Transcription

by Kate Atkinson

‘Sorry, sir,’ she said. ‘I get hay fever.’ She didn’t; she was, regrettably, in excellent health. It must be lunchtime by now, surely? But no, instead they returned to the car and Perry said, ‘Drive in the direction of Christmas Common,’ and rather than stopping at the wayside inn of her imagination they parked on a track next to a field. Her heart sank when he said to the driver, ‘We’re going for a ramble, we’ll be a while.’

  ‘Righty-ho,’ the driver said, taking out a greaseproof packet of sandwiches from his pocket. ‘I’ll have my lunch then.’

  ‘Come on, then, Miss Armstrong,’ Perry said to her. ‘Follow me.’

  He had binoculars with him and she wondered if he was looking for anything in particular.

  ‘Kites,’ he said. ‘They’re long gone from this part of the world and I don’t suppose we’ll see them again, but you can live in hope.’ Kites? Did he mean birds? First kits, now kites. Her mind ran on to Kit Kats, a thought that made her immeasurably sad as she knew there were going to be none.

  He cupped his ear and said, ‘Can you hear that woodpecker?’

  ‘That’ (annoying) ‘knocking sound?’

  Juliet knew nothing about birds. She could manage the common ones – pigeons, sparrows, and so on – but her ornithology didn’t extend beyond the streets of London. She was a complete philistine where wildlife was concerned. Perry, on the other hand, was a nature enthusiast. He didn’t find kites, but he spotted and named an awful lot of other birds. An awful lot.

  ‘You need a good memory in our line of work,’ he said. But she wasn’t going to be identifying birds, was she? (Was she?) ‘Look,’ he whispered, crouching and pulling her down with him. ‘Hares – boxing. It’s the female who throws the punches. Wonderful!’

  Any romantic notions she may have been fostering had been entirely numbed by cold and hunger. He was currently expounding on the regurgitating habits of owls. ‘Fur and bone of voles and mice,’ he said, and she thought of the witches in Macbeth and she laughed and responded with, ‘Eye of newt and toe of frog.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ he said, perplexed by the allusion. ‘Frogs – and rats – are occasionally found in their pellets. Shrews are common. You can identify the different species by their jawbones.’ He had no Shakespeare, she realized.

  He strode ahead of her and she had to go almost at a trot to keep up with him, trailing on his heels like a dutiful retriever. A nippy breeze had got up now and started to carry away his words and she missed a lot of information about the breeding habits of roe deer and the architecture of rabbit warrens. She thought longingly of the driver’s neat white sandwich triangles.

  The brooding landscape they were currently traversing, the lowering sky above their heads and the rugged terrain beneath their feet, were all conspiring to make her feel like an unfortunate Brontë sister, traipsing endlessly across the moors after unobtainable fulfilment. Perry himself was not entirely without Heathcliffian qualities – the absence of levity, the ruthless disregard for a girl’s comfort, the way he had of scrutinizing you as if you were a puzzle to be solved. Would he solve her? Perhaps she wasn’t complicated enough for him. (On the other hand, perhaps she was too complicated.)

  He turned suddenly on his heel and she almost bumped into him. ‘Are you all right, Miss Armstrong? How’s your hay fever?’

  ‘Gone, sir, thank you.’

  ‘Good!’

  And so they carried on, tramping across fields, over streams, up hills that were still slippery with the morning’s rain. Her shoes were being slowly ruined with every step (and they were going to have to do all this in reverse on the way back!).

  Thankfully, he finally came to a halt and said, ‘Shall we have a rest?’ He laid the tarpaulin sheet down again in the inadequate shelter of a bare hawthorn hedge. She only knew it was hawthorn because he told her so. Juliet shivered. It really wasn’t the weather for this kind of thing.

  ‘Do you smoke?’ he asked, taking out a heavy lighter from somewhere in his tweeds.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I don’t, I’m afraid,’ he said, and so she had to fumble in her handbag for her own pack. He lit her cigarette after several attempts as the wind was intent on extinguishing the little flame. No handy flask of tea, of course, and she was just bemoaning its absence to herself when he knelt down next to her and placed his hand on her thigh and began, rather absent-mindedly, to stroke the fabric of her coat as if it were an animal skin (and she was the animal).

