by Simon Mawer
‘Who is Oppenheimer?’
They laughed at her ignorance. Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the project in New Mexico, surely she knew that. An exceptional man in a world where genius was almost commonplace.
She drank some more bourbon and looked from one to the other, from the pale, distracted face of her brother to Clément’s world-weary expression. She remembered sitting at the table in his flat in Paris, eating by the light of a candle, surrounded by the funeral pall of the occupied city, arguing. The nature of a super bomb, something beyond the power of human imagination. And the possibilities of just such a German bomb, dreamed up by Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg, created with Czechoslovak uranium and Norwegian heavy water, conjured out of the arcane world of nuclear physics to become a nightmare that might end the war by being dropped on London. It had been a game once, that was the thing, a puzzle played by people like Clément and Ned at the level of the angstrom unit and the electron volt; and it had blossomed to become a weapon as powerful as the sun. She felt helpless anger.
‘But it’s your bloody bomb, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘You talk as though it’s someone else’s problem.’
‘It’s hundreds of people’s bomb. Thousands. Yours as well as mine. You helped, didn’t you?’
‘That’s sophistry. You have to take responsibility. You knew exactly what the damn thing would do. You told me, that time in Paris. You explained exactly. And Ned did as well. You all knew. All you bloody scientists knew.’
‘Does that mean it’s all our fault?’
Anger. Impotence. The wine, the whiskey, perhaps it was those; or perhaps it was because of what had happened earlier in her cramped little bedroom in the house in Shitty Street. She felt him there still, alive inside her when so much was dead; and she wanted him again. A compulsion. ‘It means you must take some of the responsibility.’
‘Or blame?’
‘If you like.’
He shrugged. ‘Then so must you. If you hadn’t got me out of Paris I would have spent the rest of the war there. And there would still have been the bomb. Perhaps even a German one.’
She felt stunned by anger and death and alcohol. In the camp there had been tens of thousands dead. But in those two cities that no one had heard of, tens of thousands died in a flash. And were dying still. Was it her own fault? In the myriad cogs of the world, the chain of cause and effect, was her own part significant?
She thought of a young woman examining a jar incised with beautiful figures, holding the thing in her hands and marvelling at the beauty of it. Then she takes off the lid and peers inside. And all the evils of the world fly out.
Pandora.
‘So what hope is there?’ she asked.
Clément smoked and pondered. He was still quite sober, barely sipping at the whiskey, maintaining that damned control, finding an answer for everything. ‘Things are very dangerous at the moment because they’re unbalanced. Only the Americans have the bomb – maybe we won’t be safe until all the great powers possess the thing.’
‘The Russians—?’
‘Especially the Russians. I heard there was a straw poll at Los Alamos a few weeks before Hiroshima – almost fifty per cent of the scientists thought the information should be opened to the Russians.’
Ned leaned forward. ‘Do you know that during the war Bohr came over to England to speak to Churchill? He’d already got Roosevelt’s support and he wanted to plead the case with Churchill—’
‘What case?’
‘The case for bringing the Russians into the secret. That was last year, when work was still underway. A meeting was arranged with just the two of them. Churchill and Bohr alone—’
‘How do you know this?’
He waved a vague hand. Typical Ned, always gesticulating. ‘I know it, I know it. The meeting was a disaster. Came to nothing. Churchill thought Bohr was just a dangerous, naive fool poking his nose into things that didn’t concern him. He even wanted him arrested. Arrested! Can you imagine arresting Niels Bohr?’ There was a red spot in each of Ned’s cheeks. Anger or alcohol? Maybe both those things, the one feeding the other. ‘Keeping things secret won’t stop the Russians. They’ve got the men to do it by themselves soon enough. But if we’d shared the information with them in the first place, we might have gained their confidence – as it is the Americans have forced them to find out for themselves. And to assume that the Americans have kept it secret because they want the option to use it again.’
‘Use it again?’
Ned poured himself another whiskey ‘It’s what their military men want. Build a dozen more bombs and drop them on the Soviet Union.’
‘But they’re our allies!’
