The Copenhagen Papers

by Michael Frayn

  Yes, I had simply accepted it, in the way that one accepts the times of trains and almost everything else in life.

  It was all very well for my children to laugh; they now had the benefit of hindsight. But would they really have laughed if I had read the text out to them before we’d all known the truth? Everyone had believed it, or seemed to, when I’d told them the story earlier! All they’d laughed at had been the funny bits—particularly the account of everyone crying over the death of Little Nell. My wife had read it out to her father, a scholar well used to taking a critical view, and he’d laughed like everyone else.

  My daughters now—now!—claimed that they had discussed the documents among themselves and decided privately that they were a hoax. Only with some of the very youngest grandchildren and stepgrandchildren did respect for my sagacity remain intact.

  Anyway, I set to work. First of all I wrote to Mrs. Rhys-Evans again, expressing contrition for my somewhat skeptical and perhaps rather over-hasty reaction to the anachronistic fragment of “Russian.” I explained my theory about Farm Hall reverting to Intelligence purposes after the war, and suggested that the possibility of some later Russian involvement opened up intriguing possibilities—one of them being that the papers the family had discovered might become much more interesting to a publisher. I had discreetly sent an outline of the story, I said, to an old friend of mine who had contacts inside the Intelligence community, to see if he thought there might be anything in this.

  The letter seemed to me to be remarkably temperate, courteous, and helpful, given the circumstances. Its only possible shortcoming was that it wasn’t true. But you can’t have everything.

  It crossed with one from Mrs. Rhys-Evans, also expressing contrition. Her son, she said, had now confessed that the scrap of “Russian” was bogus—that he had written it himself in revenge for all my “legalistic tripe.” It was too late, however, for me to avert the disastrous consequences of my fictitious helpfulness, undertaken with the best of fictitious motives, in showing the material to my fictitious friend with the fictitious connections in Intelligence. Five days later I had to write to Mrs. Rhys-Evans again in considerable haste, and in even more considerable embarrassment.

  I had had a rather startling call, I told her, from some idiot in the Ministry of Defence saying that he had reason to believe I had various unauthorized documents in my possession, and ordering me to return them under threat of all kinds of amazing and implausible penalties. I’d been so taken aback that I hadn’t been able to think what to say. Reflecting on it afterward, though, I said, I supposed that my Intelligence connection—whose name, Mark, I now inadvertently let slip—must have talked to someone.

  I told him not to worry about the Russian one because it was a forgery, but this seemed to make him more suspicious rather than less. He demanded to know who had sent me the documents. I refused to tell him, and I’m certain (fairly certain) I didn’t send Mark copies of any of your covering letters, so they won’t come hammering on your door, but I don’t quite know what to do with the originals. If I give them up they’ll presumably vanish into the same black hole that the Farm Hall transcripts were in for so long, and neither of us will ever see them again.

  I asked her if I should send them back to her for safekeeping, and if all the rest of the documents, as I assumed, were still safely with her son in France.

  If anyone does somehow start asking questions it would perhaps be sensible not to say anything about your suggestion of money changing hands, which might make the whole business sound less innocent than in fact it was.

  All things considered, the letter was remarkably calm and collected, and full of sensible advice—not the kind of panic-stricken reaction that might have made Mrs. Rhys-Evans panic in her turn. After all, there was no real cause for panic. Yet. The only defect of the letter that I could see as I read it over was that, once again, it wasn’t true.

  But then it’s difficult, as my man Martin Clay finds to his cost in my novel, not to get corrupted by the company you keep.

  DB:

  My first hint that something had changed came when I received an early-morning call from Celia—the real Celia. She sounded less than ever like her ficitious counterpart. Her voice was tight and panicky.

  “David! I’ve had a letter from the Ministry of Defence! It’s not very nice. They’re saying I could go to prison!”

  “Calm down, Cissy,” I told her. “Just read it to me.”

  “It says ‘Confidential. Dear Sir/Madam…’”

  “Which department is it from?”

