Transcription

by Kate Atkinson

  The village itself contained a manor, a church, a mill, a village green (with pond) and Serfs galore (quite happy – most unlikely). The Serfs ploughed and planted endlessly and there was a lot of chatter about strip farming and tithes. Nothing much else happened. The Miller’s Wife was unpopular because of her stuck-up ways; a good-hearted couple lost a pig. Oh, and a thoroughly annoying Minstrel kept interrupting everyone with his lute and his parable-like ditties. No sign of an actual plot, mind you. History should always have a plot, Juliet thought as she slashed and burned Morna Treadwell’s deathly words. How else could you make sense of it?

  She culled the Minstrel – they could dub in a lute later if really necessary (although when was a lute ever necessary?). She was rather pleased with herself for having added a poignant ending that hinted at the ravages of plague to come, even if they were going to ignore it and skip straight to the Wars of the Roses. A Servant Girl at the manor spied a rat in the pantry and then almost immediately afterwards was bitten by a flea. ‘Dratted things,’ she said. (Could they say ‘dratted’ in Schools? Juliet couldn’t remember if it was on the banned list. Probably.) ‘It’s nothing,’ the Cook told the Servant Girl. But it was something and it was definitely not going to be all right for an awful lot of people – up to half the world’s population, according to history. Even the war hadn’t managed that.

  ‘Miss Armstrong? Runners and riders at the starting gate,’ Daisy said into the studio microphone. She gave a little salute to Juliet in the control cubicle.

  The cast, sans Minstrel, and without counting Daisy, was composed of two actors and an actress. The actress was well over pensionable age and one of the actors, a superannuated rep ‘artiste’, was a quivering mess – he could barely stand at the microphone. The third member of the cast was a man called Roger Fairbrother, who was war-damaged in some unspecified way and, in Jessica Hastie’s absence, took on the role of the Cook as he had a rather light voice. Radio allowed for a degree of slippage in the gender department.

  Was this really the best Booking could come up with? The poor and the maimed, the halt and the blind? In this company, Daisy Gibbs’s haughty Miller’s Wife positively shone. Daisy was also rather convincing as the Small Girl with leprosy, shrieking enthusiastically as she was driven from the village by a Crowd. The Crowd comprised the other three members of the cast, augmented by a passing copy typist who had been sprung on by Daisy and dragged into the studio like prey. Historically, it was a commonplace procedure in Schools to press-gang anyone handy to help out with the acting side of things, not always to the artistic benefit of the programme.

  A happy ending was supplied by the return of the good-hearted couple’s prodigal pig and, in one of Juliet’s more dramatic alterations, the Miller’s Wife, instead of merely seeing the error of her imperious ways, met her comeuppance at the hands of the Serfs and was ducked in the village pond. Wildly inaccurate, probably, but the Juniors would enjoy it. They were serfs too, really, weren’t they? In thrall to the State in the shape of the education system.

  ‘You were a star,’ Juliet congratulated Daisy when the recording was over. ‘Perhaps you missed your vocation.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ Daisy said. The girl was impenetrable.

  Lester Pelling (rhymes with lemming, Juliet thought) was adding sound effects. His chinagraph pencil was clenched between his teeth as he listened with a look of furious concentration to the disc on the playback turntable, as if divining his future there.

  Juliet hesitated, unwilling to disturb Lester as he lifted the stylus and prepared to mark a groove with his pencil. Some sixth sense, however, made him turn round. He took off his headphones and said, ‘Oh, hello, miss,’ rather sheepishly, as if embarrassed to be seen at work.

  ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt you,’ she said.

  ‘That’s all right. I was just dropping the pig in. I’ve done hens and cows.’

  ‘Have you got geese?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We definitely need geese,’ Juliet said. ‘They had a lot of geese in the Middle Ages.’

  ‘I haven’t got any music either. I didn’t know what we needed.’

  ‘Crumhorns and flageolets, I expect. A sackbut or two as well,’ Juliet said, pulling these words off an obscure shelf in her memory. Were these real instruments, she wondered, or was she just making them up? They sounded ridiculous. ‘A lute, I suppose,’ she added reluctantly.

  ‘I’ll nip across the road to Effects,’ Lester said.

  ‘No, it’s all right. I’ll go to BH, you carry on here.’

