The Collected Short Stories - Jeffrey Archer [13]
“Do you realize that I can complete the Times crossword puzzle in half the time my husband can?”
The anonymous man was only thankful that he wasn’t chained to Philippa. He drafted them both to the Admiralty section to deal with encrypted wireless messages to and from German submarines.
The German signal manual was a four-letter codebook, and each message was recrypted, the substitution table changing daily. William taught Philippa how to evaluate letter frequencies, and she applied her new knowledge to modern German texts, coming up with a frequency analysis that was soon used by every code-breaking department in the Commonwealth.
Even so, breaking the ciphers and building up the master signal book was a colossal task, which took them the best part of two years.
“I never knew your ifs and ands could be so informative,” she said admiringly of her own work.
When the Allies invaded Europe, husband and wife could together often break ciphers with no more than half a dozen lines of encrypted text to go on.
“They’re an illiterate lot,” grumbled William. “They don’t encipher their umlauts. They deserve to be misunderstood.”
“How can you give an opinion when you never dot your i’s, William?”
“Because I consider the dot is redundant, and I hope to be responsible for removing it from the English language.”
“Is that to be your major contribution to scholarship, William? If so I am bound to ask how anyone reading the essays of most of our undergraduates would be able to tell the difference between an I and an i.”
“A feeble argument, my dear, which, if it had any conviction, would demand that you put a dot on top of an n so as to be sure it wasn’t mistaken for an h.”
“Keep working away at your theories, William, because I intend to spend my energy removing more than the dot and the I from Hitler.”
In May 1945 they dined privately with Prime Minister and Mrs. Churchill at 10 Downing Street.
“What did the prime minister mean when he said to me that he could never understand what you were up to?” asked Philippa in the taxi to Paddington Station.
“The same as when he said to me that he knew exactly what you were capable of, I suppose,” said William.
When the Merton professor of English retired in the early 1950s the whole university waited to see which Doctor Hatchard would be appointed to the chair.
“If the council invites you to take the chair,” said William, putting his hand through his graying hair, “it will be because they are going to make me vice-chancellor.”
“The only way you could ever be invited to hold a position so far beyond your ability would be nepotism, which would mean I was already vice-chancellor.”
The general board, after several hours’ discussion of the problem, offered two chairs and appointed William and Philippa full professors on the same day.
When the vice-chancellor was asked why precedent had been broken, he replied: “Simple. If I hadn’t given them both a chair, one of them would have been after my job.”
That night, after a celebration dinner, when they were walking home together along the banks of the Isis across Christ Church Meadows, in the midst of a particularly heated argument about the quality of the last volume of Proust’s monumental work, a policeman, noticing the affray, ran over to them and asked:
“Is everything all right, madam?”
“No, it is not,” William interjected. “This woman has been attacking me for over thirty years, and to date the police have done deplorably little to protect me.”
In the late fifties Harold Macmillan invited Philippa to join the board of the Independent Broadcasting Authority.
“I suppose you’ll become what’s known as a telly don,” said William. “And as the average mental age of those who watch the box is seven you should feel quite at home.”
“Agreed,” said Philippa. “Twenty years of living with you has made me fully qualified to deal with infants.”
The chairman of