The Long Room

by Francesca Kay

  Now for the second tape. The orange label is there to show that no one has tampered with it between collection and delivery to the designated listener. Stephen unpicks an edge and peels the label slowly off.

  Orange-label tapes are a uniform length engineered to run continuously for twelve hours. Much research has gone into these tapes and their recording of the sounds relayed to them, usually from a distance and often under circumstances that are technically far from ideal, but this research is none of Stephen’s business. He has no idea how the recordings are obtained; he does not need to know. For him the salient fact is that each recording runs from roughly midday to midnight, and from midnight to midday, and that every tape is dated. Someone – and he will never know who that is – removed this particular tape at around 11.59 last night, from a machine that must be located somewhere in the vicinity of the target premises, inserted a fresh one, scrawled 9/12 – 12.00–24.00 on the label of the old one and then, at 11.59 the following morning, repeated the whole process. And that same process happened in dozens of other places from one end of the country to the other. Dozens of anonymous people unobtrusively entering empty flats or lofts or disused offices or hotel rooms or warehouses or vehicles, picking up the plastic spools, dating them, taking them to a central point – and again it is no concern of Stephen’s where that is or who controls it – from which they will be delivered to the Institute. He envisages these shadowy people flitting through the midnight streets, their heads down and their collars up, slaves to their machines.

  It can happen that an investigation is too urgent to brook even that twelve-hour delay. In these rare cases, specifically instructed listeners are driven by taciturn escorts to addresses that they must not divulge, where they huddle in their headphones over the machines and monitor their targets in real time. Stephen would love to be assigned one of those Alpha-level cases; to be granted that unparalleled intimacy, to hear his target breathe at the same moment that he breathes himself. The possibility that this particular investigation could one day be upgraded from Bravo to Alpha is so deeply thrilling that he hardly dares to give it thought.

  In the silence, the sound of the tape docking into place is loud. Stephen presses play and the tape begins its slow passage from full to empty reel, emitting as it slides a sibilant hiss. He replaces the headphones he had for the time being removed, and plugs the jack into its socket.

  Yesterday, Thursday, early in the evening. Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air, my Helen. The sound of a key turning in a lock, a door being opened and then closed again and something dropped – a heavy bag perhaps – water running from a tap, a kettle coming to the boil, a teaspoon clinking in a cup. Light footsteps. The swish of curtains being drawn. A few words spoken, only just above a whisper; Helen, talking to herself. She does this often, murmuring some words, far too low to be overheard, with a slight enquiring uplift in her voice. Although he strains to make out her meaning it is only her tone he catches: a woman asking herself questions, who does not stay for answers. Stephen relaxes like a peaceful cat in Helen’s presence.

  The 5.40 news on television drowns out all other sounds. Stephen and Helen listen to the news together: Andrei Sakharov and his wife Yelena have ended their hunger strike; Michael Foot has won his call for an investigation into Militant Tendency. Stephen has already heard that news – and watched it too – on his own television at nine o’clock last night but he listens to it again with Helen now. When the news is over, she turns the television off. Stephen commends her discrimination as a viewer.

  More water sounds. Helen washing up her cup. Then soft rustling sounds that he has heard before: she is leafing through sheet music or the pages of a book. Now it will depend on her frame of mind. Some evenings, when Helen is at home, she practises piano; on others she will sing. Stephen loves her playing – he loves it when he hears the soft knock of wood against the lid prop, her indrawn breath, and then her first experimental scales and the way she takes one phrase and plays it over and over again – bold chords or silvery sad notes – but he is ravished when she sings. He does not know much about music and can seldom put a name to piano piece or song but he is learning; he has bought a turntable and some records. One day he will talk to her about them. In the meantime he shuts his eyes and listens to her songs of love in languages he does not always understand but which speak directly to him. It is by magic, Stephen thinks, that this woman’s voice comes straight to him from a room that he has never seen, and catches at his throat, that it stirs in him a yearning that is new, unnameable: a hunger of the heart. It makes her feel so intimately close. It tells him everything about her. And yet, although each time she tells him something new, Stephen knows that he has always known her. From the dawn of time their souls have been entwined and waiting: now hers is calling him. Helen sings for him alone; on occasion she may play the piano for her husband but when he is there she never sings.

