The German Numbers Woman. Alan Sillitoe

seasonal low pressure area was what he noted, gales and thunderstorms at the beginning of September, southwesterly wind force four increasing locally, mainly clear but with increasing cloudiness, moderate visibility, generally changeable. The Adriatic was no better, or worse, the same with the Aegean and the Levantine Basin.

      He took two pages, then changed band and swivelled the wheel onto a typhoon warning from Taiwan, said to be moving west at ten kilometres a minute, with sustained winds near the centre at 155 kilometres an hour. At least the Flying Dutchman wasn’t involved in that one, and nor was he, snug in his familiar listening post at what he could only think of as the hub of the world.

      A change from the tinkling of morse, he went on to a telephone frequency, spun the wheel and heard a Donald Duck squawk, hard to know whether it would turn out male or female, till he tuned in sharply and with delicate fingers pulled a recognisable male voice out by the tail:

      ‘You’re not supposed to drink when you take that stuff, are you, Beryl?’

      What stuff? Howard removed the earphones, plugged in the speaker, and flicked on the tape recorder, perhaps to amuse Laura later, an action utterly against the law, though he would obliterate such private talk afterwards. The Post Office regulations were severe: ‘Interception of communications is forbidden. If such communications are received involuntarily they must not be produced in writing, communicated to other persons, or used for any purpose whatever.’

      Plain enough, but too much of a sacrifice to his existence to obey such rules. In any case his transcripts were used to make the morning fire, and all tapes rubbed out to leave space for other items. If he played them occasionally to Laura what matter? Weren’t man and wife supposed to be one person? He was sure there were villainous London thieves who used VHF scanners to keep track of police movements before doing a robbery, but he wasn’t in that league, and wouldn’t have been, even with normal sight.

      He felt himself a snooper nevertheless when listening to personal telephone talk, though surely those who made calls from ship to shore must know someone might well be listening, no great feat these days, with technology coming on the market cheap, even for ordinary telephones to be tapped. Often he amused himself at midnight listening to two or three trawler skippers chatting at the fishing grounds, which he wouldn’t record for Laura because the dexterity of their bad language was astonishing to hear.

      Poor husband, or boyfriend, stuck on shore. ‘You’re not going to remember this, are you?’

      Howard could hear him but not the woman.

      ‘You all right?’

      He was an American.

      ‘See you on Friday? Look, I think you’re loaded. Why are you crying? Phone you Thursday, at three o’clock.’

      Perhaps he had sent her on a Caribbean cruise, when the last place she needed to be in was a vast floating boozer.

      ‘Honey, please don’t drink too much. I got a meeting at five o’clock. Listen, please don’t drink too much tonight. Damn, you’re really drunk.’

      Howard wanted to hear the response, instead of filling in the details from his own heart.

      ‘What does that mean?’ the man said, a mixture of concern and exasperation.

       How else to learn about life if you were blind?

      ‘All right, I’ll call you at five-thirty on Thursday. Can you write it down so you won’t forget? Why not? You’re drunk. It’s that stuff affecting you maybe. Please don’t drink anymore tonight. So you want to go, eh? OK. Love you. Bye.’

      Operator’s voice: ‘It was twenty five minutes there.’

      Such a long time for the poor chap to have been locked in a dead end debate with his wife or girlfriend. The catalogue of miseries was endless. Disasters also. A whistle went parabola through a blank frequency like an uncontrolled star across space – or a bomb making its way from a plane onto helpless people below. No knowing where it was coming from or heading for. Then the mixing warble of two oscillators made a noise like an angel drinking water.

      The aerial blues were on him, which even the tom-tom telegraphist blasting through from a Soviet Black Sea tanker couldn’t penetrate. But you must never despair, he told himself, ever, and if he didn’t, no one should.

      The man pleading with his wife wouldn’t leave him alone. Witnesses were as much in danger of despair as those involved, who at least had the umbrella of each other’s misery, as well as their own. The basic theory of magnetism instilled in the classroom was that ‘like poles repel and unlike poles attract’, but in human relationships if it went on too long the opposite would happen and both poles begin to repel. Iron filings as the uncontrollable grit of the human spirit are unpredictable in their behaviour, and nothing can save people from the unknown in themselves except endurance and understanding. Call it observations from the heaviside layer, for what they are worth.

      To take the weight from his heart – that was one way he didn’t want to go – he reached for the morse key which Laura had found in the ex-service junk store at the bottom of the steps, and tapped out a condoling message to the man who would not hear it because no transmitter was attached, though maybe Someone in the sky would take heed and filter the comfort through:

      ‘I know more about you than you can know about me, though if you could read what I am sending you might know more about me than I am allowed to know about you. You are the hero of my evening, and your wife is the heroine, perhaps even the highlight of my week, and I am your only listener, who can know more about you in the beginning than you can know about me because I can hear you while you cannot hear me. You don’t even know I am listening to your voice coming clear enough through the aether by electrical impulses, but all I want is to wish you well.’

      Four minutes at the key made his own arm ache. The vagaries of human contact were forever mysterious. Electrical impulses jump between terminals, make contact, but when communication goes on too long the power fades, and must either be renewed or stay dead. Current was low and frequency likewise between him and Laura, but the equilibrium was continuous and could never be damped. As social worker jargon might have it, they took each other for granted, but did so because they loved each other, and it was the only way to get by.

      She had gone shopping in the car, and promised his favourite pizza for supper. Elaborate cooked meals came only a couple of times a week, and who could blame her? He mused on whether the man whose wife was an alcoholic would like to meet the German Numbers Woman, thought he ought to be glad to make the acquaintance of someone with a rigidly ordered life. He would see her, neat, clean, tall and dressed in a colourful frock, proudly leading her two children for a walk on Sunday morning. They would sit at a small table by the pavement in summer, coffee for her and cake and ices for the children. Our man at the next table would be captivated by their intimacy, which he did not like to break into. But a smile cost nothing, either for him or her, and after several weeks a word or two passed between them. Both came to look forward to their brief talk, and one morning he handed the children a plastic bag filled with empty tobacco tins (or perhaps cigar boxes) which he couldn’t bear to throw away, they were so neat and useful. The children accepted with alacrity, because no one but their mother had given them a present before, and played on a spare table as if they were precious toys given out at Christmas. The German Numbers Woman smiled with pleasure, and he knew what he had always known, that the way to a woman’s love was through her children.

      More weeks went by before he asked this blue-eyed rawboned, though attractive, woman if she would come out for a drink one evening. Or did he invite her and the children to a show at the cinema? Hard to know what she would say, though Howard liked to think yes, but her previously open and youthful nature had made her a victim of predatory men, and she was wary. Yet she was also lonely, hungry almost, given her isolation with the children, and the secrecy of her work.

      Howard worried about the matter for weeks, saw the relationship in all its detail. Her dedication at transmitting numbers was indefatigable. She was conscientious because her work was of life-saving importance. Without her numbers, someone would perish, lose all hope, face peril if not destruction