by Simon Mawer
‘Marian Sutro,’ he said, bowing over her hand. ‘How good to encounter you again.’
‘How did you know?’ she asked. ‘How did you know which hotel?’
He laughed. ‘Are you being suspicious of me? We journalists keep ourselves informed. So how are you? You look well, much better than when we met in Hamburg. Tell me, do you have news of Tony? Tony Bright? I regret it has not been possible to keep in touch. Our two worlds are so far apart these days.’
‘No, I don’t. I expect he’s happily married and living in Belgium. What was her name? Anne?’
‘Anne-Griet. He never stopped talking about her. Look, I am so glad you did not reject my invitation. Will you have dinner? Is that all right?’
She felt lightened by her strange absolution, intrigued by the possibilities of this meeting. Careless, all of a sudden. ‘Why not?’
He took her to a small bistro nearby where he seemed to be well known. They sat at a table in a far corner and talked a bit about each other, what had happened since their first encounter. He’d moved into journalism at the end of the war. From writing accounts of the fall of Berlin and the liberation of the camps for Krasnaya Zvezda, the Red Army newspaper, it was a natural move to TASS, the Soviet news agency. He smiled wryly. ‘It means I can travel abroad. We are trying to create a workers’ paradise but the decadent West has its attractions. Vienna for three years and now I’ve got Paris.’
‘You’re lucky. I’ve only got grey London.’
It was easy, this chatting. She’d forgotten how easy, how one subject led smoothly to another, from what she was doing in London to politics; from politics to philosophy, from philosophy to art and science. She found herself agreeing with him, and he with her. They wanted the best for mankind, of course they did. And the Russian people were attempting a great social experiment, possibly the greatest such experiment in human history, didn’t she agree?
‘Are you trying to recruit me?’ she asked.
He looked at her with that mock-serious expression that seemed so much part of him. ‘Actually, I’m trying to seduce you. But it seems I am a bit out of practice.’
She allowed him a laugh. The wine was working its clever deceptions. She felt light-headed and happy, the visit to Belleville pushed to the back of her mind, other things pushed to the back of her mind as well, Clément for example, along with the great load of emotional history that they carried between them; and the burden of Alan’s affections that weighed her down so. But not the pure lightness of what happened in Hamburg between her and Tony Bright. Why couldn’t she conjure up any shame? And why did she feel that it all might happen again, with this man who was at this very moment trying to decide whether to have a glass of Sauternes with the dessert. ‘A half bottle between us, how about that?’ he suggested. ‘A Barsac, perhaps. Slightly less sugar.’
The waiter brought a bottle and poured. She raised her glass and looked at Absolon through the golden lens. His head was small and inverted and moving in the opposite direction to the way she moved, which seemed impossibly funny. A real image. Parallax or something. Dangerous laughter flowed between them. After the meal they stood hesitantly on the pavement outside. ‘What do you want to do now?’ he asked. ‘There’s a boîte I know. It’s not far.’
‘Why not?’ she said.
The boîte was little more than a basement cellar that had once been an air raid shelter and was now, by virtue of being painted black, a nightclub. At one end of the tunnel a jazz quartet played, led by a Negro trumpeter whose eyes gleamed like pearls in the shadows. His trumpet threw careless notes and brilliant reflections around the place while the audience listened with rapt attention. One or two got up to dance but that seemed a distraction from the focus of the evening which was the Negro and his wandering, echoic music that talked of pain and anguish and some kind of peace.
‘Bourgeois decadence,’ Absolon said. ‘And think,’ he added, indicating the audience, ‘they’re almost all Communists. It makes writing articles about them very difficult. In Russia good Communists are not meant to behave like this.’
