Transcription

by Kate Atkinson

  He sighed unexpectedly and said, ‘It’s rather tiresome, isn’t it?’

  ‘The war?’

  ‘All the resentment, I mean,’ Godfrey clarified, seeing her blank response. ‘These people –’ he indicated next door, ‘they are so very … rancorous, are they not?’

  ‘I suppose,’ Juliet said.

  ‘Human nature favours the tribal. Tribalism engenders violence. It was ever thus and so it will ever be.’

  Juliet stifled a yawn and was grateful when she heard the lift doors opening. Godfrey gave her a silent salute and disappeared into his flat.

  She kept the gap in her own door open long enough to hear Victor’s voice growing nearer. ‘Mr Toby! I need to tell you –’ and Godfrey whispering, ‘Shush, walls have ears, Victor. Come inside.’

  Juliet closed the door very quietly. ‘Do you ever doubt Godfrey?’ she asked Cyril.

  ‘Me, miss? No, never. Why, do you?’

  ‘No, of course not. Is that really the time, Cyril?’

  ‘Off to see Mrs S again, are you, miss?’

  ‘For my sins.’

  ‘Anything to tell me, Miss Armstrong?’ Oliver Alleyne was leaning casually on the bonnet of a car parked on Chichester Street, at the back entrance of Dolphin Square. Lily moved closer to Juliet and leant against her leg as if she needed the reassurance of her presence.

  ‘About Mr Toby?’

  ‘Anything suspicious?’

  ‘No,’ Juliet said. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Quite sure, sir.’

  ‘Can I give you a lift somewhere, Miss Armstrong? Pelham Place, perhaps?’

  ‘No, thank you, sir. The dog needs a walk, she’s been inside all day. Is her owner coming back, do you think?’

  ‘Who knows, Miss Armstrong. Things are in a parlous state over there.’

  There had been another cup-dropping incident yesterday.

  ‘Butterfingers,’ Perry said by way of explanation, although from where Juliet had been in the next room it had sounded awfully like someone smashing something deliberately. Soon there would be no crockery left in the flat. She had already removed the little Sèvres cup to Kensington, a place of safety.

  ‘I think perhaps we both need a break from all this, Miss Armstrong. A little holiday.’

  Holiday! She imagined a weekend in Rye or even a few days in Hampshire. A hotel or a cottage where they would open a bottle of wine by candlelight and sit on a rug in front of a blazing log fire and then he would put his arm around her and say—

  ‘Verulamium? Near St Albans,’ he said.

  Having learnt from the otters, she packed sandwiches and a Thermos for the trip.

  They were disgorged next to an underwhelming ruin beneath a menacing sky and Perry said to the driver, ‘Come back for us in three hours.’ (Three hours! Juliet thought.)

  A Roman villa, he told her. ‘A very well-preserved mosaic floor. It covers the hypocaust. Hypocaustum from the Ancient Greek – hypo meaning “beneath” and caust “burnt”. Which word do you think we get from that?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ she said, caustically. Not that he noticed. Adverbs were too subtle a part of speech for him. Could he not see that she was ripe for the plucking? And not as a rose or a pigeon. She was a gift. A pearl. The apple beckoning on the tree – a fact he seemed blithely unaware of as he expatiated upon the subject of the Roman Watling Street that was somewhere beneath their feet.

  It began to rain – a miserable kind of drizzle – and she trudged resentfully round the ruins in his wake until the three hours of purgatory were up and the driver returned, smelling of beer and cigarettes.

  So much for a holiday. It did neither of them any good, particularly Perry, it seemed.

  ‘By the way, Garrard’s telephoned while you were out,’ Perry said on their return. ‘They say that they haven’t received those earrings back.’

  ‘Oh, I meant to tell you—’

  Perry made a dismissive gesture. Apparently the diamonds had been trumped by war. ‘We’re on the run,’ he said. ‘Our troops are heading for the coast. It’s over. Europe is finished. One’s heart breaks, does it not?’

  -8-

  RECORD 5

  15.20

  GODFREY enquired about EDITH’S friend MRS TAYLOR’S son who had been called up into the Signals Corps.

