Transcription

by Kate Atkinson

  Juliet knew a little more about the dog’s provenance now, thanks to Perry, as well as something of her erstwhile owner’s pedigree. She was ‘Hungarian, quite mad,’ Perry said. In his opinion all Hungarians were mad – something to do with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but Juliet hadn’t really been listening.

  Lily’s owner, the mad Hungarian, was called Nelly Varga and, according to Perry, had been caught spying for the Germans. ‘We “converted” her.’

  What did that mean?

  ‘She was given a choice – she could go quietly to the gallows, like the German spies we have previously captured – or she could work for us instead. The threat of the noose can be quite persuasive,’ Perry said.

  ‘I expect it can be.’

  ‘And now she’s on a mission for us, in France. And we need her to come back, and that –’ he said, indicating the dog (the dog cocked its head), ‘is what will make sure she does. We promised no harm would come to her. She’s obsessed with the dog – it’s the only method we have really of controlling her.’

  ‘Apart from the noose.’

  The Germans were knocking on Belgium’s door, and after Belgium it would be France’s turn. It seemed unlikely that Nelly Varga would escape the iron maw that was swallowing Europe. Juliet hoped not – it would be a wrench to have to give the dog back to her.

  In the meantime, the dog had been ‘converted’ too. Blithely unaware of its ransomed status it seemed to have transferred its love wholesale to Juliet and Cyril. Even the monastically untouchable Perry was pulled into its circle of warmth and could often be found sitting on the sofa with Lily on his lap, absent-mindedly stroking her soft ears. ‘Helps me think,’ he said sheepishly when caught in the act of affection.

  ‘Well, I’m off, Cyril.’ She’d given up all hope for the hat, it was never going to look right.

  ‘Goodnight, miss. Enjoy the flicks.’

  Yes, it would have been nice to ‘enjoy the flicks’, she thought. Nice to sit in the warm fug of the Odeon in Leicester Square and watch a film or quietly doze and catch up on some sleep or even daydream about ‘Ian’, but unfortunately she was on a mission for the Right Club.

  Subsequent to her debut in Pelham Place, Juliet had been invited to a meeting in the smoky cramped room above the Russian Tea Room. Most of the attendees were 18b widows. There was naturally a good deal of grousing on this topic. Mrs Ambrose was there, of course, wearing a crocheted beret in an alarming shade of fuchsia. She knitted throughout, occasionally looking up from her stitches and smiling beatifically at the rest of the members.

  Mrs Scaife rarely attended meetings, but she had come once or twice with Juliet to the Russian Tea Room and they had eaten food prepared by Anna Wolkoff’s mother, who was the cook in the establishment and who appeared like a troglodyte from the basement kitchen with ‘goulash’ – which, on first hearing, Juliet had mistaken for ‘ghoulish’. ‘And it was rather,’ she reported to Perry. ‘I dread to think what animal was in it, it tasted quite zoological.’

  There were only two people close to Juliet’s age at the Right Club meeting. One was a callow youth who spouted a good deal of polemic and could just as easily have been at a Communist meeting. And a young woman, rather beautiful and haughtily Gallic (‘Belgian, actually’), who smoked incessantly and seemed almost overcome by lassitude. Her name, she said, was ‘Giselle’. Rhymes with gazelle, Juliet thought. Giselle would rouse herself from her torpor occasionally (she moved like a particularly lazy cat) in order to despise something. In no particular order, she ‘loathed’ the Duke of Kent (no reason given), the District and Circle line, English bread and Mrs Ambrose’s hat (the latter condemned in a stagey whisper in Juliet’s ear, ‘I ’ate ’er ’at.’).

  Juliet had been invited to participate in their ‘sticky-back’ campaign, for which they were paired up as if preparing for a party game. She had been relieved to be given Mrs Ambrose as a partner and thought they would be able to talk openly, but Mrs Ambrose remained stoutly in character as they made their way round the centre of London.

  They crept along in the blackout, staying close to walls and railings, avoiding policemen and air-raid wardens. ‘Jews,’ Mrs Ambrose sniffed, posting a ‘This is a Jew’s War’ leaflet on the door of an air-raid warden post. (Which one, Juliet wondered, looking at the apostrophe.) They were ‘stickering’, pasting their own propaganda (War destroys workers!) anywhere that seemed suitable – over government posters, on telephone kiosks, Belisha beacons, Montague Burtons and Lyons Corner Houses. ‘Wherever there are Jews,’ Mrs Ambrose said.