Soft laughter, their heads close together. She felt the breath of his amusement. And at that moment, quite unconsciously and without any exchange of words, agreement was reached. They left the place soon after, drifting on alcohol and a memory of the music that seemed to follow them through the streets. A threnody, she thought, uncertain what the word meant. Occasional couples passed by. She wondered whether they were being followed. She always wondered whether she was being followed; usually she felt she was but knew she wasn’t. Now, she just didn’t care. They walked because it was a fine night and because she enjoyed walking and anyway it wasn’t far, just across the boulevard Raspail towards Les Invalides, and she didn’t care if they were being followed all the way to the narrow town house near the Soviet embassy where Absolon had his flat. She was transparent, as light and translucent as tissue paper, climbing the narrow stairs with Absolon behind her to catch her if she fell.
The next day Clément and Augustine came to see her off at the station. Augustine embraced her warmly. She was so delighted finally to have met up with Marian. ‘Now we know each other, you must come and see us again. You mustn’t hide away in grey and foggy London.’
Augustine’s perfume was floral and bright, Marian’s dark and musky – the scents clashed even as they embraced. ‘I look upon you as a true friend,’ she whispered in Marian’s ear, whispered so that her husband wouldn’t hear, as though the two women shared a secret that he was not party to. ‘And I don’t mind that you fuck him.’
Happy Christmas
That Christmas she persuaded Ned to spend the day with their parents in Oxford. It would be the whole family together for the first time since before the war, with Alan as the only outsider.
It was not a successful time. Ned argued both with their father and with Alan. He always argued. The debates with her father were low key, underpinned by a whole childhood and youth of conflict; those with Alan were more outspoken, culminating in a row about nothing. They’d listened to the King’s Christmas broadcast on the wireless – the hesitant, fluting voice – and it was something Alan said, about the King and patriotism among the British public, that awoke Ned’s scorn. ‘Patriotism? Isn’t patriotism dead?’ You could see the anger in his expression, and his contempt for Alan’s plodding certainties.
‘It got the country through the war, didn’t it? Won it for us, in fact.’
‘That was brutal necessity. Drowning people clinging to a rock and singing patriotic songs to keep their spirits up, while waiting for the Soviet Union to rescue us.’
‘You’re just being offensive. And anyway, it was the Americans who rescued us.’
‘That’s the American story. But it was the Russians who lost over twenty million men and women.’
Alan should have left it there. With no one to stoke the fires the argument would have died. But he circled back to the theme of patriotism – the British had patriotism, the Russians just had fear – and then he delivered what he thought would be a decisive blow. ‘And what about Marian? Didn’t she parachute into France out of patriotism?’
Ned snorted. ‘Is that what she’s told you?’
‘Do you know any better?’
Marian tried to intervene – ‘Why I volunteered is my own business’ – but the two men were well into the argument and beyond caring what she said. ‘She went, dear brother-in-law, because she was little more than a besotted child who thought that she would be able to meet up with the love of her life in Paris. In fact you could say she went to France in order to lose her virginity.’
‘Ned!’
‘Which is precisely what happened.’
She shouldn’t have risen to the bait. She should have walked out of the room and left the two men to their idiotic argument as her parents had already done. But she didn’t. Instead she turned on her brother and used the one weapon she had against him. ‘And when are you going to lose your virginity, Ned?’ she
asked.
He smiled. She hated that smile. It was the expression he had always turned on her when she was young, a look of pure contempt. ‘As a matter of fact, I have, Squirrel. With the very same man as you did. But perhaps he never told you that.’
She stared at him. Once she’d have been surprised; but now she understood that anything was possible, even this. ‘Ned!’
He was appalled. She saw it in his expression, in the moment before he left the room – the horror of what he had just admitted. She followed him into the dining room which was still redolent of the unhappy lunch that had been eaten there. Their mother was putting the final things in order, the last pieces of cutlery from the canteen, the unconsumed candles back in their box. ‘Are you still arguing?’ she asked. ‘Surely not at Christmas time.’
They waited until she had gone before saying anything and then it was Ned who spoke first. ‘I didn’t want to tell you like that,’ he said. He flapped his hands helplessly. ‘It just came out. I’m sorry, Squirrel, I’m sorry. It was … unforgivable.’
