House of Secrets: A Bletchley Park Novella Read online

  Things were getting heated when the pub-keeper entered the backroom, a lead pipe bouncing off one palm, to tell us to taper down.

  “Shall we?” Gordie clapped his hands to announce a break, and people shuffled to the bar, many still arguing amongst themselves.

  Except Turing.

  He sat still, eyes half-closed, ruminating in his private world. For lack of a topic, I asked him what he thought of the Germans. He sighed, as if my attempt at conversation had disturbed his thoughts. When he spoke, it was in a matter-of-fact voice. “They trust their machines too much.”

  I hadn’t expected that. After all, the Panzers had blitzed Poland, and the German planes flew faster than our Hurricanes.

  Turing paused to spit a loose nail fleck into his beer, then he quaffed his brew. “They’re good engineers. Too good. Their leaders believe in precision, efficiency. They want to make perfect machines out of men. That’s why they trust Enigma.” His eyes suddenly darted around, as if he just remembered how confidential the topic was. No one else was listening, so he relaxed. “It’s coded by a machine, so they think it’s infallible. Their mistake.”

  I raised my eyebrow to question that, and he answered slowly, with a touch of condescension. “The machines are built by men.” He stopped there as if that explained all, then sipped his beer.

  After he put his mug down, he changed the topic. He told me he’d heard I was at Balliol studying literature—“Tell me about it.” He cocked his head, ready to listen.

  I started slowly, uncertain what to share, but soon, I was swept up by my interest. I spoke about Vladimir Propp’s work on morphology, how he’d collected and deconstructed every folktale and categorized the commonalities—the Quest, the Magic Object, the Hero. I was about to wax on, before I stopped, poleaxed. A moment of bleak epiphany. “It’s pointless, isn’t it? The world’s at war. No one cares about anything, much less what I do.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” He leaned closer. The smell of his sweat was not unpleasant. He had thick lashes, which mesmerized me. It was as if each flick held a personal message only I could read. “Encryption relies on randomness,” he explained in a low voice. “If you have a random key, the code is impossible to break. However, nothing is truly random. In any message, the phrases, weather reports, even the frequency of the alphabets repeat. These patterns are keys to breaking the code.” He blinked, looking thoughtful. “Maybe you can help with frequency analysis. Your specialty—it could be relevant,” he said, and I felt…grateful.

  Just as he offered to show me the Enigma machine to spark ideas, Gordie thumped my back and stuck a mug under my nose. His cheeks were rosy with drink. “Your pint, old boy. On me.” His hand swept in a courtier’s bow and the beer he held spilt.

  “Now, it’s on me too,” Turing sounded nonplussed as he rose. He headed for the restroom. Gordie didn’t look remorseful as he commandeered Turing’s seat. He asked me whether I thought Moran was soft on the Germans, and I told him I didn’t know.

  All I know is that Turing didn’t return afterward.

  In the hallway, Belle is scratching my door with his paw. I hear soft footsteps. There’s a hapless meow as Ruth scoops the cat into her room. She has taken to tying ribbons around his neck. Yester-night, she made him wear an oversized bonnet. Poor Belle.

  Robin, Robin, stop thinking of him.

  Monday, 18 March 1940

  “The fighting has begun…” the bookstore owner informed me this morning. Every day brings new rumors. The newspaper reports that in London, people fear the fifth columnists will blow up Whitehall. In the streets, people say we’re suing for peace and in the next breath, argue we have to invade Norway to forestall Hitler. In the pubs, people debate whether the Soviets will continue aiding the Germans after Poland and Finland. The Young Socialists and the Fabians feel betrayed by Stalin, whom they’d lionized, because he had conspired with Germany to divide Poland.

  My nerves were further rattled when Peter Moran vanished. I barely knew him until the debate at the pub, but a few days ago, he’d offered to lend me a German primer. When I tried to find him today, he had vanished. The Day Officer where he worked said he’d been transferred. It seemed odd, but Gordie told me I shouldn’t ask questions. “In times like this, all kinds of things get misplaced.”

  “People too?” I asked.

  “Especially people!” he insisted. “He’s probably got his orders. Relax, Robin. Everyone’s wound up tight.”

