Enigma

twisted in his hand, then swiftly turned to ash.
    Gradually his days acquired a shape.
    He would rise early and work for two or three hours. Not at cryptanalysis—he burned all that on the day he burned her card—but at pure mathematics. Then he would take a nap. He would fill in The Times crossword before lunch, timing himself on his father's old pocket watch—it never took him more than five minutes to complete it, and once he finished it in three minutes forty. He managed to solve a series of complex chess problems—'the hymn tunes of mathematics', as G.H. Hardy called them—without using pieces or a board. All this reassured him his brain had not been permanently impaired.
    After the crossword and the chess he would skim through the war news while trying to eat something at his desk. He tried to avoid the Battle of the Atlantic (DEAD MEN AT THE OARS: U-BOAT VICTIMS FROZEN IN LIFEBOATS) and concentrated instead on the Russian Front: Pavlograd, Demiansk, Rzhev . . . the Soviets seemed to recapture a new town every few hours and he was amused to find The Times reporting Red Army Day as respectfully as if it were the King's Birthday.
    In the afternoon he would walk, a little further on each occasion—at first confining himself to the college grounds, then strolling through the empty town, and finally venturing into the frozen countryside—before returning as the light faded to sit by the gas fire and read his Sherlock Holmes. He began to go into Hall for dinner, although he declined politely the Provost's offer of a place at High Table. The food was as bad as at Bletchley, but the surroundings were better, the candlelight flickering on the heavy-framed portraits and gleaming on the long tables of polished oak. He learned to ignore the frankly curious stares of the college staff. Attempts at conversation he cut off with a nod. He didn't mind being solitary. Solitude had been his life. An only child, a stepchild, a 'gifted' child -always there had been something to set him apart. At one time he couldn't speak about his work because hardly anyone would understand him. Now he couldn't speak of it because it was classified. It was all the same.
    By the end of his second week he had actually started to sleep through the night, a feat he hadn't managed for more than two years.
    Shark, Enigma, kiss, bombe, break, pinch, drop, crib—all the weird vocabulary of his secret life he slowly succeeded in erasing from his conscious mind. To his astonishment, even Claire's image became diffuse. There were still vivid flashes of memory, especially at night—the lemony smell of newly washed hair, the wide grey eyes as pale as water, the soft voice half amused, half bored—but increasingly the parts failed to cohere. The whole was vanishing.
    He wrote to his mother and persuaded her not to visit him.
    'Nurse Time,' the doctor had said, snapping shut his bag of tricks, 'that's who'll cure you. Mr Jericho. Nurse Time.'
    Rather to Jericho's surprise it seemed that the old boy was right. He was going to be well again. 'Nervous exhaustion' or whatever they called it was not the same as madness after all.
    And then, without warning, on Friday 12 March, they came for him.
    The night before it happened he had overheard an elderly don complaining about a new air base the Americans were building to the east of the city.
    'I said to them, you do realise you're standing on a fossil site of the Pleistocene era? That I myself have removed from here the horncores of Bos primigenius? D'you know, the fellow merely laughed. . .'
    Good for the Yanks, thought Jericho, and he decided there and then it would make a suitable destination for his afternoon walk. Because it would take him at least three miles further than he had attempted so far, he left earlier than usual, straight after lunch.
    He strode briskly along the Backs, past the Wren Library and the icing sugar towers of St John's, past the sports field in which two dozen little boys in purple shirts were playing football, and then turned left, trudging beside the Madingley Road. After ten minutes he was in open country.
    Kite had gloomily predicted snow, but although it was still cold it was sunny and the sky was a glory—a pure blue dome above the flat landscape of East Anglia, filled for miles with the silver specks of aircraft and the white scratches of contrails. Before the war he had cycled through this quiet countryside almost every week and had barely seen a car. Now an endless