Charles Snow - The New Men

I did not reply.

‘I suppose he has decided that persecution is a paying line.’

Again I did not reply.

‘If you will forgive a Jew for saying so,’ she said with a bitter grin, ‘it seems rather like St Paul going in the opposite direction.’

She went on: ‘Does Martin know that he has been converted the wrong way round?’

Just then the rays of the sun, which had declined to the tops of the trees, began streaming into her eyes, and I drew the curtains across the furthest window. As I glanced at her, her face was open and bleached, as many faces are in anger, grief, pain.

She cried: ‘Is there no way of shifting him?’

Then she said: ‘Do you know, Lewis, I could have had him once.’

It might be true, I was thinking. When he had been at his unhappiest over Irene, in the first year at Barford — then perhaps Hanna could have taken him away. She threw back her neat small head, with a look that seemed most of all surprised . She said something more; she had considered him for herself; but turned him down because she had not thought him strong enough. Intelligent but lacking insight, with a strong will that had so long searched for a stronger, she had never been able to help underrating the men she met, especially those of whom she got fond. It came to her with consternation, almost with shame, that, now her will had come up in earnest against Martin’s, she, who in the past had thought him pliable, did not stand a chance. She was outraged by his behaviour, and yet in her anger and surprise she wished that when they first met she had seen him with these fresh eyes.

She made another attack on me.

‘He cannot like what he is doing,’ she said. ‘It cannot be good for him.’

She turned full on me, when I was sitting near the window with my back to the sunlight.

‘I always thought you were more heavyweight than he was — but that he was the finer man.’

Making her last attempt, she was using that oblique form of flattery, which delights a father by telling him how stupid he is compared to his son. But for once it had no effect. I had no room for any thoughts but two.

The first was, the time would have to come when Martin and I faced each other.

The second — it was so sharp that it dulled even the prospect of a final quarrel — was nothing but suspicion, the sharp-edged, pieces-fitting-together, unreal suspicion of one plumped in the room where a crime had taken place. How did Hanna know so much of Martin’s actions? What was she after? How close was she really to Puchwein nowadays? Was their separation a blind?

In that brilliance of suspicion, one lost one’s judgement altogether. Everything seemed as probable, as improbable, as anything else. It seemed conceivable, that afternoon, that Hanna had lived years of her life in a moment-by-moment masquerade, more complete than any I had heard of. If one had to live close to official secrets (or, what sounded different but produced the same effect, to a crime of violence) one knew what it must be like to be a paranoiac. The beautiful detective-story spider-web of suspicion, the facts of everyday clearer-edged than they have ever been, no glue of sense to stick them in their place.

That evening, each action of Puchwein’s and Hanna’s for years past, stood out with a double interpretation — on one hand, the plunging about of wilful human beings, on the other, the master cover of spies. The residue of sense pulled me down to earth, and yet, the suspicions rearranged themselves — silly, ingenious, unrealistic, exciting, feelingless.

The same evening that Hanna visited me, Martin was talking to Captain Smith. Sawbridge was called by telephone some hours later, and ‘invited to a conference’, which was Smith’s expression, on the following day. Smith rang me up also; he wanted me there for the first morning (he assumed that the interrogation would go on for days) in order to retrace once more the facts of how Sawbridge first entered Barford.

In past interrogations Smith had questioned Sawbridge time and again about his movements, for those days and hours when Smith was certain (though he could not prove it in a court) that Sawbridge had walked down a street in Birmingham, watched for a man carrying two evening papers, exchanged a word, given over his information; and this, or something close to it, had happened not once but three times, and possibly four.

In the morning we waited for him. Smith had borrowed a room in an annexe outside New Scotland Yard, behind Whitehall on the side opposite my offices. The room smelt of paint, and contained a table, half a dozen shiny pitch-pine chairs, a small desk where a shorthand writer could sit; the walls were bare, except for a band of hat pegs and a map of Italy. I did not know why, but it brought back the vestry of the church where my mother used to go, holding her own through the bankruptcy, still attending parish meetings and committees for sales-of-work.

Smith walked about the room, with his actor’s stride; he was wearing a new elegant suit. Most of the conversation, as we waited, was made by an old acquaintance of mine, a man called Maxwell, whom I had known when I practised at the Common Law Bar. He had just become a detective inspector in the Special Branch. He was both fat and muscular, beautifully poised on small, strong, high-arched feet. His eyes, which were hot and inquisitive, looked from Martin to me. We were both quiet, and apart from a good-morning had not spoken to each other.

To Smith, Martin talked in a matter-of-fact tone, as though this were just another morning. His face was composed, but I thought I noted, running up from eyebrow to temple, a line which had not fixed itself before.

Sawbridge was brought in. He had expected to see Smith but not the rest of us; he stared at Martin; he did not show any fear, but a touch of perplexity, as though this was a social occasion, and he did not know the etiquette.

The smell of paint seemed stronger. I felt the nerves plucking in my elbows.

‘Hallo, old son,’ said Smith in his creaking voice.

‘Are you all right?’ Sawbridge responded. It was the greeting that Martin and I used to hear on midland cricket grounds.

‘Let’s get round the table, shall we?’ said Smith.

We sat down, Smith between Sawbridge and Martin. He shot from one to the other his switched-on, transfiguring smile.

‘You two knew each other before ever you went to Cambridge, didn’t you?’

Sharply Martin said: ‘Oh yes, we peed up against the same wall.’

It might have been another man speaking. I had not heard him false-hearty before; and, as a rule, no one knew better how to wait. Just then, I knew for certain the effort he was making.

In fact, the phrase was intended to recall our old headmaster, who used it as his ultimate statement of social equality. Sawbridge took it at its face value, and grinned.

‘I thought,’ said Captain Smith, ‘that it mightn’t be a bad idea to have another yarn.’

‘What’s the point of it?’

‘Perhaps we shall see the point of it, shan’t we?’

Sawbridge shrugged his shoulders, but Martin held his eye, and began: ‘You knew about how the Canadian stuff was given away?’

‘No more than you do?

‘We’re interested in one or two details.’

‘I’ve got nothing to say about that.’

‘You knew—’ (the man convicted that spring), ‘didn’t you?’

‘No more than you did.’

‘Your ring was independent of that one, was it?’

I could hear that Martin’s opening had been worked out. He was master of himself again, at the same time acute and ready to sit talking for days. To my surprise Sawbridge was willing, though he made his flat denials, to go on answering back. If I had been advising him (I thought, as though I were a professional lawyer again), I should have said: At all costs, keep your mouth shut. But Sawbridge did not mind telling his story.