Making Enemies (5 page)

*

‘The question we are faced with,’ Corless tells us, ‘is which of our two professors is stealing secrets for the Soviets? Professor Geoffrey Stevens, nuclear physicist and Nobel prizewinner, or Professor Edgar Lodz, theoretical physicist? Both are leading lights in our thermonuclear development programme.’ Corless’s gaze settles on me. ‘Cambridge is your parish, Monty. What can you tell us about Stevens and Lodz?’

Unexpectedly I am the centre of attention. I am quite unprepared for this.

‘The first thing that anyone connected with the university will tell you is that these two men hate each other’s guts. They’re bitter rivals.’

I tell the Committee what I know.

Stevens is a professor of nuclear physics whose work in the ’thirties, with a Finn called Laurentzen, earned him a Nobel Prize in the year before war broke out. In his early years in Cambridge Stevens made his reputation working with Rutherford and Kapitza at the Cavendish before setting up his own laboratory with Laurentzen, a partnership that lasted until 1938. During the war, he did not go to America to join the Los Alamos Project, though he made a number of visits to New Mexico and is well known to Oppenheimer and his colleagues there. He is generally recognized as the source of inspiration behind much of British nuclear research. He and his small team are rumoured to be working on the initial design of a ‘superweapon’, a thermonuclear device of prodigious destructive capacity to replace the atomic bomb.

‘In your opinion,’ Arthur Gurney asks, ‘is Professor Stevens a likely candidate to betray secrets to an enemy?’

‘I have known Professor Stevens for twenty years,’ I reply. ‘He is many things I heartily dislike, but I cannot see him giving secrets to the Russians.’

‘Selling secrets?’ Corless asks. ‘He’s got a second wife, a young family. Does he have money worries?’

Even after years in the department I am still not used to the way in which, because of the nature of the work we do, any evidence, however intimate, is grist to the intelligence mill. I shrug my shoulders and say nothing. I make a note that Corless will expect me to check Stevens’s bank account.

‘What about Lodz?’

I tell the Committee that I’ve never met Lodz. What I know of him I have gathered second-hand from Stevens and my other Cambridge connections.

‘Eddie Lodz is Austrian by birth. Brought up in Vienna. Went to university in Germany, studied with Heisenberg in Göttingen, and came to England as a political refugee in the early ‘thirties just before things got tough for Jews in Germany. Cambridge snapped him up because of the reputation he had already established. Married an English woman, the daughter of the master of his college. Of the two, he’s reckoned to be cleverer than Stevens, but less pushy, less forceful. A kinder man, in every respect.’

‘He could be a communist. Vienna was a hotbed of communist activity before the war,’ Benton says.

I tell the Committee that there is no evidence whatsoever to link Eddie Lodz in any way with communism. Corless thanks me for my contribution and moves the discussion forward. Full reports on both men, including the state of their private finances, will be presented to the Committee within twenty-four hours. He has already asked Colin Maitland to get the Registry to dig out all files with any reference to either man.

‘If we’re in the hands of the Registry,’ Adrian Gardner whispers to me, ‘it will be twenty-four days before they can even spell either name correctly, twenty-four months before we get any reports. By which time all that will be left of the planet will be a huge mushroom cloud hanging in space.’

‘On the face of it,’ Corless sums up, ‘the idea of Professors Lodz or Stevens giving nuclear secrets to the Soviets looks unlikely. But we can’t ignore a message from Peter just because we may not like what he tells us.’

I am to go to Cambridge with a small specialist team and find out what I can. We are to work discreetly and thoroughly. Until I report back, Peter’s allegation is to be kept strictly within the Committee: it is not to be released to anyone, not even to SOVINT.

‘No formal action on Peter’s allegation is to be taken until we can confirm the charge.’ Corless reminds us that inaction, even if temporary, may be the best way of preserving Peter. For the present, we are to work entirely on our own on this one.

‘What about the minutes?’ Gurney asks as we push our chairs back into place. ‘We have a wide circulation list. Eyes only, of course, but many recipients. What do I do?’

This is serious stuff. We are stopped in our tracks. Gurney looks haunted with anxiety. What
is
to happen to the minutes?

‘Bugger the minutes,’ Gardner says, and for once the feeling of the room is with him. ‘They can wait. Peter’s more important.’

