by Simon Mawer
‘And what would you have done in his place?’
Absolon shrugged. ‘How do you recruit an agent? The three Vs – vzyatochnichestvo, vymogatel’stvo, vera. It works just as well in English: bribery, blackmail, belief. Tell me, why did you go to France during the war?’
She shook her head. ‘I can barely remember now. Anyway, I was a different person then. A girl who believed in things like honour and freedom. And I was angry as well, angry at the way the Germans had walked in.’
‘So, belief of some kind. The believers make the best agents. Knowing what I know about your brother, I certainly wouldn’t have attempted bribery and I’d probably have ruled out blackmail. Neither produce good agents. I might have approached him directly. Or perhaps …’ He glanced at her with a faint smile. ‘I’d have approached his sister. Whom I know to be sympathetic to our cause.’
‘You think I might have persuaded him to betray his country?’
‘Could you?’
The offer was there. The blackmail was there and the offer was there, one in each hand. He dared to reach out and touch her. ‘I remember what you said to me in Paris.’
‘I said a whole lot of things in Paris. If I were you I wouldn’t believe all of them.’
‘You said your brother hated working with the bomb. Like so many others he thought the thing should never have been used on Japan …’
‘I told you that?’
‘Yes, you did. You told me he agreed with Oppenheimer, who was himself in favour of sharing the science with other nations. Just like Fuchs, and Professor Pontecorvo and many others.’
She shifted away from him, as though taking back something less material, her confidence, her trust. ‘So what are you suggesting?’
‘This is my idea: that we keep all knowledge of these photographs to ourselves. Pretend they don’t exist. But you have to approach your brother with the suggestion that he might continue where Professor Fuchs left off. I am sure you can convince him that would be the right thing to do.’ He opened his hands as if to show that there were no other options available. ‘All he has to do is follow what he believes. And he’ll never have to deal with us directly. That will be your job.’
Something lurched beneath her, as though her whole world had shifted.
‘We would have to set things up, of course,’ Absolon was saying. ‘It’d take time. And we’d have to establish a protocol for meetings. What do you think?’
‘What do I think?’
‘We’d have to do this together. You’d have to be in agreement.’
‘Or else you use those photographs?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t have control over everything. People above me only want results …’
‘So I don’t have much choice, do I?’
She waited a moment, looking at him. And then she made her move. It felt like walking a tightrope, feeling the balance, knowing that a slight shift either side might be fatal. She reached her foot forward and poised to transfer her weight onto it, feeling the rope wobbling. No safety net. ‘There’s just one thing,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’
She slid her weight forward – ‘There must be a quid pro quo. To keep my side quiet’ – and stood carefully in balance, watching bewilderment register in his expression as though he was a spectator looking up from the ground at what she was doing up there above him. Astonishment at what was going on overhead. The sheer audacity of it.
‘Your side?’
‘I’ll need something from you in return. They think …’ and she hesitated for a moment, trembling in balance, leaving him time to wonder who her side might be and what exactly they might think. ‘They want me to turn you.’
She saw it in his face: pure, unadulterated shock. ‘Who do?’
‘You can imagine who.’
‘You’re telling me you are working for the British?’
‘Is that any surprise? Look, Absolon, we can take our time.’ We. Him and her. Together. ‘I warned them it would take time to gain your confidence. And even then it only need be low-grade stuff, but it’ll have to be something. And it’ll keep them off our backs.’
He began to laugh. It was a delight to see him laugh. It was genuine laughter, a real amusement at what she was doing. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Oh, I’m deadly serious, Absolon. If you don’t play, I don’t play. It’s in both our interests.’
‘You mean, all the time you have been working for—’
‘Not all the time, no. Not in Paris. That was me, entirely me.’
His laughter subsided like a tide, leaving only a thin flotsam of amusement behind. ‘But now?’
She shrugged, eyeing him thoughtfully. ‘They’re no different from your lot, are they? They look for weaknesses, they examine the opposition just as you do.’