  E. Told his mother –

  G. MRS TAYLOR?

  E. Yes. That it was amazing how many pacifists there are in the Army.

  G. Yes?

  E. (several words inaudible) Do you remember those men who went to work at Rolls-Royce?

  G. The Belgians.

  E. They’ve got a very poor opinion of the Royal Air Force.

  15.30

  There is an incoming telephone call.

  G. Hello … hello? (puts receiver down again)

  E. Who was that?

  G. Nobody. A wrong number.

  Who was phoning him, Juliet wondered? She heard him say, ‘Yes, right, understood,’ in a different tone of voice to the one he used with the informants. Juliet wondered if it was the man in the astrakhan-collared coat.

  She didn’t like Oliver Alleyne, didn’t really trust him, but she supposed it was her duty to say something about Godfrey’s clandestine meetings. Sometimes she found herself wondering if all was as it seemed. What if there was a greater deception game in play? What if Godfrey really was a Gestapo agent? A Gestapo agent pretending to be an MI5 agent pretending to be a Gestapo agent. It made her head hurt to think about it. And how perfectly placed he would be, the puppet-master of a network of sympathizers. The spider at the centre of the web.

  She wished she could talk to Perry about it, but Oliver Alleyne had told her not to say anything to anyone. I practise to deceive, she thought. Rhymes with Eve.

  After some hesitation she typed a cryptically short note to Alleyne. I have something to discuss with you. She would give it to the messenger boy next time he called. On the envelope she wrote, ‘To be delivered directly into the hand of O. Alleyne.’

  She returned to typing – one of Giselle’s reports (although it hardly merited the noun). It was an analphabetic jumble, rather like being given an insight into the chaotic workings of a cat’s brain, although there was a rather well-doodled cartoon of a fat man in white tie and tails, an equally fat cigar in his mouth. Beneath it Giselle had scribbled ‘La Proie du soir’. La Proie – was that prey? There was no Larousse in Dolphin Square. Juliet supposed it was a portrayal of the Swedish arms dealer Giselle had spent the evening seducing. Successfully, apparently.

  It was only when she paused to consider elevenses (although it was only half past ten) that she heard an odd noise coming from Perry’s bedroom. There had been no sign of life in the Dolphin Square flat when she arrived this morning so she had presumed Perry was elsewhere. The noise was a kind of snuffling, as if an animal – a large rat or a small dog – was running amok in there. Lily had heard it too and was standing attentively, her head cocked to one side, staring at the closed door.

  Juliet got up from her desk and knocked cautiously – although if it was a rat or a dog it seemed unlikely that it would care whether or not she knocked. There was no answer so she opened the door warily, half expecting something to come running out, but nothing did. Lily, less daunted, pushed the door open wider and entered Perry’s bedroom. Juliet followed the dog.

  Not an animal, but Perry – he had been in there all along! He was kneeling by his bed as if in prayer. He turned to look at her and she could see that his face was soaked with tears. Was he ill? He seemed wounded in some way, although not by anything visible. Lily licked his hand encouragingly but his attitude remained one of despair.

  ‘Can I do something, sir?’ she asked.

  ‘You can’t help me,’ he said bleakly. ‘No one can.’

  ‘Are you having a spiritual crisis?’ she hazarded – tenderly, as seemed befitting for spiritual crises – but he laughed (rather maniacally). She cast her eye around the room (dreadfu
l phrase) to see if it held any clue to this sudden collapse. But the room rendered up nothing – the neatly made bed (military style), the carefully placed grooming items, the white shirt hanging on the wardrobe door. She couldn’t help but stare at the wardrobe. Had it come with the flat, or was it perhaps the one that the mysterious ‘first wife’ had hanged herself in? That must have been quite a surprise for Perry when he opened the door.

  Perry gave a wretched kind of sob and, unable to think of anything else, Juliet made a cup of tea and placed it silently on the carpet next to him, where he remained in supplication. She shut the door quietly and got on with her work. It turned out that discovering a man on his knees, weeping, was a surprisingly effective deterrent to romantic feelings about that man. And the wardrobe, too, of course.

  An hour later, Perry emerged and seemed restored to his usual condition of constraint, although he still had a rather haunted, woebegone look about him.

