by Simon Mawer
‘Exactly.’
Thought seemed difficult, as though demanding more strength than she possessed. Like trying to run when waist-deep in water. ‘How do you know about Clément Pelletier?’
‘Dr Pelletier has long been known to us.’
‘But how do you know that I know him?’
‘It has come to our attention in the course of events.’
‘But how, Major Fawley? How exactly has it come to your attention?’
The man smiled benignly. ‘You were put through the cards, Miss Sutro. Inquiries were made about your background, your contacts, whom you know and have known. The security people can be very thorough. You must understand these things by now.’
‘Perhaps I’m just beginning to. So what exactly would be the purpose of my contacting Dr Pelletier? Assuming that I were to go to Paris?’
‘We would like you to take a letter to him. Of course we can’t expect you to carry an ordinary letter in an envelope. Instead, we have a rather special letter.’ He reached into a pocket and took out a leather wallet. From inside this he took a key, an ordinary key that might have opened a front door lock. He handed it to her. ‘I imagine you carry a key ring of some kind? When you go to France, ensure that this key is on it.’
She held the thing between thumb and forefinger. ‘It’s just a key.’
Fawley shook his head. ‘Not just a key. You see the maker’s name, Lapreche?’
‘Of course I can see it.’
‘Well, if you file the metal down at the letter “R” you’ll find a small cavity. In the eye of the letter. You need to do it carefully but I’m sure that a person of Dr Pelletier’s ingenuity is quite capable. Inside that cavity – it’s less than two millimetres across – is what we call a microdot. Maybe you are already familiar with such things? A piece of photographic film little bigger than a full stop.’
She turned the key over in her hand. It shone in the light, a bright silver. LAPRECHE. However close she looked, there was no sign that it had been tampered with.
‘Under a microscope the microdot will reveal itself as a letter from a certain Professor Chadwick. I can assure you that Professor Chadwick is a most important person in the world of science.’
She looked from one man to the other. ‘I know perfectly well who Professor Chadwick is.’
‘Of course you do.’
‘So why me? If it’s only a matter of sending a letter from Professor Chadwick, couldn’t any agent of yours have done it? You must have people working for you in Paris.’
‘Perhaps we do. However, the letter invites Dr Pelletier to come to England—’
‘It does what?’
‘—which is where you come in. We thought you might be more persuasive than a mere letter. I believe – forgive me if I’m wrong – that there is a degree of fondness between you and Dr Pelletier.’
She felt the colour rise in her cheeks. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Just what I say. Fondness.’
‘Yes, he was fond of me. Like a brother.’
The man continued in his placid, inquisitorial manner. There was something of the barrister about him, carefully cross-questioning a witness, asking the questions in his own time, never being deflected from his purpose. ‘Dr Pelletier wrote to you when you were away at school, didn’t he?’
‘How on earth do you know that?’
‘In most affectionate terms.’
‘I asked how you knew.’ She felt a burst of rage. Ned, she thought. Her own brother betraying her confidences. And then another possibility dawned. ‘The nuns. You’ve spoken to the nuns.’
Colonel Peters shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He looked like a reluctant witness to an unpleasant surgical intervention. Fawley leaned forward and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘I believe the good Sisters were under the impression that Dr Pelletier was your uncle. That, apparently, is what you told them. Although when they consulted your parents—’
‘They did what?’
The man allowed a sympathetic smile to escape. ‘It seems that we are not the only ones to have made enquiries about you, Miss Sutro.’
‘The nuns checked with my parents? Is that what you are saying?’
‘Dear old Oncle Clément offering kisses to his beloved niece seems a different thing from an unrelated man, no relation and only a few years her senior, doing the same. Doesn’t it?’
Je t’embrasse. She recalled the thrill of reading his words, and the image that she clung to in the cloistered confines of the convent. ‘His letters stopped. I thought he’d grown tired of writing—’
‘So I imagine.’
