Transcription

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘We have to destroy it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll take it home with me, miss,’ he volunteered bravely, as if it were an unexploded bomb he was offering to defuse. ‘I’ll deal with it.’ Juliet heard Cyril’s voice in her head at the scene of a different disaster. Come on, miss. We can do this. You take the head and I’ll take the feet. She felt suddenly sick.

  The tea trolley could be heard clattering along the corridor towards them like a siege engine and they fell into a tense silence. They could have been conspirators, Juliet thought, hatching a plot to blow up the BBC, finish off Hitler’s work for him. ‘No,’ she sighed, ‘it’s my responsibility. I’ll see to it. I might go home early, actually. I’ve got a bit of a headache. Don’t worry about it – worse things happen at sea. It’ll be all right.’

  She left the building, holding the offensive recording in plain sight, as if she were taking it over to Broadcasting House. As she started across the road, the last person she wanted to see at that moment approached from the other side. Charles Lofthouse.

  ‘Juliet,’ he said pleasantly as they met each other in the middle of the road. ‘Going to BH? No problems, I hope?’

  ‘Why should I have a problem, Charles?’ She clutched the record protectively to her chest. A car whizzed by, too close for comfort. One of us is going to get killed, she thought. (Preferably Charles.) ‘Must dash, Charles. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’ A taxi hooted loudly and swerved to miss Charles, who was limping rather slowly to the other side of the road. The driver shouted an obscenity and Charles waved his hand dismissively at him. His leg was particularly bad today, she noticed. Juliet had briefly dated a pilot during the war. He crash-landed on the coast coming back from a raid and lost a leg. He made light of it, joked about it endlessly from his hospital bed (Not a leg to stand on, Pull the other one, and so on), but it ruined him and he gassed himself in his mother’s kitchen after he was released from hospital. Juliet was furious with him for killing himself. It was only a leg, after all, she argued with his phantom presence. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have two. I would have stuck by him, she thought. But perhaps that was easy to say after the fact. After all, she hardly knew him and anyway, apart from her mother, she’d never stuck by anyone else. Sometimes she wondered if she didn’t carry a fatal flaw inside her – the crack in the golden bowl, invisible to the naked eye, but impossible to ignore once you knew about it.

  She got in the cab that always seemed to be lurking in Riding House Street, although there was no rank there. It was not – thankfully – being driven by this morning’s cabbie. She was imagining it, wasn’t she – that the cab that nearly mowed Charles Lofthouse down just now was being driven by the driver from this morning? She was starting to see him everywhere. That’s how people went mad. She remembered seeing Gaslight during the war.

  On the other hand, she felt pretty sure that Charles had heard Roger Fairbrother’s linguistic lapse and still let the programme go out. It wouldn’t be Charles who would get the blame, it would be her, wouldn’t it? Devious old bugger, she thought. Juliet had learnt to swear in the North, where words like ‘bastard’ and ‘bugger’ were part of the lingua franca. She had done Outside Broadcasts, talking to miners and trawlermen about their lives. Nor did ‘fuck’ frighten her. She felt a twinge of sympathy for poor Roger Fairbrother. Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck.

  Juliet changed her mind about the cab and got out on Great Titchfield Street, to the driver’s annoyance, and then caught another on New Cavendish Street. Before stepping into it she cast a quick glance around the street. She had the uneasy feeling that she was being watched. How else would the funny little man from Moretti’s (if it was him) know where to deliver that note? You will pay for what you did. Must I, Juliet thought? The war had thrown up plenty of unpaid debts – why should she be the one being presented with the bill? Or perhaps someone was playing a trick on her, some kind of game to drive her mad. Gaslighting. But it still left the question of who. And why.

  It was only four o’clock, she thought, as the cab pulled away. Plenty of time for more mishaps to add to Prendergast’s catalogue.

  She made a pot of tea and washed down a couple of aspirins – she really did have a headache now. The food from last night was still lying on the little table at the window, looking rather weary now. She used the eggs and cheese to make an omelette. She ate the omelette. Sometimes it was better to go step by simple step. The funny little man who had stared at her in Moretti’s yesterday had eaten an omelette, shovelling it in his mouth with a fork as if he had never been taught manners. Or had been starving at some point in his life.

