Actually it happened to be true, Juliet did have sandwiches – salad cream and an egg boiled hastily while she yawned her way round the kitchen this morning. It was still only early March but there had been a bright pinch of spring in the air and she had thought it would make a change to eat al fresco.
In Cavendish Square Gardens an unoccupied bench was easy to find, as clearly no one else was foolish enough to consider it warm enough to eat their packed lunch outside. There was a blush of crocuses on the grass and daffodils were bravely spearing their way out of the earth, but there was no warmth in the anaemic sun and Juliet soon began to grow numb with cold.
The sandwich was no comfort, it was a pale, limp thing, a long way from the déjeuner sur l’herbe of her imagination that morning; nonetheless she ate it dutifully. Recently she had bought a new book, by Elizabeth David – A Book of Mediterranean Food. A hopeful purchase. The only olive oil she could find was sold in her local chemist in a small bottle. ‘For softening earwax?’ he asked when she handed over her money. There was a better life somewhere, Juliet supposed, if only she could be bothered to find it.
When she had finished her sandwich, she stood to shake the crumbs off her coat, causing alarm to an attentive retinue of sparrows which rose as one and fluttered away on dusty London wings, ready to return to their scraps as soon as she was gone.
Juliet set off for Charlotte Street again, not to last night’s restaurant but to Moretti’s, a café near the Scala theatre that she frequented occasionally.
It was just as she was passing the top of Berners Street that she saw him.
‘Mr Toby! Mr Toby!’ Juliet picked up her pace and reached him as he was about to round the corner into Cleveland Street. She plucked at his coat sleeve. It seemed a bold move. She had once startled him by doing the same when she had handed him back a glove he had dropped. She remembered thinking, isn’t this how a woman signals her intention to a man, by letting fall the coy handkerchief, the flirtatious glove? ‘Why, thank you, Miss Armstrong,’ he had said at the time. ‘I would have been perplexed as to its whereabouts.’ Flirting had been on neither of their minds.
She had succeeded now in halting him in his progress. He turned round, seemingly unsurprised, so she was sure that he must have heard her shouting his name. He looked steadily at her, waiting for more.
‘Mr Toby? It’s Juliet, remember me?’ (How could he not!) Pedestrians flowed awkwardly around them. We are a little island, she thought, the two of us. ‘Juliet Armstrong.’
He tipped his hat – a grey trilby that she thought she recognized. He offered a faint smile and said, ‘I’m sorry, Miss … Armstrong? I think you have confused me with someone else. Good day to you.’ He turned on his heel and began to walk away.
It was him, she knew it was him. The same (somewhat portly) figure, the bland, owlish face, the tortoiseshell spectacles, the old trilby. And, finally, the irrefutable – and rather unnerving – evidence of the silver-topped cane.
She said his real name. ‘John Hazeldine.’ She had never once called him that. It sounded like an accusation to her ears.
He paused in his stride, his back to her. There was the lightest talcum of dandruff on the shoulders of his greasy gabardine trench. It looked the same as the one that he had worn throughout the war. Did he never buy new clothes? She waited for him to turn round and deny himself again, but after a beat he simply walked on, the cane tap-tap-tapping on the grey London pavement. She had been discarded. Like a glove, she thought.
I think you have confused me with someone else. How strange to hear his voice again. It was him, why would he pretend otherwise, Juliet puzzled as she settled at a table in Moretti’s and ordered a coffee from the surly waiter.
She used to come to this café before the war. The name remained, although the ownership was different. The café itself was small and rather scruffy, the red-and-white-checked tablecloths never entirely clean. The staff seemed to change all the time and no one ever acknowledged Juliet or appeared to recognize her, which was in itself not an unwelcome thing. It was a terrible place really but she was predisposed towards it. It was a thread in the labyrinth, one that she could follow back to the world before the war, to her self before the war. Innocence and experience butting up against each other in the greasy fug of Moretti’s. It had been rather a relief to find it was still here when she returned to London. So much else had gone. She lit a cigarette and waited for her coffee.
