So she does work for the Service, Juliet thought. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Daisy, you’ll have to do better than that,’ she said and pushed her out of the way.
She could hear the girl on reception’s voice growing fainter behind her as she made for the front door. ‘Miss Armstrong! Miss Armstrong!’
Juliet had an escape plan. An exit. First thing this morning she had deposited a suitcase at the Left Luggage office in Victoria. Apart from clothes, the suitcase contained a few things of sentimental value – some embroidered pieces of her mother’s, a photograph of Juliet with Lily and Cyril that Perry had taken, the little coffee cup with its promise of Arcadia.
Now she was lying in wait in the tea room at Victoria, from where she intended to take the night train to the Gare du Nord. She had bought a first-class ticket so that she wouldn’t have to get on and off the train at Dover and risk attracting the attention of either the Security Services or Merton’s people. From France she would make her way to somewhere neutral – Switzerland was the obvious choice – somewhere where no one could own her, where there were no sides but her own.
She planned to board the train at the last minute. The last minute came and she made her way to the boat-train platform where people were still milling around enjoying the general sense of anticipation that surrounds a continental departure. The engine had got up a tremendous head of steam and the guard was chivvying the porters to get the last of the luggage on board.
There were two of them. Burly types in ill-fitting suits advancing purposefully towards her along the platform even as the guard began to slam shut the first of the train doors. ‘We’re here to escort you,’ one of them said as they grabbed an arm each. Oh, Lord, I’m the flamingo now, she thought.
‘Escort me where?’ she said as they frogmarched her away from the train. She had no idea who they worked for, but it hardly mattered. They could be taking her to Moscow or to a country house in Kent. Or, of course, they could be taking her to a quiet end somewhere.
At that moment the engine let off steam with a sudden ear-piercingly shrill whistle and at the same time Juliet’s saviour appeared out of nowhere and ambushed them. Nelly Varga. Nelly Varga raining blows on Juliet and her guard dogs indiscriminately. The men were momentarily confounded by the barrage from a small, deranged woman yelling in an impenetrable language. As they grappled with Nelly, Juliet seized her chance.
She was the deer. She was the arrow. She was the queen. She was the contradiction. She was the synthesis. Juliet ran.
She had got as far as Vauxhall Bridge when a car roared up and slammed its brakes on beside her. The passenger-side door opened and Perry said, ‘Get in.’
‘I couldn’t let them get you,’ he said. ‘They’re wolves, all of them.’
‘Are you a wolf?’
‘A lone one.’ He laughed.
He drove her, not to Dover, but all the way to Lowestoft. It was dark by the time they arrived and they ate fried fish and drank beer in a trawlermen’s pub near the harbour.
‘How did you know where I’d be?’ she asked.
‘Oh, a little bird told me.’ He offered her a cigarette and she said, ‘You do smoke then.’
‘I’ve missed you, Miss Armstrong.’
‘I’ve missed you too, Mr Gibbons.’
There was a sweetness between them now that seemed unbearably poignant. ‘This too shall pass,’ he said and lit her cigarette for her.
A passage was arranged and paid for, on a trawler. The men agreed to take her across to Holland at dawn. ‘I expect that would be a good place to hawk those diamond earrings,’ Perry said. I assumed I had so many secrets, Juliet thought, and yet everyone seems to have known them.
‘I’m little better than a common thief, I’m afraid.’
‘Not common. Most uncommon, in fact.’
‘Will you get into trouble? If they find out you helped me?’
‘They won’t find out.’ She supposed there was something beyond even the infra-red. Layer after layer of secrets.
‘Whose side are you on, Perry?’
‘Yours, Miss Armstrong. You’re my girl, after all.’
It was a nice lie and she thanked him silently for it. He always had such good manners. She expected it wasn’t a matter of sides at all, it was probably much more complicated than that.
They spent the night in a guest house, asleep in their outdoor clothes on top of the covers. Effigies, one last time.
