There is always something in the roof, moving through the palm leaves. Sometimes it’s the rain, pounding so violently against the thatching that it brings to mind the thud of the ack-ack guns at home. Even when it’s not raining, the rattle of the leaves never stops. Tonight, during a break in the showers, it’s no different. A snake, then, or one of the spiders June keeps seeing, bigger than her hand and bristling with hair. If it’s a spider, she can ignore it, almost, as she does the enormous mantises that sit on the wireless tables and watch them work. But the snakes . . .
It’s worse when she’s on the wireless, taking a shift for a Wren. Those eight-hour shifts are usually an exercise in solitude, broken up by navy men on hourly patrols, the inconsistent arrival of other girls to offer a break for the loo or just a chance to stand and move around for a bit. And being unable to get away from the sound of slithering, or the chitter of various creatures on the floor or walls, can be hard. Nights like this, when she’s breaking codes, she can look up or shift around now and again, although she spends most of the time hunched over a table with her pencils and stacks of paper, turning the columns of numbers into something usable to send via teleprinter to Melbourne or Kilindini.
They’ve had a boon lately—a captured steel chest of Japanese code books that let them translate some of the codes nearly instantly. One of them is obsolete already, so frequently do the Japanese change their practices, but June has made a point of translating the information it contains into English so she can develop an even stronger familiarity with the shape of the messages, and where to expect which kind of information. It helps, on a practical level, but the expansion of her knowledge is exciting, too.
She turns, stretching her arms until her shoulders creak, and glances over her shoulder to see if their mongoose is around. Not theirs, really, but all the girls talk about him that way. In town, the Sinhalese tell her that the mongoose is a pest, like the minks at home in England, but in the wireless hut nobody cares what their mongoose does when he’s not with them. They call him Box, and give him the run of the station, the mess, even the loo. June loves his bristling swagger, not to mention the way he reminds her of Kipling and Alec. When not knowing how Alec is faring feels darkest and most terrifying, she clings to the idea that Box in some way stands in for him. It’s ridiculous, she knows, superstitious claptrap. And yet.
The rustling comes again, and she looks up. It’s not in the roof—and it’s not Box. Now that she’s paying more attention, she recognizes the sound as the rattle of cards being shuffled in the corridor outside. June smiles. One of the facts of this life is the seemingly random nature of assignments, and the way a person you liked is often someone you might never see again. In this case, it is happily the opposite—the powers that be have sent Wendy Fairchild to Colombo. Wendy is a Wren now, one of the wireless operators, and she carries a deck of cards with her everywhere she goes. She says the shuffling helps her focus, which June can’t argue with. They all have their tricks in those inevitable moments when the clicks and buzzes of the wireless run together into a hypnotic murmur.
June looks at her watch—shift change, so Wendy and her cards must be coming off her watch, relieved by one of the other Wrens. It’s no time at all before Wendy bursts into the room. Becoming a Wren has not made her any more decorous.
“Good evening,” June says.
“Hallo, Attwell,” Wendy says, grinning at her. “Sink any ships tonight?”
June smiles, although she wishes Wendy would not bring up the past. Even acknowledging that they were stationed together at Scarborough feels as though it skirts the parameters of the Official Secrets Act, despite her own gladness at their reunion.
“No,” she says. She glances down at her papers. So far tonight they have divulged only vague notions of troop movements, information that June has already passed along.
Wendy sits on the edge of the desk and leans closer with a conspiratorial whisper. “Truffit put her mug down on the table just now without looking and it moved.” She shudders cheerfully. “She’d put it on something’s back, can you believe it? Whole ruddy thing would have walked right off the table if she hadn’t stopped it.”
“She trapped a mantis in a cup the other day,” June says. Merrill Truffit minds the insects less than most of them, which is good, as she seems to attract them.
“As long as they’re creeping to her and not me, that’s all very well.” Wendy laughs, shuffling her cards against her thigh. “Seen Box around?”
