Red Joan (26 page)

‘No.' She walks to the door and opens it, glancing back only briefly to witness him stubbing out his cigarette on the windowsill and flicking it outside. Her whole body trembles as she steps into the corridor, closing the door behind her. How long has she been in there? What on earth will Max think she has been doing?

She hurries down the corridor and as she gets to the meeting-room door Max flings it open. ‘What happened to you? I was beginning to think you'd drowned.' He sniffs. ‘Have you been smoking in the toilet?'

‘I was just . . . ' Joan falters. She feels dizzy, as if teetering on the edge of a great precipice. Max looks at her, his expression turning from incredulous to amused and then softening into something else entirely. He holds out his hand to her. It is a small gesture, nothing much, but to Joan it feels like a hand reaching over a cliff, offering to tug her up. She takes his hand and squeezes it.

‘It doesn't matter. We're about to start.'

P
reparing Exhibit A,' Ms. Hart announces for the video recorder.
‘Can't we just wrap this up now?' Nick asks. ‘She's already told you everything you need to hear. We went through it all yesterday. They asked and she said no. Twice.'

Ms. Hart ignores Nick. She takes a thin document out of her folder and Joan registers a flicker of triumph in the movement. It is happening now. They're producing their trump card. She can see it in Mr. Adams' expression and in Ms. Hart's eagerness.

Joan stands up. She needs to see the document before Nick does. She needs to know what it is.

‘Please sit down.' Ms. Hart's voice is loud and stern. ‘I'm passing Exhibit A to the accused,' she announces, directing her voice towards the microphone and holding the piece of paper out to Joan.

She takes it and holds it against her chest, shielding it from view while she puts on her reading glasses. She has to squint to make out the words. The document is dated 2 September 1945 and is rather laboriously entitled
Fluctuations in the Efficiency of a Diffusion Plant, Parts I–IV.
Nick stands up and goes to read over her shoulder but Joan quickly folds the paper over.

‘Well?' Ms. Hart asks.

‘Well what?'

‘Do you recognise it? Does it mean anything to you?'

Joan is silent for a moment. ‘No,' she says at last.

Ms. Hart acts as if she has not heard Joan's response. She picks up the file and points to the document. ‘This report was produced by the Cambridge division of Tube Alloys in 1945. It was classified material at the time. And somehow it found its way to a KGB file in Moscow, attributed to Agent Lotto.'

‘Who's Agent Lotto?' Nick asks.

Joan does not look up, but she feels Ms. Hart's eyes scrutinising her response. ‘We have identified this intelligence as having originated from you,' Ms. Hart continues. ‘It's come to us rather late, smuggled out of the country by an ex-KGB operative who brought these to the British Security Services as a condition of our assistance in enabling his defection. He copied out hundreds of files by hand and hid them under the floorboards of his dacha in the countryside outside Moscow. Dedicated, wouldn't you say?'

Silence. Joan's lungs pulse inside her.

‘And by a stroke of luck, yours was one of them. Agent Lotto. There is plenty here to ensure a conviction. Enough, certainly.'

Joan opens her mouth to deny it but then changes her mind. Never excuse, never explain; Leo's long-ago words echo in her mind, offering a dim glimmer of hope. ‘Surely there must be some question over the reliability of documents taken from a KGB defector.'

‘We trust him,' Mr. Adams interjects. ‘Absolutely.'

‘But it's not admissible as evidence, is it? You couldn't use this in court, even if you did know who Agent Lotto was.' Joan indicates the document she is holding, and tries to appear dismissive. ‘It doesn't even say much. You can't build a bomb from this.'

She glances at Nick hoping for some verification of this point, but Nick is not looking at her. He has taken the folder from Ms. Hart and his eyes are scanning the index of documents.

Ms. Hart does not flinch. ‘That's not the point. It was classified material. And it's not the only one. As you can see, there's plenty more where that came from.' Ms. Hart indicates the file in Nick's hands. ‘There are four more folders just like that, all attributed to Agent Lotto.'