‘But is it true?’
He shrugged. ‘More or less. That evening I told you about. Too much to drink. He had anyway. I was stone cold sober. We just … messed around. Embarrassing really.’ And then suddenly he was crying, actual tears running down his face, his features crumpled into something resembling the angry little boy he had been. She went and put her arms around him and he let her comfort him. ‘I want to go home,’ he said quietly. ‘Will you drive me to the station? I want to go home.’
‘We’ll drive you home.’
‘I don’t want to go with that husband of yours, Squirrel. An hour in the car with him? I couldn’t bear it.’
On the way to the station she asked about Trevor. How was he? Where was he? Ned shrugged. ‘He was posted, somewhere in Yorkshire. I don’t really know.’
‘You’re not in contact?’
‘I told you, Squirrel.’ That bitter little smile. Ned’s other mood. ‘We’re like spies. We work in secret and we don’t ask questions if we don’t need to know.’
‘Is it true?’ Alan asked as they drove back to London that evening.
‘Is what true?’
‘About that French fellow and your brother.’
‘I don’t expect so. Ned’s just jealous. He probably made it up.’
‘But is he a queer? Your brother, I mean. Is he really a queer?’
They drove in silence for a while, the question hanging in the air between them. She tried to bring some order to her thoughts, tried to quell her prejudices and reinforce her beliefs. ‘He’s homosexual, Alan, if that’s what you mean. He can’t help it, any more than you can help liking women.’
‘Can’t he see a psychiatrist or something? Can’t something be done these days?’
‘Could you be cured of liking women?’
He laughed humourlessly. ‘Not unless they cut my balls off. Anyway, it’s not only disgusting, it’s illegal. Imagine what might happen if he got caught soliciting in a public lavatory.’
‘I don’t imagine Ned does that kind of thing.’
‘They all do, Marian, they all do. We had an aircraftman on the squadron. Used to go up to London whenever he had leave, and they caught him in Piccadilly Underground station trying to pick up someone in the gents. Unfortunately he chose a policeman. Got two years in detention and a dishonourable discharge.’
She thought of the possibilities, the scandal, the shock to her parents.
‘And what about you?’ he asked after a while.
‘What about me? Do you mean, do I pick people up in public lavatories?’
At least he laughed, but there was little humour in it. ‘I mean, did you really lose your virginity to that French fellow?’
‘Not to Clément, no. Yes, we were lovers if you must know, but I actually lost my virginity to Benoît.’
‘So I’m third in line, am I? Or were there others?’
‘No others before you, no.’ Would he notice the careful use of words? ‘Since my sexual history is a subject for general enquiry, what about yours? Who did you lose your virginity to, Alan?’
He was silent, staring ahead through the windscreen, his hands gripping the steering wheel as though clinging to a life belt. ‘To you,’ he said.
Fuchs
The news broke in February, a cold, damp February, the very depths of winter.
‘Do you know what’s happening?’ Ned demanded. ‘Do you know what the hell’s happening?’ He’d phoned her at work and when she got to him he seemed helpless, almost hysterical, casting around as though a solution might be found somewhere in the chaos of his flat in Bloomsbury.
‘What’s going on? For Christ’s sake, Ned, what’s the matter?’
‘They’ve arrested him.’
‘Arrested? Who?’ She thought perhaps, Trevor. Or some other friend. Maybe Ned himself was under threat.
‘Klaus Fuchs, of course. Who else? Under the Official Secrets Act. Flat-footed policemen blundering their way in and taking him away in handcuffs.’ He grabbed something from the table and flung it down on the sofa. It was nothing, just a journal of some kind. The gesture seemed to sum up his sense of futility. ‘He was at Chalk River, he was at Los Alamos, he’s one of the leading theoreticians …’
‘What’s he’s accused of?’
