His Coldest Winter

He went downstairs to the basement where the big new electron microscope was set up beyond the clean-room barriers. Just short of the airlock, he paused. He knew the machine intimately, felt its function almost in his own body. It had its own hums and whispers, the heating and refrigerant drives for its diffusion pumps, the sense of its own electronic life. In a climate of science and specialisation, he’d specialised – and been hired here at Lidlock. Though he was young and very much the new boy, the microprobe was ‘his baby’.

He felt his body shiver in spite of the warmth. As a great telescope observed the past, so perhaps the electron beam looked into the future. Threat was writ large enough there. It was a threat that had been engineered by men just like himself and Lionel – intelligent people, scientists. Since the Missile Crisis, there was no getting away from it, no hope of keeping the rival megatonnage at some intellectual arm’s length. What was one actually supposed to do before hail and fire scorched the grass, and burning mountains toppled into the sea? The question wasn’t rhetorical. No wonder he’d shivered. Sooner or later, someone would press the button; people were even savvy about it.

At least Rae had left his warheads behind him; at least both of them were out of all that. He compressed his lips and cast an eye over the schedule of tasks pinned up before the holiday. Lidlock Ltd had been a backwater until quite recently. The company made safety systems for rotating machinery, and that was still its stock in trade – a more benign manufacture it was hard to imagine. St Albans itself had somehow remained ‘saintly’ and aloof, squeezed between the Hatfield defence complex and the Handley Page airstrip at Frogmore. And if Lidlock seemed to have done exceptionally well, with two recent units put up like glass boxes, and a lab section – the section Geoffrey had been recruited to join – hastily erected and tooled up to poke into fresh possibilities, well, what of it? Technology was expanding everywhere. The company was starting to diversify.

Technology was more than expanding. Four years previously, an engineer in Dallas, Texas, had built the first integrated circuit: virtually on his kitchen table, Jack Kilby, a self-effacing back-room boy with a knack for DIY, had etched the equivalent of a transistor, a capacitor and three resistors into a sliver of germanium. With its sticking-out wires sealed crudely in celluloid, Kilby’s finger-sized mock-up represented a breakthrough. Robert Noyce, a rival American, had made a similar invention using silicon. In only months, Texas Instruments had Kilby’s device down near the size of a pencil point; and Fairchild Corporation likewise with Noyce’s. Soon enough, there was the race to write entire textual machines on to microscopic wafers of single-crystal silicon. To those who knew, technology was about to exceed itself.

Miles away across the Atlantic, struggling with hastily adapted equipment, settling into half-finished premises and sharing temporary desk space with ‘Design’, Geoffrey’s colleagues didn’t know officially. When they saw their precocious junior fitted for his ‘clean suit’, however, and were asked to prepare him ever smaller samples of grit, they mostly guessed the drift – and the source of the funding.

Geoffrey himself didn’t, quite. That is, he guessed and didn’t guess. A country lad, snapped up on graduation at nearly a thousand pounds a year, soon married – wedded also to Apollonian notions of the common good – he still couldn’t quite let two and two make four. At school, he’d been taught by a charismatic science master. At UCL, a professor had uncovered his extraordinary flair for microscopy. Now, his bright start at Lidlock had thrust him to the very edge of the new, but he was still wet behind the ears, and his brain was fully stretched piloting his incredible new instrument over sub-miniature horizons. So the leap of dimension was too great. Computers were still adding machines the size of houses: he’d seen the immense ACE at the National Physical Laboratory in Bushy Park. It was the leading device in a country that led the world, and it could just about tackle the school timetable problem, the freeze-cooling of fish, and the simplest Fourier analyses.

No, in his conscious mind, he failed to join the dots. His research was pure, and the company – with an eye to the commercial future only – was just speculating in semiconductor techniques thrown up by the Americans. Nor was it remotely possible that this micro-calligraphy on grains of frosted rock could have summoned his fellow traveller, Lionel Rae, appearing from De Havilland’s barely a month after his own arrival.

Geoffrey returned upstairs without yet confronting the electron probe, and went to sit at the section of bench which was his office space. On the pad in front of him lay a stencilled notice that must have been circulated during the holiday. He took the biro from his jacket and idly clicked the button at the end. Hardly noticing what he was doing, he wrote the letters ‘C.S.’ at the top of the page. Then he sighed, because those two telltale initials let slip the person who was really on his mind. He glanced down at the memo.