‘But Agent Lotto could be anyone. It could be twenty different people.' Joan makes another silent appeal to Nick, wanting him to say something, anything, but he does not look at her. He is turning the pages of the file now, slowly and deliberately, the sudden pallor of his face contrasting with the flush of his neck.

‘I've told you already. Our source is completely reliable. We know for a fact that there are identical copies of these files stored in the KGB archives.' There is a pause. Ms. Hart stands up and gestures to Mr. Adams to do the same. ‘Coffee?'

‘Right. Yes.'

‘We'll resume in thirty minutes, and when we do I'll ask you again if you recognise the document you're holding. I would advise you to think carefully about your answer.'

Mr. Adams switches off the video recorder and follows Ms. Hart outside, shutting the door behind him.

There is a clock on the mantelpiece and Joan can hear the soft whirr of time passing. She pulls her cardigan more tightly around her. She understands now why William did what he did. He must have thought he didn't stand a chance. There is such a weight of evidence in this one file alone. She thinks of Ms. Hart's declaration at the beginning, that the charges carry a maximum of fourteen years in prison. Her mind is drawn to the sleeping tablets in the bathroom, and she imagines herself swallowing one handful after another, and the thought is almost comforting.

She closes her eyes. She knows she cannot do that. She hears Nick turning the pages of the file. She could still insist that she has never seen these documents before. After all, she has not admitted to anything. Not really. But if she does try to deny it, what next? Presumably they would take her to court and put her on trial, opening up her whole life to public scrutiny. She would have to stand in the dock and continue to deny everything, even when presented with exhibit after exhibit such as the one she has just seen. There would be a judge and a jury, witnesses, policemen, journalists.

And Nick would have to watch. Would he defend her, she wonders, if it came to it? Would he stand beside her, as he has done for so many others in his career, and speak on her behalf? Of course he would, if he believed it was the right thing to do. But would he do it if he believed Joan had done what they say she has?

She does not know. And, in any case, it is too much to ask. She can imagine the headlines if they made the link between her and Nick.
QC's mother revealed as a Soviet spy.
It would be the end of his career. It is her duty to protect her son, not the other way round, and as she sees it, there is only one way to avoid a long, drawn-out trial with all the media attention it would inevitably attract.

‘You did this, didn't you?' Nick whispers. ‘You did this.'

‘Shhh,' Joan says, her hands patting the air in front of her in a nervous gesture. Her whole body is clenched with fear.

‘I don't believe it.' His voice is suddenly tight, and the beam of his gaze is like a bright white searchlight falling coldly across Joan's chest. ‘I don't believe it. How could you?'

She looks down at the carpet. She still cannot say the words. She has a sudden thought that if she could only explain her reasons, then maybe he would understand and it wouldn't seem such a terrible thing to have done. At least it would be explicable.

‘Why? Why would you do it?' His face is incredulous now as the enormity of the accusation sinks in. The flush of his neck has risen to his face and Joan sees that there are tears glistening in his eyes. Real tears this time, not just a hint of them as there was before.

Joan looks away. How to explain it? She has a theory that everyone has a certain view of themselves, of what they would do and what they would not do in any given circumstance, and it is the combination of these choices that makes up a personality. Take Nick, for instance. What if he had been drafted into the German army in 1942, stationed in Auschwitz—terrible to think of it—and told that all he had to do was flick this switch on, wait perhaps twenty minutes, and then switch it off again? Oh yes, he's a brave man. Braver than most. Joan can imagine his outrage if she were to suggest this. He'd say that he would have stood up against them, sacrificing himself if need be, adding himself to the list.

And maybe he would have sacrificed himself. People did. Some people. But most didn't.

So how about we introduce a few ambiguities. What if doing it meant that his boys would be kept safe—Joan can picture them both—with their shocks of blond-brown hair and big breathless smiles, plasterings of mud on their little knees. Not enough? His mother, old and in need of care. His wife Briony? A cousin? A second cousin?

Too remote?

