Making Enemies (34 page)

‘How can you be sure? She may have no choice.’

‘I know the woman, you don’t.’ He was trying to reassert himself, to regain his traditional ascendancy over me.

‘The Soviets live by different rules, Father.’

‘The differences are much exaggerated.’

‘Ask her to describe the compromises she has to make to survive,’ I said, my anger slipping out of control. ‘How much of her life she keeps secret, even from those closest to her. Get her to tell you the price of dissent and whether she has ever paid it. If you live in the Soviet Union, you’re part of the Soviet system. That’s unavoidable.’

He turned away. I didn’t know if I had struck home or if he was irritated with my response and was rejecting my script. Behind us, the band was now playing Russian martial music. The crowd was dispersing, showing its feelings by moving on, an act neither of protest nor of acceptance, but a quiet, dignified assertion of freedom. I admired the subtle, unhurried way they defined their independence against their overbearing neighbour.

‘Monty and his people don’t want you to meet Marchenko.’

‘You’re their errand boy, are you?’ I was too angry to say anything. ‘It’s none of their damn business what I do.’ He had raised his voice and the people at the next table stopped talking and looked at us.

‘That’s why they asked me to make it mine.’

‘It’s none of your business either.’ He was hurling his anger at me but it was falling short of its target.

‘You could be walking into a trap. You could be in danger.’

‘I’m going to see a scientific colleague I haven’t spoken to for years. Nothing’s going to happen to me.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘I trust Marchenko.’

‘You may be wrong to do so.’

‘You’ve no grounds for saying that.’

‘Marchenko works on the Soviet nuclear programme. You work on the British programme. You meet secretly in Helsinki. Can’t you see what could be made of that?’

‘I’m not interested in what other people think.’ There it was again, the unconquerable superiority of the academic, his hubris against my experience, the eternal, unwinnable contest. ‘Anyway,’ he added slyly. ‘No one knows about our meeting.’

I’d lost patience. I couldn’t believe in his naivety. If this was his defence, it was best to destroy it at once.

‘Everyone knows about it. The British. The Russians. The Finns, probably. You’ve been under surveillance for weeks, Father. They’ve read your letters, listened to your telephone calls, they can tell you what you’ve done every hour of every day better than you can, I expect. There isn’t a moment when someone isn’t watching you.’

The enormity of what I had said stifled his reply. He sat there gazing at me in incredulous silence.

‘Monty and his lot think you’re giving nuclear secrets to the Russians and they’re looking for evidence to trap you. If you meet Marchenko, they’ll have it.’

Silence still. I pressed home my advantage.

‘The Soviets are no different. A leading British nuclear scientist, here in Helsinki – home territory for them – takes Marchenko’s bait and walks straight into their embrace. What a coup. They won’t believe their luck. They’ll whisk you out of Finland, parade you in front of the world’s press in Moscow and dress up their kidnap as a defection from the West.’

I’d gone on too long. I’d given my father a chance to find a defence.

‘Can you find it in your heart to believe that sometimes the worst won’t happen, that there is some scrap of decency left in the world? Or has your association with Monty and these appalling people led you to think badly of everyone?’

‘I know the Russians, Father. I’ve lived alongside them for too long not to know what they’re capable of. You can’t judge them as you’d judge me because they don’t recognize the same rules. You may not like that but it’s true. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.’

‘Helsinki is not Berlin.’

‘Where the Soviets go, Berlin and all its madness follows.’

‘I don’t accept that.’

‘This is a dangerous place, Father, and you’re on your own here. You’ve got no friends and maybe a lot of enemies. Listen to me and get out before it’s too late.’

‘You make it sound as if war had already been declared.’

‘You’re caught up in a game with very high stakes. You and I don’t matter, we’re victims of their paranoia. When you’re up against people without scruples, the innocent always suffer. I don’t want to see that happen to you.’

He put his head in his hands. I knew that gesture. It was not capitulation, it was a sign of uncertainty. I kept going.

‘Don’t see Marchenko,’ I said. ‘Don’t go anywhere near her. Leave her alone. Go home now, before it’s too late.’

‘If she’s in trouble, I’ve got to help her.’

‘Who says she’s in trouble?’

‘She does.’

‘How do you know she’s telling the truth?’

‘Why would she do otherwise?’

‘She may be working against you.’

‘I won’t have it, Danny. She’d never do that.’

‘How long since you saw her last? Fifteen years? The world has changed since then. Maybe she has too, maybe she’s a different woman now. Maybe she’s been trapped by the Soviets. Have you thought of that? Maybe she’s doing this against her will.’

