I left the room at midday, and saw no more of him for several days, although I knew that he was going on with the interrogation. Irene did not know even that, nor why he was staying so long in London.
One afternoon, while Martin was sitting with Captain Smith and Sawbridge in the paint-smelling room, she had tea with me and asked about him, but casually, without anxiety.
In fact, she showed both enjoyment at his rise to fame, and also that sparkle of ridicule and incredulity which lurks in some high-spirited wives when their men come off. It was much the same incredulity as when she told me that ‘E H’ (Hankins) was at last on the edge of getting married.
‘Caught!’ she said. ‘Of course the old boy can still slip out of it. But he’s getting on, perhaps he’s giving up the unequal struggle.’
Her unrest was past and buried, she was saying – but even so she was not as amused as she sounded. I was thinking that she, to whom marriage had sometimes not seemed so much of a confining bond, regarded it in her old lover with the same finality as her mother might have done. Like most of us, she was more voracious than she admitted to herself; even if he had been a trivial capture, the news of his marriage would have cost her a wrench. As for Hankins – though I listened to the squeal of glee with which she laughed at him, within weeks of being domesticated at last – I felt that she was half-thinking – ‘If I wanted, I should still have time to break it up!’
Although she did not know it, I read that night, as on each night for a week past, what her husband was doing. Evening by evening Captain Smith walked along from the room to my office with the verbatim report of what he called ‘the day’s proceedings’. Those reports had the curious sodden flatness which I had come to recognize years ago at the Bar in conversation taken down word by word. Most of the speeches were repetitive, bumbling, broken-backed. The edge was taken off Martin’s tongue, and the others sounded maundering. There was also, as in all investigations I had been anywhere near, very little in the way of intellectual interchange. Martin and Sawbridge were men trained in abstract thought, and Martin could use the dialectic as well as Sawbridge; but in practice neither of them found this the time to do so.
Over ninety per cent of all those words, day by day for more than a week already, were matter-of-fact. Captain Smith’s organization was certain, from the sources they could not reveal, that Sawbridge had walked down a named street on a named day, and passed over papers. Ninety per cent, probably ninety-five per cent, of the records consisted of questions and answers upon actions as prosaic as that.
Out of the first day’s transcript I read nothing but details. ‘You were in Birmingham, at the corner of Corporation Street and High Street, on October 17th, ’43?’ (that was only a few months after Sawbridge arrived at Barford). Flat negatives – but one or two were broken down by ordinary police facts. Who could remember the events of an afternoon three years ago, anyway? Why not be vague?
Sawbridge denied being in Birmingham on any day that month: then he fumbled: Maxwell produced a carbon copy of a receipt (dated not October 17th but October 22nd) given him by a Birmingham bookshop.
The next impression, of the later days of the first week, was that Martin was taking more and more of the examination. It looked as though Smith and the Special Branch between them had run out of facts, certainly of producible facts. Was Sawbridge experienced enough to guess it? Or did he expect there was evidence to come?
From the first, Martin’s questions were more intimate than the others. He took it for granted that, as soon as Sawbridge knew that Barford was trying to make the fission bomb, he did not feel much doubt about how to act.
E. (Martin). Did you in fact know what Barford was set up for before you arrived?
SA. (In the record, this symbol was used throughout to distinguish Sawbridge from Smith.) No.
E. Hadn’t you thought about it? (i.e. the bomb).
SA. I read the papers, but I thought it was too far off.
E. When did you change your mind?
SA. As soon as I was appointed there and heard about the background.
E. Then you believed it would happen?
SA. Of course I did, just like you all did.
E. That is, you believed this country or America would have the bomb within 3–4 years?
SA. We all did.
E. And you thought of the effect on politics?
SA. I’m not sure what you mean by politics.
E. You thought of the possibility that the West would have the bomb, and the Soviet Union wouldn’t?
(Despite Sawbridge’s last remark, Martin was using ‘politics’ in a communist sense, just as he steadily referred to the Soviet Union, as though out of politeness to the other man.)
SA. I thought if we’d seen that the thing might work then the Soviet physicists must have done the same.
E. But you didn’t know?
SA. What do you take them for? Do you think you’re all that better than they are?
E. No, but there are more of us. Anyway, you’d have felt safer if they knew what we were doing?
SA. I thought it was wrong to keep secrets from allies, if that’s what you mean.
E. The Soviet Union wouldn’t be safe until someone told them?
SA. I didn’t say that.
E. But you thought it might be your duty to make certain?
SA. I thought it was the Government’s duty.
E. You knew that wouldn’t happen. You knew that the Soviet Union might be more at a disadvantage than they’ve been since the civil war?
SA. I didn’t think they’d be far behind.
E. But they would be behind. They had to be kept up to date – even if none of them was able to extend to us a similar courtesy?
(That was the only sarcasm of Martin’s that came through the record.)
SA. They weren’t in the same position.
E. You were thinking all this within a month of getting to Barford, weren’t you? Or it didn’t take as long as a month?
SA. There wasn’t much difficulty about the analysis.
E. You talked to a contact straight away, then?
SA. No.
All through that exchange, Martin assumed that in origin Sawbridge’s choice had been simple. To introduce national terms, or words like treachery, was making things difficult for yourself not for Sawbridge. He did not think of the Soviet Union as a nation, opposed to other nations; his duty to it overrode all others, or rather included all others. It was by doing his duty to the Soviet Union that he would, in the long run, be doing his duty to the people round him. There was no conflict there; and those who, preoccupied with their own conflicts, transposed them to Sawbridge, could not make sense of the labyrinths they themselves invented in him. It was Martin’s strength that he invented none: from the start, he treated Sawbridge as a man simple and tough, someone quite unlike a figure out of Amiel or Kierkegaard, much more like Thomas Bevill in reverse.
