Chapter 55

FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, JANUARY 1944

What is the worst toll taken by BP’s necessary secret-keeping? The worry of disclosing information while under anesthesia at the dentist, the pressure of lying to one’s friends? No, according to an informal BB poll, it’s having to bite one’s tongue when Cousin Betty purrs yet again over the Christmas roast, “At least my husband/brother/father is in uniform, unlike yours! ”

Beth sat in one of the listening booths at Scopelli’s, earphones clamped over her ears, chin on her folded arms. Harry wasn’t coming today; he had a pack of six-year-olds coming over for Christopher’s birthday, so he’d given Beth the music shop key for herself. Bach’s parallel lines of melody were pouring into her ears now, precise and rippling, and behind closed eyelids Beth saw the new cipher. The cipher Dilly had been working on before he died.

Who knew what the Soviets were sending over their captured Enigma machine, or why—Beth knew it was probably dummy messages, but the cipher itself fascinated her. It seemed to have been sent over a three-wheel German army Enigma machine, but it was somehow different from the others she’d seen. Dilly was right about its spiraling inward; it seemed downright hostile to being wedged open.

“Why waste time on that? ” Peggy asked one slow night shortly after the year turned. “We’ve got stacks of more recent unsolvables if you’re bored. ” As long as Beth had worked in Knox’s section, there had been a basket heaped with the messages that couldn’t be broken—you worked on the duds when you were at loose ends, but no one had much free time now, with the Allied invasion of France looming. “Why waste time on Dilly’s old stuff? ”

“Because it was his last work. ” On and off since bringing it from Courns Wood, she’d turned back to it whenever she had a spare moment, working her way patiently through all the exercises she knew. Nothing to show for it, but being stalled didn’t give her the colossal, mind-shattering frustration Harry had experienced with the U-boat blackout. Maybe because Dilly’s discarded traffic hadn’t been deemed critical—no one was dying in the cold waters of the Atlantic because Beth couldn’t crack this cipher; it was merely a puzzle. She was starting to have dreams where a rose bloomed into lines of Enigma that then folded up on themselves like a bud flowering in reverse.

She was turning the record to the second side when the shop door banged open. Harry came in like a thunderstorm, hands balled into fists.

She pulled her earphones all the way off. “Is it Christopher? His party—”

Harry slammed the door so hard the frame rattled. “I’ve been uninvited. ”

“What? ”

“Christopher asked me not to be there. He says his friends will tease him. Because he’s the only one whose father isn’t in uniform. ”

That little brat, Beth barely managed not to say. She hoped Sheila had smacked him.

“Sheila gave him what for, ” Harry said, as if reading her mind.

“Good, ” said Beth. “You should have stayed anyway. ”

“It’s his birthday. ” Harry began to pace. “He wasn’t throwing a tantrum or trying to be cruel. Boys that age, the boys he goes to school with. . . They play war, they brag about whose father is off killing the most Nazis. Christopher’s already a wog and a cripple”—he spat the words out with savage precision—“which puts him at the mercy of any bully who wants some fun. And on top of everything else, he doesn’t even have a father he can be proud of. ”

“Yes, he does, ” Beth said.

“He has no idea what I do. ”

“Sheila doesn’t know either, but she knows it’s important. ”

“Christopher’s six. All he knows is that the other boys torment him because his dad’s a coward, and I can’t protect him. And when he asks me why I’m not fighting, I don’t have an answer. ” Harry dropped into the chair opposite Beth, face bleak. “The women working at BP—no one gives you dirty looks because you’re not in uniform. Strangers don’t stop you in the street and ask how you can hold up your head every day when other able-bodied young men are dying. Blokes don’t give you a shove and say You don’t belong in this country, and you won’t even fight for it. ”

“I’m only allowed this work because there’s a war on, ” Beth said, “and I still don’t get paid what you’re paid, Harry. Don’t tell me I’ve got it easy. ”