  ‘You know, I’d like to be a Programme Producer, miss,’ he suddenly blurted out. ‘Like you,’ he added shyly.

  ‘Really? It’s not all it’s cut out to be, you know.’ She shouldn’t be discouraging. The boy still had his hopes. She thought of Cyril again. He had been a recording engineer, too. Would Godfrey Toby deny knowledge of him as well, if challenged? Cyril, she remembered fondly, had possessed the optimistic character of a terrier dog, relentless even in the face of horror. (Come on, miss. We can do this.)

  ‘Miss? Miss Armstrong?’

  It seemed suddenly imperative to be positive. Unlike Cyril, Lester had a future of some kind. ‘Of course, it’s not unknown, Lester, for someone in your job to be promoted,’ she said. ‘The Corporation can be good like that. You’re a boy soldier now, but you could leave as head of the regiment.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Why not?’

  He grew visibly taller. He grinned widely, showing a set of frighteningly mismatched teeth. Joy, Juliet thought. This was what it looked like. She should shout for Prendergast to come and see. She didn’t.

  ‘Thanks, miss.’

  ‘Think nothing of it.’

  Daisy Gibbs stopped her as she was leaving and handed her an envelope.

  ‘This arrived for you, Miss Armstrong.’

  ‘You can call me Juliet, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  Juliet examined the envelope while the girl in Effects was trying to locate a flageolet. Her name was handwritten on the front – ‘Miss J. Armstrong’. Had it been opened? There was no evidence it had and yet she couldn’t quite quell her suspicions. Messages that appeared out of the blue were rarely comforting and frequently annoying. When she opened it, with a degree of caution, there was a folded-up piece of notepaper – no heading – with one sentence written on it. Really? she thought. They couldn’t even—

  ‘Miss Armstrong? I found the flageolet. I had to go to Music.’ The girl from Effects sounded breathless, as if she’d been chasing the flageolet around the building. (It would be a nice name for a gazelle, Juliet thought. Or a superior kind of rabbit.) ‘And there was a message for you – not so much a message as a question – from Mr Pelling. He says, “Is it a watermill or a windmill, and can you get the effect?”’

  ‘Well done you on the mill,’ Juliet said to Lester. ‘I’d forgotten all about it. I decided on wind – they had some nice … what’s the word? Whooshing. Or swishing – you know, from windmill sails. Pre-war Norfolk, apparently. In Atmosphere. We’ll have to make our own ducking stool, it’s not something they seem to have much call for in Broadcasting House.’

  They always used to do things live in Manchester with two Effects boys and water tanks and wind machines, bird whistles – the boys did authentic (and rather irritating) gulls. No one did seascapes better. Sometimes the boys would stagger out of their little cubicle looking as though they had survived a terrible maritime disaster. That was when she had moved on from Continuity to Children’s Hour, of course. They were supposed to share programmes with the other regions, but the North was particularly territorial about their Hour. It had been more fun than here. Children’s Hour was designed for entertainment, whereas Schools was endlessly purposeful. Juliet was discovering that it took its toll after a while.

  ‘Do you miss it? The North?’ Daisy had asked once, wistful for something she had never known. She was a vicar’s daughter from rural Wiltshir
e. (Of course she was. What else would she be?) ‘All those real people?’

  ‘No more real than here,’ Juliet had said, unconvinced by her own answer. Her mother was – had been – Scottish (although you couldn’t tell by looking), and they had once made the long journey to her homeland. Juliet had been very small and could remember little of this hejira. An oppressive castle and everything smudged in shades of sooty charcoal. She had expected relatives, but she remembered none. Nor, apparently, were there any on her father’s side. ‘You have his curls,’ her mother said. It seemed a poor legacy.

  When she had applied for the post of Announcer at the BBC in Manchester they had been keen to discover if she had links with the North of England; it seemed to be some kind of criterion that they needed to fulfil. She doubted that her mother’s vague Caledonian roots would go down well – a quite different Region, too far north of the wall – and so she plucked ‘Middlesbrough’ out of thin air. ‘Wonderful,’ she heard someone whisper. People always said they wanted the truth, but really they were perfectly content with a facsimile.

  Lester Pelling was waiting patiently. For her to go, she supposed. ‘I’ll let you get on,’ she said. ‘Do you need any help?’

