As a result, I was snubbed. I received by return a letter in Puchwein’s flowing Teutonic script:
‘My friend, that is what I should have called you when Roy Calvert brought us together ten years ago. I realize that in volunteering to be seen with me again you were taking a risk: I am unwilling to be the source of risk to anyone while there is a shred of friendship left. In the life that you and your colleagues are now leading, it is too dangerous to have friends.’
The letter ended:
‘You can do one last thing for me which I hope is neither dangerous for yourself, nor, like your invitation, misplaced charity. Please, if you should see Hanna, put in a word for me. The divorce is going through, but there is still time for her to come back.’
Within a few hours Hanna herself rang up, as though by a complete coincidence, for so far as I knew she had not been near her husband for months. It was the same message as at Barford on New Year’s Day — could she speak to me urgently? I hesitated; caution, suspiciousness, nagged at me — and resentment of my brother. I had to tell myself that, if I could not afford to behave openly, few men could.
In my new flat Hanna sat on the sofa, the sun, on the summer evening still high over Hyde Park, falling across her but leaving her from the shoulders up in shadow. Dazzled, I could still see her eyes snapping, as angrily she asked me: ‘Won’t you stop Martin doing this beastly job?’
I would not begin on those terms.
‘It’s shabby! It’s rotten!’ Her face was crumbled with rage.
‘Look, Hanna,’ I said, ‘you’d better tell me how it affects you.’
‘You ought to stop him out of decency.’
Without replying, I asked about a rumour which I had picked up at Barford: for years Hanna’s name had been linked with that of Rudd, Martin’s first chief. Martin, who knew him well, was sure that she had picked wrong. She was looking for someone to master her; she thought she had found it in Rudd, who to his subordinates was a bully; yet with a woman he would be dependent. I asked, did she intend to marry him?
‘Yes,’ said Hanna.
‘I was afraid so,’ I said.
‘You have never liked him.’
‘That isn’t true.’
‘Martin has never forgiven him.’
‘I wouldn’t mind about that,’ I said, ‘if he were right for you.’
‘Why isn’t he right for me?’
‘You still think you’d like some support?’
‘Oh, God, yes!’
‘You had to bolster up Kurt for years, and now you’re going to do the same again.’
‘Somehow I can make it work,’ she said, with an obstinate toss of her head.
She was set on it: it was useless, and unkind, to say more.
‘That is,’ she said, ‘if Martin will let me marry him without doing him harm.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that it may be fatal to anyone at Barford to have a wife with my particular record.’
She seemed to be trying to say: ‘I want this man. It’s my last chance. Let me have him.’ But she was extraordinarily inhibited about speaking from the heart. Both she and Irene, whom the wives at Barford envied for their sophistication, could have taken lessons from a good many of those wives in the direct emotional appeal. Anger, Hanna could express without self-consciousness, but not much else.
I asked if Rudd knew of her political past. Yes, she said. I told her (it was the only reassurance I could give her) that I had not heard her name in any discussion at Barford.
‘Whose names have you heard?’
I told her no more than she already knew.
‘Why don’t you drag Martin out of the whole wretched business?’
I did not reply.
‘I suppose he has decided that persecution is a paying line.’
Again I did not reply.
‘If you will forgive a Jew for saying so,’ she said with a bitter grin, ‘it seems rather like St Paul going in the opposite direction.’
She went on: ‘Does Martin know that he has been converted the wrong way round?’
Just then the rays of the sun, which had declined to the tops of the trees, began streaming into her eyes, and I drew the curtains across the furthest window. As I glanced at her, her face was open and bleached, as many faces are in anger, grief, pain.
She cried: ‘Is there no way of shifting him?’
Then she said: ‘Do you know, Lewis, I could have had him once.’
It might be true, I was thinking. When he had been at his unhappiest over Irene, in the first year at Barford — then perhaps Hanna could have taken him away. She threw back her neat small head, with a look that seemed most of all surprised. She said something more; she had considered him for herself; but turned him down because she had not thought him strong enough. Intelligent but lacking insight, with a strong will that had so long searched for a stronger, she had never been able to help underrating the men she met, especially those of whom she got fond. It came to her with consternation, almost with shame, that, now her will had come up in earnest against Martin’s, she, who in the past had thought him pliable, did not stand a chance. She was outraged by his behaviour, and yet in her anger and surprise she wished that when they first met she had seen him with these fresh eyes.
She made another attack on me.
‘He cannot like what he is doing,’ she said. ‘It cannot be good for him.’
She turned full on me, when I was sitting near the window with my back to the sunlight.
‘I always thought you were more heavyweight than he was — but that he was the finer man.’
Making her last attempt, she was using that oblique form of flattery, which delights a father by telling him how stupid he is compared to his son. But for once it had no effect. I had no room for any thoughts but two.
The first was, the time would have to come when Martin and I faced each other.
The second — it was so sharp that it dulled even the prospect of a final quarrel — was nothing but suspicion, the sharp-edged, pieces-fitting-together, unreal suspicion of one plumped in the room where a crime had taken place. How did Hanna know so much of Martin’s actions? What was she after? How close was she really to Puchwein nowadays? Was their separation a blind?
In that brilliance of suspicion, one lost one’s judgement altogether. Everything seemed as probable, as improbable, as anything else. It seemed conceivable, that afternoon, that Hanna had lived years of her life in a moment-by-moment masquerade, more complete than any I had heard of. If one had to live close to official secrets (or, what sounded different but produced the same effect, to a crime of violence) one knew what it must be like to be a paranoiac. The beautiful detective-story spider-web of suspicion, the facts of everyday clearer-edged than they have ever been, no glue of sense to stick them in their place.
That evening, each action of Puchwein’s and Hanna’s for years past, stood out with a double interpretation — on one hand, the plunging about of wilful human beings, on the other, the master cover of spies. The residue of sense pulled me down to earth, and yet, the suspicions rearranged themselves — silly, ingenious, unrealistic, exciting, feelingless.
36: A Cartoon-like Resemblance
The same evening that Hanna visited me, Martin was talking to Captain Smith. Sawbridge was called by telephone some hours later, and ‘invited to a conference’, which was Smith’s expression, on the following day. Smith rang me up also; he wanted me there for the first morning (he assumed that the interrogation would go on for days) in order to retrace once more the facts of how Sawbridge first entered Barford.
In past interrogations Smith had questioned Sawbridge time and again about his movements, for those days and hours when Smith was certain (though he could not prove it in a court) that Sawbridge had walked down a street in Birmingham, watched for a man carrying two evening papers, exchanged a word, given over his information; and this, or something close to it, had happened not once but three times, and possibly four.