The New Men (28 page)

She made another attack on me.

‘He cannot like what he is doing,’ she said. ‘It cannot be good for him.’

She turned full on me, when I was sitting near the window with my back to the sunlight.

‘I always thought you were more heavyweight than he was – but that he was the finer man.’

Making her last attempt, she was using that oblique form of flattery, which delights a father by telling him how stupid he is compared to his son. But for once it had no effect. I had no room for any thoughts but two.

The first was, the time would have to come when Martin and I faced each other.

The second – it was so sharp that it dulled even the prospect of a final quarrel – was nothing but suspicion, the sharp-edged, pieces-fitting-together, unreal suspicion of one plumped in the room where a crime had taken place. How did Hanna know so much of Martin’s actions? What was she after? How close was she really to Puchwein nowadays? Was their separation a blind?

In that brilliance of suspicion, one lost one’s judgement altogether. Everything seemed as probable, as improbable, as anything else. It seemed conceivable, that afternoon, that Hanna had lived years of her life in a moment-by-moment masquerade, more complete than any I had heard of. If one had to live close to official secrets (or, what sounded different but produced the same effect, to a crime of violence) one knew what it must be like to be a paranoiac. The beautiful detective-story spider-web of suspicion, the facts of everyday clearer-edged than they have ever been, no glue of sense to stick them in their place.

That evening, each action of Puchwein’s and Hanna’s for years past, stood out with a double interpretation – on one hand, the plunging about of wilful human beings, on the other, the master cover of spies. The residue of sense pulled me down to earth, and yet, the suspicions rearranged themselves – silly, ingenious, unrealistic, exciting, feelingless.

The same evening that Hanna visited me, Martin was talking to Captain Smith. Sawbridge was called by telephone some hours later, and ‘invited to a conference’, which was Smith’s expression, on the following day. Smith rang me up also; he wanted me there for the first morning (he assumed that the interrogation would go on for days) in order to retrace once more the facts of how Sawbridge first entered Barford.

In past interrogations Smith had questioned Sawbridge time and again about his movements, for those days and hours when Smith was certain (though he could not prove it in a court) that Sawbridge had walked down a street in Birmingham, watched for a man carrying two evening papers, exchanged a word, given over his information; and this, or something close to it, had happened not once but three times, and possibly four.

In the morning we waited for him. Smith had borrowed a room in an annexe outside New Scotland Yard, behind Whitehall on the side opposite my offices. The room smelt of paint, and contained a table, half a dozen shiny pitch-pine chairs, a small desk where a shorthand writer could sit; the walls were bare, except for a band of hat pegs and a map of Italy. I did not know why, but it brought back the vestry of the church where my mother used to go, holding her own through the bankruptcy, still attending parish meetings and committees for sales-of-work.

Smith walked about the room, with his actor’s stride; he was wearing a new elegant suit. Most of the conversation, as we waited, was made by an old acquaintance of mine, a man called Maxwell, whom I had known when I practised at the Common Law Bar. He had just become a detective inspector in the Special Branch. He was both fat and muscular, beautifully poised on small, strong, high-arched feet. His eyes, which were hot and inquisitive, looked from Martin to me. We were both quiet, and apart from a good-morning had not spoken to each other.

To Smith, Martin talked in a matter-of-fact tone, as though this were just another morning. His face was composed, but I thought I noted, running up from eyebrow to temple, a line which had not fixed itself before.

Sawbridge was brought in. He had expected to see Smith but not the rest of us; he stared at Martin; he did not show any fear, but a touch of perplexity, as though this was a social occasion, and he did not know the etiquette.

The smell of paint seemed stronger. I felt the nerves plucking in my elbows.

‘Hallo, old son,’ said Smith in his creaking voice.

‘Are you all right?’ Sawbridge responded. It was the greeting that Martin and I used to hear on midland cricket grounds.

‘Let’s get round the table, shall we?’ said Smith.

We sat down, Smith between Sawbridge and Martin. He shot from one to the other his switched-on, transfiguring smile.

