Last Things (38 page)

It might have been two or three days later when, not on television, but in
The Times
, I saw an item of news. One headline ran:

STUDENTS CHARGE COLLEGE WORKING ON GERM WAR.

That was it. I needn’t have read any more. Angry that I had seen so little, I still didn’t see all the connections, or even most of them: but I saw enough. Enough to be waiting for what was coming next.

Actually, the students’ announcement was, like most of their official utterances, discreet. It was issued as one of their communiqués from the principal’s office, said simply that documents had been found demonstrating that the college microbiological department was under contract to the Ministry of Defence, through the MRE at Porton. The students would insist that all work on biological warfare should be stopped forthwith.

That was ingeniously drafted, I thought. Unless it were a sheer invention, which seemed unlikely, they had got hold of some papers, and the authorities wouldn’t know which or how much they gave away.

The signatures, as with all the previous communiqués, were those of Olly and his two adjutants from the college.

Apart from the headlines, the newspaper wasn’t spending much space on the announcement. Nor did any of the others that I read. In one leader it was referred to, in an aside, as another sign of ‘immature thinking’. The leader went on to ponder whether the grants of student protesters should be withdrawn, and rather surprisingly used this example of immature thinking to conclude that they should not.

There was no reference anywhere to collaboration from outside, or to any Cambridge group. For some reason, perhaps technical, they were being kept in the background, and I was asking myself how much respite that would give.

MARGARET was already going to bed when, late the following night, the front door bell rang. I had been sitting in the drawing-room, not certain how much longer I could bear to wait: whether it was wise or not, I should have to talk to Charles. For an instant, I thought this caller might be he. Opening the door, I saw – with disappointment, with let-down – that it was Nina. Rain was trickling from her mackintosh cape and hood.

‘I’m so sorry, Uncle Lewis, I don’t know what the time is–’ she said breathlessly.

‘Never mind.’

‘But Daddy asked me to give you a message, without fail, he said, tonight.’

‘Come in.’ The let-down had vanished. I couldn’t delay in getting her coat off, bringing her into the drawing-room, meanwhile answering a call from Margaret about who it was.

‘Well?’ I asked Nina, pressing a drink on her which she wouldn’t take. Just then Margaret, in her dressing gown, joined us, kissed Nina, interposed another wait.

‘What did your father say?’

Nina swept dank hair from over her eye. She said: ‘I tried to tell him something on the telephone this morning–’

‘What was it?’

‘Give her a chance,’ said Margaret. Nina smiled at her, and then at me. She was shy but firm and self-possessed.

‘I told him I’d heard something about people making enquiries at Chester Row, but he stopped me. He wouldn’t let me speak on the phone. So I had to go to Cambridge. Then he wouldn’t ring you up either, so I had to come back and see you tonight.’

‘Yes,’ I said, restless with impatience, ‘what was this message?’

‘He said to tell you –
it looks as though someone like Monteith is already on the job. You must advise them straight away
.’

I glanced at Margaret. It was all plain. Too plain. Martin’s precautions about the telephone had probably been automatic: he had lived with security all through the war and after. So had I, for longer. I had had dealings with Monteith myself, when he was number two in one of the security services. I had dropped out of that claustral system, but I remembered hearing that he had been promoted.

‘You were told this morning, were you?’ said Margaret. She was quiet but as urgent as I was.

‘Yes,’ said Nina. The previous evening, two visitors had called at Chester Row. One was a conspicuously fat man (that must be Gilbert Cooke, I broke out, he had taken Monteith’s place at number two, the investigation was starting at a very high level).

They had asked all sorts of questions. They had been very friendly and polite –

‘They would be,’ I commented. There was a technique in interrogation. The next interview, if Gilbert took it himself, wouldn’t be quite as friendly.

‘Who did they ask?’

‘Charles. Muriel. They’d seen Olly already, somewhere else. Oh, and Gordon Bestwick was at Chester Row last night too.’

‘What did they seem to be after?’

‘How much they knew about bw (biological warfare). Where they’d been for the last week. Had they been inside the college. Had they seen the files from any of the offices. You know.’