  Not for the first time, Juliet found herself wondering if Mrs Ambrose really was against the Nazis. She certainly didn’t seem to be for the Jews, and she entered into her role so convincingly that Juliet found it quite easy to forget that she was ‘one of us’ as opposed to ‘one of them’. If she’d been on the stage you might have accused her of over-acting the part. (‘She has outstanding “tradecraft” skills,’ Perry said. ‘The mark of a good agent is when you have no idea which side they’re on.’)

  It seemed to Juliet that there were some rather blurred boundaries when it came to beliefs – Perry had once been a member of the British Union of Fascists (‘It was useful,’ he said. ‘Helped me understand them’) and Hartley (Hartley, of all people!) had been a member of the Communist Party when he was at Cambridge. ‘But everyone was a Communist before the war,’ he protested. And Godfrey, of course, had been mixing in Fascist circles for years on behalf of MI5 and seemed some days to be almost fond of his informants.

  ‘Get a move on, dear,’ Mrs Ambrose said. ‘You’re very slow. You’ve got to paste and run.’ Mrs Ambrose didn’t look as if she could run even if there was a bull behind her.

  On another occasion, Juliet had gone out with Giselle, who at least made no pretence of stickering and headed straight for a pub. ‘I need a drink,’ she said. ‘Can I tempt you?’

  What did that mean? Were they speaking in code? Was it always the same one? A very poor kind of secrecy if it was. Juliet hesitated. She would have to say it, she supposed. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ she said guardedly. ‘I think I will.’

  Giselle scowled at her. ‘I wasn’t offering to pay.’

  The pub was crowded and noisy and full of sailors rather a long way from the sea, and the two of them attracted a good many ribald comments, which were shrugged off with impressive hauteur by Giselle.

  They managed to squeeze into a corner table from whence Juliet was dispatched to the bar for rum, which she also paid for. It was rather taxing being with Giselle. What was her story, Juliet wondered? (‘She was once a mannequin for Worth,’ Mrs Ambrose had confided.) They drank the rum, it was too noisy for any conversation and they departed almost as quickly as they had arrived. They were catching different trains and Juliet was dismissed at the top of the escalator without a hint of gratitude.

  ‘Ah, Mam’selle Bouchier,’ Perry said later. ‘She is rather fond of alcohol, I’m afraid. Other things too, unfortunately.’

  ‘You know her?’

  He frowned at Juliet. ‘Of course I know her, she’s one of us. She’s an excellent agent. Didn’t she identify herself to you?’

  ‘Sort of. I suppose.’ (How many agents did Perry have in the Right Club? It seemed like half the membership.)

  His frown deepened, considering her incompetence, she supposed. ‘Are you sure all this underhand stuff is your forte?’ he asked.

  ‘I am,’ Juliet said. ‘I absolutely am.’

  After a week or two of these malicious activities Juliet was given a badge. Anna Wolkoff herself had pinned it. She had fierce eyebrows and seemed mournfully Russian, sighing in the tragic way of a woman whose cherry orchard had been chopped down as she fixed the badge on to Juliet’s dress. ‘You are one of us now, Iriska,’ Anna said. She took a step back in order to admire Juliet and then kissed her on both cheeks.

  The badge was red and silver and depicted an eagle destroying a snake, beneath which were the initial
s P and J.

  ‘Perish Judah,’ Mrs Ambrose explained amiably when asked.

  ‘What is that ugly thing on your dress?’ Perry asked.

  ‘I’ve earnt a badge. It’s like being in the Girl Guides again. It all seems rather silly.’

  ‘These people are more dangerous than they look,’ he said. ‘We’ll catch them out if we’re patient. Softly, softly, catchee monkey.’

  What does that make me, Juliet wondered – the bait? What would you bait a monkey with? (Can I tempt you?) Bananas, she supposed.

  ‘It’s like being Jekyll and Hyde in some ways,’ Juliet said.

  ‘Good and evil, dark and light,’ Perry mused. ‘You can’t have one without the other, I suppose.’ (Was he describing his own character?) ‘Perhaps we are all dualists,’ he said.