‘You two knew each other before ever you went to Cambridge, didn’t you?’

Sharply Martin said: ‘Oh yes, we peed up against the same wall.’

It might have been another man speaking. I had not heard him false-hearty before; and, as a rule, no one knew better how to wait. Just then, I knew for certain the effort he was making.

In fact, the phrase was intended to recall our old headmaster, who used it as his ultimate statement of social equality. Sawbridge took it at its face value, and grinned.

‘I thought,’ said Captain Smith, ‘that it mightn’t be a bad idea to have another yarn.’

‘What’s the point of it?’

‘Perhaps we shall see the point of it, shan’t we?’

Sawbridge shrugged his shoulders, but Martin held his eye, and began: ‘You knew about how the Canadian stuff was given away?’

‘No more than you do?

‘We’re interested in one or two details.’

‘I’ve got nothing to say about that.’

‘You knew–’ (the man convicted that spring), ‘didn’t you?’

‘No more than you did.’

‘Your ring was independent of that one, was it?’

I could hear that Martin’s opening had been worked out. He was master of himself again, at the same time acute and ready to sit talking for days. To my surprise Sawbridge was willing, though he made his flat denials, to go on answering back. If I had been advising him (I thought, as though I were a professional lawyer again), I should have said: At all costs, keep your mouth shut. But Sawbridge did not mind telling his story.

On the other side there was no pretence that anyone thought him innocent. As in most investigations, Smith kept on assuming that Sawbridge had done it, that it was only necessary for him to admit the facts that Smith produced.

Smith talked to him like an old friend going over anecdotes familiar to them both and well liked. ‘That was the time you took the drawings…’ ‘…but you had met – before, hadn’t you?’… Smith, trying to understand his opponent, had come to have a liking for him – the only one of us to do so.

Even that morning, Smith was fascinated by the discovery he kept making afresh – that, at the identical time when (as Smith repeated, without getting tired of it) Sawbridge was carrying secrets of the Barford project to a contact man, he was nevertheless deeply concerned for its success. He had worked night and day for it; few scientists had been more devoted and wholehearted in their science; such scientific ability as he had, he had put into the common task.

I remembered the night of Luke’s fiasco; it did not matter personally to Sawbridge, and he was not a man who displayed much emotion; but it was he who had been crying.

Smith shook his head, half-gratified, as when one sees a friend repeat an inexplicable oddity; but to Martin it did not seem an oddity at all. Science had its own imperatives; if you were working on a problem, you could not help but crave for it to ‘come out’. If you could be of use yourself it was unnatural not to. It was not Sawbridge alone, but most of the scientific spies who had their own share, sometimes a modestly distinguished share, in producing results which soon after (like Sawbridge, walking to a commonplace street corner, looking for a man with a daily paper) they, as spies, stole away.

All this Martin understood much better than I did. Watching him and Sawbridge facing each other across the table, I could hear them speaking the same language. The two young men stared at each other without expression, with the faces of men who had learned, more deeply than their seniors, to give nothing away. They did not even show dislike. At that moment, there was a cartoon-like resemblance between them, both fair, both blue-eyed: but Sawbridge’s face was heavier than Martin’s and his eyes glaucous instead of bright. Of the two, though at twenty-nine he was three years younger, he looked – although for the first time his expression was bitten into with anxiety – the more unalterable.

Martin’s eyes did not leave him. He could understand much that to me was alien; to do so, one, had to be both a scientist and young. Even a man like Francis Getliffe was set back by the hopes of his youth – whereas Martin by an effort seemed able to throw those hopes away, and accept secrets, spying, the persistence of the scientific drive, the closed mind, the two world-sides, persecution, as facts of life.

How long had it been since he made such an effort? I thought, watching him without sympathy, though once or twice with a pulse of kinship. Was it his hardest?

I left the room at midday, and saw no more of him for several days, although I knew that he was going on with the interrogation. Irene did not know even that, nor why he was staying so long in London.

