Fellow Passenger (4 page)

‘Will you permit me to conduct this enquiry in my own way?’ Peter thundered at him.

‘Look here, I was in that confounded wing entirely by accident!’ I protested. ‘I dropped off the roof on to a balcony, and you’ll find my bedroom slipper under it. I went through that room into the passage, was nearly seen and popped into another where I hid behind the curtains. Unfortunately I disturbed some old lady in making my escape, and she yelled for help.’

Horace was not very bright. He started off to say something and then saw that he was going to give his own movements away. I don’t believe he cared a damn about darling Dr Cornelia. He had a long way to go before reaching the mental acuteness of my aged and sympathetic captor. The old boy, who had been basking in quiet approval as if some experiment of his had revealed perverse and entertaining behaviour of the proton, met my eyes with a mischievous expression of innocence which he evidently meant me to appreciate. He had no more need of glasses than I.

My clothes, with some difficulty, were found, and I put them on. When Peter handed me over to the police, dressing-gown, pyjamas and towel were stowed away in my pack. I looked a respectable holiday-maker, but I was at once recognized as the man who had been staying at the local hotel a fortnight earlier and asking too many and too suspicious questions.

In the morning I was driven to Saxminster, and came up before the local beaks. The bench was at first favourably impressed. I was, after all, a citizen of known antecedents with a club and friends to whom reference might be made, and a bank balance - though it was mighty small, and I could not claim any source of income. But nobody could remember that there had ever been any Howard-Wolferstans at the manor, and my statement to Peter was treated as bluff or a mere impertinence. I thought it best to give no more details.

The justices remanded me for further enquiries, and were very ready to grant me bail. They had quite an argument with the police about it. But then Peter called up reinforcements - a very military-looking gentleman who had not opened his mouth in public and was continually having violent, whispered conversations with the superintendent of police. The superintendent passed on a whisper to the magistrates’ clerk. The clerk whispered to the justices. They announced gravely - though looking impatient - that in view of the Importance of the Establishment into which I had broken, bail could not be granted.

All went well in gaol. I won’t pretend I enjoyed it; but if a man is to live his life to the full, he must expect occasional loss of liberty, be it in cell or hospital bed. For the first five days I was treated genially as if it were a foregone conclusion that my behaviour could be satisfactorily explained. Then came a subtle change in the attitude of my warders.

I thought I must have broken some taboo. Had my normal social gaiety been mistaken, I wondered, for insolence? In so ancient and traditional a country as England there is a proper manner for every situation, and one knows it or should know it by instinct. In the Tower, for example, I find that a distant courtliness, a melancholy humour are much appreciated. But in a plain, respectable prison the right note for a first offender was hard to strike, especially since I was accustomed to conditions in the less formal countries of Latin America. There a prisoner is free to chat, to cook his food if he can get any, to catch his own lice and to pass the time as best he can in the easy society of well-mannered thieves and murderers. I have never been able to understand why Victorian England decided that confinement in a cell was more progressive.

The disapproval of my warders, however, had nothing to do with any traditional subtleties of behaviour. No, their inexplicable coldness merely showed that they had learned through the police grapevine of the enormity of my crime. Myself, I never suspected it. I had not even employed a solicitor to advise and defend me. I felt that the complexities were such that only I myself could be sure what to admit and what to suppress. In gaol I had had plenty of time to think, and it had occurred to me that the manor, as I had pictured it, did not fit the social habits of its day. The horde of maidservants, passing from the domestic offices to their attic bedrooms, would have to go up the main staircase, which was most improbable. The likely answer was that the Ministry had blocked up the western ends of the landings on the first and second floors to form the nunnery wing, that the nunnery stairs had originally been the back stairs and that they carried on up to the attics at some point which I had not discovered in the dark. If my father had been thinking of this second staircase - I repeat that I always had the utmost confidence in what he chose to tell me - then his nest-egg might still be where he said it was and I still had a hope of regaining it. Obviously I did not want any solicitor insisting that I should produce it and prove my title to it.

The magistrates’ court was crowded. I had a good look round from the dock. Peter and Horace were both present, and at a decent distance from them was Dr Cornelia Ridgeway. She was sternly dressed, as befitted a scientist, and a man without my keen appreciation of women might have had to take a second look before realizing that when she wished - in her bedroom or in Bond Street, for example — she could be alluringly feminine. As my acquaintance with her had been purely spiritual - or, let us say, spiritually tactile rather than coarsely visual - I might not have recognized her; but, when our eyes met, she produced a scintillating, exquisite, gorgeous carnation of a blush. There was also a tremor of the lips. I think she may have intended a distant smile, a mere politeness to show that she was above embarrassment. But I had, of course, to look away.

The case for the prosecution opened. Peter gave evidence and very wisely kept Horace right out of the story. So did Dr Cornelia. I had passed through her room and woken her up. She had screamed for help. That was all she knew. As she left the box, modest, serious and glowing with the inner consciousness that she had aroused the chivalrous admiration of every man of taste in court, I was able to express my apologies in a respectful bow

Then came my old professor. I had been right about him. He was of immense distinction, and he spent as much time at Cambridge as in the suite of rooms opening upon the manor lawn. He was Sir Alexander Romilly himself.

He had evidently decided - for he knew almost as much of possible human beings as possible universes - that a fuss was being made about very little. He pointed out that Mr Howard-Wolferstan (no nonsense about calling me the accused) had offered him no violence whatever and had indeed - ho, ho! - engaged his sympathies by conversation. So far as his experience permitted him to judge, and unless he had been grossly deceived by outward appearances, he felt as sure of Mr Howard-Wolferstan’s loyalty as of his own.

