Transcription

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘You’d better come in,’ she said to him.

  She laid out food for her guest. ‘A midnight feast,’ she said encouragingly. ‘Do eat, Mr Smith.’ How ridiculous to address him as that. ‘You can tell me your name, you know. Your name,’ she repeated more loudly. He seemed to speak hardly any English. Pointing at her herself, she said, ‘My name is Juliet.’

  ‘Pavel.’

  ‘Good,’ she said brightly. Poor blighter, she thought. She wondered if he’d actually wanted to get out or if he had been ‘persuaded’ in some way.

  He pecked miserably at the food. It seemed to depress him further – he recoiled when he tasted a pickled onion. He didn’t want tea and asked if she had beer. She didn’t. She offered whisky instead and he drank it quickly with a frown on his face, as if it reminded him of something he didn’t want to remember. After the whisky he took a small creased photograph from his wallet and showed it to her. A woman, in her forties perhaps, aged by war.

  ‘Your wife?’ she asked. He shrugged an ambivalent response before replacing the photograph in his wallet and commencing to weep in a silent, reticent way that was worse than if he’d been choking out sobs. She patted him on the back. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Or at least it will be. I’m sure.’

  He was white with exhaustion. She put a guard around the fire (she supposed it wouldn’t do if he burned to death on her watch) and made up a bed for him on the sofa. He slept in his clothes, even his shoes, and was still holding on to the leather suitcase when – almost immediately – he fell asleep. Juliet gently prised the handle of the suitcase out of his hand, tucked in the blanket around him and turned off the light.

  Slipping between her own cold sheets, she thought enviously of the fire next door. This morning’s early hint of spring had long retreated back into winter. She should have made herself a hot-water bottle. Cold nights like these were when you needed another body next to you, for warmth if nothing else – although not that of the Czech nesting next door. Heaven forfend. Juliet thought of the poor creased woman in the photograph. Dead, she supposed.

  It had been a while since Juliet had shared her bed with anyone. There had been a few, but she thought of them as mistakes rather than lovers, and no one steady in her life since she had endured rather than enjoyed a rather tortuous relationship with the second cello of the BBC Northern Orchestra. He was a refugee – Jewish – and had been one of the listeners in Room M at Cockfosters, and it had rather done for him to have to eavesdrop on Nazis all day long. And, of course, he heard a lot about the camps.

  It had been part of her job to go on tour with the Northern Orchestra and her memories of the affair mainly consisted of surreptitious sex in the unwelcoming single beds of boarding houses in Satanic mill towns. ‘Jerusalem,’ she remembered saying to the cellist as they emerged from a station underpass in some godforsaken shoddy hole and surveyed the blackened townscape. She supposed that, being Jewish, ‘Jerusalem’ meant something different to him.

  She had felt that their shared history of listening to the enemy had given them something in common, but really the affair was doomed from the start. They were both still convalescent from the war and it had been a relief to leave him.

  Now, though, she missed him. She had perhaps been more fond of him than she knew. And lately she had begun to worry that she was turning into that dreaded creature, a spinster. Perhaps soon the transformation would be complete and she would be an old maid. There were worse fates that could befall a person, she reminded herself. There could be nothing left of you but a creased photograph. Or just a name. And it might not even be your own name.

  She clambered out of bed and opened her wardrobe, where she kept a pair of suede ankle boots – stout zippered things lined with sheepskin that had done sterling service in the bad winters after the war. From its snug hideaway in the left boot she removed the Mauser that Perry Gibbons had given her. She kept it loaded, but it made her feel slightly sick to handle it now in the light of Godfrey Toby’s resurrection. (We must finish her off, I’m afraid.) Juliet placed the little gun on her bedside table. Better safe than sorry.

  It was Perry, of course, who had been Godfrey’s case officer in the beginning, but Perry left the service in 1940 and she had seen next to nothing of him since. These days he wrote books and gave lectures about Nature. A Guide to the British Woodland, for children – she had read that one as an act of friendship, long after they had ceased to be friends, if that was what they had been. He was a regular on Children’s Hour these days, where he was known as ‘Mr Nature’.

