She bathed them and put them to bed and sang them songs and told them stories in a voice utterly unlike that with which she shelled out numbers on the air. Her husband had left her years ago because he couldn’t stand the numbers voice being used in their quarrels, the ruthlessly catalogued recriminations of his misdeeds. Life on her own was hard. With the children in bed she cleaned her tiny flat, darned and washed their clothes and, if there was half an hour to spare before sleep time, and she wasn’t too done-for (she never was) she would play some Mozart or Beethoven on the record player.
Family who would have helped in her lonely life had been killed, or sent off to camps by the Russians at the end of the war, or were maybe lost in one of those air raids Howard had taken part in, sitting hour after hour at his TR1154/55 Marconi on those cold and terrifying nights during the last winter of the war, the happiest moment when, driving through the flak, the tonnage went down and the bomber lifted, and they could turn for home.
And now someone called Ingrid von Brocken came on the air to taunt him with his guilt at having, albeit at some risk, unloaded the wrath of God on her family, though she would have been only a baby at the time.
The headset brought her clearly into mind, queen of the shortwave spectrum naked under a red plastic mac reading off numbers from a pile of sheets by her left hand, the voice as always loud and precise. Maybe there was no woman at all, only an endless leftover tape playing in a forgotten East German bunker transmitting instructions to various agents. No one had thought to switch it off, current still pumped so that it would go on forever, even when all the spies were dead.
The German Numbers Woman made him sweat, so he couldn’t listen for long; but she filled his darkness with Brünnhilde eyes, and a gleam of red hair which she tied back at work, though made into braids on Sunday. He couldn’t think she was all that fearful because she made him see, thought no ill of her because in his world she was real and he knew her well, his only fear being that she might become bigger and more immediate than Laura. But that’s another matter, he soothed himself, one between me and my conscience, letting me enjoy whatever secret compensations are available.
Somewhere she must exist, and could be utterly different to the way he imagined her, but that did not matter, because whatever he made out of the voice was solidifying grist to him. He switched on the tape recorder so that he could play the voice to Laura and ask what she thought of it.
She was knitting a beige cardigan for the winter, had been on it for weeks, the body and one arm done, halfway through the other. The work settled on her lap. ‘German, isn’t it? Numbers?’
‘Yes, but what does it suggest?’
‘I can’t say. She’s counting, by the sound of it. I’ve no idea what it can be.’
Ingrid would smile if she could hear this. ‘You don’t wonder what she looks like?’
‘Well, I can’t imagine. Ordinary, I suppose. Plain. Could be middle aged, but you can’t always tell from a voice, can you?’
He switched the machine off. ‘No, I don’t suppose you can.’ He had done his duty: no secrets between them. No secrets on the airwaves, either, even when items came through in morse. Someone was always listening, so who was the person, or people, writing down the text from the German Numbers Woman? What did her figures mean? Were they weather codes, or spy instructions? ‘There’s no way of finding out,’ he said when she asked.
‘Does it bother you?’
‘No, but I’d like to know. Two receiving stations can get a cross bearing on the transmitter to find out roughly where it is, but I don’t have the equipment to be one of them. If I knew another shortwave listener we could talk about it, and maybe rig something up.’
She held the knitting to her chest, and fetched a pattern from the other side of the room, thinking how often an advertisement for the local paper had gone through her mind: ‘Wireless operator, ex-RAF, blind, would like to meet similar with sight to send morse code and talk radio matters. Two hours a week. Terms, if necessary, can be arranged.’
A hint to Howard that she would put it in showed that he needed all his self control not to be angry. And she couldn’t think why, except that he saw it as a blow to his pride, an assault on his privacy which he prized above all else. She regretted not having strength enough to force the issue, put the ad in anyway, make up a story so that the meeting could take place – not having acted courageously and broken the barrier. Howard talked sociably enough to people in the pub whenever there for a pint – his maximum intake on a walk – because she had once met him as arranged, and even before pushing open the door heard his laughter and easy responses among the loud chatter.