  She turned on the wireless, looking for the news and finding the end of Children’s Hour. Perry Gibbons. Of course it would be him. Life was nothing more than a long chain of coincidences. He was talking about beetles. ‘If you look carefully, children, you will find that there are shield bugs everywhere.’ Really? Juliet thought, casting a rather apprehensive glance around the room.

  Ever since her return from Manchester she had been wondering if she would bump into Perry. Apart from the odd glimpse from a distance, she hadn’t seen him since he left the Service during the war. (I shall be leaving you, I’m afraid, Miss Armstrong.) Had he left the Service? Or was it just the pretence of leaving? – which in many ways was more effective. It would be the same if people thought you were dead, wouldn’t it? You would be left free to live. She was reminded of the Friar in Much Ado About Nothing, advising Hero to fake her death. (Come, lady, die to live.) Juliet had seen last season’s production in Stratford (Anthony Quayle and Diana Wynyard – both very good). It was a happier outcome for Hero than for Juliet’s own fictional namesake when she tried the same trick. O happy dagger.

  Death was an extreme recourse. Perhaps all you needed to do was put about the rumour that you had left for New Zealand or South Africa. Or, in Perry’s case, that you had quit MI5 for the Ministry of Information in June 1940 and had never looked back.

  There seemed to be some kind of osmotic membrane between the Corporation and the Service, employees moving from one world to the other without hindrance. Hartley had been a producer in Talks before the war and now Perry was a regular contributor to the BBC. Sometimes you had to wonder if MI5 was using the BBC for its own purposes. Or, indeed, if it was the other way round.

  Children’s Hour ended with its usual sign-off. ‘Goodnight children, everywhere.’ Between the darkness and the daylight. That was the children’s hour, according to the Longfellow poem. It was a sprightly, sentimental kind of poem, yet it always brought on an unaccountable fit of melancholy in her. Perhaps it was nostalgia for her days in Manchester, when she had sometimes been the one to say goodnight.

  Big Ben struck the hour and the Six o’Clock News began. Juliet was prompted to set sentiment aside and went looking for her small domestic toolkit and took out the hammer, more like a toffee hammer, that she used for putting up pictures. Placing the Medieval Village on the wooden draining board in the kitchen, she smashed it to pieces. It would never know history. It was not the first time she had destroyed evidence of wrong-doing and she supposed it wouldn’t be the last.

  She arrived at Barts halfway through visiting time, bearing the remains of the grapes from the Harrods cornucopia, trimmed to look untouched.

  ‘Oh, how kind,’ Joan Timpson said. ‘These are rather superior. Where did you get them?’

  ‘Harrods,’ Juliet admitted.

  ‘You shouldn’t have gone to the expense.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Juliet said. She could hardly say that MI5 had paid for them. ‘How are you feeling anyway?’

  ‘Much better, thank you, dear.’

  She didn’t look better, Juliet thought. She looked awful.

  ‘How about the Village?’ Joan asked. ‘Went the day well?’

  Juliet was getting ready for bed when there was a noisy banging on the door. There was a hint of desperation in it. There’s a bell, she thought.<
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  She stood behind the door and said, ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It’s Hartley. Open up.’

  She did, but grudgingly. He was wretchedly drunk, which she attributed to the near-empty bottle of rum in his hand. He was catholic in his attitude to alcohol – anything would do.

  ‘Is he here?’

  ‘Is who here?’ Juliet puzzled.

  ‘The fucking flamingo – who else?’

  ‘The Czech? Pavel? No, of course not.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ There was an urgent note to the question.

  ‘Of course I’m sure. I think I’d notice. You haven’t lost him, have you?’

  ‘Flown the coop,’ he said. ‘Never turned up in Kent.’

  Juliet thought of the indistinguishable grey men. England wasn’t the only country to breed them like that.

  ‘Even you couldn’t be that careless, Hartley.’

  ‘I wasn’t the last one with him,’ he said, turning petulant. ‘I wasn’t running the safe house either. You were.’

  She sighed. ‘You’d better come in. You’re in no fit state to do anything.’

