made the journey.

  Her understanding of Bletchley was extremely limited, and she believed that was a situation shared by most of the people who worked there, the crossword puzzle experts and linguists, the prep school German masters and the geographers and mathematicians. She had even met a seaweed expert – and most of them were kept willingly ignorant about anything that happened outside the orbit of their own huts, the rickety structures in the grounds, scaldingly hot in summer, freezing cold at this time of year.

  Turing had welcomed her into Hut 8 and introduced her to most of the members, including Peter Twinn and Hugh Alexander.

  “Can’t you really tell them anything about why I’m here, Alan?” she asked him one afternoon. “I feel I stick out like a sore thumb.”

  “Well, you know…”

  “I don’t want them to feel like I’m an interloper.”

  “Interloper? We’re all interlopers in one way or another. I stick out like your sore thumb too. Do you hear me complaining?”

  They both laughed. They knew he complained rather a lot.

  “We’re all attached to a hut for no obvious reason. You’re no exception. Everyone just assumes there’s a highly secret reason why you’re here,” he said. “And there is!”

  “Ok, I see. Fair enough.”

  “Security is so obsessive here, thanks to Old Man Denniston. Nobody comes here by accident. Everyone knows that.”

  “What about that man who’s an expert in seaweed?”

  Turing thought for a moment.

  “Well, he’s an exception, but he’s still a valued part of the team. Actually, he dries out codebooks which have been thrown into the sea.”

  The truth was that Xanthe had serious doubts about whether or not she had the right to be included, despite what she had done or not done in Germany.

  “Of course you’re one of us,” said Alan supportively. “You know about the Nazi codes in… um… practice.”

  “Well, I’ve killed a Nazi official with an Enigma rotor, if that’s what you mean.”

  The relief of having one person she could talk to about her time in Berlin was absolutely invaluable. It was an extraordinary relief, in fact. Turing knew, as nobody else knew, apart, of course, from Fleming, who remained a somewhat aloof figure.

  Turing and Xanthe swung through the rickety door of Hut 8.

  “Here we are, teatime I think,” he said. “Hold on! Which of you, b… b… buggers has taken my mug…?”

  The handful of people in the hut, mostly men with wide trousers and relaxed weekend shirts, collapsed with laughter.

  “Come on, Prof,” said one of them. “Are we cryptographers or are we not? If someone padlocks their mug to the radiator, then we are duty bound to crack the code which holds it in place.”

  “Ok, where… where is it, then?”

  “I’ve got it!”

  A girl with dark hair and round glasses popped up from behind one of the screens with maps on, dividing the oceans into arbitrary sectors.

  “How do you do,” she said, shaking hands confidently with Xanthe. “I’m Joan. Welcome to our humble hut.”

  She smiled engagingly.

  “I was just saying to Xanthe that it was, um… her hut, um… too,” said Alan.

  “Really, are you a linguist or a mathematician?”

  There was a heartbeat of embarrassed silence. Those in Hut 8 or any of the other huts were not supposed to ask questions about each other.

  “Oops, sorry!” said Joan, looking embarrassed. “New people are too intriguing!”

  “None of those anyway,” said Alan. “She works in the field.”

  “But not at the moment,” said Xanthe, indicating her obvious pregnancy.

  “Remember, careless talk,” said Alan. “All we need to know from Xanthe is where she’s lodging this time.”

  “Pfff. I hate it when you go all official…” said Joan, prodding him.

  “I’m lodging in my usual digs in Bletchley, just near the cinema.”

  “Not Mrs West?”

  “How did you know that?” said Xanthe laughing.

  “We’re paid to know things here,” said Joan with a grin, putting her finger to her lips.

  *

  “You realise you know more about this stuff than the First Lord of the Admiralty,” said Turing as they walked outside.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Really. He’s a big trade unionist. And, after Lancing-Price, I think they make sure they tell their ministers nothing about codes.”

  Xanthe’s eyes began to fill with unbidden tears.

  “Oh, for goodness sake,” she said, whipping out a hanky. “Sorry, Alan, you’re quite right.”

  Turing stood, rooted to the spot in horror.

  “I’m sorry, so… so sorry, Xanthe. I didn’t, um, mean to… I mean…”

  “Really honestly, Alan, I’m just being silly. I’m more hard-headed than that. I just can’t stop weeping at the moment. I think it’s the pregnancy or the baby, or maybe I was always a bit like that.”

