The Stars We Share Read online

  “Well,” she says, “perhaps we ought to get ourselves to Paddington, have a cup of tea while we wait?”

  He gives her a rakish grin. “Be like being in a film, rather, when you see me off. Dashing flight officer and his beautiful fiancée, and all that?”

  June laughs and puts her arm through the elbow he offers, and together they set off for Paddington Station, the ring on her left hand shimmering beneath the afternoon sun.

  * * *

  • • •

  A fortnight after her arrival, June takes advantage of a rare morning away from the Y station and leaves her tiny bedsit to walk the sea-scrubbed town. Years of war, but Scarborough holds fast. The shops struggle along despite rationing, and Scarborough Castle looms protectively over the town. The scoop of harbor, the fishing boats dotted across the dark water, the capricious speckling of foam on the waves when the wind picks up . . . They speak to her of a world so much bigger than the Fenlands, bigger than London, even, that she can scarcely imagine it. A gull struggles against a slap of wind, and June turns her face to the water. It doesn’t feel like summer, not with weather like this, although on the moor there are lambs and flowering gorse.

  The red and blue shutters of the houses that ring the water remind her of Alec too, although she’s not sure why. It feels like yesterday that she saw him in London, and also as if it has been months ago. Time in Scarborough is elastic—there is the time of now, of the codes coming through and the messages going out, of the urgent clatter of the wireless and the scratch of pencils. And there is the time of everything else, mobile and confusing.

  She wishes every day that she could tell Alec the truth, but every day there is more truth to tell, more truth not told. Even among her colleagues, speaking of the Official Secrets Act, acknowledging that there are clandestine works that they are part of, is taboo. Telling Alec is completely out of the question. She believes he would wholly understand—they are both, after all, doing their part for King and Country. But now the thing that was not exactly a lie is explicitly not true: Alec knew she was in London, and now he thinks she still is.

  He is such a good man, and it’s so easy to drift into missing him, remembering the lightness of his fingers against her ribs, the thistling of hair cut shorter than she likes up the back of his skull. Too easy. She shifts so she’s closer to the seawall, not quite so much in the wind. The idea of his proposal had seemed so inevitable for so long, and yet, when he had pulled out the ring, it had been a surprise, a weird click in her chest as things fell into place.

  And of course she had said yes. That had been inevitable, too. But now, alone in the lee of the castle, she wonders. Increasingly there is the question of whether they want the same future, and that is a conversation they have not ever had. He had asked her to marry him, and she had said yes, and after the air raid, when they’d gone to Paddington to wait for his train and have a cup of tea together, he had talked about a life after the war, and his plan to stay in the RAF. He had said any number of things about the future—their future—and she had told him how grand it sounded. But she had also suggested that they would talk after the war and find their way together, and who knows how he had heard that. She has never been sold on the idea of a house full of children and herself at the helm—shouldn’t Alec know that already?—just as she knows how much he wants exactly that. And now she has a career, a purpose and goals that have nothing to do with motherhood, goals that loom broader even than the life she wants with Alec.

  The worst of it is not knowing exactly the moment at which those ideas of the future had changed—at which point she had changed. That day with Sir Reginald, her future with the FO had seemed exciting but temporary. But now, with the war happening all around her, people’s lives held in the balance of the work she’s doing, it feels quite different. Still exciting, but no longer transient. This clandestine life has become something she can’t imagine giving up.

  * * *

  • • •

  As the summer deepens, June and her colleagues at Sandybed Lane work clustered around the wireless radios, headsets clamped against their ears, civilians like June side by side with women who’ve enlisted in the Women’s Royal Navy Service. Many of these Wrens, competent and businesslike in their tidy uniforms, serve as wireless techs, charged with fixing the machines when they break. The station can’t afford the pauses that come when one of the wireless sets blows a fuse or loses its bearings; every pause is a leg up for the Germans.

  But even in summer, the rain can come in fierce off the North Sea, strafing across the rooftops and then off across the moors. In that weather, the signals break up, caught in the fists of wind and water, and June and the other girls must wrestle the messages out of what’s left. One team writes down the codes as they come through the headsets, and the other group translates them onto separate pages, comparing their work against one another’s to make sure they’ve got it right. All of it gets packed into waterproof pouches for the team of Wrens who ride the courier routes from the wireless stations—Y stations for short—to HQ. Now and again, if information seems especially precious, it goes to the station chief for transmission directly to Station X.

  June spends many of her shifts at the rickety table in the wireless room’s alcove, where she translates the listeners’ messages into English. One night that summer, the whole place seems to glow with the tension of how close they are to a solution. To an answer. June raises her head, looks around the room. Engrossed, all of them, caught up in the tangle of what often seems like nonsense, until one learns how to see through it. The codes run in her blood, fill her dreams. She has always found patterns nobody else could understand, but now her gift has purpose. She has meaning, or her mind does.

  And then something clicks—a phrase repeated once too often by a radio operator, a sequence of taps blossoming into something larger—and she falls into the moment that she knows is waiting around the corner of every message, when the layers of code fall together. The sequences of numbers and letters take on a new shape, as clear as day. June pulls back, looks at her notes, and hands the papers across the table to Wendy Fairchild.