Understanding dawned, like a revelation: ‘The nuns kept them from me. They stole them.’
Fawley removed his spectacles and polished them with a large, white handkerchief. ‘Miss Sutro, what the nuns did or didn’t do with regard to one of their flock is no concern of mine. And believe me, it is no concern of mine what your relationship may or may not have been with Dr Pelletier three years ago, except as far as it might help us. But you do seem uniquely placed to assist us in our efforts to get Dr Pelletier to come to England, don’t you?’
She didn’t know whether to be angry or not. She didn’t know what to say. She felt bewildered, almost violated, as though people had been discovered ransacking her room, going through her private possessions. Thieves in the night. ‘What work is Clément doing? Why in God’s name is this so important?’
Fawley looked sympathetic. ‘If I knew the answer to that question, Miss Sutro, I couldn’t possibly tell you.’
IX
‘The nuns, Maman.’
‘Which nuns, my dear?’ As though there were whole flocks of them out walking round the city.
‘The nuns at school, of course.’
Crows. That’s what they used to call them. ‘Look out, a crow’s coming,’ they’d say, and hurry to hide whatever illicit thing they were doing, reading a forbidden book in all probability. Or writing a secret letter.
‘What about them?’
‘Did they contact you about Clément? About how he used to write to me?’
Her mother looked vague. Marian knew that look, the expression of someone wondering whether to remember or not. ‘I believe they did. I got a rather concerned letter from Sister Mary Joseph. She asked … Oh, I don’t recall. She asked, is he Marian’s uncle? Or something like that. And I replied, no of course not, whatever gave you that idea? But he is a family friend, and how can there be any harm in a family friend writing to you? That’s what I said.’
‘That’s what you said?’
‘Of course, my darling. Why on earth are you asking about all this? It was ages ago, when you were a child. You’re anything but a child now, it seems. These days people grow up so fast. It’s the war, I suppose.’
‘They stole his letters to me, do you know that? The damned nuns stole my letters!’
‘Please don’t use that kind of language, darling. All this military service has made you coarse. And whatever the Sisters did would have been in your own best interests.’
She didn’t know whether to argue. A year ago she would have. A year ago she would have exploded in a great burst of anger. Now she merely shrugged. ‘I’m going up to London tomorrow,’ she said.
‘But you’ve only just come home. Always rushing around. I don’t know what’s going on. Is it that French boy?’
‘It’s nothing to do with him. It’s Ned. I’m going to see Ned.’
X
‘Fawley.’
Ned kicked ineffectually at a stone. ‘What about him?’
They’d abandoned his flat for the garden in the centre of the square. She didn’t want to be inside. She didn’t want to be cooped up, trapped. She wanted to be out in the open where she could breathe fresh air. She needed to breathe deeply, to let anger out and something resembling calm take its place.
‘So you do know him?’
‘I’ve met him.’
‘How? When?’
; ‘He was involved with Kowarski and von Halban, getting them out of France in 1940.’
‘So who is he? And why is he so interested in Clément?’
‘It’s to do with the war effort.’
‘Everything’s to do with the war effort, Ned. You’re to do with the war effort, I’m to do with the war effort. You’ve got to be a child or a geriatric not to be.’ She looked round at the garden, stripped of railings, its lawns dug up and given over to growing vegetables. ‘Even this bloody garden is to do with the war effort.’
‘Squirrel, you’ve learned to swear. It’s not very ladylike.’
‘I’m not ladylike. They knocked the lady out of me in Scotland. They taught me how to kill, Ned. Do you realise that?’ Her voice rose. ‘Do you?’
‘I suppose that’s part of the training. Why should it only be men who are taught to kill?’
