If he died, he would die a whole man. For in his own mind he faced the death penalty. Although he never mentioned this to anyone, it can hardly have been absent from his mind during these weeks. Actually, he could not have been sentenced to death; he was not charged with treason, which could be a capital offence, but with breaches of the Official Secrets Act. But he did not seem to realize this.
Peierls came away from the visit badly shaken by Fuchs’s revelations. He had given up smoking, but in the next few weeks he started again. To Genia, the revelation that Fuchs had been giving secrets to the Russians since the days when he worked with her husband in Birmingham and lived in their house was painfully wounding. She recalled that growing up in Stalin’s Russia, she had not trusted anyone except her mother and father and sister. During the years since she left Russia, she had learned to trust people.
She sat down and wrote a letter to Fuchs that was heartfelt and reflected hurt. She was literally crying with emotion when she wrote it, so that her tears fell on the paper and dampened it, and Peierls typed out a fresh copy for her to send.
She said in the letter that if he had intended to be a spy, he could have kept himself apart from other people. He did not have to become such close friends with his fellow scientists, to drink with them, dance with them, play with their children. By doing this, he had betrayed them. She said he had done damage to the freedoms they all enjoyed, in two ways: directly, by helping the Soviet Union, as was his intention; and also indirectly, by creating a climate of suspicion. Perhaps he had not thought of what he was doing to his friends.
He must now tell the security authorities who his contacts were, she said, to remove suspicion from other scientists, it is awfully hard, perhaps the hardest thing of all to do,’ she wrote. ‘But you went all the way in one direction, don’t stop half-way now. You are not soft, and not one for the easy way out. You are a mathematician. This problem has no rigorous solution. Try to find the best approximation.’
Her next paragraph was harsher still. She said he could escape by committing suicide, but that would be to leave the mess behind him. His fate did not matter compared with his responsibility.
She concluded: ‘You have burned your God. God help you.’
He replied quickly, writing with a scratchy pen on poor quality prison paper, so that there were blots and smudges. He admitted that he had not thought about the harm he was doing to his friends. ‘I didn’t, and that’s the greatest horror I had to face when I looked at myself. You don’t know what I had done to my own mind. I think I knew what I was doing, and there was this simple thing, obvious to the simplest decent creature, and I didn’t think of it.’ As for suicide, he said he had contemplated it as a way out, but had given it up by the time he was arrested.
He said he had learned to love again, and she had helped him.
His concluding paragraph was on a lighter note: ‘I suppose you would almost enjoy the kind of thing I am learning about here. All these people in their way are kind and decent. Even the chap who apparently made prison his home, with occasional excursions to pick up a few hundred pounds and have a few riotous weeks on them. He grew quite sympathetic when I admitted that I hadn’t made any money out of it. Nothing could shake him from the belief that I had been double-crossed.’
Erna Skinner wrote to him, and he replied, asking the Skinners to try to understand his point of view. These letters have been destroyed — Elaine Skinner burned them after her parents died — but one sentence from Fuchs’s letter to Erna Skinner remains: ‘Some people grow up at 15, some at 38. It is more painful at 38.’
She was shattered by the discovery of what he had been doing, and this undoubtedly contributed to the decline which led to bouts of heavy drinking and a nervous breakdown. When she talked about it, it was in the terms of someone whose world has suddenly been swept away. Once, she said: it was as if a series of horrible murders were committed in a community, and you suddenly found that it was your husband, or your neighbour, or your son, or somebody you trusted just like yourself. It was so unbelievable that once you grasped it, you looked at the world completely differently.’
Then the Peierls went to Brixton together to see Fuchs. They decided beforehand that there were three specific questions to which they wanted answers, and they dropped these into the conversation.
Why had he brought back Kravchenko’s book I Chose Freedom from America as a present for Mrs Peierls? He said he was just curious to know what she would think of it. Why, since he was a spy, did he drink so much, and take the risk of giving away his secret? He said he was sure he could retain his self-control no matter how much he drank.
Most puzzling of all, how could he think of bringing his nephew over from Germany and adopting him? The boy had already had a very disturbed childhood. What effect would it have on him if he came to live with Fuchs and then Fuchs was arrested? Fuchs answered that he had not considered this because he had divided his mind into two compartments, and put all his espionage activities into one compartment, so that they simply did not touch other matters. By way of explanation, he used the phrase he had used in his confession to Skardon (which the Peierls had not yet seen): controlled schizophrenia.
On this and on several other occasions, Fuchs expressed his regret at having deceived his friends, and particularly Henry Arnold. The attachment to Arnold remained, and he assumed that Arnold felt it also. He wrote to Arnold a week after he was arrested:
‘I suppose you must sometimes have felt very lonely during the last few months. If only I had not vacillated at first and made up my mind straight away, everything would have been much easier, and perhaps I might also have saved you some pain. I hope Skardon showed you the document I signed. I wrote it for several people, and you were one of them.’
He went on in the letter to ask Arnold to sell his two cars, the MG and the old car he had driven before, which he had not yet disposed of and which was now being used by someone else at Harwell. He was very precise about details: ‘The new licence for the MG is in one of the pockets beside the dashboard. You might as well go through the various pockets, which contain maps. The Morris may not be licensed, unless Jones has taken one out; if not, it may be necessary to take out a short-term licence. You can of course recover any expense.’
As it happens, a first cousin of Fuchs on his mother’s side, Gisela Wagner, was spending a term at a teacher-training college in Kent, and she visited him in Brixton.
Fuchs appeared in court again on 10 February. This time it was for a preliminary hearing before Sir Laurence Dunne, for the magistrate to decide whether the case would be sent for trial. Representatives of the whole world’s press were present. Fuchs was in the dock, but he was not called upon to say anything. He seemed calm throughout.
By now, he had retained a firm of solicitors, and they had appointed a counsel to defend him, although the defence counsel did not have much to do at the hearing. The prosecutor, Christmas Humphreys, summed up the case against him, drawing on his own confession and the exchanges over the past weeks. Arnold was the first witness. He testified about their recent exchanges, including Fuchs’s admission to him that he had given information to foreign agents.