A Vengeance of Spies, page 4
I was desperate to talk about her and couldn’t until we’d dropped Penny off at her college in Oxford after which Katherine and I spent the next hour talking about nothing else.
We were in that phase where everyone was potentially one of us, and we couldn’t ask. It was intoxicating, like having joined a secret society, but lacking the identifying handshakes.
September became October in which we broke every CASPAR cipher within half a day, and were given other, harder, more distant ciphers to work on in between.
We spent another weekend at the Shipwrights, during which we abandoned the bedroom for long enough to take dinner with Katherine’s aunt and I found what it was to talk with someone who understood.
In her aunt, I saw who Katherine would be in thirty years time, if she made choices and lived to regret them.
Margaret Catherston was as tall, as lean, as strikingly dark as her niece, but in her, the family lines came together in a way that was handsome rather than beautiful.
She carried her grief as a cape that lined her shoulders, but she was happy for us. Over the course of an evening sitting beside the vast oak-fed fire, I discovered that she had been amanuensis to the Duke of Windsor when he was still King Edward VIII, and that her lover had been one of his mother’s ladies-in-waiting.
As a result of the former, and possibly the latter, she had been offered a substantial pension to ensure her silence on private matters, and encouraged to retire early from public life at an age when she might have expected still to be working.
Her husband had been an equerry to Edward when he was Prince of Wales but had died of pneumonia when their sons were both still in their teens.
To this day, I have never fully understood the nature of her relationship with Madame Arquette, but there is no doubt both were entirely aware of the growing relationship between Katherine and me.
My mother was another matter.
In early November, a week or two after we’d dropped Melody and Penny at their respective colleges, she took it upon herself to visit my place of work.
This, you must understand, was not a normal occurrence. Nobody’s mother sailed up to the gates, name dropped until the guards let her through, and once in, addressed the visiting top brass as an old friend.
Brigadier Vaughan-Thomas, who hailed from our fathers’ branch of the SIS, was being given a tour of the facilities and my mother was invited to join him.
My first knowledge of her presence was when I looked up from a particularly knotty cipher from a German agent in Sicily to see her chatting to the colonel.
A white-haired officer stood behind her, staring at Katherine and me, thoughtfully.
‘Katherine…’ I said it in the lowest voice I could, while not quite a whisper.
She, being intelligence-trained, looked at me and did not look up.
I wrote, My mother!! on the paper in front of us.
She wrote, Should I leave?
Please don’t.
I had milliseconds to decide what to do and settled on a swift smile and a cheery ‘Mother, whatever are you doing here?’ which at least meant she couldn’t continue to pretend she hadn’t seen me.
She let the colonel usher her over and we engaged in one of those ghastly, stilted conversations where everyone pretended not to know what was happening: either personally, or professionally.
Then mother fixed Katherine with a stare I knew well and, to me, said, ‘Were you going to introduce us?’
That was when I knew that somehow, one of my sisters had said something. Or possibly my mother knew Margaret Catherston and they exchanged daily telegrams. Nothing would have surprised me.
I introduced Katherine, and my mother said, ‘Barnaby’s daughter,’ which rather proved she’d done her homework.
I felt sick and knew that she would know.
She shook Katherine’s hand rather tightly and said, ‘Edward says I can take you both out to lunch. You might wish to change?’
I shook my head. ‘It’s a twenty minute cycle ride each way to our lodgings. I don’t think, Mother—‘
‘I’ll take you both. Shall we go?’
At our lodgings, Katherine fairly sprinted into number seven as soon as the car was parked.
I thought I’d get into number fifteen on my own, but Mother insisted on coming in to meet Mrs Wellington— ‘So glad my daughter is in such caring hands’— and sat in the best chair making smalltalk while I changed from one perfectly serviceable frock into another, neither of them properly pressed.
She eyed them with distaste as we walked the car.
‘How long have you lived in that hovel?’
