Transcription

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘Tenebrism,’ Merton said, sitting down next to her and gazing at the painting. They could have been worshippers in church who merely happened to be occupying the same pew. Rembrandt was to neither of their tastes. Miles Merton was an admirer of Titian; Juliet had remained faithful to her cool Dutch interiors.

  ‘Tenebrism?’ Juliet said. ‘Darkness?’

  ‘Dark and light. You can’t have one without the other.’ Jekyll and Hyde, she thought. ‘Chiaroscuro if you like,’ he said. ‘The Tenebrosi were interested in the contrast. Caravaggio and so on. Rembrandt, of course, was a master of it. I chose to meet you here because you once told me that you admired Rembrandt in particular.’

  ‘I lied.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And anyway,’ Juliet said, unable to suppress her irritation with Merton, ‘this isn’t a Rembrandt, it’s a copy by Gerrit Lundens. “The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq, after Rembrandt”. It says so.’

  ‘Exactly. I thought there was a rather delightful irony in that. The original’s in the Rijksmuseum, of course. It is massive – much bigger than the Lundens copy. Did you know that early on in its life, Rembrandt’s painting was cut down to fit a particular spot in the Town Hall in Amsterdam? Bureaucratic vandalism in the service of interior decoration. Wonderful!’ he murmured, seemingly amused by the idea.

  Juliet placed her copy of The Times between them, on the seat. She preferred to have some space between herself and Merton nowadays.

  ‘But perhaps what you don’t know,’ he continued, ‘is that in another even more delicious layer of irony, Lundens’s copy was painted before the original was pruned by the good burghers of Amsterdam. And so now it is our only evidence of The Night Watch as it was actually painted – as Rembrandt intended. The counterfeit, although no deception was intended by Lundens, is in some ways truer than the real Night Watch.’

  ‘What is it you’re trying to say exactly?’

  He laughed. ‘Nothing really. And yet so much.’ They continued to regard the painting in silence.

  ‘You took rather a long time,’ Merton said eventually. ‘I was beginning to think you had run off.’

  ‘I’ve had a few problems.’ She took the note out of her handbag and passed it to him.

  ‘You will pay for what you did.’ He frowned.

  ‘I’m being followed.’

  Merton twitched apprehensively but didn’t look around. ‘Here?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘I thought it was something sinister, but it turns out it’s simply the dead returned to life.’

  ‘The dead?’

  ‘Nelly Varga.’

  ‘Oh, her,’ he said. He sounded relieved. ‘God, I remember her. One of our first double agents. Insane woman. She made such a fuss over her dog.’

  ‘I was told she went down on the Lancastria.’

  ‘Yes, we thought she had. But it was chaos in Saint-Nazaire. Utter chaos. No proper ship’s manifest, obviously. She made her way back here some time after the war.’

  ‘With a man?’

  ‘Her husband. Her new lap-dog, I believe. Acquired him in a refugee camp in Egypt.’

  ‘She wants to kill me.’

  ‘Any reason in particular?’

  ‘I was the one who was charged with looking after her dog.’

  ‘Oh, really? I didn’t know that.’

  ‘The dog died on my watch.’

  ‘But that’s ancient history, surely?’ Merton said.

  ‘Not to Nelly Varga. I rather admire her tenacity. Or the tenacity of her love.’

  ‘How did she know it was you? How did she find you?’

  ‘I’ve got no idea,’ Juliet said. ‘Perhaps someone told her.’

  ‘Now who would do that?’

  She sighed. ‘Sometimes, you know, I think my soul has been confiscated.’

  ‘Oh, Juliet,’ Merton laughed, ‘how abstruse you are become. Are you grappling with your conscience?’

  ‘Every day.’ She stared bleakly at the painting before rousing herself and saying, ‘I should get back. Henry the Eighth is waiting for me in Portland Place.’

  ‘Yes,’ Merton said. ‘I myself have an Uccello I need to renew my acquaintance with. I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘No!’ she muttered. ‘Don’t be. It’s over You said so.’

  ‘I lied.’

  ‘I’m not doing this any more. You said if I did this one last thing I would be free of it all.’ She could hear herself sounding rather petulant, like a child.

  ‘Oh, my dear Juliet,’ he laughed. ‘One is never free. It’s never finished.’