The café was largely frequented by foreigners of one kind or another and Juliet liked to sit and simply listen, trying to decipher where their accents might have originated. When she first started coming here, the café was run by Mr Moretti himself. He was always attentive to her, calling her ‘Signorina’ and asking after her mother. (‘How’s your mamma?’) Not that Mr Moretti had ever met her mother, but that was Italians, Juliet supposed. Keener on mothers than the British were.
She always replied, ‘Very well, thank you, Mr Moretti,’ never bold enough to say ‘Signor’ instead of ‘Mr’ – that seemed a presumptuous step to take into someone else’s linguistic territory. The nameless man currently behind the counter at Moretti’s claimed to be Armenian and never asked Juliet about anything, least of all her mother.
It had been a lie, of course. Her mother hadn’t been well, not at all, in fact she had been dying, in the Middlesex, just up the road from Moretti’s, but Juliet had preferred the subterfuge of her mother’s health.
Before she grew too ill to work, her mother had been a dressmaker and Juliet had been accustomed to hearing her mother’s ‘ladies’ complaining their way up the three flights of stairs to their small flat in Kentish Town in order to stand stiffly to attention in their corsets and ample bras while they were pinned into garments. Sometimes Juliet would hold on to them reassuringly while they balanced precariously on a little three-legged stool while her mother shuffled around on her knees, pinning up their hems. Then her mother grew too sick to sew even the simplest seam and the ladies no longer came. Juliet had missed them – they patted her hand and gave her boiled sweets and took an interest in how well she did at school. (What a clever daughter you have, Mrs Armstrong.)
Her mother had scrimped and saved and worked endless hours in order to burnish Juliet, polishing her up for a bright future, paying for ballet classes and piano lessons, even elocution with a woman in Kensington. She had been a scholarship girl in a fee-paying school, a school populated by determined girls and even more determined female staff. Her headmistress had suggested she study Modern Languages or Law at university. Or perhaps she should take the Oxbridge entrance? ‘They’re looking for girls like you,’ her headmistress said, but didn’t elaborate as to what kind of girl that might be.
Juliet had stopped going to that school, stopped preparing for that bright future, so that she could care for her mother – there had always been only the two of them – and had not returned after her mother’s death. It seemed impossible somehow. That eager-to-please, academic sixth-former, who played on the left wing in hockey, who was the leading light of the drama club and practised piano almost every day at school (because there was no room for a piano at home), that girl who was a keen Girl Guide and who loved drama and music and art, that girl, transmuted by bereavement, had gone. And, as far as Juliet could tell, she had never really come back.
Juliet had got into the habit of coming to Moretti’s whenever her mother had hospital treatment, and this was where she was when her mother died. It was only ‘a matter of days’, according to the doctor who had admitted her mother on to a ward in the Middlesex that morning. ‘It’s time,’ he said to Juliet. Did she understand what that meant? Yes, she did, Juliet said. It meant that she was about to lose the only person who loved her. She was seventeen and her grief for herself was almost as great as her grief for her mother.
Never having known him, Juliet felt nothing for her father. Her mother had been somewhat ambivalent on the subject and Juliet appeared to be the only evidence that he had ever existed. He
had been a seaman in the Merchant Navy, killed in an accident and buried at sea before Juliet was born, and although she sometimes might indulge in conjuring his pearlish eyes and coralline bones she remained dispassionate about the man himself.
Her mother’s death, on the other hand, demanded poeticism. As the first clod of earth hit her mother’s coffin, Juliet could barely catch a breath. Her mother would suffocate beneath all that earth, she thought, but Juliet was suffocating too. An image came to her mind – the martyrs who were pressed to death by stones piled on top of them. That is me, she thought, I am crushed by loss. ‘Don’t seek out elaborate metaphors,’ her English teacher had said of her school essays, but her mother’s death had revealed that there was no metaphor too ostentatious for grief. It was a terrible thing and demanded embellishment.
