The German Numbers Woman (17 page)

Carla:
‘You busy now?'

Judy:
‘Yeah. We have six people on board at the moment, which means a lot of work for me. I have to do everything for them, but it's my job anyway. Will you stay long with your boat?'

Carla:
‘I suppose.'

Judy:
‘Maybe we'll run away together. Or perhaps I'll come and try to get a job on your boat. I have a long list of things I want to do with you. I miss you so much. I want a nice dance with you.'

Carla:
‘I too. But this is our life. I can't see you in Izmir. Or Naxos. Not my fault.'

Judy:
‘I know, but I love you, you sexy thing. Love you, love you. Can you hear me better now?'

Carla:
‘There's much electric.'

Judy:
‘That's atmospherics. There's been a lot of shooting stars here, all evening. Beautiful. I wish we could see them together.'

Carla:
‘Every guest on board here asleep. We have accountant who wears waistcoat always, even when hot. He's got a lovely blonde with him.'

Judy:
‘I suppose you can't keep your eyes off her. How many more women are there?'

Carla:
‘Only two. The men are ugly. Tomorrow we go ashore. We go every day nearly, to buy food, and catch other things.'

Judy:
‘I don't want to know. Same with us. And I have to look after everybody. I eat so much I'm putting on weight.'

Carla:
‘You can be more for me.'

Judy:
‘I don't want to. I need more exercise.'

Carla:
(laughing) ‘I give you plenty when we meet.'

Judy:
‘We can do it in the day as well. I can't say all I want to over the radio, but I love you so much.'

Carla:
‘Don't say anything. I know what you think. Just remember what I say. You tell me when we meet. Lights are on all over the harbour. A plane is going in to land. Wish you were on it. Another one leaving. Wish I was on that. But I'm happy to talk to you. I dream about you every night, unless very tired. I can talk all night if you want.'

Judy:
‘No problem for me, though we're very busy these days, going from one island to another, picking things up, seeing things. A lot of telephone calls. No problems, though. I don't know what the skipper's up to. I don't want to know. I just do my job looking after them.'

Carla:
‘I like when you tell me things.'

Judy:
‘Love you, stewardess. You're my sailor.'

Carla:
‘Love you, too. Wish you were here. Tell me in a letter how you feel. I like your letters.'

Judy:
‘I'll send you another. Do you want me to buy you anything in Izmir?'

Carla:
‘Maybe you buy nice underwear.'

Judy:
‘The black? I don't know about Turkey, but I'll try. It's so nice speaking to you. You know what I want to do now? I'm shaking. I have to smoke a cigarette.'

Carla:
‘Me too. You sleep now?'

Judy:
‘I don't want to, but I think I have to.'

Carla:
‘Me too.'

Judy:
‘Alone?'

Carla:
‘No, with girl.'

Judy:
‘I'll kill you.'

Carla:
‘I love
you
, OK?'

Judy:
‘Thanks a lot. Get your boss to buy a helicopter, then we can meet anytime.'

Carla:
‘Maybe we meet in Izmir. I know good restaurant there. I want you in my arms.'

Judy:
‘Don't torment me. We'll be zig-zagging around here for another two weeks. Talk to the man with the waistcoat and maybe he'll suggest it. Got to go now.'

Carla:
‘Me too. I don't want to. I love you too much.'

Judy:
‘Not enough. Love you too, Carla. We'll talk the day after tomorrow. Make sure you're there.'

Carla:
‘I listen. Love you.'

Static, atmospherics, mush, the heavenly code for silence. He was in a different country after they had signed off, on his own, in a stranger's skin, an altered person, bereft of more than sight, sat without knowing how long, hands by the morse key as if to tap out a message and get Judy and her lover back on the air or, better by far, to talk to Judy alone, though she wouldn't understand the medium. The call had been taped and he could play it back when he liked, though felt no wish to at the moment, it would make him feel more isolated, more desolate. Despair enriched a darkness he would not be without, painful though it was. But he reached for the key, and tapped away his misery at not being close.

‘Dear Judy, I know more about you than you can know about me, though if you were able to hear what I've just listened to you would undoubtedly know more about me than I am allowed to know about you, or about myself. Or would you? Forgive the maunderings of a blind man. You are the chosen heroine of my night hours, and I am your unacknowledged swain of a listener, who knows more about you than you can know about me because I can hear you while you can't hear me, though we're on the same level in that neither of us can see each other. You don't even know when I listen to your voice electrically pulsing through the air. I know you have a lover, but I am infatuated by you so intensely that I might call it love as well, besotted hopelessly by your voice and personality coming into focus before my empty eyes. There's no one I can tell it to, which makes the pain worse, yet for that reason richer and easier to be endured. To confess it to Laura would put her into despair, or she would have me sent quickstep into a lunatic asylum, and who would blame her? To admit it to myself makes me laugh with a cynicism I haven't known before. There's a helpless yearning inside me which is new, as if I'm just born, ready to go into the world, a new man filled with hope and inspiration, willing to set out on any journey, however long and difficult, to find you, and see what you look like, though I can't, so maybe you would fall in love with me, so that I could touch you, know your shape, feel your kisses …'

A traffic list from a China coast station couldn't divert him from the amalgamation of misery and illumination. Nor would the German Numbers Woman have consoled him had it not been her night off. Nothing was able to disperse the miasma of light beyond his barrier of darkness. Some Japanese ships on call completed his dislocation. He was an island of flotsam in the mist, the coastline indistinct as on a part of the ocean not yet properly explored, or seen even by the
Flying Dutchman
's ever-searching telescopes, that ragged weevil-rotted and eternally turning craft, privileged or bedevilled in having some of the latest technology to keep it going.

