‘No, no. Of course not. I didn’t mean to imply . . . ’ He coughs, looking down at his papers and swiftly reordering them. ‘Now, I see you have a Certificate from Cambridge. Natural Sciences, Upper Second in Part I, First Class in Part II.’ He nods, as if this is the first time he has seen her results. ‘Not bad.’
Joan nods. ‘Yes, Professor. Specialising in theoretical physics.’
‘Max,’ he corrects her. ‘We’re going to be working with the Yanks here, so you must call me Max.’ He pauses. ‘I have it on good authority from your tutor at Cambridge that you’ll be interested in our work here.’ He looks at her and lowers the papers onto the desk. ‘Do you know what that work is?’
Joan shakes her head. ‘I wasn’t told anything. I just got a letter . . . ’ She goes to take it from her bag but Max waves his hand to indicate that this is unnecessary.
‘No need, no need,’ he says. ‘We recruit on a recommendation-only basis. You’ll see why.’ He pauses. ‘Have you heard of Tube Alloys?’
Joan frowns. Has she? She shakes her head, trying to hide her disappointment that the science will be materials-based. ‘I could probably take a guess though.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Well, I would assume it was a project aimed at developing non-corrosive metals for oil drills, gas pipes, or something like that. But I don’t really know how it fits in with the war. Armaments? Aerial equipment?’
Max nods. ‘Nearly. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but it’s a good start. Sounds fascinating, doesn’t it?’
Not really, Joan thinks, and there is a brief, awkward moment before she realises that he is joking. ‘I don’t understand. Is that not what it is?’
‘It’s a code name. Nobody is allowed to know what we are doing in Tube Alloys. Even some members of the War Cabinet don’t know.’
Joan feels a small shiver of fear creep along her spine. ‘And what about me? Am I allowed to know?’
‘That depends.’ Max reaches down and opens a drawer in the bottom of his desk. He takes out a brown envelope which he slides to her across the desk. ‘Before we go any further, I need you to sign this.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s an undertaking that binds you, if you sign it, to keep quiet. You won’t be able to tell your family or friends anything about what you’re doing here.’ He looks directly at her. ‘You understand what that means. It means you can’t even tell your boyfriend what you’ve been doing all day.’
Joan returns the look, refusing to flinch. She remembers Leo’s insistence in his letters that she must deny any relationship with him, if asked. It is for her own good, he tells her. She steels herself against the memory of him. ‘I don’t have a boyfriend.’
Max shifts slightly in his chair. ‘Ah, well. It was just a figure of speech . . . ’ He tails off. The morning sun floods the room, catching the edge of the mirror and sending a sliver of rainbow-coloured light along the side of his face and down onto his collar as if he has been dipped in a delicate shimmer of oil. ‘Anyway,’ he continues, ‘the point is that you don’t have to decide immediately. I want you to think about it. Take it away, read it, spend some time mulling it over. I want you to understand all the implications of signing it before you do anything.’
Joan takes the envelope and slits it open. She pulls out the sheaf of papers and looks at them. There is a covering note clipped to a carbon paper copy of the Official Secrets Act.
‘You can’t tell me anything more about it?’
‘I’m afraid I’ve told you all I can.’
Joan nods. Evidently whatever work is done by this sub-division of the laboratory is hugely significant or, at least, is thought to be. She wonders if Leo already knows what it is. No, of course not. How could he possibly know? But still, she worries about herself, about her capacity for discretion. Can she keep her job a secret? What would she tell her parents if they asked what she did?
But then she remembers her earlier visit to the woman’s house, the feel of Sonya’s hand in her own, and how she had kept the trauma of it a secret from Leo, from everybody, just as Sonya told her to, speaking only of her ‘illness’ while she pushed the memory of that day down, down, burying it deep inside her until she could feel it crumpling and weakening like a ball of bright blue silk.
‘Take a day or two,’ Max says, ‘there’s no rush. It can be hard to carry a burden like this around. Believe me. If you don’t think you can do it, it doesn’t matter. We can find another post for you somewhere else.’
She knows why she kept that day a secret. She did it for Leo, so that he would not be disappointed in her, tied to her. And now she imagines Leo’s disappointment if she refuses this job he has arranged for her, and in this moment she knows what she must do. After all, it is what she has always expected of herself: that she is loyal, trustworthy, that she would make sacrifices for her country if called upon to do so. It is just that she had not anticipated that it would ever really be required.
She takes a deep breath. ‘Do you have a pen?’
TUESDAY, 2.27 P.M.
Section 1(1) Official Secrets Act 1911 and 1920:
1(1) If any person for any purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the State:
(a)approaches, inspects, passes over or is in the neighbourhood of, or enters any prohibited place within the meaning of this Act; or
(b)makes any sketch, plan, model, or note which is calculated to be or might be or is intended to be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy; or
(c)obtains, collects, records, or publishes, or communicates to any other person any secret official code word, or pass word, or any sketch, plan, model, article, or note, or other document or information which is calculated to be or might be or is intended to be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy;
he shall be guilty of felony . . .