  She had a wireless beside her bed, a little Philetta that she turned on, lowering the volume so that she wouldn’t disturb her guest. Like many others, Juliet was soothed into the night on the airwaves by the shipping forecast. Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, southerly three or four at first in the Utsires, otherwise cyclonic five or six becoming westerly or south-westerly four or five, rain then showers, good. She was sound asleep before the litany reached Iceland. She dreamt not of seafaring or maritime weather, but of Godfrey Toby. She was walking hand in hand in a park at twilight with him and when she turned to look at him she could see that there was a black hole where his face should be. Despite this drawback he spoke and said, ‘We must finish her off, I’m afraid.’

  Juliet woke with a start. She sensed something murky was creeping towards her. It was a cruel thing, trying to sprout and find the light of day. It was truth. She wasn’t sure that she wanted it. Juliet felt fear for the first time in a long time.

  She woke for a second time somewhere in the dark wasteland of the small hours.

  Oh, Lord, she thought – Jessica Hastie. Was she still asleep in the studio?

  Juliet woke to Bright and Early with Marcel Gardner and the Serenade Orchestra on the radio. It seemed an unnecessarily cheerful way to start the day. She got up to make tea and found that Pavel was already awake. Her visitor had removed the bedding from the sofa and made a neat pile of it and now he was sitting, staring at his hands as if he was a condemned man in a cell and it was the day of execution.

  ‘Tea?’ she offered brightly. She mimed a cup and saucer. He nodded. A thank-you would be nice, she thought, even in a foreign language.

  They breakfasted on last night’s supper. He seemed no better for sleep. Pale and restless, he kept pointing at his watch while staring at her questioningly.

  ‘When?’ Juliet queried. ‘Do you mean when are they coming?’

  ‘Yes. When.’

  Juliet suppressed a sigh. They were really rather late, but he would worry more (if that were possible) if he knew this, so she said confidently, ‘Soon. Very soon.’ There was no telephone. She had recently taken steps to have one installed but there seemed to be a delay of some sort. If she went out and used a phone box it would mean leaving her visitor alone in the flat, and who knew what kind of disaster that might lead to?

  ‘Shall I put some music on?’ she asked, holding a record aloft to demonstrate. He shrugged in response, but nonetheless she took Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony from its paper sleeve and placed it on the turntable. It seemed appropriate – a fellow countryman writing about a new world – but the music had no effect on him, one way or the other. And perhaps, after all, he preferred his old world.

  He commenced pacing around the small flat like a troubled zoo animal, investigating anything he chanced upon, yet without any real curiosity. He ran his finger along the spines of her books, picked up a cushion and scrutinized its cross-stitched urn of flowers (embroidered by Juliet’s mother), traced the willow-pattern journey on a breakfast plate. His nerves were horribly stretched. When he picked up her little Sèvres coffee cup and began absent-mindedly transferring it from hand to hand, like a tennis ball, she was forced to intervene. ‘Do sit down, why don’t you?’ she said, gently removing the little cup and putting it on a high shelf as if rescuing it from a child.

  Dvořák played. Dvořák finished. Still no sign of them. Something must be up.

&nbs
p; ‘Tea?’ she offered. A pot had been made twice this morning already and in answer he simply glared at her. ‘Not my fault, mate,’ she murmured. There was a loud knock at the door and the pair of them almost jumped out of their respective skins. ‘There you go,’ Juliet said, ‘they’re here,’ but when she opened the door it was a messenger boy from Curzon Street. He was an inferior species to the BBC Boys.

  ‘There is a bell,’ Juliet said.

  ‘Vermilion,’ the messenger boy said by way of introduction. ‘I’ve got a message for you.’

  ‘Go on then.’

  ‘You’re to bring the flamingo to the Strand Palace Hotel.’

  ‘Now?’

  The boy visibly raked his memory. ‘Dunno,’ he eventually concluded.

  ‘Thanks. You can go,’ she said when he showed signs of lingering. ‘I’m not tipping you.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said and skipped down the stairs, whistling as he went.

