Charles Snow - The New Men

If that day came, I wondered — walking through the fog, taking her to tea as a sign that there was peace between us — whether she and I would at last cease to grate on each other? Was that walk through the Park a foretaste? I had not noticed her restlessness, she spoke as though she trusted me, remembering in the sight of the lighted window a spate of joy which seemed, as such joys of memory seem to us all, like the intimation of a better life from which we have been inexplicably cut off.

On New Year’s Eve, just as the Whitehall lamps were coming out, Bevill sent for me. The room which had been found for him as chairman was at the end of the passage, and even more unpretentious than his room as Minister; Bevill did not grumble, he had never in his life grumbled at a minor slight, he settled there and called it his ‘hutch’. But that afternoon, as soon as I entered, I saw his face heavily flushed, with an angry blood pressure flush that one did not often see in so spare a man, the relics of grey hair twisted over his head so that he looked like a ferocious cockatoo.

Rose was sitting with him, arms folded, unaffected except that the pouches under his eyes seemed darker.

‘This is a nasty one,’ Rose was saying. ‘Yes, it is a distinctly nasty one.’

‘The swine,’ said Thomas Bevill.

‘Well, sir,’ said Rose, ‘it means some publicity that we could do without, but we can cope with that.’

‘It knocks the feet from under you, that’s what it does,’ said Bevill. In the war, whatever the news was like, he had been eupeptic, sturdily hopeful — not once rattled as he was that afternoon.

He turned to me, his eyes fierce, bewildered.

‘Captain Hook’s just been in,’ he said.

‘Captain Hook’ was his name — partly one of his nursery jokes, partly for secrecy’s sake — for Smith, the retired naval captain, the chief of the security branch. ‘One of your scientists has been giving us away to the Russians. A chap who’s just come back from Canada. They’re going to put him inside soon, but it’s locking the stable door after the horse is lost.’

I asked who it was.

‘I didn’t get the name. One of your Cambridge men .’ Bevill said it accusingly, as though I were responsible for them all.

Rose told me that it was a man who had at no time been employed at Barford.

‘That isn’t the half of it,’ said Bevill. ‘There’s another of them at least who they’re waiting for. They oughtn’t to have to wait ,’ he burst out. ‘We’re too soft, any other country in the world would have risked a bit of injustice! Sometimes I think we shall go under just because we put too high a price on justice. I tell you that, Rose, though I don’t want it to go outside this room.’ He said to me: ‘This chap’s still knocking about at Barford now. He’s a young chap called Sawbridge. Do you know him?’

‘A little,’ I said.

‘Is he English?’ said Bevill.

‘As English as I am,’ I said.

The blood was still heavy in Bevill’s temples, as he shook his head.

‘I can’t understand it.’

He shook his head again. ‘I don’t want to set up as better than anyone else, and I can understand most things at a pinch. I expect we’ve all thought of murder, haven’t we?’ said the old man, who as a rule looked so mild. He went on, forgetting his nursery prattle, and speaking like a Hanoverian. ‘As for rape and’ — he listed the vices of the flesh — ‘anyone could do them.’

Hector Rose said, surprisingly: ‘We’re none of us spotless.’

‘But as for giving away your country, I can’t understand it,’ said Bevill. ‘I could have done the other things, but I couldn’t have done that.

‘I don’t want to put the clock back,’ he said. ‘But if it were in my hands, I should hang them. I should hang them in Trafalgar Square.’

At Barford next day, Bevill himself sat in with Captain Smith as he broke the news to the leading scientists one by one. He interviewed them, not in Drawbell’s office, but his secretary’s, sitting on typing stools among the hooded typewriters and dictaphones; sometimes I was called in to hear the same half-explanations, the same half-questions.

It was only Drawbell, sitting alone with me during the morning, who let out a spontaneous cry. This was the first day of 1946, which in Drawbell’s private calendar marked the last stage of the plutonium process, with luck the last year of plain Mr Drawbell. He had to complain to somebody, and he cried out: ‘This isn’t the kind of New Year’s gift I bargained for!’

And then again: ‘This isn’t the time to drop bricks. They couldn’t have picked a worse time to drop bricks!’

When I heard Smith talking to scientist after scientist, the monotony, the strain, seemed to resonate with each other, so that the light in the little room became dazzling on the eyes.

To the seniors, Smith had to tell more than he liked. In his creaking, faded, vicarage voice, he said that his ‘people’ knew that Sawbridge had passed information on.

‘How do you know?’ said one of them.

‘Steady on, old son,’ said Captain Smith. He would not explain, but said that beyond doubt they knew.

They also knew which information had ‘gone over’.

Another of the scientists speculated on how much time that data would save the Russians. Not long, he thought; a few months at the most.

Bevill could not contain himself. He burst out: ‘If our people are killed by their bomb, it will be this man’s doing.’ The scientist contradicted him, astonished that laymen should not realize how little scientific secrets were worth. He and Bevill could not understand each other.

Bevill did not have to put on his indignation; it was not just the kind of politician’s horror which sounded as though it had been learnt by heart. He was speaking as he had done yesterday, and as I was to hear others speak, not only among the old ruling classes, but among the humble and obscure for years to come. Bevill had not been shocked by the dropping of the bomb; but this was a blow to the viscera.

Whereas, as they heard the first news of the spies, the scientists were unhappy, but unhappy in a different tone from Bevill’s. They had been appalled by Hiroshima, still more by Nagasaki, and, sitting in that typist’s office, I thought that some at least had got beyond being appalled any more. They were shocked; confused; angry that this news would put them all back in the dark. They felt trapped.

To two of them, Smith, for reasons I did not know, said that one arrest, of the man who had been working in Canada, would happen within days. There had been at least three scientific spies, whom most of the men Smith interviewed that day had known as friendly acquaintances.

For once even Luke was at a loss. Smith seemed to be wasting his time. He had come for two purposes, first to satisfy himself about some of the scientists whom we knew least, and second, to get help in proving his case against Sawbridge. But all he discovered were men shocked, bewildered, sullen.

There was one man, however, who was not shocked nor bewildered nor sullen. It was Martin. His mind was cool, he heard the news as though he had foreseen it and made his calculations. I did not need to look at him, as Smith brought out his elaborate piece of partial explanation. I had expected Martin to see it as his time to act.

Smith asked to have a ‘confab’ with him and Luke together, since Sawbridge was working directly under them. As they sat on the secretary’s desk, he told them, speaking frankly but as though giving an impersonation of frankness, that Sawbridge’s was the most thorough piece of spying so far. The difficulty was, to bring it out against him. Smith’s conclusive evidence could not be produced. The only way was to break him down.