The following morning she received a telegram with confirmation of ‘the post’ – the wording still mysteriously vague – and instructions to wait at the bus stop opposite the Natural History Museum at 9.00 a.m. the following day. The telegram was signed ‘Room 055’.
After twenty minutes of waiting as instructed – in an unforgiving wind – a Bedford bus pulled up in front of Juliet. It was a single-decker and on its side it announced ‘Highland Tours’ and Juliet thought, crumbs – were they going to Scotland and shouldn’t someone have told her so she could have packed a suitcase?
The driver opened the door and shouted over to her, ‘MI5, love? Hop in.’ So much for secrecy, she thought.
The bus proceeded to stop several times to pick up more people: a couple of youngish men in bowler hats, but mostly girls – girls who looked as though they had just stepped out of a charm school, or indeed St James’s Secretarial College.
‘Debs – rotten, the lot of them,’ the girl in the seat next to her said, rather loudly. She was a swan, pale and elegant. ‘Do you want a fag?’ she said. She spoke with a debutante drawl herself – a laryngitic, smoke-infused one, it was true, but nonetheless it betrayed the unmistakeable timbre of the upper echelons. She held out a cigarette packet to Juliet, who shook her head and said, ‘No, thanks, I don’t smoke.’
‘You will eventually,’ the girl said. ‘You may as well start now and get it over with.’ There was a gold crest on the cigarette packet, and, more extraordinarily still, a tiny gold crest embossed on the cigarette itself. ‘Morland’s,’ the girl said, lighting the cigarette and sucking hard on it. ‘Pa’s a duke. They make them specially for him.’
‘Goodness,’ Juliet said. ‘I didn’t know they did that.’
‘I know. Mad, isn’t it? My name’s Clarissa, by the way.’
‘Juliet.’
‘Oh, bad luck. I bet everyone’s always asking you where Romeo is. I myself was named for a bloody awful novel.’
‘And do you have a sister called Pamela?’ Juliet asked curiously.
‘I do!’ Clarissa roared with laughter. She had a filthy laugh, despite her blue blood. ‘How on earth did you know that? You must be one of the clever ones. Books are such a waste of time,’ she added. ‘I have no idea why people go on and on about them.’ She tilted her head back and blew smoke out of her mouth in an admirably long, thin stream in a way that made smoking look suddenly inviting. ‘They’re all inbred,’ she added, indicating a red-haired girl swaying her precarious way down the aisle – the driver seemed to think he was at Brooklands.
The red-haired girl was wearing a nice twin-set in a pale apple-green that had clearly come from an expensive shop rather than being made by hand. Juliet’s sweater – cherry-red moss stitch – had been knitted by her mother and she felt almost embarrassingly homespun compared to the other girls. The pale-green-twin-set girl wore pearls, too. Of course. A quick inventory of the coach led Juliet to the conclusion that she might be the only girl without them.
‘Her mother’s a lady-in-waiting to the Queen,’ Clarissa murmured, indicating the pale-green-twin-set girl with her cigarette. She shifted closer to Juliet and whispered in her ear, ‘Rumour has it that—’ but at that moment the vehicle lurched around a corner and the girls all squealed in delighted fear. ‘A bus!’ someone exclaimed. ‘What a hoot!’
The girl in the apple-green twin-set had been flung on to someone’s lap by the sudden movement of the bus and along with all those around her was screaming with laughter.
‘A curse on all their houses,’ Clarissa muttered.
‘But you’re one yourself,’ Juliet ventured.
Clarissa shrugged. ‘Fourth daughter of a duke – it hardly counts.’ She caught Juliet’s eye and laughed. ‘I know, I sound like a spoiled brat.’
‘Are you?’
‘Oh, completely. Do have a fag, I know we’re going to be great friends.’
Juliet took a cigarette from the heraldic packet and Clarissa lit it for her with her lighter – gold, of course. ‘There,’ she laughed. ‘You’re on your way.’
‘That’s it, ladies and gents!’ the bus driver yelled. ‘The charabanc holiday’s over, your sentence starts here – everybody off!’
The coach disgorged the rather bewildered group outside the main gates of a prison. The driver banged on a small studded wooden door to the side of the gates. ‘Another lot for you!’ he yelled, and the door was opened by an invisible gatekeeper.
