‘The Boy wanted to be useful, sir,’ Perkins said, looking sheepish. ‘But the Boy ain’t got the strength for the nets.’
‘So I asked the Boy to clean the lifeboat,’ Brown said. He was having trouble keeping a straight face. He looked first at Perkins and then at the floor.
‘Couldn’t you think of anything else for her to do?’ Finchin was trying to frown, but he, too, struggled to stop an amused grin breaking through.
Marina squirmed. She was wetter inside her oilskins than outside. But that feeling of discomfort was not as bad as the men’s suppressed merriment at her expense. Hadn’t she done a good job cleaning that boat?
Brown pulled himself together. ‘No, sir. But to be honest, we didn’t think the Boy would take to the job with quite so much enthusiasm.’
Marina looked down at her hands, red with rope burn and the angry scratches from the bristles of the coarse metal brush. What a fool. Of course that boat didn’t need cleaning. They’d just given her something to do to keep her out of their way.
Jones came in and sat down in his place. He gave Marina a startled look. She pulled her wet hair out of her face and tried to look as normal as possible, which was hard. Now that she was inside the warm fug of the mess, her sweater gave off a cloying smell of wet sheep.
‘Is there anything the Boy can do?’ the Commander asked, looking as if he knew full well there wasn’t.
‘Not anything useful,’ Brown admitted, as if it pained him to tell the truth. ‘I asked Cook if he’d have her. But he says there’s no room in the galley and his knives are too sharp for someone with butterfingers.’ He looked apologetically at Marina as if he only told the truth reluctantly.
The Commander sighed. ‘After you’ve eaten, Denham, you can go and help Jones in the Signals Room.’
‘Perhaps the code books need dusting,’ Finchin explained, quite pleasantly.
‘Sir!’ Jones protested. ‘I don’t need any help, sir!’
‘You’ll have the help you’re given, Jones. That’s an order.’
Marina knocked on the door of the Signals Room. No answer. She knocked again. She shouted Jones’s name. Still no answer. She opened the door, just a crack. Jones turned round, alarmed, as a gust of air rustled a pile of papers on his desk.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘It’s you.’ He pulled strange-looking earmuffs off his head. His black hair stood on end. ‘Sorry,’ he said, his cheeks turning pink. ‘I didn’t hear you. I’m listening.’ He pointed at the earmuffs. ‘I’m waiting for a message from Room 40.’
The room was scarcely bigger than a cupboard. There was no porthole. Light came from a single oil lamp, which swung from the low ceiling. Jones pulled out a stool for her. They had to sit so close together that their shoulders brushed, which didn’t bother Marina – she and Edward often had to sit close together on their tree-climbing expeditions – but Jones obviously found it awkward, hunching his shoulder away from her. Now that Marina – there to be helpful, as ordered – was in the Signals Room, he didn’t seem to know what to do with her.
‘Why don’t you tell me how the machine works?’ said Marina, after a few moments of awkward silence. ‘Perhaps then I can think of a way to be helpful.’ In front of her was a large, handsome mahogany case set with dials and gauges and clock faces. Needles and spirit levels and clock hands moved and jumped and swung in erratic rhythms. There was also something like the barometer in the hall at home, which was meant to predict the weather but more accurately predicted whether Ivy would moan about her arthritis. Then there were switches and a row of tiny brass levers along the bottom. Oh, and this was the best: wires with pegs on the end that needed to be fixed to small metal keys. Even playing a church organ, with two keyboards and all those stops and pedals, couldn’t be as complicated as working this machine. Lights flashed and Marina could hear an odd noise, like the insistent dripping of a tap. How could Jones, still a boy, have any clue what he was doing with all this machinery?
‘It’s a signals machine,’ he muttered.
‘Is it difficult to work?’
‘It’s what I’m trained for,’ he mumbled. Jones had delicate hands, like a pianist. And he was very thin. He would have been just as useless on deck with Brown and Perkins as she was. ‘I had to get a trade, see. I couldn’t go down the mines, like my da . . . I couldn’t breathe down there and they had to bring me up.’
‘But what do all these dials and lights and wires do?’
‘You don’t know?’ He glanced at her, frowning.
‘No.’
‘But your father built this machine.’
Marina remembered all the boxes and packages her father had received while on shore leave, and the hours he’d spent locked away in his study.
‘I thought maybe he might have shown you . . . As he’s a signals expert . . .’
‘He doesn’t talk to me about his work,’ Marina said. This comment seemed to puzzle Jones. As though any other father would have enjoyed explaining the workings of a machine he was taking the trouble to make. But her father never thought that Marina might be interested in any aspect of his life. At least, that was how he behaved. ‘My father doesn’t talk very much at all,’ she added, as if this might explain her father’s reluctance to describe how he had made such an intricate machine.
She looked again at the switches and gauges, the little keys and the wires attached to them. ‘It looks very complicated. What does it do?’
Jones looked a little more cheerful. ‘What doesn’t it do?’
‘Well, I don’t think it can make tea, can it?’
‘I think it probably could.’ Jones almost laughed. ‘Only I haven’t got to that page in the instruction manual.’ He cleared his throat, remembering that he
