And so, bit by bit, David learned how the Resistance had people everywhere, in factories, offices, the countryside, organizing protests and poster campaigns, strikes and demonstrations. There were even small areas, mining villages and remote country districts, where they were in charge, where the police dared not venture except in force. Passive resistance was over; the police and army and their buildings were all legitimate targets. They had links with other Resistance groups throughout the continent. And they had spies everywhere, ‘sleepers’ working in institutions all over the country, awaiting the call.
Shortly after, when they met in the club again, Jackson said, ‘Time to introduce you to the Soho flat.’
‘Why Soho?’
‘Soho’s a good place to meet, full of all sorts.’ He smiled. ‘If we bump into someone from the Service in the streets, he’ll think we’re on the same business as he is, and he’s hardly going to talk about it, now is he?’
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.’