To all Lab staff: The Requirements of the Official Secrets Act 1911, Section 2. A Reminder …

He felt his face redden, and hastily scrubbed out the two jottings. He picked up the sheet to read it.

The several recent and gravely troubling spy scandals in the news … a heightened state of alert … on our guard against any species of conduct which might render us liable to …

At the end of its three paragraphs was the signature of Bob Butterfield, the company’s managing director.

He glanced around nervously, until he saw that there was a copy for everyone. He relaxed. It was nothing. In fact, when he read it again, the memo cheered him immensely. It wasn’t like Butterfield to dream of Reds under the bed. The likely case, surely, was that some civil servant on high had got into a flap and issued a directive to every boss in the region with a government contract. It was certainly no secret that Lidlock supplied a minor safety device for Victor jets. Butterfield was just passing the flap down.

Geoffrey pictured the Yorkshire engineer’s bottled fury at the risk to his pension from sexual goings-on. Amused, he vaguely remembered having signed something when he’d joined. But the idea of anyone at Lidlock having the inclination to sidle off in search of a Russian – for the sake of one military component – was surely far-fetched. He crumpled the memo between his palms just as Lance O’Neill burst into the lab.

‘GOOD CHRISTMAS, GEOFF?’ Hat in hand, overcoat unbuttoned, Lance was a kindred spirit. He was tall, dark-haired, only a few years older. His school-hero face glowed, and the cold had heightened the scrum injuries it catalogued: the broken nose, the notched eyebrow, the resculpted right ear. ‘Well?’ He flung his scarf on to the extraction unit and leaned back against the pipework to slap snow off his trouser bottoms.

‘Good enough, thanks,’ Geoffrey laughed. ‘And you?’

‘The usual,’ said O’Neill. ‘Kids enjoyed it, I suppose. Brass monkeys, wasn’t it? We ran out of coal. Can’t say I’m sorry to be back.’ He looked about him as he peeled off his coat. ‘Bugger of a job getting in. Trains no go. Buses no go. Half an hour to get the bloody car started.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Still,’ he put on a radio voice, ‘we must all do our duty and keep our spirits up.’ He tossed his ball of paper into the air and caught it. ‘So take a look at this, why don’t you? Better still …’ Rather than trying to salvage his own, he got up and fetched Lance’s memo from the corner where he worked. ‘Bobby’s got the wind up about spies and sex. We’ve all been sent one.’ Grinning, he held it out for him, and indicated Lionel Rae’s empty desk by the window. ‘His nibs as well.’

‘Hang on. Let me thaw out a bit first. Made the coffee, have you?’

Geoffrey took the beaker from the kiln. ‘Sorry.’

Finally ensconced on a high stool next to the radiator, with his pipe alight and his cup delicately balanced on the slatted top of a small, but very expensive, oscilloscope, Lance cast an eye over the memo. He seemed to miss the joke. ‘Well, it was on the cards, wasn’t it?’

‘What was?’

‘We’re being designated, aren’t we. Dedicated. Whatever you want to call it. Especially you and your Dr Gill.’

‘Me and Raj?’ Geoffrey perched on the edge of his bench and began once more to click his pen. His Dr Gill could hardly be dragged away from the silicon, or the clean rooms where it was aligned, cut into discs, polished, oxidised, doped, baked, masked and etched. Dr Gill’s empathy with the whole mysterious process, and with the quantum values of semiconductor atoms themselves, was such that Geoffrey often strove to understand quite what his boss required of him.

‘It’s a measure of your success, Geoff. They’re upping the stakes.’

‘What stakes, for God’s sake?’

‘Oh, come on. Haven’t you got the hang of it? It’s the MOD. I worry for you. They’re not pissing around, matey. Why do you think Rae’s here? Work it out, for God’s sake.’

A technician came in with a batch of perspex cases, each bound with surgical tape. They were old samples, and had to be archived. He put the cases down, pointedly removed Lance’s cup from the oscilloscope and handed it back to him.

‘Thanks, Terry.’ Lance drained the cup and tapped his pipe into a large meniscus glass he kept for the purpose. ‘Message received. Here we go, then.’ He got off his stool, glanced first at Terry, and then back to Geoffrey. ‘Enough said, I think. We’ll speak later. There’s stuff here I’d better be getting straight on with.’

