Alan Sillitoe - The German Numbers Woman

She ran the whole thing through, hoping it would be goodbye, at least for a while. Charles had died of cancer, brought on, she liked to think, by his guilt, and grief which often at the time seemed genuine enough, and reinforced by his suffering which she could hardly bear to watch when her unknowing parents took her to see him in the hospital, though nowadays she burned with shame at having felt such sorrow. How could it have happened so that no one in the family knew? He was so skilled, or frightened, and she so compliant at evading and avoiding all signs of distress. If there had been more than one side to her then, there was only one now.

She went to church occasionally, hoping to retrieve her faith, but none had come back as yet. Howard thought it was for spiritual comfort due to the isolation of their lives, and to vary her days. They had no secrets above the level at which she chose to live, and at which she had decided he must live. The shame and disgrace would never be told.

In his will Charles had made over the house for her to live in with Howard after they were married. ‘It’s a fit place for a hero,’ he said, laughing slyly as he sliced the seed cake on the tea tray when he told her. ‘And besides that, you might call it just one more bit for the war effort on my part. After all, I have this flat in town, and nobody needs more than one place.’ He had been in Whitehall throughout the war, so she didn’t see how he could feel guilty about that as well.

They stood in the rain by his grave side, and heard the panegyrics at the memorial service, Howard squeezing her hand at each remark about the dead man’s generosity and manliness. Even before death Charles had sent money to augment Howard’s pension, and then in his will left an income for them as well.

Not to accept anything would have led Howard to ask why. He reacted sensibly to their prosperity, and was grateful. ‘We must keep Charles’ photograph always on a table in the living room. He’s been marvellous, and deserves as much.’ And so they did, but she bought an identical frame for the blank side of the picture, a white sheet instead of a face, not wanting to see his staring grey eyes and bushy moustache (sheer black, though it must have been dyed) whenever she turned her head, a reminder too hard to bear. If visitors or any of the family called – rare events – she made sure to replace the real thing, in case comment was made. Not having a frame at all was impossible, because Howard could feel his way to every object in the room.

They lived just that much better by having the house and what Charles had given but, all the same, she was never free of the feeling that she had sold her soul to the devil by not having told Howard about the abortion before her marriage – there, she had said the word now – though if she had there might have been no Howard, such an event impossible for him to live with.

The recall passed at its usual slow rate, but her hands shook and she felt unsafe on her legs while flicking the kettle switch and pouring coffee grains into the pot.

Ebony the cat came into the wireless room, attracted as usual by squeals of morse, as if a flight of colourful and unheeding small birds had broken loose from their cage. Howard kept the door a few inches open so that he wouldn’t feel entirely cut off from Laura and the rest of the house. She liked it that way, though with earphones clamped on he was deaf to whatever might happen beyond his aetherised world.

Sometimes he took the phones off and pulled out the plug, let morse ring from the speaker and ripple through the house, telling the walls he was alive to their constrictions, though hoping such self-indulgent noise didn’t worry Laura.

He dropped an arm to compensate the disappointed cat, fingers riffling through fur, thinking he could tell the difference in texture while crossing from black to the small white patch near its nose, as the whorls of milk mixing with the coffee might, he imagined, be felt by a slowly stirring spoon. He could trace flowers on the wallpaper and notice where colours changed. No, it was all in the mind, except that sometimes his fingers had eyes.

She picked up the coffee cup. ‘Anything interesting this morning?’

He touched her hand. ‘I’m just trawling. There’s a liner called the Gracchi , calling Rome International Radio, and getting no reply. Then again there’s a Russian ship leaving England and heading for Lithuania with a hundred used cars on board. Wouldn’t like to say where they came from.’

She took the cat for company. ‘Come on, Ebony.’

His wireless room was at the weather end of the house, the wind a fine old comb-and-paper tune today. A slit of the window left open took his pipe smoke away. That’s how the music was made, a howling and forlorn oratorio playing from wall to wall. So much noise gusting would disorientate his senses if he went for a walk, so it was as well to be sheltered.

Headphones back in place, he tuned in to the German Numbers Woman, who spoke continuous numbers in a tone suggesting she was the last woman on earth, enunciating from a bunker in the middle of some Eastern European forest, her voice on the edge of breathlessness, as if fearful of an assassin breaking in: ‘SIEBEN – ACHT – EINS – NEUN – DREI – FUNF – VIER – ZWEI – SECHS – ACHT – EINS – SECHS – EINS – NEUN.’

On and on. She spoke in the ghostly tone of a person who might have a gun by the microphone, and Howard had listened so often to the deliberately mesmerising recitation of figures that he felt he knew much about her. The question was whether anyone else was listening, and taking down her endless numbers, and if so not only who, but what use they were making of them.

On this earth everything was for a purpose, but what hers was he could never know. Or could he? He could but go on intercepting, though he only did so now and again to check that she was still there, and she always was. She spoke on several frequencies simultaneously (he’d found her on eleven different ones already. Others he hadn’t bothered to log) so her equipment was not simple. She was no pirate of the airwaves prating for the fun of it, though if she had been a classical pirate he could imagine her making people walk the plank, counting them one by one down to the sharks in her deliberate, impersonal, cold-hearted voice.

And yet, and yet, perhaps she was misjudged. By eternally speaking numbers she was merely doing her job, and not for much money, either. Occasionally the frequencies were closed down, and she was off the air for a time. Then it could be she had caught the bus like any ordinary person, and gone home to feed her children – after shopping on the way to find what treats she could buy for their supper.

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.