Kate Atkinson - Transcription

In 1940, eighteen-year-old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past for ever.

Ten years later, now a producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat. A bill of reckoning is due, and she finally begins to realize that there is no action without consequence.

Transcription is a work of rare depth and texture, a bravura modern novel of extraordinary power, wit and empathy. It is a triumphant work of fiction from one of this countrys most exceptional writers.

For Marianne Velmans

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

Winston Churchill

This Temple of the Arts and Muses is dedicated to Almighty God by the first Governors of Broadcasting in the year 1931, Sir John Reith being Director General. It is their prayer that good seed sown may bring forth a good harvest, that all things hostile to peace or purity may be banished from this house, and that the people, inclining their ear to whatsoever things are beautiful and honest and of good report, may tread the path of wisdom and uprightness.

Translation of Latin inscription in the foyer of British Broadcasting House

Z Stands for Zero, the hour still abed

When a new England rises and the old one is dead.

From the Right Clubs War Alphabet

MISS ARMSTRONG? MISS Armstrong, can you hear me?

She could, although she didnt seem able to respond. She was badly damaged. Broken. She had been hit by a car. It might have been her own fault, she had been distracted she had lived for so long abroad that she had probably looked the wrong way when she was crossing Wigmore Street in the midsummer twilight. Between the darkness and the daylight.

Miss Armstrong?

A policeman? Or a paramedic. Someone official, someone who must have looked in her bag and found something with her name on it. She had been at a concert Shostakovich. The string quartets, all fifteen parsed out in servings of three a day at the Wigmore Hall. It was Wednesday the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth. She supposed she would miss the rest of them now.

Miss Armstrong?

In the June of 1942 she had been in the Royal Albert Hall for the concert premiere of the Seventh Symphony, the Leningrad. A man she knew had finessed a ticket for her. The hall had been packed to the rafters and the atmosphere had been electrifying, magnificent it had felt as though they were at one with the occupants of the siege. And with Shostakovich, too. A collective swelling of the heart. So long ago. So meaningless now.

The Russians had been their enemies and then they were their allies, and then they were enemies again. The Germans the same the great enemy, the worst of all of them, and now they were our friends, one of the mainstays of Europe. It was all such a waste of breath. War and peace. Peace and war. It would go on for ever without end.

Miss Armstrong, Im just going to put this neck collar on you.

She found herself thinking about her son. Matteo. He was twenty-six years old, the result of a brief liaison with an Italian musician she had lived in Italy for many years. Juliets love for Matteo had been one of the overwhelming wonders of her life. She was worried for him he was living in Milan with a girl who made him unhappy and she was fretting over this when the car hit her.

Lying on the pavement of Wigmore Street with concerned bystanders all around, she knew there was no way out from this. She was just sixty years old, although it had probably been a long enough life. Yet suddenly it all seemed like an illusion, a dream that had happened to someone else. What an odd thing existence was.

There was to be a royal wedding. Even now, as she lay on this London pavement with these kind strangers around her, a sacrificial virgin was being prepared somewhere up the road, to satisfy the need for pomp and circumstance. Union Jacks draped everywhere. There was no mistaking that she was home. At last.

This England, she murmured.

JULIET CAME UP from the Underground and made her way along Great Portland Street. Checking her watch, she saw that she was surprisingly late for work. She had overslept, a result of a late evening in the Belle Meunire in Charlotte Street with a man who had proved less and less interesting as the night had worn on. Inertia or ennui, perhaps had kept her at the table, although the house specialities of Viande de boeuf Diane and Crpes Suzette had helped.

Her somewhat lacklustre dinner companion was an architect who said he was rebuilding post-war London. All on your own? she had asked, rather unkindly. She allowed him a brief kiss as he handed her into a taxi at the end of the night. From politeness rather than desire. He had paid for the dinner, after all, and she had been unnecessarily mean to him although he hadnt seemed to notice. The whole evening had left her feeling rather sour. I am a disappointment to myself, she thought as Broadcasting House hove into view.

Juliet was a producer in Schools, and as she approached Portland Place she found her spirits drooping at the prospect of the tedious day ahead a departmental meeting with Prendergast, followed by a recording of Past Lives, a series she was looking after for Joan Timpson, who was having an operation. (Just a small one, dear.)

Schools had recently had to move from the basement of Film House in Wardour Street and Juliet missed the dilapidated raffishness of Soho. The BBC didnt have room for them in Broadcasting House so they had been parked across the road in No. 1 and gazed, not without envy, at their mother-ship, the great, many-decked ocean liner of Broadcasting House, scrubbed clean now of its wartime camouflage and thrusting its prow into a new decade and an unknown future.

Unlike the non-stop to-and-fro across the road, the Schools building was quiet when Juliet entered. The carafe of red wine that she had shared with the architect had left her with a very dull head and it was a relief not to have to partake of the usual exchange of morning greetings. The girl on reception looked rather pointedly at the clock when she saw Juliet coming through the door. The girl was having an affair with a producer in the World Service and seemed to think it gave her licence to be brazen. The girls on Schools reception came and went with astonishing rapidity. Juliet liked to imagine they were being eaten by something monstrous a Minotaur, perhaps, in the mazy bowels of the building although actually they were simply transferring to more glamorous departments across the road in Broadcasting House.

The Circle line was running late, Juliet said, although she hardly felt she needed to give the girl an explanation, true or otherwise.

Again?

Yes, its a very poor service on that route.

Apparently so. (The cheek of the girl!) Mr Prendergasts meeting is on the first floor, the girl said. I expect its already begun.

I expect it has.

A day in the working life, Prendergast said earnestly to the rump assembled around the table. Several people, Juliet noticed, had absented themselves. Prendergasts meetings required a certain kind of stamina.