Ms. Hart is outside talking to someone on her mobile phone, and Mr. Adams has gone to the shops to buy more coffee. The video camera has been switched off during the break. Nick is standing at the window, looking out across the darkening front garden to the road. He is shaking his head, still thrown by this most recent revelation.
‘I can’t believe I never knew,’ he says at last. ‘My own mother, working on the atomic bomb. I’d never have thought . . . ’ He stops. ‘You’ve never even hinted at it. I remember asking what you did during the war and you fobbed me off with your secretary story.’
‘But I was a secretary.’
Nick narrows his eyes at her. ‘Maybe, but not just a secretary, as you told me.’
‘I couldn’t have told you any more than that. It was still classified. I’d signed the Official Secrets Act.’
‘As if that would have mattered by then. The bomb wasn’t exactly a secret once everyone knew about it. I learnt about it in school for God’s sake.’ He stops and turns to look at Joan. ‘And you never told me that you met Winston Churchill. Even when I did that school project on him.’ He gives a sudden burst of incredulous laughter. ‘I mean, who meets Winston Churchill and then never mentions it again?’
Joan leans forward, wanting to reach out to him but retreating when she sees his expression. ‘Nobody said what they did during the war. They were different times.’
‘I know. I’m not angry that you didn’t tell me. It’s just such a shock. You never let on that you ever did anything like that. Not once. I feel as if I don’t know who you are.’
Joan looks at him. Does he not think she could say the same about him, or anyone for that matter? Although of course, she would never say such a thing. And perhaps the comparison isn’t fair. He has always done so well at everything, been so good, that she has worried on occasion that he has done too well. Don’t they say that about adopted children, that they think they need to be perfect to make up for the fact that they were once given away? Nick dismissed this theory as pop psychology the one time she tried to broach it with him. ‘I’m still me, Nick,’ she says softly. ‘I’m still your mum.’
He shakes his head, and Joan sees for the first time that he is hurt. His eyes are unnaturally shiny and he is avoiding her gaze. She feels her heart burn.
‘But you’re not who I thought you were. When anyone asks me what you did, or what you liked, I always said you were a librarian at my school and that you and Dad liked playing tennis, and I thought that was the truth. I thought that was all there was to know.’
‘It is,’ she whispers. ‘Or it was by then.’
‘But instead you actually spent years working on something which was so utterly . . . ’ he searches for the right word, ‘ . . . evil. And I never knew.’ He pauses, and then shakes his head. ‘How could you? Why didn’t you just refuse once you knew what it was?’
Joan casts her eyes down. ‘It may seem evil now, but it wasn’t so black-and-white back then. We had to get there first, ahead of Germany.’
‘But they were nowhere near. Surely that was obvious, even at the time. All their theoretical physicists were Jews and had emigrated or been imprisoned. They were pretty much starting from scratch.’
‘How could we have known that for sure? We couldn’t take the risk. And besides, we thought we were doing something worthwhile.’
Nick rolls his eyes. ‘Oh, come on. You can’t expect me to believe that.’
‘But it’s true. That’s how we saw it.’
‘A super-bomb? How can that ever be worthwhile?’
Joan shakes her head. ‘Not the bomb. The science of it.’ She remembers this very clearly, the shared belief among the scientists involved in the project that after the war there would be incalculable benefits from their discoveries, not just in energy sources, but potentially in medicine too. Until that moment, nuclear physics had never been an applied science in the way that biology and chemistry were, and there was a sense of excitement about the seemingly limitless possibilities this implied. Joan does not expect Nick to understand this. Nobody else does. There is such a haze of history separating the past from the present, such a terrible barrier of knowledge, that it is almost impossible to describe the bright light of idealism from such a distance. ‘I have wanted to tell you before now,’ she says at last, ‘but it was so long ago.’ She pauses. ‘And I didn’t think you’d believe me.’
‘That’s not much of an excuse. I might even have been impressed. I knew you’d been to Cambridge but I hadn’t ever really thought about how unusual that must have been at the time. I always saw you as, well, just a mum.’ He pauses, pressing his knuckles into his palm. ‘I wish you’d told me.’
‘It was in the past. Your father and I . . . ’ she sighs. ‘Well, he didn’t want it mentioned, and nor did I really. I promised him.’
Nick acknowledges this point with an incline of his head, but he does not soften. ‘So he did know, then?’
