The Long Room (27 page)
Authors: Francesca Kay
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary, #Literary, #Contemporary Fiction
In the long room it is quiet, on a morning in late winter, on the last day of the year. At their isolated desks the seven listeners keep their shocked thoughts to themselves, incapable so soon of putting words to them. Charlotte’s eyes are very red. Louise has a note in front of her of the many times that Stephen Spencer Donaldson signed the late list without authority and the folders that Muriel is missing. Damian will never know if he did the right thing or if he should have kept his suspicions to himself; Steve will get a minimum of twenty years, they say, and more if he’s unlucky.
Elsewhere in the Institute, Security is checking through its partial records of the times when L/III/SSD was seen in places where he had no excuse to be. On the seventh floor, Rollo Buckingham is reviewing the reports he knows were falsified because the information they contain directly contradicts the first-hand evidence obtained by Marlow McPherson, his colleague and close friend.
Several thousand miles away, in a windowless room in an inconspicuous building in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, an analyst is writing a report on the British Government’s undeclared attitudes to the islands that it calls the Falklands and she calls Las Malvinas. All that she knows of the source of the intelligence that will justify invasion plans early in the spring is that it is secret. And, in the long room, Christophine still
wonders about the parcel she was given when she returned to work on Tuesday, and the square of silk in iridescent blues that the parcel contained. Soft to the touch and beautiful and obviously expensive – what was in his mind? she asks herself. There was so much love behind that gift, and imagination; what in heaven’s name was wrong with that young man?
I am very grateful to Anna Webber, Hannah Griffiths, Victoria Millar and Arabella Currie for their advice, encouragement and warm support.
Quotations are taken from the following sources. In addition there are references in the text to the Bible and to the works of Baudelaire, Byron, Dante, Donne, Herrick, Keats, Marvell, Marlowe, Christina Rossetti, Shakespeare and Shelley.
p.
34
My mother wore a yellow dress, gentle, gently, gentleness
: from Louis MacNeice’s ‘Autobiography’, in
Collected Poems
(Faber, 2007). Courtesy of David Higham Associates.
p.
161
Lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm
: from W. H. Auden’s ‘Lullaby’, in
Collected Poems
, edited by Edward Mendelson (Faber, 2007) © The Estate of W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
p.
245
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go
: from Emily Dickinson’s ‘After great pain a formal feeling comes’. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from
The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition
, ed. Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson.
p.
245
sapphires and garlic in the mud
: from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’, in
Four Quartets
(Faber, 2001) © The Estate of T. S. Eliot; reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd
NOTE
: The calendar for 1981 has been shifted slightly to allow Christmas Day to fall on a Saturday.
Francesca Kay’s first novel,
An Equal Stillness
, won the Orange Award for New Writers and was nominated for the Authors’ Club First Novel Award and for Best First Book in the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Europe and South Asia Region). Her second novel,
The Translation of the Bones
, was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She lives in Oxford.
First published in 2016
by Faber & Faber Limited
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Francesca Kay, 2016
Cover design by Faber
Cover image © Dmitry Syshchikov / Shutterstock
For quotation acknowledgements, please
see here
The right of Francesca Kay to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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ISBN 978–0–571–32253–4