‘And they decided you were my weakness? How did they know about our little fling?’
Fling. She liked that. His colloquialisms that somehow seemed practised, as though he kept up to date using a dictionary of slang. ‘They know what I do with the Peace Union. They called me in for a chat.’
‘And you told them?’
‘It’s not them, it’s one. He was my handler during the war.’
‘I should have guessed at something like that. And now you’re proposing that we play one off against the other?’
‘I don’t see any alternative, do you?’
‘Do you have any idea of the danger? Moscow Centre wants total loyalty or nothing. They don’t think like you and I do. They’re paranoid. Is that the right word?’
‘It sounds right to me.’
‘And paranoids are dangerous. They’re dangerous for you and they’re dangerous for me.’
‘But they don’t need to know, do they? If you really think that’s a problem, they don’t need to know. You feed me small stuff – what’s the word for it? Chicken feed, is that it? – you give me chicken feed and I give you gold in return.’
He watched her thoughtfully. ‘The question is, can I trust you?’
She put her head on one side, as if to consider him better. ‘My dear Absolon, can I trust you?’
Could she? It is so very difficult to unpick the spider’s web of intrigue and betrayal, isn’t it? Some threads are irrevocably knotted together, others snap at the merest breath of enquiry. Later, much later, I asked her about Absolon, but she only laughed. ‘My dear, you make the most of what you can get, don’t you? And Absolon was very attractive.’ I remember the accent on the word ‘very’, a hint of rolled French r.
H Bomb
On its desert island, the device called Ivy Mike detonated. A double flash, the flash of the primary followed microseconds later by the flash of the secondary. The primary was a plutonium bomb of the Nagasaki type, releasing a storm of X-rays that flowed down into the secondary and impacted upon the hydrogen atoms in the vacuum flask so fiercely that they fused into helium and, for a fragment of time, into all the atoms of creation and a few more besides. In that process – although ‘process’ implies time and this occurred in the infinitesimal space between the units of time – temperatures were created that were greater than the centre of the sun. Within a second the fireball erupted to over three miles in diameter. Within one minute the cloud had risen to over one hundred thousand feet and spread out to cover eight thousand square miles of the surface of the Pacific Ocean. The island on which the device had been constructed vanished entirely. The thermonuclear age had begun.
‘They’ve done it, haven’t they?’ she said. She held the morning newspaper in her hands, with the headlines in grimy newsprint: US Explodes H-bomb.
Ned looked helpless. ‘What did you expect?’ He had rented a cottage on the edge of a village near Harwell. It was a place of low ceilings and small windows but without the corresponding attraction of ancient wooden beams. The only heating was provided by a coal fire in the sitting room and a paraffin stove that Marian kept upstairs to warm the spare room, where she slept when she came to visit. Now
she sat in front of the fire while he paced up and down between the wingback armchairs and the windows, opening and closing his hands as though trying to rid himself of something adhering to his fingers.
‘It’s probably not a useable weapon yet. Probably they used liquid hydrogen, that’s what fellows are saying. You couldn’t use that in a weapon. The next step is lithium hydride. That’s obvious. And once they move on to that …’
‘The papers say it was huge.’
He shrugged helplessly. ‘Eight, ten, megatons. Twenty, thirty times the size of the Hiroshima bomb. Something like that would obliterate the whole of London.’
‘And the Russians?’
‘The Russians, the Russians. They’re blundering along way behind.’
‘What Lord Russell said that time—’
‘Lord Russell’s a fool.’
‘So what can we do?’
He stopped in his pacing. ‘What can we do? Nothing.’
‘What can you do, then?’
The question lay there between them. He laughed. ‘I used to think that the best thing to do would be go and live on a Pacific island, as far away from the mess as possible. But now they’re blowing the Pacific islands to dust. Did you read the story? The island where they assembled the bomb entirely vanished—’
‘An exaggeration—’
‘Probably not.’
She felt anger, the sheer, blind anger of the helpless. No metaphors were good enough. ‘What can we do?’ she repeated.