Gurney looks very unhappy. ‘It’s very irregular,’ he says. ‘I don’t think our masters will be happy about this.’

‘Stuff our masters,’ Maitland says, seizing his chance for ascendancy. ‘Lose them for a few days, Arthur. No one will notice.’

‘Who reads them anyway?’ Gardner whispers to me, with a wink.

Corless nods his agreement. Not a single word about what we are doing is to leak out. Gurney is to sit on the minutes until he receives further instructions.

‘Your decision, Rupert, of course,’ Gurney says. It is as close as he will ever come publicly to dissent.

*

We spent two weeks in an icy, mist-ridden Cambridge and found no evidence that Stevens had met any known members of the Communist Party, let alone strangely accented men in ill-cut suits; nor that he had corresponded with scientists in Moscow or indeed anywhere else in the Soviet Union, or had any contact with anyone remotely connected with Russia or the Russians. Indeed, no meeting of any kind had taken place that could not be completely and promptly explained as part of Stevens’s academic duties or his activities as a scientific adviser to the Government. The truth, however uncomfortable, was inescapable. Professor Stevens was clean.

By the time I got back to London a new message had come through from Peter. This time he named Stevens as the traitor.

‘Danny! Danny!’

I was hardly out of the taxi before Celia had thrown herself into my arms.

‘We thought you’d be here on Christmas Eve. The children were so looking forward to it. Come along and bring your things. Everything’s ready for you. Your room’s made up. I even saved some Christmas pudding.’

My stepmother was much younger than my father. She had been one of his students at a time when the relationship between my parents had hit one of its coldest patches, and I suppose my father had found Celia’s warmth impossible to resist. To this day I am sure he engineered the discovery that he had a mistress. He wanted, if nothing else, to surprise my mother, to show her she had misjudged him. In my darker moments, I think he rather enjoyed showing her he had power over women, or one woman at least, and an attractive, young one at that.

There was no explosion after the revelation that my father had been unfaithful, only a deeper and more wounded silence in the house. From the little I saw, there was no attempt at reconciliation, only a slow and painful settling of accounts and then my mother left. She had always hated Cambridge and now there was nothing to keep her. Much later there was a divorce, rather messy as they were in those days, but my father rode the storm and settled into a new life with this woman half his age.

Celia was clearly happy with him. She produced three children in quick succession but cleverly found time, when my father was home, to devote herself to him. She was an uncomplicated woman; my father knew he was the centre of her life and in his own way he loved her for it.

‘Geoffrey’s in the study.’

In my presence she always referred to my father as Geoffrey. ‘Go and say hello. I’m saving the children for later. That’s your penance for not seeing them open their stockings.’

‘How is he?’

For a moment she hesitated, a look of anxiety suddenly clouding her naturally open expression. If she wanted to tell me something, she changed her mind abruptly.

‘He’s working too hard but there’s nothing surprising in that. Go on in. He’s expecting you.’

My father’s study was a large, untidy room at the back of the house overlooking fields that marked the outskirts of Cambridge. The relics of a long academic career were scattered like trophies everywhere, books, papers, journals, files, proofs in bundles, covering shelves, chairs, even now invading the carpet. There never had been room to sit. Now you could hardly stand. The disorder in which he lived was in reverse measure to the order of his mind.

I found him as I had left him over a year before, glasses halfway down his nose, working on some papers spread out on an illuminated lectern.

‘Daniel. At last. How are you?’

‘Hello, Father.’

We shook hands. I knew there would be no mention of my year’s absence. To hear my father you would think he had seen me only a week before. In his mind, it probably felt like that.

‘Celia was worried. She thought you were lost. I said people in the army don’t get lost, they only get mislaid.’

‘Then you don’t know much about the army.’

‘Come and sit down.’ He cleared a space for me on the sofa, piling papers and books on the floor. ‘Every year I promise myself I’m going to have a spring-clean, make the place habitable, but I never get round to it. Either that or I’ve got no sense of time. Are you with us for long?’

‘A couple of weeks’ leave, then back to Berlin.’

‘I don’t envy you that.’

‘I’ll give it all up one day soon,’ I said without thinking.

‘Does that mean you’ve made up your mind to come back?’

I hadn’t expected our quarrel to surface quite so soon, and my defence was unprepared.

‘It means I’ll leave the army some day.’

‘You know my thoughts on that,’ my father said. ‘You’re wasting your life. It’s time to get out now.’

