So, in the autumn of 1945, Bevill was listening to the scientists, hearing Mounteney’s minority opinion, trotting round the corner to the Treasury with Rose. It was on one of his committee afternoons, the technical sub-committee which I did not attend, that Irene came up with Martin for the day. On this committee Martin had a place as well as Luke, and as I took Irene out through the Park, in the foggy afternoon, to tea, I pointed up to a window whose lights streamed out into the whirling white.
‘There they are,’ I said.
‘Busy as beavers,’ said Irene.
She was smiling with a tenderness unusual in her. Perhaps she felt the safety we all snuggle in, when someone about whom we worry is for a couple of hours securely locked away. Certainly she was gratified that he was up there, in the lighted room, among the powerful. Had her prediction — ‘I should like to know what you expect from him now’ — been nothing more than hitting out at random? She had not seen him that night at Stratford; she showed no concern for what he might be planning.
Although she had been behind him in his outburst, had quarrelled with me so bitterly that we had not been reconciled till that afternoon, she nevertheless, with a superb inconsistency, had blotted all that out and now simmered with content because he was ‘getting on’.
But her smile, tender, coming from within, held more than that.
‘I love the fog, don’t you?’ she said. She said a little more: and I realized that this scene of subfusc grandeur, the back of Whitehall with window lights tumbling out in the fog of St James’s Park, at first lay heavy on her mind, as though there were a name she had forgotten and yet was lurking near her tongue, and then suddenly lifted, to let rise a memory not so grand but full of mellowing joy: another foggy afternoon years before, a street in Bayswater, the high shabby genteel houses, the joy of a childhood autumn.
Under a lamp in the Mall, I looked at her, and thought I had never seen her face so happy. Her youth was going, she still had her dash, she still looked a strapping, reckless woman — and on her mouth was a tender, expectant, astonished smile. I wonder if she had smiled so before she began her adventures. I wondered if she had come to the end of them, if she were what she called ‘settled down’?
How would she take it, when that end came? I had not yet seen a woman, or a man either, who had lived a life of sexual adventure, give it up without a bitter pang that the last door had clanged to. Nevertheless, I had a suspicion that she might struggle less than most. I did not believe that she was, in the elemental sense, passionate. There were many reasons which sent people off on their sexual travels, and sheer passion was one of the less common. If you were searching for a woman moved by passion, you would be more likely to find her in someone like Mary Pearson, who had not been to bed with a man except her husband. Of these two, it was not Mary Pearson, it was Irene, who had racketed so long, it was she who would in the long run, and not unwillingly, give way to age and put her feet up with a sigh.
If that day came, I wondered — walking through the fog, taking her to tea as a sign that there was peace between us — whether she and I would at last cease to grate on each other? Was that walk through the Park a foretaste? I had not noticed her restlessness, she spoke as though she trusted me, remembering in the sight of the lighted window a spate of joy which seemed, as such joys of memory seem to us all, like the intimation of a better life from which we have been inexplicably cut off.
31: Situation Designed for a Clear Head
On New Year’s Eve, just as the Whitehall lamps were coming out, Bevill sent for me. The room which had been found for him as chairman was at the end of the passage, and even more unpretentious than his room as Minister; Bevill did not grumble, he had never in his life grumbled at a minor slight, he settled there and called it his ‘hutch’. But that afternoon, as soon as I entered, I saw his face heavily flushed, with an angry blood pressure flush that one did not often see in so spare a man, the relics of grey hair twisted over his head so that he looked like a ferocious cockatoo.
Rose was sitting with him, arms folded, unaffected except that the pouches under his eyes seemed darker.
‘This is a nasty one,’ Rose was saying. ‘Yes, it is a distinctly nasty one.’
‘The swine,’ said Thomas Bevill.
‘Well, sir,’ said Rose, ‘it means some publicity that we could do without, but we can cope with that.’
‘It knocks the feet from under you, that’s what it does,’ said Bevill. In the war, whatever the news was like, he had been eupeptic, sturdily hopeful — not once rattled as he was that afternoon.
He turned to me, his eyes fierce, bewildered.
‘Captain Hook’s just been in,’ he said.
‘Captain Hook’ was his name — partly one of his nursery jokes, partly for secrecy’s sake — for Smith, the retired naval captain, the chief of the security branch. ‘One of your scientists has been giving us away to the Russians. A chap who’s just come back from Canada. They’re going to put him inside soon, but it’s locking the stable door after the horse is lost.’
I asked who it was.
‘I didn’t get the name. One of your Cambridge men.’ Bevill said it accusingly, as though I were responsible for them all.
Rose told me that it was a man who had at no time been employed at Barford.
‘That isn’t the half of it,’ said Bevill. ‘There’s another of them at least who they’re waiting for. They oughtn’t to have to wait,’ he burst out. ‘We’re too soft, any other country in the world would have risked a bit of injustice! Sometimes I think we shall go under just because we put too high a price on justice. I tell you that, Rose, though I don’t want it to go outside this room.’ He said to me: ‘This chap’s still knocking about at Barford now. He’s a young chap called Sawbridge. Do you know him?’
‘A little,’ I said.
‘Is he English?’ said Bevill.
‘As English as I am,’ I said.
The blood was still heavy in Bevill’s temples, as he shook his head.
‘I can’t understand it.’
He shook his head again. ‘I don’t want to set up as better than anyone else, and I can understand most things at a pinch. I expect we’ve all thought of murder, haven’t we?’ said the old man, who as a rule looked so mild. He went on, forgetting his nursery prattle, and speaking like a Hanoverian. ‘As for rape and’ — he listed the vices of the flesh — ‘anyone could do them.’
Hector Rose said, surprisingly: ‘We’re none of us spotless.’
‘But as for giving away your country, I can’t understand it,’ said Bevill. ‘I could have done the other things, but I couldn’t have done that.
‘I don’t want to put the clock back,’ he said. ‘But if it were in my hands, I should hang them. I should hang them in Trafalgar Square.’
At Barford next day, Bevill himself sat in with Captain Smith as he broke the news to the leading scientists one by one. He interviewed them, not in Drawbell’s office, but his secretary’s, sitting on typing stools among the hooded typewriters and dictaphones; sometimes I was called in to hear the same half-explanations, the same half-questions.
It was only Drawbell, sitting alone with me during the morning, who let out a spontaneous cry. This was the first day of 1946, which in Drawbell’s private calendar marked the last stage of the plutonium process, with luck the last year of plain Mr Drawbell. He had to complain to somebody, and he cried out: ‘This isn’t the kind of New Year’s gift I bargained for!’