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‘I’m Mac. Mr Macbride to you.’ His friends laughed. ‘See Nobby there?’ Mac pointed behind him to a tall figure standing at the counter. ‘Nob got banned, didn’t he. Doing eighty down fucking Clamp Hill. Oi! Nob! Has to ride up behind ever since. Or in a sidecar. Don’t you, Nob!’
Alan looked. A tall figure was staring back at them. He was older, grimmer than the rest, seeming to stoop slightly in his black, fringed jacket, the black hair straggling on the collar at either side. But the face … Nob’s pock-marked skin had been slashed. The scars ran in meaty weals on both cheeks, as though someone had played noughts and crosses on him.
‘Over here, Nob. This kid says he’ll give you a lift in his chair if you want one.’ Mac turned back extravagantly to Alan. ‘Where was it you said you was going?’
‘Over past Hemel.’ Alan pulled his gaze from the scars.
‘Hemel, Nob. Any use?’
Nob was just coming over, a bottle of Pepsi in his huge dirty hand, when a ruckus started in the far corner. It was with the boys who’d been there all the time. They were the locals, Watford. Alan swung round again, but his view was screened by the rows of leather backs. He heard threats and counter-threats, then a short, winded scream, a boy’s – or maybe a girl’s. For when a torrent of swearing rose over the jukebox guitars, and the crowd seemed to sigh, it was a girl who answered back, her voice spirited, her words unexpectedly eloquent. Someone shouted her name, Cynthia, and the scuffle began again, because she was the fucking cause of it all. A cup smashed against a wall.
Presley’s last chords clanged on the hush. Then the lads round Alan were on their feet, half-sneering, half-cheering, and he stood, too, relieved. He let himself be swept up in the action, even became part of it, shouting with the rest. Only the two lorry drivers remained unconcerned, their sports pages propped in front of their fry-ups. A round-faced Ted from the far side of the room stood on a table: Fight! Fight! Fight!’
The man in the vest called from behind the counter, ‘If you bloody lot want a bloody punch-up you can bloody do it outside. Go on! Get out of it! All of you!’ With his cleaning cloth over his shoulder, he stood unmoved at his urn. The mood hung for a second, steamy, and Alan felt his neck prickle. One instant could ruin another face. He clutched his goggles and gloves, alert for the click of the first knife. Then, as if at a signal, everyone crowded for the door. And Alan Rae went with them, thrust by the night into the thick of things.
VIOLENCE WAS A chimera – no one quite believed in it. That was a quirk left by the war: Alan’s mother had walked to work over broken glass, his uncle had seen a Normandy hedge trimmed by machine-gun bullets, the A-bomb had blown the Japs out of the fight. Violence lacked shape. Teds and bike boys seemed its only ministers. Wisecracking, fire-cracking, they were ambiguous as devils in an old pageant.
Light flared from the café windows. The car park was white where the bikes made a natural arena. They seemed to herd the rival gangs together, closing in with their welded angles and shimmering chrome. A ring had already formed, and Alan glanced to where his Triumph was parked, fifty yards from the exit. He heard the wind sough, felt the snow fall as cars passed by in the road, their engines muffled, the swish of their tyres powdery. The flecked gust, slicing through the trees at the far side, began to sting his cheek.
Two figures stood primed in the bleak little space, champions of Cynthia – whoever she was. They were identically clad, both the same height, but the Watford boy was thinner, and his face looked desperate in the harsh light. People were calling out his name. ‘Go, Pete!’ ‘You can get him, Pete!’ Pete’s eyes were hooded, his shoulders hunched too soon, defensive. He looked out from behind his fists, shifting his weight nervously from foot to foot. The other lad was chunkier, more robust, and his mates flanked him, egging him on. His hook-nosed profile was caught in silhouette as he quipped confidently to one of them.
One of the girls was crying, and people craned to see. The sobbing rose to a wail until a puffy, high-heeled creature wearing only thin slacks and a jumper broke from the ranks opposite and entered the ring. ‘You don’t have to, Jimmy!’ she called. ‘She don’t mean nothing! Just leave it, Jimmy, why don’t you!’ The snow fluttered at her heaped-up hair.
‘I ain’t fucking leaving it.’ A great laugh went up. ‘Stupid tart.’
Alan watched the girl turn away. He scanned the faces, saw Nob, caught a glimpse of Macbride. The names echoed grimly in his head. He’d already spotted a length of chain hanging from someone’s hand. His heart pounded softly as the two boys at the centre began to circle each other.