  Juliet left The Times on the seat when she departed. Miles Merton stayed where he was, as if lost in profound admiration of The Night Watch. After a few minutes, he picked up the newspaper and walked away.

  She had cast herself as the hunter, as Diana, but it turned out she was the stag, after all, and the hounds were closing in. I should have been more careful, she thought.

  In a moment of heightened madness last night, she had thought that it was Dolly who was stalking her, but she had rapidly come to her senses.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked the shadowy figure sitting in the dark of her flat. ‘What do you want from me?’ She held the Mauser steady. ‘I’m quite prepared to shoot you, you know.’

  And then, as if turned on by an unseen hand, the electricity came magically back to life and Juliet could see who her uninvited visitor was.

  ‘You?’ she puzzled.

  ‘I’m afraid so, Miss Armstrong. Do put that gun down. You might hurt someone with it.’

  ‘We’ve had our eye on you for a long time,’ the man in the astrakhan-collared coat said.

  When the electricity came back on in her flat, she discovered him sitting at the table with a bottle of whisky (her own, she noted) and two glasses. His was half empty and she wondered how long he had been there in the dark. Had the darkness been for dramatic effect? There was undoubtedly a theatrical flair about him.

  He wasn’t wearing the coat with the astrakhan collar. Unlike Godfrey, he had bought a new coat since the war. He poured her a whisky and said, ‘Do sit down, Miss Armstrong.’

  ‘Do you have a name?’ Juliet asked.

  He laughed. ‘Not really. Not one you would know.’

  ‘Any name will do,’ Juliet said. ‘It hardly matters, does it? A name is just a point of reference. Mr Green ate his dinner. Miss White liked the hat. Otherwise it would just be someone or anyone.’

  ‘Or no one.’ He relented. ‘My name is Mr Fisher.’ She supposed he was lying. The fisher of men, she thought. The fisher of girls.

  ‘Do you want something, Mr “Fisher”, or did you just come here to give me a fright? Because really I’ve had enough of those for one day. Who are you? You don’t seem like MI5.’ (But if not, then what?)

  ‘Nothing is as simple as it looks, Miss Armstrong. Surely you, of all people, know that. There can be many layers to a thing. Like the spectrum of light. I exist, you might say, in one of the invisible layers. Think of me in the infra-red.’

  ‘Oh, how enigmatic you are,’ she said crossly. She took the second glass of whisky he had poured and downed it in one unpleasant gulp. It made her feel worse rather than better. She thought of the Borgias and their poisons. ‘What do you want exactly?’

  ‘I thought you would like to know,’ Fisher said, ‘that the flamingo turned up in Halifax.’

  ‘Halifax?’ Why on earth, she wondered, would the Czech land up in a West Riding wool town?

  ‘Not that Halifax. Halifax, Nova Scotia. In transit. The Americans had him, flew him out from Lakenheath, but they had to stop to refuel. He’s tucked away in Los Alamos now. They obviously didn’t trust us to hand him over intact.’

  ‘It was nothing to do with me,’ Juliet said. ‘He was “intact”, as you put it, when I had him. And anyway, aren’t we on the same side as the Americans?’

  ‘Hm. Some might say that.’ He offered her a cigarette, which, after a moment’s hesitation, she took. �
�Don’t worry,’ he said, smiling thinly at her as he lit the cigarette. ‘It isn’t laced with cyanide.’ He lit one for himself and said, ‘Apparently, our friend the Czech, as well as what was in his head, brought out some valuable documents. Diagrams, formulae and so on. Originals, apparently. We believe, however, that someone made copies after he landed in England.’

  ‘Copies?’

  ‘On microfilm. I imagine a scenario where the poor man is exhausted after his journey to our shores. In an MI5 safe house – a warm fire, something to eat, something pleasant from Harrods Food Hall perhaps, followed by a drink – a whisky, maybe –’ he tapped the rim of the glass in front of him. ‘And then when he’s fast asleep, someone – Mr Green or Miss White, a name is just a reference – took the papers from his suitcase – perhaps someone who had once been taught how to pick locks – and then Mr Green or Miss White photographed them. And afterwards replaced them in the suitcase and locked it again. What do you think? Plausible?’

