The Seabreak Cipher

County Record Office, Exeter. Miss J. Lark is appointed to catalogue and prepare for transfer the civil defence and coastguard records of the Seabreak Point district. Duration: three months from 26 September 1947.

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T

he train was late into Marndle by eleven minutes, and Josephine counted every one of them against the watch face in her lap. The branch line from Exeter ran through country she ought to have known, but the hedgerows had thickened in the years she’d been away and the stations had lost their wartime signage and put the old names back, and none of it looked the way she remembered. She’d been gone too long. Or the wrong amount of time. Long enough that the familiar had rearranged itself into something almost right, which was worse than if it had changed completely.

She was the only passenger to step down at Marndle. The platform was short and the shelter needed paint and there was a handcart with two milk churns standing at the far end, uncollected. A porter in a waistcoat watched her from the office doorway without moving to help. One suitcase, and she could manage it herself, and she did.

The appointment letter from the county record office was folded inside the lining pocket of her handbag. Beneath it, in an envelope that had once been stiff, her release papers from January 1946, signed and countersigned and stamped with the departmental mark of a section she was not permitted to name. She had read them so often the folds had gone soft, and the ink at the creases was beginning to lift. They told her nothing she didn’t know. They were proof that she had existed, for five years, inside a building in Buckinghamshire, doing work whose results she was never shown. She carried them the way another woman might carry a photograph.

Outside the station the road was quiet. A cattle lorry stood at the kerb with its engine ticking over and a boy of about fourteen leaning on the tailgate, and beyond it a green-painted Bedford with FOSS & SON, GENERAL HAULAGE stencilled on the door. The driver was eating a sandwich in the cab with the window down. He looked at her suitcase and then at her.

“Seabreak?”

“If you’re going.”

“Going anyway. Get in.”

She put the suitcase in the back among crates of tinned goods and a coil of heavy rope and a box marked BOOTS THE CHEMIST and climbed up into the cab. The seat was patched with canvas. The driver finished his sandwich, wiped his hands on his trousers, and pulled away from the kerb without asking her name.

The road from Marndle dropped through seven miles of deep lane, the hedges so high and close that the lorry brushed them on both sides and the leaves came in through the open window. Elm and ash and the first brown of hazel. September, and the colour was already turning in the valley bottoms. The driver talked about the weather: gales forecast for the weekend, the equinox bringing it in early this year, the fishing boats tied up. Josephine answered when he left a gap for her and watched the road and the fields and the sky, which was the colour of old pewter, heavy with something it had not yet decided to do.

The lane turned and fell and the hedgerows opened and there was the sea.

She had not seen it in seven years. The last time had been Plymouth, 1940, from the window of a shipping office where she’d spent two years filing invoices and wishing she were dead of boredom, and even then it had been the Sound, flat and industrial and full of grey warships. This was different. This was open water, the Channel, stretching south and west until it dissolved into a haze that was neither sea nor cloud, and the wind was pulling lines of white across it, and the whole thing moved.

The lorry came down into Seabreak Point from the east, along the top road, and the village opened beneath them in a cleft between two headlands. Harbour at the bottom. Houses climbing the eastern slope in stacked rows of slate and whitewash and stone, connected by paths and flights of steps cut into the hill. The western headland was bare, gorse and grass, with the lifeboat house at its foot. The eastern headland ran out to a point, and on it she could see a building, stone, Victorian, with a flagpole and no flag. Below that, half hidden in the gorse, something low and flat and concrete. She noted both and filed them and said nothing.

“That’s the Station,” the driver said, nodding at the stone building. “The old signal station. Nobody up there now.”

He dropped her on Fore Street, which ran up from the quay in a curve of terraced houses, a post office, two shops with their awnings furled against the wind, and, set back slightly from the road, Mrs Endacott’s lodging house. The sign said ROOMS in faded blue letters. The front step was scrubbed. There was a privet hedge, trimmed square, and a boot-scraper by the door.

Mrs Endacott was sixty-three and had the kind of face that had decided what it thought of you before you’d finished introducing yourself. She looked at Josephine’s suitcase, which was small, and at her shoes, which were clean, and at her hands, which were not a working woman’s hands. Then she looked at the letter from the county record office and read it and handed it back and said the room was at the back, ten and six a week, breakfast at seven thirty, no supper, and the key was on the hook inside the door.

The room was small and cold and clean. A single bed with a candlewick spread. A wardrobe. A chest of drawers with a mirror above it, spotted with age. A table by the window and a chair. The window looked out over a yard and the roofs below it and, beyond the roofs, the harbour. She could hear the wind and, beneath it, the steady knock of something loose on a boat somewhere below.

She unpacked. The suitcase held what she’d brought: two blouses, a wool skirt, a cardigan, a change of underclothes, a mackintosh. Her wash things. A box of pencils and a penknife to sharpen them. Three notebooks, two blank, one started. A packet of squared paper. Her ration book. And the cigarettes, forty Player’s in a tin, because you could not always buy them and she’d learned to carry her own. Six a day, counted. She had smoked six a day since 1941 and it was one of the few habits from that time she could keep without explanation.