  This evening she has chosen the piano and she stops as soon as she hears her husband at the door. Greenwood is late. It is 19.33, a time that Stephen writes on the report sheet. Greenwood drops his crackling outdoor clothes beside the door. He has had to finish off a piece of work that couldn’t wait, there were problems with his wretched bike chain, he has oil all over his hands, he’d like to have a shower before he rings his father. Will he have time for that or is he spoiling supper? Supper is the word that Jamie Greenwood uses.

  The noise of a cork being pulled from a bottle is curiously disgusting. Cooking sounds: a knife hitting a hard surface, and a match struck, the hiss of a gas jet, hot fat splutter, china against china, metal against glass.

  Greenwood makes the telephone call that Stephen has already noted, although on this orange-label tape only his end of the conversation can be heard. Stephen closes his eyes as he listens once again to the confident male voice, the sound of shared assumptions. Let that Saudi millionaire be a hopeless shot, he thinks. Let him swing his gun round wildly and hit Jamie Greenwood, let Greenwood fall to the hard ground dying, bleeding from the mouth. Does blood spurt out in a scarlet halo, in a shower of red raindrops when a bird is shot?

  ‘Smells good,’ Greenwood says.

  Name it, Stephen urges. He wants to know what Helen will be eating. The scent of onions softening in butter, of herbs and garlic, reaches him through the thin grey ribbon and reminds him he is very hungry. What is the wine they are drinking? He thinks Valpolicella, for the beauty of the word.

  When Helen and Jamie have finished their supper it is nine o’clock and they, like Charlotte, like Louise, like Stephen unconfessed, turn on the television for Brideshead Revisited. If they speak to each other at all during the hour of the programme, their words are lost in swooning music and the actors’ voices. Charles and Julia are falling deeply and adulterously in love on board a ship in mid-Atlantic. Stephen leaves them to it and winds the tape forward to the point where Helen and Jamie make preparations for the night and shut their bedroom door.

  For a while longer Stephen shares the noises of the night. Sirens and traffic, voices in the street, a dog barking in the upstairs flat, a sudden swirl of wind in the branches of a tree. He thinks of Helen listening to them with him, as she lies sleepless by the snoring body of her husband. And then he checks his watch and sees with a shock that it is well past nine o’clock. He has kept Helen company for three hours and more; he will have to sign the late list; there is not enough time to finish writing a report.

  Every piece of equipment, any scraps of paper that bear even a single word, anything that could identify a member of the Institute, must be locked away at night. Stephen removes the orange-labelled tape and puts it into his in-tray. He carries the tray and his tape player to his allocated cabinet, stows them, clicks shut the sturdy combination lock and checks it, twice.

  His coat is hanging on a rack next to the door. He puts it on and walks slowly back to the end of the long room, lightly touching each of the eight deserted desks as he goes past. All the surfaces are bare except for lam
ps, and on Charlotte’s desk a weeping fig, on Louise’s a small grove of African violets. Green leaves and pale pink flowers, incongruous in this place of battleship-grey metal: metal desks and metal safes on a sea of carpet tiles that are also grey and dirty. The angled desk-lamps hunch above the empty planes like herons staring into stagnant pools.

  Friday night. After the darkness of the long room, the neon glare in the corridor outside stabs Stephen’s eyes. He blinks behind his glasses. There is no one in the corridor; the whole building seems unmanned although Stephen knows that there are many other corridors and many other rooms in which feverish activity will continue through the night. And, beyond the reinforced walls of the Institute, other young men will be gazing into the eyes of girls, across restaurant tables, dance floors, rumpled beds. Girls are slipping out of dresses into silky nightgowns; they are standing under showers with water flowing down their breasts. Out there, in the cold December night, new lovers are kissing for the first time and the dying are taking their last breaths. Stephen is aware that these are banal thoughts.

