Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 19, November 1944

Old Mrs. Bishop was knitting by the fire at her house in Crowborough when young Mrs. Bishop tuned in to Zeesen. The sock was khaki: it was as if she had picked up at the point where she had dropped a stitch in 1918. The grim comfortable house stood in one of the long avenues, all spruce and laurel and a coating of snow, which are used to nothing but the footsteps of old retired people. Young Mrs. Bishop never forgot that moment: the wind beating up across Ashdown Forest against the blacked-out window, and her mother-in-law happily knitting, and the sense of everything waiting for this moment. Then the voice came into the room from Zeesen in the middle of a sentence, and old Mrs. Bishop said firmly, “That’s David.”

Young Mary Bishop made a hopeless protest — “It can’t be,” but she knew.

“I know my son if you don’t know your husband.”

It seemed incredible that the man speaking couldn’t hear them, that he should just go on, reiterating for the hundredth time the old lies, as if there were nobody anywhere in the world who knew him — a wife or a mother.

Old Mrs. Bishop had stopped knitting. She said, “Is that the man they’ve been writing about — Doctor Funkhole?”

“It must be.”

“It’s David.”

The voice was extraordinarily convincing: he was going into exact engineering details — David Bishop had been a mathematics don at Oxford. Mary Bishop twisted the wireless off and sat down beside her mother-in-law. “They’ll want to know who it is,” Mrs. Bishop said.

“We mustn’t tell them,” said Mary.

The old fingers had begun again on the khaki sock. She said, “It’s our duty.” Duty, it seemed to Mary Bishop, was a disease you caught with age: you ceased to feel the tug of personal ties; you gave yourself up to the great tides of patriotism and hate. She said, “They must have made him do it. We don’t know what threats...”

“That’s neither here nor there.”

She gave weakly in to hopeless wishes. “If only he’d got away in time. I never wanted him to give that lecture course.”

“He always was stubborn,” said old Mrs. Bishop.

“He said there wouldn’t be a war.”

“Give me the telephone.”

“But you see what it means,” said Mary Bishop. “He may be tried for treason if we win.”

“When we win,” old Mrs. Bishop said.

The nickname was not altered, even after the interviews with the two Mrs. Bishops, even after the sub-acid derogatory little article about David Bishop’s previous career. It was suggested now that he had known all along that war was coming, that he had gone to Germany to evade military service, leaving his wife and his mother to be bombed. Mary Bishop fought, almost in vain, with the reporters for some recognition that he might have been forced... by threats or even physical violence. The most one paper would admit was that if threats had been used David Bishop had taken a very unheroic way out. We praise heroes as though they are rare, and yet we are always ready to blame another man for lack of heroism. The name Dr. Funkhole stuck.

But the worst of it to Mary Bishop was old Mrs. Bishop’s attitude. She turned a knife in the wound every evening at 9.15. The radio set must be tuned in to Zeesen, and there she sat listening to her son’s voice and knitting socks for some unknown soldier on the Maginot Line. To young Mrs. Bishop none of it made sense — least of all that flat, pedantic voice with its smooth, well-thought-out elaborate lies. She was afraid to go out now into Crowborough: the whispers in the post office, the old faces watching her covertly in the library. Sometimes she thought almost with hatred, why has David done this to me? Why?

Then suddenly she got her answer.

The voice for once broke new ground. It said, “Somewhere back in England my wife may be listening to me. I am a stranger to the rest of you, but she knows that I am not in the habit of lying.”

A personal appeal was too much. Mary Bishop had faced her mother-in-law and the reporters: she couldn’t face her husband. She began to cry, sitting close beside the radio set like a child beside its doll’s house when something has been broken in it which nobody can repair. She heard the voice of her husband speaking as if he were at her elbow from a country which was now as distant and as inaccessible as another planet.

“The fact of the matter is...”

The words came slowly out as if he were emphasizing a point in a lecture, and then he went on — to what would concern a wife. The low price of food, the quantity of meat in the shops: he went into great detail, giving figures, picking out odd, irrelevant things — like Mandarin oranges and toy zebras — perhaps to give an effect of richness and variety.

Suddenly Mary Bishop sat up with a jerk as if she had been asleep. She said “Oh, God, where’s that pencil?” and upset one of the too many ornaments looking for one. Then she began to write, but in no time at all the voice was saying, “Thank you for having listened to me so attentively,” and Zeesen had died out on the air. She said, “Too late.”