第20章 The Dawn

The dawn came slowly, gently, like the first light of morning after a long and dark night. Margaret walked through the streets of London, the city awakening around her, the world moving on without her but with her, in her memory and in her heart. She thought of Thomas, of Dorothy, of Frank, of all the friends she had lost and all the friends she had made. She thought of the war, of the sacrifice, of the cost of freedom and the price of truth. She thought of the future, of the world that was being built from the ashes of the old one, and she hoped that it would be a better world, one in which the lessons of the past had been learned and the mistakes of the past had not been repeated. She thought of the message that had started it all, the prediction of her death that had become the catalyst for her survival. She smiled, remembering the fear and the uncertainty and the determination that had carried her through. She was still alive. She had survived. And she would continue to serve, to fight, to protect. The dawn had come. And it was beautiful. Margaret stood at the window of her Bloomsbury room for some time after dark, watching the lamplighter make his slow circuit of the square, before she put on her coat and decided, without quite deciding, that she would walk until her legs told her to stop. The walk had a destination she confessed to nobody: Euston, first service, a platform ticket bought with coins still warm from her glove. Over Regent's Park the barrage balloons were finally coming down, cut loose and hauled in like tired whales while children raced their shadows along the railings below. Milk churns stood in white ranks outside the creamery, a paperboy was selling peace as though it were a habit he had always had, and the city smelled of coal and morning and almost nothing else. She had rehearsed the journey as an errand and it refused to stay one. Every object at Euston had grown a history—the left-luggage lockers stood in their long row like witnesses, and she walked past number 183 without turning her head, counting her footsteps instead, an old discipline from the bad winter. A porter asked whether she was travelling or meeting. Both, she said, which he accepted as ordinary, because the whole country was living on that answer now. The northbound carriage filled with soldiers sleeping off celebrations that were months cold, and she watched the country assemble itself through glass furred with breath. The line took its old curves into Northamptonshire without consulting anybody, and at Bletchley the same porter nodded her through after eighteen years' absence compressed into eighteen months, a nod that contained whole histories neither of them proposed to open. Inside the wire the park was being unmade with bureaucratic tenderness. Huts stood stripped to their floorboards; typewriters sat crated and stencilled in ranks; two Wrens fed draft papers into an iron brazier whose sparks rose straight up in the windless cold, months of her life curling orange and gone before they reached the tree line. Commander Wright supervised the inventory lists with exactly the expression he had worn while reading an impossible message in January 1943, white-haired now but upright as a flagpole. They are saying we won, he observed, not looking up. We did, she said. Both statements were true, and neither was complete, and between colleagues of certain years that passed for a warm reunion. He granted her one circuit of the ground, unaccompanied, and returned to his lists. The flagstone where a greenhouse had stood before the war sat exactly as firm as she had left it. She stood on it deliberately for a full minute, boot soles to the whole buried story, and renewed the tin's lease on darkness for another decade. Along the gravel path Hut 8 kept its windows dark, all seven of them, and the duty roster outside the door was honest at last. At the gate a young corporal let her keep a pencil stub stamped B.P.—souvenir of nothing in particular, worth everything accordingly—and she pocketed it beside her gloves like the veteran of something she could never name. The bus reached the station as the sun finally committed itself, light sliding across frozen ruts, breath hanging in flags behind the windows. Wars, she reflected, are the timetable's business eventually; the trains insist on it. On the southbound she slept without dreaming for the first time since January 1943, woke as London began assembling itself brick by brick in the suburbs, and stepped off into morning proper, letting the day take it from there. That evening the tobacconist's cat supervised her unpacking of a hamper Mrs. Whitfield had sent south—honey, blackcurrant jam, a note observing that February's bees were flying early and that the invitation stood, rosters permitting. She ate toast at the window while the streetlamps came on, and audited the arithmetic of her own survival one more time, not from fear now but the way an accountant rereads a column that has finally balanced: predicted in January, hunted through December, saved by a rumour, a typed note, and the stubborn refusal of several women to die on schedule. Between the letters she allowed herself one small ceremony. She took down the algebra text, opened the mended spine, and counted her collection of the departed: a chimney letter, two leaves of a one-time pad, a specimen sheet cataloguing a traitor's handwriting habits. She added nothing and removed nothing, and put the book back on the same shelf, spine out, where lamplight would find it first. Some collections are kept not for use but for witness; hers had never been consulted by anyone but herself, and had never once failed to steady her when consulted. Before bed she wrote two letters. The first went north accepting February on whatever terms the bees cared to offer. The second, harder, asked the ministry for first claim on any lectureship touching wireless traffic analysis, Far East section preferred—though she could not have explained the preference except as a feeling in the hands of someone holding a book whose spine held more than paper. She slept well. In the morning the snow had gone, the pencil stub stamped B.P. lay sharpened on the blotter, and dawn came around again on time, as dawns had taken to doing lately, as if determined never again to be blamed for anything. ---