In the morning we waited for him. Smith had borrowed a room in an annexe outside New Scotland Yard, behind Whitehall on the side opposite my offices. The room smelt of paint, and contained a table, half a dozen shiny pitch-pine chairs, a small desk where a shorthand writer could sit; the walls were bare, except for a band of hat pegs and a map of Italy. I did not know why, but it brought back the vestry of the church where my mother used to go, holding her own through the bankruptcy, still attending parish meetings and committees for sales-of-work.
Smith walked about the room, with his actor’s stride; he was wearing a new elegant suit. Most of the conversation, as we waited, was made by an old acquaintance of mine, a man called Maxwell, whom I had known when I practised at the Common Law Bar. He had just become a detective inspector in the Special Branch. He was both fat and muscular, beautifully poised on small, strong, high-arched feet. His eyes, which were hot and inquisitive, looked from Martin to me. We were both quiet, and apart from a good-morning had not spoken to each other.
To Smith, Martin talked in a matter-of-fact tone, as though this were just another morning. His face was composed, but I thought I noted, running up from eyebrow to temple, a line which had not fixed itself before.
Sawbridge was brought in. He had expected to see Smith but not the rest of us; he stared at Martin; he did not show any fear, but a touch of perplexity, as though this was a social occasion, and he did not know the etiquette.
The smell of paint seemed stronger. I felt the nerves plucking in my elbows.
‘Hallo, old son,’ said Smith in his creaking voice.
‘Are you all right?’ Sawbridge responded. It was the greeting that Martin and I used to hear on midland cricket grounds.
‘Let’s get round the table, shall we?’ said Smith.
We sat down, Smith between Sawbridge and Martin. He shot from one to the other his switched-on, transfiguring smile.
‘You two knew each other before ever you went to Cambridge, didn’t you?’
Sharply Martin said: ‘Oh yes, we peed up against the same wall.’
It might have been another man speaking. I had not heard him false-hearty before; and, as a rule, no one knew better how to wait. Just then, I knew for certain the effort he was making.
In fact, the phrase was intended to recall our old headmaster, who used it as his ultimate statement of social equality. Sawbridge took it at its face value, and grinned.
‘I thought,’ said Captain Smith, ‘that it mightn’t be a bad idea to have another yarn.’
‘What’s the point of it?’
‘Perhaps we shall see the point of it, shan’t we?’
Sawbridge shrugged his shoulders, but Martin held his eye, and began: ‘You knew about how the Canadian stuff was given away?’
‘No more than you do?
‘We’re interested in one or two details.’
‘I’ve got nothing to say about that.’
‘You knew—’ (the man convicted that spring), ‘didn’t you?’
‘No more than you did.’
‘Your ring was independent of that one, was it?’
I could hear that Martin’s opening had been worked out. He was master of himself again, at the same time acute and ready to sit talking for days. To my surprise Sawbridge was willing, though he made his flat denials, to go on answering back. If I had been advising him (I thought, as though I were a professional lawyer again), I should have said: At all costs, keep your mouth shut. But Sawbridge did not mind telling his story.
On the other side there was no pretence that anyone thought him innocent. As in most investigations, Smith kept on assuming that Sawbridge had done it, that it was only necessary for him to admit the facts that Smith produced.
Smith talked to him like an old friend going over anecdotes familiar to them both and well liked. ‘That was the time you took the drawings…’ ‘…but you had met — before, hadn’t you?’… Smith, trying to understand his opponent, had come to have a liking for him — the only one of us to do so.
Even that morning, Smith was fascinated by the discovery he kept making afresh — that, at the identical time when (as Smith repeated, without getting tired of it) Sawbridge was carrying secrets of the Barford project to a contact man, he was nevertheless deeply concerned for its success. He had worked night and day for it; few scientists had been more devoted and wholehearted in their science; such scientific ability as he had, he had put into the common task.
I remembered the night of Luke’s fiasco; it did not matter personally to Sawbridge, and he was not a man who displayed much emotion; but it was he who had been crying.
Smith shook his head, half-gratified, as when one sees a friend repeat an inexplicable oddity; but to Martin it did not seem an oddity at all. Science had its own imperatives; if you were working on a problem, you could not help but crave for it to ‘come out’. If you could be of use yourself it was unnatural not to. It was not Sawbridge alone, but most of the scientific spies who had their own share, sometimes a modestly distinguished share, in producing results which soon after (like Sawbridge, walking to a commonplace street corner, looking for a man with a daily paper) they, as spies, stole away.
All this Martin understood much better than I did. Watching him and Sawbridge facing each other across the table, I could hear them speaking the same language. The two young men stared at each other without expression, with the faces of men who had learned, more deeply than their seniors, to give nothing away. They did not even show dislike. At that moment, there was a cartoon-like resemblance between them, both fair, both blue-eyed: but Sawbridge’s face was heavier than Martin’s and his eyes glaucous instead of bright. Of the two, though at twenty-nine he was three years younger, he looked — although for the first time his expression was bitten into with anxiety — the more unalterable.
Martin’s eyes did not leave him. He could understand much that to me was alien; to do so, one, had to be both a scientist and young. Even a man like Francis Getliffe was set back by the hopes of his youth — whereas Martin by an effort seemed able to throw those hopes away, and accept secrets, spying, the persistence of the scientific drive, the closed mind, the two world-sides, persecution, as facts of life.
How long had it been since he made such an effort? I thought, watching him without sympathy, though once or twice with a pulse of kinship. Was it his hardest?
37: The Lonely Men
I left the room at midday, and saw no more of him for several days, although I knew that he was going on with the interrogation. Irene did not know even that, nor why he was staying so long in London.
One afternoon, while Martin was sitting with Captain Smith and Sawbridge in the paint-smelling room, she had tea with me and asked about him, but casually, without anxiety.
In fact, she showed both enjoyment at his rise to fame, and also that sparkle of ridicule and incredulity which lurks in some high-spirited wives when their men come off. It was much the same incredulity as when she told me that ‘E H’ (Hankins) was at last on the edge of getting married.
‘Caught!’ she said. ‘Of course the old boy can still slip out of it. But he’s getting on, perhaps he’s giving up the unequal struggle.’
Her unrest was past and buried, she was saying — but even so she was not as amused as she sounded. I was thinking that she, to whom marriage had sometimes not seemed so much of a confining bond, regarded it in her old lover with the same finality as her mother might have done. Like most of us, she was more voracious than she admitted to herself; even if he had been a trivial capture, the news of his marriage would have cost her a wrench. As for Hankins — though I listened to the squeal of glee with which she laughed at him, within weeks of being domesticated at last — I felt that she was half-thinking — ‘If I wanted, I should still have time to break it up!’