I knew, and Margaret also, that Nina herself was remarkably well informed. She was as cool as any of them. She reported that, early in the proceedings, before they were interrogated separately, Muriel had enquired whether she could send for her solicitor, if it seemed a good idea. Charles had stopped her, saying that it was a very bad idea. That was, Margaret and I agreed without a word spoken, good judgment on his part.

They had parted with cordiality. The next step, the fat man had said, was – if they wouldn’t mind and if it wasn’t too inconvenient – for them to have a talk with his superior. That sounded like Monteith himself: I still couldn’t understand – and if I did understand, I was more troubled – why they should be working this enquiry from the top. Normally it would be done by agents very much junior, though Cooke might have been shown the papers.

Those ‘talks’ were beginning tomorrow: that is, since it was now nearly midnight, in a few hours’ time. Olly and the signatories to the communiqué had been ‘invited’ to attend in the morning, Charles, Muriel, and ‘poor Gordon’ in the afternoon. They were to go to the Admiralty – which everyone else took for granted, but which seemed to me like a piece of mystification for mystification’s sake. Monteith and Cooke had perfectly good offices of their own, together with a dislike for using them.

‘Why “poor Gordon”?’ Margaret was asking.

‘He seems to be taking it harder than the others,’ said Nina, with a sort of clinical kindness. Then she told us, now that she had given us the hard news and could be off duty for a moment:

‘Do you know, when Daddy heard that all this happened at Chester Row, that was the first time he had realised that Charles and Muriel were living together?’

She gave an innocent smile at the innocence of the elderly.

‘What did he think about it?’ Margaret said.

‘I think he was rather shocked.’

As a matter of fact, about a sexual adventure Martin and a none-too-prim citizen of Antonine Rome would have been about equally shockable. If he disliked this one, it was because the woman had been his son’s wife, and he was still capable of blaming her.

I had been thinking, it would be better if Nina, not I, rang up Chester Row. If they were at home, I ought to go there at once. As she was obeying, she hesitated and remarked, as though it were an afterthought: ‘I don’t think anyone mentioned Guy Grenfell last night. I don’t think he’s having to go tomorrow.’

Then she went to the telephone. Those last words seemed curiously inconsequential: but Margaret looked at me with eyes indulgent but sharp. She had no doubt – that Guy Grenfell was Nina’s channel of communication – and very little more that she had brought him into the conversation, partly because she was anxious about him, partly for the pleasure of uttering his name. Uttering his name with people there to hear: she might be self-possessed, an excellent courier, but she wasn’t immune to the softer pleasures. Margaret liked her for it. As for me, in the hurry and tension of the evening, I wondered for a moment whether this also would come as a surprise to Martin, and whether or not he would approve.

In the hall of our block of flats, I waited, Nina beside me, for a taxi. I was feeling the special chagrin of no transport that came upon one in big towns. It was raining as hard as that night the previous summer when Charles had sauntered slowly home, absent-minded with joy. If we walked to the tube station, I said to Nina, we should get drenched. Did she mind? Don’t be silly, Uncle Lewis, she said, taking my arm as physically relaxed as she was shy, dark hair falling from under her hood, cheeks flushed, looking already naiad-like in the rain. I had an irrelevant thought, it was absurd, that on this particular night I should arrive at their house, Muriel’s and my son’s, just as inspissatedly soaked as when I first arrived, long ago, at Sheila’s.

We were, however, rescued. A car drew up – ‘Aren’t you getting wet?’ came a cheerful but not original question. The driver happened to be the one neighbour with whom, after twenty years living there, I was on social terms. Chester Row? No problem. Humming merrily, rosy after a party but driving with care, he took us through the midnight-empty streaming streets.

At the house, Charles opened the door, with Muriel waiting close by, but there was at once a hiatus. He held my coat, but both of them were looking, with glances that were not unfriendly but steady and purposeful, at Nina.

‘How are we going to get you home?’ said Charles, quite affectionately, giving a good impersonation of an elder brother. He didn’t look it, but he was a month younger.