  Was it a coincidence that this episode followed a visit yesterday from a pair of Special Branch officers? They had closeted themselves with Perry in the living room, from which Juliet had been summarily banished. ‘Perhaps you can do something in the kitchen?’ Perry said vaguely. Perhaps I can’t, Juliet thought, and still rather cross at having been subjected to Verulamium the previous day she said, ‘I’ll take the dog for a walk.’

  She left the door to the living room slightly open, so she was able to hear one of the Special Branch officers say, ‘Mr Gibbons, could you tell us where you were last night?’ She envied the dog’s hearing. All she could catch was Perry muttering something about the ‘War Office’. She clipped on the dog’s lead and left. She knew exactly where Perry was last night because she had seen him.

  She had been in the Rivoli Bar at the Ritz drinking cocktails with Clarissa and forcefully expressing her feelings about Roman ruins.

  ‘Oh, the Romans,’ Clarissa said dismissively, as if they were tiresome family friends.

  At the end of the evening, Juliet had spotted Perry exiting the basement bar – ‘the Ritz below the Ritz’, she’d heard it called. Someone had told her that it was also known as the ‘Pink Sink’. Because it was painted pink, presumably, although Clarissa hooted with laughter at this idea. Juliet was surprised, as Perry seemed to do nothing but work and she never thought of him drinking in a bar, especially not a pink one.

  ‘Come on,’ Clarissa said, looping her arm through Juliet’s and pulling her in the opposite direction from Perry. ‘Let’s go this way, I don’t think he’s going to want to see us.’

  Why ever not? Glancing over her shoulder she saw a man in naval uniform, a rating, approaching Perry. He was what Perry dismissively called ‘the mincing sort’. Once or twice when she had been in a car in the evening with him, he had pointed out the ‘fairies’ in Piccadilly, ‘Touting for trade like common tarts.’ She wasn’t sure what he meant. She knew about the Piccadilly tarts – but men? She hadn’t known such things existed and even now she could only conjecture.

  ‘You can tell them by the way they walk,’ Perry had told her. He had sounded disgusted and yet there he was, allowing the rating to lean in and light a cigarette for him. Perry had clasped his hands around those of the rating in order to steady the lighter. It was the gesture of a man with a woman, not a man with a man. The flare of the little flame had illuminated Perry’s features, revealing a tortured expression on his face, as if he was being forced to do something he disliked.

  But he doesn’t smoke, Juliet thought.

  Die to Live

  GODFREY HAD NO meeting with his informants so Juliet and Perry were alone in Dolphin Square, working diligently late in preparation. ‘Ducks in a row, Miss Armstrong,’ Perry said, ‘ducks in a row.’ When they finished they listened to the Nine o’Clock News, sitting companionably on the Dolphin Square sofa with a glass of whisky each. Perry said, ‘Miss Armstrong?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘May I ask you something?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  He frowned as if he was having difficulty formulating the next sentence and then, without any warning, he dropped like a penitent to his knees on the carpet in front of her and Juliet thought, Oh, no, here we go. Surely he’s not going to start praying again? But he didn’t. Instead he said, ‘Miss Armstrong – would you do me the honour of consenting to be my wife?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Will you marry me?’

  ‘You should stay the night,’ Perry said. ‘Doesn’t that make sense? The blackout and so on.’

  Juliet had been so dumbstruck by his proposal that she had said neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’ but had mumbled something that he seemed to take as an acceptance.

  ‘On the sofa?’ she queried and he laughed and said he had a perfectly serviceable bed she could share. ‘We’re engaged now, after all.’ He seemed light-headed, as if he had found the solution to something fretful.

  ‘Are we? Engaged?’ she said faintly. But I don’t want to be married, she thought.

  Perry handed her a pair of his pyjamas to wear – pale powder-blue silk with a burgundy piping, rather nice if a bit on the roomy side, and she went into the (freezing cold) bathroom to change into them. When she returned to the austere bedroom she found that Perry was similarly attired, sitting up in bed leafing through what looked like official papers – arrest warrants, by the look of it.

  ‘Ah, Miss Armstrong,’ he said, as if he had forgotten about her. He patted the bed as though he was encouraging Lily to jump up and join him. It still wasn’t the satin sheets and champagne flutes of her imagination, but it was perhaps as good as it was going to get. She climbed into the chilly bed and lay expectantly. He arched over her and she closed her eyes, but all she received was a dry kiss on her cheek. ‘Good night then,’ he said and turned off his bedside light. And that was how they slept, modestly side by side, as chaste as effigies on an icy tomb. She was not to be ploughed, but left fallow and parched. The kiss had been an imprimatur that closed rather than opened her.