  Life had progressed at such a pace in the previous week that the flamingo’s arrival on her doorstep seemed like something from a dream now. A small man without a hat, a pawn. They were all pawns, of course, in someone else’s great game. She had thought herself to be a queen, not a pawn. How foolish to think such a thing was possible, when the Mertons and Fishers of this murky world were in charge of the board.

  ‘And then Miss White – I imagine it to be a woman, somehow – intended to pass this microfilm to her masters so that all that valuable information would not, after all, be lost to them. I suppose it was a kindness on the part of Miss White not to tell her masters where the poor man was. Allowing him to escape to the West. To be free. I suppose that you photographed what was in the Czech’s suitcase because you think that the Soviets should be our friends, that we would not have won the war without them and why should they now be denied the same scientific know-how as us? Fuchs’s argument, is it not? Is that why you retrieved the documents for the Soviets? Tell me, Miss Armstrong – the purges, the show trials, the forced labour camps – they don’t worry you? Somehow I can’t see you working in a rural cooperative or a factory.’

  ‘I don’t want to live in Russia.’

  ‘That’s your problem, you see, you and Merton and his ilk. You’re intellectual Communists, but you don’t actually want to live beneath its iron thumb.’

  ‘It’s called idealism, I suppose.’

  ‘No, it’s called betrayal, Miss Armstrong, and I expect it’s exactly the same argument that Godfrey’s informants used. How tediously naïve you are.’

  ‘As it so happens, I don’t believe any more.’

  ‘And yet you are about to hand these documents back to them. To Merton. He’s been your handler a long time, hasn’t he? I wonder how much loyalty you carry for him?’

  ‘Surprisingly little.’

  The die had been cast long ago. Merton already had an introduction to her when she turned up for her interview with him at the beginning of the war. Her headmistress at the good girls’ school – an unlikely scout – had recommended her to him as ‘the kind of girl he was looking for’. He had usurped Miss Dicker for the afternoon so that he could ask the right questions. Juliet had been easy to recruit. She had believed in fairness and equality, in justice and truth. She believed that England could be a better country. She was the apple ripe for plucking and she had also been Eve willing to eat the apple. The endless dialectic between innocence and experience.

  She had walked away from him at the end of the war, but he had reclaimed her when she returned from Manchester, as had MI5, of course. (‘Just the occasional safe house, Miss Armstrong.’)

  One more job, Merton said, that was all, and she would be free of him, of the Soviets. Free to go on her way and get on with her life. And, like an utter fool, she had believed him. She would never escape from any of them, would she? She would never be finished.

  Fisher drained his glass of whisky, stubbed out his cigarette and said, ‘Do you wish you had shot me when you had the chance just now? Like you did Dolly Roberts?’ (Was there anything he didn’t know?) ‘Godfrey got himself into quite a pickle over that,’ he laughed. ‘He was strangely fond of you, protective even. A lot of people were. I suppose that was how you got away with it. Alleyne, of course …’ He trailed off and made a dismissive gesture with his hand as if batting the idea of Alleyne away.

  ‘Alleyne was suspicious of Godfrey,’ Juliet said. ‘He asked me to report back to him. I followed him and I saw you both at the Brompton Oratory.’

  ‘Yes, you were rather obvious. You had a dog, I seem to remember. There’s always a dog, isn’t there?’ he mused, and then, ‘Ah,’ he said, as if a missing piece of a puzzle had finally been found. ‘That was Nelly Varga’s dog.’

  ‘Why was Alleyne suspicious of you?’

  ‘I rather think that question should be turned on its head, don’t you? Who spies on the spies, Miss Armstrong?’

  ‘You? You were suspicious of Alleyne?’

  ‘I’m suspicious of everyone, Miss Armstrong. It’s my job.’

  ‘What of Mrs Ambrose – is she working for you?’

  Fisher clapped his hands as if to signal the end of the entertainment and said, ‘Come now, quite enough of exposition and explanation. We’re not approaching the end of a novel, Miss Armstrong.’

  But what of Godfrey, she persisted. Did he, too, exist in the spectrum of invisible light?

  ‘What of him? We recalled him to these shores for a mole hunt, although I prefer the word “traitor”. There are many questionable elements in the Service, as I’m sure you’re aware. We suspected that the flamingo might flush one out of its tunnel, if you’ll excuse the contorted image. And we were right, weren’t we? You are our little mole, Miss Armstrong. Our blind little mole.’

