Derek Beaven - His Coldest Winter

‘Good enough, thanks,’ Geoffrey laughed. ‘And you?’

‘The usual,’ said O’Neill. ‘Kids enjoyed it, I suppose. Brass monkeys, wasn’t it? We ran out of coal. Can’t say I’m sorry to be back.’ He looked about him as he peeled off his coat. ‘Bugger of a job getting in. Trains no go. Buses no go. Half an hour to get the bloody car started.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Still,’ he put on a radio voice, ‘we must all do our duty and keep our spirits up.’ He tossed his ball of paper into the air and caught it. ‘So take a look at this, why don’t you? Better still …’ Rather than trying to salvage his own, he got up and fetched Lance’s memo from the corner where he worked. ‘Bobby’s got the wind up about spies and sex. We’ve all been sent one.’ Grinning, he held it out for him, and indicated Lionel Rae’s empty desk by the window. ‘His nibs as well.’

‘Hang on. Let me thaw out a bit first. Made the coffee, have you?’

Geoffrey took the beaker from the kiln. ‘Sorry.’

Finally ensconced on a high stool next to the radiator, with his pipe alight and his cup delicately balanced on the slatted top of a small, but very expensive, oscilloscope, Lance cast an eye over the memo. He seemed to miss the joke. ‘Well, it was on the cards, wasn’t it?’

‘What was?’

‘We’re being designated, aren’t we. Dedicated. Whatever you want to call it. Especially you and your Dr Gill.’

‘Me and Raj?’ Geoffrey perched on the edge of his bench and began once more to click his pen. His Dr Gill could hardly be dragged away from the silicon, or the clean rooms where it was aligned, cut into discs, polished, oxidised, doped, baked, masked and etched. Dr Gill’s empathy with the whole mysterious process, and with the quantum values of semiconductor atoms themselves, was such that Geoffrey often strove to understand quite what his boss required of him.

‘It’s a measure of your success, Geoff. They’re upping the stakes.’

‘What stakes, for God’s sake?’

‘Oh, come on. Haven’t you got the hang of it? It’s the MOD. I worry for you. They’re not pissing around, matey. Why do you think Rae’s here? Work it out, for God’s sake .’

A technician came in with a batch of perspex cases, each bound with surgical tape. They were old samples, and had to be archived. He put the cases down, pointedly removed Lance’s cup from the oscilloscope and handed it back to him.

‘Thanks, Terry.’ Lance drained the cup and tapped his pipe into a large meniscus glass he kept for the purpose. ‘Message received. Here we go, then.’ He got off his stool, glanced first at Terry, and then back to Geoffrey. ‘Enough said, I think. We’ll speak later. There’s stuff here I’d better be getting straight on with.’

Geoffrey stood blinking as Lance’s words sank in. It took him several seconds to lose his pastoral innocence: if Lance was right, his whole life had shifted gear. He stared at his colleague, now bent over an optical device for classifying the specimens. Everything belatedly added up. What if the buildings, the expansion, the investment were all military? Once the old man retired, the factory premises could be painlessly rejigged – to make pocket-sized guidance systems for missiles. A technology was about to take off, but its production was already earmarked by the government. He, the well-meaning Geoff Fairhurst, was about to become absorbed into the armaments and aerospace frenzy that occupied the lee of the Chilterns from Stevenage right down to Aldermaston.

What a simpleton he’d been. His body gave that shiver again. The agricultural landscape he’d grown up in – the fertile plain, the windy chalk hills and sloping beechwoods, the ancient estates with their cottages, brakes and streams – was taking on a seamy side, a sense of underworld. For it might not be coincidence that the big V-bombers flew slowly and protectively over the factory like great grey bats. And maybe British intelligence already had a strong presence in the area. There might really be enemy agents, sympathisers, potential traitors somewhere out there. Eyes and ears might even now be sending details of his own life, his own name, directly to London … or to Moscow.

And suddenly, the pompous ‘any species of conduct’ did apply to him. His heart thumped. ‘C.S.’ He unscrewed the ball of paper, smoothed it with the side of his hand and scratched again with his pen at the initials he’d written at the top. Cynthia Somers was nothing real, nothing tangible. There’d been no furtive fumblings in corridors. Assignations had not been made. It was all pure as the driven snow, and he was a happily married man. No substantial alteration would occur if he never saw Cynthia again. Yet he wasn’t being honest with himself. In truth, she was a gamble with his deepest feelings, Cynthia, the missing term of an equation. His cover seemed almost blown, the sense of threat sharpening itself to a point.

Down in the basement, the microscope preserved its vacuum and waited. It was indeed a tool that could scry into the invisible. Before long, dressed in his special spacesuit, he’d be approaching it once again. A bead of sweat moistened the armpit of his shirt.

Now he had to see her, simply to reassure himself. He needed to be certain it was all in his own mind, this infatuation, that it was his own fire he was playing with, that he wasn’t at risk of making a complete and dangerous fool of himself.

LANCE WAS ABSORBED with the specimens; Terry was labelling them. Geoffrey went over to the lab window. A flake or two spiralled in the airstream against a dull hurry of clouds. Track-marked snow covered the car park a foot deep. Snow lay upon the pavements and window sills of the old quarter, above whose fairy-tale roofs towered the Norman abbey of St Alban the Martyr. The great building shimmered at the heart of things. He understood nothing of women – no one understood them, not even themselves.

There were pencilled circuit diagrams on Lionel Rae’s desk. He picked a few up, complex, hurriedly sketched logic gates with their spiky symbols and jotted values – emblems, he thought in passing, of Rae’s extraordinary mind. The man calculated like a machine, as fluent in electronics as ordinary people were in English. But the pages would do to cloak his mission. He held the sheaf out purposefully in front of him. ‘I’m going up to the drawing office,’ he said.

The drawing office lay at the far end of the block. Just before it, he could contrive to pass the room where the six girl typists sat at their desks. All down the ground-floor corridor with its run of identical newly painted flushpanel doors he was amazed at the lengths to which his emotions were taking him. The large, metal-framed windows looked over crystallised rose beds to whitened, wooded parkland. Children in the distance were sledging down a bank.

‘Morning, Geoff.’ Someone barged past his shoulder, and he turned, startled, uncertain to whom the retreating back belonged. Others were arriving ahead of him, scarfed up in greatcoats, disappearing into offices. He nodded to one or two as he passed; the place was filling up, coming to life. For form’s sake, he put his head in to exchange a few words with Clive Powell, the production manager, and again felt he had no outer shell, that his thoughts were leaking out somehow to betray him, and that was why Louisa …

But with Cynthia Somers it was not sex. It was precisely because his feeling for her would not ‘render any one of us liable’ that there was nothing to feel ashamed of.

Blushing again, he made his way on through the double doors and up the main staircase. It led straight to photolitho on the second floor. But a narrow passage on the first led to the test shop stair at the far end, and, half-way along, there was a glass partition which looked into the typists’ room. Once he reached it, Geoffrey allowed himself to hesitate and glance sideways. Four of the girls were there under the strip lighting, rattling away at their machines, pausing every now and then, elbows in, to flick the carriage levers across in that upright, female way they had. Cynthia’s chair was empty.