Transcription

by Kate Atkinson

  A boy, six years old, was sitting on the concrete of the yard, repetitively hitting an old tin lorry with a wooden hammer. Betty was already in her forties when she married Stanley and had this unexpected child. Drool dripped sluggishly from his open mouth. The girl paused in her peeling occasionally to wipe it away with a rag. The boy was called Ralph and it said ‘retarded’ on Betty’s file in the Registry. Ordinariness came at a price.

  Betty appeared in the yard, hands on hips, ready for a skirmish. ‘Are you still here?’ she said to Juliet. She was seething with resentment. ‘Why don’t you just mind your own sodding business.’ The niece stared tight-lipped at the half-peeled potato in her hand.

  ‘I’ll do just that, Betty,’ Juliet said. ‘Mrs Grieve,’ she added for good measure, and left through the back door of the yard without even looking to see how Betty reacted to being called by her old name.

  I have a little list, Juliet thought as she waited on the station platform for the train back to Victoria. Betty was ticked off the list. She wasn’t about to make Juliet pay for anything other than fish and chips.

  As she left Victoria station, Juliet became aware of a car sidling up. The passenger-side window rolled down.

  ‘I heard you went to Brighton for a paddle,’ Hartley said. ‘Want a lift?’

  ‘Not really.’ She got in the car.

  Hartley’s car was a Rover, all wood and leather and comfort. It was a solicitor’s car and seemed a sedate choice for Hartley. ‘You used to like drawing attention to yourself,’ Juliet said.

  ‘We’re living in different times. Tracked down your quarry, did you?’

  ‘Yes. She’s harmless.’

  ‘Told you so.’

  He took a half-empty bottle of wine from where it had been jammed between the seats and offered it to her. ‘Château Petit-Village,’ he said. ‘Nineteen forty-three. Excellent vintage, despite the war. Pierre Auguste at Le Châtelain gets it for me.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘You’re leaving a trail, you know,’ Hartley said. ‘The powers-that-be may begin to wonder why there’s suddenly all this interest in Godfrey’s informants.’

  ‘Do you think it matters to them? Surely they don’t care any longer?’

  ‘No, but perhaps they care about the old Toby Jug. Sure I can’t tempt you to a drink? How about dinner?’

  ‘No. Thanks.’

  ‘Well, then,’ Hartley said, ‘I’d better take you to hospital.’

  ‘Are you a relative?’

  ‘I’m Miss Hedstrom’s god-daughter. She doesn’t have any blood relatives.’

  ‘Yes, it’s a shame,’ the nurse said in Guy’s. ‘There have been no visitors since she was admitted. Miss Hedstrom’s over here, if you’d like to follow me.’

  Juliet wouldn’t have recognized Trude if she had been left to find her on her own. She had been a force once, a big woman, but now she lay jaundiced and insensible in a hospital bed, deflated and shrunk to an afterthought. She might have been a corpse already it if weren’t for the faintest rise and fall in her chest. Juliet pulled up a chair and sat down, not intending to stay to the end of the visiting hour, but the ward matron approached, creaking with starch, and said, ‘Do you think you could hang on?’

  ‘Hang on?’

  ‘The end is going to happen very soon. We like to have someone who is known to them when they go. It’s what we would all want, isn’t it? And poor Miss Hedstrom seems to have no one.’ She was already whisking the green curtains around the bed. Oh, Lord, Juliet thought. It seemed churlish to refuse a request to sit at a death-bed vigil, although if it were me, Juliet thought, I should like to slink away like a cat and die on my own in some corner, not in the company of strangers.

  Trude had never married and had spent the years since the war renting a room above a dry-cleaning establishment in Hounslow and working in the offices of a bottling plant. It must have seemed banal after so much wartime activity. Surprisingly for someone so intent on forging bonds during the war, Trude had not kept in touch with anyone since the peace. Juliet imagined an embittered existence for her – isolated in her room, living off meagre stove-top meals cooked on a little Baby Belling.