‘I refuse to believe anything like that of her.’ It was not stubbornness I was up against. The reality of Marchenko’s life in Soviet Russia lay beyond his imaginative reach. My father defended Marchenko’s innocence and good faith because that is how he knew her to be. ‘I’m seeing her because I agreed I would. I won’t go back on my word.’

I knew then that no argument I could put up would shift him from his position. The meeting would go ahead as planned. I had lost, and so had Monty. I prayed my father wouldn’t be a loser too.

‘I can’t let you go there by yourself.’

‘You’re not coming with me.’ I was surprised by the speed and vehemence of his reply. ‘I’m seeing her alone.’

‘I’ll take you there and I’ll wait for you.’

‘Ring this number.’ He was writing on one of the mats our beer mugs had been standing on. ‘Talk to Jamie Laurentzen. He’ll remember you. Tell your story to him. See if he believes you.’

It was a glimmer of hope. I took the beer mat from him gratefully.

*

If Laurentzen was surprised at my presence in Helsinki he certainly didn’t show it. The car-mad Finn I saw now was little different from the man I remembered: tall, gaunt, eyes set deep in his head, a cropped
beard, always with a pipe in his mouth. Only his colouring had changed. The hair cut close to his scalp was now white, his beard more white than grey and his skin a darker brown than I had known it.

‘Do you remember my MG, Danny? Now that was a car. I sold it when I left Cambridge. That was the last time I cried.’

I remembered exhilarating afternoons roaring round the byways of the Fens and narrow Cambridge streets, scaring the locals out of their wits. I was too young then to be frightened.

Laurentzen now had a white, pre-war Mercedes convertible and the top was down. He proudly explained its finer points to me, opening the bonnet to show me the polished cylinders and making me listen to the engine.

‘Is that not the sound of pleasure, Danny?’

I asked him if he knew that my father was in Helsinki.

‘His name was a late addition to the list of delegates to our conference. I was pleased to see it.’

‘He hasn’t got in touch?’

‘He is much in demand. I am sure he will make contact when he has a moment.’

Laurentzen smiled sadly, as if his experience of human nature gave him little to hope for. His disappointment was deep. I told him about my father’s planned meeting with Marchenko.

‘Do you have the address where they are to meet?’ I gave it to him. He shook his head. ‘This is the home of a known communist sympathizer. Quite unsuitable. I think we should surprise our Soviet friends with a small change of plan, don’t you?’

He roared with laughter at that, stuck a huge pipe in his mouth and drove off with a squeal.

‘What acceleration,’ he shouted above the roar of the engine. ‘Are you impressed?’

*

‘Is she with you, Jamie?’ my father asked, his voice full of anxiety. These were the first words these two men, once close friends and collaborators, had spoken to each other in ten years.

‘She is coming, yes,’ Laurentzen said. ‘She wishes to brush her hair first.’

‘And the Russians?’

‘There is no sign of the Russians but that does not mean they are not watching us. It is good to see you again, Geoffrey.’

The two men shook hands through the open window of the car.

‘And you, Jamie,’ my father said, ‘and you. I’m grateful.’

After so many years apart was that all these two men had to say to each other? Their partnership had produced one of the most significant scientific discoveries of the last decade, then they had fallen out for reasons that were never fully explained, and there had been no contact between them since. Now they greeted each other as if they met each day of the week.

‘Here she is now,’ Laurentzen said. ‘I told you she would come.’

There had been a transformation since our meeting earlier in the day. Ruth Marchenko had let her hair down, it was set with two combs on either side, and she had changed her dress and her shoes. I was struck at once by a kind of girlish radiance about her.

‘Geoffrey.’

It was a cry across the years, the past echoing into the present. It reached my father and touched him.

Marchenko was running towards him. A strand of hair broke loose and she tried to push it back under the comb. She laughed then, she laughed with excitement, with pleasure and delight. I realized, watching her, that she was in love with my father.

She spoke breathlessly. ‘Geoffrey? Oh, Geoffrey.’

My father had got out of the car and was holding Marchenko in his arms. She was clinging to him.

‘Ruth? Are you all right?’

They kissed each other on the cheeks and my father helped Marchenko into the car. We saw two men run out of the house and race to a car. We presumed they were Russians.

‘Get in and hold tight,’ Laurentzen said. ‘Now the fun begins.’

