Enigma

for everyone to take a meal-break. The cryptanalysts went off when they liked, depending on the stage they'd reached in their work. The Decoding Room girls and the clerks in the Registration and Catalogue rooms had to leave according to a rota so that the hut was never caught short-staffed.
    Jericho didn't notice the drift of people towards the door. He had both elbows on the table and was leaning over the cryptograms, his knuckles pressed to his temples. His mind was eidetic—that is to say, it could hold and retrieve images with photographic accuracy, be they mid-game positions in chess, crossword puzzles or enciphered German naval signals—and he was working with his eyes closed.
    ' “Below the thunders of the upper deep,”' intoned a muffled voice behind him, '“Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,/His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep . . .”'
    '“. . . The Kraken sleepeth.'” Jericho finished the quotation and turned to find Atwood pulling on a purple balaclava. 'Coleridge?'
    'Coleridge?' Atwood's face abruptly emerged wearing an expression of outrage. 'Coleridge? It's Tennyson, you barbarian. We wondered whether you'd care to join us for refreshment.'
    Jericho was about to refuse, but decided that would be rude. In any case, he was hungry. He'd eaten nothing except toast and jam for twelve hours.
    'That's kind. Thank you.'
    He followed Atwood, Pinker and a couple of the others along the length of the hut and out into the night. At some stage while he'd been lost in the cryptograms it must have rained and the air was still moist. Along the road to the right he could hear people moving in the shadows. The beams of torches glistened on the wet tarmac. Atwood conducted them past the mansion and the arboretum and through the main gate. Discussing work outside the hut was forbidden and Atwood, purely to annoy Pinker, was declaiming on the suicide of Virginia Woolf, which he held to be the greatest day for English letters since the invention of the printing press.
    'I c-c-can't believe you mmm-mmm-mmm . . .' When Pinker snagged himself on a word, his whole body seemed to shake with the effort of trying to get himself free. Above his bow-tie, his face bloomed scarlet in the torchlight. They stopped and waited patiently for him. 'Mmm-mmm . . .'
    'Mean that?' suggested Atwood.
    'Mean that, Frank,' gasped Pinker with relief. 'Thank you.'
    Someone came to Atwood's support, and then Pinker's shrill voice started to argue again. They moved off. Jericho lagged behind.
    The canteen, which lay just behind the perimeter fence, was as big as an aircraft hangar, brightly lit and thunderously noisy, with perhaps five or six hundred people sitting down to eat or queuing for food.
    One of the new cryptanalysts shouted to Jericho: 'I bet you've missed this!' Jericho smiled and was about to say something in return but the young man went off to collect a tray. The din was dreadful, and so was the smell—a blended steam of institutional food, of cabbage and boiled fish and custard, laced with cigarette smoke and damp clothes. Jericho felt simultaneously intimidated by it and detached from it, like a prisoner returning from solitary confinement, or a patient from an isolation ward released on to the street after a long illness.
    He queued and didn't pay much attention to the food being slopped on his plate. It was only after he had handed over his two shillings and sat down that he took a good look at it—boiled potatoes in a curdled yellow grease and a slab of something ribbed and grey. He stabbed at the lump with his fork, then lifted a fragment cautiously to his mouth. It tasted like fishy liver, like congealed cod liver oil. He winced.
    'This is perfectly vile.'
    Atwood said, through a full mouth: 'It's whale meat.'
    'Good heavens.' Jericho put his fork down hurriedly.
    'Don't waste it, dear boy. Don't you know there's a war on? Pass it over.'
    Jericho pushed the plate across the table and tried to swill the taste away with the milk-water coffee.
    The pudding was some kind of fruit tart, and that was better, or, rather, it tasted of nothing more noxious than cardboard, but halfway through it, Jericho's wavering appetite finally died. Atwood was now giving them his opinion of Gielgud's interpretation of Hamlet, spraying the table in the process with particles of whale, and at that point Jericho decided he'd had enough. He took the leftovers that Atwood didn't want and scraped them into a milk churn labelled 'PIG