When the cold dawn broke, Perry accompanied her down to the harbour. He handed her an envelope with banknotes inside (‘To tide you over’) and then kissed her on both cheeks and said, ‘Courage, Miss Armstrong, that’s the watchword,’ and she climbed aboard the trawler. It stank of fish and oil and the men were unsure how to treat her so they largely ignored her.
She would be away for thirty years, and when she returned it would be to a different country from the one that she had left. Her life in those years away would be interesting, but not excessively so. She would be happy, but not excessively so. That was how it should be. The long peace after the war.
She would be living in Ravello when they came for her. A knock on the door one day and two grey men standing on her doorstep, one of them saying, ‘Miss Armstrong? Miss Juliet Armstrong? We’ve come to take you home.’ She had just planted a lemon tree and felt disappointed that she would never see it bear fruit.
Tidying up loose ends, they said. She would be interviewed countless times. They needed her testament to bring down Merton and ‘to close the book on things’. He had remained protected in some mysterious way. He was a knight of the realm, an Establishment figure, but finally the rumours grew too strong to be ignored. He had flown high, he had fallen. It was the only plot.
She would not be named, although afterwards they wouldn’t let her leave. ‘We’d like to keep an eye on you, Miss Armstrong,’ they said. She didn’t mind so very much. Matteo was free to visit her, although the girl who made him unhappy did her best to prevent him.
Oliver Alleyne had already been uncovered by then, in 1954. It took everyone by surprise, even Juliet. He was nimble and managed to get out, pursued by headlines and a manhunt across the continent. He was followed by two others, a diplomat from the Embassy in Washington and a man in a critical position in the Foreign Office. Alleyne resurfaced very publicly in Moscow a year later.
There were persistent rumours about ‘a fifth man’. Many believed it was Hartley, although Juliet never thought it likely. A vague shadow of suspicion would always hang over him and, although nothing against him was ever proved, it blighted his progress.
Perry continued in his career in broadcasting. He died in somewhat mysterious circumstances in 1961. Godfrey Toby had long since stepped back into the shadows by then. Someone said that he moved to America. Or it might have been Canada.
The trawler sailed from the port into a smoky, misty kind of dawn that contained a promise of good weather later. Humber, Thames, northerly, backing south-westerly four to five later, fair to good. She was crossing the Rubicon. Juliet was glad not to be leaving from Dover. To see those white cliffs receding would have been too sentimental, too much of a metaphor for something she no longer entirely understood. This England, is it worth fighting for? Yes, she thought. What other answer was there? Really?
The trawler approached the mouth of the harbour, preparing to abandon its sheltering arms. Moles, Juliet thought, wasn’t that what they were called? A final gift of irony from her country. And there, standing on one of them, appearing slowly out of the morning mist, clearer and clearer as they drew near, was the unmistakeable figure of Godfrey Toby.
Was Godfrey the ‘little bird’ who had told Perry where to find her? Had Godfrey saved her? Or had he betrayed her? Was Godfrey ‘one of us’ or one of them? Both? Neither? There would never be an end to the questions, she realized. The Great Enigma. What had Hartley said all those years ago? Toby is a master of obfuscation. It’s easy to get lost in his fog.
Godfrey raised his
hat to her. She raised her hand in silent reply. He lifted his cane in acknowledgement. Prospero’s staff, Juliet thought. Godfrey, the Magus. The Master of Ceremonies.
As if at a sign, the mist closed around him once more and he disappeared.
1981
The Invisible Light
‘THIS ENGLAND,’ SHE murmured.
‘Miss Armstrong? Can you hear me?’
She was fading fast now. Her life a memory. She wished she could see her son one last time. Remind him to live his life well, tell him that she loved him. Tell him that nothing mattered and that that was a freedom, not a burden.
She was alone. No longer on Wigmore Street, but beginning her first steps down the long dark tunnel.
‘Miss Armstrong?’
A voice in her head – it might have been her own voice – said, Goodnight children, everywhere. She was unexpectedly soothed by it.
‘Miss Armstrong? What did she say?’
‘I think she said “It’s all right”.’
‘Miss Armstrong? Miss Armstrong?’
