Diana's Altar

by Barbara Cleverly

  Joe was hardly listening. He was looking about him at this space, the centre of the layers she surrounded herself with. Downstairs, she played the part of London hostess with her father. In her upstairs sitting room, she entertained her smart friends. With a care not to be caught staring, he took in the very different atmosphere. The fabrics here were not meant to impress, they were her own choice, for her own comfort. He had an impression of white linen, patchwork quilt, deep rugs and jugs of blue hydrangeas. A bookshelf was spilling over with yellow-backed French novels. Yet it was the one or two pictures carefully hung that intrigued him.

  He admired the Degas riverbank scene and the lively gypsy encampment by Augustus John, but it was the tender and relaxed portraits of mothers and children absorbed in domestic activities that he liked. Fat babies were being dried after their bath, a small girl was being read a story by her mother under a willow tree, another was sitting on a lap counting apples. Not at all the kind of picture a sophisticated creature like Dorothy, a woman with the pick of the art of two continents, would choose.

  She answered his thought as she often did. ‘‘I lost my mother when I was about the age of that tubby little girl over there. The woman in the portrait is very like her. I cried for two days when I found it. I don’t know who the sitter is but the painter is Mary Cassatt.’’

  ‘‘I like them. I like them very much,’’ he said quietly. “But then I’m very sentimental.’’

  ‘‘I’d noticed that.’’ She passed him a lace handkerchief. ‘‘Some would say soppy. I’ve never known a soppy man before.’’

  ‘‘Oh, I don’t know,’’ he said, politely dismissive, ‘‘I just react to circumstances . . . I coo over babies, pat puppies, smack villains in the chops. Nothing out of the ordinary.’’

  ‘‘And women? How do you react to women who’re trying to get your attention?’’

  ‘‘If it comes down to it, I reckon a man has the choice between flight and flight. I generally choose the latter.’’ Joe gave a nervous grin.

  ‘‘How very rude! And a blatant lie. This from a man who’s embarked on and promptly disembarked from two serious affairs in the last six months? You’re bidding fair to overtake my record for fickleness!’’ She took hold of his hands and looked up at him, suddenly serious. ‘‘Joe, if I’m careful not to bump your nose, may I kiss you?’’

  Panic took him by the throat and he heard himself gurgling. ‘‘Stitches in the lip . . . decidedly unpleasant experience for a girl . . . Not ungrateful, in fact honoured . . . Later perhaps . . .”

  He hurried from the room, dashed down the stairs and let himself out into the London fog before Barnes could catch up with him.

  He went to the edge of the road and looked up and down for a taxi. Nothing was moving in the streets. Perhaps if he waited, one of Despond’s guests for the evening would roll up in a cab and he could commandeer it to take him back to his apartment in Chelsea. He found he was shaking with emotion and could hardly begin to understand his grotesque reaction. A wonderful girl, whose attention he could never have hoped to attract, had thrown aside convention and her defences and made very clear her feelings for him. What the hell was wrong with him? He was no unworldly innocent to run off in the night like that to the safety of his bachelor flat. Sudden fear had ambushed him. Dorothy had said it herself—“You’re bad at choosing women, Joe.’’ True enough. And he wasn’t ready to compound his mistakes. It was difficult to accept that on this occasion he’d been chosen.

  He tried for a measure of calm and asked himself some searching questions. He stopped that exercise when he realised he’d asked the same question six times. The answer was always the same: he wanted to be with Dorothy, looking into her laughing face and snuffling into her hair. He wanted to be exchanging warm looks with her over the heads of her father’s guests. He wanted to slip his arms around her slim waist.

  He paced to and fro on the pavement, angry and confused. Stitches! True enough but what an idiot! He remembered he was still clutching her handkerchief.

  It was an even bigger idiot who, a moment later, rang the doorbell, whisked the hankie in Barnes’s face and muttered, ‘‘Awfully sorry, I seem to have walked off with this.’’

  Unfazed, Barnes said in his stately manner, ‘‘Perhaps you would like to return it to Miss Despond yourself? I believe you know the way, sir.’’

