The Copenhagen Papers

by Michael Frayn

  So how had Frayn finally managed to see through it? He confessed that someone had squealed. He wouldn’t say who, but it wasn’t hard to guess. I looked at Matthew, sitting on the other side of Michael. “Was it you?” I asked. He nodded. Of course. He had after all pleaded with me to stop, to kick my addiction. I couldn’t really feel angry with him. I didn’t toss my drink in his face or even chide him. I knew he had done it out of kindness to Frayn. And how could I berate a man I had so enjoyed sharing a stage with?

  I had ended Celia’s last letter to Frayn “Yours uncertainly.” It was not entirely facetious. Personal identity is a shifting thing. We all feel like different people at different times and with different companions: a king or queen at home, a serf at work. Or vice versa. It’s doubly true of an actor, of course, who is professionally obliged to be different people. It’s in his contract, and he can be sacked if he fails to change from David Burke to Niels Bohr or whoever it may be on the stroke of 7:30.

  I usually have no problem about changing back again at 10:30. I’m happy to swap doublet and hose, or Bohr’s good solid three-piece suit, for sweater and trousers when the curtain comes down. I like being a real person once more. But I have to confess I was a little sad to take my leave of Bohr for the last time. Not to mention Sara and Margrethe, and Matthew and Heisenberg. Or for that matter Celia and Micheal, Gerlach and Hans.

  So when Frayn sprang his little surprise on me in return, and suggested writing something about our joint discovery of the missing documents, I agreed at once. It wasn’t till I was on my way home that the full implication hit me. It was almost as if he had heard my plea not to let it all stop. The journey was to go on.

  I’m aware that it may mean I shall henceforth be remembered only as a practical joker, and that when I walk into rehearsal rooms in the future I will be greeted by cries of “Here he comes! Watch out for the water pistol, lads! Where’s the whoopee cushion?”

  And my personality would change in everyone’s eyes once again. My credit as an actor had already gone up simply by my having assumed the personality of a genius. Hitherto, casting directors had seen me as earthbound and middlebrow—a GP rather than a consultant, Redbrick rather than Oxbridge. Then suddenly I was a theoretical physicist. Now I was to take on yet another role, as a writer. I could imagine the irritation in the casting departments. “Doris! Refile David Burke with John Wood and Paul Rhys under Poets and Eccentrics.… I wish these actors wouldn’t keep moving about. It doesn’t make our job any easier.”

  Here’s another coincidence. As I was writing these final sections of our book, I kept finding a particular sheet of printed paper endlessly in the way, as if it had a life of its own and was determined to insinuate itself into our narrative. When at last I took a closer look at it, I discovered that it was the opening page of a paper written by my brother, Liam Burke, who is a professor of physiology in Australia. He has had some serious trouble with one of his eyes, and with remarkable detachment decided to write up his own case for the journals. It occurred to me that this is what Frayn and I should be doing with the paper that we were going to write. We should be turning our private experience of another sort of defective vision into a useful case study for the enlightenment of the public.

  Can the leopard change his spots quite so completely and quite so quickly, though? I’m tempted to play one last trick on you, Frayn, before the story’s over. To pick up the phone and remind you of what we agreed over that last-night dinner: that if, when we had finished writing, either of us felt that we didn’t want to let the manuscript see the light of day …

  You’d believe it, too, wouldn’t you, Michael?

  Epilogue

  MF:

  One day that summer, at a guest night in my old Cambridge college, I sat next to someone who told me that Farm Hall was now occupied by Marcial Echenique, the professor of architecture at Cambridge, and his wife, Maria Louisa, a mathematican and computer expert. I was emboldened to do what I should have done much earlier, when I was researching the play, and wrote to the Echeniques asking if I might see the inside of the house. They at once, with great kindness, invited my wife and me to lunch.

  So, on a perfect English summer’s day, we drove up to Godmanchester. It is a classically pretty village, just across the old and narrow brick bridge over the Great Ouse from Huntingdon. And there, on the outskirts of the village, was Farm Hall—the real Farm Hall. It is a most beautiful eighteenth-century house, backed by enchanted walled gardens and great lawns that open out onto the woods and distances of the flat Fenland landscape.

