Silently he performed the brief ritual of tuning the aerial until the meter obediently dipped to the final reading.
“And Bob’s your uncle!” he declared triumphantly. “Now it’s Fred’s turn. Here, your hand’s sweating. You must have had a weekend, you must. Wait a minute, Fred!” He left the room, returning with an oversized white pepperpot, from which he carefully sprinkled French chalk over the black lozenge on the key lever.
“Take my advice,” Johnson said, “just leave the girls in peace, see, Fred? Let it grow.”
Leiser was looking at his open hand. Particles of sweat had gathered in the grooves. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“I’ll bet you couldn’t.” He slapped the case affectionately. “From now on you sleep with her. She’s Mrs. Fred, see, and no one else!” He dismantled the set and waited for Leiser to begin. With childish slowness Leiser painfully reassembled the equipment. It was all so long ago.
Day after day Leiser and Johnson sat at the small table in the bedroom tapping out their messages. Sometimes Johnson would drive away in the van leaving Leiser alone, and they would work back and forth till early morning. Or Leiser and Avery would go—Leiser was not allowed out alone— and from a borrowed house in Fairford they would pass their signals, encoding, sending and receiving en clair trivialities disguised as amateur transmissions. Leiser discernibly changed. He became nervy and irritable; he complained to Haldane about the complications of transmitting on a series of frequencies, the difficulty of constant retuning, the shortage of time. His relationship to Johnson was always uneasy. Johnson had arrived late, and for some reason Leiser insisted on treating him as an outsider, not admitting him properly to the companionship which he fancied to exist between Avery, Haldane and himself.
There was a particularly absurd scene one breakfast. Leiser raised the lid of the jam pot, peered inside, and turning to Avery asked, “Is this bee honey?”
Johnson leaned across the table, knife in one hand, bread and butter in the other.
“We don’t say that, Fred. We just call it honey.”
“That’s right, honey. Bee honey.”
“Just honey,” Johnson repeated. “In England we just call it honey.”
Leiser carefully replaced the lid, pale with anger. “Don’t you tell me what to say.”
Haldane looked up sharply from his paper. “Be quiet, Johnson. Bee honey is perfectly accurate.”
Leiser’s courtesy had something of the servant, his quarrels with Johnson something of the backstairs.
Despite such incidents as this, like any two men engaged daily upon a single project they came gradually to share their hopes, moods and depressions. If a lesson had gone well, the meal that followed it would be a happy affair. The two of them would exchange esoteric remarks about the state of the ionosphere, the skip distance on a given frequency, or an unnatural meter reading which had occurred during tuning. If badly, they would speak little or not at all, and everyone but Haldane would hasten through his food for want of anything to say. Occasionally Leiser would ask whether he might not take a walk with Avery, but Haldane would shake his head and say there was no time. Avery, a guilty lover, made no move to help.
As the two weeks neared their end, the Mayfly house was several times visited by specialists of one kind or another from London. A photographic instructor came, a tall, hollow-eyed man who demonstrated a sub-miniature camera with interchangeable lenses; there was a doctor, benign and wholly incurious, who listened to Leiser’s heart for minutes on end. The Treasury had insisted upon it; there was the question of compensation. Leiser declared he had no dependents, but he was examined all the same to satisfy the Treasury.
With the increase in these activities Leiser came to derive a great comfort from his gun. Avery had given it to him after his weekend’s leave. He favored a shoulder holster (the drape of his jackets nicely concealed the bulge) and sometimes at the end of a long day he would draw the gun and finger it, looking down the barrel, raising it and lowering it as he had done on the range. “There isn’t a gun to beat it,” he would say. “Not for size. You can have your continental types any time. Women’s guns, they are, like their cars. Take my advice, John, a three eight’s best.”