Chapter 42

Letter from Osla to her Café de Paris Good Samaritan, posted to his London landlady

I don’t know why I’m writing you—my first letter after our meeting at the Café de Paris had no reply. Are you still overseas? Are you even still alive? I hope you are. You provided comfort in one of the worst moments of my life, and somehow you’ve become important to me. Perhaps that’s silly. . . I suppose I’m also writing you because I can’t write to my boyfriend anymore (let’s not get into why) and sometimes I need a page to scream into. This is such a bloody awful war, and I’m so tired of making everyone laugh. . .

“Nothing missing. ” Miss Senyard lowered the lid on the last box file. “Will you give it a rest now, Osla? ”

Osla nibbled a nail. Months and months it had taken to go through those boxes she thought might have been rifled. She’d told Miss Senyard she was worried about possible missing files, and the older woman had been dubious, but no one could say she wasn’t careful: she and her girls (and Osla, too, pitching in at least an hour after every shift) had gone through every single box and cupboard where signals, reports, and copies were stored. The stacks took up whole walls now that German naval section was consolidated. “Goddamn, ” a visiting American colonel had whistled last week. “If this were the Pentagon, there would be rows and rows of shiny filing cabinets with nothing in them, and you do it all in goddamn shoeboxes. ”

Well, Osla had seen every one checked and cross-correlated, and she was floored at all points: nothing appeared to be missing. Maybe whoever rifled through just copied down what they wanted before scarpering, she thought. But if there was a way to check for that, she didn’t know what it was.

“Thanks awfully, ma’am, ” she told Miss Senyard. “I know you’re glad to call this project a dead end. ” She’d made inquiries about the missing Hut 3 files too (the ones Travis wouldn’t admit to) and met a wall of You dinnae need to know. There was no uproar or further investigation from the mansion, and no one had been sacked from BP for carelessness—that sort of news made itself known all over the Park—so perhaps the missing files had turned up without fuss. Perhaps they’d simply been mislaid. With thousands of reports flowing through BP, surely the odd stack of paper ended up in the wrong drawer from time to time.

So let it go, her common sense advised as she headed back to Aspley Guise, but Osla didn’t entirely want to let it go. At least the mystery had kept her occupied, and there hadn’t been much in the way of bright spots lately. No more Hut 4 now that they’d moved to the big, anonymous new block; fewer jokes and more strange faces all around. No Philip to bring a jolt of sunshine into her veins; he was out at sea. No escape from tragedy when Osla translated gleeful Nazi reports in July about tracking Convoy PQ17 and sinking twenty-four of thirty ships. . .

And certainly no cessation of nightmares when she closed her eyes at night. Osla wrote her Good Samaritan about that, mainly because she couldn’t think who else to tell, wrapped up in his old overcoat, which still smelled like heather and smoke. Sometimes she slept in it. It smelled like a man, even if it wasn’t Philip, and then she could pretend she had her head on his shoulder and wasn’t just lying in the dark in her narrow bed, dying of loneliness.

“Come up to the roof, ” Mab proposed when she got back to Aspley Guise. “We won’t get another warm day like this until spring, and you look peaky. ”

“It’s the new block. ” Still the new block, even though the naval section had moved over in August. “I never thought I’d miss that creaky old hut, but these big blocks have all the boundless charm of a TB sanitarium. Conveyor belts cranking away, pneumatic tubes, Park messengers whizzing in and out. . . ” Osla shook off her blue funk, shimmied into her bathing suit (midriff-baring white dotted with red cherries), and followed Mab up the attic stairs to the rooftop, which was flat, remote, and perfect for sunbathing. Osla laid out her towel as Mab stripped down to her unmentionables; no one was going to see them up here. The day was summer-warm, more like June than October—Osla watched a Hurricane drone overhead from the nearest training base and began working through a comic weather report for Bletchley Bletherings: Warm and hazy, with a thirty percent chance of Messerschmitts! Writing BB was about the only thing that gave Osla’s days any fizz now.

“I got your Vigenè re message. ” Beth’s voice floated behind them. Even without the Dread Mrs. Finch snooping, the three of them had never dropped the habit of leaving notes for each other in code. Up on the roof, bring your bathing suit! Osla had ciphered before dashing upstairs after Mab.