  “I tell you what? Let’s go to the cinema this evening. I’m coming to the end of my watch in about twenty minutes, then we can have a drink in the Eight Belles. They’ve got Snow White on again in town.”

  Xanthe breathed a deep sigh of relief that she was foreign and was therefore allowed the occasional emotional outburst. She wiped her eyes and suppressed the sad thoughts about the baby she was carrying, and what might have been. At least she no longer felt like she wanted to vomit all the time.

  *

  “It’s just that we need to talk about your future,” said Commander Fleming, looking sophisticated in his uniform with its gold, wavy stripes. That’s why I’ve asked you to come in.”

  This was only the third time in her life that she had been in the ever more untidy, disorganised and crowded office in the Old Admiralty Building in Whitehall, the anteroom to the hub of naval intelligence, and from there to the small office with the bath again. Exactly the same, except that this time, Xanthe knew – because Alan had told her – that the bath had been used by Dilly Knox, now Alan’s legendary boss, during the First World War to help him decipher the new ciphers used by the German navy. They were launched each day at midnight and, after hours in the hot water, Knox had more often than not thought through some kind of breakthrough. It was an extremely productive bath.

  Xanthe had even met Knox, though he had been a somewhat aloof figure. She would have liked to have told him that, on this visit, there had been a spider in his bath, but she knew she wouldn’t dare.

  What a strange mixture I am, she said to herself. Brave enough to go stupidly to Berlin during a war, but not brave enough to banter with Dilly Knox.

  But now, clearly, Fleming was waiting for some kind of response.

  “I was trying not to make any decisions until the baby’s been born,” she said.

  “I know, I know. Only there is a war going on and we do need to plan ahead a little.”

  Xanthe detected more than an edge of sarcasm.

  “Listen, Xanthe. You have unique knowledge and some expertise, and I really don’t want to waste you. Turing has, I gather, integrated you into the Station X set-up – though I had advised him not to. He’s not a great one for obeying orders.”

  Xanthe felt a little weak. Why was he addressing her so? It wasn’t as if she had really done a good job in Berlin.

  Fleming stared unrelentingly at her. Then he reached a decision.

  “All right. Let me just say this. I know you’re working at some American magazine or other.”

  “The New Yorker.”

  “Good, good. And you’re learning something a
bout the way Enigma works. And if you’re not, I’ve asked Turing if he can find someone to instruct you. That’s all I want. Just to be ready. Because of the… after the… um… birth – is it possible we may ask you if you can help us again?”

  “That’s fine, Commander. Just as long as you understand I’m making no decisions now.”

  Fleming ignored her.

  “Right, last thing I wanted to talk about. Where are you giving birth?”

  “Well, I’m registered with a maternity clinic in Shepherd’s Bush, but they’ve made it pretty plain that they don’t think I should be in London. At least, not with the Blitz going on – and it shows little sign of letting up, does it?”

  “No, and I agree. That’s why I have what I think is a somewhat unconventional solution. Not yet, but when the time comes, I’ve asked Dr Bush who is the senior medical officer at Station X whether he can accommodate you there. There are many medical staff there with training in obstetrics, I’ve made sure. There are so many unused bedrooms upstairs in the big house. I’ve asked Deniston’s permission, and, well, actually he’s not that pleased. But I anticipated no great opposition if Admiral Godfrey is behind it. And he is.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “He’s my boss, the DNI. Director of Naval Intelligence. He was so keen that we accommodate you, I thought he was about to offer up his own flat in Curzon Street…”

  “God, no!”

  They both laughed, but Xanthe wondered what on earth he was talking about.

  “I just thought you’d be more comfortable in the countryside and where the action is too. I know it sounds a bit odd. I’m not sure anyone has given birth there, but there’s always a first time for everything!”

  *

  The days of sickness had given way as winter came, to a more elysian period of happiness for Xanthe. Having felt so guilty about feeling sad before, given what everyone else seemed to be going though, she now felt guilty about feeling a twinge of happiness – and for exactly the same reason.

  She loved coming and going in Hut 8 and learning about the Enigma machine with a small working model that some of the Bletchley technicians had provided for her. She still felt something of a fraud – as if maybe she had been chosen for the role because of some misunderstanding about her crossword skills in her teens. But she felt at home there and sat for hours with Peter or Alan, thinking about the practicalities of using an Enigma machine, and what slivers of information they could glean from it.