‘Wormwood Scrubs?’ Juliet puzzled to Clarissa. ‘We’re to work here?’ Not much fear that the subject of Art would raise its ugly head here, she thought.
Clarissa ground out her cigarette beneath her expensive-looking shoes (‘Ferragamo – would you like them? You can have them’) and said, ‘Well, Pa always said I’d end up behind bars.’
And that was how Juliet’s career in espionage began.
The Scrubs, as everyone called it, was chaotic, full of people totally unsuited to the job in hand. MI5 were recruiting an enormous number of new people, girls mostly, into ‘A’ Division, which was administrative. The debs in particular were useless. A few of them brought picnic hampers and ate lunch on the grass as if they were at Henley Regatta. There were still prisoners in some of the blocks, waiting to be moved elsewhere. If they were unlucky enough to catch sight of the new arrivals, Juliet wondered what they would make of all these lovely girls nibbling on chicken drumsticks. There would be some winnowing soon, Juliet expected. It would be menials who would win this war, she thought, not girls in pearls.
She was siphoned off into the Registry – a place seething with discontent – and her days consisted mainly of moving buff folders from one filing-cabinet drawer to another, or shuffling the endless index cards around according to some impenetrably arcane system.
And yet there was much fun to be had once they escaped from jail every evening. Clarissa was a real friend (perhaps her first), gold crests notwithstanding. They went out together almost every night, bumping their way through the streets in the blackout – Juliet was black and blue from nightly encounters with post boxes and lamp posts. The Four Hundred, the Embassy, the Berkeley, the Milroy, the Astoria ballroom – there was no end to the entertainment to be had during a war. They were pushed around overcrowded dance floors in a blur by a succession of men in different uniforms, temporary swains who seemed like mayflies, their faces hardly worth committing to memory.
There was a late-night coffee stall on Park Lane that they would stop at on the way home in the small hours, or sometimes they wouldn’t go to bed at all but would get breakfast in a Lyons – porridge, bacon and fried bread, toast and marmalade and a pot of tea, all for 1s 6d – and then come straight to the Scrubs and start all over again.
Nonetheless, it had been something of a relief when Perry Gibbons approached her yesterday while she was eating lunch in the canteen with Clarissa. The canteen was the same one that had previously catered for the prison population, and Juliet suspected that the unpalatable food was also unchanged. They were dining on some kind of gamey hash when she suddenly found him smiling down at her. ‘Miss Armstrong, don’t get up. My name’s Perry Gibbons. I need a girl, I’m afraid.’
‘Well,’ Juliet said, adopting a note of caution, ‘I am a girl, I suppose.’
‘Good! Then can you come to my office after lunch? Do you know where it is?’
Juliet had no idea, but he had a firm voice, a nice low register that spoke of both kindness and unassailable authority, which seemed the perfect combination in a man – in the romance novels her mother had been fond of, anyway – so she promptly said, ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Excellent. I’ll see you shortly. Don’t rush, enjoy your lunch.’ He tipped his head in Clarissa’s direction.
‘Who was that?’ Juliet asked.
‘The famous Peregrine Gibbons. He’s running B5b – or is it Bc1? It’s hard to keep track – “counter-subversion”.’ Clarissa laughed. ‘I think you’ve been plucked.’
‘That soun
ds unpleasant.’
‘Like a rose,’ Clarissa assuaged. ‘A lovely innocent rose.’
Juliet didn’t think a rose could be innocent. Or indeed guilty.
‘And here is the hidden magic,’ Perry Gibbons said now, opening a door in the Dolphin Square flat to reveal not enchantment but another, smaller bedroom, containing an array of recording equipment and two men who were currently clambering over each other in the confined space in order to install it. To be more accurate, a man and a boy. The man – Reginald Applethwaite (‘Bit of a mouthful, just call me Reg, love’) – was from the GPO Research Station at Dollis Hill. The boy, Cyril Forbes, was a junior engineer who worked there too. It was Cyril (rhymes with squirrel, Juliet thought) who would be operating the equipment whenever a meeting of the fifth column was held next door.
‘RCA Victor, model MI-12700,’ Reg said proudly, displaying the recording equipment with the enthusiasm of a showman.
‘It’s American kit,’ Cyril added shyly.