  Gordie’s a brick in these nervous times yet hairline cracks of stress have began showing. During tea break today, we took our steaming mugs for a stroll. He seemed uncharacteristically quiet, until he brought up the Polish involvement in the Park. They’d stolen the first Enigma machine from the Germans and replicated one for us. That’s how Bletchley Park got its start.

  For our walk, we headed towards the lake, traipsing through imposing stands of elm, which looked like they’d outlast the worries of men. A motorcycle carrying the latest intercepts from the coastal listening stations put-putted by. In the mottled shade of an overgrown tree, Gordie spoke of the final communiqué from the Polish, how their cipher unit at Kabaty Woods fringing the city outskirts had radioed: Pray for us.

  As he spoke, I imagined pale Polish faces slashed by branches, feet betrayed by gnarled roots, stumbling through the woods of their homeland, baying dogs in pursuit. A crunch of leaves under-boot; a pursuer’s shouts; that crack—a branch or a pistol shot?

  “Pray for us, they begged.” Gordie repeated, then he laughed harshly. “When I read that, I prayed they’d die quickly, quietly. If the Germans captured them and discovered our operation here...I suppose some would think I’m evil for harboring such thoughts. Do you?”

  “Gordie…” I patted his shoulder, “remind me never to ask you to pray for me.”

  He grinned. This wasn’t the urbane smile he offered strangers. This was earnest. Around us, Spring glowed carelessly: the tulips had blossomed into fragile cups; bushy reeds quivered in a pleasant breeze; a goose glided into the lake before dipping its beak into the mossy waters. “Maybe if we stay here, right in this moment, this Eden of ours...” He trailed off, looking around, memorizing the view. “You, me, my pipe and an unending bag of tobacco.”

  “Books. Don’t forget my books.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  I felt a wistful pang then. For what he said. Where we were. And who we are.

  “Maybe I’m mad, as mad as this world,” he continued. “I hate what I do. What I have to do. To hell with it!” Gordie suddenly flung his pewter mug into the middle of the lake. The goose flapped its wings, water cascading off alabaster wings, as it took flight.

  We stood there for a long time, maybe forever, in our private paradise.

  Saturday, 30 March 1940

  Enigma—a contrary word, as simple as it is mysterious.

  Today, Turing and I went to see the dread machine. When I met him outside the manor, his hands were crossed behind him. He was inspecting the house’s florid façade. “Ghastly, isn’t it,” I said—everyone jokes about the Frankenstein facade. Except Turing. He defended it. ‘Tis in his nature to be contrary. “The unique,” he began like a lecture, “the exceptions, aberration and the mutations—they are more fascinating, don’t you think?” He plucked a rose from a nearby hedge and held it to his nose absent-mindedly, before plucking a petal. He offered it to me for inspection. “The petals look the same, yet if you look closer, each one is different. How? Why? In many ways, flowers reveal nature’s mystery.”

  On the second floor of the manor, a guard, a chevron-striped Sergeant, glanced at Turing, before he waved us through a non-descript door. Inside, a fizzy electric light illuminated the room. After my vision adjusted, I saw an unadorned escritoire. On top, there was a typewriter-like machine with an oily black hue. “This is the first Enigma machine the Poles got us.” Turing said plainly.

  The raised key resembled finger-sized pushpins. Above, there was another grid of alphabets, and at the base, w
ires looped in and out of a plugboard. His hands cradled each side, polishing the machine with ink-stained fingers. He depressed a key, almost reverently, then another, and the keypad above clacked and lit in turn, A becoming Z, B becoming T.

  “A transcriber would read to the typist,” he continued, “then copy the lit letters; those are the encrypted letters. Once the message is transcribed, everything is sent as Morse code.” He pried the cover, revealing nightmarish innards: snagged teeth rotors, coiled tentacles. “The rotors spin as I type. Even if I press A repeatedly, different letters will light up each time.”

  German translated to Enigma to Morse back to Enigma to German then English—“It’s a sequence of translation,” I cried.

  “Do you know how many ways a message can be encrypted?” His voice glistened with oiled confidence. “Consider the 5 possible rotors from which 3 are chosen—that’s 60 possibilities. The setting of the rotors—that’s 26 x 26 or 676 possibilities because the left rotor doesn’t matter. Clamped, the three rotors have 17,576 possible positions. Here’s the real difficulty—the stecker: to choose 10 possible plugs for the board, there are over 150,000,000,000,000 combinations. Multiply all that and there are 1.074586873273 times 10 to the power of 23 possible states. That is the mystery of Enigma.”

