course watched, breathlessly, something that was at once compelling and obscene: the small woman moving, the sudden pounce, the knife striking down into the shoulder, right behind the collarbone where the subclavian artery lay deep among muscle and connective tissue, where, if you got it right, the victim would die within four seconds.
V
Marian lay awake and thought about killing. Killing in the abstract was fine. Killing at one remove, killing in theory. She remembered the Filter Room, a dozen WAAFs crowding round the table in the early evening with the calls coming through from the radar stations. The girls in a scrum, reaching out over one another to put tokens down on the map like gamblers at the roulette table placing their last bets. The excitement as single plots became dozens, became hundreds, tracks identified and called, pointing out across the bulge of East Anglia and headingtowards the sea, each single plot being seven men and that meant seven lives. Seven times seven hundred. Five thousand lives, give or take. They’d march soundlessly across the board and disappear beyond the edge of the known world and the girls would wait, smoking, drinking tea, chatting in a desultory fashion while the killing went on, distant killing that you couldn’t see and couldn’t hear, the pulverising of the German cities. But what the ginger instructor was proposing was different: killing when you could feel the man’s throat beneath your arm, his breath on your cheek, his blood on your hands. How do you do that?
‘Oh, it would be no trouble for me,’ Yvette assured her. ‘I think I would enjoy it.’
If it wasn’t death, it was destruction. How to blow a door, put a car out of action, destroy a train. She found herself paired with Emile. He always knew everything about it even before the lecture had begun. ‘Used to work on the railways in the Congo,’ he explained when they were being taught how to sabotage a railway line.
‘Was that before or after the mines?’
‘That’s a complex question.’
‘No, it’s not. It’s not even one I want an answer to.’ But she got an answer nevertheless, the precise chronology of his career as mine engineer, railway engineer, construction engineer, any kind of engineer you might wish for. ‘It was a tough life showing the blacks the way forward.’
‘You and Mr Kurtz, you mean?’
That puzzled him. It was always a triumph to puzzle Emile. ‘Kurtz? I never met anyone called Kurtz.’
She hated him. She didn’t often hate people, but she hated Emile.
One of the people on our course is a pompous KA
, she wrote to her father the next day.
The kind you abhor
.
They practised wireless telegraphy and Morse code regularly, tapping on the key with nervy fingers and trying to take down the irritating buzzing into a coherent sequence of dots anddashes.
The boat will dock at Dover on the fifteenth
.
The Test Match will result in victory for Australia
. Daft messages like that.
‘Each operator has his own fist. As individual as handwriting.’
Hands stammered on the Bakelite knobs. Arthritis, they called Morse keying: like arthritis it brought a painful tension in the wrist, aching carpals and metacarpals, stiff and inflexible fingers. ‘Accuracy is everything. Accuracy and speed. Lives may depend on it. Perhaps even yours.’ Flimsies passed back and forth from instructors to students, misreadings underscored in blue crayon.
She keyed, without a mistake:
Emile is a tiresome know - all
.
Often Marian thought of Clément. She tried not to, but she did. It seemed ridiculous to revisit a childish infatuation but the memories were powerful and disturbing, the kind of thing that could undermine your whole personality, disturb the equilibrium that adulthood had brought. She remembered him in Paris on that visit with her father a few months before the
V
Marian lay awake and thought about killing. Killing in the abstract was fine. Killing at one remove, killing in theory. She remembered the Filter Room, a dozen WAAFs crowding round the table in the early evening with the calls coming through from the radar stations. The girls in a scrum, reaching out over one another to put tokens down on the map like gamblers at the roulette table placing their last bets. The excitement as single plots became dozens, became hundreds, tracks identified and called, pointing out across the bulge of East Anglia and headingtowards the sea, each single plot being seven men and that meant seven lives. Seven times seven hundred. Five thousand lives, give or take. They’d march soundlessly across the board and disappear beyond the edge of the known world and the girls would wait, smoking, drinking tea, chatting in a desultory fashion while the killing went on, distant killing that you couldn’t see and couldn’t hear, the pulverising of the German cities. But what the ginger instructor was proposing was different: killing when you could feel the man’s throat beneath your arm, his breath on your cheek, his blood on your hands. How do you do that?
‘Oh, it would be no trouble for me,’ Yvette assured her. ‘I think I would enjoy it.’
If it wasn’t death, it was destruction. How to blow a door, put a car out of action, destroy a train. She found herself paired with Emile. He always knew everything about it even before the lecture had begun. ‘Used to work on the railways in the Congo,’ he explained when they were being taught how to sabotage a railway line.
‘Was that before or after the mines?’
‘That’s a complex question.’
‘No, it’s not. It’s not even one I want an answer to.’ But she got an answer nevertheless, the precise chronology of his career as mine engineer, railway engineer, construction engineer, any kind of engineer you might wish for. ‘It was a tough life showing the blacks the way forward.’
‘You and Mr Kurtz, you mean?’
That puzzled him. It was always a triumph to puzzle Emile. ‘Kurtz? I never met anyone called Kurtz.’
She hated him. She didn’t often hate people, but she hated Emile.
One of the people on our course is a pompous KA
, she wrote to her father the next day.
The kind you abhor
.
They practised wireless telegraphy and Morse code regularly, tapping on the key with nervy fingers and trying to take down the irritating buzzing into a coherent sequence of dots anddashes.
The boat will dock at Dover on the fifteenth
.
The Test Match will result in victory for Australia
. Daft messages like that.
‘Each operator has his own fist. As individual as handwriting.’
Hands stammered on the Bakelite knobs. Arthritis, they called Morse keying: like arthritis it brought a painful tension in the wrist, aching carpals and metacarpals, stiff and inflexible fingers. ‘Accuracy is everything. Accuracy and speed. Lives may depend on it. Perhaps even yours.’ Flimsies passed back and forth from instructors to students, misreadings underscored in blue crayon.
She keyed, without a mistake:
Emile is a tiresome know - all
.
Often Marian thought of Clément. She tried not to, but she did. It seemed ridiculous to revisit a childish infatuation but the memories were powerful and disturbing, the kind of thing that could undermine your whole personality, disturb the equilibrium that adulthood had brought. She remembered him in Paris on that visit with her father a few months before the
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