Geoffrey stood blinking as Lance’s words sank in. It took him several seconds to lose his pastoral innocence: if Lance was right, his whole life had shifted gear. He stared at his colleague, now bent over an optical device for classifying the specimens. Everything belatedly added up. What if the buildings, the expansion, the investment were all military? Once the old man retired, the factory premises could be painlessly rejigged – to make pocket-sized guidance systems for missiles. A technology was about to take off, but its production was already earmarked by the government. He, the well-meaning Geoff Fairhurst, was about to become absorbed into the armaments and aerospace frenzy that occupied the lee of the Chilterns from Stevenage right down to Aldermaston.

What a simpleton he’d been. His body gave that shiver again. The agricultural landscape he’d grown up in – the fertile plain, the windy chalk hills and sloping beechwoods, the ancient estates with their cottages, brakes and streams – was taking on a seamy side, a sense of underworld. For it might not be coincidence that the big V-bombers flew slowly and protectively over the factory like great grey bats. And maybe British intelligence already had a strong presence in the area. There might really be enemy agents, sympathisers, potential traitors somewhere out there. Eyes and ears might even now be sending details of his own life, his own name, directly to London … or to Moscow.

And suddenly, the pompous ‘any species of conduct’ did apply to him. His heart thumped. ‘C.S.’ He unscrewed the ball of paper, smoothed it with the side of his hand and scratched again with his pen at the initials he’d written at the top. Cynthia Somers was nothing real, nothing tangible. There’d been no furtive fumblings in corridors. Assignations had not been made. It was all pure as the driven snow, and he was a happily married man. No substantial alteration would occur if he never saw Cynthia again. Yet he wasn’t being honest with himself. In truth, she was a gamble with his deepest feelings, Cynthia, the missing term of an equation. His cover seemed almost blown, the sense of threat sharpening itself to a point.

Down in the basement, the microscope preserved its vacuum and waited. It was indeed a tool that could scry into the invisible. Before long, dressed in his special spacesuit, he’d be approaching it once again. A bead of sweat moistened the armpit of his shirt.

Now he had to see her, simply to reassure himself. He needed to be certain it was all in his own mind, this infatuation, that it was his own fire he was playing with, that he wasn’t at risk of making a complete and dangerous fool of himself.

LANCE WAS ABSORBED with the specimens; Terry was labelling them. Geoffrey went over to the lab window. A flake or two spiralled in the airstream against a dull hurry of clouds. Track-marked snow covered the car park a foot deep. Snow lay upon the pavements and window sills of the old quarter, above whose fairy-tale roofs towered the Norman abbey of St Alban the Martyr. The great building shimmered at the heart of things. He understood nothing of women – no one understood them, not even themselves.

There were pencilled circuit diagrams on Lionel Rae’s desk. He picked a few up, complex, hurriedly sketched logic gates with their spiky symbols and jotted values – emblems, he thought in passing, of Rae’s extraordinary mind. The man calculated like a machine, as fluent in electronics as ordinary people were in English. But the pages would do to cloak his mission. He held the sheaf out purposefully in front of him. ‘I’m going up to the drawing office,’ he said.

The drawing office lay at the far end of the block. Just before it, he could contrive to pass the room where the six girl typists sat at their desks. All down the ground-floor corridor with its run of identical newly painted flushpanel doors he was amazed at the lengths to which his emotions were taking him. The large, metal-framed windows looked over crystallised rose beds to whitened, wooded parkland. Children in the distance were sledging down a bank.

‘Morning, Geoff.’ Someone barged past his shoulder, and he turned, startled, uncertain to whom the retreating back belonged. Others were arriving ahead of him, scarfed up in greatcoats, disappearing into offices. He nodded to one or two as he passed; the place was filling up, coming to life. For form’s sake, he put his head in to exchange a few words with Clive Powell, the production manager, and again felt he had no outer shell, that his thoughts were leaking out somehow to betray him, and that was why Louisa …

But with Cynthia Somers it was not sex. It was precisely because his feeling for her would not ‘render any one of us liable’ that there was nothing to feel ashamed of.