  Trude seemed reluctant to die. Juliet sighed and, in the absence of any other amusement, took Joan Timpson’s notes for The Tudors from her bag. She had brought them to read on the train to Brighton. They had occupied so much history that they couldn’t be crammed into one programme. It was a pacy story – Henry Tudor wrenched the crown from the hands of the Yorkists, Henry the Eighth was born, married and divorced from Katherine of Aragon. Anne Boleyn was married and divorced from her head. The Juniors would enjoy an execution. Poor Joan, she had been looking forward to the Tudors.

  Juliet had got as far as Anne of Cleves (always a puzzle – what exactly was wrong with the poor woman that she was rejected so peremptorily?) when Trude’s breathing suddenly changed, growing hoarse and loud. Was this it? Juliet opened the curtain to look for a nurse, but sleep hung heavily now on the big, dimly lit ward and she could see no night staff.

  She returned to her night-watch. Trude seemed distressed; dying had roused her into some kind of fearful consciousness.

  This is what we are all reduced to, Juliet thought. Did it matter what one had believed, what one had done? (Yes!) Trude’s breathing found a new, harsher tone – a guttural kind of growl – as she turned her head from side to side as though trying to escape from something. The jaws of death, perhaps, intent now on devouring her. She had no final words, not even Norwegian ones. Juliet remembered Joan Timpson’s ‘How lovely.’ She wondered what her own last words would be.

  It would have taken the hardest heart – harder even than Juliet’s – not to feel a little sorry for Trude, but then Juliet thought of Fräulein Rosenfeld, who had lost all her prettier sisters to the camps. She stood up and said, ‘Well, this is goodbye, Trude,’ and left her to die on her own.

  Tick, Juliet thought as she walked down the endless linoleum corridors and out into the cold night air.

  When Juliet woke she sensed that something had changed. She could hear a milk float clanking along the street and the noises off of bus engines and car horns and the usual passing footfall, but everything sounded deadened and muffled. Snow, she wondered? But when she looked out of the window, it was to find not snow but an unseasonal fog that had descended in the night. That’s all I need, Juliet thought – atmosphere.

  ‘Good morning.’ A new girl on reception consulted a notepad. ‘Miss Armstrong, is it?’ She smiled, toothily pleased with herself for being so efficient. She seemed to have come out of a more pleasant box than her predecessors. A treat for the Minotaur.

  ‘Yes,’ Juliet said. ‘It is Miss Armstrong.’

  Daisy came through the front door, trailing smoky wisps of fog into the building with her.

  ‘Gosh, you’re early, Miss Armstrong. Did you have a nice weekend?’

  ‘Went to Brighton,’ Juliet said. As if I’m a normal person, she thought.

  A Boy entered the building at a businesslike trot and said cheerfully to no one in particular, ‘They say it’s going to be a real pea-souper later.’ The Boys tended to speak in clichés.

  Prendergast followed him in. ‘Here I am,’ he said, rather unnecessarily.

  ‘Where one or two are gathered,’ Juliet heard Daisy murmur.

  Prendergast was dithering more than usual. ‘Everything all right, Mr Prendergast?’ Juliet asked him.

  ‘Oh, yes, Miss Armstrong, I’m just a little anxious about English for the Under-Nines. I’ve got Carleton Hobbs in the studio reading The Pardoner’s Tale.’

  ‘He’s very good. You don’t need to worry about him, do you?’

  ‘Poor Joan’s funeral is at eleven. I may be late.’

  Juliet had quite forgotten about Joan Timpson’s final journey. ‘It’s all right,’ she soothed, ‘I’ll look after Mr Hobbs.’

  ‘Goodness, no, Miss Armstrong. You must go to the funeral. Poor Joan was so fond of you
.’

  Was she? And, even if she was, Juliet’s presence or absence could hardly matter to her now. I am too harsh, Juliet thought. She turned to Daisy. ‘Daisy – can you take care of English for the Under-Nines?’

  ‘Of course I can.’ Of course she could.

  ‘We have entrusted our sister Joan to God’s mercy …’

  Joan Timpson was being lowered uncomplainingly into her final resting place. (Rather heavier than she looks, I’m afraid. Lift on my three – one-two-three!)

  Only a handful of people had followed the coffin for the committal and burial in Kensal Green Cemetery. Fräulein Rosenfeld was one of them. She was dressed in an odd assortment of black garments, as if she had simply raided her wardrobe for everything in that colour and then piled it all on. She looked like a large, rather distressed bat.

