Red Joan (15 page)

‘He's right. What's the point in all the work you've done and all the teaching you've benefitted from if you're just going to throw it away on running messages or driving a canteen hither and thither?'

Joan feels a small flutter of affection for him. ‘Hither and thither?' she asks.

‘Is that wrong?'

‘No, no. It's right, technically. It's just that you wouldn't say it in this sort of conversation. It's a bit literary.'

He smiles. ‘I'll bear that in mind.' He coughs. ‘But I stand by what I said. There's nothing noble or heroic in doing things below your value.'

‘Soviet value theory, is it?' Joan mumbles.

‘Yes, and it's correct. Not everyone is capable of doing what you can do. Not everyone has your opportunities and your brain. You should leave the jobs they can do for them and you should do the hardest thing you are capable of. People need to push themselves. That's how society will progress.'

Joan sighs. ‘But the civil service is so drab and boring. I don't want to be stuck in thick tights and sensible shoes. The Wrens have those natty little hats and I like the idea of sleeping in dormitories and going on excursions. It sounds fun.'

‘This is war. It's not supposed to be a summer camp. And anyway, you don't like joining things. You always say that.'

‘I suppose so. But this is different.' She leans in closer. ‘Don't you think you'd like me in that nice little uniform?'

Leo does not flinch. He shakes his head. ‘I can't believe you're even taking that into consideration.'

‘No. Yes. I just thought . . . ' She stops, feeling chided. She knows he has a point and there is a lot she could do with the science she has learnt. She just doesn't want to miss out. This is her chance to be self-sufficient and practical, to demonstrate that she does have those qualities she always suspected herself of having, and she doesn't want to waste this chance by sitting in an office. These are her unprecedented times. She might end up with a degree—or, more precisely, a University Certificate—but what sort of scientific research post could she realistically hope for which might use that knowledge? They'd be more likely to want secretarial college graduates to support their male colleagues than her.

Leo frowns. ‘Let me ask around among the other postgrads. Someone is bound to come up with something more suitable for you.'

And so that is how it is left. Leo will sort something out for her, and in the meantime Joan will finish her degree and Leo his thesis. Joan has a lot of work to catch up on, partly as a result of being hopelessly unprepared by science lessons at school to partake in the sophisticated experiments required at university, and partly because of other distractions. Already she knows she will have to work non-stop during the Easter vacation to get through all the reading.

She wishes Sonya were around to distract her from her work, but Sonya has turned out to be a poor letter writer, and while Joan keeps her promise to tell her everything she is missing, Sonya does not write to Joan for almost eight months. When a letter finally arrives, it is accompanied by a beautifully wrapped bar of the nicest chocolate Joan has ever tasted. Joan is delighted with it and eats it slowly, one square at a time, placing it on her tongue and letting it soften and melt before reluctantly swallowing it.

The accompanying letter doesn't say much, but it does mention that she has met a man, ‘a darling pinko,' she calls him, who is teaching her all sorts of new tricks. He is from Worcestershire and called Jamie and has (
What did I tell you, Jo-jo?
) a British passport, and he lived in Shanghai before Switzerland, so he is almost the most exotic man she has ever met.

I hope you're keeping an eye on that cousin of mine,
she writes.
I'm surprised he hasn't been interned yet after what happened in Poland. I can't imagine the benefits to Russia went unnoticed in England. Send him my love, will you?

Joan reads this part of the letter out loud to Leo and then stops, but he does not look up from his work. ‘What I don't understand is why she doesn't write to you herself?'

Leo's shoulders stiffen. It is a small movement but Joan does not miss it. His pen stops moving but he does not turn around.

‘Leo?' Joan feels a sudden lurch in her stomach. Why does she always fear the worst? ‘What is it?'

‘Sonya and I had a . . . ' He pauses, searching for the word.

‘A fight?' Joan offers.

He turns the page of the book in front of him. His hands fidget a little as the page springs up again and he attempts to press it flat. ‘Clash,' he says eventually, turning to look at Joan. ‘We had a bit of a clash while you were ill.'