  How did he remember all that? “That’s what we are up against? It’s impossible!”

  Instead of despair, Turing crackled with energy. “Impossible? The Germans underestimate human ingenuity. There has to be a systematic way to break this. Impossible? Hardly. Why, sometimes I wake up and believe in a trillion impossible things. Give or take a few hundred million, of course.”

  “Is that a quote from Alice in Wonderland?”

  He stiffened. “Lewis Carroll was a mathematician before he was a writer. Being a scientist doesn’t mean I don’t read.”

  “You mistake me. I adore the book.”

  He paused; we back-pedaled to protect our pride. “A coincidence then. An odd moment,” he mused softly, “there are an uncountable number of books, yet I quoted a book we both like. Impossible things happen every day.” I heard his shoes against the ground, the leather tip rubbing the floor. “Robin—may I call you that?”

  The genius was gone; I saw a man studying me with half-lowered lashes.

  Enigma—its Greek origins is ainissesthai: to speak obscurely. The room folded in on me like an Oriental puzzle box, before a loud yawn from the Sergeant outside saved me.

  I begged leave. I fled.

  Even now, I can hear the door slamming, echoing in the hallways of memory. The way the Sergeant furrowed his eyes as I whirled by. For a moment, I was convinced he knew everything, from the secret of my thoughts to the thought of my secrets. Quo vadis, Robin, quo vadis?

  Monday, 1 April 1940

  A cup too much today. Gordie bought up all the French wine in town for fear there’d be none left if France is invaded. In town, a group sang bawdy songs celebrating April’s Fool.

  Syn March bigan thritty dayes and two—in the Canterbury Tales, the silly cock was tricked by the fox. I kept mumbling as Gordie helped me home. In the Bible, disobedience is the second act of creation, I insisted, while Gordie declared it was deception.

  I said, he said, she said, we said. Turing. Trouble. Both begin with T. Undecipherable feelings spin inside my head. On April’s Fool, I can fool everyone except myself.

  Tuesday, 9 April 1940

  Today, the Germans marched on Denmark and Norway. Even reading the news in print, hard-edged words, don’t make the magnitude of the calamity feel real for some. For them, there is T.S. Eliot.

  April is the cruelest month, he wrote, and it seems so to me. The world feels like a wasteland, these days. From an idyllic Eden, the Park has been transformed into an ant nest. The rose hedges outside the manor have been dug up to make space for a guard post. Each evening, a gaggle of debutantes trundle wheelbarrows heaped with confidential documents to a sooty bonfire. At the Park’s edge, I watched an elm as old as Father Time felled by Army lumberjacks. Soon, the vast acres will hold a thousand more worker drones, all turned to the business of war-mongering.

  On the way home today, I encountered Professor Littlefield, famous for his voluminous scholarship on the proper structure of a novel—that and hypochondria. Since he joined several months ago, he has lost half his weight. He raved when he saw me. “That corpse you planted last year in your garden. Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” He grabbed my sleeve, while reciting The Waste Land. “I detest T S Eliot and his anarchy. I abjure and abhor it. Where is the beauty in his words? I even wrote a letter to his publisher to complain, and he replied that rhymes became obsolete after the Great War, and didn’t I know, Sir? As if I were mad!” He broke off. “What if he’s right? What if he’s right? When man fall on each other—maybe war has torn the compact that’s language. The iambic pentameter’s scuppered by a Wolf Pack. The Petrarchan sonnet, vaporized by a mine! Words—why bother? What’s a rhyme worth? Austen! Hazlitt! I’ve spent my life studying them. All is lost! All is lost!”

  I steered him towards the tea hut.

  There, as he clutched a mug of scalding tea, laced with extra sugar, he told me how his wife was stranded in Denmark, a volunteer with the Red Cross. Everyone else in the hut looked cowed. The frontlines are a thousand miles away, but are close, so close, in our minds.

