Transcription

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘No, I don’t think so. My mother always said not to trust a man with two Christian names.’

  It seemed an arbitrary rule of thumb, although Juliet’s own mother had been dismissive of men with blue eyes, perhaps forgetting that she had once told Juliet that her father, the drowned sailor, had eyes ‘as blue as the sea’ into which he had eventually sunk.

  ‘And what is it exactly,’ Hartley said, ‘that the old Toby Jug is doing?’

  ‘I’m not supposed to talk about the operation,’ Juliet said primly.

  ‘Oh, we’re all friends here, aren’t we?’

  ‘Are we?’ Clarissa murmured.

  ‘He’s a mystery, your Toby Jug,’ Hartley said. ‘No one knows what he’s been doing all these years. “The Great Enigma”. That’s what he’s called behind his back.’

  ‘The Great Enigma?’ Juliet mused. It made Godfrey sound like a stage act.

  ‘Godfrey Toby is a master of obfuscation,’ Hartley said. ‘It’s easy to get lost in his fog. Shall we order another round? Yours is a gimlet, isn’t it?’

  Here’s Dolly

  -1-

  J.A.

  22.03.40

  RECORD 1.

  18.00 Arrival. GODFREY, TRUDE and BETTY present.

  Social chat and commenting on the weather.

  GODFREY commented on BETTY’S cold (resulting in an unfortunate loss of her voice).

  There was some talk about a friend of BETTY’S called PATRICIA (or LETITIA?) who lives near the docks in Portsmouth and how that could be useful.

  TRUDE. A friend to us?

  BETTY. Very much to our way of thinking. I said she should get a job in a pub. She used to work in one, she got experience when she was in Guildford.

  TRUDE. The pubs in Portsmouth are full of sailors.

  GODFREY. Yes, yes.

  TRUDE. And dockworkers. A couple of drinks and they’ll tell you anything probably.

  BETTY. Movement of the fleet (?) and so on.

  The doorbell rings. GODFREY leaves the room to answer it. A lot of commotion in the hall.

  BETTY. (whispering, partly inaudible) How much do you think this place costs the Gestapo?

  TRUDE. At least three guineas a week, I imagine. I’ve seen them advertised. (four or five words inaudible due to BETTY’S coughing)

  GODFREY returns with DOLLY.

  GODFREY. Here’s Dolly.

  Some conversation about the weather. Some abusive chat about the portrait of the King on the wall.

  GODFREY. How’s NORMA? (NORMAN?)

  DOLLY. The same. Not much help to us I don’t think. She’s being married at Easter. To CAPTAIN BARKER.

  GODFREY. And he’s against …?

  DOLLY. Yes. At Virginia Water. You look peaky (?)

  BETTY. It’s all the coughing (??) and strain (??)

  Or perhaps Betty was thinking of taking a train. Or cleaning the drains. Oh, do speak clearly, Juliet thought crossly. They were such a bunch of mumblers and Betty’s dratted cold made understanding them even more difficult. Half the time, of course, they didn’t even make sense and they were always talking over each other (infuriating!). Juliet had been relieved to discover that, unlike his tamed band of fifth columnists, Godfrey articulated clearly. He was nicely spoken, a tenor rather than a baritone, with just a hint of something other – Scottish, perhaps, even Canadian might have been hazarded, although he was actually from Bexhill. He possessed a soft, rather mellifluous voice, and if she had never met him Juliet might have imagined him to look rather like Robert Donat.

  Juliet pressed the lever that lifted the stylus off the record and then removed her earphones, yawned and stretched her arms above her head. The effort of concentrating had made her feel slightly sick. It was still an hour to lunchtime if she didn’t die of starvation in the meantime. She had a Ryvita cracker somewhere in her handbag. Should she eat it or save it? Save it, she decided, feeling rather superior to her usual self, which was shamefully inclined to intemperance.

  She sighed, replaced her earphones and pressed down the lever on the playback equipment. The stylus dropped scratchily on to the record and Dolly began to say something, but Betty chose that moment to sneeze (in an unnecessarily dramatic way, in Juliet’s opinion). Oh, Lord, Juliet thought, her fingers poised above the Imperial’s solid keys. Here we go again.

  She decided to eat the Ryvita after all.

