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I didn’t go to Cambridge, in the end. I always thought I would, but when the time came to make applications and attend interviews, I couldn’t help but think of that Christmas in Cambridge. And I didn’t think it would be sensible to try to revisit the past.
That was partly because of how it ended with Alexander, of course. It was also because Daisy wouldn’t be coming with me.
It was the oddest feeling, realising that we wouldn’t be together any more. The Detective Society had been the most important part of my life for five years, even as we grew up to realise quite how peculiar it had been for us to be gifted quite so many horrible deaths to investigate at such a young age. In the end, the Society was all about Daisy and me, and our secrets.
I can vividly remember Daisy’s face on the day she realised that I hadn’t understood anything about who Daisy Wells would be, as a grown up. That all her plans for us to live together and solve mysteries had just been something one says, as a schoolgirl, and that she would grow out of that.
“But, I’m going to be presented,” she said, all smooth and glossy. The face that Daisy likes to show the world, not the truth about her that I’ve seen. “I shall meet the King and Queen, and dance with the debs, and find a frightfully interesting man with a few thousand a year and a country seat.”
This is how very well-connected English women talk about adulthood. It means they go to parties with a lot of other girls of the same age, and compete for eligible husbands. Rather how my father met his concubine, I think, although I’ve never said this to Daisy. Not even on that day. She had said all this to me once before, I remembered. It had been a joke then. I had missed what changed between then and that day, and I remember wondering just how a detective could have failed to see what must have been changing right under her nose.
“And you will go to Cambridge,” said Daisy, that day.
“No I won’t,” I threw back. It was an instant decision, but not one I ever regretted. Not without you, was the part I didn’t say.
Oxford is perfectly nice, it turns out. And there are not so many ferocious cyclists as in Cambridge, so it is not a bad place to study.
On the particular day I am thinking of, I had been at Oxford for one year, one term, and three weeks. It is easy to keep track of time at university. The terms have special names (we were in Hilary term, the middle one), and are very short. My college, St Audrey’s, let me stay in the vac (that’s the holidays), so I had by this time spent long enough in Oxford to know that it is a very different place in term from outside. Out of term, Oxford is a real city, with a covered market full of lovely food stalls, and lots of places for my father to buy presents. (He is very pleased I am at Oxford, and doesn’t care a bit that it’s not Cambridge.) But in termtime, Oxford is like a lake during migration season, bustling with student geese, with flocks of chaps in subfusc migrating across the High, and the Broad, and Duke Humfrey.
(Oxford, like Deepdean has its own language for everything. Subfusc is hard to explain if you’ve never seen it, but it is just an academic gown. Imagine a long poncho made of black material and you have about the right image though there is a lot of frilly white business around the neck, too. Quite hilarious, but of course when one is English and a student, one takes it very seriously. The High and the Broad are just streets, while Duke Humfrey is a library, although it is a very old and special one, I admit. So perhaps it does deserve a special name.)
But although Oxford seemed very special, everyone told me Oxford is nothing like it had been before the war. So many more boys should be around, and some of the colleges are hosting institutions which had had to move out of London. Some colleges are entirely taken over by the army. It gave me an awkward feeling in my stomach every time I thought about that. The war is not enjoyable for anyone (bunbreak with rationing is not at all a comforting thing), but I am quite safe in Oxford, compared with people in the services, and the poor people in blitzed areas.
Of course, I am Chinese, even if Hong Kong is a part of the British Empire for the present, and you could say that the war is none of my business. But it is hard to feel that way when I have lived in England for so very long. Besides, by now (it was January 1942, the time I am thinking of), China was definitely an ally of Great Britain’s, which made it even more difficult not to feel that I should be doing something more useful for the war effort than taking lectures in mathematics and sometimes practising my first aid, just in case there was a sudden air raid after all. I felt even more like a useless girl than at school, and even more frustrated.
