The Shadow Readers

A Trick of the Light

Tamsin Trevannion could see the wrongness in a picture the way other people could smell rain — and the morning the lugger flew its small grey flag of distress, she had been the only soul on the Lizard who believed her own eyes.

She thought of it now because the sea this dawn had the same look: too composed, holding something back. May had come in cold and clean, the kind of light a painter would sell a year of his life for, every furze-blossom on the cliff struck out in gold and the sea below laid flat as hammered pewter under a sky going from grey to the colour of a thrush's egg. She sat where she always sat, on the elbow of granite above Carngwidden, her old sketchbook on her knees and a pencil gone stub-short between her fingers, and she did the thing she had done since she was small enough to need both hands to hold the pencil. She read the sea.

Not for beauty. Anyone could see the beauty; it was cheap as gulls. She read it for the small wrongness, the one false note in the chord. A patch of water that lay against the grain of the swell. A line of foam that ran where no current should put it. The eye her father called, with a worry he tried to hide, uncanny — and her mother, before the sea took her, had called God's own gift, mind you don't waste it. This morning the wrongness was only a fishing boat working the far edge of the bay, too small at that distance to be more than a fleck of dark, its sail a smudge of ochre. Nothing in it. She marked it anyway, a single stroke in the corner of the page, the way you might note a stranger's face you would never see again.

The flag had been a smudge like that, eleven years gone, and she twelve years old.

She had been on the quay at Pencarrow with the bread basket, sent for the day's loaf, when she saw the lugger far out past the Manacles — the Speedwell, though no one could have read her name at that reach — and saw the small grey rag jerking at her masthead that was not a sail and not a pennant. She had known what it was the way you know your own name spoken in a crowd. She had run to the men mending pots in the lee of the lifeboat house, old Hosken and the two Pengelly brothers and her uncle by marriage, and she had pointed and said, There's a boat in trouble, she's flying distress, and the men had narrowed their eyes against the glare and looked a long time and one of them, kindly, had set his hand on her hair.

That's no flag, my handsome. That's the light on the water. A trick of the light, see. You run on home.

She had not run home. She had stood and watched the smudge of grey work and snap, work and snap, while the wind got up out of the south-west and the sky to seaward thickened, and she had gone on saying it — she's in trouble, she's flying distress — until her voice cracked and a woman led her away by the wrist for fear she'd take a fit. By the time the Speedwell did not come in, and the tide gave back the first of what it chose to give, the men on the quay had stopped saying trick of the light and started not saying anything at all to the vicar's queer girl who had been right. Three of them drowned. One was eighteen. She had carried his face in her sketchbook for a year, drawn from memory, before she had the nerve to tear the page out, and even then she had not been able to throw it away.

That was the morning she had learned the first hard thing about her eye: that it was not enough to see. You had to be believed. And a girl on a quay, the vicar's daughter with her sketchbook and her uncanny stare, was the last creature on God's earth a working man would believe against the comfortable evidence of his own.

A gull went over, riding the updraught off the cliff without a wingbeat, and below it the terns were back — sea-swallows, her father called them, come up from Africa to nest among the thrift, hanging on the wind and then folding and dropping like thrown knives into the green water and coming up shining. They came home every year to the same hand's-breadth of cliff. She had watched for them since she was a child, the way other children watched for Christmas. Things that fly come home, she thought, and shut the book on the cold pewter sea, and went down the cliff path to the village and the church and her father's empty kitchen, where he was, as she had known he would be, preaching to no one.

—

He did it most mornings now that the house was so quiet, working out Sunday's sermon aloud over his cold tea, and she had long ago stopped being surprised to find the Reverend Augustus Trevannion in full voice to the dresser and the dead range and the picture of the Light of the World that had hung crooked since her mother died and that neither of them could bring themselves to straighten.

"—and Thomas answered and said unto him," her father was saying, one hand raised, his collar undone and his white hair on end, "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails — except I see, and put my finger into the print —" He broke off when she came in, and his hand came down, and for a moment he looked at her with the bottomless, helpless love that was the worst thing in the house. "Ah. Tamsin. You're cold, child."

"Thomas again," she said, going to the range to coax it. "You'll wear the poor man out."