The initial blows were feints. Fists skidded off leather, grazing a sleeve or missing a shoulder. Then Pete took a punch to the face and rocked back. The Stanmore gang roared as he rubbed his cheek, and Jimmy paraded in the applause. But Pete was canny, seized the moment to dart in, and came up under the other boy’s guard with a smack that glanced his eye. The sound was like fabric tearing. Instantly, the two were clutching one another, wrestling and sliding amongst the flakes while the crowd swayed. People ran this way and that to the rough shove and rhythm of the fight, and Alan moved with them in a wild, weird ballet. Whenever the combatants lurched towards him, he heard their breath as though it were his own, and watched the sharp, committed gusts snatched out of their mouths by the wind.
Now there was a lull, and the fighters were locked, resting on each other’s grip. A different girl was across from him, framed momentarily in a gap. Fair-haired, she wore a blue scarf at her neck and a pale blue coat over her jeans. Their eyes met, and it was she who dropped her gaze first. Then the crowd swirled, and when he looked again she was nowhere to be seen, and the two fighters were tangling, kicking each other’s legs. It was Pete who slipped. He hit the icy gravel so hard it forced a noise out of him. The chants went up for Jim-my! Jim-my! Jimmy raised his arm and made to drop down with a finisher; but his victim rolled clear and was instantly, spiritedly, back on his feet, half-crouched, coming on with both fists, with the Watford lads yelling for him and Alan yelling, too, until the pair of them spun away and the ring broke up.
Now it was all a whirl of limbs and faces in the slip and slide. Alan elbowed himself to the front. Two heads still bobbed and ducked in a fierce exchange, two bodies were still grappling. One flailed, the other got heaved up. One lost his footing and they were both scrabbling on the ground, here the point of a thin shoe, there a hand trying to get a hold on leather or fleece. But the hand went limp at the sound of a body blow, and another cry went up, and suddenly the figures were apart. It was a chase.
The gangs cheered and surged after them, two forms reeling and stumbling in the dark between the bikes. Alan slid and fell himself in the rush. As he got to his feet, a shape came skipping past him with an outlandish, mocking step, turning first this way, now that – like a matador, the leather jacket open like waistcoat wings. It stopped in front of the café window and waited. The other caught up, floundered, lunged, slipped, and skidded front first into the snow.
Something was spattering out of its face, dark drops falling faster than snowflakes, and it was Jimmy, staggering up, twisting away now and gasping, his hands on his thighs. Still more of the dark stuff was spilling down in the wind, leaving black garlands in the bright, fluorescent white.
He tried to straighten, not in time. Pete came in hard, gave him three punishing jabs to the body, one more to the cut face, and a vicious dead leg with his knee. Jimmy screamed and dropped where he stood. He cringed in the white scuff, covering his head with his arms. ‘OK!’ His voice was thin. ‘OK!’ A couple of his mates went over to him. Pete stepped back, and looked away, dusting the snow off his sleeves and the backs of his jeans.
Nobody in the car park moved or spoke. The mere exchange of a look seemed the riskiest thing in the world. Even the wind died, the fat snowflakes coming straight down while the cold plucked once more at the exposed skin of Alan’s throat and neck. A lorry from the main road revved in low gear and began lumbering in at the gate, its lights flashing and sweeping the rows of bikes.
Then the mood broke. Someone from Stanmore cracked on at Jimmy that he was a fucking useless cunt. The insult was buoyant, the relief almost palpable. A roar of merriment went up. Alan felt drunk with events as some great wave of generosity and good humour threatened to make them all lifelong friends. Christ, it was a fucking good dustup, a fucking good Christmas, because that Pete had a few tricks up his sleeve and he bloody gave Jimmy Chapman something to fucking think about. Yes, he fucking did.
JOSHING AND LAUGHING, the two gangs were returning inside to drink tea and talk bikes. Alan was at the doorway when he heard a voice at his shoulder.
It was the fair girl again. She was adjusting her scarf over her head. He could see by the neon flicker and the snow-glaze from the café window her heavily made-up eyes, and her hair under the fabric, fashionably backcombed. Quite tall, she was handsome rather than pretty, seemingly preoccupied with tying the two ends under her chin. Her pale blue mac hung open to reveal her sloppy-Joe jumper, and the tight fit of her jeans. ‘They said you were going to Hemel.’ She brushed at the flakes just settling on her shoulders.
‘Sort of.’ He stared at her, then briefly down at his hands.
But she was matter-of-fact, still glancing round, as though unconcernedly. ‘You couldn’t give me a lift, could you? It’s getting worse, isn’t it?’
‘What, Hemel? D’you mean now?’ It was illegal for him to take a passenger.