June eyes her warily. After two years, she is somewhat accustomed to most of the more alarming fauna that inhabit the station and her barracks in Colombo, but sometimes one of the girls will report an insect so large or grotesque that June can hardly stand to hear about it. And Wendy, as much as June likes her, has a predilection for spreading word of these egregious creatures.
“He was here a little while ago,” June says.
“Wish that mongoose would go after the crawlies more often,” Wendy grumbles. She gets to her feet. “Are you coming along to the beach tomorrow?”
“Yes,” she says. She gestures at the papers before her. “I’ll clear this tonight.” Thinking of the beach at Mount Lavinia, where she’s gone to swim as often as she can since arriving in Ceylon, is distracting, but it feels good to hold a reward out for herself on her days off. She wants to sit in the sand and watch the warm, clear waves cresting in off the green and blue water, and the cormorants and, most of all, the fishermen, who remind her somehow of the old men at home in the Fens, weaving their wicker basket nets for eels.
“Then I’ll leave you to it,” Wendy says.
“Yes,” June says. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The beach makes a grand respite from the war, but does nothing for her endless fears about Alec. They gnaw at her, cheating her of sleep, which she can’t afford, but it’s been like this since the end of November, when a months-old letter had come from her parents. Those letters are always a mixed blessing, as June can read between the lines and see that they would rather know where she is, that vague statements about the Foreign Office are not enough information for them. June understands—if she were in their shoes, she would struggle, too. For the most part, their letters are roll calls of the village, comments here and there about christenings in families she knows, the comings and goings of men on leave, holidays at the vicarage. But in that one there had been something new—a message relayed from Constance Fane, who had had a series of telegrams. Alec had been shot down over the Mediterranean, picked up by the Italians before a British ship could reach him.
June has never quite steadied herself from Alec’s first time shot down, and during the little time she’d been able to spend with him when they were both still in England he had not much wanted to talk about it. She knows almost nothing about what happened, or if there were other incidents about which she hasn’t any idea. If she thinks about it too closely, it sends a shuddering, echoing fear through her. She loves him; she does not want to lose him. And there are times when the juxtaposition of her affection for him and her desire to have a future built on career and a life of the mind is too chaotic a collision. There is no right answer, no way to solve it without breaking someone’s heart. So to hear that he had been shot down again and taken prisoner . . .
But an Italian camp is better than dead or missing, better than most of the alternatives, and so she clings to that. One of the effects of being on this side of the world has been the breaking of time. The narrative of the people she loves happens out of order with her own story, because it takes a long time for her letters to reach home, routed through the Foreign Office couriers back to London for the subterfuge of postmarking and the censor’s stringent gaze, and longer still for anything from Fenbourne to reach Colombo. This is magnified by Alec’s captivity—two months ago she received a letter from him, routed for almost a year through innumerable channels, stamped and prodded by the censors on both sides. But that letter had come from Italy, and she knows from her sources in the Admiralty that Campo 78 closed when Italy surrendered in September, its prisoners escaped into the mountainsides or loaded into trains for German POW camps. Alec did not escape; as far as she can gather, he followed the order to stay in place and await the Allies. And now, like most of the other men who obeyed, he is in one of those German camps.
June carries that letter in her pocket, a simple folded card with someone else’s plain printing utterly unlike Alec’s exuberant scrawl. A few sentences about the Italians taking good care of them, a comment about olive trees in the mountains. Nothing about what’s happened to him that has made it necessary for another man to write his letters for him, except a single throwaway line—banged up my hands rather in the last shaky do. She wrote to Floss in the hopes of learning more, but it’s been weeks now, and she has heard nothing.