He twirled the knob, searching for the night frequency of the Moscow HF-DF station. For months he had been hoping to find it, done all kinds of mental calculations to bracket the exact band of the spectrum, but with no success. There obviously was one, because planes in darkness over the vastness of Russia would need even more to know where they were, flying as blind as he was for the most part, and dependent on electrical assistance, just as he was, sitting at the radio trying to track them down. Nor could it be that planes weren't up at night, no more than he didn't listen at night. His eternal searching had put him onto Judy, but he still wanted to hear the Russian night planes asking Vanya where they were.

When the lamp was on he sat in the light though couldn't see it, reaching for the switch to press it off and cut away even from his little world within the house, stronger around him than if he had been in the deepest prison, and as alien a piece of territory as the fact of his blindness because it prevented him from travelling to Naxos and Izmir.

His blindness was a cloth pinning him to the ground and stopping all movement, mental or otherwise. With normal sight he could have found her, maybe even spoken the time of the day while passing between the tables of a café on the quayside, close enough to reinforce his imagination and call it sight, yet giving no hint of his love. He would know more what she looked like, or at least decide which of the many pictures that had passed through his mind's cyclopean eye was closest, an accomplishment sufficient to send him home, having foolishly wasted time, money and effort.

He was embarrassed, almost ashamed at the juvenile intensity of love that forced him to sit in the darkest dark unable to think of anyone but Judy, not even to move a finger, a still figure that had no will to get out of her thrall and go to bed.

If I had not been blind, he wondered, would I have left home, work and wife, and set out on a fortnight's jaunt to look for someone whose voice I'd only heard on shortwave, a voice belonging to a woman who already had a girlfriend but whom I had, like a schoolboy, fallen in love with? Why not? How can you be in love, and prove that you are, if you aren't prepared to ruin yourself by advancing matters further? Especially if it was the first time you had fallen in love which, coming at any age, was bound to strike you like a thunderbolt into paralysis. Nothing could be done, and it was yours to endure till the overwhelming wave diminished in power and broke itself – if you didn't break first, succumb to despair at the powerlessness of your life.

He did not know what got him on the move, but he was halfway to the kitchen before smiling at the fact. The kettle was filled for breakfast so he had only to throw the switch to get water for tea. Cups also were set out, as would be marmalade, cornflakes, plates and cutlery, orange juice glasses. Laura liked as little as possible to do in her somnambulist state before a drink and something to eat in the morning.

He thought of himself as a man with two lives. One was rooted here, with Laura, while the other was enclosed within a mind which was his alone, the whole reason for his existence, making his blood run faster than it had since the night over Germany had put the full stop on him. If he hadn't been blinded, and was still the same person, he would have abandoned everything and gone on his mad escapade, a thought which bridged the gap between then and now.

But when you cannot see, when most of what occurs cannot be seen, you can't affect the course of action. Neither on the other hand could you see the leaping cycles of the aether, the megahertz and geigerhertz containing speech and pictures, messages and weather maps and morse, the calling of and replying to aeroplanes, police, firemen, ambulances, ships and people, life within that immense span of the planet going on since the genius of Watt, Volta, Ampere, Hertz, Morse and Marconi had set it going. You couldn't see it, but it was there.

Laura's arrangements for breakfast were signs that one day would follow another exactly – items that hadn't been touched by him before because he had never needed to make tea at such a time. Any change of routine disturbed her, though she always denied that it did. She would wonder what had been in his mind for him to make tea on his own in the middle of the night. Let her wonder. He sat until he was too tired to move, and then moved.

TWELVE

‘You never take me anywhere,' Amanda said. ‘I like to go out now and again.'

‘You go out all the time.'

‘With you, I mean.'

He wanted to belt her one, because her accusation was only too true, but you didn't do that kind of thing, though he was ashamed to admit that the impulse came often enough. Luckily they were outside, which made the charge easier to take.

He knew every weed and corner of the garden, but was no gardener, except that he had tied a sickly tree to a pole to stop the wind pushing it down. It didn't seem to thrive, had no will to grow or even live while fastened up for six months. Ken had advised him to do it, but in spite of such countryman know-how his sensibilities were too elementary to realise that what a tree needed was tender loving care. Noticing the tree from his window one day he went out with his Leatherman knife and cut the cords so that, in the next months, it thrived, easily able to withstand the winds. ‘Let's go somewhere today, then. We'll find a nice pub, and have lunch.'

Surprising how few words made her happy. They only ever went to bed after she had passed her bleak mood onto him, though he knew that to suggest they go there wouldn't work at all. He could wait, not denying that her own terms usually made the experience a notch or two higher than memorable.

‘That'd be lovely,' she said. ‘I like to see the sea now and again.'

‘So do I,' he smiled, ‘from land,' making himself happy too. He stood in the frame of the back door, looking across the lawn and hearing the languid hot day whistle of the birds from the belt of trees surrounding the house except where the lane led up to the road. The trees there never had any difficulty, plenty of mutual support, lived and died among each other. But a tree on its own needed special treatment.

She had always thought the car a good place to ask her questions, so when into the clear of the main road said: ‘There's something I've been meaning to ask you, Richard.'

No problem in taking Sunday off, because messages didn't come through on that day, proof that government agencies liked their leisure hours. Nevertheless he had flicked on the radio, idly between getting out of bed and shaving, to hear that the French cops were ready for Pentecostal traffic being dense towards EuroDisney. Whenever she used his first name he knew something was on its way that he wasn't going to like. ‘What about?'

‘Well, you might say I've been snooping.'

He overtook a Mini on a bend, just made it. Mustn't do that again. Don't let her think she's got you concerned about whatever the asking's going to be. He pushed in the cigarette lighter. ‘How, snooping?'