Mr. Adams holds the file up to the camera so that the document can be recorded, and then readjusts the lens to focus it once more on Joan. The day has brightened into a cold, yellow afternoon, and Joan feels a stirring of hunger. She wishes she had been able to eat the sandwich Nick made for her when they stopped for lunch, but he insisted on spreading avocado across the bread instead of butter. She had asked him not to but he insisted that she’d like it, even though she told him that she’d really much prefer butter. Avocado doesn’t agree with her. It never has, although she doesn’t expect Nick to remember that, but she doesn’t remind him of this fact as she knows it will only prompt another lecture on vitamins and carbohydrates—vits and carbs, he calls them—and she is too tired for that. Why can he not just eat normally, as she does? What’s wrong with piccalilli?
‘May I see it?’ Nick reaches out to take the file from Ms. Hart. He glances at the signature on the bottom of the form, his expression registering a flicker of uncertainty before resetting itself into his usual expression of outrage that any of this is happening at all. He places the file on the coffee table. ‘Well, I don’t see that as particularly significant.’ He takes a sip of water. ‘I’d have thought it was pretty standard practice to require everyone working on anything remotely connected with the war to sign this.’
Joan feels tears rising at the back of her throat. Her arms twitch slightly, betraying her desire to reach out to her son, to tell him that she doesn’t deserve such kindness.
Nick doesn’t see Joan’s gesture but Ms. Hart does, and for a brief second Joan wonders if this is as far as she can go. She has spent a lifetime running away from this moment—never explaining, never excusing—and now she worries she might not have the strength to carry on. She is too old, too tired.
‘And did you intend to adhere to it when you signed it?’
In spite of her exhaustion, there is something in Ms. Hart’s tone of voice that causes Joan to bristle slightly; an ember of fire catching inside her. She glances at Nick and knows that she must keep going. Sh
e must protect her son, as she has always done, even if he might not know it. She raises her eyebrows as if affronted. ‘Of course I did.’
‘But you understand why I ask.’
*
Her title is stated on her security pass: Personal Assistant to the Director of the Metals Research Facility in Cambridge. How dull that sounds. How disappointing to be using her science only in order to spell the elements in the periodic table. And no hat to be worn at a jaunty angle, no uniform with a tight waist and a bright collar to be flaunted around town while practising her American-style chewing-gum walk. But still, at least she is out there doing something at last, making an effort and earning her own money.
Apart from Max, there are ten others in the department. Of these, nine are men, leaving one other woman, Karen, whose domain covers both switchboard and reception, and over which she is demonstrably territorial. At first glance, she has the air of an old-fashioned schoolmarm, neat and buttoned-up with reading glasses perpetually perched on the end of her nose, but this appearance is misleading as she turns out to be an untapped source of information about everyone in the laboratory. She is forty and a widow, with two sons both away in the RAF, and while not exactly unfriendly, she gives the impression of being bored and a little lonely. Gradually, Joan finds that various tasks which were once Karen’s—the morning tea run, stocking the biscuit tin—have been permanently delegated to her, but the upside of this is that Karen shares her nuggets of gossip more freely with Joan than with any of the others, and in this way Joan comes to know more about the people working in the laboratory than she does about most of her friends and relations.
The men are all scientists or technicians. The two most senior scientists on the project are Donald, Max’s official deputy, who is never to be seen without his maroon beret and white laboratory coat, and Arthur, a tall, straight-nosed Oxford don who shared a dormitory with Max when they were schoolboys together at Marlborough. The rest of the team are keen scientific types, mostly foreign, and they are set to work on specifically delineated aspects of the project, as it is deemed sensible to restrict the number of people with access to the overall, high-level plans. ‘Especially,’ she is told in a whisper by Karen, ‘the foreign element.’
The mood at the laboratory is one of urgency. From what Joan can gather, they are making some form of weapon. She does not imagine that it is a large weapon, given the size of the operations warehouse where construction is said to take place. There is not enough space, nor are there enough people, for anything very large to be built. Max gives her just enough information to do the work required of her, but he is not particularly expansive. Most of the time, he works on theoretical research in his office with the door closed, but he will occasionally meet with researchers from Birmingham where the other main laboratory is located. This is all Joan knows. She would not go so far as to say that she is disappointed in her lack of involvement, but she will admit that she had hoped for something a little more exciting.
A security guard checks her bag on the way in and the way out; Henry, an old, whiskery man with whom Joan has a brief chat every morning, and who gropes around apologetically in her bag every afternoon, feeling the cloth of the zipped compartment and checking her lipstick and powder compact and glasses case. What is he looking for? she wonders, as he relaxes, smiles, and nods her on her way. Stolen typewriter tape? Stamps? Envelopes?
After a month of making tea and performing general tasks, Max calls her into his office and announces that her probation period has officially ended, and so it is time they had a serious talk. Joan perches on the edge of the wooden chair opposite his desk, wondering if his stern expression is anything to do with her typing speed—she has never been very fast but, she argues in her head, she is accurate—or her occasional lateness. She braces herself, waiting.
