Tightrope

by Simon Mawer

  Clément

  One day in January Ned rang her at work to say he had a surprise for her and could she come round to his flat? He had something to show her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’d spoil the surprise, wouldn’t it? You’ll have to come round.’

  She sighed. ‘It’ll only be something stupid.’ But still she went. His flat was only a few minutes’ walk away and sometime after six o’clock she climbed the familiar stairs, not expecting much of a surprise. Some idiocy. When he opened the door he seemed almost bursting with excitement, like a child at Christmas. ‘Come on in, Squirrel. You’ll never guess. Through in the sitting room. Go and have a look.’

  ‘What on earth is this all about?’

  ‘Just have a look.’

  She opened the door cautiously. There was nothing exceptional about the room – the usual disorder of papers and cushions, the broken-backed sofa where she had slept when she had first started working, the table still half laid with whatever had been eaten at lunch – but what was not usual was the man getting up from the solitary armchair. It wasn’t ‘something’ at all. It wasn’t the inanimate object she had been expecting. It was Clément.

  At the mere sight of him she found herself shaking, with fear or with happiness, she wasn’t sure which. He had aged. Three years and he had aged. There was a hint of grey at his temples, lines on his forehead that she did not remember, a tiredness in the eyes. His hairline was receding. But on the other hand, what the hell did she look like? A haggard old crone, probably, her face scoured by incarceration, her body aged before its time. That was what she saw in the mirror; was that what he saw as she came in? There was a moment when she might have lost control altogether and burst into tears, but she managed to avoid that and instead just stood in front of him, shivering like a dog in the rain.

  ‘Did you get my letter?’ she asked. She wanted him to take her in his arms. She wanted all the comfort he could never bring her. But instead she stood there and let him hold her by the shoulders and plant a kiss on each cheek, as though she was a soldier being decorated with that bloody medal by some French general. And then he pulled her towards him and held her against his chest.

  ‘Ned has told me,’ he said.

  His jacket was something smooth and expensive with a faint stripe within the dark blue. She spoke into the fabric. ‘About what?’

  ‘About what happened to you. I … never realised.’

  ‘My letter, didn’t you get my letter?’

  She felt him shake his head. ‘I never received any letter. Where did you send it?’

  ‘Somewhere in Canada. The University of Montreal.’

  ‘I’ve been in the States for the last six months. New York. So I guess it never caught up with me.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now, does it?’

  Ned was hovering beside them, anxious to see her reaction to his little surprise. He understood the collisions of subatomic particles but he did not comprehend the collision like this of persons, the damage it could do, the forces it could unleash. Slowly, carefully, Clément let her go, sat her down on the sofa, sat down beside her, held her hands as though otherwise she might slip away and be lost. She clung to the banal as the only way to keep afloat: ‘When did you get here?’

  ‘We docked yesterday, and I came up on the boat train this morning.’

  ‘Was it on time?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  She managed to laugh. ‘Probably not, but I don’t know what else to ask. How long are you going to be here? Why are you here? What are you doing?’

  He smiled. She was a child again, and he her childhood idol. But she noticed things: like the elements he toyed with, he had been transmuted into another species, harder, more decisive, something from the New World; and his command of English had grown fluent, burnished to a transatlantic sheen. He lifted her hands and kissed them. ‘Now what are you doing this evening?’

  ‘Me? This evening? Nothing. I finish work, go home, have a bath if I’ve got a shilling for the meter. And then make myself some supper before going to bed. That’s life over here. We’re broke, Clément. The whole country’s broke. I listen to the radio a bit, or read, and then …’

  He stopped her with a finger to her lips. ‘Tonight we’re going to dinner at the Savoy. Isn’t that the best place? That’s where we’re going, all three of us.’

  ‘I can’t afford the Savoy.’

  ‘But I can.’

  She had to change. She had to go back to the bedsit off Charlotte Street to have a bath and change. She found herself in a little flurry of panic, in case he might escape and not be seen again for years. It’d only take her twenty minutes to walk, she assured him. She did it virtually every day, there and back. Twenty minutes.