‘There’s a war on, mother. This is the nature of service. If you think Duncan is anywhere better, you’d—‘
‘Don’t change the subject, Grace. It’s unacceptable. I shall see what I can do. Now, tell me about this girl. Penelope says you’re become a Sapphist. It would appear to be true.’
Penny. Damn her eyes.
I genuinely had no idea what a Sapphist was, but I knew the spirit of the question. There was no point in denying it and in any case, I was in a bullish mood. ‘It’s not illegal.’
‘I think you’ll find that in all ways that matter, it is. But that’s not the point. What do you think your future will be?’
‘I’m doing perfectly satisfactorily now, thank you.’
‘Grace, people turn a blind eye to all kinds of things in wartime. But it won’t be like this forever and my concern is your life afterwards.’
My mother tilted her head. ‘You don’t seriously believe that you can continue this in the long term?’
‘Mother, there may not be a long term. We might end up in concentration camps or hanging from piano wire, twitching our feet for ten minutes of a slow death. We might be bombed into smithereens a fortnight from now.’
Over Mother’s shoulder, I saw the door to number seven fly open. Katherine looked as sick as you might imagine. I mustered my most vicious smile. ‘Katherine’s coming. Unless you want a scene, I suggest we continue this conversation after the armistice, if there is one.’
Like most of her generation, my mother could not abide a scene. By the time Katherine climbed into the front seat of the Minx, she was at her most charming.
We ate at the Three Bells, which was where Edward took the visiting brass, except that we were an hour early and were spared having to join them.
Lunch could have been unbearably stilted, but for my beloved’s mother-taming calculus, which sifted through all the conversations we’d had, the minor things Penelope or Melody had said in passing in the car, and fitted them together so that Katherine, who had been to Roedean and read philosophy at Somerville, could ask, ‘What do you think of Parmenides? Was he the passive link between Aristotle and Socrates as Hamlyn says, or was he a serious thinker in his own right?’
My mother had her weak spots and Katherine had leapt onto one of them. Lunch passed in a blur of Greek aphorisms, place names, long-dead men I had heard of only in passing, and about whom I knew little and cared less. But my mother was thigh deep in the world of the mind and battling it out as if her life depended on it.
I think sometimes the wars would have been won faster, and with less bloodshed if women like my mother had simply set up a debating forum between the warring factions and may the best team win.
Katherine gave her the last word. I saw the moment when she took a breath to knock back a retort and, at the last moment, diverted to deliver something altogether tamer.
Mother saw it, too, I think. She’d have to have been a lot less sharp than she was not to know that Katherine could have wiped the floor with her, but she accepted the gift with unexpected grace and, laying down her napkin, turned to me, saying, ‘I will do what I can to help. Don’t do anything stupid.’
Under the table, Katherine’s foot came to rest lightly on mine. I swallowed all my instinctive responses and offered my most emollient smile. ‘Thank you. I’ll do my best not to.’
Chapter Five
The date of my mother’s visit was Wednesday 6th November - a date that was from then onward, seared in perpetuity on my memory, even had it not been the morning after Guy Fawkes night.
That weekend, Katherine and I escaped west to Shipwrights again, to hot water in the bath, and food to die for, and the vast double bed, with its fresh linen and damask bedspread.
We were paying for this ourselves by now, scrimping through the weeks, eating only at work and spending none of our pay, so that we could eat like royalty on our weekends away. Even so, I have no doubt that Madam Arquette gave us a significant discount, for which I remain grateful to this day.
Our world was almost stable, and remained so until the following Thursday. We had broken our CASPAR-GB cipher of the day - knowing the keywords made these laughably easy - and had progressed onto one in a series of hand-coded ciphers being sent from the Isle of Wight.
These were based on a book and we had no way of finding the keys, so we were doing massed substitutions at rates of hundreds per hour in an effort to create one word that made sense. I had personally got through three thousand attempts on the line I’d been given and was half-dreaming of lunch (when Katherine and I had planned to go for a walk in the grounds and might at least be able to talk without being overheard) when the colonel walked over and slapped a new CASPAR cipher slip on our desk.