Joan nods. ‘Yes, he knew,’ she says hesitantly. ‘That’s why we moved to Australia.’
‘But I thought you met on the boat going over to Australia.’
‘Well, we knew each other before then but we decided it would be easier if we pretended . . . ’
Nick makes an exasperated noise. ‘I don’t believe this. Is anything you’ve ever told me actually true?’
‘Everything I’ve told you that relates to you is true, I promise.’
There is a pause while Nick considers this qualification. ‘How can you say that this doesn’t relate to me?’
‘We’d agreed not to talk about it. I’d made your father a promise. It was a new start. You were a new start.’
She has told Nick this part before, that he was a new start for them, but she has never gone into the details of it: how much she had longed for him, dreamt of him, ached for him, before their application for adoption was approved. She has always believed that knowing how much he was wanted would be too much of a burden for him, and so she has held it back, the hope and anguish of those years when they first arrived in Australia, before the doctor finally confirmed that no, there was no chance of a baby from Joan’s damaged womb, and had they thought about adoption?
This had prompted another long process, and an uncertain one, being told repeatedly that there was something not quite right about their papers although the irregularity was never specified. They were bypassed again and again, until one day Joan received a letter saying that their application had been successful and would they please come to the Royal Victoria Hospital in three months’ time to collect their baby.
She will never forget the assault of emotion that hit her when she first picked him up in her arms and felt Nick’s soft, tiny hand close around her finger. Nothing could have prepared her for this. She remembers it as a magical time; the milky, dewy smell of him, the way his eyes changed from blue to a deeper, richer colour, almost green for a while, and then finally hazel, as astonishing as a leaf in autumn. She recalls marvelling at his tiny peachy head, his little feet, thinking how light he was, how delicate, so different from the golden-skinned little boy she had once imagined for herself and yet, at the same time, so perfect. A new start.
But now Nick is standing in front of her with his arms crossed, his initial disbelief having turned to cynicism. ‘I still think you could have told me.’
Joan’s voice is almost a whisper. ‘Like I said, nobody talked about what they did during the war. We all knew we weren’t allowed to. I didn’t even tell my family.’
Nick looks at her. ‘But Leo knew, didn’t he?’
Joan blinks. She knows that nothing has been proven. She doesn’t have to say anything. ‘No,’ she says, but the hesitation is too long.
Extract from the ‘Organisation of Tube Alloys’
14 April 1941
The objectives of the Tube Alloys project are two-fold: firstly the manufacture of the most formidable military weapon yet conceived, and, secondly, the release of atomic energy for power purposes.
The scientific background of this work was well known before the war, and nothing is more certain than that the same subjects are being industriously pursued in Germany. There is, therefore, a race against time between the Allies and the Axis powers to be the first to possess the military weapon. Whatever may be the prospect of success in a reasonable time, it is clear that the subject must be pursued with the utmost speed, regardless of cost.
Joan’s billet is in a rooming house for single women run by Mrs. Landsman, situated in the rather unglamorous location of Mill Road. She goes to visit her parents as often as she can now that there is less to occupy her time in Cambridge with so many people having been sent away or posted elsewhere. Her mother has joined the Women’s Voluntary Service and is helping to run a mobile canteen until she is forced to stop after a huge metal vat is dropped on her foot in the kitchen. Her foot will recover, the doctor says, but for now she winces when she puts any weight on it, struggling with the crutches as she catches and clips them against the furniture.
On top of this, Joan’s father seems to have aged enormously in the three years since Joan left home. He retired the previous year, but rather than improving his health by giving him the opportunity to rest, this enforced inactivity only seems to have accelerated his decline. His hair, once thick and white, is thinner, and his dark eyebrows stand out more clearly against his new pallor. Even his eyes seem to have lost some of their colour. When he takes off his suit jacket and loosens his collar at the dining table, his fingers shake a little and his mouthfuls are small and laboriously chewed.
‘How’s Lally?’ Joan asks, wanting to distract herself from the sudden, alarming hint of her parents’ impermanence.
‘Gadding about with soldiers,’ Joan’s father says, pushing his half-chewed mouthful into his cheek and grimacing.
‘She’s not gadding, Robert. She’s working a few days a week at the Jewish house for the German children.’
‘Refugees,’ Joan’s father corrects her.