One afternoon, while Martin was sitting with Captain Smith and Sawbridge in the paint-smelling room, she had tea with me and asked about him, but casually, without anxiety.

In fact, she showed both enjoyment at his rise to fame, and also that sparkle of ridicule and incredulity which lurks in some high-spirited wives when their men come off. It was much the same incredulity as when she told me that ‘E H’ (Hankins) was at last on the edge of getting married.

‘Caught!’ she said. ‘Of course the old boy can still slip out of it. But he’s getting on, perhaps he’s giving up the unequal struggle.’

Her unrest was past and buried, she was saying – but even so she was not as amused as she sounded. I was thinking that she, to whom marriage had sometimes not seemed so much of a confining bond, regarded it in her old lover with the same finality as her mother might have done. Like most of us, she was more voracious than she admitted to herself; even if he had been a trivial capture, the news of his marriage would have cost her a wrench. As for Hankins – though I listened to the squeal of glee with which she laughed at him, within weeks of being domesticated at last – I felt that she was half-thinking – ‘If I wanted, I should still have time to break it up!’

Although she did not know it, I read that night, as on each night for a week past, what her husband was doing. Evening by evening Captain Smith walked along from the room to my office with the verbatim report of what he called ‘the day’s proceedings’. Those reports had the curious sodden flatness which I had come to recognize years ago at the Bar in conversation taken down word by word. Most of the speeches were repetitive, bumbling, broken-backed. The edge was taken off Martin’s tongue, and the others sounded maundering. There was also, as in all investigations I had been anywhere near, very little in the way of intellectual interchange. Martin and Sawbridge were men trained in abstract thought, and Martin could use the dialectic as well as Sawbridge; but in practice neither of them found this the time to do so.

Over ninety per cent of all those words, day by day for more than a week already, were matter-of-fact. Captain Smith’s organization was certain, from the sources they could not reveal, that Sawbridge had walked down a named street on a named day, and passed over papers. Ninety per cent, probably ninety-five per cent, of the records consisted of questions and answers upon actions as prosaic as that.

Out of the first day’s transcript I read nothing but details. ‘You were in Birmingham, at the corner of Corporation Street and High Street, on October 17th, ’43?’ (that was only a few months after Sawbridge arrived at Barford). Flat negatives – but one or two were broken down by ordinary police facts. Who could remember the events of an afternoon three years ago, anyway? Why not be vague?

Sawbridge denied being in Birmingham on any day that month: then he fumbled: Maxwell produced a carbon copy of a receipt (dated not October 17th but October 22nd) given him by a Birmingham bookshop.

The next impression, of the later days of the first week, was that Martin was taking more and more of the examination. It looked as though Smith and the Special Branch between them had run out of facts, certainly of producible facts. Was Sawbridge experienced enough to guess it? Or did he expect there was evidence to come?

From the first, Martin’s questions were more intimate than the others. He took it for granted that, as soon as Sawbridge knew that Barford was trying to make the fission bomb, he did not feel much doubt about how to act.

E. (Martin). Did you in fact know what Barford was set up for before you arrived?

SA. (In the record, this symbol was used throughout to distinguish Sawbridge from Smith.) No.

E. Hadn’t you thought about it? (i.e. the bomb).

SA. I read the papers, but I thought it was too far off.

E. When did you change your mind?

SA. As soon as I was appointed there and heard about the background.

E. Then you believed it would happen?

SA. Of course I did, just like you all did.

E. That is, you believed this country or America would have the bomb within 3–4 years?

SA. We all did.

E. And you thought of the effect on politics?

SA. I’m not sure what you mean by politics.

E. You thought of the possibility that the West would have the bomb, and the Soviet Union wouldn’t?

(Despite Sawbridge’s last remark, Martin was using ‘politics’ in a communist sense, just as he steadily referred to the Soviet Union, as though out of politeness to the other man.)

SA. I thought if we’d seen that the thing might work then the Soviet physicists must have done the same.

E. But you didn’t know?