Fuchs’s conscience was anything but dormant; Arnold was making the mistake that many people make, of assuming that because another person’s conscience dictates a different message, it is not speaking at all. None the less, Arnold’s conception of his task could have been tailor-made to fit Fuchs. For at this time the possibility was just beginning to enter Fuchs’s mind that there might be a conflict between his friendships and his espionage. He was becoming vulnerable to the tug of ‘individual loyalty and affection’ that might pull him away from his service to the Soviet Union.
Arnold cultivated Fuchs’s friendship. He and his wife invited him over to dinner a few times, and after Fuchs moved into his house on the site Arnold took to dropping in on him for a cup of coffee. He would often be at the Rennies’, whose prefab was also a frequent stop on his rounds, and he would say, ‘Do you happen to know whether Klaus is at home?’
Marjorie Rennie would look out of the window and say, ‘Well, there’s smoke coming from his chimney so I suppose he is.’
‘I think I’ll drop in and see how he’s getting along,’ he would say.
Fuchs still used to become ill with coughs, and several times when he did he stayed at the Skinners’. He would be silent and depressed, and sometimes would not eat the meals that Erna Skinner would take up to his bedroom. On one of these occasions, when he had been ill for some days, she suddenly said to him, ‘I think you’re perfectly all right. What’s the use of lying around here?’ He replied, ‘Well, if you think so, I’ll go to work.’ And he did.
On medical advice, he went into hospital for an investigation, to see if the doctors could find some physical cause for these coughs, but they could not find any.
In the summer of 1949 he went on holiday with the Skinners, travelling by car around the South of France and Northern Italy, moving all the time. Fuchs had one of his coughs some of the time and at one point Elaine, the Skinners’ daughter, dropped his bottle of cough medicine so that it broke. He made light of it, but Erna Skinner, ever protective, was furious with her daughter.
In the close, gossipy world of Harwell, the rumour started to go around that Fuchs and Erna Skinner were lovers. There was no longer the presumption about Fuchs of neutered innocence that there had been at Los Alamos, although one woman’s reaction on hearing the rumour was: ‘Nonsense! Klaus has got about as much sex as a kipper.’
In fact, Fuchs and Erna Skinner went away for a weekend together at least once, to a hotel in Maidenhead. Curiously, although Fuchs signed the register ‘K. Fuchs and wife’, they took separate rooms. If they did have an affair, it seems unlikely that Fuchs took the lead. He seemed to have suppressed his sexual feelings, and he would not relish the risk of being found out, with the pain it might cause his friend, Herbert Skinner, and the complications that might ensue. He was not adventurous in this way; he was not a spy because he enjoyed taking risks.
One evening, Fuchs and the Skinners drove to Oxford to see the film The Third Man. Fuchs was very impressed with this film, set in postwar Vienna, with its picture of corruption and moral ambiguity, touching the emotions at several levels, the work of director Carol Reed and author Graham Greene. He went back to the Skinners’ house for a nightcap, and Erna said how much she liked the catchy zither tune that runs through the film. The next morning she got up late. She was having a bath when she heard the Third Man tune coming from downstairs. Fuchs had driven into Abingdon first thing in the morning and bought the record, and then come back and gone straight to the Skinners’ house and put it on the record player. He was capable of charming, even galant gestures like this.
He could also express friendship at a deeper level. In 1949 the Peierls’ fourth child was born, and they were distressed to discover, when the baby girl was a few weeks old, that she was a dwarf. Fuchs drove up to Birmingham right away, without telephoning in advance. He had little to say and nothing to do, but they felt warmth and support in his presence.
While Fuchs’s professional and social life were proceeding on an even keel, a turmoil was developing inside his mind. He was having doubts about his political faith.
Russia was consolidating its grip over Eastern Europe, and it had crushed a genuine parliamentary democracy in Czechoslovakia. The Soviet purge and the Moscow show trials of the 1930s were being repeated in Prague, Budapest, Warsaw and Sofia. The repressive nature of Stalin’s rule inside the Soviet Union was becoming more clear to many people in the West now that the rosy glow of gratitude for the Soviet war effort was no longer so dazzling.
Fuchs had to admit to himself that he now disapproved of some policies of the Soviet Union and the Communist Parties. The world seemed a very different place from what it was when he braved Nazi violence alongside party comrades on the streets in Kiel; indeed, the world was a different place, and his own world was very different indeed. He was like a man who marries too young, and finds himself in middle age trapped by the tastes and the lifestyle he adopted in his youth, which no longer suit him.
His doubts were inhibiting. He could not help the Russians as wholeheartedly as he had been doing. He started withholding information from them, no longer telling them every single thing that could be useful.
As many people do, he was reading the newspapers and giving his mental approval and disapproval, in varying degrees, to the actions of governments. But he was acting on these judgements. As he began to disapprove more and more of Soviet actions, he reduced the services he was providing for them, as a parent may reduce the flow of chocolates or other goodies to a child who behaves badly.
Fuchs’s doubts were not only about world politics. He was not an outsider now but a part of the Harwell community. As a division leader and a member of several administrative committees, he was one of the people responsible for guiding its course and holding it together. This was his community now, one he felt pleased and proud to belong to. Giving away its secrets was no longer simply a blow against a political enemy; it was betrayal on a personal level.
The ties he was feeling now were not only to Harwell. Independently of his opinion of the British system of government, and perhaps even in contradiction to it, he was coming to feel a deep affection for Britain and the British way of life, which Harwell seemed to represent quintessentially.
The country that evoked his affection, the Britain of the 1940s, was different from today’s Britain, more starchy, more class-ridden, less colourful, but also characterized by a strong sense of decency and fairness, to a degree that foreigners often found remarkable and commented upon. This was manifested in unspectacular ways, such as queuing in an orderly way for buses with each person taking his turn, and a concern for fair play at sporting events, and, intangibly, in personal relations. What this means can best be shown by examples. Here are two incidents, both told by people who, like Fuchs, came to Britain from abroad, and found the incident worth recalling later.
One is told by the Hungarian writer Paul Ignotus. He was a recent arrival in Britain at the time of the German air raids on British cities in 1940. He stood at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park one day, and watched while a Government speaker explained to the crowd how to behave if they found a German airman from a bomber that had been shot down. He said they should call the police at once, and that they should not talk to him or do anything until the authorities took charge of him, and should not even offer him a cup of tea. One woman spoke up in protest. ‘That’s inhuman,’ she said. ‘My son is in the RAF, and I know how he would suffer if he weren’t given a cup of tea if the Jerries brought him down.’ A few others in the crowd spoke up in her support.[15]