Making Enemies (8 page)

Along the vertical line of the graph are the percentage values of those killed, marked in descending order from a hundred per cent at the top, through eighty, sixty, forty, twenty per cent to nought at the bottom. The horizontal line is marked in kilometres, ranging from nought on the left to five on the right. The description reads: ‘Distance from the hypocentre.’ The line on the graph joins a series of dots starting in the top left-hand corner and swooping downward in a slow curve, showing that most deaths occur within two kilometres of the explosion, but that a tail of deaths continues between two and a half and four and a half kilometres.

The graph ignores the lingering impact of radiation and the slow deaths that spread outwards. This is a measurement of the impact of a single nuclear bomb on its target.

One bomb.

What are the lessons to be drawn? Survival in an atomic attack depends entirely on distance from the centre of the explosion. The force of a nuclear device covers areas vastly greater than traditional bombs. There can no longer be any distinction between military and civilian dead. What she is looking at is a mathematical representation of the indiscriminate nature of mass slaughter, the work of a man-made machine of death which, when exploded, deals out a greater destructive power than any weapon before it.

She remembers the awesome statistics she has read of the effects of the explosions in both Japanese cities.

And still the poison spreads, the slow dying continues, the aftershock of the explosion casts its deadly shadow far into the future. Parents to their children, born and unborn, perhaps to their children’s children. How long will it go on?

The spread of destruction and death terrifies her. Why should a single graph have a greater impact on her than photographs and newsreels and the graphic accounts of survivors? Because this is her territory: clinical, neutral, the unchallengeable verdict of mathematics.

How long will it go on?
Here, on her notepad, are the mathematical implications of a much larger nuclear chain reaction. She has carefully calculated the size of the explosion, its destructive power and the area over which it will work its devastation. These are her precise, accurate marks, black ink on a white page. These are her numbers, innocent in their ordinariness but terrifying in their meaning. Why should the chain reaction ever end? Why should it not go on and on until there is nothing left to destroy? She remembers what Miskin said when they were at the river …
the earth would become a desert, human life would become extinct‚
and for the first time she understands what they are dealing with. She shivers. There is no one in the lab with her. She is quite alone. She looks at the photograph of her son in a simple wooden frame on her desk, and feels again the flutter of fear in her.

I found Ridout sitting in a wheelchair beside his bed in an almost deserted ward. It was, unusually, a clear morning as I walked along the polished linoleum floors of the corridors at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, pale winter sunlight pouring in through the windows and falling across the line of empty beds waiting for the sick to be delivered.

‘Philip?’ Ridout’s eyes opened and he looked at me, startled. ‘Did I wake you?’

‘I wasn’t expecting anybody this morning, that’s all.’

He seemed neither awake nor asleep but lost in some world of his own.

‘May I stay for few minutes?’

‘There’s a chair somewhere. You’ll have to fetch it yourself. Despite this contraption, I’m less than mobile. Someone has to push me if I’m to move.’

I hadn’t seen Ridout since my last visit to Cambridge, a few months after the end of the war. He had been well then, wholly absorbed in the physics that was his life. Despite his shyness, there was an energy about him, a suppressed force that I had to admire. Now I saw a shrunken, shrivelled figure, all signs of youth gone; grey-faced, skin transparent, his whole frame was brittle with disease. The overwhelming impression was of life retreating into a redoubt from where it would make a last and desperate stand against the cancer, before giving way to the inevitable.

I found a chair and sat beside him. He summoned what little energy remained within him.

‘How are you?’

‘Dying, slowly but surely.’ I was unprepared for the challenge in his voice. ‘Have you come to take a look?’

‘I’ve seen enough men die not to need that,’ I said.

‘The trouble with a fatal illness,’ he said apologetically, ‘is that watching yourself deteriorate allows you time to become very self-centred. At least if you’re hit by a bullet you’ve little or no chance to think about what’s happening to you, whether you want the process to speed up or slow down. It’s all over in a flash, isn’t it?’

‘If you’re lucky, yes.’

I could understand his anger. The one thought we took with us into battle was that if it was to happen, pray God it was quick. Ridout had already been in hospital for ten weeks and was quite able to monitor his own progressive physical decline. It was not his mind but his body that was failing him. I could well understand why he was still unreconciled to what had happened.

‘If the mind went at the same time as the body, things might be easier,’ he said. ‘But from experience I can tell you it doesn’t. That’s where the trouble starts.’

He struggled to change his position in the wheelchair. The blanket fell off his knees. I picked it up and tucked it back for him, feeling the sharpness of his bones as I did so.

‘It’s good of you to come. Your father told me you were home on leave. I’m sure you have better things to do than sit here with me. How’s Berlin?’

I told him about our difficulties with the Russians. To my surprise the subject appeared to interest him. Briefly, something resembling the force of the past was rekindled within him.

