[The red notebook.]

August 28th, 1954

Spent last evening trying to find out as much as possible about Quemoy. Very little in my bookshelves or in Molly’s. We were both frightened, perhaps this will be the beginning of a new war. Then Molly said: ‘How often have we done this, sat here worrying, but in the end there isn’t a big war.’ I could see something else was worrying her. Finally she told me: she had been close friends with the Forest brothers. When they ‘disappeared’ into - presumably - Czechoslovakia, she went down to HQ to make enquiries. They suggested she was not to worry, they were doing important work for the Party. Yesterday it was announced they had been in prison three years, just released. She went to HQ again yesterday, asked if they had known the brothers were in jail. It turned out it had been known all along. She said to me: ‘I am thinking of leaving the Party.’ I said: ‘Why not see if things don’t get better. After all, they’re still cleaning up after Stalin.’ She said: ‘You said last week you were going to leave. Anyway, that’s what I said to Hal - yes, I saw the big chief himself. I said: “All the villains are dead, aren’t they? Stalin and Beria, etc. etc.? So why are you still going on as usual?” He said it was a question of standing by the Soviet Union under attack. You know, the usual thing. I said: “How about the Jews in the Soviet Union?” He said it was a capitalist lie. I said: “Oh, Christ, not again.” Anyway he gave me a long lecture, ever so friendly and calm, about not panicking. Suddenly I felt as if either I was mad or all of them were. I said to him: “Look, you people have got to understand something pretty soon or you’ll have no one left in your Party - you’ve got to learn to tell the truth and stop all this hole-and-corner conspiracy and telling lies about things.” He suggested I was very understandably upset because my friends had been in jug. Suddenly I realized I was getting all apologetic and defensive, when I knew quite well I was in the right and he in the wrong. Isn’t it odd, Anna? In one minute I’d have started apologizing to him? I only just stopped myself. I left quickly. I came home and went up to lie down, I was so upset.’ Michael came in late. I told him what Molly had said. He said to me: ‘And so you’re going to leave the Party?’ It sounded as if he would be sorry if I did, in spite of everything. Then he said, very dry: ‘Do you realize, Anna, that when you and Molly talk of leaving the Party, the suggestion always is that leaving it will lead you straight into some morass of moral turpitude. Yet the fact is that literally millions of perfectly sound human beings have left the Party (if they weren’t murdered first) and they left it because they were leaving behind murder, cynicism, horror, betrayal.’ I said: ‘Perhaps that isn’t the point at all?’ ‘Then what is the point?’ I said to him: ‘A minute ago I got the impression that if I’d said I was leaving the Party, you’d have been sorry.’ He laughed, acknowledging it; then he was silent for some time and then he said, laughing again: ‘Perhaps I’m with you, Anna, because it’s nice to be with someone full of faith, even though one hasn’t got it oneself?’ ‘Faith!’ I said. ‘Your earnest enthusiasm.’ I said: ‘I would hardly have described my attitude to the Party in those terms.’ ‘All the same, you are in it, which is more than could be said for -’ He grinned, and I said: ‘For you?’ He seemed very unhappy, sitting quiet, thinking. Finally he said: ‘Well we tried. We did try. It didn’t come off, but… let’s go to bed, Anna.’