  He takes the stairs rather than summoning a lift. He hopes his descending footsteps sound assertive on the bare concrete. At the bottom of the staircase a security guard is waiting.

  ‘Working late,’ he says. It’s a statement not a question.

  ‘Been a busy week,’ Stephen tells him, looking heroically exhausted.

  ‘Even so, you didn’t ought to spend your nights in here, son. All work and no play …’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Stephen interrupts him, ‘but it’s okay. My girlfriend’s waiting for me; she knew that I’d be late.’

  ‘That’s more like it,’ says the guard, with a leering wink. ‘Reg’s got the late list.’

  Reg is on duty in the guard-post, by the main entrance of the Institute, sheltered by bullet-proof glass. Behind him, flickering screens show what is happening in the corridors and stairwells of the building, and in the street outside. To speak to Stephen, Reg slides open a hatch.

  ‘Working late,’ Reg says. ‘Put your moniker on this.’

  Stephen does as he is told, adding his department and initials to the list. L/III/ SSD. Reg presses a button and the main door opens to release Stephen into White Horse Street and the night.

  White Horse Street is dark and empty; Piccadilly, a minute’s walk away, is bustling. It is two weeks before Christmas. People have been at office parties in the upstairs rooms of pubs or at the Ritz. In their twos and threes they flow along the pavements, laughing and talking loudly. Girls in high-heeled shoes. They’re still chattering beneath the harsh lighting of the escalators at Green Park and on the platforms of the station. Those few who are, like Stephen, on their own seem fugitive and embarrassed.

  Dust-metal breath and roar of an approaching train: too bright, too loud, too fast. The doors slide open. To propel himself inside them, to give himself up to those devouring jaws, requires an effort of the will. Within the carriage, when the train plunges back into its tunnel, Stephen’s face reflected in the window looks pale and moon-like, imbecilic. He remains standing and he stares at his reflected self. Mon semblable, mon frère. I never knew death had undone so many.

  At East Acton station he alights. The shop on the corner of the high street will be open; Stephen is in need of food. As he walks past the lit doorway of a pub along the road he considers going in but he has not found it to be a friendly place before and the prospect of the sour eyes of watching strangers puts him off. Safer to drink at home alone.

  Home: the lower half of a small and narrow house, the main entrance shared with the flat upstairs, although both also have their own front doors. Stephen’s door is painted brown. He unlocks it, pushes it open cautiously, leans in to switch the hall light on while still standing on the threshold. When he comes home to his empty flat he finds at times the waiting silence has an edge to it, as if someone had been there who has only just left, or something was still waiting, with its teeth bared, in the dark.

  The flat is very cold. The convector heater in the sitting room will take time to warm it up. Stephen has bought sausage rolls, baked beans, cheese, bread, chocolate, and a bottle of whisky. He holds the bottle up to the light and savours the amber glow of it, its consoling weight, its seal uncracked. Right now, at this very moment, in the dining room of Helen’s parents-in-law in Oxfordshire, dinner will be almost over. There’ll be guttering candles and silver knives, and dark red wine in crystal goblets; there’ll be firelight and golden labradors and Helen will get up from the table without a word, go to the window, catch sight of her own face in the glass and wonder why she feels so lonely.

  *

  At that time, on that Friday night, Coralie Donaldson was also contemplating food. Food is a topic that often occupies her mind. It is not that she cares about what she puts into her own mouth – it’s her son’s diet that concerns her. It always has, ever since she first spooned Farex into his gummy mouth and prayed that it would help him to grow strong. Such a skinny little thing he’d been, a child of bones as light as a bird’s, of cloud-pale skin, of deep blue shadows beneath his eyes, concavities beneath his ribs. Not a fussy eater, no; he’d swallow whatever she gave him, but it never seemed enough to bulk him out. Tubular his bones were when he was a child, and hollow – goodness no sooner poured into him than it ran straight out. Still peaky now, although no longer quite so thin.