‘I told my parents I’d be back before ten. You needn’t if you don’t want.’ She spoke with an unexpected formality. Then she suddenly smiled straight at him, and the smile and her eyes – another blue – brought him back to that moment he’d first seen her during the fight. ‘Except that my … Except that no one in there…’ Her voice was disarming, musical. She gestured towards the café, and shrugged again at the weather. Her hair clustered at her brow inside the scarf. She was too attractive.
He nodded. ‘OK.’ All at once, they were walking together through the bikes towards his own snow-powdered machine. He snatched a look back at the Bee. The only figure watching them was tall and ragged-looking, the one they’d called Nob. He was standing at the entrance under the sign, his scars catching the fitful glow like lines on a mask.
She took no notice of the sidecar, but brushed off the pillion and seated herself, while he tore off the L-plates. Once he’d lowered himself into the saddle in front of her, he felt a warmth despite the icy wind. It was like the heat of a fantasy – but one suddenly sanctioned, and given approval.
Three times he bobbed up and down on the kick-start before the engine fired. As he nudged the rig cautiously out on to the road, she put her hands in the pockets of his jacket and drew her arms tight around his waist. He could feel her fingertips. He looked down and saw her thin red shoes on the footrests, and her parted thighs. He felt her tuck her knees into the crooks of his and nudge her cheek close against the back of his neck. Her body on his was the one warm thing, and he thought he’d always known her, that she’d lain next to him since the start of things.
The full storm had crept up on them. Now it matted the air and blotted out the road. The few cars crawled in each other’s tracks, the snow piling up in ridges either side. Drivers peered through freezing slots scraped in their windscreens; lights narrowed and swung. He guessed at the chaos on the low road and took his chance along the motorway. Five minutes later they were slogging up past Bricket Wood with the snow sweeping at them from over the hills, and the cold so intense he kept calling back just to make sure she was alive. Each time, she gripped more tightly and pressed herself more closely against him.
At last, he took the exit and cut down past Hemel new town, driving under its hard sodium lights, beside its rows of council terraces, until she called out where she lived – in Boxmoor, she said, near the Fishery pub. He took her down towards the canal, and from there along a lane to a cottage which backed right on to the tow-path. And he was sure her family had lived there for centuries. And for ever, he reckoned, he’d known about them and longed for the girl in the pale blue coat.
She got off the bike. He sat still, keeping the Triumph idling.
‘Thanks for the lift.’ She was halfway to her door.
‘Wait!’ He let the bike fail and went after her, his shoe skating on the path. He thought she looked frightened for a moment. ‘Will I see you again?’
‘Do you want to?’
‘What do you think?’
She hesitated.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said. ‘I don’t even know your name.’
‘It’s Cynthia. Didn’t I tell you? But everyone calls me Cynth.’
‘Jesus! I mean … sorry.’ He was alarmed. ‘I’m Alan. I suppose I’d better…’ His voice dropped, suspicious. ‘Why did you ask me for a lift?’
She shrugged. ‘It was a hunch. I needed to get away. Didn’t I?’ She looked down. Then she said again, ‘Didn’t I?’ as though he must understand.
‘Can I see you?’
‘All right,’ she murmured.
‘What was that?’
‘I said all right.’
‘When? I don’t live round here. Tell me!’
‘I don’t know. Come when the snow clears away. If you want to.’
‘You mean that?’
‘If you want to.’
‘Of course I do!’ On an impulse, he put his gloved hands on either side of her shoulders. Before he knew it she was close up against his chest, her arms clutching on to him. She didn’t let go.
The embrace lasted a minute, long enough for her warmth to seep into him again. When they broke apart, she lifted her face and allowed her open lips to touch his. For a second, he tasted her mouth. Then, before he could respond, she’d turned away and was at her door, the key already in her hand, the lock already clicking. ‘Cynthia!’
Her door was open. He took a step towards her.
She raised her hand once, swinging round in the frame. ‘I’il see you, then, Alan. Come when the snow clears away.’ She smiled.
He raised his own hand. The door closed behind her. He called out softly, wary of rousing the house, ‘OK. I’ll do that. When the snow clears away!’
He kick-started the bike. ‘I’il see you, then, Cynth. I’ll see you!’ Revving the engine, he turned the machine around in the road and drove out by Two Waters.
All along the valley road, picking his way in the wheel-marked drifts through little Bourne End, steering the last two miles by pub signs or gate lanterns, skidding kerbless and guideless in the white-out between farms, he felt her kiss still on his lips and her name still on his tongue. He felt her embrace still behind his own back. And he knew somehow, somewhere, it was behind his father’s back, too, and he was betraying him.
