Atdtda22: Career change, 628-632

[Paul Nightingale]

The new section opens with Yashmeen meeting Kit “at the café they’d been in
the other evening”; this takes us back to 618, and “a café where they were
unlikely to be interrupted”. The location introduces stasis. For the earlier
scene, beginning on 616, Kit and Yashmeen were on the move: “They left the
Auditorienhaus and walked through the evening.” That section features mostly
dialogue, with the speaker seldom identified by name; there is little in the
way of scene-setting or contextual description. The beginning of 43.2, then,
a description of Foley Walker’s appearance (619), comes as an interruption;
and the Kit-Yashmeen dialogue continues at the beginning of 43.7.
Straightaway she suggests they walk (628); and the earlier café-scene is
invoked when she brings up “employment with the TWIT” (where 43.1 ended, on
619).

Here, the walk-&-talk is interrupted, so to speak, by the appearance of
Lionel Swome (629); Yashmeen immediately disappears, as she did when Kit saw
Foley Walker. At the end of the section she will be found “waiting at the
edge of town” (632). In the Kolonie, the Berliner said Yashmeen had sent him
(627); here, Lionel can tell Kit what he has been thinking “a couple of
minutes ago, on the way up here” (629). In the event, Kit’s new career as a
(rookie) spy (“well recommended by Sidney Reilly”, 630) ties him up as,
previously, he was secured by Scarsdale Vibe’s money; one recalls Foley
Walker pontificating on duty (“I can tell you about being bought and sold,
and the obligations that come with that”, 620). Other than that, Swome
continues Yashmeen’s earlier explication of Otzoism (631). His broad
overview includes the sweeping generalisation, “materialist or spiritualist,
they’re all bloody bomb-chuckers aren’t they”, this recalls Vance Aychrome’s
dismissal of bombers, including “many Suffragettes”, on 607: on each
occasion we’re offered an outsider’s view claiming to be authoritative.