‘Yes, exactly. That’s what I meant. Shame she couldn’t be here today though.’ Joan’s mother pushes the potatoes towards Joan, encouraging her to take another one. ‘You must make more of an effort to see her, you know. She had such a lovely time in Cambridge with you.’
Joan does not look up but takes a potato and deposits it on her plate. ‘So did I, but it’s hard when I work six days a week. I’ll invite her again, I promise.’
‘Once the war is over,’ her mother says.
Her father shakes his head. ‘It’s not going to be over as soon as you think.’
‘Of course it will. Have faith.’
Her father snorts with a mixture of contempt and amusement, a noise which Joan recognises as heralding the start of one of the good-natured yet vehement discussions she remembers so well from her childhood in which argument is treated as a form of sport. ‘I don’t see how that will help us win the war.’
‘Because we’re on the right side. Morally right.’ Her mother spears a carrot with her fork. ‘And that has to count for something. It’s just common sense.’
Under normal circumstances, such a comment would have prompted Joan’s father to denounce his wife as utterly nonsensical, and he would have taken delight in arguing with her as loquaciously as he could. But today he is too tired to argue, just as he has been on the last few occasions Joan has seen him, and instead he simply laughs and sits back, closing his eyes.
Joan stands up, thinking that she needs to find out if her father has seen a doctor. ‘Let me take those dishes out.’
‘It’s his heart,’ Joan’s mother confides once they are in the kitchen and out of earshot. ‘He’s been told to rest and to stop smoking, but there’s not much chance of that.’
‘He’s not that old, Mum.’
Her mother takes her arm and squeezes it while Joan fills the basin with soapy water. ‘He’s not young. Anyway, we’re fine really. How about you? Met any nice young men I should know about? Or are we still moping about that darned Russian?’
That darned Russian is still in Canada. Yes, she tells her mother, she writes to him every week, and no, there are no young men to rival him in her affections. But she is not moping. She is enjoying her job, not just the work but also the money and the independence it brings. She likes the closeness of the laboratory, the sense of urgency and excitement. On top of that, she likes the sociability of it, the endless rounds of dinners and drinking games in the evenings that Karen encourages her to attend. There are long games of poker after blackout, lubricated by crates of sherry and whisky brought up from the basement of the laboratories. Max rarely participates in these, being obliged to keep his distance as the most senior scientist among them, but most of the others are regular attendees and they are fun, odd nights at which the subject of research is studiously avoided, very unlike the earnest discussions of her undergraduate days. She does not tell her mother about these evenings, knowing that she would disapprove, but all in all, Joan does not consider that she has enough time to mope, especially with Leo out of harm’s way, which is more than most men of his age can say at the moment.
In fact, the only one of the old Cambridge group still around is William. He is posted close enough to Cambridge to be able to visit, and he gets in touch whenever he has some time off. When she gets home from her visit to her parents’ house that evening, she finds him waiting on the doorstep of her lodgings. ‘Oh,’ she says, suddenly remembering that they had made plans to go to the cinema that night. ‘It’s tonight, isn’t it?’
He grins, leans forward and kisses her on the cheek. ‘You haven’t forgotten, have you? I’ve already bought the tickets.’
‘Of course not,’ she says, fixing a smile on her face. ‘What are we going to see?’
‘How Green Was My Valley.’
‘How green was your what?’
He starts to explain that this is the title of the film, but Joan interrupts. ‘I was joking.’
‘Oh, right. Yes.’
Joan’s feelings towards William are ambivalent. She finds it irritating when he attempts to be charming, as he frequently does. It seems too deliberate, too forced, and yet somehow he manages to get away with it. In general, people seem to like him because he quotes Winnie-the-Pooh at inappropriate moments and is rich enough to have a perpetually carefree demeanour, and it is a source of mild irritation to her to know that this will be enough for him to have a successful career in the Foreign Office whenever he decides he’d like to, just as his father did before him.
But still, she likes to see him as a reminder of earlier times, of Leo.
The film is set during the strikes in the Welsh mining villages of the Rhondda valley, a long film in which food is carried in beautifully made wicker baskets and little Huw Morgan’s eyes gleam from his coal-dusted face over a screeching classical score, reminding her of the columns of coal miners she once saw marching through St. Albans.
The evening is warm and musky as they walk back across Parkers’ Piece to Joan’s lodgings. William holds out his arm for her to take and she slips her hand into the crook of it, although she does not want to. It seems too familiar, too tactile.