‘That’s where your father and I disagree. He believes in the good sense of the Russian people. I say there’s no such thing. He sees it as a political restraint on their gangster leadership. I tell him he’s misguided. He’s optimistic about the future. He sees the Russians freeing themselves from tyranny and I don’t. The leadership is brutal, the people are exhausted. In a society without restraint, there’s nothing you can trust. I’m right but he won’t see it. Good sense, if it ever existed, vanished the moment Lenin came to power.’

He looked at me and tried to smile, the reddish creases on his dry skin looking as if they were about to crack.

‘The Russians respect brute force. Until we can meet them on equal terms they won’t listen to us and there’ll be precious little chance of a continued peace. I can’t die while there are still so many technical problems to be solved. That’s what keeps me going. We have to build our own bomb, and the sooner the better.’

He wiped his lips with a handkerchief. ‘Would you mind fetching me some water, please? Talking makes me dry.’

I gave him a glass. He drank from it slowly, then handed it back to me.

He said: ‘I think your father has developed doubts about the rightness of what we are doing because of my illness. Although he has never said anything, I think he believes that if we had not conducted certain experiments, perhaps I would not be in here now. I think he is using my illness to question the whole idea of the nuclear bomb. That’s the biggest mistake we can make. If we slow down now, if we hesitate for any reason, we’ll lose the race. Then who can guess the consequences?’

That was the clue Celia was looking for. Philip’s illness had deeply disturbed my father. It had upset his confidence and caused him (a new experience) to question the rightness of his work on the atomic bomb and its successor, the superbomb. His moodiness and withdrawal were the external signs of his struggle with the dilemma he faced.

Ridout smiled again at me, showing his teeth and the raw, red gums. ‘If you think that the knowledge that you’re dying brings with it a sense of acceptance, you should banish such sentimentality at once.’

At that moment the flame flickered and started to go out. Its suddenness was like a curtain going down. The look of exhaustion on his face was total.

‘Tell your father to listen to what I’m saying. I haven’t got long left now, a few weeks, who knows? But I’m going to hang on till we’ve completed the next stage. There’s work to be done and he’s got to help me. We have to make this bomb. Tell him that, will you?’

‘Of course.’

He nodded at me in acknowledgement. ‘We are at odds, he and I, over this issue. I shouldn’t like to die unreconciled.’

*

‘We’ve not met,’ the voice on the telephone said, ‘but we’ve friends in common. Simon Watson-Jones. Ring a bell? Good. I was having a bite with Simon today and he was telling me how much he enjoyed chatting to you the other night. He’d like to see more of you. I’m sure you two have lots to talk about.’

I couldn’t remember saying more than hello and goodbye to Watson-Jones that evening. I was sure we’d never got into conversation. I was also sure I wasn’t being sounded out. I was being instructed.

‘Give him a bell at the House, old boy. He’d be so pleased.’

To my surprise Watson-Jones recognized my name at once when I telephoned him.

‘You got my message. Good.’ Did I have time for a drink one evening? Then home for a spot of dinner. Nothing formal. His wife Meredith might be there if she was up in town, perhaps one or two chums. It would be fun. Wednesday at six? Splendid. Meet at the House.

Two days later I waited in the lobby of the House of Commons while a clerk telephoned his office. I hoped I would see faces I recognized, men and women who had shaped our destiny, but there was no one around I could put a name to. But I felt the invisible engine of power throbbing around me, I could hear it in the busy echo of footsteps on the stone floor as people crossed and recrossed the lobby, formed groups, talked and broke up again; I saw it in the self-absorption on their faces so clearly telling us how important were the issues in which they were involved. How distant seemed the world I came from. Perhaps that is what makes politics so attractive. The thing over which you hold power is out of sight and out of earshot.

‘Danny. Good to see you.’

Watson-Jones appeared from nowhere, smiling and holding out his hand. I had forgotten how tall he was.

‘Come along.’

He led me to the Members’ bar. He ordered drinks and we sat down at a table by the window. The room was almost empty but when he spoke, Watson-Jones’s voice was hardly above a whisper.

‘A little bird tells me,’ he said in a confidential tone, ‘that Berlin might be losing its attraction.’

‘I hate Berlin,’ I said. ‘I always have done. It’s a scrap heap.’

‘Then why stay there?’

‘If that’s where the army chooses to send me, that’s where I go.’

‘Yours not to reason why,’ he said.

‘Something like that.’

‘What if,’ he said, and paused. He knew how to make the most of an effect, even with an audience of one. ‘What if there was an
opportunity to leave Berlin and do something that had nothing to do with the army?’

‘Return to Civvy Street?’

He peered at me over the tops of his glasses. ‘Is that what you’d like to do?’

‘My problem,’ I said, ‘is that I don’t know what I’d like to do. One good thing about the army is it takes away the need to think.’

Watson-Jones laughed. ‘That’s what your father told me you’d say. The difference between your father and me is, I don’t believe you.’

He sat back in his chair, pleased with his provocation.

‘I believe it,’ I said, ‘and that, surely, is what counts.’

He had thrown his stone and it had made no ripples. I wondered if that was an unusual experience for him. I could see him moving smoothly to a new position as if nothing had happened. I admired his dexterity.