Wartime is very difficult for all kinds of things that you may not have thought of. Not just rationing and air raids and knowing that people you have met and liked are fighting and perhaps dying far away, and that you won’t find out what happens to them for a long time. (Although all those are more important than anything else, especially the last one.) But it’s jolly hard to keep in touch with people when the postal service is unreliable, and everyone keeps having to move around for jobs and because of bombs or being evacuated, and the telephone service isn’t much help if you don’t know which town someone might have moved to. I heard from Kitty, often, because she was studying in London, but I had to wait for letters from Beanie to know where she was (almost anywhere, she was a VAD, which is a sort of nurse. It gives me the shivers to think of little Beanie dealing with blown-off legs in faraway countries. But she said it helps to be useful, and she always has been good at understanding what hurts people, so I am sure that she is useful).
At that time, I had been writing to Daisy care of Fallingford, because it was impossible to imagine that the house wasn’t there or that someone there wouldn’t know where Daisy was. That was true even though I knew that the house had been filled with a whole school evacuated from North London, and that Lord and Lady Hastings were living in the coach house now that O’Brian was fighting in North Africa. Daisy always knew where to find me, but even so, our correspondence was very stop-and-start, and Daisy’s letters kept referring to things I’d never heard of. It was hard to tell if she was forgetting we hadn’t already talked about them – because even after almost two years, and the argument we had about Cambridge which started then, it was still very strange not to have Daisy beside me most of the time – or whether some of Daisy’s letters had got lost in the war-affected post. Either way, there was a small cold part of me, when I thought about it, that recognised Daisy and I were not what we had been. Not at all.
Which was why it was so very strange, that day that I’m thinking of, that I caught sight of Daisy in the High. It couldn’t be her, but it was awfully like her, and I thought of her all afternoon. Even the chill in the air of the Radcliffe Camera (which is another library with a funny name, and nothing to do with snapshots) couldn’t distract me, and I didn’t get nearly as far as I should have understanding Euler.
It almost wasn’t a surprise, although it absolutely also was a surprise, if you know what I mean, to hear the porter at the lodge say that I had a visitor in the Dean’s Parlour, and to go into that cheerless beige room to find it full of Daisy Wells.
We had visited just before Christmas (even though our journeys probably hadn’t been really necessary, as the posters insist) because seeing friends is important, even just for tea and very thin sandwiches. But we had been at a Lyons on Oxford Street, and everything was not like us. St Audrey’s was much more like Deepdean, and seeing Daisy there felt like home. Daisy looked more like herself too. When I saw her in London, she had looked distracted, and a bit flimsy somehow, with a painted face and tired eyes. She said it was because she was fire watching, and ambulance driving, and other things which Daisy somehow managed to do as well as attending glamorous dances and looking for that perfect husband. I suppose I had believed that was true, just as I had believed that Daisy really wanted all those things.
But now, she looked like my Daisy. Deepdean Daisy, when the Detective Society had a case. And I knew that was what had been missing. My heart gave a great leap of excitement and happiness, because although Daisy on a case can be a most unnerving thing, it’s also the most exciting thing I know. “Watson!” she cried. “Can we talk? Secretly, I mean.”
It was just like Daisy to talk about secrecy so loudly that anyone listening would think she couldn’t possibly be serious. But I had a feeling, looking at her sparkling eyes, that Daisy meant exactly that.
We are allowed to have guests in our rooms at St Audrey’s, so long as the porter knows they are in college. Not boys, of course, they have to sit in the parlour, or preferably not enter the college at all I think, judging by the way the porters look at the ones who do visit. But girls are all right, though I would have rather Daisy didn’t see my room. I have never been good at making places cosy, and the wartime limits on absolutely everything nice meant it was awfully grey and threadbare.
But that didn’t matter. Daisy didn’t give it a look, even to joke about my bluestocking life (which she does, sometimes, although she knows I hate it). “Watson!” she cried again, the moment the door was closed, “You’re my inside man!”
And I knew, just like that, that the Detective Society had a new case.
*
An hour later, my head was spinning with news. Daisy said that nothing could be written down, so we had to talk about everything that I needed to know. We dropped our voices a little when awful Verity Carstairs in the next set came back from her Greek tutorial, huffing as usual because her tutor had been a beast (her tutor is not a beast at all, but Verity is a bad student and doesn’t care to be told it).
