The New Men

1: Argument with a Brother

I HEARD the first rumour in the middle of an argument with my brother, when I was trying to persuade him not to marry, but it did not seem much more than a distraction.

He had brought Irene to lunch with me on a wet, windy morning in late February. The year was 1939, and I was still living in college. As we sat at table in my dining-room the rain slashed against the windows, and once or twice smoke from the open sixteenth-century grate blew across the room. It was so dark outside that I had turned all the sconce lights on, warm against the panelling; in that comfortable light, while the wind thudded against the window panes, Irene set to work to get me on her side.

I had not met her before, but Martin had mentioned her name enough to make me guess about her. He had first picked her up in London, at one of his richer friends’, and I gathered that she had no money but plenty of invitations. This seemed to amuse Martin, but to me she sounded too much like a shabby-smart girl, who thought her best chance was to find an able husband.

The more I heard of her, the more anxious I was for Martin — as a father might be for a son, for there were nine years between us. He was only twenty-five, and while other people saw him as stable and detached, the last man to commit a piece of foolishness, abnormally capable of looking after himself, I could not stop myself worrying.

The day before this luncheon, Martin had asked, without seeming over-eager, whether I would like to meet Irene. Yet I knew, and she knew, that it was a visit of inspection.

She called me by my Christian name in her first greeting: and, as I poured her out a glass of sherry, was saying: ‘I always imagined you as darker than Martin. You should be dark!’

‘You should drink sherry,’ I said. She had the kind of impudence which provoked me and which had its attraction.

‘Is it always sherry before meals?’

‘What else?’ I said.

‘Fixed tastes!’ she cried. ‘Now that I did expect.’

As we began to eat, she went on teasing. It was the teasing, at once spontaneous and practised, of a young woman who has enjoyed playing for the attention of older men. She had the manner of a mischievous daughter, her laughter high-pitched, disrespectful, sharp with a kind of constrained glee — and underneath just enough ultimate deference to please.

Yet, despite that manner, she looked older than her age, which was the same as Martin’s. She was a tall woman, full-breasted, with a stoop that made one feel that she was self-conscious about her figure; often when she laughed she made a bow which reduced her height still more, which made her seem to be acting like a little girl. The skin of her cheeks looked already worn and high-coloured underneath the make-up.

Her features were not pretty, but one noticed her eyes, narrow, treacle-brown, glinting under the heavy upper lids. For me, in that first meeting, she had some physical charm.

Apart from that, I thought that she was reckless and honest in her own fashion. I could not satisfy myself about what she felt for Martin. She was fond of him, but I did not believe that she loved him; yet she longed to marry him. That was the first thing I was looking for, and within a few minutes I had no doubt. I still wanted to know why she longed for it so much.

She spoke like an adventuress, but this was a curious piece of adventuress-ship. That day she asked us, frankly, inquisitively, about our early life at home. She knew that we had come from the lower-middle-class back streets of a provincial town, that I had struggled through to a career at the Bar and had then changed to academic law and settled in the college. Following after me, Martin had won a scholarship in natural science there, and I had been able to help pay his way. For nearly three years he had been doing research at the Cavendish.

As we talked, I realized that to Irene it seemed as strange, as exciting, as different, a slice of existence as Martin had found hers.

She had drunk more than her share of the wine. She broke out: ‘Of course, you two had a better time than I had.’

‘It has its disadvantages,’ said Martin.

‘You hadn’t got everyone sitting on your head. Whenever I did anything I wanted to, my poor old father used to say: “Irene, remember you’re a Brunskill.” Well, that would have been pretty destroying even if the Brunskills had been specially grand. I thought it was too grim altogether when they sent me to school, and the only girl who’d heard the wonderful name thought we were Norwegians.’

I told her of my acquaintance, Lord Boscastle, whose formula of social dismissal was ‘Who is he? I’m afraid I don’t know the fellow.’ She gave her yelp of laughter.

‘That’s what I should get,’ she said. ‘And it’s much more dismaying if you’ve been taught that you may be poverty-stricken but that you are slightly superior.’

In fact, as I discovered later, she was overdoing it, partly because she had a vein of inverted snobbery and was exaggerating her misfortunes in front of us. Her father was living on his pension from the Indian Army, but some of the Brunskills could have been called county. In secret, Irene kept up her interest in the gradations of smartness among her smart friends.

She went on drinking, but, as we sat round the fire for our coffee, she took hold of herself and began questioning me about my plans. Was I going abroad that Easter vacation? When could she and Martin see me again? Wouldn’t I meet them in London? Wouldn’t I join them for a May Week ball?

‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ I said.

‘Do come. Wouldn’t you like being seen with me?’

‘My wife isn’t fit to dance just now,’ I said.

‘Bring someone else.’

It was obvious that Martin had not told her of my wife’s condition. She lived alone in London, and saw no one except me; increasingly those visits were hard to bear.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘You don’t want to dance with me. You’re quite right, I’m not much good.’

‘It must be seven or eight years since I went to a ball,’ I reflected. ‘Good Lord, time goes too fast.’

I had said it casually, platitudinously, but a line came between Irene’s brows and her voice sharpened.

‘That’s near the bone,’ she said.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I hate the thought of time.’

Quickly Martin smiled at her and was changing the subject, but she insisted.

‘Time’s winged chariot,’ she said and looked at me. ‘Do you like the thought of it?’

Soon she cheered up, and decided it was time to leave Martin and me together. She made some excuse; she might as well have invited us to discuss her.

I said goodbye to her in the little passage outside my gyp-cupboard, between the room door and the oak.

‘I’m afraid I’ve been horribly boring and talked too much,’ she said, as she pressed my hand.

I passed it off

‘I always talk too much when I’m nervous.’ She opened the outer door. Still she could not leave it alone; she glanced back over her shoulder, and called to me: ‘I’m very nervous today, Lewis. Believe me, I am.’

She was begging me not to speak against her. As I turned back into the room a gust of wind crashed the door shut behind me. The smoke had cleared from the fireplace, the coal was cherry-red in the iron wicker of the grate. Across the hearth Martin’s face was swept smooth in the unfluctuating glow.

He gave me a smile with his mouth tight and pulled down at one corner; it was a cagey, observant smile that he often wore, and which, together with his open expression and acute eyes, made his mood difficult to read.

His face was a young man’s, but one that would not alter much until he was old; the skin would not take lines easily, except round the eyes; he was fair, and the hair curled, crisp and thick, close to his skull. He was shorter than I was, and not more than an inch or two taller than Irene, but his shoulders, neck and wrists were strong.

Without speaking, I sat down opposite to him, then I said: ‘Well?’

‘Well?’ he replied.

His smile had not changed. His tone was easy. It would have been hard to tell how painfully he cared that I should approve of her; but I knew it.

Our sympathy had always been close, and was growing closer as we grew older. Between us there was a bond of trust. But much of our communication was unspoken, and it was rare for us to be direct with each other, especially about our deeper feelings.

It was partly that, like many men who appear spontaneous at a first meeting, we each had a vein of reserve. I sometimes broke loose from mine, but Martin’s seemed to be part of his nature, as though he would never cease making elaborate plans to hide his secrets, to over-insure against the chances of life. I was watching him develop into a cautious, subtle and far-sighted man.

It was partly that reserve which kept us from being direct with each other; but much more it was the special restraint and delicacy which is often found in brothers’ love.

‘I think she’s attractive,’ I said, ‘and distinctly good company.’

‘Yes, isn’t she?’ said Martin.

Already we were fencing.

‘Does she have a job of some kind?’

‘I believe she’s been someone’s secretary.’

‘Does that give her enough to hive on, in London?’