  He entered the small living room and dropped heavily on to the sofa. His presence filled the flat in a way that the Czech’s hadn’t. The difference between presence and absence. Reading and writing. Playing and listening. Living and dying. The world was just an endless dialectic. It was exhausting.

  ‘I was about to make cocoa.’

  ‘Cocoa?’ Hartley echoed incredulously.

  ‘Yes, it will do you good.’

  But when she came back with the two cups Hartley was asleep, still in a sitting position. She tipped him on to his side and fetched a blanket. She should hire this sofa out, she thought, before turning out the light.

  Two nights running she’d had men sleeping on her sofa. One a complete stranger, the other irritatingly familiar. I’ll get a reputation, she thought, although in fact no one in the building could have cared less what she got up to. Her neighbours were mostly eccentrics or refugees, which amounted to the same thing in practice.

  She locked her bedroom door in case a befuddled Hartley fumbled his way through in the middle of the night, mistaking her room for the bathroom.

  Juliet put the little Mauser next to the Philetta radio. It was best to be ready, even if you had no idea what it was you were ready for. And if the worst came to the worst, she could always shoot Hartley, who was snoring like a goods train next door. She had never been sure about Hartley. He had no real centre. It wouldn’t bother him to play for the other side.

  You will pay for what you did. The war was a clumsily stitched wound and it felt as if it was being opened by something. Or someone. Was it Godfrey Toby? I must find him, she thought. Perhaps I must find them all. I will be the hunter, not the hunted. Diana, not the stag. The arrow, not the bow.

  It’s all right. But it wasn’t, was it? Not really.

  Hartley was gone when Juliet woke the next morning. Only the empty rum bottle remained as evidence that he had ever been in her flat.

  The fog of sleep was still befuddling Juliet, rendering her mind a jumble of lost flamingos and unnecessary lutes, not to mention strange men with pebble eyes.

  You will pay for what you did. Was the man from Moretti’s the one demanding payment, or was he just the messenger? Could he be one of Godfrey’s fifth columnists? Trude and Dolly were the only ones whose faces she had seen, that she had ever encountered in the flesh. All the informants’ files must be buried somewhere deep in the Registry – did they have photographs attached? Godfrey could easily have fooled them into thinking that photographic identity would make it easier for them to be verified by the Nazis if they invaded. Come along now, Betty, smile for the camera. I have a little list, Juliet thought. And it’s time to work my way through it. Hunter, not hunted, she reminded herself.

  Juliet felt almost overwhelmed by the urge to find Godfrey. He would know the answers to her questions. He would know what to do. (We must finish her off, I’m afraid.) After all, he was good at ‘mopping up’.

  Perhaps all the chatter about relocation at the end of the war had been merely a ruse. What if Godfrey Toby was exactly where he had been all along? Hiding in plain sight. In Finchley. Live to die, Godfrey.

  Making her way to the Underground, Juliet felt a frisson of fear, an animal instinct that told her she was being followed. When she glanced behind her she could see no one who looked as if they might be dogging her footsteps. That was no comfort, as all it meant was that if someone was following her then they were very good at it.

  Taking a detour, she got off the Tube at Regent Street and headed to Oxford Street to get on another line. On the way she entered a Woolworth’s through the front entrance and exited through the back, a rather crude feint designed to flush out anyone who might be trailing after her. She was on high alert and when a rather drab-looking woman, marooned in middle age, bumped into her, she was forced to suppress a cry of alarm. The woman was wearing a headscarf patterned with yellow and green parrots and was carrying a battered leatherette shopping bag on her arm. Were yellow and green the two colours that should never be seen – or was that red and green? Juliet’s mother had had quite a list of dressmaker’s do’s and don’ts – no spots with stripes, and so on – which Juliet was hard-pressed to remember. Whichever combination it was, the headscarf was hideous. The woman’s leatherette handbag was easily large enough to conceal a weapon. Even in the grip of her own paranoia, Juliet could acknowledge that it was an unlikely guise for an assassin. She feared that she was beginning to tread the wilder shores of her imagination.