‘I think I’d better order a car. We shan’t get a taxi tonight,’ said Muriel.

They weren’t going to talk in front of Nina. They had realised, it didn’t take much divining, where my information had come from. They didn’t seem to resent my possessing it (in fact they had greeted me with warmth and perhaps relief) but they weren’t giving Nina the chance to transmit any more. They had become, and no one could blame them, as security conscious as the men who had been questioning them.

They were doing less than justice, though, both to themselves and Nina. It wasn’t through their laxness that she had learned any single fact: as I discovered later, Guy Grenfell had of necessity to know all the secrets, and they couldn’t have foreseen that, apparently all of a sudden, he wanted to share everything with this girl. Whereas Nina, who was really as discreet as her father, had spoken only to him. She couldn’t do more, because of her obligations to the others, nor less, because of her duty to do her best for Guy.

Anyway, Muriel did not take her upstairs. We all waited down in the dining-room, Charles pouring me a drink, making a kind of family conversation about Irene’s sciatica and Maurice’s new wife, whom by this time they had all met. Nina, not at all touchy, showed no sign of resentment at being shut out. She had the talent for acceptance which one sometimes found in the happy. We were all listening, me with impatience, for the car to drive up outside.

At last the three of us were alone in the long drawing-room. Charles and Muriel sat on the sofa facing me, his arm round her and fingers interlaced. It was not often that they were demonstrative in public, if by public one meant anyone else’s presence, such as mine.

I said: ‘Well, I’ve heard these people came and questioned you. You’d better tell me what they said.’

Their account, though fuller, agreed with what I had been told already once that night. They both had precise memories, and sometimes they reproduced conversations word by word. There was one point of interest, though it was predictable. When they were being interrogated separately, the two agents had left them for a few minutes, obviously to confer, and returned to concentrate on a day, the preceding Wednesday, for which Charles had already given a story of his movements. She had been taken over the same hours, asked where she had been, how much of the time he had been with her, whether she could sketch out her diary of the day. It was an old trick, and I was surprised that Cooke had used it so blatantly. It had got nowhere. Their reconstructions coincided, and they had demonstrably been telling the truth.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s all right. But it’s tomorrow that matters.’

‘Or rather today,’ said Charles looking at his watch. It was now past one o’clock.

‘You’ve been summoned for the afternoon, haven’t you?’

They nodded.

‘That gives us a bit of time. There are several ways you ought to prepare yourselves–’

‘Look,’ said Charles, ‘I can handle this situation for myself. For us both.’

It sounded like, it was, a flash of adolescent pride, such as he might have shown two or three years before but had long outgrown. It was strange to hear it from him now. For an instant he seemed sham-arrogant, young or even pathetic. I was moved by a once-familiar yearning, now forgotten or submerged.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Muriel, squeezing his fingers, calling him by a pet name which I had never heard. ‘He knows things, we don’t. You’ve got to listen.’

Charles’ face was close to hers, as he broke into a slight acquiescent smile.

‘The first thing is,’ I said, ‘don’t underestimate them. They don’t work the way we do. They don’t believe in intuition much. They just go on adding one and one. But they tend to get there in the end.’

I went on: ‘Which means, whenever they have a fact right, and they will have a large number of facts right, your best line is to agree with them. Don’t deny anything which they can prove. That makes it easier, if you want to deny something which they can’t prove.’

‘I follow,’ said Charles who was now gazing at me with concentration.

‘Don’t say any more than you need. You can tell them you disapprove of biological weapons. They’ll be used to that. Don’t elaborate. Don’t go in for systematic theory. Remember their politics are simpler than yours.’

‘What do I do?’ asked Muriel.

‘The same.’

‘Won’t it look as though he’s rehearsed me, though?’

‘You can’t provide for everything. People aren’t clever enough to pretend for long. No, you say the same. Same facts, same timetable, same attitude. That’s natural. After all, to some extent I presume it happens to be true.’

Muriel gave a neutral smile. For the first time I noticed a very small dimple on her right cheek, close to her mouth, which didn’t appear to have its replica on the other side.