  ‘I like funerals,’ she told Juliet in the taxi on the way to the church.

  ‘Oh, me too,’ Prendergast said. ‘You know where you are with a funeral. And such good weather for it. I always think it would be a shame to be buried in sunshine. There are so few good days in England, one wouldn’t want to miss one.’

  ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust …’

  The words took on a distorted, dampened timbre in the fog, as if they were coming from under water. Visibility was so poor in Kensal Green that they could barely see each other across the grave. A solitary wreath had decorated the plain coffin and was now waiting patiently to one side for the grave to be filled in. ‘From your friends and colleagues in Schools,’ the card on it read. It was extraordinarily depressing to think that this was what a life might amount to. Juliet thought of Trude, who had no one to mourn her at all, and now here was poor Joan (welded now to that unsatisfactory epithet in life and death), who had only Schools to regret her passing.

  ‘In the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life …’

  The few remaining mourners scattered after their muted ‘Amen’s and Juliet walked slowly away with Prendergast and Fräulein Rosenfeld.

  The funeral seemed to have propelled Prendergast into a state of abject whimsy. ‘For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,’ he said, ‘before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.’ He looked as though he might be about to break into a jig amongst the headstones.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Fräulein Rosenfeld said.

  ‘G. K. Chesterton.’

  ‘I have never heard of him, I am afraid to say.’

  ‘Oh, he’s very good. You must let me lend you a copy of something by him.’

  They were at a loose end without a funeral tea to go to. Poor Joan didn’t seem entirely dead without a glass of sherry and a slice of Dundee cake to send her across the Styx.

  ‘There is a very nice little tea shop up the road from here,’ Prendergast said hopefully.

  ‘Or we could go to the pub,’ Fräulein Rosenfeld said more sensibly.

  ‘The Windsor Castle it is then!’ Prendergast said gaily.

  ‘You go,’ Juliet said. ‘I’ll catch you up. I’d like to stay behind for a little while. My mother’s buried here, you see.’

  ‘Oh, goodness,’ a stricken Prendergast said, as if her mother was freshly dead. ‘I’m so sorry. Of course you must visit her grave.’

  ‘Would you like me to accompany you?’ Fräulein Rosenfeld asked, placing a sympathetic hand on her arm. She is a friend to the dead, Juliet thought.

  ‘That’s very kind, but I’d like to be on my own, if you don’t mind.’

  Her mother wasn’t here, of course. Strictly speaking she was nowhere, although she had been buried in St Pancras and on her gravestone was the inscription ‘At Home with God’, which a seventeen-year-old Juliet had chosen in the futile hope that the words might be true – that her mother might be sitting companionably with Him, listening to the wireless in the evenings or perhaps playing rummy. Juliet could still remember her mother’s delighted laughter when she laid down a triumphant fan of cards. It seemed unlikely that God played rummy. Poker, perhaps.

  The fog hampered Juliet’s search for the grave. It was a modest grave in a large cemetery and she was feeling quite frazzled by the time she finally came across it.

  The plot was untended, the grave rather neglected. This is what happened when no one knew where you were buried, when they didn’t even know you were dead, for that matter. Juliet thought she should come another time and tidy it up, plant some snowdrops perhaps, although she knew she wouldn’t. I am consistently remiss, she thought.

  The inscription on the tombstone read ‘Ivy Wilson. 1922–1940. Beloved sister of Madge.’ It was a simple epitaph but it had been wartime and the funeral had taken place in a hurry. I have been too many people, Juliet thought. The spy Iris Carter-Jenkins, a perky, plucky sort of girl. The ‘beloved sister’ Madge Wilson, who had falsely identified poor Beatrice – the very same Beatrice who was now mouldering in the grave in front of her under a false name. (How strange it had felt to resurrect Madge on her visit to Philippa Horrocks in Finchley! Beloved sister.) There had been other identities too, although she never owned up to them in public. And then there was Juliet Armstrong, of course, who some days seemed like the most fictitious of them all, despite being the ‘real’ Juliet. But then what constituted real? Wasn’t everything, even this life itself, just a game of deception?