It’s possible there are other letters in this confounding handwriting waiting for her somewhere. The post at Anderson has been regular enough, but there are girls whose letters came while they were temporarily elsewhere. Mail forwarded or lost and never seen again. Even Pamela, whose fiancé is still only as far away as India, is subject to the maddening tides of communication. It’s likely enough the same has happened to her, that Alec’s letters are caught in the system somewhere. She gathers from things she’s heard from her mother, or from the Wrens, that the post is equally inconsistent the other direction, but nevertheless she writes to Alec once a month—it’s not often enough, and she feels sick over it, but it feels less bad than more letters compounding the deception. The more often she writes him, the worse she feels, sending half-truths to this man who loves her with all his heart, going through God knows what in Germany.
But sending off these letters is the least she can do. Perhaps there is a middle ground of sorts between the kind of woman she is and the kind of wife she does not want to be. Given what she knows of the German camps he may need more than she knows how to give. Duty means something new now. And so, perhaps, does love.
The roof rustles again, and June tries to relax. Probably it’s Box, hunting. It helps that the mongoose is so good at being a mongoose; it helps her keep the fears at bay. Box has been with them since spring, killing kraits and chasing the larger insects, and one of the other girls swears she saw him hypnotize a cobra. June is reasonably sure this is not strictly true, but it doesn’t matter. Wherever Box wants to go in their compound, he is welcome, although she wishes he would stay close.
So far they have been lucky; except for the kraits that Box tackled, and one scare with a viper, all the Wrens have avoided the snakes. Not that there’s time to think about them—the signals come in fast, and the work of either transcribing or decrypting them is endless and precise. Most of the time it’s Wrens capturing the signals, then sending them around the corner to June or the other codebreaker. The Japanese meteorological codes are beautifully ordered, intricate columns of numbers that June must unravel until they turn to messages.
But often as not June is happy to do the Wrens’ work—they face the same risks, and the lines between who is a Wren and who is not seem sometimes to have collapsed. The night before she had taken Lucy Kent’s shift, because Lucy, who is barely twenty, wanted to go to the Silver Fawn with an officer she’d met the day before. And everyone knows that June will take all the shifts she can—ask Attwell, they say.
Time passes because she forces it to pass, or so it seems. Ceylon is both Shangri-La and Purgatory. When she arrived, there was a skeleton crew of codebreakers and wireless operators; most of the Far East Combined Bureau had gone to Kilindini or Delhi by then. Set up in an old whitewashed building that had once been a school for the sons of landowners, politicians, and prosperous merchants, June and her colleagues had operated more as a way station than a proper outpost for a long while. That had changed last September, when FEBC had come back to Colombo. It’s better now, with the Wrens. Before, it had been so lonely, no matter how deep she had sunk herself in the work. Now, though, it’s more like Scarborough, or even Bletchley Park.
For the most part, June would rather be here, listening to the scratch of her pencils or the static-blurred world beyond Ceylon. If only the weather would cooperate. Monsoon season is mostly past, and in theory it is the best time of year throughout Ceylon. Often there is rain despite the change of seasons, and thunder too, crackling through the headset until her head hurts. But worse than the deafening interference from nearby power lines and the local airfield or the rain is knowing that they may be missing codes—a transposed digit, a dot noted in place of a dash, can mean life or death. There is no margin for error. Even when their shifts change at the wireless, there is an elaborate dance of headset and pencil so someone is always listening, someone is always writing. They cannot pause, ever.
But tonight, beyond the weather, there’s a low whine, like a dog or an old lorry. It’s not one of the usual night sounds, and she’s never heard it before over the headset, either. She stands and goes to the wireless room, where Lucy Kent is now back on duty after her night off. June stands next to her, trying to place the sound, which is now getting louder and more insistent. And then it crystallizes for her—it’s an airplane, too low and too close, and it reminds her of London in the Blitz.
One of the navy men bursts through the door. “Shelter now, ladies! Zeroes incoming!”
Lucy glances out into the night, still listening to the headset. “Can’t,” she says. “Too much message traffic.”
“I’ll take it over,” June says.
“Sorry, miss,” the sailor says to June, his breath coming too fast, “orders are to get civilians to safety!” He hovers behind Lucy. “You too, Kent.”
