Lines and Shadows E-Book

Sarah Bower

• Herausgeber: Story Machine
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 193

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

1960. The height of the Cold War. Maths prodigy Ginny Matlock is appointed to be the first woman computer at a secretive nuclear testing facility off the East Anglian coast. She quickly finds, in this landscape of endless skies and shifting shorelines, that nothing is what it seems. What is the terrible secret of Briar Cottage? What dark tale haunts the local pub? And who is the mysterious Artist with whom Ginny's fate becomes entangled? As the Berlin Wall rises and nuclear Armageddon threatens in Cuba, can Ginny build a life for herself among so many mysteries or will the terrors of the age suck her under? Sarah Bower's brilliant novella blows the spy thriller genre to pieces and creates a feminist masterpiece from what is left of the rubble. A swirling mystery in which mathematical proof is always just out of reach. Lines and Shadows is the strange lovechild between Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent and John Le Carre.

Leseprobe

LINES AND SHADOWS

Sarah Bower

Lines and Shadows, copyright © Sarah Bower, 2023

Print ISBN: 9781912665273

Ebook ISBN: 9781912665280

Published by Story Machine

130 Silver Road, Norwich, NR3 4TG;

www.storymachines.co.uk

Sarah Bower has asserted her right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or copyright holder.

This publication is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

For my sister, Jenny Gorvin, and all the others alongside whom I lived through (and failed to remember) The Sixties

1

The stiff envelope had the hue of clotted cream against the pale green everyday Poole pottery. The Ministry of Defence seal gleamed like anthracite. Ginny’s father had his Daily Mail up to his face as usual, in a way which somehow created the optical illusion that it was the paper eating his toast rather than him. Her mother fussed unnecessarily with the kettle, hummed, turned up the Home Service News, turned it down again. Ginny set the envelope aside, lifted the cosy off her egg cup and began to slice the top off her egg.

‘Well,’ said her mother eventually, ‘aren’t you going to open it?’ Ginny’s mother wasn’t patient; pressure built up in her as if she were a small, volatile volcano and had to find instant release.

‘In a minute, mum.’ Ginny wasn’t being unkind, but she hadn’t expected the letter to arrive so soon and she needed a few minutes to make herself ready for whatever it might have to say. She was more like her dad, she supposed, whose rhythmic biting and chewing had suffered no interruption, although she did notice a slight tremor running through the front page, making Mr. MacMillan’s moustache twitch. She stared into her egg, assessing the thickness of the white and the number of degrees off a circle of the circumference of the yoke. She didn’t exactly know she was doing this, just that the progress of the calculations through her mind calmed her so her hands were hardly shaking at all when she picked up the letter and opened it.

It was a short letter, and she read it twice before saying anything, just to be absolutely certain she hadn’t made a mistake. She hadn’t.

‘I got it,’ she said quietly. ‘I got the job.’

2

As her train steamed eastwards the rain gave way to a quilt of white cloud, cities to small, poor-looking hamlets, the Pennine crags to the Lincolnshire Wolds to a landscape so flat you could almost imagine God’s hand smoothing it the way her mother smoothed a bedspread. If you believed in God. The previous summer, Ginny had graduated from the Manchester College of Science and Technology with a first class honours degree in applied mathematics and she knew perfectly well the flatness of the land was to do with the measurable density of rock, with wind speeds and the work of gravity upon water. There was no mystery, merely that which had yet to be discovered.

She disliked the countryside. All of it. When she was two, she and her mother had been evacuated to a village in Wales where everything smelt of dung and damp plaster and her mother, who was expecting her brother, Joe, cried as endlessly as it rained outside so she came to believe her dad was actually dead. She was five when he came to collect them at the end of the war, and she ran away because she was sure he was an escaped POW come to murder them. She’d been hoping so much for a posting in London, or Cyprus or Germany, any of those places mentioned on Two Way Family Favourites. If she’d been to a proper university, she would probably have got one, but she had had to make do, her father explained, because they needed to save money for Joe’s future. A boy had to have a proper future. So she had to content herself with the college, and a degree awarded by the Victoria University up the nice end of Oxford Road, and was posted to Aldeford. It had taken her some time to find it on a map.

After changing at Birmingham and Ipswich, the final leg of her journey took her on a two-carriage train full of Easter holidaymakers to Felixstowe. She had to share her compartment with a gang of tipsy Teddy Boys and was sure she must reek of beer and Brylcreem by the time she dragged her case on to the platform at Felixstowe where she had been told a car would meet her. Dusk was falling and she hunted in vain among the throng on the station forecourt for anyone who looked as if they might have come from Aldeford Air Force Base. She failed to spot a scrap of RAF blue among the optimistic summer colours of her fellow travellers. As the station emptied and darkness deepened, she became certain she had been forgotten. Had she got the date of travel wrong? Not possible. The MoD had sent her tickets. Well, she thought, if it came to it she could always take a taxi; the local cabbies must be familiar with the base. She just hoped it wasn’t too far and she would have enough money to cover her fare.