  Inside my room, the writing table abuts the window. It’s a solid table with no give. From here, I see Mrs. Crumley and Ms. Huxtable talking over the fence, ridiculing the debutantes and their obscene skirts and bare, sinful calves, before they exchange a covered basket.

  The black market is well and alive, and Mrs. Crumley is an alchemist who knows exactly how many eggs make a pint of butter and a lump of sugar. Theirs are mundane worries, more real than the cryptograms that float around the huts, the dreaded messages with bony alphabets laid in furrows of five, like corpses waiting to be tagged.

  It seems T.S. Eliot has begun to get to me too. I think of skeletons dancing, skulls cradled in the crook of their arms. How far the Germans march! Can we stop them? How long will this war drag on?

  You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing?

  Friday, 12 April 1940

  I called my uncle today and received bad tidings. A U-boat had torpedoed the Wintergreen, a merchant ship he had a stake in. Somewhere off the Cape of Good Hope, a thousand crates of Ceylon tea are steeping away, turning the sea red, like a scene from the Bible.

  While I was listening to his sulfurous rants, someone rapped on the booth with a coin. Through the lead glass, I saw Ruth’s impatient countenance, so I ended the call as politely as possible.

  When I came out, Ruth commanded me to wait for her in the imperious manner I’ve learnt to recognize as the quintessential Windermere.

  As I waited, a male colleague strutted by, tipped his hat, and hummed a bar from Sir Elgar’s Enigma Variations. We’re not supposed to breath a word of what we work on, but Elgar’s the most patriotic British composer, and his music has become a wink-and-a-nod to those in the know. The man looked about to stop to chat when Ruth flung the door open. She was in a foul mood; I’d heard her quarrel with her fiancé, even though I was outside the booth.

  On the way back, she pedaled furiously. However, she’s soft, too used to city life, its leisurely buses and trams. Without trying, I overtook her, lost in my thoughts.

  There’s a book of fairy tales I’m writing for my niece, and I’ve been wondering how to complete the last story. In the tale, a princess is trapped in a floating monastery. It floated so high up that people mistook its golden spire tips were stars. Every night, the monks would vote to see which one of them would marry her but they could never form a majority. One night, the princess saw a robin singing on a tree branch near her window and…and what? I couldn’t figure out how to end.

  Perhaps if I were less engrossed, I could have prevented what happened to her.

  A mile pass the cairn marking the to
wn’s border, Ruth screamed. When I turned, I saw her off-track, her bicycle bouncing off a gnarled oak root. She’d let go of the handles to shield her face, then crashed near the tree.

  “I’m fine,” she insisted as she tried to stand. Fireflies weaved a halo around her and she reminded me of Shakespeare’s Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. Oh, proud Titania! Humbled Titania! I almost chuckled, until I noticed her trying not to cry. “I can’t stand. I twisted my ankle,” she said in a quivering voice. “What do we do?”

  Preux chevalier. I knelt before her.

  It was a long walk back, carrying her, and whatever guilt I felt for laughing lifted as her spirits rebounded. After the initial awkwardness, she tucked her chin into the crook of my neck, her breath furry against the inner curve of my ear. “You’re stronger than you look, Robin. You remind me of Galahad,” she murmured. “It’s said he was so holy he never succumbed to woman. That’s why he could find the Holy Grail. Do you think such men still exist?”

  I considered my answer for a while. “I’m sure they do.”

  I’d long suspected from the twitching of curtains that Mrs. Crumley spied on the road. She ran out before Ruth and I reached her gate. Once we carried Ruth to her room, Mrs. Crumley shooed me away.

  Now, I can hear the creaking of matronly footsteps on the ceiling. No doubt, Belle’s on the prowl as well. That makes two creatures limping tonight.

  My hero, she’d called me. I can still feel her wool stockings, the soft press of her calves. Woman—a mysterious sex. Whatever. Come the morning, this hero has to rescue two abandoned bicycles.

  Thursday, 25 April 1940

  Another Park Philosophers’ Night. At the Dunscombe Arms, the topic was whether Socialism was valid now the Soviets supported the Germans. Nicholas Riceman, an erudite with a pelt-like moustache, argued for, while John Hughes vehemently championed Adam Smith—a Balliol man—and John Stuart Mill’s ideals. Both pulled from different fields of science and philosophy to support their view, until the argument became murkier and murkier.