The German Numbers Woman. Alan Sillitoe

didn’t say exactly. We weren’t in the pub for long. But I gathered it was something to do with boats.’

      ‘Would be, I suppose. Did he tell you when he’d call?’

       ‘He didn’t promise. Seemed uncertain, because of his work. But I think he was quite keen on it, because he said he would as soon as he could.’

      He had wondered why she was so long away, often did, though in this case the adventure was worth it if he could one day gab with an ex-Merchant Navy key-basher. He often had the dread that Laura would go out and never come back. Just like that. She would be spirited away forever. Hard to know why he should think so, though if you’d had one disaster another was always possible. Maybe that was it, no other reason at all. To make it unthinkable he told her about his fear, and they laughed at such an impossibility, an evening taken up with speculation as to what he would do if left alone in the house with no money. The fantasy enthralled them through twilight and into supper. He was inventive, as if he had heard the solution suggested by a message on the radio.

      ‘If I was alone, and had to get by, you know what I’d do?’

      ‘Can’t imagine,’ she said.

      ‘Nor me. But it’s just come to me. I’d take my morse key and oscillator, and a groundsheet, which I’d sit on outside the big supermarket. I would have a notice on a bit of cardboard beside me, having got Arthur the postman to write it, saying: “GOOD LUCK AND LONG LIFE TO YOU ALL.” I’d sit there, and send it in morse at maximum volume over and over again, my cap in front for passers by to drop money into. It’d be such an original way of begging that I’d be bound to make several pounds a day for my food, especially if I went into the supermarket at closing time to scoop up stuff that had passed its sell-by date.’

      ‘A brilliant idea,’ she laughed. ‘You wouldn’t be a beggar, though, you’d be a busker, an entertainer. Perhaps you’d be spotted, and you’d make a tape, and get into the top ten. You’d be interviewed on the radio. You might even go on television.’

      ‘Well, you never know, do you? Maybe I should do it anyway. It wouldn’t be a boring life, because I’d hear some very interesting remarks from people as I sat on the pavement. Children with pretty young mums would be the best givers. They’d be spellbound at the music from my morse machine, and have to be dragged away screaming because they wanted one to play with as well. Maybe an ex-service wireless op would be so intrigued he’d drop me a quid, and even stop for a chat. What a life it would be, as long as the police didn’t move me on.’

      ‘You could go somewhere else,’ Laura said, ‘couldn’t you? Outside the church, or the library. I’d certainly put something in your cap. In fact I might be so amazed by your act that I’d fall in love with you and carry you off.’

      ‘And we’d soon be back where we started,’ he said, ‘which is no bad place to be.’

      ‘I do hope that chap calls,’ she said.

      

      A careless and wayward signal came like a fly into his web – VIP from Lux Australis. He asked Laura to look the call sign up in his manual. Sensitive fingers were for splitting kilocycle hairs so as to get aircraft captains giving their position crossing the North Atlantic, a constant coming and going.

      The cannon shell that had swept through the Lancaster over Essen smashed the radio and blinded him. The smell of metal and burning wires in a cold darkness threw him to the deck, on hands and knees looking for his eyes, for a place to see and cool the heat of his flesh, to find a window to the outside and discover what happened. He wanted to know where he was, even to leap from the plane and find out on whatever part of the earth.

      Under his radio desk, locked in a box which Laura might know about but had never asked him to open, were his training manuals and discharge papers, the last resort to riffle through, as he used to, though no longer necessary. They lay there, best left alone in the hope of being forgotten. A life of action was no longer open to him, had been over from the age of twenty, but you didn’t complain. It wasn’t done. Life in an aeroplane had been all he wanted, made for no other, and when it was taken away he no longer felt any connection with his past or himself. For a while he was drowning in black space, happy that no one could realise his pain. He seemed normal, but the clock had stopped, pendulum and mainspring gone. Like others no doubt, he smiled when tea was brought, or his bed was made, or the MO asked how he felt.

      ‘Fine, Sir. Never felt better.’

      ‘Good chap.’

       It was the only answer. Wanting to die was lack of moral fibre, and when he thought of Laura he craved even more to float into extinction and never come back. Yet when she came, and he heard the gentle plain words she had to say, he decided to live. Her tone suggested that a similar disaster had happened to her, and there could be no greater sympathy than that. He couldn’t but want to live with a young woman who had such miraculous powers of empathy that she would match herself so equally with him.

      Even so, the mind was too often in turmoil, though no matter, as long as he kept it to himself. The Flying Dutchman was ever at the helm. What would he have done and been if he had led an ordinary life? The question hadn’t popped up of late, meaning that his existence had become normal. One less architect or clerk in the world made no difference. He could have been anything, but now he was everything because he was himself again, had been for a long time. Put your hat on in the House of the Lord, and say how do you do to the German Numbers Woman.

      Perhaps it was her day’s break, but trawling the higher reaches of the shortwave spectrum, he put his fingers to the typewriter and recorded that: ‘The Indian Government has produced a macabre plan to clean up the polluted Ganges where hundreds of corpses are brought each day and floated down the river on makeshift funeral pyres. Now three thousand soft shelled turtles are to be introduced into the waters around the Holy City of Varanasi (which he assumed was Benares) where they still feed off the corpses.’

      Such a gem made his day, better than taking down screeds of gobbledegook which blighted dreams and damaged otherwise untroubled sleep. The scriptures of the aether shape the heart. He tapped that too onto his typewriter, as if it had come through in morse, though what government would send that out? – signing off with: ‘What God hath wrought.’

       SEVEN

      Richard focussed his Barr and Stroud 8 x 30 binoculars on the block-like radio and television detector van parked in the lay-by at the end of the lane: two straight aerials to one side, and a Bellini-tosi system above the driver’s cabin. Windows blacked out, the only identification mark, apart from licence plates which he could not see, was a POLICE sign on the side.

      He looked down on a grey stone wall, covered with ivy and overgrown grass. The wooden lattice fence at the end of the kitchen garden had gone mildewed. It was a bloody disgrace, the whole plot surfaced with a thin layer of dead leaves, and a few upright stalks of etiolated currant bushes. Green-trunked trees beyond were tangled with last autumn’s twigs, and made a silhouette between him and the neighbouring hill. Ken was supposed to keep the place tidy, but was only interested in growing vegetables they didn’t need but he did.

      If they were searching for a transmitter they wouldn’t find one, but he switched off the communications receiver in case a microphone was beamed at the open window. He passed the time sending a few paragraphs from The Times on his morse key, after disconnecting the oscillator, just the rhythmical clicks to keep him occupied while wondering what the hell the car was doing there. After five minutes his wrist ached, and he was making mistakes. It wasn’t easy, without half an hour’s daily practice.

      He supposed the van was parked so that the crew inside could rest from their work of looking for clandestine television sets. They were no doubt eating sandwiches, and drinking coffee out of flasks. On the other hand maybe they were investigating him. Perhaps his more-than-ordinary aerials had attracted their attention, or some local snooper had reported hearing suspicious