‘Because she wanted you to go to Switzerland with her?'

Leo presses his lips together. ‘That was part of it. Not all of it.' For a moment it looks as though he is going to tell her more, but then his eyes become glassy and she knows that this subject, like so many others, is not open to her. She hates it when he is like this. Even though she tells herself that his reluctance to tell her everything is only natural after the life he has had, she still feels angry with him that he does not want to share everything. Perhaps Sonya was right. Perhaps she doesn't understand him enough. But still, why has he not mentioned this until now? Why must this be a secret? He turns back to the desk and picks up his fountain pen, and then he begins to scratch a list of numbers onto the paper in front of him. ‘Have you seen my supervisor's book? The orange one?'

‘It's over there.' Joan points to the chair where he left it the previous evening, where he always leaves his books, and does not take her eyes from him as he stands up from his desk and goes over to pick it up. ‘Well, she sends her love to you anyway,' she adds, not ready to let the subject drop quite yet.

Leo nods. ‘Please say I send her my best wishes.' He pauses. ‘Tell her I'll write soon.' And then he bends down, kisses Joan on the top of the head, and walks out of the room.

 

M
s. Hart takes a letter from her briefcase and hands it to Joan. ‘This is from Leo's file,' she says. ‘He seems to have managed to convince someone that he'd lost interest in the cause by the time the war started.'

Joan does not lift her eyes from the piece of paper.

‘Would you say that was true?' Ms. Hart asks.

Silence.

Ms. Hart's voice is gently persuasive. ‘I'm just asking your opinion, Mrs. Stanley. Would you have said that Leo's dedication, faith, whatever you want to call it, wavered at this point?'

‘Leo wasn't a very expressive person. I don't know what he thought, and I wouldn't like to speak for him.'

‘But how did it appear to you?'

Nick interrupts. ‘Who are you questioning here? My mother? Or this Leo person?'

Neither Ms. Hart nor Mr. Adams look at Nick.

‘I would say,' Joan begins tentatively, ‘that his viewpoint changed slightly as a result of the pact.' She pauses. ‘But I wouldn't have said he wavered.' She looks up. ‘Leo wasn't the type to waver.'

 

22 March 1940

 

Leo GALICH has been interned, apparently at the instigation of Sir Alexander Hoyle.

Personally, I think we shall have to decide on a policy with regard to aliens with socialist leanings. If we accepted them in the first place, and if we have no evidence that they abused the hospitality we have shown them by engaging in extreme political activities, there does not seem to be any justification for interning them.

As far as we are concerned, GALICH is a borderline case. We have been presented with evidence by one of GALICH's tutors at Cambridge who declares himself a dyed-in-the-wool Tory. He believes that GALICH's interest in communism stems from witnessing the rise of Hitler during his early years in Leipzig but, like so many of his type, the Nazi–Soviet Pact has done for any misguided sense of loyalty he may have felt towards Stalin.

There does not seem to be anything in his activities to which we could properly take exception beyond youthful exuberance, but it would be more satisfactory if he could find employment in his own sphere of usefulness in one of the Overseas Dominions to keep him out of harm's way. We will ask the Special Branch to pursue this actively.

In my opinion, our policy should be to intern alien communists only when we have evidence that they are in touch with the Communist Party of Great Britain. Any very drastic change of policy should be taken only when it is quite clear that the communists are on the side of Hitler in the war against Great Britain.

 

In the spring of 1940 the bombing starts—not just in London, Birmingham, Gateshead, Glasgow, but also to a lesser extent in Cambridge—and there is a round-up of enemy aliens. Leo is arrested and marched off to the police station, along with a significant proportion of the science faculty.

‘Look after my papers, Jo-jo,' he instructs as he is taken away. ‘And can you hand-deliver my thesis to my supervisor and collect it once he's read it? Keep it safe for me.'