"He is much maligned." Her father lowered himself into the chair that had been her mother's. "Doubting Thomas, they call him, as though doubt were a sin. But our Lord did not rebuke him for needing to see. He showed him. Reach hither thy finger. He met the man's eyes with his own wounds." He turned his tea cup a slow quarter-turn on the table, not drinking it. "It is only afterward He says the other thing. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. As though that were the harder grace." He smiled at her, tired. "I have always thought Thomas the most honest of them. He would not say a thing was true until he had proof. There are worse faults in a man."

In a man, she thought, and said nothing, and got the fire going, and made fresh tea because the cold cup was a small wound she couldn't watch. Her mother's chair. Her mother who had gone off Pelloe's rock on a grey day six years past, reaching — not for herself, never for herself — reaching for a child swept off the lower ledge by a sea nobody had seen coming, and had caught the child by the wrist and flung him up to the men above, and gone under on the backwash, and not come up. Tamsin had been on the path above, too far, too small, screaming into a wind that took the sound and gave back nothing. She had seen the whole of it. She saw most things. That was the trouble.

There was, on the dresser among the unpaid bills, a letter four months old from the Slade School in London, evacuated up to Oxford for the duration, holding her place — we should be most glad to see Miss Trevannion resume her studies when circumstances permit — and circumstances did not permit, and would not, while there was a war on and a father alone and a brother at sea and the whole world tipped on its end. She had two terms of drawing in her and a head full of light and nowhere on earth to put it. She washed paint pots that had no paint. She read the casualty lists in the West Briton and felt the war as a great machine that only ever took — took the Hendy boy, took both the Roscarrock brothers, took the lights from the windows and the bells from the tower and the young men from the lanes — and gave her, specifically, nothing to do but watch and be useless and be right about the sea.

"There's the gate," said her father, and his whole face changed, twenty years off it in a heartbeat, and he was up and at the window. "There's Jago."

—

Her brother came up the path with his cap shoved back and his kit-bag on one shoulder and his grin already going, and the kitchen filled up with him the way it always did, too big for the room, smelling of ship and salt and the particular fug of a man who had slept in his clothes on a train. He had one day. The Carlow Star sailed on the evening tide from Falmouth and joined her convoy off the Lizard and went out into the Atlantic, and he had one day of leave to spend, and he spent the first hours of it eating everything in the larder and making their father laugh until the old man wept, and teasing Tamsin about her drawing and her stooped scholar's neck, and not once, not for a single breath, talking about where he was going or what was out there in the grey under the grey.

In the afternoon the two of them walked up onto the cliff, the way they had walked all their lives, and the wind had gone round and the terns were still working the swell below, and Jago stopped being twenty-seven and funny for a while and was just her brother, looking out at the thing he had to go back into.

"They're saying the lanes are bad," she said, because someone had to, and it would never be him.

"They're always bad." He had his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the horizon. "We've a good escort this trip. Corvettes. A right gang of them." He said it lightly. He had always lied to her lightly, ever since she was small and afraid of the dark of the church, and she had always known, and had always let him, because the lie was a kind of love and you did not refuse love in wartime. But she saw — of course she saw — the muscle ticking at the corner of his jaw, and the way he did not look at the open water for long, as though it might catch his eye and hold it. He was more afraid than he would ever let their father guess, or her. The U-boats were out there in their grey wolf-packs, and he was going out to meet them with a hold full of God-knew-what and a flag and a prayer, and he was twenty-seven and he wanted to come home.

"Here," he said suddenly, gruff, the way men go gruff to cover the soft thing. "I've something for you. Don't go making a fuss."

He took her hand and turned it palm up and put into it a small heavy thing, brass and glass, cold from his pocket. A watchmaker's loupe — the kind a jeweller screws into his eye, a fat little barrel of polished brass with a lens at one end that made the whorls of her own thumb leap up huge and strange.

"Where did you—"

"Won it off a Dutchman in Halifax. Cards." He closed her fingers over it, his big hand around her thin one. "He swore it'd magnify a flea's wedding ring. Reckoned you'd put it to better use than I would." He was grinning again, but his eyes weren't in it, quite. "There's a thing in it, Tam. So you'll have summat of mine to look through. So you'll—" He stopped. Started again, lighter, and that was worse. "So you can find me when I come home. Use that, and you'll spot my ugly mug coming up the path a mile off, and you can put the kettle on."