  “Whitehall. An assistant security officer.”

  Dear Sir/Madam … Following information received, it has come to my notice that you may be in possession of documents removed without authorisation from former MOD property. I am directed to require you to surrender any documents that you believe may fall within this category within seven days of the receipt of this letter. Failure to do so may expose you to the possibility of prosecution.

  “It says I’ve got to send them Recorded Delivery to their office in Sheffield. And it says,” she continued:

  I must remind you that it is an offence under the Official Secrets Act 1989, punishable by a maximum of three months’ imprisonment, or a fine up to level 5 (£2,500), to fail to comply with an official direction for the return or disposal of a document covered by the Act. Alternatively, proceedings may be instituted against you under civil law for breach of confidence, and an injunction sought for the return of the documents.

  I must also remind you that disclosing a document protected against disclosure, while knowing or having reasonable cause to believe that it is protected against disclosure, is an offence punishable by a maximum of two years’ imprisonment, and/or an unlimited fine.

  “David, what am I going to do?”

  I should like to give Michael the satisfaction of saying that this letter put the fear of God into me. I really would—now that we are both on this side of the keyboard. And if I couldn’t honestly say that, then I should like to console him with the thought that at the very least I had a queasy moment. But I must be honest. I knew it was a hoax from the moment Celia began to read it out. Celia herself, I concede him this, was shaken—and wasn’t entirely convinced by my reassurances; some days later she leapt to the conclusion that a man she found lurking up a telegraph pole outside her house was not a British Telecom engineer but a spy from the MOD.

  But I knew from the first moment that it was a hoax because I was expecting something like this. I had always known that sooner or later the penny would drop. Sooner or later the sheer height of the heap of improbability that I had been piling up with a mechanical digger ever since the whole business began would bring it tumbling down to overwhelm Michael’s determination to believe and his cunning in finding reasons to justify his belief. There are limits to the gullibility of even the cleverest of men!

  Then again, as a hoaxer myself I am constantly on my guard. Ever watchful. Paul Scofield caught me out once, in retaliation for my little sally as Sgt. Blenkinsop of the Railway Police. So did another actor, Michael Simpkin, after an unfortunate episode in which he had managed to believe that I was a leading actress he had once worked with. We were in the living room of his house in Cricklewood when we suddenly heard … the muezzin, calling the faithful to prayer. At least I heard it, loud and clear—but Simpkin couldn’t hear anything. Had he gone stone-deaf? Evidently not—he could hear me, and my growing bewilderment and alarm. He just couldn’t hear the muezzin, and he watched me with a growing bewilderment and alarm of his own, until I began to think, So this is how it happens! This is how you can go mad. Not gradually, but suddenly, just like that! Out of nowhere, out of thin air—just like this hallucinatory muezzin.

  Except, I realized, that it wasn’t coming out of thin air … It was coming out of Simpkin’s word processor!

  Or, rather, out of the tape recorder that he had hidden beneath it.

  Strange—these things aren’t so funny whe
n you’re on the receiving end.

  But the muezzin from the MOD didn’t cause me a moment’s anguish. Celia, too, I’m pleased to say, saw through it at once. My Celia, I mean, the fictitious one. She may not have been as clever as Frayn, but she had long experience in dealing with the dreadful Micheal’s japes and wheezes, and when she sat down to reply she knew exactly what she was dealing with and who was responsible.

  MF:

  “I should tell you,” wrote Mrs. Rhys-Evans, “that I have received another tiresome practical joke from my son Micheal, this time directed at me. It’s an official-looking letter, supposedly from the MOD, threatening me with prison over the Farm Hall papers. He denies it of course, but it has his grubby fingerprints all over it: clumsy, obvious, badly researched, over the top.”

  The address of the Director, Archives, in Sheffield, she claimed, was known to every taxi driver to be the home of a lady of easy virtue, and she had discovered, from the billets-doux she had once been accustomed to receiving at one stage of her life from her boyfriend Kim Philby, that government departments always used 100 gsm paper, not 80 gsm.