  Oh, my giddy aunt, Juliet thought, was this – finally – what she thought it was? Was there protocol for this? Was it another test? She felt that some kind of protest was possibly required (It’s the female who throws the punches. Wonderful!) and said, ‘Sir? Mr Gibbons?’

  ‘Call me Perry, do, please.’

  For a moment she thought he was going to open her coat. To unwrap her like a gift. (I am a gift, she thought), but he contented himself with fiddling with one of the buttons. He took his fedora off and placed it on the ground next to them. The wind was bound to blow it away, didn’t he realize that?

  He took her cigarette from her and stubbed it out on the ground and Juliet thought, Oh, here we go. An induction and a seduction.

  ‘I studied to be a priest, you know,’ he said. The balance tilted away from seduction. There certainly was a kind of Jesuitical cast to him; she could imagine him sombre in a black cassock. ‘Unfortunately I lost my faith,’ he said, and added ruefully, ‘Not so much lost as misplaced.’

  Were they going to discuss theology? He leant in closer as if to inspect her and she caught his tweedy tobacco scent. The balance tipped towards seduction again. He frowned at her. The balance wavered uncertainly.

  ‘Are you … intact, Miss Armstrong?’

  ‘Intact?’ She had to think for a moment what he meant by that. (She thought of the Latin. Untouched.) ‘Oh,’ she said eventually. The balance lurched towards seduction. ‘Yes, sir.’ She blushed all over again, dreadfully hot suddenly, despite the weather. It wasn’t a question you asked if you weren’t intending to do something about it, was it? Although in her imagination this act had involved dim lighting, satin sheets, perhaps flutes of champagne and a discreet veil drawn over the crude mechanics of the act, mainly because she still had little idea of what they were.

  Also, on a practical level she had imagined a bed, not a hillocky field beneath a thundery sky that was the colour of putty. An uncomfortable tussock was sticking into her left buttock. She could see dark clouds moving in from the west and thought, We’re going to get rained on. Out of the corner of her eye she saw his hat blow away. ‘Oh,’ Juliet said again.

  He leant closer. Very close. He did not look as attractive from this distance, in fact he looked not a little unlike an otter. She closed her eyes.

  Nothing happened, so she opened them again and found him gazing steadily at her. She remembered he had learnt mesmerism when he was younger and she thought, Good Lord – was he hypnotizing her? She felt quite woozy all of a sudden, although she supposed she was now officially starving so it was no wonder. And then he was on his feet, pointing at the sky and saying, ‘Look, a sparrowhawk!’

  Was that it then?

  Juliet struggled to her feet and craned her neck obediently. The first fat wet drops of rain fell on her face. ‘It’s raining, sir,’ she said to him. He was heedless, lost in tracing the bird with his binoculars. After a while he handed them to her and she put them to her eyes, but she could see nothing but the dismal sky.

  ‘Did you see it?’ he asked when she lowered the binoculars.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Wonderful.’

  ‘It doesn’t know there’s a war on,’ he said. The bird seemed to have brought on a fit of melancholy.

  ‘No, I don’t suppose it does, sir.’

  ‘Perry,’ he reminded her.

  They spent the next twenty minutes looking for his hat before giving up and returning to the car.

  The driver got out of the car when he saw them approaching. Juliet could see him smirk
ing at Perry’s hatless head and the rather mucky knees of his trousers where the tarpaulin had failed to protect him.

  ‘Good walk, sir?’ the driver asked.

  ‘Excellent,’ Perry said. ‘We saw a sparrowhawk.’

  ‘Did you enjoy yourself today, Miss Armstrong?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was very nice. Thank you.’ To be honest, not one jot, she thought.

  She sat in the back of the car on the way home while Perry sat up at the front with the driver.

  ‘Miss Armstrong – all right in the back there?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Perry.’

  ‘Why don’t you take a nap?’

  So she did, while Perry and the driver talked about Association Football, on which subject they both appeared to be experts, although only the driver had ever kicked a round ball.

  When they arrived back in London he took her to the Bon Viveur in Shepherd Market for dinner and she forgave him for the day-long famine he had subjected her to. She had to change first, of course, her shoes and coat were caked in mud and her stockings laddered beyond repair. Even a good dinner was hard-pressed to make up for that.