  Juliet could only imagine the havoc she would cause if she started brandishing her own gun on Oxford Street. And she couldn’t shoot every drab housewife – she’d be here all day. She hadn’t realized quite how many of them roamed the streets of London during the daytime. Herds of them were heading into John Lewis, where there was a sale on, all in the same uniform of shapeless gabardine coats and dismally out-of-date hats. It was the war, Juliet thought, remembering the photograph of the flamingo’s creased wife, it has made refugees of us all.

  When the train arrived, she got in and then got out again just as the doors were closing. No one followed her and the platform remained empty, not a drab housewife in sight. I’m being ridiculous, Juliet thought. When the next train arrived, she climbed aboard and took a seat. Glancing out of the window as the train began to pull away from the platform, she caught sight of the man from Moretti’s – the unmistakeable pockmarked skin and pebble eyes. He was sitting on a bench in front of a poster for Sanatogen Tonic Wine (for which he was a very poor advert), the large black umbrella like a staff at his side. He gave her a small salute of recognition, but it was difficult to tell if it was a threat or a greeting. Either way, it was horribly unnerving.

  And then something even more unnerving occurred. The woman Juliet had bumped into outside Woolworth’s – she of the parrot headscarf and leatherette shopping bag – appeared from nowhere and slid on to the bench next to the man from Moretti’s. The two of them stared silently at Juliet, like a pair of resentful bookends. Then the train hauled itself into the blackness of the tunnel and they disappeared from sight.

  Who were they? Some kind of odd husband-and-wife team? What on earth was going on? Juliet hadn’t a clue. Rhymes with true, she thought.

  Same oak front door, same brass lion’s head knocker. Juliet even recognized the hydrangea that was growing next to the gate, although it was still dormant, waiting for spring. Juliet lifted the lion’s head and rapped it sharply against the oak. Nothing. She knocked again and was startled when the door flew open abruptly. A rather harried young woman, wearing a frilled apron and with an artful smudge of flour on her cheek – the perfect picture of post-war young womanhood – said, ‘Oh, hello. Can I help you?’

  ‘My name’s Madge Wilson,’ Juliet said. ‘I’m looking for the people who used to live here.’

  From the depths of the house came an angry squawk and the
woman laughed apologetically and said, ‘Look, why don’t you come in?’ (But I’m a complete stranger, Juliet thought. For all you know, I’ve come to murder you.) Wiping her hands on her apron, the woman said, ‘You’ll have to excuse my appearance. It’s my baking day.’

  She led Juliet trustingly down the hall. Over her shoulder she said, ‘My name’s Philippa – Philippa Horrocks.’ The house smelt authentically of wet nappies and sour milk. Juliet thought she might retch.

  The door to the living room was open and Juliet caught a glimpse inside. It had been redecorated since she was last here. For a dizzying second she was back in the past, sitting on the cut moquette of Godfrey Toby’s sofa. (Can I get you a cup of tea, Miss Armstrong? Would that help? We’ve had rather a shock.) She gave herself a mental shake.

  As she entered the kitchen the source of the squawking was revealed – a furious, small boy, besmirched with egg yolk and strapped tightly into a high-chair.

  ‘Timmy,’ Philippa Horrocks said, as if he was something to boast about.

  ‘What a sturdy little chap,’ Juliet said, shuddering inwardly. She found most children slightly repellent.

  ‘Can I offer you a coffee?’ Philippa Horrocks said. No sight or smell of anything in the oven, Juliet noticed. No bowls or spoons or scales anywhere. So much for baking day. (‘It’s in the details,’ Perry said.)

  ‘No, thank you. I’m actually here looking for the Hazeldines. They lived in this house during the war. They were friends of the family and I was trying to get in touch to invite them to my parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary.’ If you’re going to tell a lie, tell a good one.

  ‘Pearl,’ Philippa Horrocks said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Pearl. You know, twenty-five is silver – thirty years is pearl.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Juliet said, and thought, I sound like Godfrey Toby.

  ‘We had our wood last year. Five years.’ One of Philippa’s eyelids fluttered.

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Hazeldine,’ Philippa Horrocks said, making a great show of thinking. ‘Are you sure? We bought the house at auction in ’46 and the man who had owned it before had lived here for years before that.’