The German Numbers Woman (28 page)

‘You can hardly say I make a habit of that kind of thing.'

She was going too far. ‘I didn't mean to imply you did.'

‘Wouldn't your curiosity have been aroused?'

‘It might have been. I can't be sure. I would have waited for more information before coming up here.'

He spooned hot apple tart and custard. ‘We needed a holiday, as you said, so I suggested we come.' Their talk was embarrassing now that she had decided his venture was weird and futile, not fit for her approval, but he saw no way to convince her, especially since the quest was peculiar even to him. He controlled an unfamiliar annoyance, though spoke as openly as possible. ‘I didn't tell you why I thought we needed a holiday because I assumed you would see the reason as a bit daft, and I'd get discouraged.'

A response would lead into the unusual territory of a quarrel. He had wanted to do without her, even to deceive her. If she hadn't asked he would have told her nothing. He was suggesting it had been a mistake to ask, and perhaps he was right. Rules in such a marriage had to be made up as you went along. Because every day was the same there was always the danger that one day would be different. ‘What shall we do this afternoon?' she said, after the silence.

‘I'd like to walk the town a bit more.'

She folded her paper napkin, and reached for the bill. Only one thing was on his mind, which it seemed nothing could move. ‘It'll be tiring, you know, and boring for me.'

‘I'd be happy to go alone.'

More than happy, no doubt. ‘What I mean is that it will be boring for me without you.' The girl took the twenty-note. ‘I have some ideas about our holiday as well, and I'll tell you what we're going to do. We'll go to a place called Somersby. I read in the guidebook that Tennyson was born there. I'm sure you'll enjoy it. I know I will. We can both walk around the town some more tomorrow.'

Such negotiations over disputed territory brought them closer, gave something to talk about at least, laced with the unfamiliar frisson of infighting. He would relent, allow chance to operate in the hope of it bringing unforeseen results. ‘Fair enough. We'll do it your way.'

She gave him his stick. ‘Not my way entirely. If you aren't going to like it, we won't go.'

‘Oh,' he smiled, ‘I'll enjoy it.' Judy must know about Tennyson, and it was more than possible she would want to show Carla his birthplace.

‘And tonight,' she said, ‘you can try to get the east coast stations on your radio.'

Between tea and dinner he lay down to sleep. So did Laura, on the other side of the bed. Somersby, embosomed (a word she used) in early greenery had exhausted them. ‘All those Tennysons,' she recalled, ‘half mad, and doped on laudanum!'

‘I want to hear his poems again,' he said. ‘“Tiresias” is the one I like, but it would be, wouldn't it? How did it go?'

‘Like this, I think.' Years ago she had thought it apposite to learn:

‘I wish I were as in the years of old,

While yet the blessed daylight made itself

Ruddy thro' both the roofs of sight, and woke

These days, now dull, but then so keen to seek

The meanings ambushed under all they saw,

The flight of birds, the flame of sacrifice

What omens may foreshadow fate to man

And woman, and the secrets of the Gods.'

‘I forget the rest, though it is rather long. What a pity I didn't bring the book. I could have read all of it.'

‘I can't wait,' he said. ‘Maybe we'll leave the day after tomorrow.' If he couldn't find Judy by then he would conclude she'd gone elsewhere, maybe taken Carla to Scarborough, or Blackpool, or to the Derbyshire hills.

After dinner Laura stayed in the lounge with a couple telling her about their holiday in Israel. Upstairs Howard put his radio on a chest of drawers under the window, threw out a length of wire, and plugged in, using earphones so as not to disturb anyone next door, leaving him alone with the ionosphere hissing and crackling, talking and morsing as the needle swivelled through scores of stations.

A hotel bedroom was more clandestine than his own mock radio shack, and the last two days of speculation were erased by the streaming of bird sounds into the brain, a relaxing therapy never known to fail.

The east coast transmitters, loud, brash, and a delight to listen to, nevertheless gave out little of interest. Messages from tankers requested pilots to guide them to their berths, sounding so close he had to decrease the volume. He soothed himself for half an hour with North Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico weather, such clear and easy to read rhythms transferred to his hand held tape recorder in case anything was worth putting onto the typewriter at home.