  It was a very good dinner, though. ‘Eat up,’ he said. ‘You’re probably still growing. You look as though you need fattening up.’ (Like a veal calf?) There was chicken in a white sauce and some kind of marmalade pudding, and they drank ‘an excellent Pouilly’ that the sommelier said he’d been saving for Perry. ‘Becoming rather scarce now, sir,’ he murmured.

  She had never had an ‘excellent’ wine before, never been to dinner with a man, never been to an expensive restaurant, one with linen napkins and little red-shaded lamps on the table and waiters who called her ‘madam’.

  Perry raised his glass and, smiling, said, ‘To victory.’ She had passed the test, apparently, although she couldn’t quite quash the suspicion that she had been ‘put under’. What if he had planted a suggestion in her mind? She had seen hypnotists on stage and worried that she would suddenly start quacking like a duck in the canteen or think she was a cat when she was on the Tube. (Or worse.)

  He unexpectedly reached for her hand across the table and, holding it a little too firmly for comfort, he gazed intently into her eyes and said, ‘We understand each other, don’t we, Miss Armstrong?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, although she didn’t understand him in the slightest.

  She had been plucked. More pigeon perhaps than rose.

  Have You Met a Spy?

  -18-

  RECORD 10 (contd.)

  (Sound of a map being unfolded.)

  GODFREY. What are the landmarks like?

  WALTER. A gas works.

  Some conversation, mostly inaudible due to the map, about a gasometer. WALTER says something about ‘a small road’ or load(?)

  (Two minutes lost through technical hitch. Record very indistinct afterwards.)

  WALTER. It is difficult, you see, here is … (ab. 6 words) exactly how to cross (?)

  GODFREY. Cross here?

  WALTER. The main point is this, you see. But you know I expect they will (inaudible)

  GODFREY. Yes, yes.

  WALTER. But they will (inaudible but the word ‘aerodrome’ heard)

  GODFREY. (Sound of the map) Is that the (?) building here?

  WALTER. What do you want to know?

  GODFREY. You’re going to Hertford? (Or Hatford?)

  WALTER. This factory here is near Abbot’s Langley. Near the river. This is the canal.

  GODFREY. I see.

  WALTER. Near the railway line. This is a pill box, then this barbed wire fence. Then the railway cutting. Ammunition or gunpowder, I think. They’ve put up a notice – ‘No Smoking within 100 yards’, you see.

  GODFREY. Yes. Have you put a cross against it?

  WALTER. Not this one. It’s just by Abbot’s Langley. You can probably (inaudible).

  (Drinks. Some social chat.)

  GODFREY. How is your wife doing?

  WALTER. Why do you ask?

  GODFREY. We take an interest in our agents’ domestic affairs.

  If only Perry would take an interest in my ‘domestic affairs’, Juliet thought. (Is there a man in your life, Juliet – may I call you Juliet? I would be honoured to be that man and—)

  ‘Do you have a minute, Miss Armstrong?’

  ‘Yes, of course, sir.’

  ‘I have been mulling it over,’ Perry said, ‘and I’ve come to the conclusion that perhaps you are ready.’

  Blimey – for what? Not more otter expeditions, she hoped.

  She was to be a spy. At last. Her nom de guerre was to be ‘Iris Carter-Jenkins’. At least it was devoid of Shakespearian connotations. No more people quoting ‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ at her.

  ‘I’ve bumped you up a bit,’ Perry said. ‘Got you out of Kentish Town, as it were. Iris grew up in Hampstead, father was a consultant at St Thomas’s. Orthopaedics – bones and so on.’

  ‘Was?’ she queried.

  ‘Dead. Your mother too. I thought that it would be more authentic, easier for you to “play”.’

  Must she always be an orphan, even in her fictional life?

  Her main task, he explained, was to try to infiltrate the Right Club. ‘These people are a cut above our Bettys and Dollys,’ he said. ‘The Right Club is drawn from the Establishment – a membership peppered with the names of the great and the good. Brocklehurst, Redesdale, the Duke of Wellington. There’s a book, supposedly – the Red Book – that lists them all. We would very much like to get our hands on it. A lot of its members have been swept up by Defence Regulation 18b, of course, but there are still many left – too many.

