David visited the flat for the first time the following week, one evening after work. It felt strange, getting off the tube at Piccadilly Circus and walking into Soho. The address he had been given was in a narrow alley, a door with peeling paint beside an Italian coffee shop. Inside, two Jive Boys stood beside a jukebox, which was belting out some of the horrible new American rock ’n’ roll. The papers said the jukebox craze would kill live music, that they should be banned. David knocked. He heard footsteps descending stairs and the door opened. A dark-haired woman stood there; even in the dim light from within David saw she was attractive. She wore a shapeless smock covered in splashes of paint. She gave him a direct look from green, slightly Oriental eyes, and said, ‘Come up,’ brusquely. She had a faint accent that he couldn’t place.
He followed her up a narrow staircase, smelling of damp and old vegetables, into a studio flat, a big single room with pictures stacked against the wall and on easels, a narrow bed and tiny kitchen at one end. The pictures were oils, well done. Some were urban scenery, narrow streets and baroque churches, others snow-covered landscapes with mountains in the distance. In one, figures were lying on the snow, covered with red splashes; blood, David realized. At once he was reminded of Norway, German planes strafing the column of British soldiers stumbling terrified through the snow.
Geoff and Jackson were sitting on either side of an electric fire. Geoff smiled awkwardly. The woman spoke first. ‘Welcome, Mr Fitzgerald. I am Natalia.’ Her smile was pleasant but somehow closed. In the light she looked a little older than he had thought, in her mid-thirties perhaps, tiny crow’s feet beside those eyes, slightly narrowed and upturned at the corners. She had long, straight brown hair and a wide mouth above a pointed chin.
‘This is where we will meet, our little Imperial group.’ Jackson looked at Natalia with a respect that surprised David. ‘Natalia is to be trusted absolutely,’ he said. ‘When I’m not here, she is in charge. We meet together, and never with anyone else, apart from our India Office man’
‘I understand.’
‘So.’ Jackson put his hands on his knees. ‘Tea, everyone? Natalia, would you mind doing the honours?’
The first thing they discussed, that night at the end of 1950, was how David could gain access to the room in which the confidential department files were kept. David could think of no way to get in there, as the only people with keys were the Registrar, Dabb, and the woman in charge of the secret files room, Miss Bennett, and both had to hand their keys in to the porter whenever they left the building.
‘We don’t need the key,’ Jackson said briskly, ‘just the number on the tag. You know there’s a number stamped on all of them, four digits, so that if a key gets lost they can match the numbering with their records at the Department of Works.’
‘All Civil Service filing cabinets, and the keys, are made by Works Department locksmiths,’ Geoff explained. ‘When the ’48 rules came in forbidding Jews from working in the Civil Service all Jewish employees had to leave. For security reasons.’
‘Yes.’ David remembered lying awake at night beside his sleeping wife as Parliament passed yet another anti-Jew law, fists clenched, eyes wide.
Jackson said, ‘One of the locksmiths was an old Jew who was kicked out then. He’s come over to us, and brought the specifications for all the keys with him. All you need is the number on the key to the secret room and he can make a copy.’ He smiled. ‘These stupid Jew laws actually help us sometimes.’
‘But how do I get it?’ David asked.
Jackson exchanged a look with Geoff. ‘Tell me about Miss Bennett.’
‘She’s one of the 1939–40 intake, when they allowed women into the administrative grades because of the war.’
Jackson nodded. ‘I often think those women who stayed after the Treaty must feel very out of place. Unmarried, of course, or they would’ve had to leave. What’s Miss Bennett like?’
David hesitated. ‘A nice woman. Bored, I think, wasted in that job.’ He thought of Carol, her desk behind the counter with the buff files with red crosses marked ‘Top Secret’, a cigarette usually burning in her ashtray.
‘Attractive?’ Jackson asked him.
