sounds a rather indomitable old God.’ She came around with the milk, not altogether liking the subject, Richard thought, who didn’t know it took her back to the hospital where Howard lay wounded and blinded after the raid, when he had said much the same thing. They hadn’t talked about it since, so his ideas had altered little in all those years, though why had such talk come up at this moment?
‘No one can kick against Fate, in any case.’ Richard drank his coffee, hot as it was, even if only to have something to do in putting the cup down. Faced with a man who had been more in its grip than most he didn’t feel predestination to be the right subject so early on. Or maybe it was best to get it out of the way.
‘True,’ Howard said dryly. ‘Funnily enough, though, I dwell on it every day. Not for long, but I do. A survival exercise you might call it. Still, it’s strange the subject came up.’
‘Maybe it’s the common denominator of those who have a life long attachment to wireless,’ Richard suggested. ‘You can’t help but feel everything is foreordained, every dot and dash sparking the details of somebody’s fate into your ear.’ He turned to Laura. ‘Now we are talking shop. Didn’t take long, did it?’
She liked his levity of tone, as well as skill and diplomacy in keeping the chat going. ‘I’ll leave you both to it. I must put those lovely flowers in water, and tidy up the kitchen after supper.’
Richard tapped the rim of the cup with his spoon, as if she had taken their talk with her. Howard looked, if he could be said to, at the door through which she had gone, then lowered an arm to stroke the cat which, though silent, he knew to be there.
Richard saw him as being all the time alone in a place Laura could never reach. When they weren’t together Howard was somewhere on his own, unreachable and curled into himself. It was the only way he could get by, but even if he had never been afflicted he might still have been an unreachable loner. You couldn’t tell, though he imagined Laura got into his spirit and lodged there for her solace as well as his.
‘You sound as if you’re trying to send me a message.’
He lay his spoon in the saucer. ‘Same old restless fingers.’
‘Like all of us. The French call wireless operators “pianistes”, so I hear, because they play at the key and make a peculiar rhythmical noise. I suppose it does sound weird to other people, but to us it’s like listening to plain language.’
Richard thought it charitable to let someone do the talking who lived a virtual hermit much of his life. Which is good as far as I’m concerned because he’ll have little to judge me by, though it could be I’ll learn more from him than he will from me.
‘You might call us the high priests of morse. Funny how I sometimes feel one myself,’ Howard said. ‘We’re members of a secret society because we have access to spheres which let us clip into their traffic – unknown to those who are communicating. I often envy the way they go on so blithely, not suspecting a thing.’
He spoke slowly, yet a subtle urgency lay behind his words, sometimes as if he would stumble over the next, though he never did, choosing each phrase as if rehearsed beforehand in the darkness of his mind. Perhaps Howard thought he was speaking to someone who lacked one of the many senses developed through being blind, or who was without at least one extra sense which a man with sight couldn’t have. At the same time he seemed unaffected by Richard being a stranger, unselfconscious to an extent that he was on his own, or talking to a mirror in which he couldn’t see himself. Though finding it a peculiar experience Richard was neither offended nor embarrassed, simply standing to one side while Howard did the talking. He assumed he would get used to it, if he came to see him again, and for Laura’s sake, after another glance at the photograph of her as a young woman, he very well might.
‘For instance,’ Howard went on, ‘there was a time when I heard Chinese operators on the Peking to Turkestan run. Very peculiar morse they sent. Most had no idea of the rhythm, and it was hard at times to make sense of. Then Laura read me from the newspaper that when a Chinese airliner was hijacked the wireless operator killed the terrorist with an axe!’
Richard laughed with him, saw the smile lift his cheeks, an extension of the lips, the sound unnerving, like a hand scraping on cardboard. ‘Served the bugger right. Hijackers will become the unacknowledged legislators of the world if we’re not careful.’
‘It’s wonderful that the sparks did it,’ Howard said. ‘It must have made his day, after being bored so long at his key. I wish I’d been tuned in at the same time, when he sent his SOS. I’m always on the line for learning something new about the human soul. A peculiar wish, you might say, because I don’t suppose I’ll ever be able to, at least until I’ve learned all there is to know about my own – assuming that’s possible, which of course I have to doubt. I’m not even sure I would want to know myself completely, though the wish is always there.’
Richard sat again, resisted taking up the spoon in case he tapped out something incriminating. ‘I don’t imagine it would do much good to either of us.’
‘It might make me a different person, and that couldn’t be bad, under the circumstances. The thing is, that all the time I listen at the wireless I feel myself changing, but so subtly I don’t really notice at the time. That’s what keeps me going. Though it can be disturbing it’s also like a balm, twenty years measurable only in micro units. I tune in on the wavelengths we used in the Air Force, hoping to hear something vital, but there’s nothing there anymore, just silence, or atmospheric mush.’ He was quiet for a moment, and for Richard to fill it would seem too brusque an interruption. Then he decided: ‘Let’s have a whisky. We can take our glasses to the wireless room.’
The cat followed them. Howard switched on to the French merchant marine station, a call sign endlessly repeating. ‘Such a noise would send most people mad, if they were forced to listen.’
‘Me as well,’ Richard said. ‘Maybe they used that sort of thing in Northern Ireland, to get people to talk. A chap went mad from hearing it when I was at radio college. It can be a good weapon. For instance I was in a hotel room once, and a party was going on next door. It was after midnight, and I couldn’t get to sleep. Luckily I had a portable shortwave radio I was taking with me to join a yacht, so I plugged it in and held the speaker against the wall. It only needed two minutes, with the loudest possible morse belting away. Cut their jollity dead. Didn’t hear a murmur after that, though I did get a few funny looks at breakfast.’
The room was neat, custom built for the purpose, a narrow table from wall to wall, and a small window for taking the aerial outside. The wall was covered by a coloured Mercator map of the world, and a plotting chart of Western Europe similar to his own. Maybe Howard liked to feel the paper.
He was put in the spare chair while Howard fiddled with the controls of an old RAF Marconi, to the left of his typewriter and the modern equipment. A morse key was screwed into the table and wired to an oscillator. Richard imagined him being helped into his flying jacket, hitching on a parachute, and sitting hunched at his wireless as in the old days, re-living the trip of his final devastation over Germany. He might also wear a suit and beret, and play a resistant pianiste in occupied France, keeping a loaded and cocked revolver by his sending hand should the Germans break in, aiming to kill them but reserving the final bullet for himself. Such people were taken alive if possible, tortured to make them spill codes and contacts before being killed. ‘Been hearing anything interesting?’
The magic eye of his twenty-quid junk-shop radio was a button of green flame created out of electrons and neutrons, which produced a small circle of living light held to a constant glow, not an identity button for the blackout but one for the overcoat of a
