Doctor Who_ The Turing Test Part 11

It was in this situation that I met Daria. Like Turing's first meeting with the Doctor, it happened in Oxford but on a very different day. It was June or early July not long after the D day landings. Rain was sluicing down, and the air was warm and murky. I had gone home to my family for a weekend, with reluctance because of the feelings this always brought to the surface. I was out walking in the rain, without an umbrella, because, after a strained lunch with my wife and children, I couldn't stand it any longer.

I saw Daria looking at the window of a second-hand bookshop. She had a scarf that fluttered in the wind like a grey flag, and a hat like an inverted saucer. Her long coat blew against her legs, and she was wearing high-heeled shoes. Her lines were perfect: she could have been designed, complete with her clothes, an artefact from the decade before the war.

I walked up to her, and pretended to admire the books, though in fact the shop didn't interest me, being a repository of ancient Victorian fiction in tatty editions.

It was she who spoke first. 'I have seen your picture,' she said. 'You are the novelist.'

Her accent interested me at once, being like no single European accent I knew. It was as if the tilt and slant on every letter had been taken and averaged by a machine. Her syllables were precise, well considered.

I confessed to being the novelist, and told her about the play and the film. She looked at me with hooded black eyes and a face that wore a lot of make-up but no expression. 'And where have you been writing your novels most recently, Mr Greene?'

I smiled into that perfect, designed face. 'Colonial police.'

'Yes. I thought that your sun tan might be tropical.'

I hadn't thought I still had a 'sun tan', but I nodded.

'And you are...?' I asked.

'Looking for someone.' She said it with a smile of the sort that indicated I might be the fortunate someone she was seeking. I wasn't fooled, knowing such smiles for what they are.

'I'm just looking for something,' I replied.

She nodded. 'Let's have a drink.'

Daria knew the barman in a small redbrick pub along a side street, and the barman had an old bottle of rum, refilled many times (or so he boasted) from navy rations obtained by his nephew in Plymouth. Daria affected a Continental disdain for his bar chatter, but I could see he wouldn't get that bottle of rum out for just anyone he was fascinated by her. Almost as fascinated as I.

At that first meeting we discussed books. She was well read and intelligent she was familiar with Pound and Walter de la Mare, but had also read J.M. Barrie and C.S. Lewis as well as his well-known religious essay 'The Allegory of Love', she was familiar with 'Out of the Silent Planet', a science-fiction story he has written of which I was quite unaware. We discussed Lewis's views on Christianity. I asked Daria if she was a Catholic, but she shook her head. As she did so a curl escaped from the formed ma.s.s of her hair, a small beckoning motion that made her seem more human. We didn't touch. I admired her lines as if she were a sculpture, and she accepted my admiration with just the trace of a smile.

We met again in London the following week, in a cellar bar, and talked of travelling. Daria spoke about Paris as if she knew it well, and we looked forward to its liberation. 'You must meet me there,' she said. In return, I told her about Africa, and Mexico, and my other journeys. She listened with an air of total absorption, as if she were recording every word on a tape.

When I came to an end of my narrative, she asked, 'What's the strangest thing that ever happened to you?'

I hesitated, thinking about it, turning over various ideas in my mind. It was late: we were in one of those cellar bars so popular in London during the war, where business could carry on under the threat of air raids, and lights could be bright without breaking the blackout regulations. Here, however, the lights were dim, the lamps dressed with small pink shades to give a romantic ambience. There was even some brandy on the table in front of us another of Daria's discoveries. Other couples were leaving, perhaps for bed: I couldn't help looking at the women and comparing them to Daria. Even the slimmest had a greater solidity than she, a fles.h.i.+ness and reality that she could never possess. I was afraid to touch her, afraid that I would feel only metal and gla.s.s.

'Graham?'

I had been staring: I apologised.

'The strangest thing...?' she prompted again.

'The Doctor, I suppose,' I said. I felt a tightening in my stomach muscles as I spoke: I suppose you could call it a gut instinct, a sense that I had done the wrong thing.

Daria, however, showed no particular interest. 'Which doctor?' she asked.

I explained him: his lack of a name, his mysterious appearance, his obsession with what I described as a 'minor border incident' in Africa.

'What incident?'

'There was a light in the sky something that scared the locals. The French across the border thought we were testing a new weapon, and the Germans sent an SS squad in I can't think why. I met them in D'nalyel. They terrified me. I suppose I was lucky they didn't kill me. Afterwards the Doctor insisted there was something else to it something ' I shrugged 'mystical, I suppose.'

She nodded. 'And do you think there was?'

'No.' I said it without hesitation: it was easy to be rational, three thousand miles away and over a year later. 'I don't know what the natives saw. Maybe it was a weapon. There have been rumours about the Germans.'

'Super-rockets. I have heard of those too. But you said the Doctor was the strange thing.'