  ‘As an extra lure for them, you – in the shape of Iris Carter-Jenkins – work in the War Office, something clerical, you know the kind of thing.’ (I do, for my sins, she thought.) ‘You have a fiancé in the Navy, a lieutenant, Scottish. “Ian” – he’s on HMS Hood, a battlecruiser. I’ve given your mother some rather tenuous connections to the Royal household – you’ll be their kind of people, or at least you’ll appear to be.’

  ‘So I’m to find out what they’re up to?’

  ‘In a nutshell. I already have agents in place, but I particularly want you to get close to a Mrs Scaife, she’s near the top of the heap. Iris has been “designed” to appeal to her. We think she’ll respond well to her.’

  ‘To me, you mean.’

  ‘No, I mean to her, Iris. Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Miss Armstrong. You have an unfortunate tendency to do so. Iris isn’t real, don’t forget that.’ (But how can she not be? Juliet thought. She’s me and I’m real.) ‘And don’t get the two confused – that way madness lies, believe me.’ (Had he ever been mad then, she wondered?) He’d been rather crabby of late, glowering darkly at the bust on his roll-top desk as if Beethoven were personally responsible for the frustrations of war.

  He’d torn in to Dolphin Square before lunch this morning, tweeds flying, speaking to her before he’d even got through the door. ‘The climate in the Home Office is staggeringly lax. I had a meeting this morning at nine a.m. and Rothschild and I waited for nearly two hours. The only other person there was the charwoman! Do they know there’s a war on?’ He took on a different character when he was angry – really quite handsome.

  She persuaded him to go downstairs with her to the Dolphin Square restaurant for tea and cakes (a ‘staggeringly lax’ thing to do, probably). ‘Sorry, Miss Armstrong,’ he said, over a coffee jap, ‘I’m a bit of a bear at the moment.’ Of course, Perry knew things that other people didn’t, it was bound to have an effect. A man of secrets – both his own and other people’s.

  His list of (somewhat relentless) character notes continued once they were back in the office, the cake not having mollified him to any noticeable degree. ‘You will have an official existence – identity card, ration book and so on, all in Iris’s name. If anyone were to, say, rifle through your handbag, they would have no idea you were not her. It’s best to have a se
parate handbag when you are Iris, in case anyone is suspicious of you and they take a look. Stick close to the truth, if you can,’ he said. ‘It means you’re less likely to slip up. You are, for example, perfectly free to like shepherd’s pie and the colour blue and lily of the valley and Shostakovich – though God knows why.’ He laughed good-naturedly.

  What a lot he knew about her! She wasn’t even sure how. When had she ever talked about shepherd’s pie to anyone? Or Shostakovich, for that matter. What other things about her did he know?

  ‘Actually, on reflection,’ Perry said, ‘I can’t imagine Iris liking Shostakovich – a little too outré for her. Stick to the lighter stuff, if you have to talk about music. You know, The Merry Widow, something of that ilk. It’s in the details, Miss Armstrong – never forget that. You can, essentially, be you – the essence of you, as it were – you just can’t be Juliet Armstrong who works for MI5. Try not to act,’ he added, ‘try just to be. And remember, if you’re going to tell a lie, tell a good one.’

  He scrutinized her. ‘It can be a difficult concept, fabricating a life – the falsehoods and so on. Some people find it challenging to dissemble in this way.’

  Not me, Juliet thought. ‘I’ll give it a go,’ she said, adopting a spirited tone. She had already decided that Iris Carter-Jenkins was a gutsy kind of girl. Plucky, even.

  ‘Good girl. It’ll be a bit of an adventure for you, I expect. I’m going to start by sending you to the Russian Tea Room in Kensington. A rehearsal, if you like. It’s not far from where you live. Do you know it?’

  No, she thought. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a hotbed of Nazi sentiment – the Right Club holds its meetings there. It’s run by a woman called Anna Wolkoff, she’s the daughter of the Tsar’s naval attaché. The family’s been marooned here since the Revolution. All these White Russian émigrés see Hitler as a means to reclaiming their country. Utterly deluded, of course, he’ll turn on them eventually.’

  Juliet was well acquainted with Russian émigrés as there had been a family of very disgruntled ones next door to her and her mother in Kentish Town. They seemed to live on boiled cabbage and pigs’ trotters and their savage arguments could be clearly heard but not understood. Her mother had been sympathetic but exasperated.