At first she thinks she has not heard him correctly. ‘The Prime Minister is coming here?’ she repeats, her notebook half open on her knee.
Max nods.
‘Here?’
‘Yes.’ Max grins at her, and for a brief moment Joan wonders if there is something else in the smile, a sort of curiosity, and it flashes through her mind that the one person Karen has not told her much about is Max. She must ask her later. She imagines suddenly, oddly, how he might look when he is asleep, and thinks that there is something endearingly boyish about him. She shakes the thought from her mind, hoping it is not evident in her face.
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it a secret or are the others allowed to know?’
‘Nobody outside the laboratory can be told. Everyone here is allowed to know, but only Donald, Arthur and I will be at the meeting. We can’t have everyone coming, although the Prime Minister wants to meet them all, shake their hands, that sort of thing. I’ve put Karen on sentry duty to arrange everything. But only the four of us will be at the meeting, along with the PM and anyone he decides to bring.’
‘Four? I thought you said it was just you, Donald and Arthur?’
Max grins. ‘I want you to be there too.’
‘Me? What can I do? I know less than anyone here.’ Joan is surprised at how excited she feels about the prospect of this official visit, even if the thought of actually speaking to the Prime Minister fills her with a slight dread. She feels—what?—starstruck.
Max smiles. ‘That’s why I thought it would be useful to include you. It’s time you started being more involved. There was a reason why I wanted a science graduate to fill your position. And . . . ’ he looks embarrassed, ‘ . . . we need someone to make the tea and generally smooth things over by looking pretty.’
Joan tries not to blush at this obtuse and unexpected burst of flattery. It is not what she expects from Max, who is normally unwaveringly correct. She attempts a wry smile. ‘All the essentials then, I see.’
‘But I also think it’ll help you to learn more about what we’re doing here. I assume you learnt a thing or two about atoms during your time at Cambridge?’
‘Of course.’
‘Good,’ Max prompts, gesturing with his arm that he wants her to expand on this answer.
And so she does, haltingly at first, describing in scientific terms the internal structure of an atom, the nucleus of protons and neutrons orbited by a whirl of electrons. It surprises her to find that she has missed thinking in this way. She has noted the wooden plaque in the entrance of the laboratories, declaring that it was in this very building in Cambridge, in 1932, that the atom was first split, and so she describes this process too; how it is possible to bombard the nucleus of an atom with neutrons so that the energy in the nucleus is redistributed, causing another particle to be emitted and leaving behind a slightly different substance from the original one.
Max nods. ‘Exactly.’ He presses his fingertips together, which Joan recognises as the gesture of an academic, a theorist. ‘And are there any exceptions to this rule?’
‘Uranium, I think.’
‘And what happens with uranium?’
‘It splits in two, releasing energy. But it releases two or three neutrons, not just one.’ Joan has read about this in an academic paper for her third-year exams, published just before the war but only introduced to the syllabus as she was about to leave.
‘And?’
Joan frowns. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re a physicist. So tell me, what are the implications of this? What could you do with that information?’
‘I don’t remember anything else being mentioned in the paper.’ She frowns. ‘But I suppose, if you had enough uranium atoms in isolation and you split one of them, then splitting just one would release enough neutrons to split more, and then those in turn could be used to bombard other particles.’
Max nods. ‘A self-sustaining chain reaction. And then?’
‘It would produce increasing amounts of energy.’
‘Yes
. Enormous amounts. A new source of power entirely.’ Max pauses, as if waiting for Joan to answer a question he has not yet asked. ‘So what else could it be used for?’
There is a silence as the implications of Max’s question creep up on her. ‘An explosion?’ she ventures.
‘Not just an explosion.’ He pauses. ‘A super-bomb. A war-ending bomb.’
Joan stares at him. ‘Can it be done?’
‘Why not? It’s possible in theory, although there are still unresolved problems, principally regarding uranium supply.’ He pauses. ‘But the crucial thing is that it does seem to be possible, and if it is we can’t let the Germans get there first.’
‘How do you know they’re trying?’
Max smiles. ‘The first uranium discoveries were made four years ago. Do you know how many papers the Germans have published on this subject since then?’
Joan shakes her head slowly.
‘None. Not a single one. Complete radio silence. So I’d say there’s a ninety-nine per cent chance they’re working on this too.’ Max pauses. He picks up a file and hands it to Joan. ‘I’d like you to read over these summaries. I need a basic diagram drawn up for tomorrow, not necessarily to scale but large enough to put up on the wall and get the idea across. There are some sketches in here you can use as a template.’ He grins. ‘How are you at drawing?’
Joan starts with the basics. Initially her drawing takes the shape of a badly proportioned fish. A large fish, perhaps a shark or a tuna. She draws a circle in the middle of the fish’s body and splits it in two with a line, the divided core hiding beneath the place where the fins would be, and then she shades this circle with her pencil. The shading represents the critical mass of uranium, the unstable element, not yet unified. If Joan were given to metaphor, she might describe the uranium particles as elbowing one another, jostling for position on the starting line. But Joan is not given to metaphor. It is a simple, scientific process.
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