The Village Dance

The dance was held in the church hall because the village pub had lost its roof to a gas leak in February and nobody had gotten around to fixing it. Evelyn arrived late, which she always did, because late arrivals were unremarkable and she had learned, over eighteen months at Bletchley, to be unremarkable.

She worked at Station X. That was all she could say to anyone, and she'd learned not to say even that — if you admitted to a station you'd have to explain what a station was, and then you were a sentence away from something you weren't allowed to speak aloud until the war ended, if it ended, if you lived to see it.

So she told people she was a secretary for the Foreign Office, which was close enough to the shape of true that she could say it without her face changing.

The hall smelled of cigarette smoke and wood polish and the particular anxious energy of young people who knew some of them wouldn't make it to the next dance. An American soldier asked her to dance before she'd finished hanging up her coat.

"I don't know this one," she said, because the band had lurched into something with a syncopated rhythm she didn't recognise.

"Neither do I," he said. "I just wanted an excuse."

His name was Thomas Hale. He was from Ohio, which he pronounced Oh-HI-oh with the emphasis that made it sound like a greeting, and he had the kind of face that looked like it had smiled a lot before the war and was working hard to remember how. He was stationed twelve miles east — she didn't ask for what purpose, and he didn't ask why she wouldn't say what she did for the Foreign Office. That mutual discretion was its own kind of intimacy.

They danced badly through three songs and stood outside in the cold for a fourth while he smoked a cigarette he didn't really want and told her about his mother's garden in Columbus.

"Peonies," he said. "She grows peonies. I didn't know that meant anything until I got here and there were no flowers anywhere."

Evelyn thought of the grounds at Bletchley — the lake, the lawns they weren't supposed to cross. She thought of the huts with their blackout curtains, the women hunched over their sheets of intercepted text in the blue light of electric bulbs. She thought of the thing she did every day that she could never explain, that was winning the war in ways that would not be written down for decades.

She looked at Thomas Hale and thought: I will not be able to tell you anything real about myself, and you're shipping out in two weeks.

"Give me your address," she said. "I'll write."

He looked surprised. "You don't know me."

"I know you like peonies. That's enough."

He laughed — really laughed, for the first time all evening, and it changed his face back into the one he'd had before the war. He wrote his APO address on the back of a cigarette card and pressed it into her hand.

"I'm terrible at writing letters," he said.

"You'll get better," she said. "There's nothing else to do in France."

She walked home alone through the blackout and told herself it was nothing. He was a stranger. He'd be gone in a fortnight. She had more important things to carry.

She kept his card in the pocket of her cardigan for the next eleven days.