  At one o’clock, Barnes made his ritual inspection of the upper floors before retiring for the night. The butler was smiling. The evening had gone well. Young Sandilands had not only changed his mind and accepted an invitation to dine, he’d been the life and soul of the party. Sharp enough to hold his own with the master, gracious and amusing with his fellow guests and confident enough to stand no nonsense from Miss Dorothy. He’d do!

  Pacing silently past Miss Dorothy’s room, Barnes paused, checked that the coast was clear and put an ear to the door. Girlish giggles. The assistant commissioner was doing his stuff. Barnes smiled and padded on down the corridor.

  Author’s Note

  Treachery at the Cavendish Laboratory: Russian Spies in the 1930s.

  Authors are often asked: “Where do your ideas come from?”

  I never thought I’d hear myself say, “From page eleven of the Tuscaloosa News, December 24, 1957!”

  But there it was—the headline that intrigued me:

  britain got crocodile, russia got sputnik

  That’s what happens when you enter the names “Peter Kapitza” and “Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge” on Google.

  In the months of research I did for the book, this headline was the first I came across that dared to make an accusation rarely expressed in my country—England—to this day. It suggests that in the foremost physics laboratory in the world in the 1930s, the group of men who first split the atom (Nobel Prize winners of the future and geniuses who make the Big Bang Theory lads look like sixth-formers) were sheltering in their midst a Russian agent. This man, an extraordinarily talented physicist and engineer, would, after thirteen years of working in Cambridge, return to his homeland to present the fruits of his experience to Stalin. He would go on to build Russia’s version of the Cavendish in St. Petersburg, exploiting the knowledge he had acquired in Cambridge.

  The judgment of the Tuscaloosa journalist in 1957 was cynical:

  An eight-foot crocodile with gaping, saw-toothed jaws, carved on the brick wall of a Cambridge University laboratory, will remind Britons for generations to come that “Kapitza was here.”

  Yes, Dr. Peter Kapitza, the Russian scientist who designed Sputnik, very definitely was here. I found traces of him everywhere at Cambridge, where he spent 14 years doing atomic research at British government expense.

  The fruit of that research is the Russian satellite now circling the globe at 18,000 miles per hour.

  The charge would seem to be that the development of the Soviet atomic bomb, Sputnik, the space race all followed thanks largely to Kapitza’s double-dealing. And Cambridge was left with his crocodile. The carving was chiselled into the brickwork of the laboratory avowedly as a joking Kapitza tribute to Sir Ernest Rutherford, the Director of the Cavendish, whom Kapitza nicknamed “The Old Crocodile.” He was ostensibly linking his formidable boss flatteringly with the Russian symbol for the father of the family. A different interpretation is that it carries the connotation of “hypocrisy.”

  Rutherford and the scientific establishment appear to have shown nothing but sympathy for their colleague in his predicament when he wrote to them from Moscow (where he’d gone for his usual summer holiday) claiming that he was being held in Russia against his will. Stalin, he told his Cambridge mentor, was making him build up, practically single-handedly, a new laboratory: “The Institute for Physical Problems.” He had the nerve to complain to Rutherford that the resources available to him in Russia were outdated and inadequate. Could Rutherford help?

  He sent a list of requi
rements: the big generator, duplicates of the hydrogen and helium liquefiers, the wiring, the clocks, two top physicists to act as his assistants . . . Rutherford replied testily that he’d be asking for the paint off the walls next. And yet—the gentlemen at the Cavendish responded to this plea by packing up the equipment Kapitza wanted and posting it off to Russia.

  Why did this man go unchallenged? Was everyone looking the other way deliberately? Where was the British Secret Service in all this?

  This story takes the fictional Joe Sandilands into the turbulent and shady world of spying, defection and atomic secrets between the two world wars.

  In 1933, MI5, the British Secret Service, was a very sketchy, cash-strapped organisation and not to be compared with the present super-efficient, highly technical body. Its headquarters were in the Cromwell Road in London and though it kept an excellent filing system it was something of a gentlemen’s club, running a few agents and keeping tabs largely on Irish terrorists and the increasingly active Russian menace. Hitler’s Nazi Party did not give much cause for concern, being considered somewhat distasteful and, judging by the ease with which their agents in Britain were identified and dislodged or turned, hardly a threat to our society. Anti-spy work was shared, not always smoothly, with the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police. This was staffed by ambitious young men, the cream of the detective force. Linguistically gifted, intelligent and resourceful Branch officers performed any duties involving physical force, such as arrests and interrogation of suspects. The Branch was technically under the direction of an assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard.