It felt very strange, to have a case without a notebook. After Daisy had said everything she needed to (sometimes twice, to be sure I grasped it), I took a deep breath.
“I just need to be absolutely clear,” I said. Daisy gave me a quick look of impatience, the kind she would usually suppress. I ignored it. “…because this matters a great deal.”
I took another breath, because it truly did matter, in the way that even detection hadn’t ever quite mattered before in my life, and certainly nothing else has ever come close. “You work for…. intelligence-“ (This means spies, and what Daisy actually said was, “I’m doing a little job for Uncle Felix,” but she knew I would understand that.) “In fact, you’ve been working for them since you left Deepdean, because there are concerns about enemy agents among the upper echelons of society.” (That was just what Daisy had said, such an odd phrase. It means rich people and aristocratic people, with a smattering of the right sort of famous people, who are amusing but not pushing. People have said that the war is changing England, but that part has never changed.)
Daisy nodded. Not so impatient this time. I think she could see that I was imprinting the information on my brain by concentrating very hard and speaking aloud, instead of writing everything down. “And now, you have a more important job that isn’t just about society people, it’s about… codes.” I whispered the last bit, because that was the most important thing, the part that had made Daisy’s eyes light up. Codes and code breaking, and a place in Buckinghamshire that we weren’t allowed to talk about where the most important codes were broken. Codes that could help to change the course of the war.
(“I told them you had the right stuff,” Daisy had said, carelessly. “They need mathematicians.” Nothing would come of that until after this present case, apparently, but it was possible that even though I am Chinese, I might have a role to play in the war effort after all. I didn’t think then, but I have many times since, how much it told me about what Daisy had been doing in the last year or more, that she could pass on my name like that. If it does mean what I think, I don’t believe her heart was ever in husband-hunting. I have felt better ever since about our row, and how Daisy seemed to have changed so much. Although I do wish she could have told me, at least a little bit, before this day.)
“And you think,” I continued, “I mean, you all think, you all have reason to believe… that someone in Oxford is a traitor. Someone is hindering those people at Blet… that place in Buckinghamshire. Someone is trying to stop their work. Someone who is very clever, and very Oxonian.”
“Yes,” said Daisy. “Isn’t it perfect? It must be someone in the Mathematical Institute, almost certainly a Fellow, although I suppose a very well-connected student might be a possibility. So we can’t get at them from outside. We need you, Hazel. Will you help us?”
*
That moment was fourteen months ago. Today, the traitor was hanged. It was me that identified him and his works. I couldn’t write down his motive, means and opportunities, but I found that the old ways of organising my thinking worked almost as well without writing down. Daisy got up a flirtation with an officer stationed at Brasenose, and used black market petrol coupons to visit him weekly. And, of course, to meet me for bunbreak (or rather, hot Bovril and toast, for this was the worst of the rationing years), and to exchange gossip.
Gossip of a sort, that is. Most weeks I had something to tell her, even if it was a lot of negatives. Innocent people under suspicion whose secrets turned out to be having babies with their servants, or gambling, or making intimate friends of a kind the RAF is supposed to forbid, although everyone knows that men who may die any day are not paying much attention to such rules. She visited for months, until we could be quite sure that we had the right man as the traitor, and until we could find a way of exposing him that would not blow my cover. Then Daisy broke it off with her officer, and her visits became more occasional. But it didn’t matter as it had done, because I knew that we were friends again.
Daisy is here today, gossiping. She came to tell me the traitor has died. It isn’t being reported, because of morale, but she knows a chap who knows a man who knows the Wormwood Scrubs hangman, and she came to tell me that it most definitely is over. Her hand is on mine. It’s a congratulations and a triumph, for the old Detective Society, and a comfort, because even in these days of endless deaths, Daisy knows I will feel this one a little differently. That is the thing about Detective Societies. What they deal in is death.
Her hand is very warm, and her eyes are shining as she says, “We did it, Watson.” It is very distracting from my other dark thoughts. Daisy says that we make an unbeatable team, and that we should continue. I’m not quite sure what she means by that. Not when her eyes shine so. But I know that I am willing to try whatever Daisy wants to do next.
***