Alone, he was king of his world, no territory of greater expanse than in his mind when assisted by varying and multiplying noises coming into the earphones. Aether sings, is never silent, indecipherable morse lost in vague ringing tones or a low roar as of the sea suddenly punctuated by a rogue whistle coming and going, the momentary growl of a button-message, arrowing from where to where? With such noises he could see, and the universe surrendered to him, at least that part between the earth’s crust and the heaviside layer, where no part of him was tied to the yoke of his blindness.
Mysterious morse signals, in plain language or in code, ragged beyond comprehension and impossible to grasp, suggested a ghost wireless operator somewhere, wild eyed and stricken with eternal panic, the shirt half flayed off his back by the wind, the only other man besides the captain still on the Flying Dutchman, sending messages on an ancient spark transmitter, the ship forever caught in savage gales south of the Cape of Good Hope.
Distress signals from the ship came and went into Howard’s earphones, mercilessly chopped by interference or atmospherics, weakened by distance, containing harrowing accounts of the Flying Dutchman’s plight but impossible to make sense of. Maybe lightning had shattered their eyes, but both captain and wireless operator thought they could see perfectly well, yet were unable to distinguish between dark and day in the howling torment of the waves. Signals from the ship turned up all over the spectrum, vague, hardly recognisable, trying to break through and make sense to someone with the superior knowledge, intuitive skill and power to release them from their spellbound circuits around the waters. Maybe they prayed for a Nimrod aircraft or a fast destroyer to rescue them from their plight. Masts gone, at times waterlogged, the ship struggled to stay afloat, and they couldn’t know that nothing would make it sink because the eternal powers of the universe would not allow it.
The captain in his travail had gone insane and, roped to the wheel, drove the ship on automatically with declining yet always-renewable strength, while the wireless operator in his cabin sat hour after hour tapping out his unreceivable messages of distress, hope and no hope fusing an addled brain that gave no rest.
At times Howard knew he was close to the wireless operator of the Flying Dutchman because nothing could be done for him either. His fate was settled. The vessel was adrift and could not make port, but the man persisted in his task, no thought of saving himself, because staying on was the only chance of survival, making life ordered even in damnation.
He never stayed long on one frequency, and in any case the Flying Dutchman’s signals always drifted away, impossible to follow, too painful to chase. Shrieks of static and dying whistles ate into the eardrums and conjured bad pictures, so he settled on the clear top-strength machine morse of the station giving the Mediterranean weather forecast, pulled over the typewriter and touch typed on his beloved elderly machine that, having only capital letters, made it easy to use for transcripts.
A seasonal low pressure area was what he noted, gales and thunderstorms at the beginning of September, southwesterly wind force four increasing locally, mainly clear but with increasing cloudiness, moderate visibility, generally changeable. The Adriatic was no better, or worse, the same with the Aegean and the Levantine Basin.
He took two pages, then changed band and swivelled the wheel onto a typhoon warning from Taiwan,
said to be moving west at ten kilometres a minute, with sustained winds near the centre at 155 kilometres an hour. At least the Flying Dutchman wasn’t involved in that one, and nor was he, snug in his familiar listening post at what he could only think of as the hub of the world.
A change from the tinkling of morse, he went on to a telephone frequency, spun the wheel and heard a Donald Duck squawk, hard to know whether it would turn out male or female, till he tuned in sharply and with delicate fingers pulled a recognisable male voice out by the tail:
‘You’re not supposed to drink when you take that stuff, are you, Beryl?’
What stuff? Howard removed the earphones, plugged in the speaker, and flicked on the tape recorder, perhaps to amuse Laura later, an action utterly against the law, though he would obliterate such private talk afterwards. The Post Office regulations were severe: ‘Interception of communications is forbidden. If such communications are received involuntarily they must not be produced in writing, communicated to other persons, or used for any purpose whatever.’