David could suddenly see where this might be going, and felt something sink in his chest. ‘Not really.’ Carol was tall and thin, with large brown eyes and dark hair, a long nose and chin. She always dressed well, always with a touch of colour, a brooch or a bright scarf, in tiny defiance of the convention that women in the Service should dress conservatively. But he had never been remotely attracted to her.
‘Interests? Hobbies? Boyfriend? What sort of life does she have outside the office?’
‘I’ve only spoken to her a few times. I think she likes concerts. She’s got a nickname, like a lot of the junior staff.’ He hesitated. ‘They call her the bluestocking.’
‘So, possibly lonely.’ Jackson smiled encouragingly. ‘How about if you became friendly with her, took her out to lunch a couple of times, say. She might be flattered by the attention from a handsome educated fellow like yourself. You might be able to contrive a way of seeing the key.’
‘Are you suggesting I . . .’ He looked round the small group. Natalia was smiling at him a little sadly.
‘Seduce the girl?’ she said. ‘Ideally no. That could lead to gossip and even trouble, given you’re married.’
Jackson looked at him. ‘But you could make friends with her, lead her along a little.’
David was silent. Natalia said, ‘We all must do things we do not like now.’
And so David made friends with Carol, going towards her end of the long counter if he had papers to book out or return, taking the opportunity to chat. It had been easy. Carol wasn’t popular in the dusty, conservative atmosphere of the Registry and was pleased to have someone to talk to. He remarked casually that he had heard she had been to Oxford, like him. She told him she had read English at Somerville, that her real love was music but she had been hopeless at any instrument she tried. He learned how lonely she was, with only a couple of women friends and her elderly, difficult mother, whom she looked after.
They had told him to take his time, but it was Carol who, a month later, diffidently took the initiative. She said that sometimes she went to lunchtime concerts at local churches and wondered if he might like to come to one. He had pretended an interest in music and he could see the hesitant hope in her eyes.
And so they went to a recital. Snatching a quick lunch in a British Corner House afterwards Carol asked, ‘Doesn’t your wife like music?’
‘Sarah doesn’t like going out much just now.’ David hesitated. ‘We lost a little boy, at the start of the year. An accident in the house.’
‘Oh, no.’ She looked genuinely distressed. ‘I’m so sorry.’
David couldn’t answer; he felt suddenly choked. Tentatively, Carol put out a hand to touch David’s. He withdrew it sharply, and she reddened a little. ‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘I understand.’
‘It helps to get away from things at lunchtime, do something different.’
‘Yes. Yes, of course.’
There were more recitals, more quick lunches, after that. She told him of her problems with her mother. And sitting together at the concerts, she would try to make sure their bodies touched. He hated what he might be doing to her. But his commitment to the Resistance was hardening and so, slowly, was he. He learned, in Soho, more of the truth behind the propaganda in the press and on the BBC; the strikes and riots in Scotland and the North of England, the chaos in India, the endless savagery of the German war in Russia. He saw the increasing confidence of the Blackshirts on the streets as the Jews, marked by their yellow badges, shuffled along, eyes on the ground.
It was January before he managed to see the key. Watching her, David had seen that at work Carol kept it in her handbag, always giving it to the porter before they went out. At their last concert David had noticed she seemed a little distracted. She told him over lunch that her mother was being especially difficult, and had accused her daughter of taking money from her purse, which was absurd because it was Carol’s salary that kept them both. She feared the old lady might be going senile.
He worked out how he might do it. The following week he suggested another concert, in Smith Square. Carol agreed enthusiastically. He said he would get the tickets on his way home. On the day of the recital, bringing a file into Registry, he went over to her desk. She was splitting one of the secret files into two, carefully moving documents from one folder to another. As usual, David was careful to avoid glancing at them; she was well trained and whatever Carol felt about him she would have noticed that. ‘Looking forward to the concert?’ he asked.
He saw that sparkle in her eyes. ‘Yes. It should be good.’
‘What seats are we in?’
She gave him a puzzled smile. ‘You’ve got the tickets.’