‘As used at Trent Park,’ Perry Gibbons added. ‘The interrogation centre,’ he said, when Juliet looked blank. ‘Merton works there sometimes, I think. He recruited you, didn’t he?’
‘Mr Merton? Yes, he did.’ She hadn’t seen Miles Merton since he had interviewed her. (I just needed to ask the right questions.)
Both Reginald and Cyril were eager to show off their technical skills and bombarded her with information about the recording equipment – cutter-head float stabilizer … styrol diaphragm … moving coil element … pressure operated … steel and sapphire recording styli – until Perry laughed in a rather strained way (laughter didn’t seem to come naturally to him) and said, ‘Enough now, gentlemen. We don’t want to overwhelm Miss Armstrong. She is here to be a typist, not an engineer.’
The walls were soundproofed, he explained as he led her next door, Reginald and Cyril on their heels, still chattering cheerfully about instantaneous recording discs and 88A microphones.
It was the mirror-image of the flat they had just left, as if they had gone through the looking-glass. The autumn-leaves carpet, the unremarkable Harlequin wallpaper – which Juliet recognized immediately as the same rose-and-trellis pattern that her mother had chosen for the walls of their living room in Kentish Town. The unexpected sight of it was a kick to her heart.
‘Bugged!’ Cyril said.
‘The microphones are in the walls,’ Reg explained.
‘In the walls?’ Juliet said. ‘Really?’
‘Can’t tell there’s anything in there, can you?’ Reg said, tapping the wall.
‘Gosh, no,’ Juliet said, genuinely impressed.
‘Good, eh, miss?’ Cyril said, grinning at her. He looked incredibly young, as if he still belonged in infant school. Juliet could imagine him in the school playground, dirty knees, wrinkled grey socks falling around his ankles, conker ready to fly.
Reg laughed and said, ‘He’s a little charmer, that one, isn’t he?’
Cyril’s face was engulfed by blushes and he said, ‘Don’t listen to him, miss.’
‘Lock up your daughters, eh, Mr Gibbons?’ Reg said.
‘I don’t have any, I’m afraid,’ Perry Gibbons laughed, again rather stiffly. (Would he lock them up if he did, Juliet wondered?) He smiled at Juliet, as if apologizing for something – his awkwardness, perhaps. He had a lovely smile. He should smile more often, Juliet thought.
‘He’s considered a bit of a renegade within the Service,’ Clarissa told her that evening over drinks at the Four Hundred Club. ‘I’ve been mugging up on Perry Gibbons on your behalf.’ His wealth of talents apparently included very clever card tricks – he was a member of the Magic Circle – and he spoke Swahili (What was the point of that, Juliet wondered? Unless you were a Swahili, of course) and used to play badminton ‘almost’ at a professional level. ‘Also a keen naturalist and he read Classics at Cambridge.’
‘Who didn’t?’ Hartley grunted.
‘Do shut up, Hartley,’ Clarissa said. Hartley – his first name was Rupert but Juliet never once heard him called that – had barged his way into their company. ‘Oh, not Hartley,’ Clarissa had sighed when she caught sight of him bulldozing his way through the crowds towards their table. ‘He’s such a boor.’ He had sat down and promptly ordered two rounds of cocktails for them, to be delivered ten minutes apart. Hartley was a drinker – it was what defined him really. He was remarkably unattractive, with brushy dark red hair and freckles splotching his face and hands (and presumably the rest of him, although that didn’t really bear thinking about), giving the illusion that somewhere in the ancestral line a giraffe had been introduced.
‘He likes to play the buffoon,’ Clarissa had said, ‘but he’s acute really. He has an entrée into society, of course – his father’s in the Cabinet.’ Oh, that Hartley, Juliet thought. He had come to MI5 via Eton, Cambridge and the BBC – a well-trodden path.
‘Well, chin-chin,’ Hartley said, downing his drink in one. ‘Gibbons is a queer fish. Everyone goes on about him being a polymath, but you can sometimes know too much. It makes him very dry. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find a hair shirt beneath all that tweed.’
‘Well, good luck with him, anyway,’ Clarissa said to Juliet. ‘The girls in the Scrubs think he has SA.’
‘SA?’
‘Sex appeal!’ Hartley snorted. (He had been denied it at birth by some malign spell.)