She put the pencils and the paper on the table and the cigarettes beside them and hung her mackintosh on the back of the door and stood there for a moment in a room she would be living in for three months, in a village she had never visited, to do a job nobody else had wanted. Then she went downstairs and out and walked down Fore Street toward the quay.

Mrs Endacott watched her go from the front room window, and Josephine knew she was watching, and did not turn.

The quay was new. That was the first thing she noticed. The wall was rebuilt, the stone clean-cut and properly pointed, and there was a concrete apron and an ice house and the frame of a fish market building at the far end, not quite finished. Somebody had spent a great deal of money here, and recently. The rest of the village was salt-worn and patched and making do, but the quay was new.

Three fishing boats were tied up along the wall, their hulls painted in blues and reds that were already peeling. A fourth was hauled up on the stone ramp at the harbour’s edge, which she would later learn was called the Slip. Nets were spread over a low wall to dry. The wind was picking up and the boats were pulling at their ropes and the halyards were rattling against the masts in a way that sounded like something being counted.

She walked to the end of the quay and stood there. Below her the water was brown and green and muscular, pushing against the wall and pulling back, and the swell was coming in from the south-west and breaking on something she could not see, about four hundred yards off the eastern headland. Two rocks, she thought. Covered or nearly covered. The water lifted over them and dropped and the foam spread and dissolved and the rocks appeared again, dark and wet, and then the water covered them.

A gust came off the water and she felt it in her chest and in her hair and she put both hands in her coat pockets because her hands were cold, and they were always cold, and had been since 1940 or thereabouts. She stood and looked at the sea. The last of the afternoon light was on the headland and the gorse was a deep brown-gold and the concrete blockhouse was a pale scar in the middle of it. The stone building above it, the signal station, had two dark windows facing the sea.

She was aware of someone behind her.

Not close. Twenty yards, perhaps, at the other end of the quay, near the Slip. She did not turn at once. She had spent five years in a room where you did not turn when someone entered, and where the impulse to look was a thing you trained yourself out of, because looking was a concession and a concession was information. She waited. The wind moved. The halyards knocked.

When she did turn, casually, as though she’d simply run out of sea to look at, there was a man standing by the Slip with his hands at his sides. He was fifty or near it, in a heavy jacket and a knitted cap, lean and weathered in the way fishermen were, and he was looking at her with an expression she could not read from that distance. Something between recognition and alarm. He held her gaze for perhaps two seconds. Then he turned and walked away along the harbour wall, and his stride was steady and unhurried, and he did not look back.

She did not know his name. She would learn it the following morning, when Colin Widger came running up from Chapel Cove, and the whole of Fore Street emptied, and she went down to the shingle with everybody else and stood in the wind and looked at the thing the sea had brought in.

His name was Edmund Praile. He was fifty-eight years old. He lived in a cottage on Quay Lane, last but one. He had a daughter named Ruth and a grandchild he had not lived to see turn four. He had mended nets and repaired boats and kept a log at the Vane Head signal station for five years of the war, and he had carried a strip of folded paper in his coat for two years and seven months, waiting.

He was the man on the quay, and he would be dead before midnight, and Josephine Lark had just walked into the last day of his life without knowing it.

She turned back to the sea. The wind was building. The equinoctial gales were coming in and the boats would not be going out tomorrow and the sky in the west was the colour of a bruise, purple and yellow-grey, pressing down. The rocks off the headland disappeared under a swell and came back and disappeared again.

She walked up Fore Street in the fading light. The post office was closed. One of the shops had a display of tinned pilchards and Sunlight soap and a card in the window that said NO CIGARETTES. The other was a newsagent with the Western Morning News on a board outside, three days old. She passed the Cormorant, the inn, where a light burned in the bar window and she could hear a wireless playing something orchestral. A man was sweeping the step. Tall, broad, an apron over his shirt, moving the broom in long practised strokes. He glanced up at her and nodded and she nodded back and walked on. He went back to his sweeping.

At Mrs Endacott’s she let herself in with the key on the hook. The hallway smelled of furniture polish and boiled vegetables and the cold particular smell of a house near the sea, salt in the plaster, in the curtains, in the wool of the stair carpet. She went up to her room and sat at the table and took out a pencil and the squared paper and wrote the date at the top: 26 September 1947.

Below it she wrote nothing. She had nothing to write. She was a records clerk from the county office at Exeter, here to catalogue forty-one boxes of paper that nobody in this village wanted catalogued, and to prepare them for transfer, and in three months she would put them on a lorry and go back to a city where the house she’d grown up in had been sold and her mother was seven months dead and her brother believed she had spent the war typing.

She sharpened the pencil with her penknife, slowly, turning the blade along the wood. She was good at this. It was one of the things she’d learned: sharpen a pencil so the point holds, so the graphite doesn’t crumble, so the line stays clean. She had learned it in a hut in Buckinghamshire alongside a great many other things she was not allowed to mention, and the pencil was the only one of them she could carry out through the gate.

The wind rattled the window. Downstairs Mrs Endacott moved through the house, turning off lights. The knock of the halyard on the mast carried up from the harbour, irregular and persistent, counting nothing.

Josephine sat at the table with her sharpened pencil and her clean square of paper and listened to the sea she had not seen in seven years, and did not yet know what it was trying to tell her.