The gramophone needle struck its first dramatic note and the tango record belted out into the air.
‘Can we have a break now, Violet,’ Rosemary pleaded from the armchair. ‘You’ll get us shot. The neighbours already hate us.’
Violet pouted and pushed closed the wooden doors beneath the gramophone, slightly muffling the volume. ‘Happy now?’ she mouthed, downing the last dregs of her drink, before making a flouncy exit.
Rosemary lowered her Britannia and Eve magazine and scowled at Elsie.
‘She only does it to wind you up,’ Elsie said. ‘You know what she’s like.’
‘That’s your answer to everything she does,’ Rosemary snapped. ‘‘You know what she’s like.’’
‘Join in,’ Elsie retorted. ‘Have some fun. Live a little.’
‘I don’t want to behave like…that,’ Rosemary said. ‘Considering her upbringing, she’s got absolutely no morals. I mean, bringing that married soldier back here the other day…I despair, I really do. Besides, I don’t see you joining in.’
‘I’ve got to get ready for work,’ Elsie responded, standing and making for the door.
‘But you haven’t, though,’ Rosemary argued. ‘You’re not supposed to be on shift today.’
Elsie stopped and turned around. ‘You know full well what’s going on at the moment. Tonight’s going to be a big night.’
Rosemary shook her head dismissively. ‘Honestly, it’s not good for you,’ she said. ‘You take one set of pills to keep you awake and another to knock you out. It’s not healthy.’
‘There’s important work to be done,’ Elsie said with a shrug, leaving the room. It was the kind of wishy-washy answer that she had been giving lately when people started to ask too many searching questions. It was true, she had been spending a lot more time in the operations room. It was the one place where she was left alone and where she didn’t have the capacity to think of anything other than the job in hand. Besides which, she was needed in the operations room—now more than ever.
The unsettling music and thorny comments from the sitting-room dissolved when Elsie pushed shut her bedroom door. She breathed out sharply, then began to strip down to her underwear. She stood beside her bed, vulnerable, and spread her hands out on either side of her belly; the swelling seeming to be becoming more obvious each day, yet still nobody but Violet had any inkling of her condition. Her eyes instinctively moved to the pot of quinine pills on her bedside table that Violet had procured for her the moment that Elsie had told her that she was pregnant. She had suggested a raft of other horrific ideas, from crochet hooks, or falling down the stairs, to even putting leeches inside herself. But it was all so medieval and awful that she couldn’t bear to think about it. Violet had reassured her that the quinine pills were safe—she had used them more than once herself.
She fumbled in her handbag for a cigarette. She despised herself for her feelings. She wasn’t a woman like Violet, with not a single maternal bone in her body; she had always wanted children and being a teacher had only solidified and strengthened that desire. But she had suppressed that feeling a long time hence—soon after her marriage, in fact, despite Laurie’s keenness to immortalise their marriage almost as soon as their vows had been exchanged.
Elsie cursed herself for allowing those old invasive thoughts back in. It never ceased to amaze her how, with no effort whatsoever on her part, her mind could retrieve painful memories and replay them with such stark clarity. The image was horribly vivid. She was there, back in Bramley Cottage, trying to retrieve something from a marriage that she had never wanted in the first place. She recalled with irony her desperate wish never to have a child by him, her husband. She saw herself sitting on the cold toilet outside, her stomach feeling like it was full of razor blades, watching the small bloody mass tumbling out between her legs. And Laurie’s sweaty dumbstruck face, peering around the toilet door. Guilt-ridden.
She closed her eyes, trying to resist and suppress back the memory.
The final flickers of the burning tobacco brought with it the end of the worries. She threw the stub from the window and took her WAAF uniform from the wardrobe. As she pulled on the blue-grey outfit, so her attention shifted to her duties in the operation room.
Calmly, she left the bedroom and went downstairs. She called goodbye to the other girls and ventured out into the chilly early afternoon.
She collected her bicycle from the side of the cottage and pushed it down the garden path until she reached the lane. Her journey to the toy factory completed her mental transformation; by the time she had dismounted and added her bicycle to the multitude of others propped beside the building, she had entirely settled her mind to work.
As she entered the operations room, she was instantly aware that something important was underway. At first she couldn’t put her finger on what was different, exactly—then she realised that, despite there being extra operators on duty, the room was ominously quiet.
‘Ah, Elsie,’ RKB called from the open door to the Intelligence Office. ‘Find Mike, would you—we need you to take a lead on the R/T today. I think she’s next-door taking a quick break.’
‘Rightio, sir,’ Elsie answered, removing her coat and hurrying over to the Unintelligent Office. She pushed open the door and found Aileen clutching at a mug of cocoa. She looked pale and drawn with large dark circles under her eyes.
‘You look exhausted,’ Elsie commented.
‘Thanks,’ Aileen answered. ‘I’m not sure when I last slept. You don’t look so great yourself.’
The two women laughed. Aileen had recently been promoted to Intelligence Officer—the first woman, as far as they knew, in British history