  Professor Echenique showed us over the house. He pointed out the discreet door leading to a separate wing that he believed must have housed the eight British eavesdroppers and their equipment, and explained how the elegant reception rooms on the piano nobile had once been partitioned to provide accommodation for the ten German scientists. Erich Bagge (the member of the German team who really had kept a diary) had paid a nostalgic return visit, said Professor Echenique. They had all enjoyed their stay in the house, Bagge had told him; so perhaps the lighthearted atmosphere of fun in the dorm that prevails in the spoof journal was not all that wide of the mark after all.

  Bagge also had one darker memory. When the partitions had been in place, he told Professor Echenique, the central section of what is now the drawing room had been Otto Hahn’s quarters. The published transcript for the terrible night when they all heard the news of Hiroshima records the fear Heisenberg and the others felt that Hahn, tormented by guilt for the part he had played in the development of the bomb by his discovery of fission, might attempt suicide. Bagge had pointed to the hook in the ceiling of the drawing room from which the chandelier is now suspended. Hahn, he said, had actually attempted to hang himself from it.

  It was another detail of Professor Echenique’s account, though, that struck a particular chord with me. When he and his wife had acquired the house, they had had no more inkling of its previous history than Mrs. Rhys-Evans had. Then one day they had discovered concealed false beams full of wiring with no apparent connection to any of the domestic lighting or power circuits—a mystery that had completely baffled them until one of the professor’s students told him that he had been reading Robert Jungk’s book about the development of the bomb, Brighter than a Thousand Suns, and had come across a strange reference to the house.

  What struck me most of all were the circumstances in which Professor Echenique had discovered the hidden wiring, and had the first intimations of a buried past.

  He had taken up the floorboards.

  Life not imitating art, in this case, but prefiguring it.

  Or did some passing shadow of newly learned suspicion cross my mind when Professor Echenique told me that?

  Of course not. Not the faintest shadow. The earth was beginning to settle down beneath my feet again by this time. I was back to where I was the first time I heard of those same floorboards yawning open to reveal their curious secrets, back to believing whatever I was told, just as we all are.

  More or less.

  ALSO BY MICHAEL FRAYN

  fiction

  SPIES

  HEADLONG

  THE TIN MEN

  THE RUSSIAN INTERPRETER

  TOWARDS THE END OF THE MORNING

  A VERY PRIVATE LIFE

  SWEET DREAMS

  THE TRICK OF IT

  A LANDING ON THE SUN

  NOW YOU KNOW

  plays

  ALARMS & EXCURSIONS

  COPENHAGEN

  NOW YOU KNOW

  HERE

  LOOK LOOK

  BENEFACTORS

  NOISES OFF

  MAKE AND BREAK

  BALMORAL

  CLOUDS

  DONKEYS’ YEARS

  ALPHABETICAL ORDER

  THE TWO OF US

  translations

  UNCLE VANYA (Chekhov)

  THREE SISTERS (Chekhov)

  THE CHERRY ORCHARD (Chekhov)

  THE SNEEZE (Chekhov)

/>   WILD HONEY (Chekhov)

  THE FRUITS OF ENLIGHTENMENT (Tolstoy)

  EXCHANGE (Trifonov)

  NUMBER ONE (Anouilh)

  film and television

  CLOCKWISE

  FIRST AND LAST

  REMEMBER ME?

  opera

  LA BELLE VIVETTE (from Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène)

  THE COPENHAGEN PAPERS. Copyright © 2000 by Michael Frayn and David Burke. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Frayn, Michael.

  [Celia’s secret]

  The Copenhagen papers : an intrigue / Michael Frayn and David Burke.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: Celia’s secret. London : Faber and Faber, 2000.

  ISBN 0-312-42124-9

  1. Frayn, Michael Copenhagen. 2. Forgery of manuscripts—England—History—20th sentry. 3. Germans—England—Godmanchester—History. 4. Nuclear weapons—Germany—History. 5. Godmanchester (England)—Germany—History. 6. Scientists—Germany—Biography. 7. Atomic bomb—Germany—History. 8. Heisenberg, Werner, 1901–1976. 9. Burke, David, 1934– I. Burke, David, 1934– II. Title.

  PR6056.R3 C45 2001

  822'.914—dc21

  00-051965

  First published in Great Britain as Celia’s Secret by Faber and Faber Ltd., London

  First Picador Edition: January 2003

  eISBN 9781466829435

  First eBook edition: September 2012

  P1