Chapter 41

FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, JUNE 1942

This fine summer weather means romance, judging from the number of BP engagements rumored! What the huts and night shifts hath joined together, let no one put asunder. . .

Two weeks after the conversation with Sheila Zarb, Beth became a thief.

“Beth Finch. ” Giles’s voice hovered somewhere between amused and offended. “Are you actually rummaging in my wallet? ”

“No. Yes. ” Beth could feel the things she’d taken, nearly burning a hole in her pocket. She’d just managed to ease Giles’s wallet back into his jacket where it hung over his chair—a much easier job in the large, crowded new-built canteen than it would have been in the old mansion dining room—but he’d ambled back with his tray faster than anticipated. “I needed something. . . I didn’t steal! I left you two shillings in place. ”

“I don’t really fancy anyone taking a poke in my wallet who isn’t me. ” He dumped his tray on the table. “What did you need so badly? ”

“I—” Beth couldn’t say another word. It was four in the morning and the canteen was full of tired people jostling for plates of corned beef and prunes. Beth ducked her head, avoiding his eyes. “I—can’t say. ”

Giles went through his wallet. His brows rose. “Well. I’m plus two shillings and minus two—”

“Pleasedon’tsayit. ” Beth squeezed her eyes shut in agony. “Please, Giles. ”

He sat back in his chair with a grin. “Wouldn’t dream of it. ”

She fled before he could make any more jokes.

“Beth? ” Harry stopped in surprise, coming out of Hut 8 five hours later. Beth had been wondering what to do if he worked a double, but here he was, rumpled and tired looking, shrugging into his jacket.

“You’re off shift? ” Of course he was, it was nine sharp and people were streaming into the bright summer morning toward the gates, but so much of ordinary conversation seemed to be about stating the obvious. How did anyone stand it? “Where are you off to? ”

She’d been expecting him to say “home” and she had an answer for that, but he surprised her. “Hopping the train to Cambridge for the day. Sheila’s already there, visiting her parents with Christopher—it’s better if I don’t go with them, so I’ll loaf about until afternoon and then bring them home. ”

“Why can’t you visit her parents? ”

Someone jostled past Harry; he moved to one side near the brick half wall erected to shield the hut from bomb raids. “Once her dad is two pints in, he’ll start making digs at me, and her mum always frets about how dark Christopher turned out and argues about me teaching him Arabic. ” Harry’s face was taut.

“I don’t see Sheila putting up with that. ”

“She gives them hell. But Christopher cries, and—” Harry broke off. “How do you know what Sheila would or wouldn’t do? ”

“We met again a few weeks back”—Beth looked down at her handbag—“and talked. ”

“. . . About what? ”

Beth couldn’t manage the answer. “You’re off to the train station then? ”

“Yes. ”

She took a breath. Let the breath out. “I’ve never been to Cambridge. ”

He looked at her then, exhausted, direct. “D’you want to come? ”

THEY DIDN’T SPEAK on the station platform, or on the train. Harry angled his big body in the crushing crowd so Beth had a bit of space, and then stood silent, expression abstracted. Beth knew the look, having seen it in the mirror often enough. She was still fighting off the code’s mesmeric hold herself, and she’d had a good shift’s work, hard concentration giving way to clean, decrypted script. She hadn’t spent hours banging her head against an impenetrable wall. In the cramped space between them she raised her hand, flashed five fingers rapidly like a cluster of Enigma traffic, and then swirled them like a whirlpool, letting her eyes cross. Harry nodded, lids lifted briefly as he grinned. As she dropped her hand back to her side, the backs of their fingers brushed together with the swaying of the train. Beth stood quietly, focusing on the haphazard touch.

They got off at Cambridge, Harry taking her hand quite naturally, pulling her through the crush on the platform. He didn’t drop it, and she didn’t tug away. She saw spires and golden-stoned buildings; a city half-medieval and utterly untouched by bombing—she couldn’t help turning her eyes everywhere, astounded.

“Cambridge is lovelier than Oxford, ” Harry said. “Don’t let any of the Oxford blokes tell you different. ”

Beth didn’t see how anything could be lovelier than this. They meandered, Harry pointing out his favorite spots: “There’s the Eagle, best pub in town; I used to work proofs over a pint in the evenings. . . the tower there marks Caius College—my cousin Maurice dared me to climb the roof at night and make the Senate House leap across the lane below. Maurice got recruited to BP too, you know—I had no idea, till I saw him flashing his pass at the gate. . . ” Cambridge wasn’t as intimidating as London but was much bigger than Bletchley. And not a soul here knows me. All her life Beth had lived in a glass bowl where she couldn’t cross the road without meeting five people who called out her name.

Harry bought a packet of ersatz meat-paste sandwiches, and they ate on the grass in a loop of the river. He sat with his knees up, shoulders giving an irregular hitch now and then, and a lingering fear flashed in Beth—breakdown. Like poor Peggy, who had returned from bed rest pale faced and elusive about her time away. “You’re not going crazy, Harry. ” Beth said it blunt and direct.

“It feels like it. ” He looked at her, speaking equally bluntly. “What did Sheila tell you? ”

Beth had hoped she could get through this without blushing, but she might as well have wished for the moon. “About someone she sees. . . Someone you don’t mind about. ”

“I’ve never met him. ” Harry tossed a crust into the river. “But I hope he’s head over heels for her. ”

“You—really don’t mind? ”

“She should be happy while she can. ” Harry shook his head. “She fell for a flier. . . if he lives through the war it’ll be a miracle. ”

“So. . . ” Beth couldn’t finish the sentence or her sandwich.

