Code Name Verity(17)

‘I’m not leaving it!’ Maddie cried, and managed to wrestle the umbrella inside. The girl behind her pushed and one of the girls ahead of her grabbed her by the arm and pulled, and then they were all trembling in the dark underground with the door shut.

A couple of them had had the sense to grab their cigarettes. They passed them around, parsimoniously sharing. There was not a single lad about – the men were quartered half a mile away on the other side of the airfield and used a different shelter – those that weren’t scrambling into aircraft to fight back. The girl with the matches found a candle, and they all settled down for the duration.

‘Bring us that deck of cards, love, let’s have a round of rummy.’

‘Rummy! Don’t be soft. Poker. We’ll play for ciggies. For gosh sakes put that brolly down, Brodatt, are you completely bonkers?’

‘No,’ Maddie said very calmly.

They were all crouched on the dirt floor round the playing cards and glowing tobacco ends. It was cosy in perhaps the way you’d be cosy in hell. Something flying low was peppering the runway with machine-gun fire; even buried mostly underground, even a quarter of a mile away, the shelter’s iron walls shuddered.

‘Glad I’m not on shift right now!’

‘Pity the poor souls who are.’

‘Can I share your umbrella?’

Maddie looked up. Crouched next to her, in the light of the flickering candle and one oil lamp, was the small German-speaking wireless operator. She was a vision of feminine perfection and heroism even in her WAAF regulation issue men’s pyjamas, her fair hair tumbling in a loose plait over one shoulder. Everybody else was shedding hairpins; Queenie’s hairpins marched in ordered rank on her pyjama pocket and would not go back in her hair till she was back in bed. With her slender, perfectly manicured fingers she offered Maddie her cigarette.

‘Wish I’d brought a brolly,’ she drawled in the plummy, educated tones of the Oxbridge colleges. ‘Super idea! A portable illusion of shelter and safety. Have you room for two?’

Maddie took the cigarette, but did not immediately move over. The fey Queenie, Maddie knew, was given to fits of madness such as stealing malt whisky from the RAF officers’ mess, and Maddie was sure that anyone bold enough to impersonate an enemy radio operator on the spur of the moment was entirely capable of mocking someone who burst into tears every time she heard a gun fired. On a military airfield. In a war.

But Queenie didn’t seem to be making fun of Maddie – quite the opposite. Maddie budged over a little and made room for another body beneath the umbrella.

‘Marvellous!’ Queenie cried out happily. ‘Like being a tortoise. They ought to make these out of steel. Let me hold it up –’

She gently prised the handle out of Maddie’s trembling hand and held the ridiculous umbrella up over both their heads inside the bunker. Maddie took a drag on the offered cigarette. After a while of alternately biting her nails and smoking the borrowed cigarette down to a sliver of paper and ash, her hands stopped trembling. Maddie said hoarsely, ‘Thank you.’

‘Not a problem,’ said Queenie. ‘Why don’t you play this round? I’ll cover you.’

‘What were you on Civvie Street then –’ Maddie asked casually. ‘An actress?’

The little wireless operator dissolved in a fit of gleeful laugher, but still steadfastly held up the umbrella over Maddie’s head. ‘No, I just like pretending,’ she said. ‘I do the same thing with our own boys, you know. Flirting’s a game. I’m very boring really. I’d be at university if it weren’t for the war. I’ve not quite finished my first year. I started a year early and a term late.’

‘Reading what?’

‘German. Obviously. They spoke it – well, an odd variant – in the village where I went to school in Switzerland. And I liked it.’

Maddie laughed. ‘You were wizard this afternoon. Really brilliant.’

‘I couldn’t have done it without you telling me what to say. You were brilliant too. You were right there when I needed you, not a word or call out of place. You made all the decisions. All I had to do was pay attention, and that’s what I do all day on the Y sets anyway – just listen and listen. I never have to do anything. And all I had to do this afternoon was read from the script you gave me.’

‘You had to translate!’

‘We did it together,’ said her friend.