  ‘Our neighbours’ was what Cyril called the informants, and soon the name stuck; even Perry had been heard to employ the term. It was a handy shorthand for the cavalcade of people who had been coming for nearly a month now to the Dolphin Square flat with their talk of potential sympathizers, of RAF camps being built, of the location of Army recruitment centres – not to mention the endless reports on the low morale and general unwillingness to commit to war amongst the populace. A fountain of bitterness tapped by Godfrey Toby.

  Chatter and gossip, a lot of it, yet somehow more alarming because of that. The willingness of seemingly ordinary people to bring any scrap of information if they thought it would help the enemy’s cause. The main characters in this cast of perfidy were Dolly, Betty, Victor, Walter, Trude and Edith. Each reported on a myriad others, filaments in an evangelistic web of treachery that stretched across the country.

  There was a timetable, drawn up by Godfrey himself, that charted all the prospective to-ings and fro-ings of the neighbours. It was mostly for Cyril’s benefit, so he knew when to pitch up in Dolphin Square, but it helped all of them to keep out of the way at the designated times. ‘We don’t want them to get to know our faces,’ Perry said. ‘We must remain anonymous. It is we who are the neighbours, as far as they are concerned.’

  Godfrey’s informants were given expenses for transport and phone calls and treated to meals and drinks by him. Trude, however, was paid. She was a rather peevish and controlling Norwegian, naturalized here for many years now, and was particularly busy recruiting and truffling out Nazi sympathizers. She seemed to have contacts all over Britain and thought nothing of going to Dover or Manchester or Liverpool to sound out potential allies to their cause. Her mother had been half-German and Trude had spent many holidays in Bavaria. She had worked at Siemens, which was where Godfrey had first met her (‘Some kind of social club,’ Perry said), and in many ways she was the originator of the entire Godfrey operation. Like the first person to be a victim of the Black Death, Juliet thought. ‘Or Eve,’ Perry said, ‘and original sin.’

  ‘A bit unfair on Eve, sir.’

  ‘The blame generally has to fall somewhere, Miss Armstrong. Women and the Jews tend to be first in line, unfortunately.’

  Edith was in her fifties and worked in a dress shop in Brighton, patrolling the English Channel during her daily clifftop walks. Walter was a naturalized German who worked in the offices of the Great Western Railway and knew a great deal about tracks and trains and timetables. Victor was a machinist in an aircraft factory. Perry worried about these last two the most, as they had access to blueprints ‘and so on’ – ‘Sabotage is one of our greatest fears,’ he said.

  Betty and Dolly, old comrades from the British Union of Fascists, behaved like mother hens around Godfrey, clucking about the state of his health and the strain of the incessant demands made on him by the Third Reich. Betty was in her thirties, married to a man called Grieve whom she appeared to dislike with a passion. Dolly, at forty-five, was an unwilling spinster who worked in a large laundry in Peckham, dealing with military uniforms. She believed that from the arrival and departure of these uniforms she was able to deduce the deployment of troops across the south-east of England. (‘The woman’s a fool,’ Perry said.)

  Dolly often brought her dog to these meetings, a yappy thing that had the knack of barking at crucial moments, making the informants’ conversations even more inaudible. The dog was called Dib. Betty, Dolly and Dib, like a music-hall act, Juliet thought. A particularly poor one.

  Juliet knew them by their voices, not their faces. Trude’s sing-song Scandinavian, Victor�
��s thick Geordie lilt, Betty’s Essex-housewife whine. Godfrey was always careful to introduce each person as they made their entrance into the flat, a master of ceremonies announcing his acts on stage. ‘Hello, Dolly – how are you tonight?’ or ‘Ah, here’s Victor.’ But he didn’t really need to as Juliet soon learnt to recognize them.

  ‘You have a good ear,’ Perry complimented her.

  ‘I have two, sir.’ I am too frivolous for him, Juliet thought. It put more of a responsibility on her than him. Being flippant was harder work than being earnest. Perhaps Perry was beginning to get the true measure of her character and was finding her wanting.

  He had been rather irritable recently, constantly in and out of Dolphin Square, off to Whitehall, St James’s, the Scrubs. He sometimes took Juliet with him, introducing her as his ‘right-hand woman’ (although he was left-handed, she noted). She was also his ‘Girl Friday’ and occasionally his ‘indispensable aide-de-camp, Miss Armstrong’. He seemed to regard her as a rather precocious child (or a particularly clever dog), although more often than not she was just a girl, and an invisible one at that.