‘I’ve got an idea,’ said Martin, with an appearance of elaborate reflection, ‘that she shares a flat with another young woman.’

‘She must find it pretty hard to keep going,’ I said.

Martin agreed. ‘I suppose it’s genuinely difficult for them to make a living, isn’t it?’

He was capable of stonewalling indefinitely. Trying another line, I asked whether he had decided anything about his own future. His research grant ran out by the summer, and, if there were no war (our habitual phrase that year), he would have to find a job. He would get a decent one, but, we both knew by this time, there were three or four contemporaries ahead of him, who would take the plums. His research was sound, so Walter Luke said, who supervised him: but Luke added that, judged by high standards, he was turning out good but not quite good enough.

I was more disappointed than I wanted Martin to see, for I had invested much hope in him, including hopes of my own that had been frustrated. His expectations, however, seemed to be humbler than mine. He was ready to come to terms with his talents, to be sorry they were not greater, but to make the best of them. If he believed that he might surprise us all, he hid it. He accepted Luke’s opinion as just. That afternoon he thought the likelihood was that he would get a post in a provincial university.

‘If you thought of marrying,’ I said, ‘you couldn’t very well manage on that.’

‘I suppose it has been done,’ he replied.

Then I asked: ‘As a matter of fact, are you intending to marry her?’

There was a pause.

‘It’s not completely out of the question,’ he said.

His tone stayed even, but just for an instant his open, attentive expression broke, and I saw his eyes flash. They were dark blue, hard, transparently bright, of a kind common in our family. As they met mine, I knew in my heart that his resolve was formed. Yet I could not help arguing against it. My temper was fraying; as I tried not to sound clucking and protective, I could hear with dislike the urge in my own voice.

‘I must say,’ I broke out, ‘that I think it would be very unwise.’

‘I wondered if you would feel that,’ said Martin.

‘She’d be a load on you.’

‘Why do you think that, particularly?’

He had the interested air of a man discussing the love affairs of an acquaintance, well liked, but for whom he had no intimate concern. It was assumed partly to vex me a little; but in part it was a protection against me.

‘Do you think that she’d be much good as a professional man’s wife?’

‘I can see that she would have her disadvantages,’ he said reasonably.

‘You need someone who’ll let you work in peace and for that you couldn’t find anyone worse.’

‘I think I could get my own way there,’ said Martin.

‘No, you couldn’t. Not if you care for her at all, which I presume you do, otherwise you wouldn’t be contemplating this piece of suicide.’

‘Yes, I do care for her,’ he said.

The coals fell suddenly, heaving a bright and fragile hollow in which the sparks stood still as fireflies. He leaned across to throw on coal. When he had sat back again I said: ‘Then imagine what it would be like. She’s rackety and you’re prudent. She’d have all the time in the world on her hands, and do you think she’s the woman to stay still? What do you think you’d find when you got home?’

‘It’s just possible that I might be able to settle her down.’

I was handling it badly, I knew. I said: ‘You know, I’m not a great expert on happy marriages. But on unhappy ones I do know as much as most men.’

Martin gave a friendly, sarcastic smile. I went on. He met each point on the plane of reason. He had reckoned them out himself; no one insured more carefully against the future. I was telling him nothing he did not know. I became angry again.

‘She’s pretty shallow, you know. I expect her loves are too.’ Martin did not reply.

‘She’s bright, but she’s not very clever.’

‘That doesn’t matter to me,’ he said.

‘You’d find her boring in time.’

‘I couldn’t have done less so up to now,’ said Martin.

‘Just imagine her being bright — for — ten years. In ten years you’d be sick and tired of her.’

‘Ten years,’ said Martin. He added: ‘If that’s the worst that happens!’

‘She’d be driving you off your head.’

‘If this fission affair works,’ said Martin, ‘we shall be lucky if we have any heads.’

That was the actual moment at which I first heard the rumour. There was a touch of irritation in Martin’s voice, because over his marriage I had pressed him too far.

He was putting me off. He had not spoken with any special weight, for he was thinking about Irene and my opposition; yet something in his tone brought me up sharp, and I had to inquire:

‘Is this anything new?’

‘Very new,’ said Martin. He was still trying to lead my attention away, but also he was half-caught up, as he said: ‘It’s very new, but I don’t know how everyone missed it. I might have seen it myself!’

He told me that, within the past fortnight, letters had been published in scientific journals in several countries, and that the Cavendish people and physicists everywhere were talking of nothing else. That I could understand. He then gave me an explanation which I could not understand, although I had heard plenty of the jargon of nuclear physics from him and Luke. ‘Fission’. ‘Neutrons’. ‘Chain reaction’. I could not follow. But I could gather that at last the sources of nuclear energy were in principle open to be set loose; and that it might be possible to make an explosive such as no one had realistically imagined.

‘Scientists always exaggerate,’ I said.

‘This isn’t exaggerated,’ said Martin. ‘If it happens, one of these bombs would blow up Cambridge. I mean, there’d be nothing left.’

‘Will it happen?’

‘It seems to be about an even chance,’

I had stood up, as I attempted to follow his explanation. Then I walked across the room and looked out of the window into the court, where the rain was blowing before the wind, forming great driven puddles along the verges of the grass; in a moment I returned to where Martin was still sitting by the fire, We were both sobered, but to me this piece of news, though it hung over us as we faced each other, seemed nothing but a red herring.

I came back, more gently now, to the prospect of his marriage. Had he really thought what, in terms of day-to-day living, it might mean? He was once more polite, sensible, brotherly. He would admit the force of any one of my doubts: he would say yes to each criticism. Although underneath I could feel his intention, embedded right in the core of his will, nevertheless he was ready to make any other concession to my worry.

Nothing said in anger would be remembered, he was as good as saying, with his good-natured, sarcastic smile. In fact, even in the bitterest moment of the quarrel, I had taken that for granted. It did not enter my mind that anything could touch the confidence between us.

2: A Code Name

MARTIN married Irene that autumn, but I could not visit them for some time afterwards. For the war had started: he was working at Rosyth in one of the first degaussing parties, and, as for me, I was already a temporary civil servant in London.

As the early months of war went by, I heard nothing, and thought little, about my brother’s marriage; but the piece of scientific news which, when I was trying to turn him against Irene, he had used as a false trail, came several times into my office work.

It happened so through some personal coincidences. It was because the Minister knew me that I went into his department, and it was because of his own singular position that we saw the minutes of the scientific committees. His name was Thomas Bevill, and he was a second cousin of Lord Boscastle. He had been a professional politician all his life without making much of a mark in public; in private, in any government milieu he was one of the most trusted of men. He had the unusual gift of being both familiar and discreet; forty years before, when he began his career, he had set himself never to give away a secret, and never to allow himself the bright remark that makes a needless enemy. So by 1939 he had become such a link as all governments needed, particularly at the beginning of a war, before the forms of administration had settled down: they needed a man like Thomas Bevill as the chairman of confidential committees, the man to be kept informed of what was going on, the supreme post office.

Just before war began, he asked me to join him as one of his personal assistants. He had met me two or three times with the Boscastles, which was a virtue in his eyes, and I had been trained as a lawyer, which was another. He thought I was suitable raw material to learn discretion. Gradually, in the first autumn of the war, he let me item by item into his confidential files. That was why, one autumn afternoon, he sent word that he would like a ‘little talk’ with Hector Rose and me.

