Red Joan (28 page)

 

*

 

He suffers another heart attack a week later, this one much larger than the first. A telegram arrives for Joan at the laboratory, given to her by Max and written by her mother in the throes of grief so that no attempt is made to soften the blow. PLEASE COME, it reads. FATHER DEAD.

The war is over and most people have lost someone—not quite unprecedented, these times—but until this moment she has never known the wash of emptiness that comes from such finality. To know that she will never speak to him again, never hear his voice or know his thoughts or bury her head in his chest as she used to when she was a child. This knowledge provokes in her the odd sensation that she is disintegrating, that her grief is pooling away into a great ocean of shared sadness.

And now what? she thinks. What happens now?

Max is watching her, looking at her in that way he sometimes does. Slowly, he turns around and closes the door so that they are momentarily alone, and then he takes her in his arms and she feels the solid press of his body against hers. It is familiar and strange all at once. So much has changed since they last touched that she is no longer sure she recognises the person she thought he was. ‘I'm sorry,' he whispers. ‘I'm sorry about everything.'

Everything? Joan thinks. About my father dying, yes; about your wife, maybe. But
everything
?

‘I wish I could come with you and look after you.'

‘I'll be fine,' she whispers, and although she appreciates that he is trying to be kind, she finds that she cannot look at him. She knows why not, although she will not explain it to him. It is a silly thought—irrational—although she cannot entirely dismiss it and she feels her heart hardening, darkening, even as she rests her head on his shoulder. Because he led the project here, didn't he? He provided the principal contributions from Britain to the American project in terms of the development of plutonium. If not for him, it might never have happened. Her father might never have had that first heart attack in the attic with the radio on. He might have lived another ten years.

Where does responsibility begin, and where does it end?

 

Sitting on the train to St. Albans, she closes her eyes and remembers her father's voice, deep and clear, his way of glancing at her during her mother and sister's odd conversations, smiling and rolling his eyes just a touch. She remembers how he sat on the back step before her university interview, blackening and polishing her shoes until they shone, how he kissed her on the head in delight when he found out she had got a place. She is dreading the eulogy, when she will have to walk to the altar and deliver the address. Her mother will not want to do it, and Lally is too young, so it will be left to Joan. She will have to block out the terrible truth of what she has done and pretend to be the girl he believed her to be. What would he have thought, if he had known? Would he have been proud of her? From each, he once said, according to his ability. Is this what he meant?

The memory of these words makes her heart stagger. She remembers Churchill's promise in parliament, and the terrible reports of the war on the Eastern Front, the pictures rumoured to be from Stalingrad during the siege. She thinks of Leo, standing in front of the washbasins in Montreal University ladies' lavatory and telling her that she is scared of the wrong thing, and for the first time she understands that he is right. The realisation strikes her with such force that she cannot push it aside. The war is over, and yet she knows that there can be no hope of peace in the future if one side alone has a weapon like this.

She recognises now what he meant when he said she was in a unique position to make things fair. To make the world a safer place. To do her duty, as her father once told her she must.

The countryside flickers past the train window. All she has to do is give the information to Sonya. That's what Leo implied. Sonya would pass it on to whomsoever requires it, and beyond that . . . At this she falters. Beyond this, Joan cannot imagine. It sounds so simple, so easy. She feels a terrible stab of regret to know that, in order to do this, the person she will have to betray is Max. She knows that, to him, the bomb is not just a thing. It is his life's work. There will be no going back once she has done this. He will never again hold her hands and tell her he loves her and wants to talk to her for ever. There will be no lingering ‘maybe' left hanging between them, no hope of another perfect kiss like the one on the boat.

But did he not mislead her too? Did he not lie to her, just a little?

