I could say nothing for a moment. I was amazed, even more flattered. I felt a flush of warmth towards Wright for at last finding me a job, if a peculiar one. I had imagined Ainsley wished only to interrogate me about the I G Farben plant, not to offer me a lever of the war machine. Perhaps they could find no one else to take it. My students today might be appalled at my accepting such inhuman work without scruple. But I had no qualms later over the Americans dropping two atom bombs on the Japanese. You could not fight the Nazis or the Kamikazes with half a smile on your face. My only feeling, as I agreed, was the job being preferable to peeling potatoes in the Army.
'Where does this research take place?'
'In Oxford. At the Fungus Institute, a small and admirably unobtrusive grey stone building just south of the Parks. The strictest secrecy is of course essential-you will have to sign the Official Secrets Act, which proscribes the most alarming penalties. As far as the University and the rest of the country are concerned, you are performing research on making valuable foodstuffs from toadstools and lichens.'
Well before that snowy Christmas, I was installed on one side of South Parks Road at Oxford, secretly attempting to breed strains of germs so deadly they could wipe out the population of Europe, while in the large building opposite Professor Florey was attempting to develop penicillin and save the world from the deadly germs which already infested it. Thus science progresses.
I wore grey flannel trousers and a Harris tweed jacket and I bought a second-hand bicycle. I found lodgings in north Oxford, that area of red-brick family dwellings embraced by the Woodstock and Banbury roads, where the lofty donnish intellect struggles daily with earthy domesticity. I had David Mellors and his new wife nearby for company. I browsed in Blackwell's and drank in the Randolph. I have never enjoyed so gentle and agreeable a life as the time I was preparing unpleasant death for millions. Of my laboratories, my colleagues and my work itself I may still write nothing. The Official Secrets Act has an infinite memory, and the world is not yet peaceful enough for dust to lie undisturbed on my deadly experiments.
In that December, when the strange war became weirder, with the Russians fighting the Finns and the British about to fight the neutral Russians instead of the Germans, I had a letter forwarded from the Harley Street house with a Swedish stamp and an affixed strip of brown paper printed, _Opened By the Censor._ Inside was an unaddressed, undated sheet with a typed message.
_Dear Jim
God willing, I shall arrive in London via Stockholm first-second week December. I'm trying to fix a passage with United States Lines to be home in time for Christmas, but of course it's tricky. Call me up at the Savoy. I'm still where the railway flies in the sky.
Cordially,
Jeff_
I was astounded to find Jeff still in Wuppertal, even though the RAF was dropping on him nothing more weighty than the prose of the Ministry of Information leaflets. Perhaps he was still trying to stop the war. The Savoy knew nothing of him, but it was not the time to make bookings from one side of Europe to another. I left the Fungus Institute number, and two mornings later he telephoned in high spirits.
'I arrived in a Swedish plane with the Swedish ambassador, which I guess is safe enough,' he explained. 'Hey, what are all those blimps in the sky round London?'
'That's the balloon barrage. The Germans run their bombers into them.' Jeff pressed me to have dinner the following night. I asked if I could bring a girlfriend.
'Sure thing, old man. I'm lonely. There's no girls I know left in London, and Donna sailed home early summer.'
'What's it like, being a neutral in Germany?'
'Creepy. The Gestapo had their beady eyes on me round the clock. I guess they'd have run me out, if I hadn't jumped of my own accord.'
'How are the Dieffenbachs?'
'Are you crazy? If I'd waved to them in the street, they'd have ended in a concentration camp.'
Jeff had the same suite as in peacetime, with blackout curtains which he claimed made opening the window like undressing a nun. I knew that Elizabeth was living in her father's flat, and imagined she would be impressed to meet a man hot from the enemy's camp fires. But it was I who felt staggered as she appeared through the door in uniform, with a Service gasmask in a haversack. 'Motor Transport Corps,' she explained. 'Do you like it? I wish I was blonde. Khaki goes so much better with fair hair. American cigarettes, divine,' she murmured, taking one of Jeff's Chesterfields.
'Where are you serving?' asked Jeff, dazzled by her.
'I'm going to Paris on Monday. There! I should never have said so. Careless talk costs lives. I'm driving ambulances and things at the British Transit Hospital, because of the French I picked up with Mummy on the Riviera, though everyone says I have the most ghastly Midi accent. Mummy thinks that Paris will be a much nicer place to spend the war in than London. Last time, they had a few shells from Big Bertha, but the food remained delicious. Mummy regards the war as a personal insult to her from Hitler,' she added to me.
There was champagne, and caviar canapйs on a silver tray. Jeff wanted to express either admiration of the fighting British or appreciation at escape from austere Germany. There was no food rationing in England until the following month, and there seemed a shortage only of taxis and torch batteries. As the long-promised bombs stayed off, London had the gaiety of a fashionable garden-party spared a threatening summer storm.
'Have you seen anything of Archie?' I asked Elizabeth while Jeff was telephoning the head waiter.
'Yes, he's dreadfully confused, poor dear. Now that Hitler's in bed with Stalin, he doesn't know if the war is an anti-Fascist crusade or an anti-Communist one. He says the British working classes went to war quite ignobly, only because they were fed up with Hitler. But fed-upness is an incredibly powerful force, isn't it, with the British? So in the end he's gone to join up as a Guardsman.' This was news to me. 'At least it will give him some peace from continually redefining his attitudes. What are you doing at Oxford?'
'I'm on war work at the Fungus Institute.'
Elizabeth looked nonplussed. 'I've got it. You're developing a mushroom like the Caterpillar's in Alice. Eating one side will make our soldiers so small they can creep on the Germans unseen, and the other will make them so tall they'll frighten the enemy to death.'
'That's right,' I told her.
Jeff explained to us how the Germans were cock-a-hoop after the Polish campaign. 'The Wehrmacht and the dive bombers made mincemeat of the Poles. They've a new tactic. If the tanks run into trouble, they radio the Stukas to bomb them out of it. I guess Poland hadn't a combat plane in the sky after the first day. And now they've sunk your carrier, the Courageous. And the _Royal Oak,_ right inside Scapa Flow. You've got to take your hat off to the U-boat captains, I guess.'
'You forgot the Athenia,' said Elizabeth. 'Sunk without warning nine hours after the war started. Drowning a hundred and twelve people, including children.'
'And including twenty-eight Americans.'
She coloured. 'I'm sorry.'
'Anyway, the Germans believe that Churchill sank the Athenia, to do another Lusitania. It's a crazy idea, but nobody dare deny it. Say, you remember your Professor Domagk? He was arrested by the Gestapo.'