The Minister’s room was only two doors from mine, and both, relics of the eighteenth-century Treasury, looked out over Whitehall itself, brilliant that afternoon with autumn sun that blazed from the windows opposite ours. The Minister was not in the room, but Sir Hector Rose was already sitting by the side of the coal fire. He was a man in the early forties, stocky, powerful, and youthful-looking, his official black coat and striped trousers cut to conceal his heavy muscles. The flesh of his cheeks shone as though untouched, and his face, hair, and eyes had the same lightness. He greeted me with his usual excessive politeness. Then he said: ‘I suppose you have no idea what our master is going to occupy us with?’

I said no, and it was clear that he had none.

‘Has anyone else been summoned, do you know, Eliot?’

I did not think so. Rose said: ‘That makes us a very cosy little party.’

He spoke with a flick of the tongue, but he did not mean that it was strange for him, the Permanent Secretary, to be invited along with someone many rungs lower (I had started as what the Civil Service called a principal). Rose was too confident a man to bother about trivialities like that; he was himself formal, but he only objected to informality in others when it interfered with his administrative power.

The Minister came in, carrying a coalscuttle, on his hand a grimy cloth glove. He knelt by the grate, picked out lumps of coal and built up the fire. He was naturally familiar and unobtrusive in manner, but sometimes I thought he had developed it into an act. When people called on him in Whitehall, he would take their hats and coats and stow them punctiliously away in his cupboard. Kneeling by the fire, he looked thin-shouldered, wispy, like an elderly clerk.

‘I just wanted to have a word with you two,’ he said, still bending down.

‘An old boy came in to see me a day or two ago,’ he went on, as he pulled up a chair between us, round the fire. The ‘old boy’ was an eminent physicist, not more than sixty, that is, ten years Bevill’s junior. And the visit had taken place a week before: Bevill had been thinking things out.

‘I think I ought to put you two in the swim,’ he said. ‘Though, as you may have gathered, I’m a great believer in no one knowing more than he’s got to know to do his job. And I don’t mind telling you that I’ve wondered whether either of you have got to know this time. But Eliot must, if he’s going to be much use to me, and there may be some action for you, Rose, not now, perhaps in a year or so’s time.’

‘If you think it wiser that I shouldn’t know till then, Minister,’ said Rose. Underneath the courtesy, he was irked by Bevill’s talent for using two words where one would do. I thought that he underrated the old man, particularly when, as now, he settled down comfortably to another Polonius-like discourse on security. The first thing, said the Minister, was to forget all about the official hierarchy, the next was to forget that you had any relatives. If you possess a secret, he said, your secretary may have to know: but not your second-in-command: and not your wife.

‘If you decide to leave me out at this stage, I shall perfectly well understand,’ said Rose, getting back to relevance.

‘No, my dear chap. It wouldn’t be practical,’ said the Minister. ‘I shouldn’t be able to pull the wool over your ears.’

The Minister sometimes got his idioms mixed up. Rose went on watching him with pale, heavy-lidded eyes, which met the old man’s frank, ingenuous, blue ones. With the same simple frank expression, Bevill said: ‘As a matter of fact, some of these scientists believe they can present us with a great big bang. Like thousands of tons of TNT. That would be a futurist war, if you like. That old boy the other day said we ought to be ready to put some money on it.’

It sounded like the gossip I had heard in Cambridge, and I said so.

‘Ought you to have heard?’ said Bevill, who thought of science in nothing but military terms. ‘These chaps will talk. Whatever you do, you can’t stop them talking. But they’re pushing on with it. I’ve collected three appreciations already. Forget all I tell you until you have to remember — that’s what I do. But the stuff to watch is what they call a uranium isotope.’

He said the words slowly as though separating the syllables for children to spell. ‘U.235,’ he added, as though domesticating a foreign name. To each of the three of us, the words and symbols might as well have been in Hittite, though Rose and I would have been regarded as highly educated men.

The Minister went on to say that, though the scientists ‘as usual’ were disagreeing among themselves, some of them believed that making a ‘superbomb’ was now only a matter of a series of techniques. They also believed that whichever side got the weapon first would win the war.

‘These people always think that it’s easier to win wars than I do,’ he added imperturbably.

‘How soon before it’s a feasible proposition?’ Rose asked him.

‘Not tomorrow,’ said Bevill. ‘Anything up to ten years.’

‘That’s a very long-term prospect,’ said Rose.

‘I’m not an optimist,’ the Minister replied. ‘It may be a very long-term war. But I agree with you, my dear chap, it doesn’t sound like business for this time. Still it won’t do any harm to watch out and keep our powder dry.’

‘Many thanks for giving me the warning, Minister,’ said Rose, deciding there was nothing more of use to be learned that afternoon. ‘Many, many thanks.’

But before Rose could get away, Bevill showed us his private dossier of the uranium project. We must not refer to it again by that name, he said: as with all other projects of high secrecy, he copied out the ‘appreciations’ in his own hand, keeping no copies: the documents were then mounted in a loose-leaf cover, on which he printed a pet name.

‘I’m going to show you my name for this new stunt,’ he said, with a smile that was frank, shy and eager. And into that smile there crept the almost salacious pleasure that many men show as they talk of secrets.

He turned over the cover, and we saw, painted in bold capitals, the words:

MR TOAD

‘That’s what we’ll call it here, if you don’t mind,’ he added.

3: What Might Have Been Foresight

IT still did not seem significant. That winter, one or two of us who were in the secret discussed it, but, although we looked round the room before we spoke, it did not catch hold of us as something real.

Once Francis Getliffe, whom I had known longer than the other scientists, said to me: ‘I hope it’s never possible.’

But even he, though he did not want any men anywhere to possess this power, spoke without heaviness, as if it were a danger of the future, a piece of science fiction, like the earth running into a comet’s path.

All the arrangements of those first months of Mr Toad were on the pettiest scale — a handful of scientists, nearly all of them working part time, scattered round three or four university laboratories; a professor wondering whether he might spend three hundred and fifty pounds for some extra help; an improvised committee, meeting once a month, sending its minutes to the Minister in longhand.

In the summer of 1940, on one of those mornings of steady, indifferent sunshine that left upon some of us, for years afterwards, an inescapable memory, I was walking down Piccadilly and noticed half a dozen men coming out of the Royal Society’s door in Burlington House. I knew most of them by sight. They were scientists, nearly all youngish men: one or two were carrying continental briefcases; they might have been coming from an examiners’ meeting. In fact, they were the committee, and the sight of them brought back the Minister’s pet name, which, with the war news dragging like an illness, did not seem much of a joke.

Soon afterwards, in the Minister’s office we received intelligence that the Germans were working on the bomb. Although we had all assumed it, the news was sharp: it added another fear. Also it roughened the tongues of those who were crusading for the project. Step by step they won for it a little more attention. By the spring of 1941 they obtained sanction for a research establishment — not a grand establishment like those working on radio and the immediate weapons of war, but one with perhaps a hundred scientists to their thousands. For a site, they picked on a place called Barford — which I had not heard of, but found to be a village in Warwickshire, a few miles from Stratford-on-Avon.

It became one of my duties to help them collect staff. I could hardly have had a more niggling job, for almost all scientists were by this time caught up in the war. Even for projects of high priority it was difficult enough to extract them, and so far as priority was concerned, the Barford project still had none at all. The only good scientists not yet employed were refugees, and it was clear that they would have to form the nucleus of Barford.

Accepting those facts, the Barford superintendent and his backers still made a claim, a modest claim, for at least one or two of the better young Englishmen. It was thus that I was asked to sound Walter Luke; if we could get him released from his radio work, would he be willing to move to Barford?

Then I wondered about Martin. I had heard little from him. I should have heard, if things had been going well, if like a good many scientists of his age, he had fallen on his feet. For eighteen months he had been doing a piece of technical routine. He seemed to be doing it just as competently, neither less nor more, than a hundred other young men in the naval ports. From a distance I had been watching, without being able to help.