In fact, Martin assumed Sawbridge did not think twice about his duty until he acted on it. Then he felt, not doubt, but the strain of any man alone with his danger – walking the streets of Birmingham under the autumn sun, the red brick gleaming, the Victorian gothic, the shop fronts – so similar to the streets of the town twenty miles away, where both he and Martin had waited at other street corners. The cosy, commonplace, ugly street – the faces indifferent, the busy footsteps – no one isolated or in any danger, except one man alone, looking out for an evening paper, the homely evening paper which, not many years ago, he would have bought for the football results. That was the loneliness of action, the extreme loneliness of a man who was cutting himself off from his kind.
From Martin’s questions, he understood that too, as pitilessly he kept on, waiting for an admission.
What had sent Sawbridge on those walks, cut off from the others safe on the busy street? I could not find a satisfactory answer. Nearly everyone found him dislikeable, but in a dull, unspecific fashion. His virtues were the more unglamorous ones – reliability, abstinence, honesty in private relations, In some respects he resembled my bête noire, Pearson, and like Pearson he was a man of unusual courage. He possessed also a capacity for faith and at the same instant for rancour.
No doubt it was the rancour which made him a dynamist. Compare him, for example, with Puchwein, whose communism sprang from a magnanimous root – who was vain, impatient, wanted to be benevolent in a hurry. And, just as with many Romans who turned to Christianity in the fourth century, Puchwein wanted to be on the side of history. He had no question intellectually that, in the long run, the communists must win. But those motives were not so compelling as to drive him into danger; to go into action as Sawbridge did, benevolence was not enough.
Then what was? The hidden wound, people said: the wound from which he never took the bandages and which gave him his sullen temper, his rancour. None of us knew him well enough to reach it.
Did Martin see the wound clearer than I did? Did he feel any resemblance to himself?
If so, he shut it away. Behaviour matters, not motive – doing what he was doing, he could have no other thought.
The visits to Birmingham, the autumn transaction (giving the news that the pile was being built), the three visits in the spring, one just before Sawbridge had accompanied Luke into the hot laboratory: on each visit, what data had he given over?
Denial, denial again.
Martin increased the strain.
He knew, via Captain Smith, the information that had passed. He knew, which no one else but Luke could, that one piece of that information was false; while waiting for the rods to cool, they had decided on which solvent to use for the plutonium – and then, a good deal later, had changed their minds. It was the first method which had been told to the agent; only Luke, Sawbridge, and Martin could know the exact circumstances in which it had been decided on, and also given up.
Martin asked Sawbridge about those decisions. For the first and only time in the investigation, Martin gained an advantage through being on the inside. So far as I could judge, he used his technical familiarity with his usual deliberate nerve; but that was not the major weight with which he was wearing Sawbridge down.
The major weight came from his use of Sawbridge’s loneliness, and his sense of how it was growing as the days dripped by. Against it Martin brought down, not only his bits of technical knowledge, not only the facts of the meetings at the Corporation Street corner – but also all the opinions of Barford, every sign that men working there were willing to dismiss Sawbridge from their minds, so that he should feel separate even from those among whom he had been most at home.
No one knew better than Martin how even the hardest suffer the agoraphobia of being finally alone.
On the seventh day, the record ran:
E. I suppose you have got your notebooks about the work at Barford?
SA. Yes.
E. We shall want them.
SA. I shall want them if I go back.
E. Do you think you will go back?
SA. I hope you realize what it will mean to Barford if I do not.
E. You might have thought of that before.
SA. I thought of it more than you have given me credit for.
E. After you made the first contact with—’
SA. I have not admitted that.
E. After you made the first contact, or before?
SA. I thought of it all along.
For those seven nights running Captain Smith brought the record into my office. He made excuses to stay with me as I read; it looked like a refinement of security, but afterwards he liked to go out with me for a drink, taking his time about it. I discovered that he had a valetudinarian wife, for whom, without letting out a complaint, he had sacrificed his pleasure ever since he was a young man; but even he was not above stealing a pretext for half an hour away from her.
On the eighth night, which was Thursday, September 23rd, he came into my office hand on hip, and, as he gave me the typescript, said: ‘Now we shan’t be long.’
‘What?’
‘Our friend is beginning to crack.’
‘Is it definite?’
‘Once they begin to crack, they never take hold of themselves again.’
He said it in his parsonical tone, without any trace of elation.
I felt – visceral pity; a complex of satisfactions: anxiety that the time was near (I neither wanted to nor could have done it while the issue was not settled) when I must speak to Martin.
‘How long will he get?’ I asked.
‘About the same as the other one.’
He stared at me.
‘Ten years, there or thereabouts,’ he went on. ‘It’s a long time for a young man.’
I nodded.
‘We’ve got to do it,’ he said, in exactly the same neutral creaking tone. He had not spoken of Sawbridge’s sentence with sentimentality, but as a matter of fact; but also I had not heard him condemn Sawbridge. Smith had more moral taste than most persons connected with crime and punishment; the country had a right to guard itself, to make sure that men like Sawbridge were caught; but, in his view, it had no right to insult them.
The next night, the Friday, Smith was late arriving at my office. When he did so, fingering the rolled-up record as though it were a flute, he said: ‘Our friend is going to make a complete statement on Monday morning.’