  He did not.

  As Juliet was leaving, she suddenly remembered. ‘What was your father, Lester?’

  ‘Miss?’

  ‘What was your father?’

  ‘A bastard,’ he said softly, taking her by surprise. No one swore in Schools, nothing beyond the occasional ‘Damn and blast’ on account of some technical problem, and yet this was the second obscenity she’d heard in the last half-hour. On her return from Broadcasting House, Charles Lofthouse had caught sight of her and said, ‘Well, Fuchs is fucked.’ He was trying to shock her, she knew, but she looked at him coolly and said, ‘Is he now?’

  He had held up the front page of an early edition of the Evening Standard for her to read.

  ‘Fourteen years,’ he said. ‘They should have hanged him, surely?’

  ‘Russia was our ally when he gave them secrets,’ Juliet said, scanning the newspaper. ‘You can’t be a traitor if it’s not the enemy.’

  ‘Sophistry,’ he snorted. ‘And a naïve defence at best. Whose side are you on, Miss Armstrong?’ He sneered like a pantomime villain and she suddenly realized how much he disliked her and wondered why she hadn’t seen it before.

  ‘It’s not about sides,’ she said testily, ‘it’s about the law.’

  ‘If you say so, dearie.’ He had limped off and she had had to restrain herself from taking one of the records in her arms and throwing it at him. She’d wondered if you could decapitate someone if you sliced an acetate-covered aluminium disc through the air at just the right angle. Death by flageolet.

  ‘Apart from being a bastard?’ she prompted Lester Pelling.

  ‘Sorry, miss. It just came out.’

  ‘Trust me, I’ve heard worse. In the meeting this morning, you suggested a day in the life of a trawlerman and you said your father was – I’m just curious, that’s all. I find unfinished sentences dis—’

  ‘A fishmonger. He was a fishmonger, miss.’

  ‘There you are then.’

  ‘And a bastard,’ she heard him murmur as she left the room.

  She had just settled back at her desk when a BBC Boy – they were the cadets of the Corporation – delivered another envelope to her desk. ‘Juliet Armstrong’ was written on it in a sloppy, rather foreign-looking hand. She sighed – was she to be bombarded all day long by messages? This one, however, was of a quite different quality to the one that Daisy had handed to her earlier. Inside the envelope was a single sheet of ruled paper, quite small, torn from a notebook. In the same scrawly hand as her name on the envelope, someone had written, ‘You will pay for what you did.’

  Juliet leapt up from her desk as if she’d been bitten by a plague-carrying rat, ran out into the corridor after the Boy and said, so sharply that he cowered, ‘Who gave you that note?’

  ‘Reception, miss. Do you want to send a reply?’ he asked meekly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who gave you this?’ she demanded of the uppity girl on reception, returned intact, apparently, by the Minotaur. She thrust the envelope in front of her nose.

  ‘Someone,’ she said, refusing to be intimidated.

  ‘Can you be more specific?’

  ‘A man. Short.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Juliet urged.

  ‘He had a funny eye.’

  ‘And a limp?’ Juliet hazarded, remembering the funny little man in Moretti’s.

  ‘Yes, he did. He was most peculiar. Friend of yours, is he?’

  I am Ariadne, mistress of the maze, Juliet thought. (Was a maze different from a labyrinth? How?) And I am not going to lift a semi-divine finger to save you when it’s time for you to be sacrificed to that great half-bull, half-man. Was the bull the top half or the bottom? She couldn’t remember. Whichever way round it was, the Minotaur seemed a very priapic kind of myth. They had done the story of Daedalus and his labyrinth on Children’s Hour, sanitized and abridged somewhat. It had been popular. Icarus, his son, of course had flown too high and fallen. It was the perfect plot. It some ways it was the only plot.

  ‘Passing sentence, Lord Chief Justice Lord Goddard said: “You have betrayed the hospitality and protection given to you by this country with the grossest treachery.”’ Juliet was reading her own later edition of the Standard while she ate supper.

  You will pay for what you did. Fuchs was going to pay now. But who wants me to pay, she wondered? And with what? Blood money? A pound of flesh? And who was demanding recompense? And for what? Her life seemed littered with misdeeds, it was difficult to pinpoint which one someone might wish to bring her to account for. Her mind was still occupied with Godfrey Toby’s snub. There was no way in the world that he didn’t recognize her. The war had been a tide that had receded and now here it was lapping around her ankles again. She sighed and chastised herself for a sub-standard metaphor.