Loyalty? Well, I supposed it would be investigated, but I was so precious innocent and confident that I was startled when the word was openly mentioned. I fear I returned Sir Alexander’s little nod without the full courtliness which springs from an easy mind.

I am not, I am quite sure, more Ecuadorian than English. But put it this way. I had been brought up in a country where a man of substance and family could do more or less as he liked, short of murder. Such eighteenth-century liberty was, of course, unthinkable in England; but the nearest thing to it was the charitable attitude adopted, before the war, to the peccadilloes of high-spirited but essentially honourable young men at the older universities. And that had been my chief experience of England - two years of school, four years at Oxford and a fifth as a gilded and irresponsible youth in London. Thus I was idiot enough to expect that my breaking into Moreton Intrinseca manor - in the absence of any evidence of theft or intended theft - would be treated as an eccentricity in the worst of taste, and that I should be let off with a tremendous lecture from the magistrates and a heavy fine. I had also, I fear - for youth in the Americas endures so easily - forgotten that I was thirty-seven not twenty-two.

When I was called upon to tell my story, I put it very simply. I said that I had no witness except my father who was dead. He had told me that there was a considerable sum of money in the house - I claimed that it was gold coin and in a deed box, for I dared not weaken my story by saying I hadn’t the faintest notion what it was - but that the box was not in the attic where he said it would be found. I strenuously maintained that I had passed through the wing set apart for female scientists by the purest accident.

The Crown had employed an eminent Q.C. to deal with me. He seemed a very ferocious iron-grey sledge-hammer to crack a harmless nut, but I supposed, uneasily, that his presence was just bureaucratic routine. He asked me whether I seriously expected my story to be believed. I answered that I did not and that, all the same, it was true. I rather hoped that he and the magistrates would suspect me of telling a gallant lie. Dr Cornelia was clear on my evidence and Peter’s of all possible complicity, but I might well have been enamoured of the intellectual in the green nightdress.

Counsel for the prosecution ignored those attractive byways. He asked me whether, a fortnight earlier, I had been in the district asking questions about the atomic establishment and the accommodation at the manor. I admitted that I had, and that it was natural enough. I hoped, I said, to be invited to eat a meal, and had not realized that an invitation would be so difficult to obtain.

‘You did not appreciate, perhaps,’ he asked me, ‘that the establishment would be so security-minded?’

‘No, I did not.’

‘It had not occurred to you that some of the administrators might be working at night on papers classified as Most Secret?’

‘No.’

‘Sir Alexander Romilly, for example?’

‘I am sure Sir Alexander would never take back to his rooms any documents which would be safer at the Establishment,’ I answered.

As a matter of fact, the old boy’s desk had been covered by a mass of official-looking documents with some kind of test report in the middle of them and a formidable sheet of calculations. But I was not going to give him away. He had proved himself a lot more capable of looking after secret papers than any amount of security officers and barbed wire.

‘Have you any political affiliations?’ Counsel asked.

‘None whatever.’

‘You are not a member of the Communist Party?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Have you ever been a member?’

Good God, I had completely forgotten it! It was no more important to memory than whether I had worn a red tie or a yellow one. So much had come between. Youth passing into middle age. Six years of exhausting service to my country. The death of my parents. It seems to me, now, impossible that I could have forgotten. Yet I had. The communism I knew was comparable to my other social or anti-social activities. In my conscious mind there was no association between the real, objective communism of every day and my own early follies. Suppression, because I was ashamed of them? It’s possible. In any case I had done my own brain-washing with an efficiency which startles me. How many other discreditable episodes have I conveniently forgotten?

‘Yes,’ I answered him, utterly horrified.

‘When did you resign from the party?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I put it to you that you never have resigned.’

My expression must have been guilty as hell - exactly that of a spy who had trusted that his political allegiance would never be ferreted out. In 1938, when I was twenty-one and up at Oxford, communism was a mere protest against Hitler and Mussolini. A fashionable protest. A jest, though an angry one. Some of my contemporaries, I suppose, must have taken it very seriously, for since then they have solemnly exposed the struggles in their blasted consciences. I have no conscience - politically, I mean.

It was hopeless, in the atmosphere of to-day, to explain that I had never resigned my membership because I did not think it of sufficient importance. My silence was damning. I will give the rest of this appalling cross-examination verbatim. I can never forget it.

‘When did you join the party?’

‘In 1938.’

‘What were your activities?’

‘None - except that I once hoisted the red flag on Magdalen Tower.’

‘Secretly?’

‘Of course - though everyone knew I had done it except the authorities.’

‘That was on the instructions of the party?’

‘Lord, no! They were very angry. They said it was an irresponsible, diversionary activity.’

‘But they did not expel you?’

‘I don’t know. Not at that meeting, anyway.’

‘Why not?’

‘They probably thought I might be some use to them in Ecuador.’

‘And were you?’

‘No. The war broke out soon after my return, and I was much too busy to bother with them. I suppose they lost track of me.’

‘What did you do in the war?’

‘I formed and led an organization of dockers and airport workers on the Pacific coast of South America.’

‘For what purpose?’

‘Counter-propaganda and other pro-allied activities.’

‘And of course you found communists the most useful? Just as in Greece and Jugo-Slavia, for example?’

‘No. As a matter of fact we didn’t touch the communist organizations at all. Most of my men were Catholics, in name at any rate.’

‘From whom did you take your orders?’