Blushing again, he made his way on through the double doors and up the main staircase. It led straight to photolitho on the second floor. But a narrow passage on the first led to the test shop stair at the far end, and, half-way along, there was a glass partition which looked into the typists’ room. Once he reached it, Geoffrey allowed himself to hesitate and glance sideways. Four of the girls were there under the strip lighting, rattling away at their machines, pausing every now and then, elbows in, to flick the carriage levers across in that upright, female way they had. Cynthia’s chair was empty.

Someone was working the Roneo. He craned his neck to see. At the same moment, the girl gave over cranking the handle, turned and stared back at him – not Cynthia but the freckly redhead from accounts, June Something-or-other. His spirits plummeted as he looked hastily away, shocked at the extent of his disappointment, at how much he’d anticipated seeing her again. Then another girl caught his eye, and he retreated, diagrams in hand.

They’d spoken several times, Cynthia and he. Once in the spring, she’d come with some files for Lionel Rae, and had stopped by Geoffrey’s piece of bench to look over his shoulder. He’d been examining photographic results, swirling iridescent images and beautiful sliced forms that could sometimes take on all kinds of impressions. They could almost stand as pictures in their own right. He’d got up in his white coat to explain them to her, though words had seemed only to mar a shared sense of wonder. Then he’d even taken her down to show her where the probe was, outlined its principles as simply as he could, chattered on at times too freely – at others with a formality that verged on the tongue-tied – about the semi-magical properties of silicon, and about his own scanning electron beam. It could penetrate, he’d said, more deeply into nature’s enigma than anything before it.

A flicker of a smile had crossed her face. But she’d seemed genuinely interested; and it was flattering, since she was so attractive. That was when he’d first felt the understanding between them, a meeting of minds. Most definitely, he wasn’t sexually in love with her. In fact he’d have liked to protect her from the sexual tide coming in, an intelligent girl who might all too easily be damaged. She was younger, and he was married. She had her own life, of which he could, and should, know nothing.

It scared him to feel quite so devastated at her absence from the typing room. He stuffed the papers into his jacket pocket. She scared him, even as she thrilled him with her sense of difference, of selfhood, the crisp, faintly provocative way she wore her clothes, the cut of her hair, the tightness of her skirt.

THERE WAS NO thaw overnight. More snow fell. On the next day, a Friday, the earth had another new beginning, without smutch or stain. Then a wind got up from the east that set ranks of silver-grey clouds streaming in the middle air. It plucked the traceries from stalks and wires, dislodged the frosting of empty boughs, and brought great swags of snow from shifting evergreens thudding down on to the white carpet below. Any wakeful creatures hoping to scavenge food it sent back to their burrows.

The roads were more perilous than ever. Driving off from his house, Geoffrey skidded most of the way down Cowper Road. The only visible patches of tarmac showed on the High Street, the long straight road which neatly bisected his home town along the valley floor. Attempts had been made to put down salt and grit. He watched the market people while he waited behind a van at the traffic lights. The fishmonger had shovelled up two huge sugary pyramids on the wide pavement in front of the old Town Hall. He was setting out his stock under the arches, wearing fingerless gloves and an Arsenal bobble-hat, and whistling at the favour of sub-zero temperatures. The packed fish lay incalculably cooled, head to tail in their propped-up boxes.

Few other people were on foot. A dark-coated City commuter was starting down King’s Road towards the station, his bowler resolute, his rolled umbrella held out to the side like a ski stick. The market boys by WH Smith’s were larking round their trailer with handfuls of snow. A woman pushed a pram in the direction of Woolworths.

The lights changed to green and Geoffrey’s wheels slipped as he accelerated behind the van. Then the old road bottlenecked between Victorian shopfronts and the fine eighteenth-century houses with discreet brass plates of solicitors and accountants. He nose-to-tailed it past the medieval church on the left and the modest cinema on the right.

Five ancient routes converge towards London through the chalk knuckles of the Chilterns. The small market town that was home to both Geoffrey and Alan was on the middle one of these, its fold the Roman Akeman Street. A canal and a mainline railway ran in addition, hidden by the tangled lanes yet squeezed to within almost touching distance of the road. Somehow, the valley accommodated a ruined castle, a ruined gasworks, an aerosol factory and a Tudor public school. Most of the houses were old and higgledy-piggledy, though there was nothing outrageously quaint, nor very ugly, nor very remarkable. Geoffrey had grown fiercely fond of the place. He’d imagined it would be a home for a family. He believed it still could be.