‘Are you the new computer? I was expecting a guy but you seem to be all that’s left. I thought it was…intriguing they’d got us rooming together.’ The voice was a sophisticated-sounding drawl, a hybrid of American and upper-class English, the girl to whom it belonged an even more surprising encounter in an old-fashioned English seaside town. Despite the fact that it was almost dark, she wore oversize sunglasses with tortoiseshell frames, a boilersuit cinched tight at the waist with a heavy leather belt and workmen’s boots. Her flame red hair was bound up landgirl style in an expensive-looking silk scarf. She held out a hand and Ginny took it; she had a firm, boyish grip and bright scarlet nails.

‘Yes,’ said Ginny eventually, ‘I suppose I am.’ The girl responded with a decidedly unladylike whistle between her teeth; she was wearing, Ginny noticed, the sort of lipstick her mother would describe as ‘tarty’, a dusk-defying match for her nails. ‘You’re a first, then. God knows what they’ll make of you on the Island. I’m Frank, by the way.’

‘Virginia Matlock. Ginny.’

‘Ah, so that’s what the “V” stands for. I’d decided you were Vincent.’ Frank picked up Ginny’s suitcase and swung it effortlessly as she led the way to an American jeep, flamboyantly parked with one wheel up on the kerb and its rear end stuck out half way across the road. ‘Climb in,’ she said, flinging the suitcase into a well behind the seats. In her straight skirt, Ginny couldn’t emulate Frank and leap into the jeep without opening the door, and felt Frank’s gaze upon her as she settled herself primly, feet and knees together, hands folded over her handbag in her lap. Frank made her uncomfortable; her scrutiny was too intent, too – well – frank. And they were to share a room? She was glad when the other girl turned her attention to the road and Ginny could try to set her impressions in order. She had more questions than answers but for now it was a relief to have nothing more to concentrate on than not being thrown out of the vehicle as it rattled and lurched along potholed lanes with high hedgerows looming either side. She tried not to think about what would happen if they encountered anything coming the other way. She wished Frank would remove the dark glasses.

The hedgerows gave way to dunes, strange sculpted shapes that glimmered palely into view and were gone as the headlights passed over them. Frank made an abrupt right turn and, after a few hundred yards, halted the jeep in the middle of an unlit space whose borders were vaguely demarcated by the silhouettes of buildings and buttery squares and oblongs of lit windows. From the largest of these spilled voices and piano music as well as light, and a sign above it proclaimed The Merman Inn. An unusual name, Ginny thought.

‘Here we are,’ said Frank. The jeep was the only motor vehicle parked in the square, whose surface was beaten earth rather than tarmac, though a horse and cart were tethered outside the pub. Frank heaved Ginny’s suitcase out of the jeep and set off past the pub, which stood at one corner of the square. The dimly illuminated sign displayed a crude and shocking image of the merman, suspended by his tail over a fire basket, curls of hair and fire entwined in the sign painter’s fancy.

Momentarily distracted by the pub sign, Ginny had to move smartly to catch up with Frank’s long, swinging stride. As they rounded the end of the pub, the ground sloped away and Ginny found herself in a narrow lane, bordered on one side by a row of terraced cottages and on the other by a ruined tower. Entirely in darkness, it formed a dense, crenellated silhouette against a sky which now shimmered with wintry starlight. A chilly breeze had got up, bearing the scent of salt and seaweed, rustling the ivy which shrouded the tower. Ginny shivered; she hoped there wasn’t much further to go. You’ll be making a vital contribution to our Cold War effort, Brigadier Bough-Mantle had told her at her interview, absolutely essential work to keep the country safe. In the godforsaken wilds of Suffolk, on a cold spring night of knifing, ghostly wind, she felt utterly unequal to the task, unequal to anything, in fact, other than a hot bath, a mug of cocoa and a night’s sleep.

‘I won’t be living on the base, then?’ she asked, as Frank stopped in front of a cottage, rummaging in one of her voluminous pockets for a key which she thrust into the lock of a Brunswick green-painted door. A matching boot scraper sat to one side of it and on the other a plant pot containing a very dead geranium.

‘Oh no, only the military live on the base, the rest of us are billeted in the village. You’ll be sharing with me and Alicia. This is home. Briar Cottage. Alicia’s the sleeping beauty.’ She laughed, opened the door and stood aside to let Ginny enter.