  “I say,” June says, “take a look?”

  Wendy nods, running her fingers across June’s decoding while she scans the original messages. June takes advantage of the pause to stand and stretch.

  “My God,” Wendy says.

  “It’s the real thing, then,” June says. She knew it, but hearing the urgency in Wendy’s voice changes what it means.

  Wendy turns and flags down one of the wireless men from the Royal Navy as he comes back from a break with a cup of tea. “Fetch the chief, will you?” The sailor puts down his cup and runs for the office at the far end of their compound.

  Minutes later the station chief bursts into the room. “Attwell?”

  June hands him her notes. “It’s the Lohengrin, sir. They’ve shown their hand.”

  He looks up. “You’ve identified their coordinates?”

  June nods. “Yes.”

  The chief says, “Bloody good show, Attwell,” and rushes back out.

  Wendy lights a cigarette. “That’ll teach them to talk to Berlin.”

  June chuckles. “I should think we would want them to keep doing it, if we hope to keep stopping them.”

  Wendy laughs, tilts her head up toward the tiny slit of window, and blows a stream of smoke. “Rather.”

  June says, “So now we wait?” She’s fidgety with the need to keep going, to scratch the messages onto paper and turn them into something that makes sense, but at the same time it feels correct to acknowledge the moments like this, when everything comes together just so.

  Her friend shrugs. “That’s our war.”

  And so it is. The Lohengrin is a new German battleship, sleek and dangerous, for all intents and purposes invisible in the North Sea as she slips through the waves and sinks British ships. And the war is goi
ng badly enough without this—they have lost Crete, and Rommel is waltzing across North Africa, seemingly impossible to stop. So many nights are spent watching the Wrens note down the double-bar sign of a U-boat, or the dispiriting moment when German Control radios back to a ship with a confirmation code—every message the Germans receive that the Y station hasn’t captured . . . Sinking the Lohengrin, or even just stopping her, would be an incredible boost.

  * * *

  • • •

  It’s two days later, June back at her desk with her pencils and thin sheets of paper, when the message comes from London—the Lohengrin is scuttled, and the prime minister offers his personal thanks to the men and women of the Y station on Sandybed Lane.

  “Jesus,” Wendy says, when the station chief has finished relaying the message. She smiles at June. “What miracle will you manage next?”

  June ducks her head, embarrassed. The Lohengrin is hardly the first German ship they’ve seen to; Y stations all over Britain send urgent messages to HQ every day. But this one does feel special, and the message from Churchill looms large. It seems so unlikely, and yet somehow perfect, that a collection of scribbled notes could lead to a triumph like this (and, a voice in her hindbrain reminds her, not quite sure how to feel, the loss of thousands of enemy sailors). Then, beyond the word from Churchill, the chief has a message solely for her as well. June follows him back to his office, her heart thumping—it can’t be Alec, please don’t let it be Alec.

  “They’re transferring you,” the chief says bluntly, his shoulders sloping unhappily.

  “Oh,” June says. “I see.” She hasn’t been here very long at all, despite the elasticity, and the quick friendship with Wendy, but it has felt right for her since the beginning. At the same time, the moves so far have meant learning more new skills and developing her talents. They could be sending her back to London, for all she knows.

  “Whitehall will send a car for you,” he says. “I’m afraid I can’t say more.” He shrugs, and June wonders if he disapproves of the use of petrol and the car it will take to get her wherever it is they’re sending her.

  “I imagine it’s too many changes by rail,” she says. Even Scarborough to London is two changes at best, and if they’re sending her somewhere more distant than that, it could be four or six. For a second she’s distracted by the ticking of railway schedules in her head, and she shakes it off. “I’ve liked it here, sir,” she says.

  “You did good work,” the chief says. “It’s no surprise they want you somewhere else.”

  “Thank you,” June says. She looks at the map on the chief’s wall, the corners of it curling away from the pushpins holding it in place, the abandoned pewter tea tray on the edge of his desk, the pipe tipped into a dish on the windowsill. Though it’s only been a handful of months, sometimes it feels like she has known Sandybed Lane, and this office, for years.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next morning she leaves the Y station and finds Floss waiting.

  “June, darling,” he says, clasping her hand.

  “Hello, Floss,” she says. “I’m glad to see you.”

  He chuckles. “You may be the only one left who feels like that.” He leads her slowly, his stick tapping against the stones as he makes his way to a waiting car, blocky and black, the driver leaning on the bonnet and smoking a cigarette.

  The driver takes her valise and tucks it away in the boot. Floss makes sure she’s settled and slides in next to her. The driver throws the butt of his cigarette into the gutter and gets in, and the engine curls to life. Floss props his cane in the corner and turns to face June across the wide seat, his analytical eyes running over her. June doesn’t mind—she is long since used to the way he looks at her, as if she’s an aggregation of data, not a woman.