He laughed. ‘That, Squirrel, was yesterday. Now, the Americans are terrified of them and they have the power to do something about it. A few atom bombs on the major Russian cities – Moscow, Leningrad, a couple of others – and the Soviet Union would be back in the Stone Age.’
There was a silence. Was it the silence of complicity? Clément stubbed out his last cigarette. ‘I guess it’s time for bed. I’ve got to be up bright and early tomorrow. I’ll call a cab. I can drop you off on my way, if you like.’
She began to clear the debris away, the ashtrays, the glasses. Ned sat in the only armchair, holding onto his glass and watching. His mind had veered away from the subject in hand. Perhaps it was the drink. There was a sardonic smile on his lips as he watched Marian doing her little tasks. Suddenly he said to Clément, ‘She told me about the two of you, you know that?’
Another bomb, this time small, personal, destructive but not deadly. Marian turned on him. ‘Shut up, Ned.’
But Ned was beyond any sisterly stricture. ‘You’re lovers, aren’t you?’ he said to Clément. ‘Were, are, who knows?’
‘You’ve had too much to drink.’
He held up his glass, eyeing Clément through the amber liquid. ‘I wonder when the first time was?’
She ignored him and walked out of the room with the glasses. Clément followed her into the hallway. ‘Why the hell did you tell him?’
‘It was ages ago. We were talking about things …’
Ned called out from the sitting room: ‘You know what? I’ll bet it was at Annecy.’
‘It was your fault bringing that bottle.’
‘He’s an adult. He can decide for himself how much to drink.’
‘He’s a child and you know it.’
Ned’s voice came to them. ‘You were just a little girl then, weren’t you, Squirrel? What would the parents have said if they’d known? You can’t have been more than fifteen. Is that legal? A fifteen-year-old?’
She busied herself in the kitchen leaving Clément to deal with her brother. She could hear Ned’s voice raised in protest and Clément’s quieter tones. ‘Fuck you!’ Ned shouted. ‘Fuck both of you!’
She’d never heard such language from him, never heard such language at all since she left the WAAF. Not the girls, of course. But the airmen. Effing this and effing that. She couldn’t even bring herself to think of the word despite the fact that she had done it, with Clément, just that evening. Fucked. She found her coat, vaguely aware of Clément persuading Ned to bed, vaguely aware of having drunk too much herself, and inhaled too much smoke, and wanting to be out in the cold, fresh air. ‘Is he all right?’ she asked when Clément appeared.
‘He’ll sleep like a baby.’
They crept out of the flat, closing the door behind them quietly like thieves escaping from the scene of a crime. Clinging together against the cold they walked as far as Cambridge Circus before they managed to find a taxi. Inside the cab he put his arm around her and drew her close. ‘Why don’t you come back to my hotel?’
‘Don’t be silly.’ But she wanted to. The compulsion was there, like a predator lying in wait. ‘Anyway, they wouldn’t let me in.’
‘I can slip the night porter a couple of dollars not to notice. They love dollars.’
‘You’d make me feel like a
tart.’
That amused him. ‘How the hell would you know what a tart feels like?’
‘Every woman knows,’ she said.
He left the next day, taking the boat train to Newhaven to catch the overnight ferry to Dieppe. She went with him to the station to see him off. It was impossible not to recall that song they had played at the holding centre before she went to France: Puisque vous partez en voyage. A couple parting at a railway station. It seemed to be the only record in the place and they’d played it over and over again in the hours before her drop.
Puisque vous partez en voyage
Puisque nous nous quittons ce soir.
She bought a platform ticket and followed Clément through the barrier. Sounds echoed in the vast drum of the roof, the snort of steam, the slamming of doors, the rattle of people. They stood on the platform, talking about Paris, about his wife and child, about his sister Madeleine and his parents: the awkward, uncertain discourse of departure, enhanced by betrayal.
‘You must come over and see us,’ he said.