Ned shrugged. ‘Klaus is an idealist. If they paint him as a monster and a traitor, don’t believe it.’
‘That’s not answering the question, is it? What did he do? Did he pass information to the Russians?’
‘He always believed that we should. Many others agreed, as I’ve told you. Oppenheimer believes it – and look how they’re treating him now. Shunning him, threatening to drag him in front of one of their bloody Senate committees.’ Now Ned’s voice trembled with fury. He understood the illogical behaviour of sub-atomic particles but not the illogical motions of politics and politicians. ‘The Russians were our allies, weren’t they? Our saviours, maybe. And now they are being made our enemies. That fool Russell. You heard him.’
She thought of Véronique, of how she used to extol the virtues of the Russians, of how she insisted that the Red Army would come to their rescue. Which, eventually, it did, but too late for her and tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of others. And Absolon, she thought of Absolon, who carried a belief in Communism within him like a religious faith.
Within a day it was in most of the papers: Klaus Fuchs had appeared at Bow Street Magistrates Court, charged with two acts of communicating secret information to a foreign power.
‘Whatever they say about him,’ Ned told her when they met up again, ‘you must remember that he is an honourable man.’ Honourable sounded strange in his mouth. He was not given to delivering encomia. ‘He was trying to balance things out, Squirrel. Don’t you see that? What we’ve talked about. Look at the way the Americans have behaved. They closed us out of the atom bomb project and now they’re in England, they’re in Germany, they’re in Italy, they’re crawling all over Europe. They’ve got big bombers and over a hundred atom bombs and every one of them is aimed at Russia. Do you know, they have a new bomber so big there’s a gallery inside the wings so that a crewman can walk inside to service the engines?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I’m not being ridiculous. I’m telling you the truth. It can carry an atom bomb on a round trip of nine thousand miles and more. They can wipe all the major Russian cities off the face of the earth in a matter of hours … and their bloody generals want them to do it. Only the president himself – the man who gave the order for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for God’s sake – has been able to stop them. What happens when he goes? What lunatic might come in his place?’
They contemplated the idea of a lunatic in charge of the bomb.
‘They’ve been to see me, do you know that?’
‘Who have?’
‘The flat-footed men from the Special Branch. They’re interviewing anyone connected with Klaus. They’ve se
en Peierls and his wife because Fuchs used to stay with them in Birmingham. They’ve interviewed half a dozen others, too. Cockcroft knows all about it, of course.’
‘And what did you tell them?’
‘What should I have told them? That I agree with everything he did? That I think he’s some kind of hero? I told them that I like and respect the man but I’m not a close friend. That I had no idea of anything he may have done in the privacy of his own life. And that as far as I’m concerned Klaus Fuchs is a brilliant scientist and a decent man.’
‘So why don’t you resign?’
He frowned. ‘You think I ought to? It did occur to me. Hand in my notice and at the same time release my story to the press. I can just see the headlines. Fellow Scientist Stands Behind Red Master-Spy.’
‘Boffin Backs Betrayer. That’d be the Daily Mirror.’
‘Nest of Traitors in Our Midst. The Express.’
For a moment they laughed together, children again. Then he fell silent and serious. ‘I hate them, do you know that? I thought having a socialist government in power might change things—’
‘It has—’
‘No, it hasn’t. The same grey men are in charge. The same narrow view of the world – us against them, and if there’s a dispute then we’ll fight over it. Except that now one side has got atom bombs.’
‘The Russians have theirs. They tested one last year.’
‘And you know why? Because of people like Fuchs. But still they’re years behind the Americans … and they’ll be further behind still when the Super happens.’
The Super. It was no secret. The good Lord Russell himself had even mentioned it in his lecture. But the project itself had been announced to the world just three days after Klaus Fuchs’s arrest, when the US president Harry S. Truman declared that his country would actively pursue research into the possibility of constructing a thermonuclear device – a hydrogen bomb.