Haldane gave Leiser a trench coat and Wellingtons and Avery took him for a walk. They went by bus as far as Headington, sitting on the top deck.
“What happened this morning?” Avery asked.
“I thought we were fooling about, that’s all. Then he threw me.”
“He remembered you, didn’t he?”
“Of course he did: then why did he hurt me?”
“He didn’t mean to.”
“Look, it’s all right, see.” He was still upset.
They got out at the end of the line and began trudging through the rain. Avery said, “It’s because he wasn’t one of us; that’s why you didn’t like him.”
Leiser laughed, slipped his arm through Avery’s. The rain, drifting in slow waves across the empty street, ran down their faces and trickled into the collars of their mackintoshes. Avery pressed his arm to his side, holding Leiser’s hand captive, and they continued their walk in shared contentment, forgetting the rain, or playing with it, treading in the deepest parts and not caring about their clothes.
“Is the Captain pleased, John?”
“Very. He says it’s going fine. We begin the wireless soon, just the elementary stuff. Jack Johnson’s expected tomorrow.”
“It’s coming back to me, John, the shooting and that. I hadn’t forgotten.” He smiled. “The old three eight.”
“Nine millimeter. You’re doing fine, Fred. Just fine. The Captain said so.”
“Is that what he said, John, the Captain?”
“Of course. And he’s told London. London’s pleased too. We’re only afraid you’re a bit too …”
“Too what?”
“Well—too English.”
Leiser laughed. “Not to worry, John.”
The inside of Avery’s arm, where he held Leiser’s hand, felt dry and warm.
They spent a morning on ciphers. Haldane acted as instructor. He had brought pieces of silk cloth imprinted with a cipher of the type Leiser would use, and a chart backed with cardboard for converting letters into numerals. He put the chart on the mantelpiece, wedging it behind the marble clock, and lectured them rather as Leclerc would have done, but without affectation. Avery and Leiser sat at the table, pencil in hand, and under Haldane’s tuition converted one passage after another into numbers according to the chart, deducted the result from figures on the silk cloth, finally retranslating into letters. It was a process which demanded application rather than concentration, and perhaps because Leiser was trying too hard he became bothered and erratic.
“We’ll have a timed run over twenty groups,” Haldane said, and dictated from the sheet of paper in his hand a message of eleven words with the signature Mayfly. “From next week you will have to manage without the chart. I shall put it in your room and you must commit it to memory. Go!”
He pressed the stopwatch and walked to the window while the two men worked feverishly at the table, muttering almost in unison while they jotted elementary calculations on the scrap paper in front of them. Avery could detect the increasing flurry of Leiser’s movements, the suppressed sighs and imprecations, the angry erasures; deliberately slowing down, he glanced over the other’s arm to ascertain his progress and noticed that the stub of pencil buried in his little hand was smeared with sweat.
Without a word, he silently changed his paper for Leiser’s. Haldane, turning around, might not have seen.
Even in these first few days, it had become apparent that Leiser looked to Haldane as an ailing man looks to his doctor; a sinner to his priest. There was something terrible about a man who derived his strength from such a sickly body.
Haldane affected to ignore him. He adhered stubbornly to the habits of his private life. He never failed to complete his crossword. A case of Burgundy was delivered from the town, half bottles, and he drank one alone at each meal while they listened to the tapes. So complete, indeed, was his withdrawal that one might have thought him revolted by the man’s proximity. Yet the more elusive, the more aloof Haldane became, the more surely he drew Leiser after him. Leiser, by some obscure standards of his own, had cast him as the English gentleman, and whatever Haldane did or said only served, in the eyes of the other, to fortify him in the part.