The German Numbers Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

communicated to other persons, or used for any purpose whatever.’
    Plain enough, but too much of a sacrifice to his existence to obey such rules. In any case his transcripts were used to make the morning fire, and all tapes rubbed out to leave space for other items. If he played them occasionally to Laura what matter? Weren’t man and wife supposed to be one person? He was sure there were villainous London thieves who used VHF scanners to keep track of police movements before doing a robbery, but he wasn’t in that league, and wouldn’t have been, even with normal sight.
    He felt himself a snooper nevertheless when listening to personal telephone talk, though surely those who made calls from ship to shore must know someone might well be listening, no great feat these days, with technology coming on the market cheap, even for ordinary telephones to be tapped. Often he amused himself at midnight listening to two or three trawler skippers chatting at the fishing grounds, which he wouldn’t record for Laura because the dexterity of their bad language was astonishing to hear.
    Poor husband, or boyfriend, stuck on shore. ‘You’re not going to remember this, are you?’
    Howard could hear him but not the woman.
    â€˜You all right?’
    He was an American.
    â€˜See you on Friday? Look, I think you’re loaded. Why are you crying? Phone you Thursday, at three o’clock.’
    Perhaps he had sent her on a Caribbean cruise, when the last place she needed to be in was a vast floating boozer.
    â€˜Honey, please don’t drink too much. I got a meeting at five o’clock. Listen, please don’t drink too much tonight. Damn, you’re really drunk.’
    Howard wanted to hear the response, instead of filling in the details from his own heart.
    â€˜What does that mean?’ the man said, a mixture of concern and exasperation.
    How else to learn about life if you were blind?
    â€˜All right, I’ll call you at five-thirty on Thursday. Can you write it down so you won’t forget? Why not? You’re drunk. It’s that stuff affecting you maybe. Please don’t drink anymore tonight. So you want to go, eh? OK. Love you. Bye.’
    Operator’s voice: ‘It was twenty five minutes there.’
    Such a long time for the poor chap to have been locked in a dead end debate with his wife or girlfriend. The catalogue of miseries was endless. Disasters also. A whistle went parabola through a blank frequency like an uncontrolled star across space – or a bomb making its way from a plane onto helpless people below. No knowing where it was coming from or heading for. Then the mixing warble of two oscillators made a noise like an angel drinking water.
    The aerial blues were on him, which even the tom-tom telegraphist blasting through from a Soviet Black Sea tanker couldn’t penetrate. But you must never despair, he told himself, ever, and if he didn’t, no one should.
    The man pleading with his wife wouldn’t leave him alone. Witnesses were as much in danger of despair as those involved, who at least had the umbrella of each other’s misery, as well as their own. The basic theory of magnetism instilled in the classroom was that ‘like poles repel and unlike poles attract’, but in human relationships if it went on too long the opposite would happen and both poles begin to repel. Iron filings as the uncontrollable grit of the human spirit are unpredictable in their behaviour, and nothing can save people from the unknown in themselves except endurance and understanding. Call it observations from the heaviside layer, for what they are worth.
    To take the weight from his heart – that was one way he didn’t want to go – he reached for the morse key which Laura had found in the ex-service junk store at the bottom of the steps, and tapped out a condoling message to the man who would not hear it because no transmitter was attached, though maybe