He resumed his pacing. ‘It’s trying to predict the future, isn’t it? What might happen if … The war in Korea, for example. They say that MacArthur wants to use atom bombs. Can you imagine that, Squirrel? Atom bombs against Korea, atom bombs against China, atom bombs against Russia. Can you imagine? And the next excuse might be in Europe. Berlin, maybe. Or Poland. Who knows?’
She looked at her brother, daring him to understand what she meant. ‘Or could it be like I said – like poison gas, each side too frightened to use it. And that can only happen if there’s some kind of balance.’
‘So what are you trying to say?’
‘You cannot leave this in the hands of the politicians and the military, Ned. You can do something, we can do something together.’
‘What? Arrange a public meeting where Lord Russell can tell us all to go and attack Russia?’
She shook her head. ‘We can help the Russians. Like Fuchs did, like Alan Nunn May, like Bruno Pontecorvo. All men who acted out of their beliefs. What motivates the others – Chadwick, Cockcroft, William Penney, all those others you talk about? Self-interest and fear. Nothing more. You said it yourself. And in the meantime, the Americans build up an arsenal big enough to end human life on the entire planet.’
‘It’s too dangerous,’ Ned protested. ‘It’s too difficult.’
‘No, it’s not. I told you I can make contact for you. Just trust me, Ned.’
‘Are you serious, Squirrel?’
‘Of course I’m serious. I’ll mention to the right person that my dear older brother wishes to get in touch with someone from the Soviet scientific establishment in order to exchange views. That’d be a start, wouldn’t it? It’s what you want to do, isn’t it?’
There it was, out in the open, the taboo broken. He’d stopped at the window, looking away from her out of the window at the abandoned strip of grass that constituted the garden. At the far end was a wooden hut that the estate agent had optimistically called a summer house. ‘Do you think it’s possible?’
‘I’ll see what they say.’
‘Just ideas, nothing more.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she insisted. ‘It’ll be all right.’
Of course, she didn’t mention the photographs. Little sister protecting big brother, old roles neatly reversed. And she didn’t mention Fawley’s proposal to her, that she attempt to turn Absolon. In the past it had been the other way round – Ned would persuade her about what was right and what was wrong. Now it was different: while he had somehow remained a child, she had grown into something else – an adult, with an adult’s ability to manipulate, to persuade, to convince that black was white, that evil was good. He came and sat down beside her, letting her take his hand for a while: brother and sister united by bonds that were too convoluted to untangle.
‘Who is this person that you know, Squirrel?’
‘An old friend. I don’t think you ought to know his name.’
He looked at her with a childish cunning. ‘Do you sleep with him?’
‘Sometimes.’
That amused him. A braying laugh. He held her hand open almost as though he was reading her future there in the palm. And then he kissed it. ‘You’re no better than me, are you?’
Geneva
Things moved with molluscan slowness. Marian could imagine enciphered messages going back and forth between the Soviet embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens and some glum, anonymous fortress in Moscow. ‘They want to go carefully,’ Absolon explained. ‘All the dust thrown up by the Fuchs case. And Pontecorvo. And Burgess and Maclean. They want everything to settle down. Is that what you say? Let the dust settle?’
It was what you said. But there was more to the waiting than a mere desire for the dust to settle. ‘And they’re frightened of dezinformatsiya,’ he added. ‘Disinformation. They have a morbid fear of being sold counterfeit goods. I’m afraid nothing I say will convince them – they want to meet him.’
‘Meet him? Who wants to meet him?’
‘They’ll send someone who knows the subject. A fellow physicist.’
‘Here?’
He opened his hands helplessly. ‘It’s difficult in Britain …’
‘Then where?’ She was suddenly angry, protective of her brother. ‘I’m not having him travel to anywhere in the Soviet Bloc. Who knows what might happen? Anyway, the British authorities wouldn’t allow it. And not to somewhere like Finland, either.’