  Again, the touch of his finger to her lips. They’d take a cab. He’d come with her. This time he wasn’t going to let her go.

  Not let her go. What did that mean?

  In the cab they talked. There was so much to talk about it seemed an impossible task. Where he’d been, where she’d been, how their separate lives had got them to this particular place and time, in the back of a taxi driving up Charlotte Street towards the dreary little terrace house she shared unequally with Enid Miller. But not the war. Not what had happened to her then. She didn’t want to talk about that. She had to keep hold of those memories, hold them tight and never let them go because once out in the open they would be transformed by words, a string of words, into something that would never match the reality. So she asked about him about Canada and the United States, places that seemed impossibly distant, impossibly wealthy, a world away from this Europe of ruin and deprivation. And then there was his marriage. She suddenly remembered his wife’s name. Augustine. And the baby. Must be a toddler by now. More questions than answers. She felt that the journey should be prolonged, that they should drive round and round the city talking like this, trying to sort out all those things she had thought about, brooded over, longed for, loved and loathed. But all too soon they were turning in to Chitty Street, which she called Shitty Street because that’s what it was, a short road to nowhere lined with old terrace houses which no one seemed to care for except Miss Miller. He’d not be able to come in, she explained, because there was that little house rule – no male visitors after six o’clock. Miss Miller had to keep up standards. ‘She thinks the country’s gone to the dogs.’

  Clément thought that funny. ‘What’s special about six o’clock? What’s to stop you having sex at three in the afternoon?’

  She laughed, imagining it. Three in the afternoon.

  But in the event Miss Miller was enchanted by the visitor. She deployed her French with simpering fluency. Doctor Pelletier, was it? Was that a medical doctor? Oh, a doctor of physics! Imagine! The idea seemed to send a shiver of delight through her. She was truly enchanted to make his acquaintance. Vraiment enchantée.

  ‘Dr Pelletier is an old friend of my family, from before the war,’ Marian explained.

  ‘Indeed? Well, I’m sure that we can relax our rules this one time, can’t we? If you show him into the sitting room, Marian …’

  Thus Clément was established in an over-stuffed armchair beside the gas fire – ‘Have you put a shilling in the meter, Marian?’ – and given a sweet sherry and a copy of the Manchester Guardian while Marian went upstairs to her room to change. Her heart was racing. It seemed a ridiculous cliché but it was true – it seemed to be going at about a hundred and twenty beats a minute. Clément was there in the sitting room, displaying an Olympian calm, while she was up here feeling like a child again, reduced from her painfully acquired maturity to the condition of a puerile adolescent, complete with scurrying pulse and sweaty forehead. In the bathroom Miss Miller’s carefully typed notice warned her: IN VIEW OF NATIONAL AUSTERITY MEASURES, PLEASE DO NOT DRAW BATHS MORE THAN FOUR INCHES IN DEPTH. But she drew one of at least six inches and lay in the warm water and tried to gather her thoughts. Once she had possessed a measured mind, o
ne that could rationalise even at moments of stress; now her thoughts seemed in chaos once again, the random panic of a young girl. Downstairs was Clément, whom she had adored; Clément who was married with a child; Clément who had made love to her, once, in his own bed, in his apartment in Paris; Clément who had swept out of her life the next moonlit night on a field in the Cher Valley, leaving her bereft and alone in the cold. And now here he was, downstairs. Still married, so he said. Prepared to return to Paris in a few days and try to make a go of things. Dying to see his child – whose name she couldn’t remember – once again.

  This time he wasn’t going to let her go. What had he meant by that?

  She heard talking below. Perhaps it was Miss Miller quizzing him to find out more. The woman could have got a job as an interrogator.

  What exactly is your relationship with Marian?

  Exactly how long have you known her?

  Did you have a sentimental relationship with her? Have you, perhaps, been intimate?