‘Well? Did you enjoy it, Jo-jo?’
Joan flinches. Only Leo calls her Jo-jo and William knows that. Well, maybe Sonya too. He is probably just trying to be friendly.
‘It was sad,’ she says. ‘And a bit American. Everyone was too pretty. There wasn’t enough genuine grime.’
William laughs. ‘I think the director did originally intend to film it in Wales but the war got in the way.’
‘It has a habit of that,’ Joan murmurs.
‘It’ll get in the way for the Yanks too, soon. Roosevelt wants to join in. It’s just the American public who are reluctant.’
‘I’d have thought that would be enough to stop him.’
‘This war’s not like the last one. They can’t expect to remain out of it just because they’re surrounded by oceans. Something will happen to bring them in.’
Joan glances at him sceptically but says nothing. How can he always speak with such assurance? What is it that makes him so confident of his own opinion?
William casts a sidelong glance in her direction. ‘Anyway, how are things with you? Enjoying your job?’
‘Yes. Very much.’
‘What is it you’re working on again? I don’t think you’ve told me.’
‘It’s research.’
‘Yes, I know that. What sort of research?’
Joan punches him on the arm. ‘You know I can’t tell you that.’
‘Careless talk, blah, blah blah. I’ve seen the posters. But I’m still interested.’
‘Well, I can’t tell you because I don’t know. I’m just a secretary. They don’t tell me anything.’
‘And you don’t read, you just type. Is that it?’
‘Exactly.’
William purses his lips and looks at her. ‘But it must be nice to know you’re contributing to the war effort.’ He thinks about this for a moment and then grins suddenly. ‘How about lunch tomorrow? Or dinner? I haven’t got all that much to do, and a chap’s got to make the most of his leave these days. They keep talking about sending us off somewhere.’
Why? she thinks. What do you want from me? We’re not comfortable together. ‘I can’t,’ she says, trying to look disappointed.
‘Why not?’ William asks. ‘I’ll come to meet you at the laboratory. You could just tell them you’re popping out for lunch. Or I could meet you after work.’
Joan laughs. ‘I’m a secretary,’ she tells him. ‘I’m not allowed to pop anywhere for lunch. Besides, there’s no time. I don’t finish until after seven and I have too much to do to go out at lunchtime.’
‘Your boss must like you then.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘If he didn’t like you, he wouldn’t give you so much to do. He wouldn’t want you around.’
Joan nods. She would concede that there is a certain complicity between her and Max, a calmness in their little corner of the laboratory, even if there is usually a door between them. She likes the way he asks how she is every morning, and the way he thanks her for his morning cup of tea, which is more than most of them do, and he seems grateful and apologetic at the same time. ‘I suppose so,’ she agrees. ‘Why are you interested in all this anyway? It’s boring.’
‘Not for me it isn’t. I’m going to be sent away any day now. It’s nice to know how to imagine everything back home.’
She cringes slightly. ‘William,’ she says. ‘I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.’
‘The wrong idea about what?’
‘Well . . . ’ she pauses, ‘about us.’
He laughs and squeezes her arm. ‘Don’t be silly, Jo-jo. I know. We’re friends. That’s all. I know it’s Leo you’re waiting for.’
‘I’m not waiting,’ she corrects him, but then she looks up at him and allows him to see the blush rising in her cheeks.
‘Of course you’re not,’ he says. ‘And besides, I thought you knew.’
‘Knew what?’
‘About me.’
They are walking down her road now, a row of tightly packed Victorian houses, larger from the inside than they appear from the pavement, with cellars and attics. Joan looks at him and frowns. She cannot think what he means. ‘What about you?’
He looks at her, astonished. ‘You mean you actually don’t know?’
Joan tries to keep the exasperation out of her voice. ‘Know what?’
William waves his arm, as if to brush her question aside. ‘Ask Leo next time you see him.’
‘Fine,’ Joan says, irritated that he will not just tell her. ‘I will. Well, anyway, here we are. Thank you for walking me home.’
‘Don’t mention it.’ William leans forward and kisses her wetly on the cheek. She feels the imprint of his lips lingering on her skin. He smiles, stands back and salutes in a ridiculously overdramatic manner while Joan rummages in her bag for her key. She wants to wipe the kiss off, but she knows she should wait until she is inside before she does so. She finds her key, smiles, and offers an embarrassed salute in return from the porch as she steps inside.