I could not say much about Barford; in any case I knew that in this matter his temperament would work like mine; we said yes, but we did not like to be managed. Nevertheless, I could drop a hint. He could see for himself that it might give him a chance.

Later, my memory tended to cheat; it made me look as though I had the gift of foresight. That was quite untrue. In the spring of 1941, there were several other projects on Bevill’s files which seemed to me of a different order of importance from Mr Toad. As for Barford, I did not believe that anything would come of it, and my chief interest was that it might give Martin a better chance.

4: Result of a Manoeuvre

IT was some weeks before either Luke or Martin could get to London, but then I arranged to see them both on the same afternoon in May.

Martin was the first to arrive. It was over a year since we had met, and, as we enquired about each other, there was the sense of well-being, the wiping away of anxiety’s fret, that one only gets with those who have become part of the deep habit of one’s life.

Soon I asked: ‘How is Irene?’

‘Very well,’ said Martin, looking straight into my eyes, giving nothing away.

He walked round my office, admiring the Regency mantelpiece and the view over Whitehall. He was rejoicing that I was having something of a success — for, entirely through the Minister’s backing, I had just been promoted. In a section of the war, I now had my bit of subfusc power. I was for shrugging it off; but Martin, however, set more store by official honours than I did.

‘Are you sure you’re making the most of it?’ he said, with a proprietorial, insistent air,

He was delighted, and in his delight there was no envy. Yet suddenly he was sounding knowledgeable and worldly; it was strange, out of the haze of family memories, to see him standing there, a calculating man. If he had a success himself, I thought, he would have all the tricks ready to exploit it.

Actually, he had nothing to exploit. I listened to him saying that, as far as his job went, there was still nothing whatever to report. No change. I was full of irritation, for, when you hope for someone as I did for him, you blame them for their own misfortunes.

‘So far as there’s been any luck in the family,’ I said, ‘I’ve had it.’

‘I don’t believe in luck to that extent,’ said Martin, without complaint.

‘You’ve had none,’ I said.

Then Martin smiled, and brought out a phrase which would have been meaningless to any but us two. ‘You’ve got someone to live up to.’ It was a phrase of our mother’s, holding me up before him as an example, for I had been her favourite son. I recalled her as she lay dying, instructing me sternly not to think too little of Martin. No injunction could ever have been less called for; but later I believed that she was making amends to herself for not having loved him more.

Martin was talking of her when, an hour before I expected him, Walter Luke came in. Ever since I had known him as a younger man — he was still not thirty — he had thrown the whole of his nature into everything he felt. I had seen him triumphant with every cell of his body, as a human integer of flesh and bone: and I had seen him angry. That afternoon he was ashamed of himself, and it was not possible for a man to throw more of his force into being ashamed.

‘Hallo, Lewis. Hallo, Martin,’ he said. ‘I’ve just been ticked off. I deserved it, and I got it, and I’m beginning to wonder when I shall manage to grow up.’

He slumped on to a chair, immersed in his dejection. His backbone usually so straight in his thick energetic frame, curved disconsolately against the leather; yet he exuded vigour, and both Martin and I were smiling at him. His cheeks were not as ruddy as when I first saw him at high table, five years before. In the last two years he had carried responsibility, and even on his physique the strain had told. Now he looked his age; there were grey hairs at his temples; but his voice remained eager, rich and youthful, still bearing a rumble from the Plymouth dockyard where he was brought up.

He had just come from one of the radio committees, where he had been arguing with someone he called a ‘stuffed shirt’ (and who was highly placed). The stuffed shirt had been canvassing his favourite idea, ‘and I tell you,’ said Luke, ‘if I’d been asked to think of something bloody silly, I couldn’t have thought up anything so fantastically bloody silly as that.’ Luke had apparently proceeded to say so, using his peculiar resources of eloquence. The chairman, who was even more highly placed than the stuffed shirt, had told him this was not the right spirit: he was thinking of his own ideas, and didn’t want the other’s to work.

‘The old bleeder was perfectly right,’ said Luke with simplicity. He went on: ‘I never know whether I’ve got cross because some imbecile is talking balderdash or whether my own precious ego is getting trampled on. I wish one of you shrewd chaps would teach me.’

Walter Luke was neither pretending nor laughing at himself; he was contrite. Then, with the same freshness and resilience, he had finished with his contrition. He sat up straight in his chair, and asked what I wanted to see him about.

I said we had better have a word alone. Luke said: ‘Why have we got to turf Martin out?’

‘Lewis is right,’ said Martin, getting ready to go.

‘It depends which surprise-packet he’s going to pull out of the bag,’ said Luke, with a broad, fresh grin. He looked at me: ‘Barford?’

I was taken off guard.

‘Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, said Luke. ‘We know all about that.’

Martin was smiling, as Luke began to talk to him. It was clear that Martin, though he was discreet, knew enough to horrify the Minister; as for Luke, he knew as much as anyone had heard.

For anyone used to Bevill’s precautions, this was startling to listen to. In terms of sense, it should not have been such a surprise. Word was going round among nuclear physicists, and Luke, young as he was, was one of the best of them. He had already been consulted on a scientific point; he could guess the rest.

I had to accept it. There was also an advantage in speaking in front of Martin; it might be the most natural way to draw him in.

At that moment, he was listening to Luke with a tucked-in, sarcastic smile, as though he were half-admiring Luke’s gifts, half-amused by him as a man.

‘Well,’ I said to Luke, ‘as you know so much, you probably know what I’ve been told to ask.’

‘I hadn’t heard anything,’ he replied, ‘but they must be after me.’

‘Would you be ready to go?’

Luke did not answer, but said: ‘Who else have they got?’

For the first time that afternoon, I was able to tell him something. The Superintendent, Drawbell, the engineering heads –

‘Good God alive,’ Luke interrupted, ‘Lewis, who are these uncles?’

A list of names of refugees — and then I mentioned Arthur Mounteney.

‘I’m glad they’ve got hold of one scientist, anyway,’ said Luke. ‘He did some nice work once. He’s just about finished, of course.’

‘Do you feel like going in?’ I asked.

Luke would not reply.

‘Why don’t they get hold of Martin?’ he said. ‘He’s wasted where he is.’

‘They’re not likely to ask for me,’ said Martin.

‘Your name keeps cropping up,’ I said to Luke.

Usually, when I had seen men offered jobs, they had decided within three minutes, even though they concealed it from themselves, even though they managed to prolong the pleasure of deciding. Just for once, it was not so.

‘It’s all very well,’ said Luke. ‘I just don’t know where I can be most use.’ He was not used to hesitating; he did not like it; he tried to explain himself. If he stayed where he was, he could promise us a ‘bit of hardware’ in eighteen months. Whereas, if he joined this ‘new party’ there was no guarantee that anything would happen for years.

There was nothing exaggerated in Luke’s tone just then. I was used to the rowdiness with which he judged his colleagues, especially his seniors; it was the same with most of the rising scientists; they had none of the convention of politeness that bureaucrats like Sir Hector Rose were trained to, and often Rose and his friends disliked them accordingly. Listening to Luke that afternoon, no one would have thought, for instance, that the poor old derelict Mounteney was in fact a Nobel prizewinner aged about forty. But on his own value Luke was neither boastful nor modest. He was a good scientist; good scientists counted in the war, and he was not going to see himself wasted. He had lost that tincture of the absurd which had made Martin smile. He spoke without nonsense, with the directness of a man who knows what he can and cannot do.

‘I wish some of you wise old men would settle it for me,’ he said to me.