  So my first barrel had gone wide. Far from avenging my humiliation, it had opened me to more. My only consolation was that it had taken David five days to respond, and that the terms in which he denounced the forgery seemed to me somewhat disproportionate. Maybe, privately, unacknowledged, he had had a bad moment or two.…

  In any case, as I had labored with computer and scanner to capture the MOD logo off a letter I had received from their library during my research for the play, and the OHMS blazon and OFFICIAL PAID stamp off an old envelope from Inland Revenue, I had been able to gain a little insight into my tormentor’s delight in forgery. Forgery, I had discovered, is a very slow and fiddly business, but a curiously satisfying one. It offers all the opportunities of fiction, together with a clear and definite goal. In fact it had become an entertainment for the whole family, with my elder stepdaughter supplying the address of the Director, Archives, and my elder son-in-law the authorship of the signature, while my younger son-in-law posed as a neighbor to whom the letter had been delivered in error and dropped it through Mrs. Rhys-Evans’s letter box for me, in order to save me from the possibility of prosecution for passing OFFICIAL PAID mail through the post.

  Now what? I’d still failed to flush David Burke out. I had another look at Mrs. Rhys-Evans’s latest letter. “When I write to you,” she said, “I always look at that picture of yours. I believe General Montgomery did this when he was fighting Rommel in the desert: had his picture (not yours) on the wall of his tent in Tobruk. It helped him get into the mind of his adversary.” She (he) was presumably referring to the photographs of the cast and production team in the program. I got the program out of the file and looked at the various pictures of David.

  There he was in character as Niels Bohr, arguing with Heisenberg: open, innocent, straightforward. And there he was as himself, gazing back at me, half-concealed behind a beard for some reason, his head turned mockingly a little to one side. He was smiling, but there was something a little unsettling about the smile. Sometimes you know that people are smiling insincerely, and it’s because they are smiling with their mouth but not with their eyes. I covered up David’s mouth and looked at his eyes. They were quite unmistakably smiling. His smile was sincere. Then for some reason I tried covering up the eyes and looking at the mouth.… It was the mouth that wasn’t smiling.

  I suddenly had the impression that I had a rather tough nut to deal with. Someone who was elusive rather than guileless, and remarkably obstinate. I in my turn felt a little like Rommel, gazing at a picture of Montgomery. An unfortunate position to find myself maneuvered into, of course, when you think of the outcome of the North African campaign.

  Well, if I couldn’t panic David, perhaps I could apply a little pressure on the character he was playing. Not Niels Bohr—Celia Rhys-Evans. If she was real. I rang up the Electoral Register Department at Hounslow Council; she was as real as Bohr. I should have liked to study her photograph a little. My helpful younger son-in-law, Oliver Wilson, who has long experience of making the kind of television programs that involve undercover operations against various kinds of suspected malefactors, offered to find out everything about her, including her ex-directory phone number, within half an hour. I nervously declined. He was a director with the Roger Cook investigative program at the time, and generously suggested that he should ask the large and terrifying Mr. Cook to doorstep her. I was tempted, I have to admit … but declined once again, and instead turned up unannounced myself with my wife for a friendly chat about the poor woman’s problems with her semidelinquent son, and perhaps her recollections of Farm Hall, Kim Philby, and other matters. She was out. Just as well, possibly; however embarrassing she might have found the conversation, I should almost certainly have found it more embarrassing still. I’m no actor.

  I explained all this to my daughter Susanna, back from BBC America in Washington for a few days. It inspired her to an ingenious piece of lateral thinking. I might not be an actor, she pointed out, but I knew one—a very fine one, who was particularly good at appearing guileless and innocent while at the same time being evidently extremely successful at hoaxing people. Why didn’t I go to David Burke, she said, and explain to him that I now suspected that Mrs. Rhys-Evans was merely acting as the creature of a mysterious operator in the background? Then I could ask him to try and find out who it was by confronting her in some devious but guileless-seeming way while I looked on. He would surely feel, given the circumstances, that he owed me a favor. Though in all probability he would have to own up as soon as I put the idea to him. And if he actually had the cheek to take the job on, he would scarcely be able to carry it off without the truth emerging.