‘Let me tell you what I have in mind,’ he said. ‘Of course,’ he leaned forward as he spoke, ‘you understand this is all very hush-hush. Nothing’s official yet.’

He looked up to wave absent-mindedly to a colleague who passed our table.

‘There’s been a move recently,’ he continued, leaning forward once more, ‘to get me and one or two others to make more of our position in the Party. Form a group. Create a platform. Consolidate what we believe in. That sort of thing. I didn’t initiate it but nor have I resisted it. A group, if it is to mean anything – and I’m talking now in political terms – has to have an organization and organizations have to have money. Well, the money is in place. Now we’re looking for the organization. The people to do the job.’

He sounded pleased with himself. I sensed the money came from Watson-Jones himself, or someone close to him.

‘What are these people going to do?’ I asked.

‘Influence opinion. Change minds. Steer this country back to safer waters.’ He lowered his voice again. ‘Help get our people back into power and the country out of the bloody mess it’s in.’

The room was filling up around us and there was a buzz of excited chatter. A man came across to our table and said, ‘Simon, a word in your ear later, yes?’

‘Surely, Johnny.’ Watson-Jones smiled at me but made no introduction. ‘Where were we?’

‘Changing minds,’ I said. ‘Getting the country back on its feet.’

‘Well, what do you say?’

‘To what?’

‘Joining us.’ I must have looked baffled because he laughed and said, ‘I should explain. We’re going to start a research office. Do a bit of hard thinking. Facts and figures. Write speeches. Publish papers. Propose policy. Put a bit of muscle into our opposition, and God knows it needs it. We thought you might like to help us do it.’

There was no explanation of the ‘we’ he referred to.

‘Shouldn’t you look for someone with political ambitions?’

‘We don’t want anyone with ambition. That wouldn’t do at all.’

I waited for him to qualify his remark but there was no sign he knew what he’d said. Evidence of his thick skin, or my thin one.

‘We’re not looking for a decision right now,’ he said. ‘But give me a steer. What do you think of the idea?’

‘Berlin or London? Where’s the choice?’

‘Then you’ll think about it?’

‘Of course.’

‘Splendid. What we hoped to hear. Now,’ he looked at his watch. Already his attention was on something else. ‘Time for dinner. I think we’ve earned it. What do you say?’

*

Meredith Watson-Jones was American, and it was immediately clear that the money was hers and there was plenty of it. The house in South Street had a richness about it, a certainty in its own taste that comes from the employment of an expensive interior designer. It was somehow too good to be true. The paintings were early American: scenes of the Civil War, Southern landscapes and some family portraits, serious-looking men and women on horseback, sullen Negro slaves and elegant plantation houses in the background. I wondered if they really were family portraits but they gave you the impression that they were, and that was what counted.

‘Darling,’ Watson-Jones said as we entered, ‘we’re late. We were having such an interesting talk, weren’t we, Danny? Will you forgive us?’ He kissed Meredith lightly, brushing her cheek with his lips, and introduced me. ‘Now, is everyone here?’

Watson-Jones’s idea of a quiet evening was not mine. There were twelve of us at dinner, none of whom I had met before. The Watson-Joneses had a butler and, I presumed, a cook. Where they
managed to get their food from I had no idea. I ate things that evening that I had not tasted since before the war.

I sat next to Meredith Watson-Jones. When she spoke, she leaned towards me, occasionally touching my hand for effect. There was nothing flirtatious in her action, it was a natural, even unconscious, mannerism. Her slow speech, with its fading traces of a Southern drawl, and her sweet smile combined to captivate me. I am sure she was used to captivating men, but it was an act without guile. I saw in her none of the subtlety of the good politician’s wife. I wondered what her life was like when she wasn’t on duty.

‘I gather you’re stationed in Berlin,’ she said. Watson-Jones had evidently briefed her earlier.

‘I was telling your husband,’ I said, ‘how much I hate Berlin.’

‘Then we’ll talk about something else, Daniel.’ She touched my arm and moved at once to the second subject of her briefing, ‘Simon and I are great fans of your father’s articles. You must be so proud of him.’

We talked about my father; what it was like to be brought up in a university town; why I had not finished my degree and mercifully very little about the war. I learned that she had rejected the chance to return to America in 1939 because her duty was to be at her husband’s side. I managed somehow to get her to tell me how she had met her husband.

‘Daddy sent me to England for the summer. I didn’t want to come at all but Daddy and Mother said it would be good for me. I had this beau they didn’t like and this was their plan to separate us. Someone took me to a party at Cambridge and there I met this tall English boy. Do you know, I couldn’t understand a thing –
thaing
– he was saying –
saaiying
– he seemed to swallow every word he spoke. But he had deep blue eyes and they followed me wherever I went. So the very next day I decided that if he was going to look at girls like that, I’d rather he looked at me than anyone else. So I got on a train and went back to Cambridge and told him so. Wasn’t that awful?’