‘This is off schedule. Therefore it matters. Stop work on the WIGHT ciphers and get me this in plain text as fast as you can.’
I caught Katherine’s eye. She shrugged and reached for our much-thumbed copy of the Bible. I broke the short, sharp message down into digraphs, split them into two columns and waited for the key.
“Revelation twenty two verse one, word twenty eight,’ Katherine ran her finger along the line, counting under her breath. ‘Yielded. And verse six word nine, faithful.’
She underlined them as I drew out the squares. ‘They’ve never used Revelation before. Must be relevant, you’d think?’
‘Or it fell open at that page. Or the minister ranted from it at the pulpit on Sunday.’
‘Don’t think so. This is Dublin, they don’t use the King James there.’
‘Maybe they’re part of an underground secret Protestant sect?’
Our minds were not on the conversation: we were deep in the decryption, racing to see who could break her half the fastest.
I let all my frustration run into my pen and ran through as fast as I have ever done.
‘Finished!’
And, from Katherine, ‘Finished!’
Eilis O’Donovan, the super-brain scion of Military Intelligence who worked on the next desk, was our regular adjudicator.
She shook her head. ‘Dead heat. You each owe the other lunch.’
‘Damnation.’ We feigned irritation and I passed Katherine my letters to fit back together to bring out the plain text.
‘And so? What does it say?’
‘We’ve done it wrong.’ She frowned. ‘Even I know this isn’t Polish. Not enough consonants.’
‘Let me see.’ I looked over her shoulder, resting my hand on hers, the closest we dared be to each other in public.
IN AI NM DE FA GR IO MH AN OI CH EX
‘You’re right. Nor is it Italian. Or Portuguese, Spanish, Hungarian, French, German or Dutch.’ Not that they used Dutch, but at least I could read it. ‘It’s gibberish.’ I said, ‘We must have the keywords wrong.’
She passed me the Bible. ‘Rev 22128 and 2269. If you can unearth something different, be my guest.’
I couldn’t. ‘Maybe IR counted wrong?’
For the rest of the morning and into the afternoon we tried different words on the line, different lines in the verse, different verses and even different books: we tried pretty much every variant on 22128 and 2269. None of them yielded anything better.
We moved onto bibles in other languages. We were trying Portuguese when Edward Catherston loomed over the desk.
‘I have to see the Brigadier. He wants the result.’
‘We don’t have it yet.’
He blinked, hard. ‘I don’t understand.’
We showed him the working. He was no slouch at mathematics and understood the squares.
We talked him through every variant. He ran his fingers through his half inch hair. ‘Keep trying,’he said, and left. Even for him, this was brusque. I gave Katherine my, he still loves you, look. She pulled a face. We went back to the cipher.
Even without Edward’s exhortation, we were hardly likely to give up. We had missed lunch and were about to miss tea when Eilis returned from the canteen with a cosied pot and three tin mugs.
‘No milk,’ she said. ‘They wouldn’t let me bring that.’ She laid her trove on our desk. ‘But I did get biscuits.’
I hadn’t realised how hungry I was until she spread out a brace of wholewheat digestives on the desk.
’Eilis, how can we ever repay you?’
‘Just break the cipher. It seems to matter.’
She poured us a mug each and came to lean beside me, to drink hers.
My desk was as ordered as I could make it, but by then, the piles of different attempts overlapped in a sea of incomprehension, except that we’d left the first decrypt at the top, taped to the desk, as our baseline.
‘Holy Mother.’ Eilis leaned over my shoulder. ‘Can I look at that?’
‘Be my guest.’
‘This is Irish.’ She took my pen. ‘May I?’
I sat back. Katherine stopped what she was doing and together we watched Eilis break the original digraphs out into words, deleting the final X.
IN AI NM DE FA GR IO MH AN OI CH EX became: In ainm De, fag riomh an oiche
‘Could you render that into English?’