I smiled. 'I don't know why I said that. He was an odd man an ageing fop, stranded in Africa, in a prison cell, with no papers. He co-opted me, in a way. I got him out of prison, got him some ID, got him back to England. I shouldn't have done it I had no proof he wasn't working for the Germans. I just believed him it was almost a religious thing, as if I had to. "The Good Lord's Light in his eyes", and so on.'

Daria laughed. It was unexpected, as if the Venus de Milo Venus de Milo had smiled. 'He went back to England, then?' had smiled. 'He went back to England, then?'

'I don't know. I saw him on to the liner. I never heard from him again.'

'You will,' she said. 'He is the sort of man who returns to haunt you.'

I laughed too. 'I have a feeling that you may be right.' But I didn't believe her.

Soon after that, she went home insisted on walking alone. I should have been disappointed; I should have wanted her to come home with me. I did feel a frustration, but it was without either the tenderness or the rawness of pa.s.sion: it was the frustration of the man who cannot buy the objet d'art objet d'art he would like to possess, or cannot afford the suit he would like to wear. Daria was a woman: but I didn't feel as I should towards a woman. My senses were telling me the truth, but it was a truth I couldn't believe. he would like to possess, or cannot afford the suit he would like to wear. Daria was a woman: but I didn't feel as I should towards a woman. My senses were telling me the truth, but it was a truth I couldn't believe.

When we next met once again in Oxford the talk turned, quite early in the evening, to emotional matters. I told her about my wife and my mistress. I tried to express the rawness of the conflict. Daria listened, as always, as if making a recording, without comment or sympathy.

'You do understand love?' I asked at one point, when she seemed particularly unresponsive.

She nodded. 'The need to make babies is very powerful.'

I was astonished and angry. Her metallic detachment was beginning to seem unnatural. 'It's not just making babies! I've made mine, but I still need '

'But your mistress you say has not made her babies. This is where the pa.s.sion and suffering start also perhaps your guilt.'

I looked at her. She was serious, I think. Her expression was contemplative, her eyes watching me.

'What Dorothy feels, and what I feel, and what my wife feels has very little to do with "making babies". s.e.xual relations.h.i.+ps have a spiritual aspect '

'You are sure of that? Is that why you are trying to get into bed with me do you think I'm a spirit?'

I tried to laugh, but the sound died like a fire smothered with too much coal. 'I think you're an ' I was going to say 'attractive woman' but stopped and decided to be honest. 'I'm not sure I want to go to bed with you.'

'Good,' she said. 'You wouldn't enjoy it. Others haven't.'

I looked in her face for a trace of the hurt that might drive such a bare statement, but I could see nothing other than that recording, weighing intelligence.

'What do you do?' I asked her.

She smiled. 'I have told you before, but you didn't listen then and you're not listening now.' She made a dramatic pause, with the perfect timing of a professional actress. 'I am looking for someone.'

'That can't be what you do all the time.'

'It's what I am, Graham. The woman who is looking for someone.'

'What happens if you find him?'

'I'll have to be someone else. Or nothing at all.'

I misunderstood her meaning. I didn't think she was literally looking for anyone, s.e.xually or otherwise: I thought she was talking in metaphor. Expressing, perhaps, a spiritual longing. My mistake was to cost a great deal.

Two months pa.s.sed, and I didn't hear from Daria, though she had my London address. The telephone number she'd given me was never answered, and the address was a bomb site. I thought that she might have been killed this was the time of the V 1s and V 2s, of unpredictable death. My boss at Military Intelligence, Kim Philby, suggested an alternative that she might have been working for someone, trying to turn me or recruit me.

'The Russians?' I hazarded.

He smiled. 'Why the Russians? She sounds Bulgarian to me.'

We both laughed: the ineptness of the Bulgarian Service was famous. He offered to trace her using the Service, but I refused: he may have done it anyway. I heard nothing more about it. I attempted to forget about Daria, with some success, though I would see the line, the form of her in cars from the previous decade, in the architecture of a tube station or the Hammersmith Odeon. She would appear as part of the design, formed by the other lines, and then the perspective would change and I would see it was just an illusion, an ordinary woman. In those hidden moments in the last year of the war I came to appreciate some of the glamour and obsession that surrounded things that were, or claimed to be, beyond the merely human.

Then three things happened at once. Philby received news of the new, bizarre code from Dresden that the people at Bletchley couldn't break. The Doctor turned up, again in prison, involved with Turing and the Dresden code, and asking for me. And on the same day, a note arrived from Daria, recalling our conversations about travel, and asking me to meet her in liberated Paris.

Chapter Thirteen.

I first went to Cromerton in Surrey, where they were holding the Doctor. It was a war-built compound: low whitewashed concrete buildings surrounded by high fences. There was barbed wire by the mile, and an air of tense efficiency. A red-andblack notice told me this was a top-security establishment.