  ‘Right, we’re off,’ she said to Pavel. ‘Get your things.’ Juliet mimed the charade of retrieving a suitcase and overcoat to him. I could get a job on the stage, she thought. I’d be better than some I know. She thought of Jessica Hastie again and felt a twinge of guilt.

  Her charge fetched his meagre worldly possessions. The large coat gave him an odd childlike air, as if he’d raided a dressing-up box. He would be cold without a hat, she thought. What had happened to it? Was a man’s hat the first thing he lost in a crisis, she wondered? Or the last?

  The only thing to do was to hail a cab on the street, so she coaxed him down the stairs as if he were an infant and she was taking him on a pleasant class excursion rather than throwing his fate to the winds.

  Juliet made him shelter from view in the doorway of a block of flats at the top of a side street while she went out on to the main road to hunt for a cab. She had to step so far out into the busy Brompton Road that she considered it a marvel that she wasn’t mown down by a bus.

  Eventually she managed to bring down a taxi outside the Oratory and hustle Pavel into it before saying, as quietly as she could, to the driver, ‘The Strand Palace Hotel, please.’

  ‘It’s no good whispering, love,’ he said. He was a professional Cockney by the sound of it. ‘I’m deaf in that ear. The Blitz,’ he added, as if he should be given a medal for surviving it. (Yes, definitely a professional.) And they would all have medals if that was simply the case. She patiently repeated the address to him and in response he yelled, ‘The Strand Palace Hotel?’ so loudly that most of South Kensington must have heard. She could have throttled him.

  After casting a quick glance in all directions, Juliet jumped in the cab. They were about to move off when the passenger door on Juliet’s side was wrenched open. Pavel screamed like a fox and Juliet thought about the little Mauser and how handy it would be for moments like these (to shoot the taxi driver, if no one else), but then she realized that the person hijacking their cab was Hartley.

  ‘Can we go now?’ the taxi driver said. ‘Or are there more of you?’ He was the truculent sort. Juliet suspected that he wasn’t deaf at all.

  ‘Yes,’ Juliet snapped. ‘We can go.’ She had been terrified for a moment. ‘For God’s sake, Hartley.’ She scowled at him. Pavel was cowering in the corner of the seat, more rabbit than fox. ‘You completely spooked him.

  ‘He’s a friend,’ she said soothingly to Pavel, prodding Hartley in the chest to demonstrate. ‘Friend. Also he’s an idiot.’

  ‘Am I a friend?’ Hartley asked curiously.

  ‘No. I was trying to make him feel better.’

  Juliet and Hartley had long ago abandoned manners with each other. It was refreshing to behave without respect towards someone.

  Hartley reeked of garlic, unpleasant in the small space of a black cab. He had always possessed some outlandish tastes in food – gherkins and garlic, stinking cheeses, and once she had gone to his cell in the Scrubs for something and had found what looked like a glass jar of tentacles on his desk. (‘Squid,’ he said happily. ‘Came in on a flight from Lisbon.’)

  ‘You’re late,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not late, you are,’ she countered, offering Pavel a mint from a roll in her pocket in defence against the garlic – but he waved her away as if she was offering poison to him.

  The poor man was ten times cleverer than she and Hartley put together (twenty times cleverer than Hartley alone) and yet he was entirely at their disposal.

  Hartley, settled now on the jump seat, grinned inanely at Pavel. ‘Has he been any trouble?’

  ‘No, of course not. He wouldn’t say boo to a goose. I’m late for work,’ she added, the mention of geese reminding her of Past Times. It was due for transmission this afternoon and she hadn’t listened to it yet. Everything was behind because of Joan Timpson’s ‘small’ operation. She was in Barts but Juliet hadn’t been to visit. She should. She would.

  ‘Vermilion,’ she said sotto voce to Hartley. She didn’t want the cab driver to blazon it to Trafalgar Square, which they were currently negotiating in a very laborious manner. ‘Can you go a bit quicker?’ she said, but he ignored her. ‘Vermilion,’ she repeated softly to Hartley.

  ‘Yes. Password for …’ he nodded in the direction of Pavel. ‘What about it?’

  ‘Has it been changed today?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘To what?’