Author’s Note
Roughly speaking, for everything that could be considered an historical fact in this book, I made something up – and I’d like to think that a lot of the time readers won’t be able to tell the difference. I’m only stating this to prevent people claiming that I got something wrong. I got a lot of it wrong, on purpose. After many conversations with myself, I went ahead and invented whatever I felt like – the novelist’s prerogative, I suppose. If I had to describe the process, I would say that it felt like a wrenching apart of history followed by an imaginative reconstruction. (And yes, I did get a little obsessed – unhelpfully – about the nature of historical fiction.)
That isn’t to say Transcription’s origins aren’t rooted in reality – it was one of the periodic releases by MI5 to the National Archives that fired my imagination to begin with. The documents that caught my eye (apologies to Juliet) concerned a WW2 agent known as ‘Jack King’ (and almost always simply referred to as ‘Jack’ in these documents). Jack’s identity, after years of speculation, was finally revealed to be Eric Roberts, a seemingly ‘ordinary’ bank clerk who lived with his family in Epsom.
There is a letter in the file from the Westminster Bank querying why (‘why on earth’, one feels) the Security Services were interested in their apparently rather insignificant employee – ‘What are the particular and especial qualifications of Mr Roberts – which we have not been able to perceive – for some particular work of national importance.’ (I love this letter.)
Roberts had in fact been working for MI5 for some time, infiltrating Fascist circles, and his CV hints at someone far from ordinary – his proficiency in judo, for example (he was a member of the Anglo-Japanese Judo Society), and the languages under his belt – Spanish, French, and ‘slight’ Portuguese, Italian and German.
The new operation for which he had been recruited (his handler was Victor Rothschild) was one dedicated to monitoring the fifth column and any subterfuge they might be planning. Roberts posed as a Gestapo agent and, in a flat off the Edgware Road, he met with a number of British Fascists who reported back to him on Nazi sympathizers. Some, like Marita Perigoe, were paid for their services, but most served the Third Reich from a point of principle. Except, of course, they weren’t serving the Third Reich, as all the information they brought to ‘Jack’ was siphoned off to the Security Services. Virtually every fifth columnist in Britain was neutralized by the operation and important information (amidst an awful lot of dross) was prevented from reaching Germany – although, it has to be said, in the final analysis the fifth column turned out to be relatively unimportant in the greater picture.
There are transcripts of Jack King’s meetings – hundreds of pages – that make for fascinating reading. Although I began with ‘Jack’, it was the transcriptions that began to take over my imagination. There is no record in the public domain of who typed them – it seems to be mainly one person (a ‘girl’, obviously) – and as I spent a period of my life as an audio typist I felt an odd affinity with this anonymous typist, especially when, on the odd occasion, her own personality breaks suddenly through.
At the time of the National Archives release I was reading Joan Miller’s short memoir (I suspect she is not the most reliable of narrators). Joan Miller was one of Maxwell Knight’s female agents who infiltrated the Right Club – more fifth columnists – and I thought it would be interesting to conflate fictionally the ‘Jack case’ with the operation being run by Maxwell Knight from his flat in Dolphin Square, where Joan Miller worked with him. (She also lived with him, in a somewhat unsatisfactory manner.) Joan Miller is not Juliet Armstrong, but they have certainly shared some of the same experiences.
Eric Roberts, Maxwell Knight, Joan Miller, ‘Mrs Amos’ (Marjorie Mackie), Helene de Munck, Captain and Mrs Ramsey, Anna Wolkoff, Tylor Kent, were the ghostly inspirations that set me off on this particular fictional path, but they are shades and shadows behind the characters and events in this book. (Although Anna Wolkoff appears fleetingly, and the real Miss Dicker – the ‘Lady Superintendent’ of the female staff – makes an appearance.) The spectres of the Cambridge spies stalk these halls too, and some of Perry’s outbursts are based on entries in Guy Liddell’s diaries. Nelly Varga and Lily are a tiny nod in the direction of double agent Nathalie ‘Lily’ Sergueiew, code name ‘Treasure’, and her dog, variously called Frisson or Babs (I much prefer Babs), who died, to Treasure’s fury, while in the hands of MI5. Sergueiew, like so many at the time, led a fascinating life.