  Joe would have found himself with a very hot potato in his lap.

  The activities of the Cambridge Four—Blunt, Burgess, Maclean and Philby—during the Second World War and the Cold War years are well documented and their consequences understood. These student spies were, at the time of the story, already actively communist. Little seems to have been written about the years immediately preceding their activities but it was at this crucial time—the year the lithium atom was split at the Cavendish Laboratory—that Peter Kapitza may well have done much more serious damage to the West. It was a piece not of spying, perhaps, but of deception and manipulation so blatant that, to this day, Britain has difficulty in questioning and evaluating it.

  Our scientists and writers prefer to dwell on the many entertaining stories that came out of the Kapitza years. They were seduced by the young and arrogantly idealistic world created in this academic hothouse and by the gifted Russian at the centre of it. I decided to trail this intriguing man. Amusing, witty, daring to tease and criticise his distinguished employers, Kapitza was loved by all who met him and worked with him. He affected an exaggerated Englishness with his tweeds, flat caps, pipe-smoking and enthusiasm for fast cars and motorbikes. He flattered and fawned and was disarmingly open about his love for Russia and his communist affinities. Hiding himself in plain sight? A man who has no secrets can hardly be suspected of being a secret agent. It’s the ultimate cover.

  At a time when the British working class was being hounded and imprisoned for communist leanings, Kapitza seemed able to talk openly of his sympathies without attracting suspicion. MI5 noted his links with Communist Party members and associations but no steps were taken to bring him to book. He even stated to Rutherford in a letter from Moscow: “. . . First of all, I am and always will be in sympathy with the work of the Soviet Government on the reconstruction of Russia, on the principle of socialism and I am prepared to do scientific work here.”

  He complains of being held a virtual prisoner by Stalin, anxious, lonely and suffering increasingly fragile mental health and yet, for the next decade and beyond, this self-styled victim confronted—even crossed swords with—murderous monsters: with Joseph Stalin and Lavrenti Beria, the sinister head of the Secret Police and Nuclear Weapon Development. Kapitza got his own way and he survived—a feat which could only have been achieved by a man of considerable nerve and incontestable political and scientific clout. This factual evidence does not fit with the plaintive, homesick-for-Cambridge image he projects in his correspondence. He outlived several tyrants, dying in 1984 and—with his sense of humour—probably well aware that he’d had the last laugh.

  At the height of his popularity in Cambridge he formed the Kapitza Club, an intellectually adventurous and entertaining gathering of the world’s most intelligent men. Einstein, Heisenberg, Dirac, Landau, Chadwick, and Skinner were some of the distinguished members.

  The stories about the club abound. The very last meeting was held when he was warmly welcomed back to Cambridge in 1966 after thirty-two years in Russia. Kapitza was staying as a guest in his college and he was invited to sit on High Table for dinner. Discovering that he did not have a gown to put on, a steward dashed off and returned with one that, when examined, proved to have Kapitza’s name stitched into it. The college had kept his old gown through the intervening years, awaiting his return.

  This politically amoral opportunist is still exercising his charm. He elbowed his way into the story I was writing. I was fully intending to tear off the smiling mask and reveal him for the duplicitous scoundrel he might well have been, but, once again, he roars in on his Scott motorbike, smiles, displays his skills and roars off again. Unchallenged by me or anyone—except the hard-nosed journalist of the Tuscaloosa News on Christmas Eve in 1957.

  Readers wishing to find out more about this outstanding scientist and social will-o’-the-wisp could dip into some of the following books.

  Andrew, Christopher. The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5. London: Allen Lane, 2009.

  Badash, Lawerence. Kapitza, Rutherford and the Kremlin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

  Boag, J. W., P. E. Rubinin, and D. Shoenberg, eds. Kapitza in Cambridge and Moscow: Life and Letters of a Russian Physicist. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1990.

  Quinlan, Kevin. The Secret War Between the Wars: MI5 in the 1920s and 1930s. Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2014.

  And concerning the London Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard in Joe’s day:

  Howgrave-Graham, H. M. Light and Shade at Scotland Yard. London: John Murray, 1947.