I shook my head. I had put Bevill’s request, but that was as far as I felt justified in going. For what my judgement of the war was worth, I thought on balance that Luke should stay where he was.

He could not make up his mind. As the three of us walked across the Park towards my flat in Dolphin Square, he fell first into a spell of abstraction and then broke out suddenly into a kind of argument with himself, telling us of a new device in what we then called RDF and were later to call Radar. The evening was bright. A cool wind blew from the east, bringing the rubble dust to our nostrils, although it was some days since the last raid. Under our feet the grass was dust — greyed and dry. I was worried about the war that evening; I could see no end to it; it was a comfort to be with those two, in their different fashions steady-hearted and robust.

On the way home, and all the evening, Martin kept putting questions to Luke, steering him back to nuclear fission. I could feel, though, that he was waiting for Luke to leave. He had something to say to me in private

At last we took Luke to the bus stop, and Martin and I turned back towards St George’s Square. The full moon shone down on the lightless blind-faced streets, and the shadows were dark indigo. Flecks of cloud, as though scanning the short syllables in a line of verse, stood against the impenetrable sky. Under the moon, the roofs of Pimlico shone blue as steel. The wind had fallen. It was a silent, beautiful wartime night.

‘By the way,’ said Martin, with constraint in his voice.

‘Yes?’

‘I’d be grateful if you could get me in to this project somehow.’

I had never known him ask favour of this kind before. He had not once come to me for official help, either at Cambridge or since. Now he was driven — scruple, pride, made his voice stiff, but he was driven.

‘I was going to suggest it,’ I said. ‘Of course, I’ll—’

‘I really would be grateful.’

My manoeuvre had come off; but as he spoke I felt no pleasure. I had taken it on myself to interfere; from now on I should have some responsibility for what happened to him.

Now the trigger had been touched, he was intent on going: why it meant so much, I could not tell, His career? — something of that, perhaps, but he was not reckoning the chances that night. Concern about his wife? — he would not volunteer anything. No: simple though the explanation might seem for a man like Martin, it was the science itself that drew him. Though he might have no great talent, nuclear physics had obsessed him since he was a boy. He did not know, that night, what he could add at Barford; he only knew that he wanted to be there.

He admitted as much; but he had more practical matters to deal with. Having swallowed his pride, he did not intend to prostrate himself for nothing.

‘You’re sure that you can get me in? I should have thought the first move was to persuade someone else to suggest me. Walter Luke would do…’ Could I write to Luke that night? Could I, as an insurance, remind Mounteney that Martin and I were brothers?

It was late before we went to bed; by that time Martin had written out an aide memoire of the people I was to see, write to, and telephone next day.

5: Advice from a Man in Trouble

MARTIN’S transfer went through smoothly, and he had begun work at Barford by June. With Luke, it took months longer.

In November I paid them an official visit. The Superintendent was still demanding men, and some of his sponsors in Whitehall had become more active; they even began to say that one of the schemes at Barford might give results within two years.

Francis Getliffe and the other scientific statesmen were sceptical. They were so discouraging that the Minister did not feel it worthwhile to inspect Barford himself; but, with his usual desire to keep all doors open, he sent me down instead.

I spent a morning and afternoon walking round laboratories listening to explanations I only one-tenth comprehended, listening also to the clicking, like one-fingered typewriting, of Geiger counters. But I comprehended one thing clearly. There were two main lines at Barford — one which Luke had set up on his own, with a few assistants, mine the other led by a man called Rudd. Rudd was the second-in-command of the establishment; his line was, in principle, to separate the isotope, and they were attempting several methods; it was one of these, on which Martin and a team of scientists were working, which Rudd was trying to sell. As an official, I had been exposed to a good deal of salesmanship, but this, for unremitting obsessive concentration, was in a class by itself.

It was having an effect on me. Next morning I was due for a conference with the Superintendent, and I needed to clear my head. So, as an excuse, I went off by myself to call on Luke.

It meant a walk through a country lane leading from the mansion, which had been turned into the administrative headquarters, to the airfield. The hedges were brittle and dark with the coming winter, the only touch of brightness was the green of the ivy flowers. At the top of the rise the mist was shredding a way, and suddenly, on the plateau, the huts, hangars, half-built brick ranges, stood out in the light of the cold and silvery sun.

Inside Luke’s hangar, the vista was desolate. A quarter of the roof was open to the sky, and a piece of canvas was hanging down like a velarium. The only construction in sight was a cube of concrete, about six feet high, with a small door in it standing slightly ajar, through which a beam of light escaped. The afternoon had turned cold, and in the half-light, lit only by that beam on the wet floor and a naked bulb on the side of the hangar, the chill struck like the breath of a cave. No place looked less like an engine room of the scientific future; it might have been the relic of a civilization far gone in decay.

There was not a person in sight. In a moment, as though he had heard me, Luke came out of the cube door, muttering to someone within. He was wearing a windjacket, which made him seem more than ever square, like an Eskimo, like a Polar explorer. He beat his arms across his chest and blew on his fingers.

‘Hello, Lewis,’ he said. ‘It’s bloody cold, and this blasted experiment won’t go, and I want to run away and cry.’

I was interrupting him, he was fretting to get back to work; a voice from inside the cube asked about the next move. For minutes together, Luke gave orders for a new start the following day. ‘What shall we do tonight?’ came the voice.

Luke considered. For once he did not find the words. At last he said: ‘We’ll just go home.’

I walked back with him, for he and his wife had invited some of my old acquaintances to meet me at their house that evening. He was so dejected that I did not like to press him, and yet I had to confirm what everyone was telling me — that he was getting nowhere. Even so, my own question sounded flat in the bitter air.

‘How is it going, Walter?’

Luke swore. ‘How do you think it’s going?’

‘Is it going to come out?’

‘Does it look like it?’ he replied.

I told him that I should be talking next morning to Drawbell, that nothing I could say would signify much, but it all helped to form opinion.

‘You didn’t do much good bringing me here, did you?’

Then he corrected himself, though his tone was still dejected. ‘That’s not fair,’ he said.

I asked more about his method (which aimed at plutonium, not the isotope).

‘I’m not promising anything,’ said Luke.

‘Will it work in time?’

‘I can’t see the way tonight,’ he said, with another curse.

‘Shall you?

He said, half depressed, half boastful: ‘What do you think I’m here for?’

But that was his only burst of arrogance, and in the party at his house he sat preoccupied. So did Martin, for a different reason: for Irene had arranged to meet him there, and, when everyone else had arrived, still did not come.

Each time the door opened Martin looked round, only to see the Mounteneys enter, then the Puchweins. And yet, though he was saying little and Luke brooded as he went round filling glasses from a jug of beer, the evening was a cosy one. Out of doors, the countryside was freezing. It was a winter night, the fields stretching in frosted silence. Outside was the war, but within our voices and the light of the fire. It was a night on which one felt lapped in safeness to the fingertips.

Ideas, hopes, floated in the domestic air. For the first time at Barford, I heard an argument about something other than the project. After science, in those wartime nights, men like Puchwein and Mounteney had a second favourite subject. They argued as naturally as most of us drink, I was thinking, feeling an obscure fondness for them as I listened to them getting down to their second subject, which was politics.

For Puchwein, in fact, I had the peculiar fondness one bears someone to whom one has done a good turn. A close friend of mine called Roy Calvert had taken risks to smuggle Puchwein out of Berlin in 1938, and several of us had helped support him. But Puchwein was not in the least got down by having to accept charity. His manner remained patriarchal, it was he who dispensed the patronage. He had a reputation as a chemist. He was a very big man, bald and grey, though still under forty. When he took off his spectacles his eyes slanted downward, so that he always seemed about to weep. Actually, he was cheerful, kind, and so uxorious that his wife was showing lines of temper. But he forgot her, he was immersed, as he and she and Mounteney, and sometimes Nora Luke and I, threw the political phrases to and fro in front of the fire.