  I took another look at David’s photograph. He might have the cheek to take it on, it seemed to me. He might even manage to carry it off, just as he had carried off everything else so far. In which case the great tangle of fiction that we had all got ourselves enmeshed in would get into still worse knots.

  A week later, I had to accompany a party of people to see the show, and I was still turning Susanna’s idea over when I went round for the traditional call on the dressing rooms afterward. I had the impression that at the sudden sight of me David’s famous guilelessness flickered a little. Was it my imagination, or did he look, just for a moment, a little shifty?

  Looking shifty, it seemed to me, was the least he could do. Particularly since by this time he was negotiating behind my back with a friend of mine to make an even bigger fool of me.

  Or so I hoped.

  DB:

  The latest recruit to our growing cast of characters believed firmly enough in his own existence, to judge from the size of his name in his letterhead:

  He was a friend of Michael Frayn’s, he said. Frayn had apparently given him the task of reading various German texts for him when he was researching Copenhagen, and had now asked him, while he was in London recently, to look at the documents Frayn had been sent by Mrs. Rhys-Evans. His command of English left a little to be desired, but he seemed to have his head screwed rather more firmly to his shoulders than poor Frayn. He confessed that he had found the documents very puzzling.

  I could not understand much more than Michael himself some of the pages. I left him on tenderhooks to know what he may find if you should persuade your son to let out more of these documents. But I must tell you privately that I for my part smelled a rat.

  I brought copies of these documents back to Munich, and I have made a little research of my own. According to one of documents, “O” should celebrate his birthday in Farm Hall. Now, who is “O”? I find that the only “O” at Farm Hall was Otto Hahn. I also find that the scientists were kept in Farm Hall from July 1945 until January 1946—and unfortunately Professor Hahn’s birthday was in March.

  So he suspected that something fishy was going on—a hoax on Frayn, in fact.

  I wonder if “C. Rhys-Evans” should be also
perhaps a friend of Michael. Yes? My first guess is of course a rival dramatist. Do I detect by any chance the hand of Tom Stoppard behind this?

  I was, of course, flattered to be identified with Stoppard. Particularly since Jürgen Hoechst had not Hoechst me for a moment, any more than the MOD had. Did Frayn really think I might be Tom Stoppard? Or was he still trying to flush me out? Was he hoping that vanity would make me boast “No! Not Tom Stoppard! Me—David Burke!” Because even though he had seen through Celia Rhys-Evans and her German documents, he still hadn’t discovered who was behind them. Had he?

  In any case I was not yet ready to yield to the proffered handcuffs. I was enjoying the writing too much.

  I’ll tell you something, Frayn, now that the whole thing’s over: it was writing all those letters and documents that kept me going during the run of Copenhagen. It’s a wonderful play, but it was so tiring to do! For all three of us. We’d take it in turns to come into the theatre looking like zombies. Never mind the play—the sheer number of stairs between the stage and the dressing rooms at the Duchess was a marathon in itself. Every night I counted them: 8 stairs down and 48 up from the stage door to the dressing room when I arrived in the evening, 56 stairs down to the stage at “Beginners.” Same again up at the end of Act One; down at the beginning of Act Two; up again at the end of the play; 48 down and 8 up again to go home. That’s 336 steps a night. We did 211 performances at the Duchess. That’s 70,896 steps!

  What I want to say, Michael, is that what kept me going through all those steps, days, weeks, months, was, yes—your play, of course—certainly—the play—but also that crazy gang of shadow figures that I was sharing with you. Writing! There’s nothing like it! Well, you would know! You sit down in a corner. By yourself. With a sheet of paper and an old ballpoint. And out it comes! While the world, and all the steps in it, can go hang!