Plain enough, but too much of a sacrifice to his existence to obey such rules. In any case his transcripts were used to make the morning fire, and all tapes rubbed out to leave space for other items. If he played them occasionally to Laura what matter? Weren’t man and wife supposed to be one person? He was sure there were villainous London thieves who used VHF scanners to keep track of police movements before doing a robbery, but he wasn’t in that league, and wouldn’t have been, even with normal sight.
He felt himself a snooper nevertheless when listening to personal telephone talk, though surely those who made calls from ship to shore must know someone might well be listening, no great feat these days, with technology coming on the market cheap, even for ordinary telephones to be tapped. Often he amused himself at midnight listening to two or three trawler skippers chatting at the fishing grounds, which he wouldn’t record for Laura because the dexterity of their bad language was astonishing to hear.
Poor husband, or boyfriend, stuck on shore. ‘You’re not going to remember this, are you?’
Howard could hear him but not the woman.
‘You all right?’
He was an American.
‘See you on Friday? Look, I think you’re loaded. Why are you crying? Phone you Thursday, at three o’clock.’
Perhaps he had sent her on a Caribbean cruise, when the last place she needed to be in was a vast floating boozer.
‘Honey, please don’t drink too much. I got a meeting at five o’clock. Listen, please don’t drink too much tonight. Damn, you’re really drunk.’
Howard wanted to hear the response, instead of filling in the details from his own heart.
‘What does that mean?’ the man said, a mixture of concern and exasperation.
How else to learn about life if you were blind?
‘All right, I’ll call you at five-thirty on Thursday. Can you write it down so you won’t forget? Why not? You’re drunk. It’s that stuff affecting you maybe. Please don’t drink anymore tonight. So you want to go, eh? OK. Love you. Bye.’
Operator’s voice: ‘It was twenty five minutes there.’
Such a long time for the poor chap to have been locked in a dead end debate with his wife or girlfriend. The catalogue of miseries was endless. Disasters also. A whistle went parabola through a blank frequency like an uncontrolled star across space – or a bomb making its way from a plane onto helpless people below. No knowing where it was coming from or heading for. Then the mixing warble of two oscillators made a noise like an angel drinking water.
The aerial blues were on him, which even the tom-tom telegraphist blasting through from a Soviet Black Sea tanker couldn’t penetrate. But you must never despair, he told himself, ever, and if he didn’t, no one should.
The man pleading with his wife wouldn’t leave him alone. Witnesses were as much in danger of despair as those involved, who at least had the umbrella of each other’s misery, as well as their own. The basic theory of magnetism instilled in the classroom was that ‘like poles repel and unlike poles attract’, but in human relationships if it went on too long the opposite would happen and both poles begin to repel. Iron filings as the uncontrollable grit of the human spirit are unpredictable in their behaviour, and nothing can save people from the unknown in themselves except endurance and understanding. Call it observations from the heaviside layer, for what they are worth.
To take the weight from his heart – that was one way he didn’t want to go – he reached for the morse key which Laura had found in the ex-service junk store at the bottom of the steps, and tapped out a condoling message to the man who would not hear it because no transmitter was attached, though maybe Someone in the sky would take heed and filter the comfort through:
‘I know more about you than you can know about me, though if you could read what I am sending you might know more about me than I am allowed to know about you. You are the hero of my evening, and your wife is the heroine, perhaps even the highlight of my week, and I am your only listener, who can know more about you in the beginning than you can know about me because I can hear you while you cannot hear me. You don’t even know I am listening to your voice coming clear enough through the aether by electrical impulses, but all I want is to wish you well.’
Four minutes at the key made his own arm ache. The vagaries of human contact were forever mysterious. Electrical impulses jump between terminals, make contact, but when communication goes on too long the power fades, and must either be renewed or stay dead. Current was low and frequency likewise between him and Laura, but the equilibrium was continuous and could never be damped. As social worker jargon might have it, they took each other for granted, but did so because they loved each other, and it was the only way to get by.
