Chapter 60

Letter from Osla to her Café de Paris Good Samaritan

Please tell me broken hearts aren’t fatal. Please tell me this feeling won’t kill me. Right now I wish it would. Float me a message in a bottle, Mr. Cornwell, and tell me it will be all right. . .

You could feel it, Osla thought, when something big was coming at Bletchley Park. Maybe no one traded details of their work, but you couldn’t mistake the taut, febrile excitement in the canteen when waves of cryptanalysts sprinted in, bolted revolting platefuls of cheese and piccalilli without complaining, and sprinted out with pencils already in hand. You felt it. The temperature across BP rose like mercury in a thermometer.

The invasion was coming.

Not that other matters didn’t intrude, however.

“Osla, do you see the traffic in your section on the Fleet Air Arm? ” Beth spoke in a low rush, abruptly sitting down beside Osla in the canteen. “I need to know what planes go down. What the casualty rates are. ”

“Oh, Beth. ” Osla looked at her billet-mate, who had been pulling more shifts than ever since Harry left for training. Her complexion looked like ash. Osla pushed her plate over. “Eat my kippers. You’re skinny as a hat rack. ”

“Just give me the numbers! ”

Osla pushed a curl behind one ear. Her head ached, her hands were yellow from applying makeup to her legs after her last pair of stockings bit the dust, and oh, yes, she still woke up every morning thinking Philip and waiting for the accompanying stab of agony. So far the plan of utterly ignoring a broken heart on the theory that it wasn’t important during wartime was not really working terribly well.

“I see some of the traffic about the Fleet Air Arm, ” she told Beth, who looked every bit as dead inside as Osla felt.

“Are the odds as bad as for the RAF? ”

Osla chose her words carefully. “When they’re shot down, they’re. . . things are much more final than with the RAF. Because they can’t bail out over land and make their way home. ”

“Tell me if you see anything about—”

“I’m not allowed, Beth. I can’t. ”

“Yes, you can. ” Beth’s voice scaled up. “We’re not over an open telephone line, we’re not out in public. We’re inside BP. You can tell me. ”

“It’s not your—”

“Osla. ” Beth was getting looks across the crowded canteen now, hunched toward Osla with everything in her body saying please.

A pause, and Osla found herself nodding. “I’ll look up the latest traffic. ” A minor breach in secrecy, but one everyone let slide—the huts were too full of women keeping anxious eyes on husbands and brothers at the front for there not to be a little discreet information trading. Osla couldn’t stop herself from looking for the Whelp, now that it had sailed for the Pacific, no matter how many times she told herself it wasn’t her business any longer. Why couldn’t hearts simply be reset, dialed back until they felt no more than the usual sympathy one felt for any man heading to war? Looking at Beth’s reddened eyes, Osla thought her billet-mate might be wondering the same thing.

“Thank you, ” Beth said, low voiced. “I’m sorry to ask. ”

“Oh, plug it, if I can’t bend a rule just a little for you of all people, what am I good for? ” Osla felt a sudden rush of affection. All right, she didn’t have Philip, but she had friends. More than the daytime friends like Sally Norton and the other translators; she had friends like Beth whom she would never have met if not for this war. Strange, quirky, brilliant Beth, who had recently confessed in a midnight heart-to-heart that she was deathly afraid of having no work like this once the war was done.

“I have to get back to my section, ” Beth said now, and in a blink was back to being crisp and calm. The workload was killing everyone else with this run-up toward the invasion, but for Beth it seemed to be revivifying. Osla envied her.

She worked on the week’s issue of Bletchley Bletherings, then realized as soon as she got back to her block that it would have to be scrapped. There was much bigger news for BB than a lampoon of the Highland Reel Club.

“The date’s been finalized, ” said their head, looking over the assembled naval section. “Sixth June. Last hours of the fifth, if the weather’s good to us. ”

Osla felt her fingernails digging into her palms.

“All leave has been canceled, ” he went on. “Our focus is now on intercepts regarding positions of German mines in the channel. Good hunting, ladies. ”

Osla exhaled slowly. Maybe this was the purpose she’d been driving for the entire war, the time and place to finally prove herself. In three short weeks, amphibious vessels would be clawing through channel waters for Normandy.

Let’s sweep their path.

She reached for her German dictionary. Mine, mine-laying, mine ship. . .

Time to buckle down.

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