The day after Bevill offered Martin the appointment, Captain Smith came into my office and unravelled one of his Henry James-like invitations, which turned out to be, would I go with him to Wandsworth Gaol and have a chat to Sawbridge? I tried to get out of it, but Smith was persistent. He was sensitive enough to feel that I did not like it; but after all, I was an official, I had to live with official duty, just as he did himself.
In the taxi, he told me that he was clearing up a point about the Puchweins. It was worth ‘having another try’ at Sawbridge, who occasionally talked, not giving anything away, more for the sake of company than because he was softening. As we drove through the south London streets in the November sunshine, he told me more of Sawbridge. He had not recanted; others of the scientific spies gave up their communism in prison, but not Sawbridge. For a few days, sitting opposite to Martin, he had been ‘rattled’. During that time he made his confession. He had blamed himself ever since.
‘He’s quite a lad, is our young friend. He doesn’t make any bones about it,’ said Smith with proprietorial pride, stiff on his seat while we rocked over the tram-lines, through the down-at-heel streets scurfy in the sun.
At the prison, Smith took me to an assistant-governor’s room, which in his view gave a ‘better atmosphere’ for his talks with Sawbridge. For myself, I should have preferred the dark and the wire screen. This room was bright, like a housemaster’s study, with a fire in the grate, photographs of children on the desk, and on the walls Medici prints. The smell of tobacco rested in the bright air. Outside the grated window, the morning was brighter still.
When a warder brought Sawbridge in, he gave a smile as he saw Smith and me standing by the window, a smile not specially truculent but knowing, assertive, and at the same time candid. Above his prison suit his face looked no paler than in the past, and he seemed to have put on a little weight.
Smith had arranged for the warder to leave us alone. We heard him close the door, but there were no steps down the passage. Sawbridge, who was listening, cocked his thumb, as though at the warder waiting behind the door, and repeated his smile.
Smith smiled back. With me, with his colleagues, he was never quite at ease; but he was far less put off inside that room than I was.
‘Here we are again,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Sawbridge.
Smith made him take the easy chair by the fire, while Smith sat at the desk and I brought up a hard-backed chair.
‘Have a gasper?’ said Smith.
‘I still don’t smoke,’ Sawbridge replied, with his curious rude substitute for humour.
Smith began inquiring into his welfare. Was he getting enough reading material? Would he like Smith to inquire if he could be allowed more?
‘I don’t mind if you do,’ said Sawbridge.
Was he getting any scientific books?
‘I could do with more. Thanks,’ said Sawbridge.
Smith made a note; for once, Sawbridge was allowing himself to let slip a request.
Then Smith remarked that we had come down for a ‘spot of talk’.
‘What are you after?’
‘We should like to have a spot of talk about Puchwein,’ said Smith, surprisingly direct.
‘I’ve not got anything to say about him.’
‘You knew him and his wife, didn’t you?’
‘I knew them at Barford, like everybody else. I’ve not got anything to say.’
‘Never mind about that, old man,’ said Smith. ‘Let’s just talk round things a bit.’
As Smith foretold, Sawbridge was willing, and even mildly pleased, to chat. He had no objection to going over his story for yet another time. It occurred to me that he was simply lonely. He missed the company of his intellectual equals, and even talking to us was better than nothing. Methodically he went over the dates of his spying. As in each statement he had made, he would mention no name but his own: he had inculpated no one, and maintained all along that he was alone.
‘People remember seeing you at Mrs Puchwein’s,’ said Smith.
‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ said Sawbridge.
‘Don’t you think you ought to be surprised?’
‘I don’t see why.’
‘I can’t think of anything obvious you’ve got in common.’
‘Why should we have anything obvious in common?’
‘Why were you there?’
‘Social reasons.’
‘Did you ever pay any other social calls of any kind?’ Smith asked.
‘Not that you’d know of.’
‘Why were you there?’
‘As far as that goes,’ said Sawbridge, turning on me with his kind of stolid insolence,’ why were you?’
Smith gave a hearty, creaking laugh. He went on questioning Sawbridge about Puchwein – where had he met him first?
‘You soon found out that he was left wing?’ said Smith.
‘I tell you, I haven’t anything to say about him.’
Smith persisted.
‘When did you first hear that he was left wing?’
All of a sudden, Sawbridge broke into sullen anger.
‘I shouldn’t call him left wing?
‘What would you call him?’ I said.
‘He’s no better,’ said Sawbridge, ‘than you are.’
His voice was louder, at the same time impersonal and rancorous, as he let fly at Francis Getliffe, Luke, me, all liberal–minded men. People who had sold out to the enemy: people who would topple over at the first whistle of danger, that was what he thought of liberal men.
‘That chap Puchwein isn’t any better than your brother,’ said Sawbridge. Impersonally, he lumped Martin in with the rest of us, only different in that he was more effective, ‘I’m not sure he isn’t worse. All Puchwein knows is when it’s time to sit on the fence.’
‘I thought you’d nothing to tell us about him,’ said Smith.
‘Well, I’ve told you something, haven’t I?’ said Sawbridge. ‘We’ve got no use for chaps like that.’
Back in a café in Westminster, Smith, sipping China tea with his masquerade of preciousness, went over Sawbridge’s replies.
‘We didn’t get over much change out of our young friend,’ he said.
‘Very little,’ I replied.
‘No, I wouldn’t say that, old son,’ said Smith. But, as he argued. I was thinking of Sawbridge – and it was a proof of his spirit that, neither in his presence nor out of it, did I think of him with pity. Faith, hope, and hate: that was the troika which rushed him on: it was uncomfortable to remember that, for the point of action, hate was a virtue – but so also, which many of us were forgetting in those years, was hope.
Could one confront the Sawbridges without the same three forces? He was a man of almost flawless courage, moral and physical. Not many men would have bent as little. Then, against my will, for I was suppressing any comparison with Martin, I was teased by a thought in my brother’s favour, the first for long enough. It was difficult to imagine him taking Sawbridge’s risk; but, if he had had to pay Sawbridge’s penalty, his courage would have been as stoical and his will as hard to crack.