Evelyn, he never tired of telling her. Which was why he had insisted on throwing a lavish party to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary.
Watching her brother emerge from the marquee along with Kit, the pair of them still laughing over something, Evelyn thought what a shame it was that Edmund and his wife, Hope, hadn’t had a child of their own. Of course, he was utterly devoted to Annelise, their adopted daughter, but he had once confided in Evelyn that he would have loved a house teeming with boisterous children. ‘That’s so typical of a man,’ she had gently chided him, ‘not thinking of the actual work involved in caring for a brood of children. Not to say the pain of giving birth to them!’
One or two very quiet well-behaved children might have suited Hope, but a rowdy houseful would have been torture for her. Evelyn had long since come to the conclusion that while Hope, a prolific children’s author, wrote so imaginatively for her audience, almost as though she were a child herself and inhabited the world she created for them on the page, she didn’t enjoy their company very much. She found them exhausting to be around, always preferring to escape to her study where she could pour her energy into her work.
Evelyn meant no criticism of her sister-in-law in believing this, it was merely an observation. Hope was also Kit’s sister and they had been friends since they were children themselves, so there wasn’t much they didn’t know about each other. Their being married to each other’s siblings had a satisfying sense of symmetry to it, and perhaps a sense of rightness, of how it was always meant to be.
She went over to the fridge for a bottle of milk and after filling a jug, her eye caught on that day’s copy of The Times on the kitchen table. Neatly folded, it was where she had left it at breakfast that morning, the cryptic crossword only half completed. Time was she would have done it in the blink of an eye. It was her ability to do this, coupled with her love of mathematics, which was what she had studied at Oxford, that led her to do the work she had during the war.
Nobody in the family, or her current circle of friends, had ever known exactly what she did, and because she had signed the Official Secrets Act, it had to stay that way. She told people then, and even now, that it was clerical work for the Ministry of Defence she had been assigned to do, that it was all a bit hush-hush. ‘I was nothing but a glorified paper-pusher,’ she would explain to anyone who asked what she did. ‘Utterly boring, but it was essential to keep the wheels running for the war effort.’
Like many of those she worked with at Bletchley Park, her recruitment had come by way of an old college tutor. Out of the blue she had received an invitation from Dr Goulding to meet up for a drink and a chat. Several days after seeing him in Oxford, she received a letter requesting her to attend an interview in London. She was happy enough teaching at the village school, but sensing an opportunity to be free of the drudgery of looking after her ungrateful and ill-tempered mother, and to give Kit time to adjust to the direction in which his own life had gone, she leapt at the chance to escape. Within the week, and leaving her furious mother in the capable hands of a nurse, she arrived at Bletchley Park and started work as a decoder in Hut 5. It was the most satisfying work she had ever done, the most exhausting as well.
She had a feeling that Romily had guessed that she was doing a lot more than mere clerical work, because she once asked if Evelyn had ever come across an old chum of hers called Max Blythe-Jones. In fact, Evelyn knew Max well, but all she said to Romily was that the name rang a bell. As for everyone else, they took her at her word, that it was tedious filing she mostly did.
She still missed those days at Bletchley. She missed the camaraderie and the knowledge that she was doing something vital. Marriage and motherhood, and a return to teaching, had been life-changing and rewarding, but it wasn’t the same as being part of a close-knit team put together to decode ciphers and save lives.