The same happened with the BBC, although here I have been considerably freer with invention in the services of the novel and I apologize to those earnest pioneers in Schools. Some – many – of the programmes mentioned are real, but a handful are invented. Much of their content is based on my own childhood memories of listening to them. I hadn’t intended to have the BBC in the novel at all, least of all Schools Broadcasting, but I had just read Penelope Fitzgerald’s gem of a novel Human Voices, as well as returning again to Rosemary Horstmann’s memoir, and somehow the ‘two great monoliths’ seemed to belong shoulder to shoulder on the same pages. Rosemary was a friend in later years of my mother, and I have plundered her life – benignly, I should add. After the war Rosemary joined the BBC in Manchester, first as an announcer, then as a producer on Children’s Hour, before moving to London and joining Schools Broadcasting in 1950. Her story is full of little nuggets that must surely be otherwise forgotten. (Juliet’s nosebleed was actually that of pianist Harriet Cohen.) Rosemary moved over to television in the early Fifties and attended a production course at Alexandra Palace. (One of her fellow trainees was a young David Attenborough.) What surprised me when writing this book was not how much had been remembered and documented, but how much had been lost and forgotten, and my job, as I see it – others might not – is to plug the gaps.
Try as I might, MI5 would not speak to me about the technicalities of the transcription service during the war (and it is good that our secret services wish to remain secret), so I ‘borrowed’ the recording equipment from that used by the listeners in the M Room at Trent Park, albeit theirs was on a larger scale (a detailed inventory is held in the National Archives).
The transcriptions themselves, apart from the odd direct quotation, are my fabrications, but they mirrored the real ones very closely as far as subject matter, patterns of speech and so on are concerned. The biscuit intervals and social chat and technical hitches, even the iron crosses, are authentic, as are the endless ‘inaudible’s. Trude’s suggestion that a dead body could be concealed in a coal hole was Marita Perigoe’s, although she did not specify the Carlton Club. (The Carlton Club was destroyed during the Blitz, so it might have been rather a good idea.) Many of the technicalities of BBC recording are also based on Rosemary’s memories as well as The History of School Broadcasting and are not necessarily entirely accurate or contemporaneous (but near enough). I am fiction’s apologist.
I rat
her thought that with Human Voices Penelope Fitzgerald had cornered the market, as it were, in novels about the BBC during wartime (how could anything be better?), but then Roger Hudson introduced me to George Beardmore’s wonderful memoir, Civilians at War, and between that and Maurice Gorham’s Sound and Fury I realized there was so much more material to be mined. (I particularly loved George Beardmore’s story of sitting outside the Control Room of the BBC with a loaded shotgun across his knee, ready to defend the engineering equipment to the death.) Too late for me, sadly, but I do recommend the Beardmore to anyone wanting to read something accessible and articulate about daily life in wartime London. (I have appended an abridged bibliography for anyone interested in the material that provided some of my sources and inspirations.)
Finally, one more apology – to the manager at the Dolphin Square apartments who showed me round under the illusion that I was interested in renting one. I expect my enthusiasm at the sight of an original fireplace might have given me away.
Sources
Andrews, Christopher, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (Penguin, 2009)
Fry, Helen, The M Room: Secret Listeners Who Bugged the Nazis in WW2 (Marranos Press, 2012)
Pugh, Martin, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! (Jonathan Cape, 2005)
Quinlan, Kevin, The Secret War between the Wars (Boydell Press, 2014)
Saikia, Robin (ed.), The Red Book (Foxley Books, 2010)
West, Nigel, MI5 (Stein and Day, 1982)
Carter, Miranda, Anthony Blunt: His Lives (Macmillan, 2001)
Masters, Anthony, The Man Who Was M: The Life of Maxwell Knight (Basil Blackwell, 1984)
Miller, Joan, One Girl’s War (Brandon, 1986; originally published 1945)
Rose, Kenneth, Elusive Rothschild (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003)
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