They all flinch as the plane rumbles overhead, the guttural throb of the engine filling the room. The angry pocking of the guns follows, and the sailor and June crouch low until it passes. Lucy hunches closer to the wireless, her face gone pale. Outside, someone is screaming.
Lucy stands, the headset in her hand, Japanese messages still trickling through the static and out into the room. June reaches for it, but Lucy doesn’t let go. The three of them are still standing like that, viscous black smoke rolling into the room, when the plane passes again. Bullets from its guns lace through the palm leaves and send fragments blasting into the room. One bayonets the sailor in the base of his throat, and he drops, blood welling like spilled milk.
“The shelter!” June shouts. Time is moving wrong, and she can’t shake the sound of the plane. She can barely see through the smoke, just enough to see Lucy still hesitating. And another plane, the engine protesting.
Then the roar of engine vanishes in the shriek of metal twisting into trees and concrete. Lucy drops to her knees, screaming, and in the instant before the plane explodes, June dives to cover her. We should have gone to the shelter, she thinks. Then the sound of the explosion rolls over her, deafening her, and the wall shudders against the blast. Fragments of tree and metal and glass explode around them. The world goes dark.
She wakes in the infirmary two days later, dizzy and weak. A scattering of small shrapnel wounds itch as they heal, and her arm is in a sling, a separated shoulder jammed back into place. Her knees, her face, the side of her head . . . everything hurts. Doctors and medical staff hover, check her chart, examine the wounds, vanish again, the tide of them ebbing and flowing according to some schedule June can’t identify.
Another set of days pass, and Wendy comes to visit her, her face drawn. “You saved that girl’s life,” she says without preamble.
June looks down at her counterpane. Lucy is bruised but back at work in the wireless hut, according to one of the medics, but June keeps thinking of how she hadn’t managed to save the sailor. “She was awfully brave, staying with the wireless like that. If it were up to me she’d be in for a promotion.”
Wendy smiles. “Braver than I would have expected. She’ll go far, I should think. But so could you.” She shrugs and pulls a sealed packet from her bag. “In any event, these came for you while you were . . . out.” She pats June’s good shoulder and leaves the packet on her lap.
“Can I ask you something?” June tries to sit up straighter, though the effort sends a thrum of pain through her. They are close enough that she knows there are Fairchild parents in the Midlands somewhere, but she and Wendy, like almost everyone else in their world of make-believe, have never delved much deeper into each other’s lives.
“Of course,” Wendy says, her face creasing with concern.
“I wondered,” June says, and pauses, unsure how to continue. There is the Act to avoid, and while their covert careers have had a fair amount of overlap, they have diverged quite a lot as well. “I wondered what you tell your people.” She gestures at the packet Wendy has handed her. “Being laid up like this has brought it home, rather, not ever being able to say a word.”
Wendy studies her hands while she considers her answer. “Not the same for me, I suppose,” she says at last. “I don’t have anyone waiting for me like you do, except my parents. Of course, they lost the plot years ago. Told them I was off to the Wrens and bob’s your uncle.”
June nods, pondering Wendy’s response. It makes sense that as a Wren her friend has more options, or at least more cover. A Wren could at least tell her people she is stationed overseas and leave it at that. “Thank you,” she says after a moment. “That helps.” Though it doesn’t, really, not at all.
“You’re quite welcome,” Wendy says. “And, Attwell—good show, the other day. Not a lot of us would have had the wherewithal to pull that off.” And with that she lets herself out.
June turns her attention to the packet. There’s not much there, but the battered card from Alec hits her like a punch in the gut. She has wondered before if they will both make it through the war, but this is the first time, confined to her bed, she has ever wondered if somehow he will survive and she will not. She turns the card over. It’s cheap stock, postmarked from Germany six months earlier, routed through the usual channels. Am safe. Prisoner at Stalag Luft I in Germany. I hope you will write via the Red Cross. Love to everyone. God, it sounds nothing like him at all, and the handwriting is still not his. The math of it doesn’t make sense—when he was still in Italy he had said his hands were banged up, but that was so long ago. What has happened to him, to his hands, that would leave him still unable to write to her?