  Juliet was unsure what a dualist was. Not, she supposed, someone who crossed swords at dawn. Someone who was in two minds about things, perhaps.

  In the Odeon, the National Anthem started up at the end of the programme and Juliet struggled sleepily to her feet. Giselle, who had been sitting next to her, uncoiled herself languidly from her seat like a rather dreamy cobra. Juliet had just begun to sing ‘God save our gracious King –’ when she found herself being prodded by Giselle’s bony elbow in her side.

  Oh, good Lord, Juliet thought, for the Right Club didn’t stand and sing for their King, instead they substituted their own version of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. The pair of rather strident Regulation 18b widows whose company they were in had already launched into ‘Land of Hope and Jewry’ in their reedy church voices. (‘All the Jewboys praise thee / as they plunder thee.’)

  ‘Sing,’ Giselle hissed to her.

  ‘Land of Jewish finance / fooled by Jewish lies,’ Juliet sang quietly. It felt like such a travesty, a counterpoint in every possible way – musically and morally – to the National Anthem. The neighbouring members of the audience glanced at them in alarm but seemed too surprised to say anything.

  It wasn’t the only infraction they committed in cinemas. They cat-called and jeered in the middle of newsreels – ‘Jew-lover’, ‘warmongers’ and so on – and then ran away from the cinema before anything could be done about it.

  ‘They were showing Gaslight with Anton Walbrook, he was awfully good,’ Juliet reported to Perry later (and dishy, too, but she didn’t say that in case he took it as a judgement on his own looks). ‘He persuades his wife that she’s going mad.’

  Perry laughed rather mirthlessly and said, ‘And you enjoyed that, did you?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ Hartley said. ‘His wife went loopy and hanged herself in the wardrobe.’ More Rochester than Heathcliff then. ‘That was his first wife, of course,’ Hartley continued cheerfully. (His first wife?) ‘Nobody knows what happened to the second one.’

  Bluebeard then. There were – happily – no locked rooms in the Dolphin Square flat and Juliet could find no dead wives hanging bloodily on butcher’s hooks – or in wardrobes, for that matter. Perhaps they were stored in his ‘other place’ in Petty France.

  ‘I’m surprised,’ Clarissa said. ‘Men like Perry don’t usually marry.’

  -6-

  15.05.40

  G. When you went with MRS SHUTE?

  T. GLADYS? Yes.

  G. And got wet through? (both laugh)

  (Cigarettes)

  18.30 The doorbell rings.

  G. Here’s BETTY.

  T. Did you get the job in the NAAFI?

  B. Still waiting to hear.

  G. I see.

  B. And I still have to finish up where I am so it’ll be another week before I could start.

  G. At the NAAFI?

  B. Yes. (Inaudible)

  T. She would get ten years for that letter.

  B. She would, wouldn’t she?

  T. What would you get for receiving it?

  (Laughter all round)

  G. Has anyone got Welsh blood here?

  B. A long way back, but I’m not proud of it.

  T. I went to Manchester to see that woman.

  G. The German? And she’s called BERTHA?

  T. BIG BERTHA. (laughter)

  B. She takes after her mother. I’ve seen a photograph.

  T. German sort of face?

  B. I would say. (laughter) Will she write? SW6 – is that Fulham?

  (Biscuit interval)

  B. Did I tell you about that Jew that came round? He said he could get me anything in the way of underthings.

  G. Yes, yes.

  B. They’ve got everything somewhere.

  T. He’s not the worst of them. (inaudible) Poisonous (?)

  B. Well, a friend of mine knows a Jewess who (inaudible) often for Easter. That’s not their holiday!

  G. They have Passover.

  T. Well, they’re soon going to find out, aren’t they? Get what’s coming to them.

  G. Hm?

  The nearer the war got to their own shores, the more excitable the informants had grown. The more sure of themselves, too. ‘Cocky lot, aren’t they?’ Cyril said.

  Godfrey and Perry had cooked up a scheme to reward them for their loyalty with small iron crosses – lapel badges, several of which were delivered to Juliet one afternoon by a messenger boy.

  ‘Has an admirer sent you something, miss?’ Cyril asked, looking at the cardboard box on her desk.

  ‘I don’t think it’s from an admirer, Cyril,’ she said when she opened the box. ‘At least, I hope not.’