  He mouthed a word. He looked like a distraught fish. ‘Aquamarine,’ she decoded eventually. Were they working their way through the colours and now had reached the more abstruse layers of the spectrum? What would be next – caput mortuum, heliotrope? The colours of the day. Last year it had been all sea creatures. Octopus, prawn, dolphin. Fish of the day. She thought of Lester Pelling and his father the fishmonger.

  ‘You should know it,’ Hartley said. ‘Why don’t you know it?’

  ‘Perhaps because I don’t actually work for you any more, you know. You’re not even paying me, just expenses. And you’re obviously incompetent or I would know it.’ Pavel made a little whimpering noise. ‘He doesn’t like it when the grown-ups fight,’ she said crossly to Hartley. Perhaps she could shoot Hartley too. ‘It was just that the messenger boy said “vermilion” this morning.’

  ‘Oh, messenger boys are known to be careless,’ Hartley said. ‘If not downright stupid.’ He was in the middle of trying to direct the driver to the side entrance of the hotel on Exeter Street. The driver seemed reluctant to take instruction and they drove round into Burleigh Street and then out on to the Strand itself before he was finally persuaded that they really did want to go to where they said they did. They had made a full circuit of the building, occasionally against the honking traffic, by the time he finally pulled up outside the door.

  Hartley said, ‘I’ll hop out and check the coast is clear.’

  What an ugly hotel. Juliet could see the Savoy from here, on the opposite side of the Strand. So much nicer. It was one of Giselle’s haunts during the war. She had been very free with her sexual favours – in order to acquire information, supposedly, although Juliet suspected she would have been free with them anyway. Then the SOE got their hands on her and she was parachuted into France. She was never heard from again, so presumably she was captured and either shot or sent to one of the camps. Juliet sometimes wondered if—

  ‘We go? Please?’ Pavel said, interrupting her thoughts.

  ‘No. We don’t go. Not yet.’

  Ten minutes passed. ‘The meter’s running, you know,’ the driver said.

  ‘I do know that, thank you,’ she said tartly.

  Fifteen minutes. This was ridiculous. Pavel was getting more and more agitated. He looked like he might be about to bolt. The cab driver adjusted his rear-view mirror to take in Pavel and said, ‘Is he all right? He’s not going to be sick, is he?’

  ‘No, of course he’s not.’ He did look rather green though. Juliet made a decision and said, ‘Drive on. Take us to Gower Street,’ but Hartley chose that moment to reappear. He opened the door of the cab and said
to Juliet, ‘All clear,’ and to Pavel, ‘Shall we?’ gesturing like a footman for him to step out of the cab.

  ‘I think he’s going to take a bit more cajoling than that,’ Juliet said.

  The indistinguishable grey men had put in an appearance today. They were sitting in the lobby; one was drinking tea, the other was reading The Times. They were not very good at pretence. I would have done a much better job, Juliet thought.

  She looked around and found that Hartley had disappeared and she’d been left to do this on her own.

  When they caught sight of Juliet, the two men stood up, abandoning their props. Oh, here we go, she thought. She put her arm through Pavel’s as if they were about to do the Gay Gordons. He was nervous, she could feel a tremor through the thick worsted of his overcoat. They must have seemed an odd couple to anyone watching their hesitant progress. She looked him in the eye and said, ‘Courage,’ and nodded at him. He nodded back, but she didn’t know whether or not he understood. She guided him gently towards the grey men.

  ‘Miss Armstrong,’ the tea-drinker said. ‘Thank you, we’ll take him from here.’

  They led him away. He was squashed between them. Poor flamingo, she thought, always destined to be the meat in someone or other’s sandwich. Did people eat flamingo? It seemed like an unappetizing bird.

  He looked back at her, an expression tantamount to terror on his face. She smiled at him and gave him a little thumbs-up sign, but she couldn’t help thinking that perhaps it should have been a thumbs-down. He looked like a man being led to the gallows.

  ‘They’re taking him somewhere in Kent,’ Hartley said in her ear.

  ‘Don’t sneak up on me like that. What’s in Kent?’

  ‘Someone’s country house. You know – roaring fire, comfortable sofas, after-dinner whisky. Make him feel at ease and then scoop out the contents of his brain.’