She looked at him. Once she would have entrusted him with her life; now matters weren’t so clear-cut. She didn’t know him any more, that was the problem. The Ned of old was like a childhood memory – uncertain, distorted by time. ‘This man Fawley paid me a visit and all he did was speak about Clément. What’s so important about Clément, Ned? That’s what I want to know. For God’s sake, Fawley and his henchman came all the way to Oxford to proposition me. They’ve set themselves up as some alternative to the organisation that has recruited and trained me.’ She felt herself hovering between tears and anger, wavering like something balanced on a fulcrum with only two ways to go, both of which involved falling. ‘I’ve got no idea what the hell’s going on, and no means of finding out. These people are asking me to do something for them and I want to know what it’s all about. You know and you’re not telling me. Christ alive, I’m your sister, Ned!’
He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘I’m afraid I simply can’t tell you. It’d put you in danger if you knew.’
‘What a bloody pompous thing to say! I’m not a child any longer. I’m up to my neck in stuff that’s just as secret as yours. And why should it be all right for you to know but not me? Typical bloody man. The dear little woman can’t know, but I can.’
‘It’s not that. The fact is, you’re going to France. You know what the risks are.’ He shook his head. ‘You mustn’t know, Squirrel. Really.’
‘But you should?’
‘It’s not my choice. I was part of the team that debriefed Kowarski and von Halban when they got out of France in 1940. I spent that year at the Collège before the war. I know all about their work.’
She looked at her brother with sudden clarity, an intense white light of revelation. ‘You’ve been briefed to tell me all this, haven’t you? You’re working with them, aren’t you?’
He barely hesitated. ‘Of course I am.’
She looked round at the ruined garden. What did Ned’s answer mean? Were they no longer brother and sister? Did she now have to judge even her relationships with her own family through the distorting prism of secrecy and connivance? ‘It was you who told them, wasn’t it? About me and Clément.’
‘Certainly, I told them.’
‘But why? For God’s sake, why?’
‘They came a couple of weeks ago. Shortly after I saw you the last time. I thought it was security screening. You know what it’s like. Lots of questions.’
‘What questions?’
‘About you. Family and friends, our life in Geneva before the war, that kind of thing. And then they asked, what about Clément Pelletier?’
‘How did they know?’
‘They know I worked with him. It’s not a secret, for heaven’s sake. And then they asked, how well does your sister know him?’
‘And you told them?’
‘Of course I did. Why shouldn’t I?’
Anger was an organic thing, occupying parts of her body. The brain, of course, but also the chest and the stomach, a tumour of anger, a metastasis of rage. She spoke French. French was a weapon she could use, a rapid, caustic, light flutter of fury. ‘Because it sounds to me rather like betrayal.’
‘Oh, don’t be melodramatic. All I said was that you were quite close.’ He looked away, avoiding her eyes. ‘This is ridiculous, Squirrel. Like brother and sister, I said; nothing more than that. You and me, Madeleine and Clément. I had no idea where it was leading.’
‘That’s the trouble, isn’t it? I have no idea where it is leading either. And you don’t help because you won’t even tell me why they’re so interested in Clément Pelletier. Christ, you’re a coward, Ned. I always looked up to you, thought you were my big, clever, brave brother. But now I see you for what you really are.’
At last there was some reaction from him, some glimmer of shame and anger in his look. ‘And what is that?’
‘You’re a cold fish, Ned. You don’t understand the basic human decencies. You shun the parents, and now you’re shunning me. Soon you’ll have nothing left except your stupid bloody physics.’
There was silence. They stood there in the garden with the wreckage of their relationship between them, like two children looking down on a broken toy. Ned glanced over his shoulder, as though it were all his fault, as though he had smashed the thing in temper and the adults were coming to see what the fuss was all about. But there were no adults around, nobody at all, only the trees in the garden and the blank windows of the houses that surrounded the square.
‘All right, I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘If that’s the only way you’ll see how important this all is. I’m putting you in danger, even more danger than you were in before, but I’ll tell you. Clément was part of Fred Joliot’s team at the Collège de France, you know that. Well, they were working on the idea of an atomic bomb.’