  Juliet lay awake for a long time before the dog scrambled up on to the bed and started licking her face and nuzzling her neck, more affectionate than the man lying fast asleep next to her. Was Perry a tortured Catholic? One who had taken a vow of celibacy that would be broken only on their honeymoon? (Perhaps they would spend it acrimoniously in St Albans.)

  The wardrobe loomed forbiddingly in the dark and she thought about the first wife. And what about the second one – what unfortunate fate had befallen her? If she married Perry, she would be his third wife. Perhaps it was like Goldilocks and she would be the one who was just right. (‘You’ve got to give him credit for trying,’ Clarissa said.)

  Juliet gazed helplessly at Perry’s sleeping profile in the darkness. Was a little passion too much to ask for? A bit of melting and swooning? Perhaps sex was something you had to learn and then stick at until you were good at it, like hockey or the piano. But an initial lesson would be helpful.

  She must have fallen into sleep eventually because she was jolted out of it by a loud hammering on the door. Perry clambered out of bed like a scalded cat, almost as if he was expecting trouble. There was barely any light in the sky, so it seemed likely that it was an emergency of one kind or another. Had Paris fallen?

  She could hear voices in the hall and then Perry came back, looking bemused but rather relieved, and said, ‘You’d better put some clothes on. Your presence is requested.’ Not Paris then.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, still groggy from sleep.

  ‘There are some detectives from Scotland Yard here. They seem to think that you’re dead.’

  ‘What?’

  He handed her his dressing-gown. The dog, which had been sleeping at the foot of the bed, jumped off and escorted her out of the bedroom, its claws pitter-pattering across the cold linoleum.

  It growled when it saw the two serious-looking men – one quite tall, the other quite short – who were waiting in the living room. They introduced themselves as detectives from Scotl
and Yard. Juliet thought of the little Sèvres cup. Surely they weren’t here for that? In lieu of his dressing-gown, Perry had pulled on his big tweed overcoat over his pyjamas. He looked faintly ridiculous. I can’t possibly marry him, she thought.

  ‘Here she is,’ Perry said, uncharacteristically bright. He introduced her: ‘My fiancée, Miss Armstrong.’ Fiancée – oh, Lord, Juliet thought, was that really what she was now?

  ‘There, you see,’ Perry said to the detectives, ‘Miss Armstrong looks in rather good condition for a corpse. Admittedly,’ he laughed, ‘she’s always rather slow when she’s woken up early.’

  The short detective ran his eyes over her, taking in the dressing-gown, the dishevelment. He cast her a look of mild contempt. It’s not what it looks like, she thought crossly. (If only it was.)

  ‘Perhaps Miss Armstrong could show us some identification,’ the tall detective said. He smiled encouragingly at her.

  ‘Darling?’ Perry smiled expectantly at her. (Darling, she wondered? When had he ever addressed her as that?) He put his hand in the small of her back. It felt both intimate and cautionary. The presence of the law seemed to be making him unaccountably nervous. She remembered the visit from Special Branch the other day.

  ‘Miss Armstrong?’ the short detective prompted.

  ‘I know who I am.’ (Do I, she wondered?) ‘Isn’t that proof enough? And Perry – Mr Gibbons – knows who I am.’

  She looked at Perry and he nodded helpfully and said, ‘I do.’

  ‘But do you have anything that proves that, beyond the say-so of both of you?’

  ‘Say-so?’ Perry said, frowning at them. ‘Surely my word is good enough? I’m a senior MI5 officer.’

  Both detectives ignored him and again the short one prompted, ‘Miss Armstrong?’

  ‘Well,’ Juliet said, ‘you see, the thing is, my bag was stolen a few days ago – near Victoria station – in a café. I foolishly put it on the ground while I was having a cup of tea and the next thing I knew it had vanished. I don’t know if you know this, but there has been rather a spate of bag-snatching in that area, and, of course, it had all that kind of thing in it. Identity documents and so on.’ If you’re going to tell a lie, tell a good one.