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Enigma

Enigma

Titel: Enigma Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Robert Harris
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female sex—women driving lorries, women in trousers, women drinking and smoking in public houses unaccompanied by their husbands, women neglecting their children and their homes. 'As a jewel of gold in a swine's mouth, so is a fair woman which is without discretion.' (Proverbs ll.xxii).
    If only it were true! she thought. If only women had usurped authority over men! The Brylcreemed figure of Miles Mermagen, her head of section, rose greasily before her inner eye. 'My dear Hester, a transfer at the present moment is really quite out of the question.' He had been a manager at Barclays Bank before the war and liked to come up behind the girls as they worked and massage their shoulders. At the Hut 6 Christmas Party he had manoeuvred her under the mistletoe and clumsily taken off her glasses. ('Thank you, Miles,' she'd said, trying miserably to make a joke of it, 'without my spectacles you too look almost tolerably attractive . . .') His lips on hers were unpleasantly moist, like the underside of a mollusc, and tasted of sweet sherry.
    Claire, of course, had known immediately what to do.
    'Oh, darling, poor you, and I suppose he's got a wife?'
    'He says they were married too young.'
    'Well, she's your answer. Tell him you think it's only fair you go and have a talk with her first. Tell him you want to be her friend.'
    'But what if he says yes?'
    'Oh, God! Then I suppose you'll just have to kick him in the balls.'
    Hester smiled at the memory. She shifted her position in the bed again and the cotton sheet rode up and corrugated beneath her. It was quite hopeless. She reached out and switched on the little bedside lamp, fumbling around its base for her glasses.
    Ich lerne deutsch, ich lernte deutsch, ich habe deutsch gelernt. . .
    German, she thought: German would be her salvation. A working knowledge of written German would lift her out of the grind of the Intercept Control Room, away from the clammy embrace of Miles Mermagen, and propel her into the rarefied air of the Machine Room, where the real work was done—where she should have been put in the first place.
    She propped herself up in bed and tried to focus on Abelman's German Primer. Ten minutes of this was usually quite enough to send her off to sleep.
    'Intransitive verbs showing a change of place or condition take the auxiliary sein instead of haben in the compound tenses
    She looked up. Was that a noise downstairs?
    'In subordinate word order the auxiliary must stand last, directly after the past participle or the infinitive
    And there it was again.
    She slipped her warm feet into her cold outdoor shoes, wrapped a woollen shawl about her shoulders, and went out onto the landing.
    A knocking sound was coming from the kitchen.
    She began to descend the stairs.
    There had been two men waiting for her when she arrived back from church. One had been standing on the doorstep, the other had emerged casually from the back of the cottage. The first man was young and blond with a languid, aristocratic manner and a kind of decadent Anglo-Saxon handsomeness. His companion was older, smaller, slim and dark, with a northern accent. They both had Bletchley Park passes and said they'd come from Welfare and were looking for Miss Romilly. She hadn't turned up for work: any idea where she might be?
    Hester had said she hadn't. The older man had gone upstairs and had spent a long time searching around. The blond, meanwhile—she never caught his name -had sprawled on the sofa and asked a lot of questions. There was something offensively patronising about him, for all his good manners. This is what Miles Mermagen would be like, she found herself thinking, if he'd had five thousand pounds' worth of private education. What was Claire like? Who were her friends? Who were the men in her life? Had anyone been asking after her? She mentioned Jericho's visit of the previous night and he made a note of it with a gold propelling pencil. She almost blurted out the story of Jericho's peculiar approach in the churchyard ('ADU, Miss Wallace . . .') but by this time she had taken so strongly against the blond man's manner she bit back the words.
    Knock, knock, knock from the kitchen . . .
    Hester took the poker that stood beside the sitting-room fireplace and slowly opened the kitchen door.
    It was like stepping into a refrigerator. The window was banging in the wind. It must have been open for hours.
    At first she felt relieved, but that lasted only until she tried to close it. Then she

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