Time, that flexible dimension, stopped. She thought of Ned’s jokes – death rays, devices that could see in the dark, bombs that could blow up whole cities. And the silly games they’d played – Pig-in-the-middle, Kriegspiel, Consequences. ‘An atomic bomb? Are you serious?’
He laughed, that little snorting dismissive laugh that so annoyed her. ‘Of course I’m serious.’
‘Clément was working on an atomic bomb?’
‘That’s what I said, isn’t it? He’s still there, still in Paris, and as far as anyone knows, still working at the Collège de France.’
‘And working on a bomb?’
‘Who knows if that’s what he’s still doing? But he was.’
‘You mean it could happen? Some sort of super-bomb?’
‘It’s easy. That’s what makes it so frightening.’
‘Easy?’
‘Uranium. You must have heard me talking about it, that Christmas before the war. Everyone was talking about it at the time. If you fire a neutron at a uranium nucleus it splits apart into two new atoms – different elements. Barium and krypton.’
She remembered now. ‘You and Clément came home for the holiday and we all went to the chalet in Megève. We wanted to ski but all you and Clément did was talk about science. I remember no one understanding a word you were saying. Daddy said it sounded like alchemy, turning base metal into gold. The philosopher’s stone. “What will you physicists come up with next?” he kept asking. You got angry with him.’
‘As always, he was missing the point. He thought it was a joke, some kind of esoteric conjuring trick. That’s the trouble with diplomats. They’re all classicists. Not a scientist among them. Any scientist would have realised how fundamental it was.’ Fundamental was one of Ned’s words. He could batter you into submission with it. ‘It was totally unexpected, this splitting. I mean, really amazing. As startling as firing a peashooter at a diamond and – ping! – the diamond splits open … and becomes two new jewels altogether. Ruby and sapphire, say. And at the same time energy is released, a massive amount of energy.’
‘But wasn’t all that done in Germany? What’s it got to do with Clément?’
‘Hahn and Strassmann were the first to publish, in December 1938. Yes, they were in Berlin. But Irène Curie and Pavel Savitch had got exactly the same ex
perimental results a year before at the Radium Institute in Paris, only they hadn’t interpreted them correctly. I must have told you about this at the time.’
‘We were hardly listening, and when we were we didn’t really understand.’
‘It’s not that difficult.’ He looked impatient, almost angry. ‘That’s the trouble with people. They just don’t try to understand. You see, atomic nuclei are held together by huge forces, and at the time everyone thought that they couldn’t come apart like that. But they can. If the nuclei are big enough, they can. And when they do the energy equivalent to those forces is released. Then Fred’s lab showed something more: when this fission takes place – that’s what they call it, fission – as well as the energy it also emits neutrons. These neutrons will then hit other uranium atoms and cause them to split as well. If each decaying atom releases at least two neutrons then those neutrons could hit two more uraniums, making them split up in turn. You understand the idea? Atomic billiards, but each single collision creating the possibility of two further collisions. You’d get a cascade of uranium atoms splitting up, one causing two others, two causing four, four causing eight, and so on. An exponential increase. They call it a chain reaction. Joliot and his team showed that it would happen. Not that it might happen – it would happen.’
She was used to conversations like this. Ned had tried to explain his world to her many times. It seemed a bizarre place, of nebulous ideas and cloudy realities. Remember, he’d told her, the atom is mainly nothing at all, a hard nucleus, where all the matter is concentrated, with acres of empty space all around it. If the nucleus were the size of your fist – he’d held up his own – then the outer limits of that one atom, the outer edge of its emptiness, would be about half a mile away. Reality is so much empty space.
‘And this chain reaction makes a bomb?’
‘Think of the energy,’ he said. ‘When a uranium nucleus splits, you’ve suddenly got two nuclei right next door to each other.’ He made a ball of his hands, fingertips touching, and then collapsed the ball into his two fists. ‘But nuclei shouldn’t be close together like that. They should be—’