“I’m not, ” he snapped, eyes flaring. She held his gaze, not backing down, and he reached across the table, enveloping her hand in his bigger one. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t whine like this. ”

She studied him. “It’s not just Christopher, is it? ”

Harry looked down at their hands, spreading her fingers like a fan. “If I’d known coming to Bletchley Park meant I could never fight—that none of us BP chaps would ever be allowed to enlist, because they can’t risk us being captured—I’m not sure I’d have come. And I’m not the only one who feels that way. ”

“You wish you’d joined the RAF and died somewhere over Kent in ’Thirty-Nine? ” Beth asked, incredulous. “Or been a gunner and got captured at Dunkirk? That would have been a better use of your brain? ”

“Being clever shouldn’t exempt me from danger. I’m not saying they aren’t right to keep me from joining up now—the Park’s secrecy is more important. But I wish I could have had the chance to do more than I’ve done. ”

“Are you saying you have no impact on this war? Estimate how many transports have crossed the ocean safely because you broke the U-boat traffic. ” She paused. “Anyone can be fodder for machine guns, but only a few can break top-level ciphers. This war needs your skull intact. Let someone else get blown up—better them than you. ”

“You’re not saying we’re better than the boys who get blown up—”

“A lot of them, yes. You are. We are. Our souls aren’t worth more to God, but our brains are worth more to Britain. ”

Harry looked at her a moment. “God knows I love you, Beth, ” he said. “But sometimes I find it hard to like you. ”

“What? ” She felt like she’d been slapped.

“Our brains work a certain way—a way that makes us useful. And yes, we save lives. But it is colossally goddamned arrogant to look down on those lives we save because their brains don’t work like ours. ”

“It’s not arrogant to know what we’re worth, Harry. And it’s ridiculous to think that shooting our enemies is a nobler or more effective part of the fight than decrypting their battle plans. We might fight with paper and pencil, but that doesn’t make it less of a fight. ”

“I know that. I know the fight is worthwhile. But it’s hollowed me out until I’ve wondered if I’ll end up in a padded cell, and it’s put a target on my son’s back, and I’ll be damned if I pretend I don’t have regrets. ” He pulled away, rising and beginning to pace again.

“I wouldn’t have you if not for this job, ” Beth said, feeling cold. “Is that something else you regret? ”

Harry stopped. She saw the tension in his broad back. “No, ” he said quietly.

But. . . ? Beth thought.

“I envy you sometimes. ” Harry turned, leaning an elbow against the doorjamb. “How you sail through every day, oblivious to everything but work. I can’t decide if you really don’t care, or you care but you’re so focused it all ceases to exist as soon as you fall down the rabbit hole. ”

“Care? About what? ”

“The war, as it exists outside a stack of ciphers. Your friends, whom I know you love but you don’t pay much attention to—”

“I do, too—”

“Mab’s drinking herself sick in the Recreation Hut after every shift. She’s hanging by a thread. Haven’t you bloody well noticed? ”

“. . . No. ” Mab was unhappy, of course she was, but hanging by a thread? Mab who still trimmed Beth’s hair in its Veronica Lake wave every month, who had taken her to London for her contraceptive device. “I didn’t realize, ” Beth said in a small voice.

“And I just told you I love you, and you didn’t even blink. ” He folded his arms across his chest. “Do you love me, Beth? ”

“You also said you found it hard to like me, ” Beth rallied. “That might have hit a little harder. ”

“When you’re clicking along like a clockwork mechanism completely oblivious to everyone around you, yes, I find that hard to like. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you. I do. Fairly incurably. ”

Beth looked down, fiddling with the earphones on the table, feeling one of her persimmon blushes sweep over her face. “I don’t—know what to say to that, ” she said finally. “Or what to do with it. We can’t change anything. I don’t want to change anything. So why do we have to discuss it? ”

Harry came over, tilted up her face, and kissed her gently. “Beth, ” he said, “you don’t know what to do with it because it doesn’t come in five-letter clusters. ”

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