The door opened straight on to a shabby front parlour, the walls a nicotine beige in the patchy light from a standard lamp in one corner and an Anglepoise with a broken arm spring which lolled drunkenly over the edge of a deal table with four rush-bottomed chairs tucked under it. A lugubrious sideboard stood beneath the window to the right of the door, and next to it a treadle sewing machine. A sagging sofa upholstered in dark brown chenille and an armchair of indeterminate hue made up the rest of the room’s furnishings. It was at least warm, with a log fire crackling in a tiled fireplace. The rug in front of it, Ginny noticed, was blotched with scorch marks. The only object in the room which did not share the signs of long and impersonal use was a smart red and cream portable Dansette balanced on top of a crate full of records in the space under the stairs.

Framed in the open doorway to the kitchen, from which clouds of steam and a smell of boiled potatoes emanated, was a remarkably tall, willowy girl wearing a blue silk kimono over a pair of denim cigarette pants and a white teeshirt. Large, lilac-grey eyes looked out from beneath strong brows and a tangle of loose, dark curls. Until she smiled, she had a mouth like a Victoria plum but when she smiled everything below her nose was large white teeth.

‘I cooked,’ she announced, in an accent which went with the aristocratic nose but was at odds with the wide and enthusiastic smile. ‘Sausage and mash.’

‘Hunky dory,’ said Frank. ‘This is Ginny. Ginny, Alicia.’ Alicia stepped forward and offered Ginny a long, pale hand to shake. Her nails were bitten to the quick.

‘So, you’re a computer. How exciting. We haven’t had a girl computer before, have we, darling?’

‘Sure ain’t,’ said Frank. Ginny wondered if the Brunswick green door were some kind of time machine and she had stepped back into the 1940s.

‘It’s 1960,’ she said, cursing herself for sounding defensive. ‘There have been women computers in America for ten years. Grace Hopper? Katherine Johnson?’ The other girls looked blank, then Frank said,

‘Best thing to come out of America, apart from me, of course…’

‘But you’re only half American.’ Alicia gave Frank’s shoulder a playful push.

‘…apart from me, is Otis Redding.’

‘Ignore her, Ginny. We’re in awe of you, really. You must be so clever.’

‘Well, I don’t know who Otis Redding is.’ She wanted to be conciliatory. She was tired of being the odd one out, an object of wary curiosity like a walrus in the Thames or a woman in Parliament. Yet the looks turned on her by her new housemates made it immediately clear she had only made things worse. Dumping Ginny’s case unceremoniously beside the front door, Frank crossed to the Dansette, slipped a single out of the stack of records and put it on the turntable.

It was a live recording, the music emerging from a chaos of voices as if being played in a crowded bar, like a scene, Ginny thought, from one of those black and white musicals her mother loved on Sunday afternoon television. The impossible moment when everything magically came together and parallels converged, and now there was a tight blare of horns, a bass guitar picking out a rhythm, a voice full of raw energy and Frank singing along with it and dancing slick-hipped around the dull little room, her scarlet nails flashing as she moved in and out of the light.

‘That’s Otis Redding,’ she breathed as the song ended, her green eyes dancing like birch leaves in a wind. ‘That’s what we’re saving the world for.’ Only when she heard the percussion of pots and pans from the kitchen did Ginny realise Alicia was no longer in the doorway.

Returning from wherever the music had taken her, Frank gave herself a little shake and found an LP of something cooler, more jazz-lounge, to play while Alicia served up the sausage and mash and tinned peas on a set of mismatched plates. To the spun-out wail of a saxophone, Alicia explained that she and Frank were secretaries: she to the base commander, Wing Commander Drummond, and Frank to the American Air Force liaison office. So all they could really tell Ginny with any certainty was that civilian staff travelled to the base and back on a flotilla of small boats. As Ginny didn’t know, or couldn’t tell them, where she would be working, they could say no more.

‘I would,’ Ginny assured them. ‘’I assume we’ve all signed the Official Secrets Act.’

‘There are still different clearances, though,’ said Frank.

‘Are there? I had no idea.’

‘I guess that means you’ve signed the whole thing. Top level clearance.’ Their eyes, the green and the lilac, fixed on her, Alicia’s amazed, Frank’s impossible to read. To Ginny, bone-tired as she was after her long journey, in the fug of the warm sitting room with a full stomach, their combined gaze felt like a weight leaning on her. It took an effort of will to get up from her chair, stack the plates and carry them to the kitchen. She must show willing with the household chores, yet if she sat there much longer, she would drop into an abyss of sleep.

‘There are tinned peaches,’ said Alicia, ‘and condensed milk.’

‘That’s so kind, but I’m exhausted, I’m afraid. Can I save mine till tomorrow?’

‘Of course. Frankie, take note.’

‘I promise to keep watch for the phantom peach snatcher and fight him off with my trusty can opener.’