We were followed for a time, but Laurentzen knew the countryside, which our pursuers did not, and his car was much faster than theirs. I guessed we had doubled back on ourselves a couple of times, and once we had left the city I kept getting glimpses of the sun on the water. We were travelling east, along the coast, but I no idea where we had ended up, except that we were some distance from Helsinki.

‘Welcome to my summer home,’ Laurentzen said. ‘Here you will be safe. Not for ever, but for a few hours. You may speak freely. You will not be overheard. Please. You are welcome here.’

He led us into a painted wooden house on the edge of the sea.

‘Many years ago, in a moment of rashness I bitterly regret, I told my husband what happened in Leiden. If I had not done that he would not have been able to betray me all those years later. You would not be in danger now. I must ask your forgiveness for what I did.’

‘Did he force you to tell him?’

She remembers that terrible night, the night she told Ivan in a moment of desperation that she had slept with Stevens. Why did she tell him? What did she hope to gain but his anger, his disdain and rejection of her? How many years later did that pathetic man offer the secret of her infidelity to his inquisitors in exchange for his own life? They accepted his offer, then changed their minds and executed him anyway. In that moment, unknowingly, he drew her into Andropov’s power.

‘No,’ she says quietly. ‘No, he never forced me.’

‘There is nothing to be forgiven,’ he adds quietly. ‘How could there be?’

Across the years his hand reaches out to her and she feels his warmth. The gentleness of his words bathes her like a warm breeze. She wants to kiss him and love him. But she doesn’t move. His grip tightens on her fingers, closer, closer. She wants him to draw her closer.

‘How you have suffered,’ he says. ‘How wrong it all is.’

They sit there, linked together, in silence. Outside the sun is climbing. She wonders what time it is but dares not ask. They are in their own world again now; time doesn’t matter. Nobody will disturb them. She is safe with him. This is where she is meant to be.

*

‘This is our task,’ he is saying to her, ‘our responsibility.’

She is not here on her own account. Gromsky, Tomasov, Lykowski, Markarova have placed their trust in her, as has Andropov. Though she is exhausted, she must fulfil her duty to them all. She must hear what he is saying.

‘Every day more of us believe that what we are being asked to do is wrong.’

‘What can we do, Geoffrey? What power have we got?’

‘We have the power of our knowledge. If the scientific community says “no” loudly enough, our voices will carry across national frontiers. If we refuse to work for any political regime, East or West, until our demands for international scientific control are met, then political strategies based on the development of nuclear weapons will be stranded and we will have delivered the world from the possibility of annihilation. We will have banished nuclear arsenals because we, the builders, refuse to build. Instead of being the architects of destruction, we will have started the design of a new world. We will earn the respect of future generations.’

It is a courageous speech, whose sentiments she endorses. She also knows it is wholly impractical. Geoffrey is an innocent dreamer. She knows the world as it truly is because she lives it every day of her life, while he can only imagine. All her disappointments rise again.

She looks out to sea. The morning is bright now. A couple are walking a dog on the beach. She can see a man swimming. The world is waking up to another day.

‘I must get you away from here,’ he says, his face lighting up as he speaks. ‘We will be the symbol of a new world order, a Russian scientist and an English scientist, working together for what we believe in, speaking the same language. We will fight this madness together.’

He smiles at her and squeezes her hand.

‘We will begin the campaign in Cambridge. I will find you somewhere to live – you can stay in our house until we get you a place of your own.’

‘Geoffrey.’ She must stop him before it is too late.

‘Why not? What other solution can there be? Together we will present an unanswerable argument.’

‘Geoffrey. I have a mother and a son.’

‘If you leave Moscow they will send them after you.’

‘If I leave they will keep them as hostages and force me to return.’

‘What possible use can they have for an old woman and a child?’

‘That is how they operate.’

She sees his hopes begin to fade.

‘Will you go back? When this conference is over?’ he asks.

‘To Moscow? Of course. I live there.’

‘Everything will continue as before?’

‘What choice do I have, Geoffrey? It is the world I know.’ She puts her finger to his lips. ‘Don’t make parting harder than it already is. Please say nothing more.’

‘You cannot imagine how difficult this is.’

‘I know only too well.’

*

He has looked at his watch twice in the last five minutes. She knows it is time for them to leave. She has told him everything but the greatest secret of her life.

‘There is something I want you to see.’ She reaches into her handbag and produces a wallet of photographs. She chooses one and hands it to Stevens.

‘This is my son, Valery.’

Stevens looks at the photographs. His expression registers nothing. Surely he can see what to her is so obvious? She smiles and puts her hand on his shoulder.