‘I’m not good at Gaelic, but I think it’s something of the order of, ‘In the name of God, leave before this night.’
She laid down the pen. ‘I’m not fluent. I might be wrong.’
‘An off-schedule emergency broadcast sent from Ireland to England in Irish? I’d say it would be something like this, wouldn’t you?’ Katherine was already reaching for the files on the CASPARs. ‘Where’s CASPAR-GB just now?’
‘Coventry.’ I knew because every time GB went there, I thought that Melody was safe. That was one of the things we noticed: wherever CASPAR-GB stayed the night, was a place the Luftwaffe did not visit.
Until now. My heart stilled a moment. ‘They’re going to bomb it. Coventry. Tonight. We have to tell Edwa— the colonel.’
Katherine caught my wrist. In front of Eilis, we dared this much. ‘Stay calm. He’s gone to see the brigadier. We can get word to them both.’
‘How?’
‘They meet at the club: White’s. We can send a telegram.’
‘You can’t send it in plain text. The Luftwaffe is going to bomb Coventry. You can’t say it so everyone in the telegraph office can read it. There’ll be pandemonium.’
‘We can encrypt it. The colonel can read squares. We just need a pair of keywords.’
‘Use his name: Edward Catherston. No risk he doesn’t know it or can’t spell it.’
So we did: we wrote out: Caspar speaks Irish Gaelic. Today’s post warning to leave Coventry by tonight soonest. Extreme urgency. Coventry in mortal danger! Intercept? Or Evacuate!’
It may have been somewhat histrionic, but thanks to my mother’s visit, Edward knew that she had a daughter in Coventry and we knew he’d take it seriously.
The encryption took us minutes and then Katherine, who had the details of the club, went off to send the telegram.
Left alone in the anticlimax, Eilis and I drank tea together in celebration of having actually made a difference to the war and then, when Katherine returned, all three of us went to the Three Bells for a valedictory dinner.
As hostelries went, it wasn’t a patch on the Shipwrights, but it was warm and comfortable and served good food. It also rented rooms by the night and so this once, in the aftershock of the decrypt, and in the knowledge that we had done something genuinely useful, Katherine and I abandoned our vows of chastity, poverty and secrecy and rented a double room, telling ourselves everyone would understand that we didn’t want to cycle home in the dark so late at night.
The following morning, we were ten minutes late for work, having cycled back to numbers seven and fifteen for a change of clothes.
The day was grey, but peaceful. We sang as we cycled, racing the last bit, so that we arrived breathless and laughing at the gates.
Edward met us at the cycle sheds, our cipher telegram in his hand. ‘Who sent this?’
Katherine said, ‘I did. But Eilis was the one who broke the cipher. Without her, we would never have—’
‘You didn’t think to label it priority?’
‘What do you mean? Of course I labelled it properly.’
‘You did not.’
‘I did. Without question, it was labelled, Priority, For Your Eyes Only. And I appended, NameKey, so you would break the squares. I know how things are done. Edward, what’s happened?’
‘Last night, Coventry was the target of the main Luftwaffe raid.’
‘But it was evacuated, surely? Or the bombers were jammed?’
‘The jamming was not deployed. The fighters were not deployed. Nobody was evacuated. We did not get this message. You did not label it priority.’
‘Edward, I did!’
Katherine shouted, I think. My world cracked open. As down a long tunnel, I heard the colonel say, ‘Grace, I am very sorry to tell you that your sister Melody is amongst the missing, presumed dead. Your mother is sending a car to pick you up and take you home.’
I remember very little of the following week. Nearly six hundred souls were lost in Coventry on the night of the 14th of November 1940, with several thousand more injured. Over four thousand homes were destroyed, the cathedral suffered a direct hit and over fifty percent of the factory units were rendered incapable of production. The Luftwaffe used Pathfinders for the first time, and incendiary bombs to set firestorms to maximise the damage.
