Signal Moon(14)
“Five days. I booked ’em all at the Grand in York.”
“Room 202?”
“Wouldn’t take any other. I’ve got a full moon shining through this window right now.”
Lily stretched out an arm to lift the blackout curtain a hair. “Half-moon here. I guess it’s a different moon, even if we’re both in a Yorkshire June.”
“Too bad.” His voice was low. “I wish you could see the moonlight shining into this room, Lady Rose.”
Lily wished that too. She wished she could shimmy into her best violet crepe frock and pearls, and run into the Grand to see him come pelting down the stairs in uniform—she couldn’t help but picture blues and gold braid like the boys here had, not these things he called digi-cams. Whatever the uniform looked like, she could imagine herself slinging her arm through his, her head just about topping his shoulder, and dragging him out for a night on the town. Whether it was York in her time or York in his, they could surely have found someplace playing Glenn Miller. Matt had told her he could dance: Swing club in college, I can cut a rug pretty good. Cutting a rug to “Moonlight Serenade,” his arm around her waist, her hand in his, on a night with a full moon.
But it wasn’t going to happen.
“Lily . . .” She heard him take a deep breath. “The disruption effects, whatever they are—they’re fading. All over, wherever they popped up. This channel we’re talking on, it could cut out anytime.”
“How long do you think we’ve got?” she managed to ask around the thickness in her throat.
“Minutes? Hours?”
They’d already been on borrowed time, Lily thought. Not even borrowed time—slipped time. Someone had slipped a little of his time into her pocket, and she didn’t know how much more they had left.
She curled her head against the wireless. Too metallic and blocky to feel anything like a man’s shoulder, but one could pretend. “Do me a favor, cowboy?”
She could hear him turning over on his own bed, springs squeaking again. “Anything.”
“Talk to me, Matt. Just talk to me. Until the signal moon goes zero.”
September 2023
The first time Matt went to Bletchley Park, he did the tourist stuff: wandered the big Victorian mansion, took the tour of the grounds and outbuildings mocked up to look like they would have looked in Lily’s day, stood in awe in front of the Alan Turing exhibit. This time he went to the Y Station display, and stood for quite a while in front of the clumsy wireless receiver and Bakelite headphones.
“Now, the Y Station listeners didn’t work here at Bletchley Park,” he heard a guide telling a group of tourists. “They worked in outstations all over Britain—mostly young girls. Without their taking down the Morse and the German ciphered traffic coming over the radio waves, the codebreakers here wouldn’t have had anything to decode. If you’ll look at the display here . . .”
There were black-and-white photos of Y Station listeners. Matt scanned the faces but didn’t see Lily. She’d been photographed a lot in her life: the debutante in white satin and ostrich-feather headdress, the smiling Wren in brass-buttoned uniform (that photo was the screensaver on his phone), the wedding day photograph coming out of the Dorchester Hotel in London, the old woman with white hair who had volunteered at Bletchley Park when it opened as a visitors’ center in the nineties . . . He’d gone down the Google Images rabbit hole, after their last conversation broke off with a flat, final hiss of static. They’d been trading terrible jokes—Lily had been telling him what the Nazi said to the other Nazi on the Russian front: “That cute little Russian girl is giving me the eye!” “So why don’t you go talk to her?” “Because she’s eyeing me with—”
Matt wondered if he’d ever find the rest of the riddle. If he even wanted to.
He gave up on the Y Station display and wandered over to the Codebreakers’ Wall. Veterans, families, and Bletchley Park supporters could have names engraved on a brick on that wall; he already knew Lily’s family had bought one for her in 2015, five years after she died. He’d dug up an Instagram video of the occasion: a wobbly handheld shot of a brick wall, the young voice of one of her grandchildren burbling, “Gran was just the coolest, I mean, a viscount’s daughter who did codebreaking and had a Dylan Thomas tattoo on her forearm?”
He’d dropped the phone then and cried. Just fucking wept.
He could feel his eyes pricking now as he found the same brick: Lily Margaret Wright, née Baines. “Hey, Baines,” he said softly. He’d be damned if he called her by her married name. The Google hunt had turned up her husband too, of course. Good-looking guy, ex-RAF, fifty-two years married. Matt hoped he was a good guy. Matt also kind of wanted to punch his face in.
He’d hoped he’d feel something, looking at Lily’s brick. Closure sounded stupid, but . . . something? “Maybe I’ve been hoping this will turn out like a movie,” he said aloud, “and your granddaughter will walk up and tap me on the shoulder, and she’ll look just like you. Played by Lily James in the movie, of course.”
But that was even stupider. No granddaughter doppelganger could replace Lily Baines, the voice on the other end of the transmitter. The voice he couldn’t find again, no matter how many frequencies he tried on the old wireless.