‘Can’t you see it?’

‘See what?’

Those grey-blue eyes, staring at her quizzically. How well she knows that look.

‘See what?’ he asks again.

How can he fail to see that which is so clear to her?

‘You are the father he has never seen.’

‘Valery is ours?’

‘Yes.’

‘You never told me.’

‘He is a good boy,’ she says. ‘You would be proud of him.’

‘Why did you never tell me?’

‘How could I? At first I was not sure. But when I was sure, it became my secret. It kept me close to you; I could look at Valery and I could see you. There was some comfort in that. As he grows older he becomes more like you every day, not only in looks but
in manner too. Sometimes it makes me laugh to listen to him. I am hearing you speaking Russian.’

‘All these years,’ he says. ‘All these wasted years.’

She holds his head against her as his body shakes. She tries to calm him but the tears flow out of him as if a dam has broken: all the sorrow, the rage, the hurt of the years is released and he lets it run out. It is some time before he is calm again.

‘Can I see him?’

‘That is impossible,’ she says. ‘You mustn’t even think it.’

‘I must see him. I have to. I am his father.’

‘He knows nothing about you.’

‘You never told him?’

‘How could I? It would be intolerable for him to know the truth. We live on opposite sides of a divided world. He would never be allowed to see you. You cannot ask him to live with the knowledge of something he can never realize.’

‘But I know.
I
know.’

‘He is young, Geoffrey. Think of him. You’re not living in Moscow. You’re not Russian. He is all those things. For as long as our two countries see each other as enemies, your son will remain unknown to you. That is the legacy of what we scientists have done to the world. That is what you must fight to destroy. For his sake and those of his age, and younger. You must go on to make his future secure.’

Can telling him the greatest secret of her life provide the motive that will drive him on to overcome whatever obstacles are thrown in his path? Will he go back to his own people, his own leaders, and ask them to speak to the Supreme Soviet?

‘I will send you photographs,’ she says. ‘I will write to tell you what he does with his life. But you cannot see him.’

He looks at her, desperation in his eyes. She knows what he wants to say. If something happens to you, his eyes tell her, how will I know if he is still alive? How will I know?

She wants to say, there is no consolation, that is what we have made of our lives; there are no answers, no reprieves. We are victims of politics. Now our lives must be about making a safer world for our son.

She kisses him. ‘We cannot let ourselves think these thoughts. We must remember that once we loved each other and that Valery is the living testimony to that love. We may be apart but we are
luckier than some. Perhaps,’ she smiles as she says this, ‘perhaps he will grow into a famous physicist like his father. Perhaps you will read of his achievements in the scientific journals and be proud.’

He looks at her, a man lost and desolate, and she feels her heart almost break. Why must she always be strong? Why her? Why can’t she break down and be comforted by him?

‘What am I to do?’ he asks.

‘Keep the secret,’ she says. ‘We cannot burden his life with our guilt, our needs, our recriminations for secrets not shared. He must be free to live the life he chooses, in so far as any choice is possible within the Soviet Union. We must do what we have to do to make that possible. That is the greatest gift we can give him.’

She knows that what she says is true, but it is not what she wants. She wants Stevens to sweep her up into his arms, to rescue her and Valery; to take them away from Moscow to a life without fear, where she can dedicate herself to the two men she will never stop loving.

It is morning now. Light, she knows, brings with it truth. She is Russian and she must return to Moscow. He is English and must return to Cambridge. That is their fete. She smiles to herself. Fate is such a Russian concept. She wonders if the English think of their fate. She suspects not.

‘It will be very difficult to say goodbye,’ he says.

‘We have done it before and we must do it again.’

‘There will be other conferences. Rome in November. Oxford next year. You must come to Oxford, bring Valery to Oxford. We must meet as often as we can. That is our obligation to each other.’

‘No dreams, Geoffrey. Not this time.’

She remembers the red university diary, and the names of towns she has never visited. Milan. Basle. Oslo.

She takes his hand. ‘No false promises. No self-delusion. If we meet again, it will be entirely by chance. I have only one regret. For you, I wish I was beautiful.’

‘You are beautiful,’ he says, and she laughs again, disbelieving but pleased, because she knows he means it even though it is untrue.

‘Let me go, Geoffrey.’

He has taken her in his arms. She removes his hands and holds
him apart from her. In that moment she understands him as she has never done before. His fate is that he can never have the one thing he wants.

‘It is time we returned to our real lives.’