‘Perhaps.’ She felt impatient to be gone. Her feelings, whatever they had been, had shrunk in the bleak light of day. She tried to recall her emotions at their last parting, in the night time cold of a field by the Cher, with the Lysander roaring in the moonlight and Clément looking down at her from the cockpit. ‘Maybe we’re condemned to always be saying goodbye,’ she said.
He turned her face towards him. ‘Why didn’t you come with me in that bloody aeroplane, Squirrel?’
She shrugged. ‘People keep asking me that.’
‘What people?’
‘People. Just people.’ She glanced round. Was someone watching them from the ticket barrier? She thought she’d seen the same figure earlier on when they arrived at the station, a bland, forgettable shape, immediately turning away. She had a sense for such things, the instinct for survival in a hostile world. ‘What would have happened to me, anyway? You’d have gone off to Canada and I’d have been left behind in England, trying to persuade them to send me back to France.’
‘At least you wouldn’t have been captured. You wouldn’t have been in that damned camp. You’ve not said anything about it.’
‘And I’m not going to.’ Doors were slamming up and down the length of the train. A whistle blew. ‘You’d better go.’
He bent and kissed her, then turned and climbed aboard. For a moment he was visible behind the glass, like a faded photograph preserved from some half-forgotten past. Then the train began to edge forward, slowly but inexorably, like a glacier; then faster like a river, until finally it was streaming out of the station in a torrent, leaving her stranded on the bank.
Alan
Clément Pelletier. It’s easy enough to discover the bare bones of his life. Born in Paris in 1910, he attended the École Normale Supérieure and completed the agrégation in physics and mathematics in 1932. In 1938 he obtained a doctorate in mathematical science from the Faculty of Science of the University of Paris while working under Frédéric Joliot-Curie on the radioactive decay of uranium isotopes and their fission products. In 1940 he married Augustine Sousa and the next year the couple had a daughter. Mother and daughter left Paris in 1941 to take refuge in Annecy while Pelletier himself continued his research at the Collège de France and at Ivry until, in the autumn of 1943, he left France for England in a covert operation involving the British intelligence services. After a brief spell in Cambridge he travelled to Canada where he worked with Lew Kowarski and Bertrand Goldschmidt on the Anglo-Canadian nuclear programme. At the end of the war he spent time at Columbia University where his field of interest remained with uranium and the newly discovered transuranic elements. In 1946 he returned to his native country and recommenced work in Paris with Professor Joliot-Curie …
That’s the kind of thing an encyclopedia says. Or Wikipedia, I suppose. What it doesn’t mention is as significant as what it does. For example, the curious phenomenon of action at a distance, like the electromagnetic force or the force of gravity that physicists talk about – in this particular case his departing for Paris to attempt, among other things, the reconstruction of his marriage, which departure became a kind of gravity in reverse, repelling rather than attracting, flinging people this way and that, Clément back into the bosom of his incipient family, Marian back into the arms of Alan Walcott.
I remember my mother’s shock as she put down the phone, the sudden change in expression from when she was talking to the person on the other end of the line. ‘How wonderful,’ she had been saying into the receiver. ‘How marvellous. Are you happy? Of course you’re happy. My goodness, it’s a bit unexpected, but wonderful news. We’d love to, yes. Yes, we’d love to.’
But her expression changed to bewilderment when she finally laid the receiver to rest. ‘That was Marian,’ she told my father. ‘You know that RAF pilot she was going out with for a while, the one whom she said wouldn’t leave her alone? We met him once, didn’t we? Well, they’re getting married.’
It was, in the manner of those times, a small affair in a registry office in Chelsea. There’s a photo taken on the steps outside – the happy couple in the centre with, on Marian’s side, the thoughtful parents-in-law and on Walcott’s the joyous Mrs Walcott senior (Alan’s father had died of a perforated stomach ulcer in 1944). In the group there is also Marian’s brother Ned and Alan’s sister Morag. Outflanking them all is my father looking as tall and awkward as a wading bird among geese, and my mother laughing and putting her hand to her hair, thereby giving the impression that the wind has just blown her down the King’s Road.