It had been foul weather, wet and windy, the day that her mother died. Juliet had lingered in the warm sanctuary of Moretti’s for as long as possible. She had eaten cheese on toast for lunch – the cheese on toast that Mr Moretti made was infinitely superior to anything they made at home (‘Italian cheese,’ he explained. ‘And Italian bread’), and then had fought her umbrella all the way along Charlotte Street back to the Middlesex. When she arrived at the ward she discovered that it wasn’t safe to believe anything that anyone told you. It turned out that her mother had not had ‘a matter of days’ but only a handful of hours, and she had died while Juliet was enjoying her lunch. When she kissed her mother’s forehead it was still warm and the faint scent of her perfume – lily of the valley – could be caught beneath the awful hospital smells.
‘You just missed it,’ the nurse said, as though her mother’s death was a bus or the opening of a play, when really it was the denouement of her drama.
And that was that. Finito.
The end, too, for the staff of Moretti’s, for when war was declared they were all interned and none of them ever came back. Juliet heard that Mr Moretti went down on the Arandora Star in the summer of 1940, along with hundreds of his imprisoned countrymen. Many of them, like Mr Moretti, had been in the catering trade.
‘It’s a bloody nuisance,’ Hartley said. ‘You can’t get decent service in the Dorchester any more.’ But that was Hartley for you.
It made Juliet melancholic to come back to Moretti’s, and yet she did. The lowering of her spirits at the memory of her mother provided a kind of ballast, a counterbalance to what was (in Juliet’s opinion) her own shallow, rather careless character. Her mother had represented a form of truth for her, something that Juliet knew she had moved away from in the decade since her death.
She fingered the strand of pearls at her neck. Inside each pearl there was a little piece of grit. That was the true self of the pearl, wasn’t it? The beauty of the pearl was just the poor oyster trying to protect itself. From the grit. From the truth.
Oysters made her think of Lester Pelling, the Junior Programme Engineer, and Lester made her think of Cyril, with whom she had worked during the war. Cyril and Lester had much in common. This thread of thought led to many others until eventually she arrived back at Godfrey Toby. Everything was interconnected, a great web that stretched across time and history. Forster might have said Only connect but Juliet thought there was something to be said for cutting all those threads and disconnecting oneself.
The pearls at her neck were not Juliet’s, she had taken them from the body of a dead woman. Death was a truth too, of course, because it was an absolute. Rather heavier than she looks, I’m afraid. Lift on my three – one – two – three! Juliet shuddered at the memory. Best not to think about that. Best not to think at all, probably. Thinking had always been her downfall. Juliet drained her cup and lit another cigarette.
Mr Moretti used to make her a lovely coffee – ‘Viennese’ – with whipped cream and cinnamon. The war did for that too, of course, and the beverage on offer in Moretti’s nowadays was Turkish and more or less undrinkable. It was served in a thick thimble of a cup and was bitter and grainy, made palatable only by the addition of several spoonfuls of sugar. Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the history of a cup. Juliet was in charge of a series for the Juniors called Looking At Things. She knew a lot about cups. She had Looked At them.
She ordered another awful coffee and, for fear of encouraging him in some way, tried not to look in the direction of the funny little man who was sitting at a corner table. He had been staring at her on and off since she first sat down, in a way that was extremely disconcerting. Like many in Moretti’s, he had the shabby air of the post-war European diaspora. There was a trollish look to him too, as if he had been put together from leftovers. He could have been sent from Booking to play one of the dispossessed. A hunched shoulder, eyes like pebbles – slightly uneven, as if one had slipped a little – and pockmarked skin that looked as if it had been peppered with shot. (Perhaps it had been.) The wounds of war, Juliet thought, rather pleased with the way the words sounded in her head. It could be the title of a novel. Perhaps she should write one. But wasn’t artistic endeavour the final refuge of the uncommitted?