A SOUND SLICED through a dream. Geoffrey Fairhurst opened his eyes enough to aim the flat of his hand at the stud on his alarm clock. Broad daylight was seeping from the curtain edges. He cursed the clock for making him late for work, because, as the simplest fool knew, at twenty past seven in the tail end of December nothing half so bright was supposed to occur. And what mocking brightness it was – a sweet limpidity that washed pearl the moulded ridges in the ceiling’s plaster and stole almost a yard along the papered walls. Wearily, he raised himself.
His wife, Louisa, began to stir. ‘Louie?’ He put a hand to her shoulder, and she made a series of indefinable noises before turning over and huddling further into the blankets.
He didn’t blame her. The room was even colder than the past few mornings, and, as he groped on the bedside table for his watch, the air bit wickedly at his ears and nostrils. It reminded him there’d been a snowstorm. In the same breath, it explained the light outside.
His spirits lifted. An uncomplicated man in a plainer tale – so he’d have described himself – he felt a childhood excitement that made him throw off the covers and climb out of bed. He grabbed his dressing gown around him, tiptoed shivering across the rug to the window and parted the curtains.
A radiance from the frostwork on the glass bathed him from every angle. It was like the illumination of some white rock, exuberant, cleansing, touching his good-natured, standard-English profile, probing his already slightly receding hairline. It lit up the stubble under his chin. But the panes were so scribbled over and spangled he could see nothing of the world outside. And the ice was so coarse that when he rubbed at it with the heel of his hand it stung his skin and cost him seconds of a delicate tingling pain before he’d melted a patch large enough to squint through.
The effort was worth it. The fall had been as heavy as any child could have wished. He remembered looking out over the Vale of Aylesbury from the tied cottage on the Waddesdon Estate, where he’d been born twenty-three years previously. Now, he lived only a dozen miles away – in a self-possessed little Chiltern town suddenly buried under snow. From the window of his house on Cowper Road, through the dip and up the slope to the new so-called chalets opposite, each roof was laden a foot thick, every branch above the blanketed ridges was freighted with finely balanced icing, and each smoking chimney exhaled almost clandestinely from an overcoat of slow grey white – that brightened even as he watched. All fuss and detail of things was covered. Even the bristly woods on the crown of the far hill were mere smudges, nothing but white heaps under the sky. Snow was still falling.
Then Louisa was standing beside him. She’d bundled herself in the eiderdown, and was melting her own view-hole. He waited for her to share the moment, but she made no comment on what she saw, only turned away after a few seconds to crouch at the paraffin heater. He watched her open the stove, light a match and touch it to the wick, until the flame spread around the rim of the burner. ‘Wonderful isn’t it, the snow?’ He put a hand on her hair.
She glanced back at him in the way that so confused him. ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it,’ she said, flatly, and began putting the flue back together.
He picked up the flannel trousers he wore for work and made his way across the landing, feeling angry and bewildered in ways he didn’t understand. He trod quietly on the bare boards, as though there were sleeping children in the next room, but it struck him that he didn’t quite belong any more in his own home.
A more mundane problem nagged him while he was shaving. It was his week to drive, and exactly how he was going to get his car across the other side of the valley to pick up Lionel Rae, who worked in the same lab, he couldn’t tell. Dressed and breakfasted, he remembered Rae was staying a couple of extra days at his sister’s somewhere down in Kent. So he was let off tackling the steep slopes round the chalets where Lionel and Judith lived.
It was odd he should feel so relieved, because as a rule he enjoyed Rae’s company. He felt lucky to have found someone he could get on with. Rae didn’t stand on ceremony, didn’t preen in his former glory, but was informal and approachable. Geoffrey already saw himself as something of a protégé. Rae encouraged him to question everything dusty or old-fashioned, and he liked the attention. To tell the truth, he liked Lionel better than his own equally brilliant, but rather remote and punctilious boss, Dr Raj Gill.
He didn’t reach the lab until ten thirty. The drive to St Albans was infinitely slow, pretty but dangerous, and there were abandoned cars all along the way. The snow would melt under the tyres of the little convoys, then freeze again in their tracks. His brisk white Mini did better than most, but still slid about badly, and a crawl was the best he could manage. By the time he turned into the factory car park, his nerves were jangled. Few of his colleagues appeared to have made it. His half-finished, makeshift lab space was entirely empty.
GEOFFREY STOOD AMONGST the electronic paraphernalia and metallic grey cabinets that defined his days. The lab was both futuristic and foetal: there were ducts and pipes, and cables angled across the walls like rationalised veins. It was warm. There was an audible mains hum, combined with an intermittent buzzing sound. Something was switching in and out. It made him think of Louisa again. A threat hung in the air between them, so recent and out of the blue that he couldn’t see why it should be, or exactly what he might have done wrong. Of course he loved her. He filled a glass beaker with water and placed it in the specimen kiln to heat up, then closed the snug steel door and paced about.
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.’