She had gone shopping in the car, and promised his favourite pizza for supper. Elaborate cooked meals came only a couple of times a week, and who could blame her? He mused on whether the man whose wife was an alcoholic would like to meet the German Numbers Woman, thought he ought to be glad to make the acquaintance of someone with a rigidly ordered life. He would see her, neat, clean, tall and dressed in a colourful frock, proudly leading her two children for a walk on Sunday morning. They would sit at a small table by the pavement in summer, coffee for her and cake and ices for the children. Our man at the next table would be captivated by their intimacy, which he did not like to break into. But a smile cost nothing, either for him or her, and after several weeks a word or two passed between them. Both came to look forward to their brief talk, and one morning he handed the children a plastic bag filled with empty tobacco tins (or perhaps cigar boxes) which he couldn’t bear to throw away, they were so neat and useful. The children accepted with alacrity, because no one but their mother had given them a present before, and played on a spare table as if they were precious toys given out at Christmas. The German Numbers Woman smiled with pleasure, and he knew what he had always known, that the way to a woman’s love was through her children.
More weeks went by before he asked this blue-eyed rawboned, though attractive, woman if she would come out for a drink one evening. Or did he invite her and the children to a show at the cinema? Hard to know what she would say, though Howard liked to think yes, but her previously open and youthful nature had made her a victim of predatory men, and she was wary. Yet she was also lonely, hungry almost, given her isolation with the children, and the secrecy of her work.
Howard worried about the matter for weeks, saw the relationship in all its detail. Her dedication at transmitting numbers was indefatigable. She was conscientious because her work was of life-saving importance. Without her numbers, someone would perish, lose all hope, face peril if not destruction and, as the analog of his receiver rested on a frequency unused except by caustic atmospherics, the answer came to him that her numbers were meant for the wireless operator of the Flying Dutchman who, when he wasn’t sending his melancholy and distressful messages, was tuned in to receive her strings of numbe
rs.
There was no other solution, no answer, it made sense, fitted into Howard’s god-like manipulations. Her numbers were transmitted to give the Flying Dutchman hope, to keep the wireless operator and his captain from going finally into the deep, to warn them of the approach of the wildest typhoon weather, a life line to their ultimate survival. The tone of her voice, so hard to Howard, was like honey because the shade of absolute command and confidence kept them going, saying they were not alone, that they were not forgotten, that they had some link, however slender and uncertain, with the rest of the world.
Yet there was something else, a thought so outlandish, and for that reason absolutely convincing, as to chill the bones. He played with it awhile, doing shuttlecock and battledore with disjointed words, going into dreamland on Air Uterine and absent-mindedly flicking the tuning wheel to hear something which would divert him from a notion slowly forming, which was (for it could not be held back) that the German Numbers Woman’s outgoing peroration fed into a mechanism of the Flying Dutchman which prevented them ever seeing land, kept them at sea, going round in great circles, and helpless to escape any of the storms. The wireless operator spent all his time when not sending or receiving vainly trying to break the code of her numbers, lost in a cryptographic maze incapable of solution, but under the impression that if he did reduce it to sense their tribulations would be over and a calm tropical landfall come in sight.
While the wireless operator became demented in grappling with the codes, not knowing that the greatest brain of the universe would be unable to break them, Ingrid the German Numbers Woman sat with her children talking happily to the man at the café on Sunday morning. The benighted sparks of the Flying Dutchman sweated and swore as huge waves lifted and spray battered his cabin, while Ingrid put a chocolate into her mouth, and her new-found boyfriend lit a cigar, and the eternal trio stayed locked into the triangular and mysterious fix, held there by Howard – the only way he could disentangle himself of the German Numbers Woman and her codes and give himself peace.