Charles Snow - Last Things

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s all right. But it’s tomorrow that matters.’

‘Or rather today,’ said Charles looking at his watch. It was now past one o’clock.

‘You’ve been summoned for the afternoon, haven’t you?’

They nodded.

‘That gives us a bit of time. There are several ways you ought to prepare yourselves–’

‘Look,’ said Charles, ‘I can handle this situation for myself. For us both.’

It sounded like, it was, a flash of adolescent pride, such as he might have shown two or three years before but had long outgrown. It was strange to hear it from him now. For an instant he seemed sham-arrogant, young or even pathetic. I was moved by a once-familiar yearning, now forgotten or submerged.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Muriel, squeezing his fingers, calling him by a pet name which I had never heard. ‘He knows things, we don’t. You’ve got to listen.’

Charles’ face was close to hers, as he broke into a slight acquiescent smile.

‘The first thing is,’ I said, ‘don’t underestimate them. They don’t work the way we do. They don’t believe in intuition much. They just go on adding one and one. But they tend to get there in the end.’

I went on: ‘Which means, whenever they have a fact right, and they will have a large number of facts right, your best line is to agree with them. Don’t deny anything which they can prove. That makes it easier, if you want to deny something which they can’t prove.’

‘I follow,’ said Charles who was now gazing at me with concentration.

‘Don’t say any more than you need. You can tell them you disapprove of biological weapons. They’ll be used to that. Don’t elaborate. Don’t go in for systematic theory. Remember their politics are simpler than yours.’

‘What do I do?’ asked Muriel.

‘The same.’

‘Won’t it look as though he’s rehearsed me, though?’

‘You can’t provide for everything. People aren’t clever enough to pretend for long. No, you say the same. Same facts, same timetable, same attitude. That’s natural. After all, to some extent I presume it happens to be true.’

Muriel gave a neutral smile. For the first time I noticed a very small dimple on her right cheek, close to her mouth, which didn’t appear to have its replica on the other side.

‘I want to ask you something,’ I said curtly. ‘For practical reasons I ought to know. It’s almost certainly Charles they’re after’ (I was addressing myself to Muriel) ‘not you. So I ought to know.’ Then I spoke straight at him: ‘What have you done?’

He leant back, the whites of his eyes visible under the irises. ‘That’s not so easy to answer–’

‘That’s nonsense.’

She was coming to his help, saying, ‘No, it’s really not,’ when he sat up and faced me.

‘No,’ he said, in a level tone, ‘I don’t mind telling you, but it isn’t so easy. I don’t want to fake it either way.’

‘Well then. Did you extract those letters from the office?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘Not with my own hands, that is. But that’s the trouble, I don’t want to pretend that I’m not involved.’

‘How much are you involved?’

‘I knew about it before and after.’

‘But you didn’t take the letters?’

‘I’ve told you, no.’

‘You had them in your hands?’ As I asked, Muriel was shaking her head, but he wasn’t looking at her for confirmation.

‘Not that either. But I’ve seen photostats.’

That, though it was clearly true, seemed an odd piece of bureaucratisation.

‘Have you been inside those offices?’ I meant by that, those of the principal and the professors.

‘Not at the relevant times.’ (That is, when the files were ransacked.) ‘But I have been inside them, yes.’

‘So have I, so have the others,’ Muriel intervened. On the spot, that baffled me. It appeared that each of the Cambridge group had been by himself inside the college. Charles and Muriel, not together but on their own, had been smuggled in at night. Later it occurred to me that Olly might be making certain that they were committed. He had made use of them, very sensibly, as staff officers, and hadn’t wasted them as crowd fodder. As for spokesmen, he didn’t want too many public faces. But the private faces had to perform some token action: so each of them had made his visit and had, in form, taken part in the occupation. After they had told me of those incidents, so far as I could guess holding nothing back, I said: ‘That is all?’

‘That is all,’ said Charles.

‘They will know nearly everything you’ve said, either of you.’

I was talking of Monteith and his people. I emphasised that they would almost certainly know of meetings in this house and of the nocturnal visits. They would probably know that Charles was one of those who had been shown photostats. It was not impossible that they had had an informer somewhere near: it was not impossible, it was probable that they had one, though how close to the centre I couldn’t guess. It was not impossible that they knew of Charles’ staff work and of the first idea about the bw documents, but that would be very difficult to prove. On that he needn’t volunteer anything.

‘It comes to this, doesn’t it?’ Muriel was speaking, having been subdued most of the night, acting only as a support for Charles. ‘They’ll know that he’s connected, we couldn’t cover that up if we wanted to, could we? But that’s really all they’ll know and I suppose something like that applies to me.’

‘That’s the best you can expect,’ I said.

Neither of them was soft, but they were lost, and to an extent frightened because they were groping, in the security fog. I had been in my mid-thirties when, at the beginning of the war, I had my first taste of that peculiar chilling swirl. They had walked into it very early. When I mentioned that there might have been an informer among their circle, even in this house, they had looked both astonished and, unlike either of them, dismayed. They had felt an intimation of the mosaic of paranoia, the shrinking or freezing of one’s own nature, that came to any of us when overwhelmed by secrecy. You had only to feel that paranoia for a short period in your life, to live just temporarily with security, to understand what happened to conspirators once they gripped the power and then realised there might be other conspiracies, this time against themselves.

Quietly, Charles asked: ‘What is the worst we can expect?’

‘They might know effectively everything that you’ve said and done.’

‘What would that mean? For him?’ Though, as the night went on, Muriel’s eyes were becoming reddened with tiredness, they were brilliant. She had become much more aggressive than he was. She sounded, all the tricks of politeness gone, as though she were defying me.

I replied, doing my best to seem professional, that it was almost unthinkable they would prosecute. It wouldn’t be worth the publicity. Incidentally they wouldn’t like to give away their sources of information. There would, however, be entries on personal dossiers. There would be communications about Charles and his friends with persons at Cambridge. It was conceivable that one or two promising academic careers would be interrupted.

‘Do you think that will happen?’ he said.

‘Your guess is about as good as mine.’

‘If it does, you wouldn’t like it, would you?’

‘No.’

He said: ‘Nor should I.’

He had been speaking intimately, equal to equal. He didn’t ask if I understood why he had acted. He might have taken that for granted, or thought it irrelevant. He wasn’t trying to be considerate. It was knowledge, of himself and me, that he was speaking from, not emollience.