  When the front door opened and closed Marian panicked. He’d left. He’d been forced to confess about their sleeping together – ‘but those were exceptional times, in Paris during the war, and anyway it was only once’ – and Miller had thrown him out. But then there were footsteps on the stairs – too heavy for Miss Miller – and a gentle tap on the door and his voice saying, ‘Squirrel?’

  Squirrel. The nickname that, outside of her family, he alone used. ‘Yes?’

  ‘She’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Yes, gone. Come out.’

  ‘I’m in the bath.’

  ‘Then finish and come out.’

  I confess I’ve made this up. I know a great deal but I can’t know everything. So, like me, you’ll have to imagine her climbing out of the bath, her skin glistening like pearl, suds sliding off her pallid limbs and her loose breasts, the little forelock of hair between her legs tugged downwards by a rivulet of water. Imagine her haste as she dries herself. What, she wonders, is going to happen? She wraps the towel around herself with scant decency and opens the door. There’s no one on the landing, but the door to her bedroom is ajar. ‘Clément?’

  When she pushes the door fully open, there he is, sitting in her single narrow armchair, waiting for her. ‘What on earth are you doing? She’ll go mad if she comes back and finds you here. I’ll probably be thrown out on the street.’

  He grinned. ‘Penge.’

  ‘What do you mean, Penge?’

  ‘I don’t mean anything. It’s a place. Where in God’s name is Penge?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Well, that’s where she’s gone. To see her sister. Apparently her sister has fibroids—’

  ‘Fibroids?’

  ‘Whatever they may be. I insisted I wasn’t a medical doctor but that didn’t seem to stop her explaining in lurid detail. Fibroids give terrible trouble with bleeding and pain, she informed me. She speaks surprisingly good French, by the way. Anyway, this sister lives in Penge and I am reliably informed that Penge involves a train journey from London Bridge – are there trains at London Bridge? – and Miss Miller will not be back until late.’ He held out his hands as though to demonstrate. ‘So here I am, all because of fibroids in Penge.’

  She laughed. Here he was. Clément, stepping out of her past, out of the nightmare of her final day of freedom in France in the autumn of 1943, out of the insane world of deceit and deception that had been Paris during the occupation. Clément, magically appearing in this strange new world of peace where whole cities could be obliterated in a flash. She stood for a moment, on the brink, watching him. Then she stepped forward and let her towel fall to the floor and said, ‘I want you to fuck me.’

  Actually, she said it in French. It was easier in French, a more or less innocent verb having long ago become indecent: ‘Je veux que tu me baise’ – ‘I want you to kiss me’ – becoming, with use, ‘I want you to fuck me.’

  ‘Je veux que tu me baise,’ she said, and then she began to weep. Clément got up from his chair and went to put his arms around her. Perhaps he understood something of the desolation she felt. He was, after all, a sensitive man as well as an intelligent one. The two don’t always go together but in his case they did. He understood that the woman he had known since her childhood was, in some indefinable way, damaged, and although he couldn’t know exactly where that damage lay, he guessed that somewhere in the gelatinous convolutions of her brain a small nexus of connections – synapses, maybe – had been broken. He was used to the complex machinations of mathematics – one of his achievements had been in the calculation of neutron emission by plutonium isotopes, work that led directly to the abandoning of the Thin Man design of atom bomb in favour of what became Fat Man which obliterated most of Nagasaki – but he would have been the first to admit his helplessness when confronted by the far more complex intricacies of the human brain. Yet any putative damage lay beside the fact that he had known this woman since she was fifteen, when she had been passionately in love with him in the way that only a fifteen-year-old can be and he himself had been more than a little in love with her; and beside the fact that their love had been consummated once, in his Paris apartment, on the night before she – this girl become woman – had spirited him out of occupied France; and beside the fact that she was naked in his arms, and taking hold of his hand and putting it between her legs and rubbing herself against it while begging him through her tears to do what she wanted. Baise-moi, baise-moi, she begged him.