But Absolon had all the answers ready. ‘There’s a physics conference of some kind coming up in Geneva. The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. He can get a place on that easily enough …’
According to Absolon there would be a little rigmarole to establish contact, one of those exchanges she recalled from the war. Ned would have to learn the words exactly: ‘Remarkable how the politicians fight while we get on with one another without any problem.’
‘Apart from language difficulties.’
‘Those can always be overcome.’
It was their first visit to Geneva since before the war, brother and sister travelling together for old times’ sake. Their father told them how much he wished he could go with them but things kept him in Oxford – business at his college, correcting proofs of the book he was writing, the need to look after their mother who was having such trouble with her hip. So they went on their own, just the two of them taking the train to Paris and the overnight sleeper to Geneva. They stayed in a pension near the railway station and took a bus to the conference. The city was the same but the people they had known had been scattered by the war and the demise of the League of Nations. Perhaps there were still some she had been at school with before she was packed off to the convent in England but how could she relate to anyone she had last known when she was a mere fourteen? All that remained were the ghosts of memory, of sailing on the lake, of walking with Clément in the Jardin Anglais, of being young and having a whole world ahead of her.
The conference of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics was held in one of the university buildings on the edge of the Parc des Bastions, an edifice that might as well have been a bank as a place of learning. Each morning, like a mother taking her child to school, she ushered Ned in, hopeful that he would be happy, that he would be safe, that he would not be bullied. And dutifully she met him at the end of each day with anxious questions – how did it go? did you make any nice new friends? what did you learn?
‘Don’t fuss, Squirrel,’ he complained.
The contact was ma
de on the last day. It was a seemingly innocuous encounter among hundreds of others, a nondescript man called Chernikov who came up to him during a coffee break and introduced himself with the bland assertion that, ‘I believe we’re interested in much the same field.’ And then: ‘Remarkable how the politicians fight but we get on with one another without any problem.’
‘Apart from language difficulties.’
‘Those can always be overcome.’
‘He was a bit shy at first,’ Ned told his sister. ‘Then bolder and bolder once we both knew what we were about. We went for a little walk together and he asked me lots of questions and I gave him a little envelope with some stuff about the decay products of lithium deuteride and he gave me a collection of dross in return. And we went on our different ways contented. Altogether it was smooth as a pick-up in Regent’s Park public lavatory.’
‘Ned!’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘You’re not going to take the moral high ground with me, are you, Squirrel? Not when you’re being fucked by your Russian. You know what I said – you’re no better than me.’
They caught the Paris train that evening and were back in London the next day. The world seemed unchanged.
Stalker
A moment of the purest coincidence. There I am, going through the cheap books on the pavement outside Marks & Co in the Charing Cross Road, when I look round and spot her. Marian Sutro. She’s crossing the road towards Shaftesbury Avenue. For a second, putting a book down, I am about to call out to her; but then something else takes over, a desire to know more than ever I can gain by a casual and short-lived encounter on a street corner in the middle of London.
So instead I followed her, tailed her, did the spy thing. I did it expertly, make no mistake, keeping to the opposite side of the street, keeping well behind her, stopping when she stopped and turning to the nearest shop window to watch her in reflection. In this manner we made our way towards Piccadilly. She was wearing a spring dress with blue polka dots on a white ground so she was pretty conspicuous even with the traffic that passed between us and the maze of people through which she had to thread her way. And her walk … I recalled her walk from that summer in Sussex and watched now with a little thrill of admiration and lust: long-limbed, long-striding, her skirt swaying with the movement of her backside. You want a cliché? Coltish. She was what? Twenty-nine, thirty, something like that, but to me she seemed rather older. This was the woman who had done the impossible, who still did things that were beyond my capabilities – travelled to Paris, travelled to Geneva, turned cartwheels. I hurried after her, following the uncertain and narrow line between adolescent prank and adult obsession, while the colt strode steadfastly towards Piccadilly Circus with, so I fancied, the press of people parting to let her through. And then she vanished.