Some of those phrases, as used by both Puchweins and Mounteney but by no one else in the room, would have given me a clue if I had not known already. ‘The party’ for the Communist Party, ‘Soviet’ is an adjective for Russian, ‘Fascists’ as a collective term to include National-Socialists, ‘The Daily’ for the Daily Worker, ‘social democrats’ to describe members of the Labour Party such as Luke, or even unorthodox liberals such as Martin and me — all those were shibboleths, and meant, if one had ever listened to the dialect of intellectual communism, that those who used them were not far from the party line.

Neither Puchwein nor Mounteney concealed it. Throughout the thirties it had been nothing to conceal. They did not hold party tickets, so far as anyone knew; but they were in sympathy, Mounteney in slightly irregular sympathy. None of us was surprised or concerned that it should be so, certainly not in that November of 1941, when not only to the Puchweins but to conservative-minded Englishmen, it seemed self-evident that the war was being won or lost on Russian land.

Just then Luke went round with the beer again, the argument suddenly quietened, and I heard Emma Mounteney whispering to Hanna Puchwein with a glance in Martin’s direction:

‘Where is our wandering girl tonight?’

Hanna looked away, but Emma was hard to stop.

‘I wonder,’ she whispered, ‘if T—’ (a man I scarcely knew) ‘is on his lonesome.’

Martin was on the other side of the fire. I thought that he could not have heard. Nevertheless, before Puchwein began again, Martin apologized for Irene. She was finishing some work, he said; it must have taken longer than she reckoned, and it looked as though she might not get there at all. His composure was complete. I had once known a similar situation, but I had not summoned up half his self-command. Yet, as the talk clattered on, his eyes often gazed into the fire, and he was still listening for a ring at the door.

Martin had not spoken since his apology for her, and I wanted to shield him from going home with the Mounteneys, whose house (at Barford the scientists and their families were crammed on top of each other, as in a frontier town) he shared. So I invented a pretext for us to walk home together.

In the village street, all was quiet. A pencil of light edged the top of a blacked-out window frame. Otherwise the village was sleeping as it might have done on a Jacobean night, when some of these houses were built. Martin’s footsteps, slower and heavier than mine although he was the lighter man, seemed loud on the frosty road. I left him to break the silence. Our steps remained the only noise, until he remarked, as though casually: ‘Walter Luke didn’t say much tonight, did he?’

I agreed.

‘He must have had something in his mind. His experiment, I suppose.’ And that was all he said.

Martin was doing what we have all done, refer to ourselves, half apologize, half confide, by pretending an interest in another. If I had been an intimate friend but not a brother, perhaps even if I had been a stranger. I thought that just at that moment he would have unburdened himself. Often it is the reserved who, when a pain, or even more, a humiliation, has lived inside them too long, suddenly break out into a confidence to someone they scarcely know. But I was the last person to whom he could let go.

As we both showed when we first talked of his engagement, there was a delicacy in our kind of brothers’ love; and the closer we came to our sexual lives, the more that delicacy made us speak in terms of generalization and sarcasm. We knew each other very well by instinct. We could guess which women would attract the other, and often it was an attraction that we shared. Yet I had never told him any detail either of my married life or of a love affair. I should have felt it, not so much embarrassing to speak, though that would also have been true, but worse than embarrassing to force him to listen. It was the same from him to me. He could not tell me whom he suspected she went to bed with; he could not tell me what she was like in his own bed; and so it was no relief to speak at all.

At the crossroads he asked if I minded walking a few yards to the bridge; it was as though he wanted an excuse for not returning home (or was it superstition, as though, if he did not hurry back, all would be well?’). It was a moonless night, and the stars were faint, but there was a glimmer on the river. All of a sudden a November meteorite scorched its way across the sky, and then another.

‘More energy there than we shall make,’ said Martin, nodding in the direction of the establishment.

Now that my eyes were accustomed to the light I could make out the expression on his face. It was set and sad — and yet he was controlling his voice, he was beginning to speak seriously, about the project.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I suppose the people here are putting some pressure on you?’

I said yes.

‘They want you to invest in this place in a big way?’

Again I said yes.

‘As long as you all realize that nothing here is within years of being tested—’ He broke off, and then said: ‘It would be very nice for me if Rudd’s show came off. I should get some reflected glory, which I could do with.’

For a moment his voice was chilled, as though his secret thoughts were too strong: but I understood.

‘You don’t think it will come off?’

He paused.

‘I haven’t got the grasp some of these people have, you know, and most of them believe in it.’ Then he added: ‘But I shouldn’t like you to plump for it too far.’

‘What’s the matter with it?’

‘I think your own reputation will look nicer,’ he said, ‘if you go fairly slow this time.’

It was not until we were walking towards his house that he said: ‘I can’t explain why I’m not convinced. I wish I were better at this game, then perhaps I could.’

When we had mounted to his landing above the Mounteneys, there was no light under the door. As soon as we were inside the room Martin said, and for an instant his voice had become unrecognizable: ‘I detest living in other people’s houses.’

In that instant his face was white with temper. Was he thinking that Emma Mounteney would know the exact time that Irene climbed up the stairs? Then he spoke, once more calmly: ‘I think I’d better wait up for her. I don’t think she’s taken a key.’

6: Morning Before the Office

NEXT morning I woke out of heavy sleep, and was dragged at by a memory of muttering (it might have been a dream, or else something heard in the distance) from the bedroom next door. When I got up and went into breakfast, Irene told me that Martin had already left for the laboratory. She was wearing a dressing-gown, her voice was quiet but tight; without her make-up, she looked both drabber and younger.

In silence I ate the toast and jam of a wartime breakfast. Looking down from the window into the sunny morning, I could see the river flash through the elm branches. I was aware that her gaze was fixed on me.

Suddenly she cried out: ‘Why do you dislike me so?’

‘I don’t,’ I said.

‘I can’t bear not to be liked.’

Very quickly, almost as though she had been rehearsing it, she told me a story of how, when she was twelve, she went to stay with a ‘glamorous’ school friend, and how the other girl had been asked by an aunt. ‘Who is your best friend? Is Irene your best friend?’ And the answer had come, polite and putting-off, ‘Oh, Irene has so many friends.’

‘I couldn’t face her again,’ said Irene, and then: ‘I wish you would like me.’

‘It doesn’t matter to either of us.’

‘I want you to.’ Her tone was at the same time penitent, shameless, provocative; it was easy to imagine how she spoke to her husband.

I had to rouse myself.

‘You want it both ways, you know,’ I said.

‘What have I done against you?’ she burst out defiantly.

‘Nothing.’

‘Then why can’t we get on?’

‘You know as well as I do. Do you expect me to approve of you as my brother’s wife?’

‘So that’s it,’ she said.

‘Don’t pretend that’s news,’ I said. ‘Why have you started this — this morning?’

She had crossed over to the window seat, and was watching me with sharp eyes, which were beginning to fill with tears.

‘You’ve taken against me, just because I couldn’t stand the very thought of those people last night.’

‘You know perfectly well that’s not all.’

‘Would you like me to tell you what I was really doing?

I shook my head. ‘You’re not a fool. You must realize that you’re damaging him—’

‘I suppose my dear friends were wondering who I’d taken to bed, weren’t they?’

‘Of course.’

‘Who did they think?’

I would not reply.

‘Whose name did you hear?’ she cried.