  At the Savoy Grill waiters cruised round them while they talked of the future, little of which, she knew, would happen: how Clément would return to France where his wife and child were waiting for him, and how all of them might meet up again in Annecy at the Pelletier family home. They would love Augustine, of course they would, as much as they had loved Clément’s sister Madeleine. They would make her one of theirs, the little quartet become a quintet, playing a childlike music with adult overtones. But that took them back to the days before the war and that was much easier, for the past had happened and so could not be gainsaid – the sailing on the lake had happened, the skiing at Megève, the playing silly games – pig-in-the-middle and Kriegspiel, that blind chess where she had adjudicated between Ned and Clément as each tried to work out the other’s moves – all these things had happened. And so, for a couple of hours, it was as though nothing had changed, as though six years of wartime were hidden away in a chance fold of the fabric of time and Annecy in 1936 or 1938 joined seamlessly to London in the early days of 1946, with a cold rain outside and rationing still in force.

  After the meal they went back to Ned’s flat. Clément produced a bottle from his briefcase and announced, ‘Bourbon,’ as he poured them tumblers full. ‘Terrible, flowery stuff but easy to drink. Typically American. Let’s drink to something. World peace is too grand. Let’s drink to us three.’

  She smiled at the idea – the three of us! – and sipped whiskey and watched the two men talking and smoking. Ned was telling them about his new work. He would start shortly at some research centre that was opening near Oxford. He’d be on the government payroll, a civil servant with a government salary which was a change from the uncertainties of university research. Chadwick had recommended him and Cockcroft was the director so the job was a foregone conclusion really. He’d be working under Klaus Fuchs in the theoretical physics department.

  Clément knew them all, of course. Cockcroft, Fuchs, Chadwick. It was incestuous, this world of atomic physics. He threw names around quite casually, like someone seeding fertile ground – Bohr, Lawrence, Fermi, people he had met in the States. They all seemed to be his friends. Soon he might go back to Canada. He saw himself as a channel of communication between the French programme, if there was to be a French programme, and the British and Canadian work in Montreal; perhaps even with the Americans, although that seemed unlikely. ‘The Americans betrayed us,’ he asserted. ‘Fundamentally, they betrayed us.’

  It seemed something of an ou
trage, that idea. They were our allies, weren’t they?

  ‘They took what we knew of the bomb and then kept us out of the development.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘The British and the French, especially we French. Oh, yes, Cockcroft and Peierls and Fuchs were there at Los Alamos, but only on sufferance. It should have been made by the Allies together but instead it’s an American weapon, for their exclusive use.’

  And so, inevitably, they were talking about the Bomb itself. The thing was always there really, skulking in the background of any conversation in those days, just as Hell had once skulked in the background of every conversation in the Middle Ages, or in her convent school. The vital thing, Clément said, was to think about it as something elemental, a force of nature like an earthquake rather than as a weapon. ‘Weapons are designed to be used. The bomb must never be used.’

  ‘But it already has been!’ she cried. Blackened logs came before her eyes, figures carved in charred wood. They had shape but no form, arms but no fingers, teeth but no eyes. ‘Two cities destroyed. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands dead. People are still dying from radiation.’

  Clément nodded, as though she had just learned the lesson he intended. It was like before the war, when sometimes he was so smug and self-confident about what he knew that she could have hit him. ‘That’s exactly the point, Squirrel. Believe me, until Japan nobody really understood. When it was tested in the desert it had no context – the desert remained desert, however carefully they measured the blast.’

  ‘Except the sand turned to glass,’ said Ned.

  Marian was stupefied. ‘You mean it had to be used on people before they could understand what it could do?’

  Clément lit another cigarette. His fingers were stained with nicotine, like Vera’s. He blew smoke into the air. ‘More or less. Working on something like that you get detached from reality, consumed by the problem. And in wartime you think of weapons, not victims. But now everyone understands – Oppenheimer more than anyone: this thing is so vast that nothing less than world government can contain it.’