Okay, so maybe he'd be less certain now, but he'd still be adamant that a loophole could be found. Maybe—ah-ha—maybe he would have done it just until he found that loophole. Perhaps he would offer a moment of kindness to some of the people in that camp, extra rations, conversation, a smile of encouragement, and he might start to tell himself that this made up in some small way for the flicking of that switch. A gasp of humanity in this cold, bleak forest where even the birds refuse to sing. He might have found that he could turn off the guilt he felt, tune it out.

What did Milgram call this? The Perils of Obedience. Something like that.

Because whatever else that experiment showed, it also showed that it can be hard to hold onto the things you thought you knew about yourself, the things that seem so definite when there is nothing there to test them. Real life is not that simple. There are endless ambiguities. Impossible to be certain of the things you would do and the things you would not do.

‘Why?' he asks again. His expression is pleading, vulnerable, as if he is willing his mother to tell him something other than what he believes, to proclaim that of course she has never seen any of the documents in the file before and it's all a huge misunderstanding, and that she has a committee meeting to get to. Behind his shoulder is a row of old school photographs, brought over from Australia by Joan and now a source of amusement to his sons whenever they come to visit. The frames are dusty and tired-looking, but the boy grinning out from the pictures is young and optimistic and full of energy, growing older picture by picture, smarter and more confident each year. There is one of Nick leaving school, one at his graduation, his nose burnt from having spent the previous day at a students' march in Sydney, one of him being called to the Bar in London, dressed in a wig and gown and looking mildly embarrassed. Tell me, Joan thinks, tell me you wouldn't have done the same in my position.

But she will not say this. Because the only way you can tell the absolute truth is to tell it fast and tell it straight. Never excuse, never explain. Leo was right.

Joan looks up at her son, wishing with every cell of her body that there was something else she could say right now. But there isn't, and so, very softly, she whispers a single word. ‘Hiroshima.'

 

The first test of the atomic bomb takes place in America during the height of summer in 1945, not long after the conclusion of hostilities in Europe. It explodes just before dawn into a cloudless sky, and even from twenty miles away the light it produces is astounding, a ball of energy hovering above the plain, dwarfing the distant mountains and mushrooming smoke into the night sky.

‘They've done it,' Max announces that afternoon after the news has been cabled to him and he has called everyone into his room for a meeting. ‘The Yanks have done it.'

It is no surprise that the Americans have got there first, but the response to the news in the laboratory is a collective gasp. Not surprise exactly, but astonishment, or perhaps pride, to discover that it works—it actually works!—and that it is possible, after all, to create power from nothing, or from very little. It is not an exaggeration to say that something new has arrived on the planet, rewriting all the basic precepts of science in the process, and it is an incredible thing to know that they and their American counterparts have brought it into being. It is the Creation story rewritten for modern times. Let there be light! And it is so, at the press of a button. No other process has such efficiency, or such potential. But potential for what?

Joan turns to look outside and sees a thin sheet of cloud wafting across the deep, dark blue of the sky. The light emitted by the explosion is said to be brighter than the sun, but here, in Cambridge, house martins flit from branch to branch in the tree below the window. It seems so peaceful that it is almost incredible to believe that an explosion of such magnitude has taken place just across the ocean. How can something so big leave so little trace? It is not a thought she has had before, not at any time during the war when there were countless air raids and explosions that might have prompted it, and this was just a test bomb. Nobody was actually hurt. No homes were destroyed, no livelihoods erased. So why does this one above all others cause her heart to slow as if it is pulsing treacle?

Donald is the first to address Max. ‘What now then?'

Max's expression is still incredulous. ‘They'll use it on Japan, I suppose.'

Joan looks up with a start. ‘But they won't just drop it on them, will they? I mean, they'd have to be warned. It's supposed to be a deterrent, isn't it?'

He shrugs. ‘But we're at war. There's not much opportunity for a chat.'

The curtness of his response surprises Joan. It is not what she expected from him. Gentle, thoughtful Max, who she often catches quietly watching her while she works, who tells her he loves her and then refuses to kiss her because she deserves more than that, who can make her giggle like a child. ‘Of course there is,' she says, and her voice is louder than normal. ‘They could stage another demonstration and invite Japan, and that would give them the chance to surrender.'