After the ceremony the disparate little party went for an awkward lunch at a restaurant nearby before the newlyweds drove off to Sussex to spend a week of nuptial bliss in – yes, you have guessed aright – Furze Cottage, the use of which, along with the gift of an entirely useless set of silver-plate fruit knives, was my parents’ wedding present to the happy couple.
I tried – I still try – to imagine their stay on the Sussex coast. Parked outside the cottage, the little MG called Gloria; inside the cottage, the fetid reek of sexual discovery. Marian had to learn something new, the mechanics of a lasting sexual relationship, something that depends on seeing your partner all day, in all states, naked and clothed, clean and dirty, asleep and awake, fair and foul. Did she abandon herself to his embrace, lose herself in the heat of his love, find ecstasy in his arms? Subsequent events suggest not, but at the time, immersed in the stream of time and with no idea of the rocks and rapids that lay ahead, who knows? Perhaps, for that week of artificial bliss, she found Alan’s particular attentions satisfying. Or perhaps the memories of Benoît Bérard and Clément Pelletier haunted the nuptial bedroom. Impossible to tell.
By the time of the marriage Alan Walcott had left the Air Force and found a job with a well-known tyre company for which his rudimentary French was apparently an asset. Although blessed with some exalted title – Regional Sales Coordinator, or something – I fear he was little more than a supervisor of travelling salesmen, frequently dispatched to Carlisle or Belfast in pursuit of improved sales, much of his salary being dependent on commission. All of this I gathered from overhearing my parents talk about them. Marian, so they said, was still working with her strange French organisation but surely that would come to an end quickly enough. Surely there would soon be an addition to their incipient family.
I hoped not. Whatever went on in the privacy of their bedroom, the thought of Marian rendered dull and distracted by motherhood, repelled me. I wanted to preserve the image I had of her cartwheeling across the lawn outside our block of flats or letting me cuddle up beside her on the sofa in Furze Cottage. Was she happy? I wondered. Content for the moment, perhaps. Alan was a considerate husband, probably as much in love with her as he had claimed in those letters and calls and occasional meetings when he laid siege to her spinsterhood. Whether she was in love with him is another question. She was fond, that weasel-word that hides so much. She appreciated his attentions
but sometimes found them irksome. She understood his physical needs and sometimes shared them. She felt flattered by his affection and sometimes returned it. But she refused to give up her job when he suggested it, protesting that she could not hang about the flat all day – they had rented a place on the southern borderland of Kensington, near to Alan’s place of work – and pretend to be a housewife. Of course when, if, she fell pregnant – that phrase again – she would hand in her notice and surrender to the world of motherhood, but in the meantime she would damn well continue at the Franco-British Pacific Union, running the library under the auspices of Miss Miller – who quite liked Alan when she met him but did wonder whatever happened to that charming Dr Pelletier – and assisting in the Union’s programme of visiting speakers and lectures.
And then the skeleton of Ravensbrück reached out its bony finger and tapped her on the shoulder. It came in the form of an official letter from the Judge Advocate General’s office: would Marian Sutro, former Ensign of the FANY, former honorary Flight Officer WAAF, be prepared to appear as a witness for the prosecution at the trial of various members of the camp staff of the Ravensbrueck concentration camp, to take place in Hamburg in December of this year?
She thought about it for days before she told Alan, and when she did she knew exactly how he would respond. ‘Why the hell should you put yourself through this?’ he demanded. ‘What’s the point? All you can do is upset yourself when you are settling down to a normal life again.’
‘I have a responsibility to people.’
‘You have a responsibility to yourself! And, for God’s sake, to me. I don’t want you raking over all those memories. You’ve always told me you don’t want to talk about it. And now you’re proposing to do precisely that!’
All the obvious arguments were trotted out. It was the first real conflict of their marriage. But still she went, transported by the Royal Air Force, who flew her to Northern Germany in the cold of winter, into the frozen urban landscape that high explosive and incendiary bomb had sculpted out of the pre-war city of Hamburg – the place where that peculiar human meteorological invention, the firestorm, had first been conjured out of the elements.