Switching to short wave, he trawled the usual frequencies and fancied, with a shock that went through his whole body, as if he had touched a naked cable, that he heard Carla calling her girlfriend. He twitched the needle, to go back slowly over an arc of almost silence. The aether played party tricks to bemuse and deceive. There were footpaths, bridleways and lanes through the static, no terrors or lack of navigational know-how for a blind man. Distant laughter on the half wane mocked him to return and look for it, but he was adept at playing ring around the moon, went up wave and down wave, waited on the edge, smoothed in and came out again, sneaked as slowly over the frequency as if a voice he wanted to hear, and which knew he wanted to hear it, could feel him changing kilocycles, each one passing like the clanging of a door.

Carla must know something I don't know, or she's calling another boat and another woman. Maybe a man, because you couldn't always tell with such people. A Slavic voice poached on the wave but didn't stay, and Carla's urgent requests fell into the silence, then came clear enough from the whirlpool: ‘'Ello,
Daedalus, Daedalus
, this is
Pontifex
. You hear me now, over.'

Judy couldn't, or wouldn't, or she wasn't anywhere but in Boston, which Carla seemed not to know. Again and again she called, as if convinced Judy was somewhere waiting – pleading for her to answer. He felt angry at such importunity, at such clamouring for Judy when she knew she couldn't possibly be there.

But she was. ‘
Pontifex, Pontifex
, this is
Daedalus
, this is
Daedalus
. Now I hear you. My receiver wasn't tuned in properly, but I found the trouble.'

Her voice was nowhere as loud or clear as on the larger receiver two hundred miles further south, but he heard enough, wanted to bang his head against the wall because they had conspired to deceive him as to where in the universe they would be.

Carla:
‘I thought you in England.'

Judy:
‘I should have been, but they stopped me. I couldn't go. The other woman didn't come out to replace me, and they had to do a job which was urgent. I lost my airline ticket, but it means nothing to them. They'll pay. I cried when they told me. It's getting too much. I sometimes want to die.'

Carla:
‘You no die.'

Judy:
‘I know. But I feel like it. I wanted us to go to Boston. I wanted you in bed with me.'

Carla:
‘Me, as well. What we do?'

Judy:
‘Don't ask me.'

Carla:
‘I do. Who else ask?'

Judy:
‘I know, but not yet, please.'

Howard felt their pain overwhelming whatever had been in him, and could hardly bear to listen. Their plan had misfired, been smashed. What was fate playing at?

Judy:
‘I can't wait for the Azores, though. Big thing.'

Carla:
‘You no say about that.'

Judy:
‘Yes, I know, but I only say it might because I want you to come as well.'

Carla:
‘I don't think it possible.'

Judy:
‘Love you, Carla, but I can't help this situation. It's killing me.'

Carla:
‘No kill. We meet soon.'

Judy:
(as if she will weep) ‘But when?'

Carla:
‘Soon. In London maybe we meet.'

Judy:
‘I long for it. But I have to go now. The skipper's found out about me using the radio, and he'll be back soon. He doesn't like it. I'm for the big chop if he catches me. I'll call you tomorrow, but only for a minute. Nobody will notice that.'

Carla:
‘I listen, then. Call you anyway.'

Judy:
‘And I'll pick up your wonderful voice, even if I can't answer. Love you a lot, Carla.'

Carla:
‘Love you, Judy.'

At least he knew what she looked like, had enough details to sketch out a vivid comic-book picture. Tall and well built, with fine features, shiny blonde hair ponytailing down her back, a loving woman who liked a good time with her girlfriend. She wore pale grey trousers and a white blouse with a colourful silk scarf casually knotted, leather sandals on elegant feet, a gold buckle the colour of her earrings. After signing off with Carla she would smoke a thin black Turkish cigarette, and pensively wonder what direction her life could take now that their plan to meet had gone for a burton. Perhaps the cigarette made the roof of her mouth hot, and called for an ice-cream – another human touch to her appearance.