She takes a notebook and pen from her bag. She knows that what she is about to do will be breaking her oath under the Official Secrets Act but she will not think about this. Not now. From memory, she notes down the basic process involved in making an atomic bomb. It would be easier to do this at the laboratory where she has access to the figures, but at this stage she wants to give an outline, to see if they are as interested in the information as Leo believes them to be. She gives details of the difficulties in uranium production and adds various suggestions of how these might be solved, specifically by the use of plutonium. She describes the tamper and the casing used to hold the bomb together while the chain reaction gets started, and the materials to be used at the implosion stage, and she sketches a diagram of the finished product, as yet unbuilt, including its projected dimensions.

Carefully, she rips the pages out of her notebook and folds them into her pocket as the train pulls into the station. She does not want to waste any time for fear that indecision will get the better of her. At the station, she fumbles in her bag for change. She walks to the nearest telephone box, slips a coin into the slot and waits for the operator to pick up. Her stomach is giddy. The connection is made, plainly, calmly, and Joan recites Sonya's extension.

‘Putting you through.'

There is a brief pause at the other end of the line, and then a click.

‘Hi, it's me,' she says. ‘I'm in St. Albans. I . . . I need to see you.'

‘Oh?' Sonya's voice is soft, musical, as though she is smiling. ‘Is it urgent?'

Joan pauses. It is not too late. She could still change her mind. ‘Yes, it is rather. I have something for you.'

‘I wondered if you would,' Sonya says, not asking what it is but receiving the instructions calmly, as if she has been expecting a call like this. ‘Right. I'll borrow Jamie's motor. If I leave now, I can be there by late afternoon.'

A deep breath. In and out. Joan tries to make her voice sound light and breezy, pretending to herself that this arrangement is nothing more than two friends meeting for a natter. ‘Meet me in the coffee shop by the cathedral at four thirty.'

She replaces the receiver and feels a shiver of cold running through her. She waits for a moment, her hand resting on the receiver. She could stop it all now. She could call Sonya back and tell her not to come because she has changed her mind. But then she remembers her father's leg, the way he used to hop across the room in the morning before he had strapped the wooden support to his bandaged stump, the noise of it on the bedroom floor. She thinks of her mother's boys crying out for morphine in the hospital, corridors and corridors of them, and the terrible mushrooming swirl of heat and ash in the pictures of Hiroshima, and she clasps her hands together across her body in a sort of prayer. Only it is not a prayer. It is an entreaty, a plea, a promise. It is a wash of conviction that rushes over her chest and causes her to inhale deeply, involuntarily, until her lungs are full of air.

After the flood, a covenant.

J
oan slumps back in her chair. She sees Nick's expression of disbelief.

‘No, Mum, no. Stop the tape. She doesn't know what she's saying. She's only saying it because she's scared. She thinks it's what you want to hear.' Nick lunges towards the video recorder, reaching for the stop button. Mr. Adams blocks him, extending a solid arm to discourage him from touching anything, and for a moment the two men look at each other, locked in a breathless impasse, until Nick lowers his head and steps back. Turning around, he comes to kneel in front of Joan, his hands on her knees. ‘Please, Mum. You don't have to say this. You didn't do it. I know you didn't.'

Joan reaches forward to take his hands. How she wishes she could stand up, take her son in her arms and feel the warmth of him spreading through her body like forgiveness, but she does not dare. ‘I'm sorry, Nick,' she whispers. ‘I'm so sorry.'

‘You have to stop talking,' he urges, and he is whispering now, his lips close to Joan's ear. ‘They'll send you to prison for something you didn't do. Do you know what it's like in there? You're eighty-five years old. I need to look after you. I
want
to look after you. How can I do that if you're in prison?'

Joan puts her hand on his. ‘I can look after myself.'

‘No, you can't.'

Joan looks at him, her darling boy of whom she has always been so proud, who has worked so hard and done so well, who is strong and generous and gentle with her, and she knows she does not deserve him. Her heart breaks to see how much he wants to protect her, convinced that she needs him to do this for her, that she could not cope without him. She understands why he thinks this. It is the role she has always played. But she will not allow him to protect her now, not over this. It is her duty to protect him. She shakes her head, slowly, slowly. ‘It's too late,' she whispers. ‘They already know.'