Impatiently I repeated Emma’s question about T—. She gave a yelp of laughter. She was for an instant in high spirits, nothing but amused.

‘They can’t think that!’

She stared at me: the tears had gone.

‘You won’t believe me, but they’re wrong. It wasn’t him, it wasn’t anyone. I just couldn’t stand their faces any more. I had to get out on my own. They’re hopelessly wrong. Please believe me!’

I said: ‘Whether they’re right or wrong — in a place like this you mustn’t given anyone an excuse to gossip, it doesn’t matter whether it’s justified or not.’

‘How often I’ve heard that,’ she said with a glint in her eyes.

‘When?’

‘All night long. Do you think you’re the first to scold me?’ She looked at me, and went on: ‘He was specially angry because you were here to see.’

After a moment, I said: ‘That’s neither here nor there.’

‘Isn’t it?’ said Irene.

‘The only thing I’ve got a right to talk about,’ I said, ‘are the practical consequences. Unless you want to damage his career, the least you can do for Martin is behave yourself on the outside.’

‘I promised him that this morning,’ she said in a thin voice.

‘Can you keep your promise?’

‘You needn’t worry.’ Her voice was thinner still.

Then she stood up, shook herself, went to the looking-glass and remained there, studying her reflection.

‘We ought to be moving soon,’ she said, her voice full again, brisk, and matter-of-fact. ‘These people aren’t altogether wrong about me. I may as well tell you that, though I expect you know.’

I was getting up, but she said no, and sat down opposite me.

‘They’ve got the idea right, but it’s my past coming back on me.’ She added, without emotion: ‘I’ve been a bad girl. I’ve had some men.’

Yes, she would have liked to be an adventuress: but somehow she hadn’t managed it. ‘Perhaps you’ve got to be cooler than I am to bring it off,’ she said, half-mystified.

It was she who had been used, not her lovers; and there was one who, when she thought of him, still had power over her.

‘Martin knew about him before we married,’ she said. ‘Have you heard of Edgar Hankins?’

I had not only heard of him, but ten years before had known him fairly well.

‘I loved him very much,’ she said. She went on: ‘I ought to have made him marry me.’

‘Was it a matter of will?’ I said, feeling more tender to her.

‘No,’ said Irene, ‘I’ve got the will, but I can’t trust my nerves.’

Then I asked why she had married Martin. She began not by answering the question, but by saying: ‘You shouldn’t worry too much about Martin.’

‘Why not?’

‘I fancy he’s a harder man than you are.’

She said it as though she were praising him. Reverting to her businesslike manner, she went on about her reasons for the marriage. She had found some of her friends competing for him, she said; and that provoked her. But most of all she wanted safety.

‘I was getting notorious,’ she said. ‘When people heard my name, they were beginning to say “Oh, her”.’

Curiously, by this time she and I were on easy terms. Nevertheless, I did not know how much to believe. She was anxious not to give herself the benefit of the doubt, she was putting herself in the coldest light. Nearly always, I thought, there was something men or women were protecting, when deliberately, and with pride, almost with conceit, they showed you their most callous side.

All of a sudden she looked at me with her eyes narrowed and frightened.

‘Why did you ask me — about marrying him?’

I tried to put her off.

‘Do you want him to leave me?’

‘That’s not my business,’ I said.

‘Are you trying to take him away?’ Her tone had been brittle, the tears had been near again, and she sighed.

Then she threw her head back, and put on her matey, hard-baked smile. ‘You can try anything you like,’ she said. ‘Nothing will have any effect on him, you ought to know that by now.’

Within ten minutes we were walking along the footpath to the laboratories, Irene’s face groomed as though nothing were more impossible than tears or anger, both of us talking as though there had been no scene between us. Just once, she referred back to it, when she commented out of the blue: ‘Mornings before the office.’

It was her phrase for any kind of morning drama: it was a phrase that only had meaning if your working life was disciplined, as all of ours had by this time become. Whatever was left behind at home, the files were waiting. As we walked along the country footpath, I was myself sorting out my official thoughts, collecting what I could safely say to Drawbell.

Before I called on Drawbell, I said goodbye to Martin. He was standing in his laboratory, looking at one of the counters: tiny neon lamps, the size of buttons, flickered in and out, the noise tapped on, on the indicator the figures moved like a taxi register.

‘Any progress?’ I asked.

‘Nothing new,’ said Martin patiently. He and others had already explained to me that what was true of pure scientific research was truer still of this: that the days of crisis were few: that it was only after long periods of preparation, measured in months, not days, that they came to a ‘result’ — one day of excitement, and afterwards another period of building, routine, long-drawn-out suspense.

In the office where Drawbell’s secretaries worked, I was kept waiting among the typing stools and dictaphones before I could see him. I suspected that he was doing it on purpose, as I went on chatting to Hanna Puchwein and her assistant, Mary Pearson, the wife of one of the chief engineers, a young woman who at that first impression seemed just spectacled and flushing. At last the bell trilled on Hanna’s desk, and she took me in.

Drawbell’s office had in the past been the main drawing-room of the Barford house. On the high walls, where the white paint was chipping from the panels, were pinned charts, tables of organization, graphs, diagrams. The room was so long that there was time to notice my footsteps on the parquet as I went towards Drawbell’s desk. He sat, steadily regarding me, watching me come towards him without changing his expression or making a sound.

All this was put on. I had met him several times, in that office as well as in London. He was not an academic, and Luke and the others said, with their usual boisterous lack of respect, that he was not a scientist at all. In peacetime he had been head of another government station. Though I knew that he was not unformidable, I knew also that he was a bit of a humbug and a bit of a clown.

He remained silent. I sat down in an armchair by his desk, He went on gazing at me, with an unwinking inflexible stare from his right eye: the other had little vision and turned blandly off at forty-five degrees. He was bald: square-jowled: podgy-nosed: wide-mouthed, with upturning melon-lips. I studied him, also without speaking.

‘Eliot,’ he said at last, ‘I’m not satisfied with the support that we’re receiving.’

I said that this was what I had come to talk about.

‘Now you’ve had an opportunity to see what we’re doing.’

I said yes.

‘I hope you’ve made the most of it. I hope you are beginning to realize that this place maybe — I don’t say that it is, I say may be — the most important institution in the entire world. And I’m going to ask you straight out: what help am I to expect from headquarters?’

I hesitated.

‘Naturally, I expect some positive results from you,’ said Drawbell.

I was the wrong man for this opening, but I had to be patient. I had two problems on my mind. What was going to happen? I had not much doubt of the answer — but how frankly should I tell it to Drawbell?

I knew in cold blood what was bound to happen. Even if Rudd’s scheme worked (perhaps Martin was underestimating its chances), it would take years. All the scientists they wanted were working elsewhere, most of them on RDF, on work that would pay dividends in one year or two, not in the remote future: no one in authority could take the risk of moving them; even if the Barford result was certain, instead of uncertain, no one at that stage of the war could do much more.

If I were to be any use as an administrator to Barford, I had to get them to trust me: so I decided to be open with Drawbell. I said that no one could spend any time with his scientists without becoming infected with their faith. He nodded his head. I should report that to Hector Rose and the Minister, for what it was worth: but Drawbell must not expect too much.

‘Why not?’

I told him what I had been thinking to myself. He was up against the facts of war. Whatever I reported to the Minister, or the Minister represented to his committees, or the committees recommended on their own, would make little difference. Barford would get buildings and equipment without any serious trouble, but could only hope for a few extra scientists. However much faith anyone had, the men just did not exist.

‘Strip the country,’ said Drawbell,

I told him any set of responsible persons would have to say no. We couldn’t weaken ourselves in 1943 or 1944 for the sake of a gigantic gamble.