  He had invited her to accompany him to a drinks party at the Admiralty. ‘Colleagues,’ he said, ‘but women will be there, wives mostly.’ It proved to be quite a sedate affair and Juliet had the impression that she was being exhibited, like an accessory, or perhaps a curiosity. ‘You’re a sly old dog,’ she heard a man murmur in Perry’s ear. ‘You have a bit of fluff, after all, Gibbons. Who would have thought it?’

  Perry seemed intent on her learning who everyone was. ‘That’s Alleyne over there by the window.’

  ‘Alleyne?’ she queried. She had heard the name. He had the air of a man who knew he was attractive.

  ‘Oliver Alleyne,’ Perry said. ‘He’s one of us. He’s rather ambitious.’ He said this last regretfully – Perry was not someone who lauded ambition. Or admired good looks. ‘His wife’s on the stage.’ He made it sound disreputable. He’s old-fashioned, Juliet thought. Tremendously upright. She would, undoubtedly, fail to come up to his standards. ‘And that’s Liddell, of course,’ he continued. ‘Huddled with your friend Merton.’

  ‘Hardly my friend,’ Juliet protested. ‘More like my Spanish Inquisitor.’ (You have to choose. There’s a gun to your head.) Miles Merton was staring at her in an unnerving manner, but didn’t acknowledge her and she turned away from his gaze.

  ‘A somewhat Machiavellian character,’ Perry murmured. ‘I wouldn’t trust him, if I were you.’

  ‘I am too lowly for him to notice.’

  ‘The lowlier the better for Merton.’

  When she looked again, Merton had disappeared.

  ‘That’s Hore-Belisha over there,’ Perry continued, ‘talking to Hankey – the Minister without Portfolio.’ (‘Hanky-panky,’ Hartley referred to him as. Of course. Hartley was irredeemably juvenile.) What a silly title, Juliet thought, as if he’s left his portfolio on the Tube somewhere. She supposed these men didn’t travel by Tube, they all had cars and drivers, organized by Hartley’s poor overworked secretary – Hartley was in charge of Transport, based on his passion for cars rather than any proficiency in the role.

  ‘And that’s Halifax, of course, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs,’ Perry continued (rather relentlessly), ‘and over by the door … that’s …’ He was an educator, Juliet thought (and she was currently his pupil). That was his character. It seemed a waste of an attractive man.

  Or a cultivator, perhaps, and she was his field, waiting to be ploughed and sown. A rather risqué sort of thought that made her blush. He was immensely grown up (thirty-eight) and necessarily more sophisticated than the untried airmen and soldiers who were her usual beaux. Juliet was waiting to be seduced by him. By anyone really, but preferably him. It was turning into a rather long wait.

  ‘Are you all right, Miss Armstrong? You look a little flushed.’

  ‘It’s quite hot in here, sir.’

  ‘So many of those men have no morals,’ he told her as they were retrieving their coats at the end of the night. ‘They’re with their wives and yet half of them will have a mistress tucked away somewhere.’ Was that the function she was fulfilling for him, Juliet wondered? ‘Tucked away’ in Dolphin Square as she was. But which was it – wife or mistress?

  Certainly quite a lot of people had drawn the conclusion that because of their seclusion in Nelson House there must be something ‘going on’ between them, whereas the truth was that he was bewilderingly reticent with her. He was the perfect gentleman and, unlike the salesmen in the Fitzrovia hotel, there were no attempts at fumbling – in fact they often performed an awkward little dance around their small office to avoid touching at all, as if Juliet were a desk or a chair, not a girl in her prime. It seemed that she had acquired all the drawbacks of being a mistress and none of the advantages – like sex. (She was becoming bolder with the word, if not the act.) For Perry, it seemed to be the other way round – he had all the advantages of having a mistress and none of the drawbacks. Like sex.

  As well as transcribing his conversations with the ‘neighbours’, Juliet also typed up Godfrey’s own records of the meetings, which were rather masterly precis. Sometimes he referred to her transcripts to ‘jog his memory’, although Godfrey seemed to have a remarkably good memory, keeping constant track of his informants’ comings and goings. (‘And how is that naval engineer you met, Betty – Hodges, wasn’t it?’ or ‘How is your wife’s mother, Walter, Mrs Popper?’)