‘I will,' she says. Her eyes fill with tears and, although she knows that she needs to be brave and there are far worse places he could be sent during wartime than a camp out of the line of fire, she still wishes he did not have to go. Or at least, that he would be less prosaic about his departure. It could be years before they see each other again and she wants something more from him than this. Something to hold on to while he is away.

Say it, she thinks. Please say it.

But he does not. He might think it. She is certain that somewhere inside him he does think it, or at least feel it, but he does not say it. He frowns as he pulls on his jacket and pats his pockets to check he has his keys, cigarettes, gloves. ‘Don't forget,' he says.

‘I won't.'

The policeman puts his head back around the door. ‘Come on.'

Leo nods and turns to leave.

‘Leo.'

‘Yes?'

Her voice is small and hopeful. ‘I'll miss you.'

‘Of course.' He takes a step towards her and kisses her quickly, too quickly for her to be ready for it and leaving only the lingering scratch of his stubble against her lips. ‘I'll miss you too, Jo-jo.'

He is sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Man, and thence to Canada on board a ship flying a swastika flag to indicate that it is transporting German prisoners of war alongside the British internees, most of whom are Jewish and have spent the last five years trying to avoid being trapped in enclosed spaces. However, it is seen as a way of keeping the ship afloat, and the voyage passes without incident.

Leo writes to her from Quebec, reporting that the camp is clean and bright and the air smells of pine needles. There are huge portions of food served up in the canteen, and he has been asked to deliver a series of lectures about Soviet Planning to the discussion group he and his comrades have formed to keep their minds active. Joan can imagine Leo at the camp, assuming his position as unofficial leader as if he would expect nothing else, just as he always did back home.

Although he would not say he is enjoying it exactly, there is no evidence of any bitterness or resentment in his letters, and it is a relief to Joan to know that he is not unhappy. Once again, she takes comfort from the fact that the frequency and length of his letters must at least indicate that he thinks of her often, but she wishes he would say something, anything, a bit . . . well . . . softer.

She does not mention this in her letters back to him. It seems such a small thing to complain about when there are so many terrible things happening across Europe. Later, she will think that one of the reasons for Leo's attitude towards Britain (‘an unheroic nation' he will call it, once it is all over) was because he missed those early, dreadful months of the Blitz during which German planes droned over the country every night and the earth shuddered and flashed under the weight of bombardment. He did not stand on the roof as part of the Newnham Fire Brigade as Joan did to watch the fires burning themselves out along Vicarage Terrace, nor did he see the smoking piles of rubble that sometimes littered the streets near the station in the mornings, the photographs of funeral carriages in the newspapers, the pictures of mansion blocks of flats blown open like dolls' houses, women sitting tight-lipped on buses, determinedly not looking out of the windows and smiling at the conductor as she—they were nearly always women in those days—clipped the tickets. And everywhere, in every crack and pore, the tireless, clinging dust.

Joan does not mention any of this either. It is not done to complain, so instead she tells him about the books she is reading, the films she has been to see, the essays and experiments she is working on for her finals. She mentions dances and dressing-up parties and taking fifteen-year-old Lally punting on the Cam when she came to visit by herself for the first time. She tells him about the craze for skating on Mill Pond when it freezes over during Lent Term, and about cycling out to Lingay Fen with some of the other girls from college to practise on the much bigger, smoother rink where the All-England Championships used to take place before the war.

She does not tell him that her greatest enjoyment is her weekly hot bath, how she fills the tub with metallic-tasting water from an array of kettles and saucepans, and holds her breath while she submerges her whole body so that the world around her becomes muffled and muted. She does not tell him that lying naked in warm water is the only substitute she can find for the warmth of his body next to her own, for his arms, his smell, the comforting weight of him, and how, for a brief moment, it allows her to forget the terrible empty ache in her stomach.

 

Final examinations come and go. The undergraduette protests outside Senate House on results day are muted this year, seeing as the country is in the throes of pulling together and there are far worse things happening in the world than women not being allowed degrees. But still, it exists as a minor gripe, a rumbling of discontent, and there are assurances that surely,
surely
, after this second war, they will have to relent and allow women to be admitted fully into the university.