  The grave’s a fine and private place, Juliet thought. Not so for Mrs Scaife’s little maid. Beatrice was not alone in her bed of cold earth. She had been given no choice but to share it with a complete stranger, not to mention a dog. It was rather crowded in there. Innocence and guilt, the two entwined reluctantly together for eternity. Two ticks for the price of one, Juliet thought. Tick. Tick.

  Something flitted across the corner of Juliet’s vision, breaking her contemplation. Was she imagining a flash of green and yellow in the fog? She spun round but she could see no one. Hurrying out of the cemetery, she experienced a horrid sense of foreboding at her back. She was half expecting the graves to gape open and the dead to chase her down the Harrow Road.

  By the time she had negotiated her way out of the cemetery and found the Windsor Castle, Prendergast and Fräulein Rosenfeld had already left. The man behind the bar had no trouble remembering them. (‘Half a pint of stout each in the snug.’)

  She hailed a taxi to Tottenham Court Road and made her way on foot to Charlotte Street. She did so much doubling back and shooting off down alleys and side streets in an effort to shake off her invisible stalker that she was quite worn out by the time she sat down at one of the grubby tables in Moretti’s.

  Amidst the usual dilapidated clientele, Juliet ate a rather questionable corned beef sandwich. She couldn’t help but think of Mr Moretti’s cheese on toast – a pain perdu in so many ways, most of them existential now. Trude’s death, followed so swiftly by Joan Timpson’s funeral, had engendered a kind of malaise in her. Today the dead were everywhere, tumbling out of the box of the past and inhabiting the world of the living. Now it was Mr Moretti’s turn, it seemed.

  How frightened he must have been when the torpedo hit the Arandora Star. There had been a veiled accusation of cowardice against the Italian internees, as if they could have saved themselves if they had tried harder, but they went down in minutes, elbowed out of the way by the German POWs, apparently. (Yet could one really be blamed for the selfish instinct to survive at the cost to others?)

  When she heard that the Arandora Star had sunk, Juliet had asked Perry to find out if Mr Moretti was on the passenger manifest and he had come back a few days later and said, ‘I’m so sorry, Miss Armstrong, it seems that your friend is one of the dead.’ She hadn’t cried then, but now she felt tears pricking hotly in her eyes. She lit a cigarette to counter them.

  ‘Can I pay, please?’ she said briskly to the Armenian, who seemed irritated by the request. You will pay for what you did. Perhaps she was going to spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder, wondering when the bill was going to be presented. The reck
oning of the dead.

  The script for The Tudors – Part One was waiting, rather threateningly, on Juliet’s desk when she arrived back in Portland Place.

  Not one of Morna Treadwell’s, thank goodness. Somewhere along the line in her own past life she must have taken a wrong turning, Juliet thought. Why else would she be sitting here? Giselle came into Juliet’s mind. Despite dying at the hands of the Nazis, she had never merited the soubriquet ‘poor’. You had to ask yourself, which was better – to have sex with any number of interesting (albeit possibly evil) men (and some women too, apparently), to be glamorously decadent, to ingest excessive amounts of drugs and alcohol and die a horrible but heroic death at a relatively young age, or to end up in Schools Broadcasting at the BBC?

  It was a relief when five o’clock came around.

  Pelham Place was only a short detour on Juliet’s route home. She hadn’t been back here since Mrs Scaife was arrested in the summer of 1940 and it felt strange to find herself standing once more on the pavement in front of the imposing portico and magnificent front door. The black paint on the door no longer shone, the white portico no longer gleamed – due to war or neglect, or both.

  If anyone wished to exact reparation from Juliet, then surely it would be Mrs Scaife. Juliet had been instrumental in ruining her life, deposing her from her salmon-pink damask throne and packing her off to jail for the duration of the war. Her fall from grace had been the longest and her landing the hardest of all of them. Her conspirator Chester Vanderkamp had served a year in jail in America and now taught Maths in a junior high school in Ohio. The FBI ‘looked in’ on him occasionally, according to a man Juliet knew in Washington. She had conducted a brief affair with this man shortly before D-Day, when he had been a major in the 82nd Airborne. She hadn’t expected him to survive Operation Overlord and was surprised when he resurfaced in government after the war. They had stayed in touch, although distance was not a great encouragement to friendship. He was rather useful.