She could not speak for a moment. She held the loupe so hard the brass bit her palm.

"You'll come up the path yourself," she said at last, "and you can put your own kettle on, and stop talking soft."

He laughed, and the danger of the moment passed, and they walked back down with the light going gold and then rose and then grey over the sea, and that evening he kissed their father on both cheeks and held him a long time, and he swung Tamsin off her feet the way he had when she was six, and he went down the lane in the dusk to the bus with his bag on his shoulder, turning once at the bend to throw them a salute that was half a joke and half not, and then the hedge took him.

She stood at the gate after the engine had faded and held the loupe up to her eye and looked through it at the empty lane, at the place where he had been, and the dust of him hung magnified and golden in the last of the light and then settled and was only dust.

—

She did not sleep. She lay and listened to the sea working at the bottom of the cliff the way it always worked, patient, taking its time, and she thought of Jago going out into it, and of the Speedwell and her grey flag, and of three drowned men and a mother who reached, and of two terms of drawing and a held place she would never take up, and of the great machine of the war that took and took and had, so far, given her nothing to do but watch.

By morning she had decided. She did not tell her father. She put on her good coat and walked the four miles to the recruiting office over the chemist's in Helston, where a sergeant with a moustache and a cold sat behind a desk under a poster of a girl in air-force blue looking nobly upward, and she said she wanted to join the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, and the sergeant looked at her hands and her stooped neck and her clear, disconcerting eyes and pushed a form across the deal desk and uncapped a pen.

She thought of switchboards. She thought of a hut full of plugs and cords and other girls' chatter, of carrying mugs of tea down a corridor, of typing lists or peeling potatoes for men who flew — of being, after all this watching, merely and blessedly useful, a small cog turning at last in the machine instead of standing on the cliff above it. The loupe was in her pocket. She could feel its weight against her hip, brass and glass, her brother's last joke and last love.

She signed her name where the recruiting sergeant pointed and thought of switchboards and tea-urns, of being merely useful at last; she did not yet know that the Air Force had no intention of putting her anywhere she expected.

The House That Wasn't There

Switchboards, Tamsin had decided, would smell of bakelite and other women's tea — and so she was wholly unprepared for the test that slid a blurred photograph across the desk and asked her, of all things, what was wrong with it.

That came later, in her third week. First there was the blue.

The blue was the first lie the Air Force told her, and she came almost to love it for its honesty about everything else. It was serge the colour of a bruise three days old, scratchy at the collar, two sizes adrift in the shoulders and pinched at the cuff, and it announced to anyone with eyes that you were nobody yet. They issued it from a counter by the armful — tunic, skirt, cap, the great navy knickers the girls christened blackouts before the first night was out — and a corporal with a face like a closed door measured nothing and asked nothing and moved you along. Tamsin came away with a uniform that fitted where it touched and a tin button-stick and the conviction that she had left Pencarrow not by train but by some trick of falling, into a country where her own body was government issue.

The depot itself was a sprawl of huts on flat Midlands ground, all cinders and creosote and a parade square scraped raw by ten thousand boots. There was no sea anywhere. That was the strangeness she could not get past in those first days — that the horizon simply stopped, fenced and flat, and the light came down without the sea to throw it back, so that the whole world looked underexposed. She woke at the bugle in a long hut of thirty iron beds and lay a moment listening for gulls and hearing only a girl two beds down crying very quietly into a folded sleeve, the way you cry when you have already learned it does no good.

Drill broke them and made them. By the left — wait for it — quick march. Corporal Naish had a voice that could strip paint and a gift for finding the one girl in the squad who had got it wrong, which for a fortnight was reliably Tamsin, who could not for her life tell her right foot from her left under instruction though she had walked cliff paths in the dark since she was six. Trevannion, are you with us or are you painting a picture? — and the squad's stifled snort, and her own ears going hot. But the boots learned what the head could not, and there came a morning when thirty pairs of them came down together with a single crack on the wet cinders, and something in her chest lifted at the sound, traitorous and glad.

