“There was always a man with a dog.” Atkinson is clearly having fun. Men in astrakhan-collared coats leave folded newspapers on park benches, strangers whisper in front of paintings in the National Gallery, London cabbies are in on the act. Not to mention the spies themselves, who come straight from central casting: chain-smoking debutante Clarissa (“Pa’s a duke”) hard-drinking femme fatale Giselle fake Gestapo agent Godfrey with his trilby and top dog Oliver, who has a rakish smile and good looks. Invisible ink, secret camerasand miniature Mausers: all the toys in the spook kit are here (still shiny and new at this point in history). And that’s not all she misses.īodies in the coal hole and strangling by Hermès scarf – as Juliet reflects, this is espionage as “a Girls’ Own adventure”, “a bit of a lark”. Despite Juliet’s boast that she has “learnt to read between the lines”, she fails to see that her boss Perry, the object of her romantic fantasies, prefers to spend his time in the “Pink Sink” or the “Ritz below the Ritz”. This is a novel about identity in which no one and nothing is exactly as they seem – a spy novel, in short. The fog is not there just to create mood (“that’s all I need, Juliet thought – atmosphere”) it symbolises the “fog of obfuscation” in which they are all operating. Then it is back to 1940 (this wouldn’t be a Kate Atkinson novel if it didn’t play fast and loose with time), and we discover that Juliet worked for MI5 (after “that well-trodden path” via Oxbridge and the BBC), recording meetings of British fascists and Nazi sympathisers – the transcriptions of the title. Juliet, we learn, was damaged long before the car incident, first by the death of her mother – “the only person who loved her” – and then by “the wounds of war”. “Yet suddenly it all seemed like an illusion, a dream that had happened to somebody else.”Ī couple of pages later we are in 1950: Juliet is on the brink of “turning into that dreaded creature, a spinster”, working in the schools department of the BBC, producing radio shows called Past Lives and Looking at Things, “bringing Everyman to life through the ages”.

“It had probably been a long enough life,” she reflects as she lies on the London pavement. It is 1981, the year of a royal wedding, andJuliet is 60. She has been hit by a car while crossing the road after a Shostakovich concert. W hen we first meet Juliet Armstrong she is “badly damaged.

Transcription by Kate Atkinson