  In truth, there’s not a lot to think about tonight, in the matter of meals tomorrow. The planning has been done, was done a week ago, as the thinking for the week ahead is now in progress. For dinner when Stephen comes there will be tomato soup, and corned beef hash with potatoes and boiled carrots, followed by peaches and evaporated milk. Corned beef, being tinned, is one of those foods that keep from week to week but fresh meat isn’t safe to store for very long.

  Coralie is looking forward to tomorrow afternoon. The shops are interesting at this time of the year, brave with gold and green and scarlet, with cheerful tins of Quality Street and bumper packs and things you wouldn’t see otherwise: chestnuts, Turkish Delight, tangerines like precious gems in their wrappings of blue tissue. There’s a feeling of brightness and excitement, even though it’s cold and the days are full of rain.

  Is it raining now? Hard to say, when the windows are shut and the curtains drawn and Coralie secure within her walls in the lee of Didcot Power Station. Above her, less than half a mile away, colossal towers of steam rise up into the darkness of the night but here, in this squat brick house, the lamps are lit, the cat’s asleep and the television is chattering in the corner of the room. There’ll be no need to pull aside an edge of curtain and peer into the outside world until the morning. And, when the morning comes, so too will her son, her peely-wally boy, her clever boy, her Stephen.

  Saturday

  Country clothes, weekend clothes, moss-green and fawn-flecked tweed, leather buttons like carved conkers, checked cotton shirts and cavalry twill. Stephen’s brogues were neatly polished. That Saturday morning, before he left for Didcot, he walked round to the corner shop to buy the milk he had forgotten the night before and, although it was not likely he would encounter anyone he knew in the network of streets where he lived just off Western Avenue, it was not inconceivable, and therefore he was correctly dressed. If he were to see anyone from the Institute he probably wouldn’t acknowledge them in any case: an early lesson on the course he took as a new recruit warned against hailing any colleague met by chance lest that colleague was working under cover. ‘Only think what damage you might do to a tricky operation if you were to cry “Good morning, Jim” to an operative who at that moment was calling himself Jack.’ Nevertheless, acknowledged or not, if Stephen is to be recognised, it must be for what he is: a man off to the country for the weekend. By the same token, from Monday to Friday, he is equally appropriately dressed in a three-piece suit and tie. These are the cuirass, the greaves and gauntlets of the modern man.

  Stephen thought of Jamie Greenwood, also in his country clothes, somewhere
in a field that morning. What exactly is a shooting jacket? Is it a garment that has pockets for dead animals and guns? Waterproofed, presumably – or blood-proofed – against the seepage from the rabbit’s wounds and the torn flesh of the pheasant. His images of Greenwood are necessarily indistinct for he has not yet seen the man himself, either in the flesh or in a photograph. But he is easy to imagine. Stephen has seen many young men just like him, at Oxford and at the Institute. Tall men with loud voices who inhabit their clothes as if they were bespoke and never bought from ordinary shops. Or, indeed, as if they had inherited them, as if clothes were valuable possessions, to be bequeathed by fathers to sons and worn by those sons with pride. Second-hand clothes, in Stephen’s childhood, were a source of shame. Cast-offs and hand-me-downs, smelling of mildew and desperation, piled in depressing heaps on trestle tables in church halls at jumble sales, picked over by sad-eyed women old before their time. It had come as a surprise when he first heard a boy boast of owning his grand-father’s dinner jacket. However hard the times were when Stephen was growing up, his mother had insisted on new clothes. Before he went to Oxford she took a day off work so that they could shop together for the evening dress that Coralie believed her son would wear on a regular basis. In the gents’ department of Elliston & Cavell she had examined the rows of shiny jackets and trousers with a single stripe, fingering the satiny lapels, shocked at their cost but nonetheless determined that Stephen should be suitably caparisoned at this new stage of his life.

  He remembered their worry over ties. Red silk or black? In the end she had chosen for him: black and velvet, secured around the neck by an elastic band, as the alternative – a perplexingly thin strip of fabric – could not by any stretch of their imaginations be envisaged as a bow. When, at home, he had tried the new tie on, he had thought it was perhaps a little large. Above it, his face looked round and pale; the face of a kitten in a noose, suspended in cruel jest before it’s drowned.