The cars in front of him crept past the Eagle and Child. Run-down timbered cottages marked the town’s end by Swing Gate Lane. Then the hedges after Bankmill were all but covered, and the road seemed one ruck in a stark white bedsheet, along which Geoffrey crawled for three interminable miles. When he turned off at Two Waters to cross the Grand Union, the canal appeared oddly to craze and steam in the shelter of its bridge.

There was another queue right into Hemel Hempstead new town and up through the housing estate. The hill was steep. On one side, the local boys had made a strip of ice and were taking turns to slide down; on the other, a stream of younger children were dragging toboggans up towards Jarman’s Field, their progress mostly faster than the cars. He turned off at the crest to cross the bridge over the motorway, but St Albans Abbey only came into view after another five-mile slog against the grain of the landscape. Built from the stone slabs of Watling Street, it marked the next Roman route around the capital.

But at Lidlock there was still no sign of Cynthia, even though he found pretexts enough to pass the typists’ room, to check post and reception, to roam the stores and the workshops. He gained no more than enquiring looks, and was left to deal with a sense of loss he hadn’t bargained for. It had been, he ruefully acknowledged, in the nature of an experiment.

More staff had made it into the lab: Bill Hollingworth, Royston Gaines, Millicent Throssel, the female metallurgist. Lance was there, of course. Geoffrey stood beside Rae’s empty desk looking out of the window at the white expanse between himself and the parked cars. He felt strangely old and set up for life. In his sports jacket and flannels, with his honest looks – the sandy hair just a little unruly, the blue eyes engaging, the smile a fraction too ready and disarming – he’d tried to pull this masculine world around him. He had slide-rule and praxis at work, his good wife at home. He drew a promising salary.

So he stared at the featureless white outside, as at a screen on which his past life could be projected. A village youth, he’d courted Merriam, from the prefabs. She’d caught the same bus to school. As it jolted towards Aylesbury Grammar, she’d seemed so perfect, two rows in front, half-obscured by the rail at the back of her seat. Her sleeve, her shoulder, the line of her neck, the clusters of her auburn hair – he’d been struck to the quick when she’d turned round to look at him.

One day, he’d encountered her, and there was nothing for it but to ask her out. They’d been to the Gaumont matinee, and for cycle rides together. They’d lain in the long grass at the edge of Lodge Hill and he’d kissed her romantically. So far, so good. But the lips of an unknown girl he kissed at a party game suddenly tasted far sweeter, and filled his sexual imagination to bursting for more than a week. He was flummoxed. Shortly afterwards, the illusion collapsed and he hadn’t loved Merriam at all.

A similar disenchantment happened a year later. He was left thinking he’d misunderstood the whole business, and this was exactly when his intellectual engagement had been caught by the inspired science master. Science was manly, and above all hectic fictions of his heart. He’d met Louisa while they were both students in London, and married her, on the basis that what he’d felt before was infatuation, not love at all. He loved Louisa.

IT WAS CYNTHIA who woke those first feelings again, still stranger and more knowing. She focused him, as if one of the electromagnetic lenses he worked with had been switched on. Her skin, her eyes, the colours she wore, the weave of her clothes, things she’d touched assumed a special quality – but he couldn’t imagine sleeping with her as he slept with Louisa. Neither could he fancy her privately, as he fancied any number of women rather more than his wife.

This time, however, he knew what was happening. He’d read of Huxley’s experiments with mescalin. Vision was chemical; the lucid phenomenon of the girl at work was some brainstorm of illusion. The mind was a frontier, and there was a secret gambler in him. He’d elected to observe himself ‘falling in love’.

He was paying a price, of sorts. Now the lab had its own alteration. Its metallic surfaces, lit oddly from the whiteness outside, were too smooth, too grey, their edges too hard. It was suddenly a barren place. Nor could he lose himself in the work. Dr Gill was being cryptic, full of nods and winks, but seemingly producing nothing for his attention. Geoffrey could only attend to a backlog of routine tasks: on the microscope, he checked supply voltages, performed unnecessary recalibrations. He couldn’t run the electron beam itself because he lacked any detailed brief.