The last time we had been in this room together we had argued bitterly and both said things we regretted. I had told my father that I had passed up an opportunity to leave the army, and the sudden virulence of his attack on my decision forced me into a stubborn defence, a refusal to accept any part of his argument. My pigheadedness, as he called it, only helped to redouble his anger. The memory of that unhappy evening was one of the reasons I had stayed away from Cambridge for almost a year. The last thing I wanted was to stir it all up again.

‘For the moment it suits me,’ I said, more out of weariness than defiance. ‘There’s nothing else I want to do.’

‘Other men are out of uniform. Why not you? The war’s over.’

The last time he had said that, his voice had been shrill and the points of his cheeks red with anger. There was no hint of that now, only that familiar coldness that told me his anger had cooled to indifference.

‘It doesn’t always seem like that in Berlin.’

‘That’s a poor apology for inaction. Berlin is not a microcosm of the rest of the world. I thank God I can see more clearly than that.’

‘We may have defeated one enemy but there’s another in his place now. Someone has to guard the gate.’

The thought was not mine but my American companion’s. I was surprised at how easily I had accepted his analysis of what was happening.

‘The Russians aren’t the enemy some people would have us believe. They’re weak, economically in chaos, they can’t build a war machine without starving their people, and the Russian man in the street has got too much sense to stand for that. Their leaders want us to believe the opposite and their propaganda is very successful. We mustn’t allow ourselves to fall for it.’

That was as close as he could get to saying that I was a victim of their propaganda and he was shocked that a son of his could be taken in so easily. I remembered the speed with which we had seen the Russians set up their own puppet administration in the Eastern Zone of Berlin in defiance of the Allied agreement. It had all the hallmarks of a carefully planned operation by a well-prepared apparatus, and its accomplishment had left us breathless. It was an illegal act under the treaty, and the Russians had calculated that there was
little we could do about it. They’d been right. We’d let them get away with it.

‘It looks different when you’re living next door to them.’ I hadn’t the energy to put it more strongly than that.

‘Leave Berlin, Danny. You’ve done enough. Come back where you belong. There’s unfinished business.’

I had completed my second year at Cambridge when the war broke out and I had joined up at once. My father had opposed me then and he was still, years later, unreconciled to my view that the war had made a return to undergraduate life impossible.

I wanted to tell him that I was never coming back but somehow I couldn’t. I hadn’t the heart or I hadn’t the courage, and I suspect he knew it.

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said, and to my surprise he dropped the subject. A year ago he would not have done that. Was this real evidence of a change in him? Or had he softened in the time I’d been away?

‘It’s good to see you again,’ he said with uncharacteristic warmth.

My father and I never found it easy to spend much time in each other’s company. We never developed any intimacy in our relationship. One of the strange legacies of the war was that we had been forced to spend so long apart that in our minds our relationship had grown closer than it really was.

‘I will always be thankful that you were spared when so many others were not. Go and say hello to the children. I’ll join you when I’ve finished.’

I played with the children after their bath and wondered how these small individuals could be related to me. They saw me as I saw myself, more as their father than their brother. But their bright faces and their laughter touched me, as Celia knew they would, which is why she left us alone.

We had dinner soon after Celia had put them to bed. My father was full of university gossip: who was going for preferment where and how mistaken they were to imagine they might get it (‘Overestimating one’s worth has become a new sport here. No doubt they’ll award a blue for it soon’); who had written what and what dreadful rubbish it was (‘God knows who’ll read it’); and how publishers were good for nothing (‘the idlest profession in the world’). Twice Celia asked me about my life in Germany but both times my father steered her away from the subject. I couldn’t tell if it was deliberate or not.

Celia left us alone after dinner and we returned to my father’s study with a bottle of whisky.

‘Cambridge hasn’t changed by the sound of it,’ I said. ‘Still the same old place.’

‘I only wish that were true.’ The bitterness in his reply was unexpected. ‘I thought the war might expand horizons, bring some breadth of vision to us. Wishful thinking. We’re more trivial than ever. More inward-looking. More conscious of ourselves and jealous of each other. The world might as well be in darkness for all the notice we take of what happens outside the gates of this fenland refuge.’

‘Can you blame people for escaping here? Cambridge is as good a place to hide as any.’

‘Oh, I blame them,’ he said with surprising venom. ‘I blame them all right.’