“Letter came for each of you, ” Beth continued, wind stirring her blond hair as she came up onto the roof. Osla had marveled before at the change in her quietest billet-mate—something had shifted in Beth, beyond the hair and lipstick. She hardly seemed to be present now unless she was on her way to BP, straining like an eager greyhound to get to work. If she wasn’t working, Beth didn’t even seem to be there. Not in the please don’t look at me way of the silent, henpecked girl Osla had first met—more in the sense that she wasn’t really interested in anything that took place outside Knox’s section. That, or heading to Cambridge every day off to listen to records; something else the old Beth would never have done, so Osla supposed it was progress. . . Still, there was something Osla found unsettling in her billet-mate’s preoccupied stare lately.

“For you, and you—posted here, not through the London PO Box. ” Beth handed over the letters, sitting down on the slates and tilting her face upward. “That plane’s doing another loop. ”

“A Hurricane. I used to make them. ”

“Did you? ” Beth asked vaguely.

“Yes. ” Osla heard her voice grow tart. “And you’ve heard that story several times. Can’t you at least pretend not to utterly ignore anything that isn’t in bally code? ”

Beth looked puzzled. Osla sighed and tore open her letter, getting a familiar jolt of joy as she recognized Philip’s writing.

Darling Os—I haven’t had a letter in ages. Did I do something to offend? Don’t tell me you’ve met someone else, because if you have, I’ll paste him.

On the heels of joy: pain. Because she couldn’t tell Philip why she’d stopped writing.

You might hurt for a while, Osla told Philip silently, but I’m keeping you safe. Her commander had been clear—if she failed to keep Philip at arm’s length and there was another security breach, Osla wouldn’t be the only one called to account. Philip could be too, and he had more to lose. His shining new lieutenancy, his pride in serving at sea, his acceptance from the royal family when he hardly had family of his own left. . . all that could go if there was talk of treason.

He would never recover from a blow like that. Even a brave man like Philip had his Achilles’ heel.

I’m protecting yours, Osla thought, folding up the letter. Even if you never know it.

Her ears rang suddenly as Mab let out a whoop. “He’s coming home! Francis is coming home! ”

“From Inverness? ” Osla asked as Beth said, “From where? ”

“I thought they were going to keep him there till he sprouted heather. ” Mab shuffled a ream of pages, still reading—her husband was always writing her thick packets, and all summer long she’d been scribbling thick packets back.

Osla took her involuntary tendril of envy, squashed it flat, and stamped on it repeatedly. “How long has it been now? ”

“Four months, ages longer than he originally thought. . . ” Mab hugged her knees. “He’ll have three days, the eighth through the tenth of November. How am I going to wait another month? He wants me to take the train to Coventry, and bring Lucy. ” A dizzy smile. “He’s going to show us his house—the house we’ll all live in after the war. ”

Osla’s envy raised its head again, and she gave it another vicious stamp. “Absolutely topping! ”

“Come with me, ” Mab said promptly. “I’ll need someone to help look after Lucy. ”

“So you can boff your husband senseless each night? ” Beth said.

Osla and Mab turned to stare at her. “Where did you learn an expression like that, Miss Finch? ” Mab laughed. “Clearly you have been falling into bad company. ”

“Beth, are you sloping off to meet some fellow? ” Osla exclaimed in mock horror. “All these Cambridge Sundays. . . ”

She meant it as a joke but Beth looked upward, avoiding eye contact. “That Hurricane’s back. ”

Osla’s senses pricked. Maybe if Beth seemed distant lately there was a better explanation than overwork. “Don’t get in a flap, tell me—”

“Look, Coventry—can one of you come? ” Mab pleaded.

The pink in her cheeks made Osla forget about Beth. Mab was positively shining, not with the cool, hard confidence she’d radiated from the day they met, but with pure joy. She’s in love, Osla thought. She may have married Francis for hardheaded reasons, but now she’s head over heels.

“Well, I’d better come along so you get your idyll, ” Osla said lightly. Three days alongside a husband and wife fizzing with mutual adoration—this was going to require a lot of mental stamping. But Osla couldn’t say no, not when Mab sat there visibly clutching her own happiness like it was the most fragile of vases. “If you brought Beth, she’d get the swithers, disappear down the center of a rose for an hour, and next thing you knew Lucy would turn up in Timbuktu. ”

The Hurricane circled round again, even lower. Mab grinned, eyes sparkling. “Let’s give him something to look at, ladies. ”

She stripped off her brassiere and whirled it over her head as the plane droned overhead. Osla pulled off the top of her bathing suit and did the same, laughing. “No, thank you, ” said Beth, keeping her blouse buttoned, but she waved. The Hurricane waggled its wings in return, and Mab blew a kiss. “Guess what, flyboy! ” she shouted upward. “My husband’s coming home! ”

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