That was the levelling, and it was the best of it. The Air Force took a duchess's god-daughter and a Bermondsey machinist and a vicar's girl from the Lizard and set them scrubbing the same latrine floor on the same knees, and after a week none of it signified. There was a tall languid creature called Petherick who had been presented at Court and could swear like a stoker; there was Aggie from Salford who could not write her own surname without her tongue between her teeth but who sewed Tamsin's stripes straight when Tamsin's wandered; there was the night the hut pooled its chocolate ration and ate the lot at lights-out and lay sick and laughing in the dark while the orderly officer's torch went past the window and did not stop. Tamsin wrote to her father that she was well and learning to march and could not, somehow, find the words for the rest of it — the queer fierce comfort of being one blue body among many, scoured of everyone's name. She wrote to Jago that the food was a shaky do and the girls were grand and she missed the smell of the boat-shed, and she did not write that at night she sometimes took the brass loupe out from where it lived against her breastbone on its bit of cord and turned it to the window and looked at the depot's single naked bulb through it, the filament leaping suddenly huge and gold, just to have one true small thing magnified and her own.

To find me when I come home, he had said, pressing it on her at the station, the watchmaker's glass that had been their grandfather's, and she had not had the throat to answer him. He was somewhere on the grey Atlantic now with the convoys. She did not look at the loupe long.

She was braced, all that while, for the switchboard. Everyone knew where the WAAF went — the plotting tables and the teleprinters and the great hot rooms full of cables, or the cookhouse, or the stores. Useful. Invisible. She had made her peace with it on the train south; had decided that to be merely useful, after a childhood of being the vicar's odd girl with the unsettling stare, would be a kind of mercy. She practised in her head the patience it would take. She did not expect to be looked at twice.

Then came the test.

They were marched in batches into a chill schoolroom hut and sat at desks with a pencil and a buff folder each and told not to turn the cover until the word. A flight officer with steel spectacles and a clipboard walked the rows. The word came. Inside were pictures.

Not sums, though there were a few of those — strings of numbers with one gone wrong, a shape that ought to come next in a row of shapes. Mostly pictures. Two drawings of the same crowded street, near enough identical, and the instruction: mark every difference. A photograph of a wood from very high up, grainy and grey, and: how many roads enter this wood? A picture of a field that was only a field until you held it at the right tilt and saw the long faint bones of something old beneath the plough, and: describe anything unusual. And the last, the one she would think of afterwards as the one that did it: a blurred grey photograph, smudged and poorly fixed, of nothing she could name — and beneath it, in plain type, What is wrong with this image?

Around her, pencils stalled. Petherick, two desks over, was chewing hers and frowning at the wood as though it had insulted her. Tamsin's hand had already moved.

It was not cleverness. That was the thing she could never afterwards explain, not to Strang, not to anyone. She did not reason it out. The pictures spoke to her the way the cliff face spoke, the way the sea did — a wrongness pricking at the edge of sight before the mind had any business naming it. The street: she ringed eleven differences in the time the rest found four, the shifted shadow under an awning, the cart with one wheel too many, a window shuttered in one and open in the other. The wood: three roads where two were obvious and the third only a paleness in the canopy where men had once dragged something heavy through. The field: a building stood here once — you can read it under the corn, square, with a yard. And the blurred grey nothing — she sat with it a moment, turning her head a half-inch the way her father turned his to find the hour in the churchyard, and saw it.

The shadows fall two ways, she wrote. The light here, and the light there, and they don't agree. It's two pictures made one. Somebody's joined them and hoped no one would look.

She had no notion it was the right answer. She had no notion there was such a thing as the right answer. She handed in the folder and went to scrub a floor and forgot it, the way you forget a dream that frightened you pleasantly, and three days passed, and on the fourth a runner found her at potato-bashing with her sleeves rolled and her hands grey to the wrist, and said the flight officer wanted her, and would she come now.

The room was small and the blackout was up though it was full afternoon, and a single lamp burned on a deal table. The flight officer with the steel spectacles sat behind it. There was a second chair on Tamsin's side and a buff form squared off on the wood between them, and nothing else, and the bareness of it set her heart going before a word was said.

"Sit down, Trevannion." Not unkind. Not anything. "You did unusually well on the selection. Unusually." A pause in which Tamsin understood she was being looked at properly for the first time since Pencarrow, and held still under it. "I'm not at liberty to tell you what for. I'm going to ask you to sign something first, and I want you to listen to me while you read it, because once you've signed it, it doesn't end. Do you understand? Most things in the Service, you can leave behind you. This one you carry to your grave."