‘Hypocrite.’ Alicia threw her napkin at Frank. Removing it from her shoulder and throwing it back, Frank said,

‘Your room is the one at the front, right at the top of the stairs. The bathroom leads straight off the kitchen, I’m afraid. No idea of bathrooms when this place was built.’ Ginny had assumed that to be the case; they had lived in a similar house until she was eight and her father earned the promotion that enabled them to move to the villa in Didsbury where her parents lived now.

‘So quaint,’ added Alicia, ‘though we do keep chamber pots upstairs. Horrible having to traipse down in the middle of a cold night.’ Yes, thought Ginny, yes, it was, but a step up from the lean to in the back yard, the spiders, the mildewed copies of the London Illustrated News.

‘And sorry about the bikes,’ called Frank as Ginny was putting the plates in the kitchen sink. ‘We used to keep them under the stairs before the Dansette arrived.’

She used the bathroom, where three bicycles served as tolerable towel rails, then dragged her case up the steep, narrow stairs, across a cramped landing to her room. In contrast to the sitting room, the air was gelid, thick with a must of damp and mothballs. She wondered how long it was since anyone had slept in it. Yet the bed was made up, with a jaunty coverlet of crocheted squares, and there were towels folded on the end of it which exhaled a thin breath of lavender when she picked them up. Something told her this was Alicia’s work. The dressing table drawers were neatly lined with offcuts of a floral wallpaper and the chamber pot beneath the bed, though it had a chip in its rim, was flawlessly clean and smelled of Jeyes Fluid. She unlaced her shoes and crossed the room in her stockinged feet to draw the curtains, the carpet rough and threadbare beneath her tread.

Even in the darkness, she could appreciate how a view of the tower filled her bedroom window. Crumbling atop its mound it loomed over the row of cottages, once, perhaps, reassuring to the villagers it was built to protect, but tonight it seemed to Ginny like a cold breath from a past riddled with violence and superstition. Yet at least she did not have to overlook the pub, with its macabre sign. Her hand on the edge of the curtain was stayed by movement, bats, perhaps, or an owl, or the sheep which grazed on the mound.

‘It’s just a sheep lavatory nowadays,’ Frank had said as they walked past the tower earlier. Ginny whisked the curtain shut and set about lighting the Calor gas heater that stood in front of the room’s small fireplace, to take the edge off the cold before climbing under the covers.

3

She knew no more until her travelling alarm clock was ringing in her ear and Frank’s voice on the other side of her door was confirming that it was six a.m. The light filtering through the curtains promised a fine morning. She opened them on to a cloudless sky, an expanse of delicate aquamarine behind the castle, shading to primrose yellow as she looked to her left, to the east and the sea and the rising sun. The light gilded the tower’s old stones, lending them a honeyed glow and haloing the sheep as they cropped the mound. In daylight she could see the tower was only part of the ruin, that an arch at its base gave on to a courtyard surrounded by the rubble of walls. A pair of gulls perched on the battlements, their morning quarrel easily loud enough to be heard through the glass; they rose into the air as a horse-drawn milk float clopped past then returned to their perch and continued their squabble. The sea itself was barely a glint in the corner of Ginny’s eye yet it pervaded everything, as if the light only came to her refracted from its surface.

As the girls walked down the lane after breakfast, it dipped completely out of sight of the water, but the sea’s restless shushing filled Ginny’s ears and she could taste salt on her tongue. Her lungs filled with the iodine tang of seaweed. Outside the final cottage in the row they were joined by two other girls, one introduced as Jean, the other whose name she failed to catch. Jean, who was short and curvaceous and wearing a pink bobble hat, cast Ginny a mournful look and asked,

‘I suppose you’re in poor Sue’s room?’

‘Sue?’ Custodian, she assumed, of the third bicycle in the bathroom.

‘Yes. Surely they’ve told you…’

‘Those are our boats.’ The lane had opened out on to a broad sandy space strewn with fishing boats and tractors. There was a slipway into a narrow channel of steely water and a row of mooring posts alongside it. A single storey building of gunmetal grey weatherboarding with a lookout tower bore a sign beside the door proclaiming it to be the harbourmaster’s office. Flags and a windsock snapped from the pole on its roof. The boats to which Frank was pointing were moored together, six of them, painted in matching camouflage with outboard motors and cross thwarts and a uniformed helmsman sitting in the stern of each. Ginny had no time to wonder about the mysterious ‘poor Sue’ as the civilians employed on the base converged on the boats and jostled for places. There were ten of them to each boat. She found herself sitting between Alicia and a nondescript man of indeterminate age who reminded her of the clerks in her father’s office, kindly, balding, with pockets full of humbugs. Men in whose eyes she would never be more than ten or eleven, an odd little girl with an arithmetic book in the corner of the room. Alicia turned round to chat to the girls sitting behind her, the man fought with the breeze for his newspaper as their boat bobbed out into the channel.