Juliet was contemplating confronting the odd little man in the polite way of an English woman – Excuse me, do I know you? – although she was fairly certain that she would have remembered someone so odd, but before she could get as far as addressing him, he stood up abruptly.
She felt sure he was going to come over and speak to her and readied herself for some kind of conflict, but instead he shambled towards the door – he had a limp, she noticed, and in lieu of a walking-stick he was supporting himself with a large furled umbrella. He disappeared into the street. He hadn’t paid, but the Armenian behind the counter merely glanced up at him as he left and remained uncharacteristically unperturbed.
When her coffee arrived, Juliet swallowed it down like medicine, hoping it would perk her up for the afternoon’s onslaught, and then gazed like a clairvoyant at the coffee grounds that were left at the bottom of the small cup. Why would Godfrey Toby refuse to acknowledge her?
He had been coming out of a bank. That used to be his cover – bank clerk. It was clever really, no one wanted to engage a bank clerk in conversation about his job. Juliet used to think that someone who seemed as ordinary as Godfrey Toby must be harbouring a secret – a thrilling past, a dreadful tragedy – but as time had gone by she’d realized that being ordinary was his secret. It was the best disguise of all really, wasn’t it?
Juliet never thought of him as ‘John Hazeldine’ for he had inhabited the rather dull-seeming domain of Godfrey Toby so thoroughly, so magnificently.
To his face he had been ‘Mr Toby’, but really ‘Godfrey’ was how everyone used to refer to him. It indicated neither familiarity nor intimacy, it was simply a habit that had formed. They had called their operation ‘the Godfrey case’ and there were a number of files in the Registry that had been headed simply ‘Godfrey’, and not all of them were successfully cross-referenced. That was the kind of thing that used to send the Registry queens into a tizzy, of course.
There had been talk of moving him abroad after the war ended. New Zealand. Somewhere like that anyway. South Africa, perhaps. To protect him, in case of reprisals. But wasn’t retribution – one way or another – something they were all at risk of?
And his informants, the fifth columnists – what of them? There had been a plan to monitor them in peacetime, but Juliet wasn’t sure if it had ever been implemented. She did know that the decision had been made to leave them in ignorance after the war. No one had told them about MI5’s duplicity. They never knew that they had been recorded by microphones embedded in the plaster of the walls of the flat in Dolphin Square to which they came so eagerly every week. Nor did they have any idea that Godfrey Toby worked for MI5 and was not the Gestapo agent to whom they thought they were bringing traitorous information. And they would have been very surprised to know that the following day a girl sat at a big Imperial typewriter in the flat next door and transcribed those traitorous conversations, one top copy and two carbons at a
time. And that girl, for her sins, had been Juliet.
When the operation was wound up at the end of ’44 they were told that Godfrey had been stood down and ‘evacuated’ to Portugal, although in reality he had been sent to Paris to interview captured German officers.
Where had he been since the end of the war? Why had he returned? And, most puzzling of all, why would he pretend not to recognize her?
I know him, Juliet thought. They had worked together throughout the war. She had been in his home, for heaven’s sake – in Finchley – where he had lived in a house with a solid oak front door and a robust brass door-knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. A house with leaded lights and parquet flooring. She had sat on the cut moquette of his solid sofa. (Can I get you a cup of tea, Miss Armstrong? Would that help? We’ve had rather a shock.) She had washed her hands with the freesia-scented soap in his bathroom, seen the array of coats and shoes in his hall cupboard. Why, she had even glimpsed the pink satin eiderdown beneath which he and Mrs Toby (if there ever really had been such a person) slept.
And together they had committed a hideous act, the kind of thing that binds you to someone for ever, whether you like it or not. Was that why he had denied her now? (Two sugars, that’s right, isn’t it, Miss Armstrong?) Or was that why he had come back?
I should have followed him, she thought. But he would have lost her. He had been rather good at evasion.
1940
One of Us
‘GODFREY TOBY IS his name,’ Peregrine Gibbons said. ‘He poses as an agent of the German government, but of course he is one of us.’