Inside, it was no more or less than a prison. Miles of dark linoleum, windows with black roller blinds permanently drawn. I found the Doctor in a small cell with no window and no radiator. It was cold, but otherwise very like his cell in Sierra Leone. It too smelled of bad food and stale urine. The Doctor was wearing a green velvet jacket over his white s.h.i.+rt, and his shoes had been removed, but otherwise he was dressed as he had been the last time I had seen him, and his hair was just as long, as foppish and inappropriate in England as it had been in Africa.

'I see that your dress sense hasn't improved,' I told him.

He grinned. 'Not in a hundred years! I've been wearing clothes like these whenever I can for as long as I can remember. Just say they're a part of me. Now, what can I do for you?'

'I think it's more a case of what I can do for you.'

He stared at me. 'What do you think? Let me find them. I couldn't get back into Germany, and then there was something else I needed to take care of: I've lost a great deal of time already.'

I had expected something of the sort, and had an answer ready. 'It's not that simple. You must be aware of '

'You didn't tell me they sang.'

It was true: I hadn't. I'd a.s.sumed that he was the expert, that he would know.

'You never asked me, I said.

He nodded. 'I wouldn't have known what it meant. Turing didn't, even after he heard it on the recording. But I know.' He looked up. 'You are going to let me out of here?' His expression was rather like that of a cat begging for food.

'It depends what you're going to do. At the moment you're under arrest for treason.' I resisted the temptation to add, 'again'.

'Hmm.' He appeared to be considering the problem, as if it were of a scientific nature and subject to a rational solution.

'Perhaps if you could tell me why you're so interested in this German code?'

'Oh, for heaven's sake! It's not German, and I'm not interested in the code. I'm interested in the makers of the code, who are the same people you met in Africa but they're wearing German uniforms, or possibly other uniforms, by now, but most likely German because that's where they are, and we need to find out who and how and why they're here and what to do about it and we'll have to do it soon because they're sending that message to someone, aren't they? And they've got a reason for doing it and they may be expecting a reply or even a visit, so now will you let me out of here out of here?'

He finished the speech with his hands on my shoulders and his face about three inches from mine.

'This isn't Africa, Doctor. As you've discovered, you can't just sneak across the border here. Nor can I spring suspicious bodies from prison without the necessary authority.'

I knew this was lame reasoning and the Doctor gave me a look to show he was aware of its crippled state.

In an attempt to heal it, I added, 'I'm leaving the Service officially, I've left.' It wasn't quite true: Philby had refused to accept my resignation. But I was determined to escape as soon as possible, nonetheless.

The Doctor remained silent.

'All right. I have to go to Paris. There's a woman '

He laughed, then. Laughed and laughed and laughed. Then sobered up, very quickly, as if he had thought of something. 'This woman,' he said. 'What is she like?'

I hesitated, then told him. Before I had half finished, he said, 'And you never noticed?'

'Noticed what?' But I knew, from the expression on his face. It should have been obvious was obvious. But I hadn't noticed. No wonder I had been afraid to touch her. The melted remains at Markebo returned to my mind, the screams of the SS men, the bloodless trail in the bushes. The prison cell felt chillier: I felt a claustrophobic fear, looking at the bare brick walls.

'I think I should come to Paris with you,' said the Doctor.

I shrugged. 'All right, I'll let you out. But if there's to be any chance of getting you overseas I'll have to think of a d.a.m.n good excuse.'

He said nothing. I turned and faced away from him, looking at the blank door of the cell. 'Listen,' I said. 'You were a pupil of the German mathematician, David Hilbert. An English colonial Canada, perhaps?' I looked at him for a moment. 'Mmm no, Indian Civil Service. Turing's father was ICS. So you lost your pa.s.sport when you had to leave Germany abruptly at the outbreak of war and have found it difficult ever since. You knew of Turing's work and guessed that he would be working on secret codes. You wanted to help him because you haven't been able to help against Hitler in any other way and thought your German mathematical training might help. Do you understand?'

'Perfectly. And a very good lot of nonsense it is, too. I can see why you're a fine novelist.'

I turned to face him. 'This isn't a game, Doctor. I'm an author, but I'm also a secret agent. I think it's a farce, most of the time, but people keep getting killed. That's not funny.'

'It isn't,' he agreed. He stared at the dirty floor of the cell, his face full of shadows. 'It's called war. And we might be fighting more than one of them.'

I didn't know whether he meant more than one enemy, or more than one war. I didn't think to ask.

By the time I reported back to Philby, I had thought of some more lies to go with the first one.

'I think the best thing would be to take the Doctor to Paris,' I told him. 'If he's working for the Germans or anyone else there's a good chance he'll try to get in touch, or even get away. If he isn't or if he's come over to our side he'll be just as much use there as here, and I can keep him away from anything he doesn't need to know about.'