Then he stopped. Whatever he had wanted to say, he had changed his mind. Since our last meeting something must have happened to allow doubts to surface. Doubts about what I didn’t know; he had covered up too quickly to allow me more than a moment’s glimpse. But though he was now doing his best to conceal his concerns from me, the moment was too strong to ignore. My father was in the grip of a deep anxiety.

‘Who wants to hear the miserable litany of an old don in his declining years? No one, thank God.’ He pulled down the blackout on himself and switched his attention to me. ‘Tell me about Berlin.’

He questioned me intently on the work I was doing, when I thought the civilian administration might begin to take over, did I think the good Germans could make democracy stick? I cannot say that my father opened his heart to me that night because he didn’t. But we talked with an openness I hadn’t experienced before, and we avoided the treacherous subject of our relationship with each other.

‘It’s getting late. You’ve had a long day.’ My father got to his feet. He was bringing the conversation to an end, not because he was tired but because he was afraid of where it might lead.

‘What’s all this? What are you working on?’

I was standing by his desk. There were newspaper cuttings on the lectern I had not noticed before.

‘Ah, that.’

My father betrayed all the signs of a schoolboy caught smoking behind the bicycle sheds.

‘That is what Celia calls my fall from grace.’

I look a cutting from the lectern. I saw his name under the title of an article.

‘Good God.’ I was genuinely surprised. ‘You never told me you were writing for the papers.’

‘My weekly sermon to the masses.’

‘This paper doesn’t reach the masses.’

‘To a professor of physics, being read by more than five people is reaching the masses. Being understood by more than five people is more than one can hope for in a lifetime.’

‘What made you do this?’

‘Why does anyone do what he affects to despise? It pays well and my colleagues hate it. What further justification should one look for?’

‘What do you do in these pieces?’

‘What I’ve always done, only now I do it in the public prints as well. Expound. Disturb. Provoke and generally pontificate. A thousand words each week on a topical issue. Political. Social. Economic. Even moral, if I choose it. I am told I am quite successful. There’s talk of extending my contract.’

He looked at me, an image of impish delight. ‘What gives me most pleasure is the jealousy my journalistic exploits arouse among my colleagues. Two nights ago in hall, the senior tutor leaned towards me before grace and muttered: “How could you stoop so low?”’

‘How did you answer that?’

‘I said if the University paid better, then professors with young and expensive wives wouldn’t have to prostitute themselves to make ends meet.’ He laughed at his own remark. ‘You’re wondering how this began, aren’t you? Quite by accident. I did a broadcast for a colleague who was ill and the editor of this rag heard it and rang me up. I was all for turning down the proposal but Celia wouldn’t have it. That woman is ruining my life.’

‘May I see what you’ve written?’

‘Good heavens, no. You’ve got far better things to do with your time.’

‘I’d like to.’

‘Take them to bed with you then. With luck you’ll fall asleep before you’ve read a single word.’

He gave me a folder full of cuttings.

‘They edit me. They cut bits out. They rewrite sentences. I find it very unsettling. I’ve not been edited since I was an undergraduate. What’s worse, they do it rather well.’

*

I did not sleep much that night. I read what my father had written not once but again and again. As I did so, I began to sense the cause of his anxiety. There was a struggle going on within him, a conflict between the beliefs that had made him a pioneer in nuclear research and something new, a moral position he had reached, I presumed, in the year since we had last met. What had led him to this point I had no idea. If I had never really known my father before, now I knew him even less.

The West had exploded a nuclear device, his argument went, and the world knew that the Russians were racing to build a similar or better weapon. There was talk now of a ‘superweapon’, whose destructive powers were many times greater than those of any atomic device. The dangers the world faced if either side were to explode such a device were too grim to contemplate. We had within our power the ability not only to wreak havoc upon our enemies but upon ourselves as well. We could blow up the world through a never-ending chain reaction, cause the end of civilization, create a poisonous desert after a thermonuclear storm in which life in any form would be unsustainable. The earth would be a poisoned graveyard, hurtling pointlessly through time. Was this to be the legacy of the war to end all wars?

We had harsh choices to make, made harder by the debts we owed to the New World. But choices, however difficult, had to be made if the possibility of a lasting peace, a world for ever freed of conflict, was not to slip out of our grasp. That, surely, was what the sacrifice of the war years had been for.