She slid the form across. Tamsin read the heading. Official Secrets Act. The print below swam a little.

"I'll tell you plainly what it means," the officer said, and now she leaned forward and the lamp threw her spectacles to two blank coins of light, "because the words don't, not really. It means that whatever you are about to do — and I can't yet say what that is — you will never speak of it. Not while the war is on. Not after. Not to your mother." A beat. "Not to your priest in the box, if you keep one. Not to the man you marry, lying beside him in the dark forty years from now when the war is a thing in books. You will let them think you spent it answering telephones. And you will go on letting them think it, and go on not telling them, every day, for the rest of your life. There is no later when this is lifted. There is no one you may safely tell. Is that clear?"

The lamp hissed. Somewhere outside a squad was being marched and the corporal's bark came faint through the blacked-out glass. Tamsin thought, absurdly, of her father in his study, of the Sunday he had preached on Thomas who would not believe unless he saw and put his hand in the wound — and our Lord did not rebuke him for it, mind, but met him where he stood. She thought: I am about to put my name to a thing my father will never be allowed to put his hand in. She thought of her mother, who could not be told anything now, ever, being five years drowned. The list the officer made — mother, priest, husband — and at the head of it, unspoken, the dead.

"It's clear," she said.

"Then read it. Properly. I'll wait."

She read it properly, every clause of it, while the officer sat with her hands folded and did not hurry her, and that small courtesy frightened Tamsin more than any bark of Naish's, because it told her the thing was real and grown-up and would cost. Then she took the pen, and saw that her hand was steady — that, at least, would not betray her — and signed Thomasina Mary Trevannion in the long upright hand her father had taught her, and felt nothing change in the room at all, and understood that this was how the largest doors opened: without a sound.

The officer blotted the signature and stood. "You'll have a travel warrant by this evening. Pack your kit. You leave in the morning." And, at the door, almost as an afterthought, in a voice gone suddenly human: "It's good work, Trevannion. The best there is. I'd give a great deal to be going where you're going." Then the door, and the corridor, and the ordinary blue afternoon that knew nothing.

The warrant, when it came, told her nothing either. She had expected a place on it — a station, a town, some plain English word she could carry south. There was none. Where the destination should have been a clerk had written, in a careful copperplate, a string of letters and numbers that meant nothing to her and, she suspected, were meant not to. Proceed as directed. A railway transport officer at the junction read it, looked at her without curiosity, and pointed her at a platform she had not known was there.

So began the journey to nowhere. A main-line train south through a country shorn of its signposts — every station name painted out, every fingerpost gone, the whole island gone deliberately blind so the enemy might not find his way across it — and Tamsin pressed to the window reading the land instead, the way she could not help reading anything: a chalk scar here, a spire there, the bend of a river, building a map in her head of where she might be while the map of the world withheld itself. She changed at a town she could not name onto a branch line, two carriages and a tank engine that fussed along between high hedges into the folding green of hills she did not know, beech-hung and secret. The light went long and gold and then began to fail.

The train stopped where there was no station. Just a halt — a single short platform, no name, no lamp lit yet, a fence and a gate and beyond the gate a closed truck waiting, khaki, with its canvas down. Two other girls in new blue got down with her, as lost as she was; they looked at one another and did not speak, because what was there to say that the Act had not already forbidden. An aircraftman with a clipboard checked their warrants against a list and said nothing about any house, any unit, any name. He handed them up into the back of the truck, and Tamsin saw as she climbed that the windows had been painted over, black, inside and out, so that you might be carried anywhere and never see it, and a small cold thrill went through her that was not quite fear and not quite the old prickle of the cliff edge.

They jolted along lanes she could not see. The other two girls held their kitbags on their knees in the dark. One of them, very young, whispered, "Where are we going?" and no one answered her, and Tamsin found her own hand had crept to the loupe under her tunic and closed round it, the small worn brass warm from her body, the one true thing she had left to find her way by.

The truck's painted windows let in nothing but a smear of dusk, and then a gate, and then a house too big for the dark to finish — and a corporal saying, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, "Welcome to a place that isn't here, miss. Mind you never say its name."