He couldn't deny how slipshod she was to think nobody could overhear her conversation. She used the radio like a telephone, with no notion of its vulnerability. Most people were similar in their faith, if they weren't wireless operators, and knew nothing about radio, looking on the phenomenon as a kind of magic, and as if their words went securely from one ear to the other. No wonder the skipper had told her not to do it, though such carelessness with regard to radio could only make her more interesting.

‘We're wasting our time in Boston,' he said. ‘I heard her on the radio. She's still out there. Something went wrong with the crewing arrangements, and she couldn't make it.'

He was infatuated with her, though she supposed detectives often were with their prey. Stalkers would be certainly. ‘Shall we stay on, then?'

‘I don't see any point.'

‘Let's have another night,' she said, ‘and then we'll go back. We can drive to the Wash tomorrow, and hear the birds. We brought the binoculars and the book so I'll tell you what they are. I've also been looking at the map. There are some curious names for sandbanks – whole families of them.'

‘Like what?'

She spread the map on the bed. ‘Oh, there's Bulldog Sand, and Pandora Sand.'

‘I expect they're married. A right couple they must be.'

‘Perhaps brother and sister. Then there's Roger Sand, and Old South, not to mention Westmark Knock. You couldn't find better names on your radio. There's Peter Black, and Thief Sand, and Gat, and Trap, and Hook, as well as Stubborn Sand, and Macaroni Channel.'

He laughed. ‘You're right. What I wouldn't give to hear names like that,' wondering if somewhere among them he would find a clue to Judy's antecedents, though it could be she wasn't born of the area, only connected to it by some branch of the family. Not here now, maybe in two weeks she would be, walking the streets, haughty and set apart among the stay-at-homes yet glad to be in a place known since infancy. He would be on the south coast, the radio blank because she and her girlfriend were in Boston. He ached for a sight of her, but fate was as blind as he was. To beat the painful tension he must assume they would never meet, though in his imagination he would keep her a prisoner behind a jumble of kilocycles, locked in an electric cell, pristine and never aging, a picture for himself alone, no one able to release her from his radio hideaway.

But if ever he did get close, and he had to foresee the possibility so as to live in hope, he would touch her face in recognition, establish a memory in case he should meet her a second or third time, would guide a hand from nose to lips, over the contours of the chin and around to that tactile place at the back of the neck. Then she would be his.

‘We should go to bed,' Laura said from her seat at the dressing table. ‘I'll help you get your things off.'

The promise of her body between the sheets had never failed to displace even the room he was in, but now, shamming enthusiasm when her fingers began their work, the word ‘Azores' lit his mind like the flash of a beacon, repeating itself across the shining water.

He saw himself performing self-destructive actions of which he would normally never approve, tried to ignore the word ‘Azores', pull away from its dangers, and get back to being the person he had always supposed himself to be, but he was no longer in control and, happy enough in such a state, was helplessly pulled along.

EIGHTEEN

‘I don't want to do anymore of this,' he would say to Waistcoat, who was sure to come back with: ‘I'm afraid you have to, yellow belly. Nobody retires from this game till I press the buzzer. If they do it before then they are likely to find themselves up the creek without even a teaspoon. In Essex most likely, face down in the ooze. Or you'll be a waiter for the rest of your life at the Scarface Hotel – as I myself might if I wanted out.'

He knew it, so would keep the cosy chat to himself for some time yet. In any case there still wasn't enough in his Malta account to provide a comfortable beachcombing life till he popped his clogs, and he hadn't the right to go poor due to moral scruples, whether or not he assumed that Amanda would stay with him if he did.

All the same a few more trips and he would be justified in hinting that the job was too hard, and it was time a younger man took his place. He was too loyal, he would say, to allow his body to let them down in a crisis. And his present loyalty could be proved by blowing the gaff on that big gorgeous Judy yapping to her Spanish girlfriend. Love isn't only blind, it's dangerous, and she ought to be put down.