  Was it something to do with the unexpected reappearance of Godfrey? There was a covenant of guilt between them – had he been sent a bill of reckoning too? And could you drive yourself mad with questions?

  She cut herself another slice of bread and buttered it thickly. The tin of spaghetti that she’d planned had, thankfully, been abandoned. She’d had to dive into Harrods Food Hall on the way home to buy provisions for the unexpected visitor who was to arrive later. Harrods was on her way home – she rented a flat in one of the more obscure streets of South Kensington still stoically waiting to recover from the war. She had lived here throughout the duration and it seemed disloyal to leave now. Even when she had moved to Manchester to start with the BBC she had kept the flat on, sub-letting it to a matron at St George’s who had seemed the essence of propriety but had turned out to be a raging alcoholic, confirming Juliet in her long-held belief that appearances were invariably deceptive.

  In Harrods she had bought bread, butter, ham sliced off the bone while she watched, a thick wedge of Cheddar, a half-dozen eggs, a jar of pickled onions and a bunch of grapes. She put it all on Hartley’s tab – he had some kind of special agreement that bypassed rationing. She doubted that it was above board. She filed the receipt carefully in her purse. They would complain in Accounts that she’d been to Harrods and not somewhere cheaper, but Hartley wouldn’t care.

  Juliet ate some of the grapes and then put the kettle on the hob, laid a fire and lit it. Her visitor wasn’t due for another hour. She wished, not for the first time, that there was room in the flat for a piano. She was completely rusty, of course. Sometimes she went over to Broadcasting House and practised on a piano in one of the rehearsal rooms. She owned a gramophone, but it wasn’t the same thing – it was the opposite, in fact. Listening, not playing – in the same way that reading was the opposite of writing.

  She put on Rachmaninov’s Third – his own 1939 recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra – and fetched the envelope from her handbag a
nd read again the note that Daisy had given her. ‘The flamingo will arrive at 9.00 p.m.’ Hardly code, was it? You would think they could do better, use some kind of cypher if they were going to commit to paper. Was it supposed to disguise the message if someone came across it accidentally? Or indeed, on purpose. She thought of Daisy – had she read this? She acted as innocent as a lamb, but that meant nothing, did it?

  And who in their right minds would think she was having a flamingo delivered? A parrot, perhaps, or a budgerigar – Harrods pet department would convey either, probably – but a flamingo? Why not just ‘parcel’ or ‘packet’? The note had been written by Hartley, of course, a fact that made her even more irritated by it.

  She threw the paper on the fire. He wasn’t a flamingo – obviously – he was a Czech being brought out of Vienna, through Berlin, on an RAF transport. A scientist, something to do with metals, not that she really wanted to know. He was being flown to RAF Kidlington and by tomorrow night he would be gone on the way to somewhere else – Harwell or America or somewhere more obscure.

  Recently, MI5 had asked Juliet to run an occasional safe house for them. Since she had worked for the Security Service throughout the war, they seemed to think they had some kind of claim on her trustworthiness. It was a dull business, more like babysitting than espionage.

  The Rachmaninov finished and Juliet turned the wireless on and promptly fell asleep. When she woke it was to the chimes of Big Ben announcing the Nine o’Clock News. Fuchs again. Someone was knocking on the front door of her flat, so gently as to be almost inaudible.

  ‘There is a bell,’ she said when she opened the door. She had been expecting the usual indistinguishable grey men, but instead it was the RAF – a Squadron Leader and – translating his stripes – a Group Captain. Blimey, Juliet thought.

  The Group Captain was craggily handsome and must have been dashing during the war, but he had no interest in the niceties. ‘Miss Armstrong? “Vermilion” is the word of today and this is Mr Smith. I believe he is to stay here tonight?’

  ‘Yes. He is,’ she said, opening the door wider. The two officers stepped aside to reveal the Czech, small and rather derelict, standing between two RAF policemen. He looked more like a prisoner than a defector. He was wearing an overcoat that was clearly too big for him and clutching a small, battered leather suitcase. He had no hat, Juliet noticed. A man with no hat looked surprisingly vulnerable.