“It isn’t anything you said,” she says. “You know, the way people imagine things are said, or solved, back at the ranch. I’m sure the operators think the Bombes are solving Enigma. Only we know it isn’t quite like that. They’re not solving a thing they know about. They’ve no idea.” Her eyes pursue thoughts grappling the air. The wind abates. “They’re passing current, spinning, clicking, and that’s all. Whereas, to us, it’s meaningful. A reduction of wheel orders, a precious glimpse of possibilities for where things are inside the enemy’s machines. I’m not saying it isn’t wonderful, what your contraptions do—but the amazing part is us, our making sense of it. Pouncing upon a lead. A likely crib. And then the really funny thing is this: just maybe, Alec, you are—we are—in the end a little Bombe-like, too: giving off sparks and hints that we don’t understand ourselves.”
She takes my hand and looks at it. “We have this strong notion that only we can know ourselves, but maybe we make better sense in others’ eyes.”
A mouth appears in her posy. An evolutionary riot of change—a cloud massing, a lightning strike—splits cells, reroutes the glycoproteins and sugars, performs an eon-long foxtrot. The lips speak only Native Plant, the noise of a bud opening. “These are my thoughts,” hazards the Wayfarer, “and what you’ve said, June, persuades me: the Bombes could be thinking. If part of how you think is inaccessible to you, perhaps a sham, and theirs is totally, then where’s the point of severance?”
And on that sibilant last note the posy wilts, its flowerets fade.
“It’s late. It’s time we went,” I say, into a salty gust. Lining our track, the hawthorn and hollies shiver. “There’ll be a storm. We ought to call in on Mother, on our way back. Give her the glad tidings.”
“If you insist,” June says. “She’ll think me loose. I’m not wearing a hat.”
“You lost it on our walk.”
“And so I did. How silly of me to forget.”
Leaves skip ahead of us as we near Chapel Hill, the lane that falls past flint-clad cottages onto the Brighton road. Our bikes are where we left them at the entrance to an overgrown snicket of yew, ivy, and hart’s-tongue fern, through which a stream dribbles its way into the Ouse. The snicket leads to a graveyard. The cottages are battening down. Hard faces and forearms reach out from dark interiors to pull the half-doors shut. We’re strangers, here. June takes my arm: she understands the thrill of banishment. Even the rattling hedge applauds our solitude. The secrecy of everything we do makes us invisible. We are not welcome in the world of graft and privation, call-ups, rations, and refugees. We do not work in the same factories, making buttons, checking tool parts; or know—or ever will know—what it’s like to lie awake in crowded attics monitored by rats. We have plunged otherwise into reality. We are like spies upon ourselves, living behind the shopfront of appearances, manners and decency. We seem to do nothing but symbolize and calculate. Bletchley: a country-house party for intellectuals driven about Berkshire in smoky-glassed buses. But what we do forces the key that opens doors of consequence. With this one needle click of a rotor, in one machine, I thread a bridge across the Atlantic, escort a merchant vessel home. I do not fight. But I outwit. I conjure for the German sea-wolves nothing but a fret-filled oceanic vacancy.
June is astride her bike and ready to set off.
“There’s something else.” I point toward the woods. “In there. I haven’t got a ring for you. But I have—a dowry. Two, actually. I brought them here a while ago, when I was—visiting my friend.”
She listens with the effort of a teacher wishing to reserve judgment. She breathes in very carefully, and says, “You’re being most mysterious, Alec. I’m not sure if I should be pleased you planned all this. How did you know I’d accept you? It is the feminine prerogative to be mercurial, you know.”
“Oh, mercury. I wouldn’t be so proud of that. Makes good mirrors, if you can live with the toxicity. But you can do so much better! I like to coat my glass with pure silver, the most reflective metal and—a symbol of equality. The isotopes, you know—equal in abundance.”
June asks me what I’ve done. I tell her that I’ve laid in store a pessimist’s ransom. Some currency, in case the worst happens, which it well might. It’s hard to think of these old hills and ancient paths falling—of coming round a turn in the herringbone wall to find sentries, a BMW R75, its loud report. And hard to brook our country’s death, the death of a whole world. But even Trentham over in Hut 1 has started to hint at the need for “realistic” plans, contingencies. We can’t believe in our complete failure, although the evidence is everywhere about. We’re shut out from our own catastrophe.
I take June, softly protesting, past our recumbent Hercules into the ivied grove. Some paces in, the stream cuts through the fern. The leaves of ivy make a brittle carapace upon the earth.
“Good God. Alec!”
And here they are: two rag-wrapped thousand-ounce ingots beneath an overturned wheelbarrow. No: I don’t believe in God—but I believe in others’ superstition, and our animal regard for sacred spots.
“I’m going to bury them.”
A graveyard is the safest vault. June clears her throat and stifles her astonishment. Why here? She doesn’t put the question quite like that, but, being practical, asks how, after the war, if we’re still here, I’ll know which tussock, which bald patch or broken root, conceals our wealth?
I thought about this when I hauled the barrow up the hill some weeks ago.
The ingots represent the sum of my inheritance—father’s Indian pension, the fellowship from King’s—minus immediate costs for Christopher’s memorial. His parents—Quakerish, austere, in their way admirable—planted a tree. I wanted him to have something more permanent. His mother died when I became the don Chris should have been. I had usurped her son’s future. The silver bars are grave goods to console a kindred spirit lost to her and undeserved by me.
I’ve chosen turf on the near bank, between the water and a partly hollowed-out oak tree, one side of which is black, blasted, and bossed, the other densely green. If I look up, toward the church beyond the stream’s far shore, there is a new stone sprouting in the yard. It stands palely amid the aged monuments, a footnote to the tower’s blue-gold clock. That is the vital alignment. The stone reads: “To the memory of a Beloved Son, Christopher Molyneaux,” inscrutable from where I sit, grubbing the earth, but clear and plain in my mind’s eye. Into the earth I heave the bullion, which peeps out from its shrouding cloth. Catches the light. It is like burying a star.
“There. Rest in Peace. Tree, stone—the yellow one—and clock form a straight line. I know the distances.”
June squats between the raised roots of the oak and ties her hair.
“But still,” she says, “encipher them and be detailed. You’re four feet from the stream, at a right angle to the oak tree’s major surface limb. Write it all down.” She smiles. “Include the map coordinates.”
“It feels a bit like ‘gardening.’ Cheating, you know…”
Gardening’s not gardening. It’s just our name for laying mines where we know they’ll be found. The German signals traffic that results has known content—the mines’ coordinates—that makes the isolation of a keyword easier.
“Who do you think I am, Alec? Naval Command?”
I take some paper and a pen from my pocket, scribble a few plain-text details, note down a first enciphering.