She would book a call home. Trunk calls almost always took ages to come through, but tonight she might be lucky and get through before lights out.
‘Could I have Holdenby 195, please?’ she asked the operator, who answered almost at once. ‘Holdenby, York?’
‘Have one shilling and sixpence ready, please.’
Daisy smiled. Operators never asked you to have your money ready if they didn’t have a line to Trunks. She pushed three sixpenny pieces into the slot, with a ping, ping, ping.
‘Press button A. You’re through now.’
All at once life was not good, exactly, but at least bearable. A phone call home with no bother and Lyn back off watch in less than an hour. If only there were some way to ring Keth or even send a message on the teleprinter at Epsom House, then life would be really good. If only Washington – and Keth – were not so far away!
‘Mam! It’s me! I’m back safe and sound. Thanks for a lovely leave …’
Keth spread the papers on the table in his room, gazing at them with disbelief.
‘Read them,’ he was told in Room 22. ‘Read them over and over. Think yourself into Gaston Martin. Bring them all back here, though, before you go to sleep. They’ll be safer with us.’
Sleep? Would he ever sleep again? He hadn’t felt too bad about what was to come until he was faced with another man’s identity. That was when it really hit him.
An identification card with Keth Purvis’s photograph on it; a card skilfully forged to look as if it had been in his pocket – in Gaston Martin’s pocket – since his discharge from the French Army in the winter of 1940.
Gaston Martin, his work permit said, was a labourer. Keth looked at his hands and shrugged, then looked again at the equally worn discharge certificate, taking in still more of the details of Gaston Martin’s life. He must, he had been told, commit it to his memory; must imagine himself into another man’s ego – into his psyche, his soul. He must, from now on, even try to think in this other man’s language.
Born to Belle Martin in her mother’s apartment at Nancy at three in the afternoon; two months after his father’s death in the trenches. Left in the care of his grandmother when his mother returned to her former occupation of seamstress. A sewing-maid, like Daisy’s mother?
Daisy. He was back home, yet she did not know; just the distance of a phone call away, yet he must not ring her. And of course he could not, because Keth Purvis no longer existed; not until he returned from France, that was. If he returned, he thought distastefully.
Gaston Martin. Born on 3 September 1917. He would remember the date easily because another war, this war, started on 3 September.
He didn’t know his address because as yet no one knew just where he would be put ashore. When they did, an address would be written in in the same faked faded ink, he supposed. They were thorough, he’d grant them that.
Put ashore. Words to start the tingling behind his nose. Somewhere, probably, between La Rochelle and Biarritz, Room 22 said vaguely; somewhere very near, Keth hoped, to the package he was to pick up.
That part of the coast would be safer, wouldn’t it, than the highly fortified northern ports of Calais and Dunkirk? The journey would take longer, though. How many days’ sailing time by submarine and did submarines travel submerged during daylight hours? How many miles an hour could they do? Knots per hour, wasn’t it?
He wondered how it would feel to be submerged. Submariners couldn’t suffer from claustrophobia on the sea bed, could they? So much water around and above them. How much pressure, his mathematical mind demanded, could the hull of a submarine take?
But that was nothing to do with him and he forced his thoughts back to the business of getting to France. A crossing to the north would have taken less time; but the South of France was nearer to unoccupied country – to Vichy France; nearer, too, to neutral Spain – if you could call Franco neutral in his thinking.
Yet why had Room 22 laid such stress on the nearness of Vichy France, and Spain? Was his trip – hell, trip? – to France more dangerous than they wanted him to believe?
He was afraid. He admitted it. Not necessarily of being killed quickly and cleanly. That took seconds and most times you didn’t know it was going to happen, his father once said. But he was really afraid of being taken and interrogated and then killed and worse even would be the knowledge that he would know, just before it happened, that he would never see Daisy again, nor Mum, and that they would probably never know how he had died. That really hurt.
He reached in the pocket of his jacket for his flask, poured a too-large measure of whisky, then tossed it down. It stung his throat and made him gasp for breath, but he felt better for it.
Once, when he worked in the boring safeness of Bletchley Park, Daisy had demanded to know why he was so secretive about what he did, and was he really a spy?
Keth Purvis a spy! His laugh had been genuine, yet now he was a spy. An enemy agent the Germans would call him if they got hold of him. He was to assume another man’s identity, carry false papers, wear specially provided civilian clothes obtained in France. What else could he be called but spy?
He wanted Daisy now, yet who was Daisy? Gaston Martin did not know of her existence. Gaston Martin had been discharged from the Army because his hearing was impaired. His papers said so. He must remember that, always. Not to hear properly might be an advantage if people started demanding answers to questions.
The whisky inside his empty stomach was beginning to relax him and he found he could think of Daisy without feeling sick at the thought of losing her. He wasn’t going to lose her! They were sending him to France as a courier because he knew about Enigma. That was all. He wasn’t an agent. Agents were highly trained and he was an amateur. Even that stupid lot at Whitehall didn’t send amateurs into danger – not real danger. He was to be taken to France by submarine, met, then hidden until it was time for him to bring back the package. They would take good care of him. Not that Keth Purvis was of any importance. What was important was the machine he would bring back. Any boffin with a knowledge of Enigma could have done it, couldn’t they? They had chosen him because he owed them one for his passage back to England, so he had to do it, if only to save lives at sea. Keth Purvis wasn’t at sea, was he? Didn’t cross the Atlantic again and again in a slow-moving convoy, nor go on the Murmansk run – that suicide trip to the north of Russia with tanks and guns for Stalin.
When it was over and done with he would return to Bletchley Park. They had told him that. And when that happened, he would never again complain of the mind-blowing frustration of it. He would even be glad that in some small way, perhaps, what he had done would help decode German U-boat signals more easily. Breaking their code only one day in five wasn’t on. When they could break it as easily as the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe codes, then the Atlantic would be a whole lot safer for Allied seamen.
He looked at the flask, then screwed the top back firmly. Gaston Martin had no need of more.
He picked up the closely typed papers he had been given. Gaston Martin, born to Belle and the late Jules a year before the end of the last war.
His mother was dead too. In hospital, following complications after an operation for appendicitis and no, he had not been with her when she died. It was too sudden, too unexpected. Only Grand-mère was with her. Grand-mère died a year later. Both she and Maman were buried at – Hell! Where?
Frantically he searched through the papers. So much to learn, but learn it he would, because he was going to France and coming back safely. All in one piece.
D-watch, relieved by A-watch, arrived back at Hellas House at twenty minutes past midnight or, in naval time, 00.20 hours.
‘Hi,’