He looked at her straight. “This is all I’ve got to offer you: the occasional afternoon. Because I’m not leaving Sheila or my son. Wouldn’t you rather be off with some fellow who can take you to meet his parents, give you a ring someday? ”

“No. ” Mab seemed to love being married, and clearly Osla wanted to be, but Beth didn’t feel that tug. She’d just got out of a household that felt like a prison; the thought of starting things up with a man who might trap her in another household someday made her want to scratch and howl. Beth wanted the life she already had, only—

“Why are you here? ” Harry asked, low voiced.

Because I don’t know if you’re the only friend I have who does what I do and loves what I love—or if you’re something more, Beth thought. And I want to know. Because you make me dizzy.

She didn’t know how to say that. “Why did you ask me to come along today? ” she asked instead.

“Because you’ve got a great, big, beautiful brain all teeming with lobsters and wheels and roses, ” Harry said, “and I could get tangled up in it all night. ”

You said it better, Beth thought dizzily. She spoke before she could stop and think, before she could find an excuse to dive back into the shadows.

“Can we go somewhere? ”

Harry smiled. He still looked exhausted, but the smile lightened him all over, as if he were hovering over the grass and not sunk into it like a boulder. He reached out, linking his fingers through Beth’s. “D’you like music? ”

THE SIGN OVER the door read Scopelli’s Music Shop. The premises were closed and shuttered—it was Sunday morning, Beth realized; everyone was at church or at home. She could have been in chapel right now, ignoring her mother’s reproachful stares—instead she was hand-in-hand with a married man, thinking. . .

Well, things that weren’t suitable for chapel.

“I had a job here my last year at King’s College. ” Harry let them into the shop and began turning on lights. “Old Mr. Scopelli let me keep a key so I can come on my afternoons off and listen to music. ”

Most of the shop was in shadow, but Beth saw booths with chairs and headphones. “What do you listen to? ” She’d heard so little music, only what was on the radio that Mrs. Finch thought appropriate. At Aspley Guise, they didn’t have a radio at all.

Harry went to the wall of records, running his fingers along the top shelf. “Since the U-boat blackout, Bach. ”

“You said once it was splendidly foursquare, ” Beth remembered. “Patterns for days. ”

“Maybe that’s why I’ve been burying myself in it. Trying to find U-boat keys in The Well-Tempered Clavier—at least it’s something we haven’t tried at work. ” His face darkened briefly, then he gave his head a fierce shake as if to shove Hut 8 and everything about it back into the hole it came from. He pulled a record down. “There. . . ” Nodding to the booth at the back. Beth took a seat and Harry dropped into the chair beside her, putting the record on and fiddling with various dials. He shrugged out of his jacket and pushed back his sleeves. “We’ll both hear it this way, ” he said, picking up two pairs of headphones and slipping one over Beth’s ears. The world sealed away with a suddenness that surprised her, and she wished she had a pair of these at ISK—then she’d really be able to focus, no distractions of Phyllida’s throat-clearing or Jean’s slight humming. . .

In the artificial silence she looked at Harry, then looped her fingers round his wrist and tugged. His big hand rose to the nape of her neck, then his other hand moved to her hair, tangling slowly through it, and the silence filled up as he kissed her. Not with sound, Beth thought, gripping his loosened collar and pulling him closer, with color. Honey yellow, sunshine yellow, flooded her to the bone in the utter stillness.

He pulled back, hand still warm at the side of her throat. He looked a question at her. She smiled.

He lowered his head, kissed the space between her collarbones, then drew back and pulled the record from its sleeve. Beth saw the label: Bach’s Partita Number 2 in C Minor. He dropped the needle, and a piano began.

Patterns—Beth could hear them unspooling, golden horizontal lines, more melodies adding in, undergirding the first. Patterns mingling, left hand and right. Patterns she didn’t have to solve, just admire. Harry kissed her again. Beth closed her eyes, following the left-hand pattern as it surged, following the pulse in Harry’s neck as it surged under her fingertips. She followed the strong lines of his throat down into his collar, listening, moving her lips to his neck. She felt him swallow, felt his hand make a fist in her hair, and it hurt wonderfully. She had never liked to be touched, but now she couldn’t get close enough. Normally Harry hunkered down in chairs as if to keep his vast size from intimidating anyone, but now she had the feeling of being pulled into the unyielding granite loom of a mountain. He could have broken her between his huge hands like a toothpick and it didn’t frighten her at all—if anything Beth had a fierce thrum of pleasure, because he was nearly shaking with the effort to hold all that strength back, let her be the one to move first.

The world jolted as he tugged her earphones away. “—should stop, ” he was saying.

“Why? ” Everything was too loud. Beth was curled in his lap, her blouse and brassiere on the floor, Harry’s shirt unbuttoned; they were both breathing hard. Music came tinnily from the discarded earphones.

“I’m not going to get you in trouble. ” Harry went through his pockets with a muttered curse. “I didn’t bring anything—didn’t think the day had anything like this in store. ”

Beth reached over to her handbag and showed him what she’d swiped from Giles. “I did. ”

Harry burst out laughing. “Don’t tell me you marched into a shop and asked for—”

“As if anyone would sell them to me! ” She felt the blush come. “Nicked from Giles. ”

“Christ, Beth. ” Harry put his forehead against hers and laughed in huge, gusting waves. He sounded like he hadn’t laughed in months.

“Does this make me a. . . ” Beth hesitated. “I thought I should be prepared. Just in case. ”

“You’re a bloody genius. ” He swiped the two small packets from her hand. “Mr. Scopelli turned his back room into a bomb shelter—there’s a camp cot and blankets. . . ” Harry paused, giving her a look up and down that scoured like coal fire. “Christ, even your nipples blush. ”

“Shut up. ” Beth reached for the earphones. “I want to hear the end of the partita—”

He swung her off his lap, holding her off the ground close against him, eyes black and ravenous. “Bugger. The partita. ”

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