  Mopping up, Hartley had said. Godfrey was good at mopping up. She had been looking for Godfrey, but all this time he had been looking for her.

  She had an arrangement with Fisher. She would not be arrested and tried for treason (‘and possibly hanged’) if she would hand false information to Merton.

  ‘We’re prepared to save your neck, Miss Armstrong. But at a price, of course.’

  ‘You want me to be a double agent?’ she said wearily. ‘You want me to carry on working with Merton and at the same time work for you?’ The worst of all worlds. A servant with two masters. A mouse being toyed with by two cats.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s the only way out of this mess for you. I am the bearer of consequences, Miss Armstrong.’

  The copy of The Times that she was to leave for Merton in the National Gallery would have the microfilm concealed within its pages as previously arranged between them, but the film would not be of the documents she had taken from the Czech’s battered suitcase and photographed as he slept on her sofa. Instead it would contain false information – ‘Basically gobbledegook,’ Fisher said, ‘but it will take the Russians a while before they realize. Hopefully they’ll blow themselves up a few times before it dawns on them. And after that, of course …’ He raised his arms wide as if to indicate an infinite future for her of feeding false information, of double-dealing.

  ‘Well, I must be off,’ he said. ‘I’ve kept you long enough.’

  ‘I expect you can find your own way out,’ Juliet said, ‘seeing as you found your own way in.’

  He paused in the doorway and gave her a long look. ‘You’re my girl now, Miss Armstrong. Don’t forget it.’

  This, after all then, was the true bill, Juliet thought as she heard the front door close behind him. And she would be paying it for ever. No exit, she thought.

  ‘I believed,’ Juliet said sadly, although there was no one to hear her. ‘I believed in something better. In something more noble.’ And that, for once, was the truth. And now she no longer believed and that was another truth. But what did it matter? Really?

  Juliet went straight from her rendezvous with Merton in the National Gallery to Portland Place. The girl on reception waved an e
nvelope at her and said, ‘Oh, Miss Armstrong, someone left a message for you,’ but Juliet walked past her as if she wasn’t there. She had had quite enough of messages. She made her way to Prendergast’s office and knocked on his door. He was alone, sitting at his desk, but the nutmeggy, old-church smell of Fräulein Rosenfeld still perfumed the air as if she had just left the room.

  ‘I’ve written something,’ Juliet said. ‘It’s a letter of recommendation for Lester Pelling. “To Whom It May Concern – Mr Pelling is an excellent employee …” – that kind of thing.’ She handed him the letter. ‘I’ve signed it and I wondered if you would care to as well.’ She could easily have forged Prendergast’s signature, of course – she had a talent for signatures that weren’t her own – but she thought it would be better luck not to be underhand. Lester was a robustly honest sort of boy who had been brought down by her own neglect of duty. She should have been more careful. She wanted to do right by at least one person in her life.

  ‘Oh, with pleasure,’ Prendergast said enthusiastically, signing his name with an inky flourish. ‘How thoughtful of you. I really should have written a testimonial myself without being prompted. He was a good boy.’

  ‘He was. He is.’

  Juliet hesitated at the door on the way out. She would have liked to say something to Prendergast, something about idealism, perhaps, but he might have objected to the ‘ism’. Or perhaps it would be better to urge him to marry Fräulein Rosenfeld. She imagined a future for them, attending other people’s funerals and reading G. K. Chesterton to each other. Instead she said simply, ‘Well, I must get on. Poor Joan’s Past Lives and so on.’

  She put Lester’s reference in an envelope and gave it to a secretary. ‘Find Lester Pelling’s address and get this sent over to the post room, will you?’ Before handing it over, she scribbled on the back of the envelope, ‘Good luck, Lester, from Juliet Armstrong.’

  She encountered Daisy in the corridor. ‘Miss Armstrong?’ Daisy sang out. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Optician, Daisy. You know – the headaches.’

  ‘Miss Armstrong, come back!’ There was a new note in Daisy’s voice, something authoritarian that was unbefitting a vicar’s daughter. She took up a wicket-keeping stance to hinder Juliet’s progress towards reception.