  And, of course, Juliet was at Perry’s beck and call for a miscellany of his own dictation and note-taking. She also spent many a dreary hour typing up ‘spy fever’ reports from agents all around the country, who had interviewed people anxious to let the government know that they thought they had seen a contingent of Hitler Youth cycling across the South Downs, or that their next-door neighbour – a ‘Germanic-looking woman’ – was hanging out her nappies on the line in a way that ‘suggested semaphore’, as well as all the usual complaints about people who owned German Shepherds.

  Juliet also typed up Perry’s diary – nothing personal, just a record of meetings and events. Did he keep a personal diary? And if so, what would he write in it? (Miss Armstrong becomes more attractive to me every day, but I must resist the temptation!)

  He had been at a succession of meetings in Whitehall recently (without her), none of which seemed to have gone his way, and now, as well as Godfrey’s transcripts, she was spending her time typing an endless series of memos and letters and diary entries documenting his frustration – Why does AC still not see that ALL alien residents MUST be interned?! We must work on the basis of guilty until proved innocent. (Rather harsh, Juliet thought, thinking of the staff in Moretti’s.) There is an old-fashioned liberalism which seems to proliferate within the Cabinet – this will become lethal! … The DG is anxious that COMPLETE censorship be imposed on Eire … met with Rothschild at the Athenaeum … GD was believed to be recruited by the Abwehr in ’38 yet he is still in place! … leakages all over the place … bureaucratic ineptitude … the prostitute LK is known to be having an affair with Wilson in the Foreign Office and yet … complacency … muddle-headedness … And so on. And on.

  And on.

  And on.

  Godfrey’s conversations next door – for the most part numbingly mundane – were really quite a relief.

  -20-

  GODFREY. And that man – BENSON (HENSON?)

  BETTY. He said he doesn’t like MOSLEY very much, he seemed to be talking mostly from a B.U. angle (four words inaudible)

  GODFREY. Yes, I see.

  (Biscuit interval.)

  GODFREY leaves the room. Some inaudible whispering between BETTY and TRUDE. GODFREY returns.

  RECORD 13

  BETTY. Apparently Chelmsford has become a hot-bed of Communism. MRS HENDRY (HENRY?) –

  GODFREY. The Scots woman?

  BETTY. Yes, works in a pub there, the Red Lion, or the Three Lions, and says that the man who owns it – BROWN, I think �
� says he was rooked for whisky at £2.15s.6d a bottle from the Premier Guaranteed Trust – a Jewish company.

  Conversation only partly heard due to their whispering. Something about people who were strongly Jewish, something about the British Israel Foundation.

  BETTY. And it’s difficult to retaliate when people say it was the Germans who started it, because then you’ll just draw attention to yourself.

  TRUDE. I say – quite casually – ‘I do wish it hadn’t been us that started the war.’ That usually stops them in their tracks.

  GODFREY. Have any of the gun positions been altered along the front at Broadstairs? (Apparently TRUDE has recently visited the coast.)

  TRUDE. No. They’re manned by crews of three or maybe five. (four or five words inaudible) Troops from the Staffords, I think.

  GODFREY. Yes, yes, I see.

  The informants rambled on tirelessly with their fragmentary thoughts and ideas and Godfrey absorbed it all like a patient sponge. They incriminated themselves at every turn, while he said almost nothing. He had a wonderful way of drawing them out with his placid responses (Hm? and Yes, yes and I see), not so much an agent provocateur as an agent passif, if such a thing could be said to exist. (‘Sometimes,’ Perry said, ‘saying nothing can be your strongest weapon.’) Juliet, and perhaps Juliet alone, had begun to sense Godfrey’s impatience. She had learnt to read between the lines. But wasn’t that where the most important things were said?

  -21-

  BETTY. I don’t know when I can come. Tuesday or Friday.

  GODFREY. You can telephone here.

  TRUDE. Can you bring the invisible ink? Would you mind?

  BETTY. Yes, I meant to bring the other bottle back.

  GODFREY said it was rather scarce and then gave DOLLY some instructions how to use the ink.

  Some inaudible conversation due to paper rustling.

  (Cigarettes)

  GODFREY. Will I see you next week?

  TRUDE. Not for two weeks. I’m going to Bristol. I’ll call in on that farmer (three words inaudible). He had a lot to say about Kitzbuhl (??)