 

All the papers produced by the research team are duplicated and numbered serially and stored in Max's heavy-duty metal cabinet. Joan has always done this in the meeting room at the end of the corridor, and now she agrees with Sonya that she can simply make an extra copy of anything that looks important, one to be filed and the other to be handed to Sonya at their monthly meeting, and then Sonya can pass the information on.

‘But to whom?' Joan wants to know when Sonya describes this stage of the process to her.

Sonya raises an eyebrow. ‘I'm not going to give you names.'

‘I don't want names. I just mean in general.'

‘To a contact at the centre in Moscow.'

‘The Lubyanka?' Joan's eyes are wide. She has heard of this place before. It is the headquarters of the Soviet foreign intelligence unit and was frequently mentioned in hushed tones during those early university meetings. She used to picture it as a grey, labyrinthine Soviet building until Leo corrected her, explaining that it was actually quite grand, having been originally built for the All-Russia Insurance Company before the Revolution, and then requisitioned by Lenin to house his secret police. She knows it will not be the same now as it was then, its parquet floors unpolished and its pale green walls grubbied by time, but it is still daunting to imagine. When Leo visited Moscow before the war, he described the building works which were in the process of adding an additional floor to the top of the building to house the ever-expanding police service, covering up the baroque features that had made it such a grand building in the first place. He told her there were prison cells in the basement where enemies of the state were imprisoned and interrogated, and that this was where the old Soviet joke originated that the Lubyanka was the tallest building in Russia because you can see Siberia from the basement. Joan tries to imagine her documents arriving there. ‘Will you send them by post?'

Sonya laughs. ‘Don't be silly. I'll radio it.'

‘Is that safe? Can't people listen in?'

‘I'll encrypt it first. I learnt how to do that in Switzerland.' She takes a bite of sandwich and her nose wrinkles ever so slightly at the taste of powdered egg. ‘Didn't you know? Jamie was my instructor. That's how we met.'

No, Joan did not know this, but she had often wondered what he did as Sonya had only ever described him as being ‘in business.' ‘So you radio it to a contact. An agent?'

Sonya shrugs. ‘An officer, usually. Although it's not always the same person. They come and go.'

Joan frowns, not understanding. ‘Come and go where?'

Sonya sighs and shakes her head. ‘Moscow is full of traitors. If someone disappears, you don't ask what happened to them. You just accept the new one.'

‘What do you mean, “disappears”? Do you mean they get imprisoned in the basement?'

‘To start with.'

‘And then what?' She remembers Leo's Soviet joke. ‘They get sent to Siberia?'

‘If they're lucky.'

‘And if they're not?'

Sonya smiles. She puts a finger to the side of her temple and her thumb mimes the act of pulling a trigger.

Joan stares at her.

Sonya laughs. ‘It's all right, Jo-jo. It's not going to happen to you. They'd have to get you to Moscow first and they're not going to do that. You're just helping out. You can't betray them because you don't know who they are.'

‘But you do.'

Sonya shrugs. ‘I do.'

‘And they know you.'

She nods.

‘So how do you know who you can trust and who you can't?'

Sonya looks at her and smiles. ‘I trust myself.'

There is a silence while Joan waits for her to expand on this. ‘And?'

‘And that's it. The most important rule of the lot. Trust no one.'

‘What about Leo?'

Sonya waves the question away, as if it is a ridiculous thing to ask. Of course it is. There is no time to dwell further on this because Sonya has moved on to issue general instructions, telling her that she must learn to be on the lookout for people following her. She should travel by taxi whenever she is carrying classified material, and she should double back on her route every time. Never go directly to any meeting point.

‘Why?'

‘It's the only way to be sure you're not being followed.'