  “So tell me,” he says, pressing the button that raises the partition between the driver and the back of the car, an excited gleam building in his pale gray eyes, “what do you know about Bletchley Park?”

  * * *

  • • •

  It’s the middle of the afternoon when the car makes its way into the Buckinghamshire village of Bletchley, and June’s mouth goes dry. Here, then, is her future—she has known the work she’s done in the Y stations goes to a place known only as Station X, but everything beyond that has been fuzzy at best. Does it bode well, the glossy light starting to go golden around the edges even in this old brick factory town? The car winds through the village, and Floss points out the newsagent and the greengrocer and the butcher, the various small shops she will need once she’s settled. And then there are the heavy gates, and young soldiers guarding them. Floss shows the soldiers a card, and they step sharply into salutes, then pull the gates open for the car.

  The manor itself appears out of the parkland like a vision, but the vision, June thinks, of someone who had never seen a proper country mansion and was putting it together based on a child’s description.

  Floss follows her gaze and laughs. “Hideous, isn’t it? But it suits our needs.” He gestures out the window. “And the lake is rather nice.”

  June has an unwelcome buzz of anxiety, thinking about this lake that Alec will never be able to skate on. And then they’re at the door, and she follows Floss inside.

  * * *

  • • •

  Hours later she emerges into the twilight. She has a chit for a billet in town, a ration book, and a vague sense of what she’ll be doing, but for the most part she is feeling unmoored in a way she usually doesn’t. The afternoon has been swallowed by the intricacies of her new post, including another lecture about the Official Secrets Act and its application to the work at Bletchley Park. An officer has told her that violations of the Act are treasonous and will lead to prison, at least. It’s largely the same message she’d had already from Sir Reginald, but with a hint more melodrama—as he’d paced the room, this man’s hand had crept to the holstered revolver at his belt, and June had shuddered at the grim tone he’d given that at least.

  She sits on the edge of the steps, waiting for Floss to collect her again. Her new colleagues come and go around her as she considers the surprising path that has brought her here. All those months learning the rudiments of her new trade, and now here she is right in the humming heart of it all.

  * * *

  • • •

  The Japanese codes move like water around rocks, intricate and alchemical, and June takes to them right away. Her colleagues in Hut 7 love the puzzles as much as she does, and sometimes it’s almost like a game, despite the grind of urgency that lies beneath everything they do. There are nearly infinite variations and nuances, and the new imperative of containing all the variables is exhilarating. This is nothing like traditional Morse code, or like the basic ciphers she made up in school, dots and dashes standing in for letters, just a new alphabet. Most of the cryptanalysts have done Greek at school; new alphabets and grammars are easily absorbed. What makes the Japanese codes so astonishing is the blur of the pictographs and characters, and the speedy transfiguration of those characters in and out of Morse. And then, the ciphering and the meteorological codes on top of that . . . June has never felt more vital or alive.

  Bletchley Park feels like home, and she thrives in the company of her peers. Now and again over the summer the powers that be send her back to Bedford or one of the other outposts, but for the most part she is a girl billeted in the tired old village of Bletchley. She and the other girls who board in the old brick house tell the elderly owners that they’re clerks at the radio factory Bletchley Park is pretending to be. When the couple’s son is invalided home from France that October, June moves into the old Abbey building on the manor grounds with the Wrens.

  She makes friends, all of them bound by the pressures of their work and of secrecy. She misses Alec, but she would rather miss Alec from the bewilderingly ugly old manor than anywhere else. And he seems happy enough
with his airplanes and his mates, no matter her fears for him. Life expectancy for pilots is so low, and she worries he is not careful enough. Although: Can he be? Is there an enough?

  * * *

  • • •

  In the nights that autumn, lying awake in the room she shares with a host of Wrens, she looks at the ring he gave her that spring, and her heart larrups against the walls of her chest. They have seen each other once since then, in August, a tangled visit in London, where he still thinks she lives.

  Such an odd day, that. The chaos of London, Alec trembling when he pulled her into a kiss. Lunch at a café near the British Museum, and Alec’s long hands looped around a porcelain mug chipped in a bombing earlier that summer or reaching across the table to play with her fingers. Alec’s smile, full of promise and lit with hope. The subterfuge for even a single day had exhausted her.

  Too, though, he had brought her one of his stories, a quiet balm of normality in their upside-down world. They had been back at the train station, sitting close together on a bench near the platform, and he had sighed and whispered, Once upon a time there was a river. And she had answered as if it were a sacred moment of call and response at church, And on that river lived a bear. Something had flashed bright and happy in his face, and then he had gone on.

  The bear lived in an old stone house in the shadow of the Tower, and in the afternoons he liked to look upriver toward the sunset, watching the light filter through the caissons and abutments of the bridges. The house belonged to a princess, who had come to London to establish an alliance in the spice trade.

  It was February, and a fog had crept along the river from the sea. The bear had not seen the sunset in days, just the low glint of sun and moon through the icy haze, but he was happy, curled up before the blaze the princess’s manservant had laid in the cavernous marble fireplace. The house was cold, and the princess had fallen into the habit of sitting with her bear by the fire.