Sex was a subject that was still largely a mystery to Juliet. Her éducation sexuelle (it was easier to think of it as something French) was woefully riddled with lacunae. They had drawn diagrams to show the domestic plumbing system at school in Housecraft. It was a pointless subject – how to lay a tea tray, what to feed an invalid, what to look for when buying meat (beef should be ‘marbled with fat’). How much more useful if they had taught you about sex.
And her mother’s romantic novels were no help either, containing as they did an endless parade of sheikhs and oil barons in whose arms women routinely swooned. These same women also had a tendency to melt at crucial moments, but that only made Juliet think of the witch in The Wizard of Oz, and that could hardly be what was intended.
‘And Gibbons has got no small talk whatsoever,’ Hartley said. ‘It makes people suspicious of him. The Service runs on small talk. No wonder he’s isolated himself in Dolphin Square.’
‘Is your agent going to live here then?’ Juliet asked, absently tracing the rose-and-trellis with her finger.
‘Godfrey? Good Lord, no,’ Perry said. ‘Godfrey lives in Finchley. Up until now, our “spies” have had ad hoc meetings – pubs, restaurants and so on. They believe that this flat has been secretly paid for by the German government, specifically to serve as a meeting place for them and their “Gestapo agent”. A place of safety.’
There was a desk and a telephone and four comfortable chairs arranged around a coffee table in front of the fireplace. Ashtrays were plentiful. There was a portrait of the King on the wall.
‘Will the informants not think that odd?’ Juliet asked.
‘There is a certain irony, is there not? But they will believe it’s all part of the disguise.’
He checked his watch and said, ‘Godfrey will be here in a minute, he’s coming to inspect the set-up. The whole operation hinges on him, you know.’
They returned to ‘their’ flat next door and Perry said, ‘Why don’t you make us all a cup of tea, Miss Armstrong?’ Juliet sighed. At least in the Scrubs she had been no one’s skivvy.
There was a modest knock at the door and Perry Gibbons said, ‘Ah, there he is – right on time. You can set your watch by Godfrey.’
Juliet was expecting someone strapping, a kind of Bulldog Drummond, so she was rather disappointed that in the flesh he cut an unassuming, Pooterish figure. With his bashed trilby and old trench coat, Godfrey Toby had a slightly used air about him. He was carrying a cane – walnut, topped with a silver knob – an accoutrement that in the hand of another man might have looked rather affected, but he made it seem quite n
atural. It gave him a somewhat jaunty, almost Chaplinesque air – which was perhaps not his character. (‘But you would think he’d be better off with an umbrella,’ the ever-practical Cyril said to her later. ‘He doesn’t need a stick, there’s nothing wrong with his legs, is there? And a cane’s not much good if it rains, is it, miss?’)
Godfrey was introduced to Reg and Cyril, and Juliet last of all, as she was struggling in the kitchen with the tea tray (milk jug to the top right, sugar bowl to the bottom left, according to those Housecraft lessons).
The set-up was gone through again and this time Cyril was told to go next door so that Reg could demonstrate the recording process. Cyril – not as bashful as he looked, apparently – launched into a rendition of the ‘Beer Barrel Polka’ with some gusto and at some length, until Juliet was dispatched to tell him to stop.
‘We could send him in instead of tanks,’ Reg said. ‘That’d put the wind up Hitler.’
Juliet’s part in the proceedings was then explored. Godfrey Toby listened in on the headphones as the recording of Cyril singing was played back (‘The gang’s all here!’ he concluded in a rousing fortissimo). ‘And then Miss Armstrong types what she hears,’ Peregrine Gibbons said – Juliet obligingly hit a few keys on the Imperial to demonstrate – ‘and thus we have a transcription of everything that is said next door.’
‘Yes, yes, I see,’ Godfrey said. He stood beside Juliet and read the words she’d typed. ‘“The gang’s all here”,’ he said. ‘Very apt, I’m sure.’
‘And now we simply have to wait for our guests,’ Peregrine Gibbons said. ‘And then the real work will begin.’
Perry, Godfrey, Cyril, Juliet. The gang’s all here, she thought.
‘So you’re working with old Toby Jug, are you?’ Hartley said. They had encountered him again in the Café de Paris. He was proving relentlessly unavoidable.
‘Who?’ Clarissa asked.
‘Godfrey Toby,’ Juliet said. ‘Do you know him?’ Clarissa seemed to know everyone.