At least she knows where he is now. Or where he was, six months earlier, which will have to suffice. She pauses over I hope you will write. Likely the systems are failing once again. No matter—this is progress, of a sort. Six months ago, he was alive. She looks in the pouch again, and finds a note from Floss:
I’m sorry to hear that Oswin is in one of the German camps. We hear of unspeakable conditions, and while they are not as savage as the Japanese camps they are hardly fit, some of them, for our men. I do hope he’s well enough, when the war ends, to come home. I’ll keep my ear to the ground, but I shouldn’t hold my breath if I were you. No news is better than bad news, as they say.
More to follow—F.
She puts Floss’s note aside and holds Alec’s card to her chest, and for the first time since she was a very small child, she thinks about praying. But the deity of her childhood seems as unreal as ever, and instead she writes back to Floss, thanking him for his note and hoping he can find out more. And she writes to Alec as well, telling him to hold steady. She doesn’t mention the Zero to either man—Floss likely already knows, and Alec never can.
After another week in the infirmary, the doctors take the stitches out of the back of her head, where a piece of shrapnel had left a cut like the bite of a large bird. When they order her to take ten days of leave, she protests—she has already been out of the codes for more than a fortnight and the business of stopping the Japanese feels more urgent than ever. She takes her convalescence in the hill country, where it’s cool and the trees are full of birds and animals so lush she is half-convinced she’s imagining them. She spends the first day in Kandy, exploring the ancient city and its temples, wondering what Alec would think of them and then shying away from those wholly futile questions. From Kandy she makes her way up to the plantation the officers use as a getaway lodge, complete with golf and dressing for dinner. Local boys shear the tops from coconuts for her, and an old Tamil woman in a dark red sari, gold rings in her nose and ears, brings her tea every morning in a quiet room looking out over the shaded green fields. The food at Anderson is good—there is always strong coffee and fresh fruit, always enough to eat—but here it’s another level up. She has fruit and hoppers at breakfast every day, letting the yolks of the eggs run across the crisp edges of the thin sourdough bread, lacing all of it with a spicy pol sambol. In the evenings, she avoids the dinner crowd and stays in her room, and the old woman brings her coconut shredded into greens and dishes of fish curry laden with coriander sprigs and redolent of tamarind and lime. There are so many fireflies at night that sometimes she struggles to find the stars; the whole dark sky is laced with life.
Too, the days of luxury have filled her with a new kind of guilt—she has felt bad for a while now about the food at Anderson, given the privations her parents, let alone Alec, must be facing. To sit on a verandah and watch thrushes and bulbuls flit through the afternoon light makes her feel like Marie Antoinette, or worse. She has never been anywhere so peaceful as this, surrounded by birdsong, and there is no guidebook or care instructions to tell her how to feel when purple-faced monkeys leap through the trees, their strange barking calls echoing off the lodge. But Alec is in a German prison camp, and the war is still on, and she needs more than ever for this to end.
After the war she’ll have to find her way back into a normal life again, and all of this will be a scar of sorts, hidden quietly beneath her skin as if a companion to the pale V-shaped line beneath her hair. She will never be able to reveal these scars to anyone, least of all Alec.
And throughout her recovery, the question of what her future is meant to hold nags at her. There might have been a point at which she could have chosen a path that severed her from Alec and gave her the Wrens or the Foreign Office instead. But now that moment, whenever it was, seems hazy at best. And, in the larger picture, it has become irrelevant. Alec is a captive now, and keeping her promise to him is how she can save him, if there is anything left of him to be saved. Before the POW camps, perhaps she would have found a way to keep following this path of numbers and logic. Perhaps, even in the volcano of heartbreak that would have resulted, they would have been all right. But now it seems unlikely that Alec would heal from such an event. On the contrary, he will probably need her more than ever. A decent woman would honor her commitment to a man like Alec.