  ‘War merit second class,’ Godfrey chuckled when he came in early (rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat-TAT) to pick them up. ‘A Kriegverdienstkreuz,’ he said. ‘Shall I spell that for you, Miss Armstrong? For the transcript?’

  ‘Yes, please, Mr Toby.’

  ‘For services to the Third Reich!’ Godfrey smiled at her as though they shared a secret, one that went beyond Dolphin Square. (She thought again of their stroll through the twilight in Kensington Gardens, the fallen glove. Perhaps I can escort you as far as the Albert Hall?) ‘The medals to be worn concealed, of course,’ he added. ‘They will be told that the German government wants to show appreciation for their work. And if there’s an invasion they will be able to identify themselves as friend rather than foe to the Nazis.’

  But surely that wasn’t a good idea, Juliet puzzled? The Germans would have a cohort of ready-made collaborators waiting for them.

  ‘But we will be able to identify them by their medals! Also they have been given addresses to go to if the Germans invade. Muster stations, I suppose you could say, but the minute they turn up there they will be arrested.’

  Juliet couldn’t remember reading that in any transcript. Perhaps they had talked about it over spaghetti.

  ‘And then what, Mr Toby?’ Cyril asked.

  ‘Oh,’ Godfrey said casually, ‘we’ll shoot all the informants the minute the first Nazi sets foot on our soil.’

  Who would be the one holding the gun, Juliet wondered? It was difficult to imagine Godfrey putting a blindfold on Betty or Dolly and pushing them up against a wall.

  ‘I would do it,’ Cyril said. ‘I don’t mind. They’re traitors, aren’t they?’

  They had all deliberated several times recently about what they would do in the event of invasion. ‘It’s imperative we defend the BBC,’ Perry said. ‘The Germans mustn’t get their hands on the radio transmitters.’ Juliet imagined herself with the Mauser, heroically fighting to the death outside Broadcasting House on Portland Place. She rather liked this image of herself.

  ‘Miss Armstrong?’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Shall we listen to Churchill’s speech on the wireless? I have some gin, foraged from War Office.’

  ‘Splendid, sir.’ It was the end of the working day and she had planned to go to the Embassy Club with Clarissa, but she supposed she would be failing in her patriotic duty if she didn’t listen to their new prime minister, although she would rather have been dancing and forgetting their country’s woes. Especially as all he was offering the
m was a wretched cocktail of blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind.

  Yet it was stirring stuff and she suddenly felt immensely grown-up and serious, although that might have been due to the gin. ‘Can we do it, do you suppose?’ she asked Perry.

  ‘God knows,’ he said. ‘The situation is grave. All we can do is try our best.’

  They chinked their glasses and Juliet said, ‘To victory,’ and Perry said, ‘To courage. The watchword is courage, Miss Armstrong,’ and they downed their gin.

  Masquerade

  ‘A PARTY?’

  ‘A soirée. You will come, dear, won’t you?’ Mrs Scaife said.

  ‘I’d love to,’ Juliet said. ‘Is it in Pelham Place?’

  Mrs Scaife laughed. ‘Goodness me, no. A friend has lent me a room.’

  The ‘soirée’ was to be a gathering of ‘like-minded people’. ‘Great times are ahead of us, Iris, dear.’

  The idea of attending on her own made Juliet rather nervous. She had grown accustomed to the unflappably woolly presence of Mrs Ambrose and even the glorious indifference of Giselle, but now Iris was going to have to go it alone. Her solo debut.

  The ‘room’ turned out to be a thing of grandeur – the ballroom of a splendid house on Pall Mall – and Juliet wondered who Mrs Scaife’s friend was that he (or she, possibly) was able to provide such an opulent venue. Massive pillars made from a meaty kind of marble ran in a double colonnade, their distant capitals gilded with acanthus. Glittering mirrors walled the room and reflected the gigantic chandeliers. It was the kind of room where men signed treaties that damned both victor and loser, or where girls in disguise mislaid their glass slippers.

  The sticky-back campaign, the hectoring and so on were all inconsequential, weren’t they? A diversion even. The real power of the Right Club lay somewhere else. In Whitehall, in the back rooms of stuffy London clubs, in lustrous rooms like this. The Bettys and the Dollys of this world were the troops, niggling over the weather and bus fares and rationing, but here there were only generals. They would constitute the new world order if the Germans came.