‘I won’t tolerate the word gamble,’ said Drawbell, in a loud monotonous voice, speaking like a man trying to hold back his anger.

I had expected him to be reasonable; I had misjudged him.

He would not listen to my case. He shouted me down. He tried cajoling me, saying that I was the only man in the Minister’s entourage with any imagination. He tried threatening me, asking how I should feel when the Germans dropped the first uranium bomb on London.

I was used, like any official who has had to carry bad news, to being blamed for it, but it was an effort to keep my temper.

‘Quite frankly,’ said Drawbell, meaning by that phrase that something unpleasant was coming, ‘I hoped that you were going to be less obstructive.’

He went on: ‘Of course, I shan’t be able to hide it from your superiors that we’ve been disappointed by your visit.’

I said that was up to him.

‘If your superiors take the same hopeless attitude as you do, Eliot, it will be a black day for this country.’

‘You must tell them so.’

Suddenly Drawbell gave a surprisingly sweet smile. ‘I’ve told them already, Eliot, and I shall go on telling them.’

He behaved as though it were no use abusing me further, and began to talk in a realistic manner,

‘Well,’ he said, ‘assuming that you’re right to be hopeless — how many scientists shall I get?’

I had not replied before Drawbell put on a grin, half coaxing, half jeering: ‘Come on. Just between you and me.’

So all that display of indignation had been an act; he was ready to use his own moods, my comfort, anything or anyone else, for the sake of Barford.

This time I was cautious. I said that another establishment, doing work of the highest war priority, had just been allowed to search for thirty scientists of reputation. If the Minister and the committees made out the strongest case for Barford, they might get ten to twenty.

‘Well, if it’s only ten,’ said Drawbell, surprisingly reasonable, ‘that’s better than a slap in the belly with a wet fish.’

He regarded me with good nature, as though I had, through no special fault of my own but for a higher purpose, been roughly handled. It was amiably that he inquired: ‘Would you like to know what I shall do with them?’ I expected him to say — they will go to Rudd. Drawbell made a theatrical pause, and said: ‘I shall put them where they are most needed.’

I asked, impatient at this new turn, where that would be.

‘Rudd thinks he will get them all,’ said Drawbell.

‘Will he?’

‘Not on your life. It’s not good for anyone to think they’re the only runners in the field.’

He gave a cheerful, malevolent chuckle. One could tell how he enjoyed using his power, keeping his assistants down to their proper level, dividing and ruling.

To complete the surprise, he was proposing to reinforce Luke whom he disliked, whom he had heard disparaged for weeks.

‘It doesn’t matter who brings it off,’ he said, ‘so long as someone does.’

He nodded, for once quite natural: ‘I don’t know whether you pray much, Eliot, but I pray God that my people here will get it first. Pray God we get it.’

7: Voice from a Bath

LOOKING back, I re-examined all I could remember of those early conversations at Barford, searching for any sign of troubled consciences. I was tempted to antedate the conflict which later caused some of them suffering. But it would have been quite untrue.

There was a simple reason why it should be so. All of them knew that the enemy was trying to make a fission bomb. For those who had a qualm of doubt, that was a complete ethical solvent. I had not yet heard from any of the scientists, nor from my friends in government, a single speculation as to whether the bomb should be used. It was just necessary to possess it.

When Drawbell prayed that the Barford project might succeed, he was not speaking lightly; he happened to have kept intact his religious faith. In different words, Puchwein and the fellow-travellers, for just then there was no political divide, would have uttered the same prayer, and so should I.

When I first heard the fission bomb discussed in the Minister’s room, my response had been the same as Francis Getliffe’s, that is, to hope it would prove physically impossible to make. But in the middle of events, close to Martin and Luke and the others, I could not keep that up. Imperceptibly my hopes had become the same as theirs, that we should get it, that we should get it first. To myself I added a personal one: that Martin would play a part in the success.

During my November visit to Barford my emotions about the project were as simple as that, and they remained so for a long time.

Yet, soon after that visit, I was further from expecting a result even than I had been before. Within quite a short time, a few weeks, the wave of optimism, which had been stirred up by Drawbell, died away; others began to accept what Martin had warned me of by the Barford bridge. It was nothing so dramatic as a failure or even a mistake; it was simply that men realized they had underestimated the number of men, the amount of chemical plant, the new kinds of engineering, the number of years, before any of the methods under Rudd could produce an ounce of metal.

Then America came into the war, and within a few weeks had assigned several thousand scientists to the job. The Barford people learned of it with relief, but also with envy and a touch of resentment. There seemed nothing left for them to do. A good many of them were sent across to join the American projects. The Minister, whose own post had become shaky, was being pushed into letting others go.

By the early summer of 1942, the argument had begun as to whether or not Barford should be disbanded.

Just as that argument was starting, we heard the first rumours of Luke’s idea. Could the Canadians be persuaded to set up a heavy-water plant? the Minister was asked. If so, Luke saw his way through the rest.

No one believed it. The estimates came in, both of money and men. They were modest. No one thought they were realistic. Nearly all the senior scientists, though not Francis Getliffe, thought the idea ‘long-haired’.

Following suit, Hector Rose was coming down against it, and deciding that the sensible thing was to send the Barford scientists to America. High officials like Rose had been forced to learn how much their country’s power (by the side of America’s) had shrunk; Rose was a proud man, and the lesson bit into his pride, but he was too cool-minded not to act on it.

I did not believe that Luke’s idea would come to anything. I did not know whether anything could be saved of Barford. As for Martin, I was angry with him again because his luck was so bad.

I was wondering if I could help find him another job, when in July I received a message that he urgently wished to talk to me and would be waiting at my flat.

It was a hot afternoon, and the Minister kept me late. When I arrived at Dolphin Square I could see no sign of Martin, except his case: tired, out of temper, I began to read the evening paper, comfortless with the grey war news. While I was reading, I heard a splash of water from the bath, and I realized that Martin must be there. I did not call out. There would be time enough for the bleak conversation in front of us.

Then I heard another sound, inexplicable, like a series of metallic taps, not rhythmical but nearly so, as though someone with no sense of time were beating out a very slow tattoo on the bathroom wall. Inexorably it went on, until I cried out, mystified, irritated: ‘What are you doing?’

‘Trying to lodge the pumice-stone on the top of the shaving-cupboard.’

It was one of the more unexpected replies. From his tone, I knew at once that he was lit up with happiness. And I knew just what he was doing. He kept his happiness private, as he did his miseries; and in secret he had his own celebrations. I had watched him, after a success at Cambridge, stand for many minutes throwing an india rubber up to the cornice, seeing if he could make it perch.

‘What have you been up to?’ My own tone had quite changed.

‘I moved into Luke’s outfit a few weeks ago.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve got in on the ground floor.’

It was a phrase quite out of character — but I did not care about that. I had ceased to respond to his joy, I was anxious for him again, cross that I had not been consulted.

‘Was that wise?’ I called.

‘I should think so.’

‘It must have meant quarrelling with your boss.’ (I meant Rudd).

‘I’m sorry about that.

‘What about Drawbell? Have you got across him?’

‘I thought it out’ — he seemed amused that I should be accusing him of rashness ‘—before I moved.’

‘I doubt if Luke’s scheme will ever see the light of day,’ I cried.

‘It must.’

‘How many people believe in it?’

‘It’s the way to do it.’

There was a pause. Once more, there came a tinkle on the bathroom floor, meaning that he had missed his aim again.

‘Do you really think that?’ I said.

‘I’m sure.’

‘How long have you been sure?’

‘I was more sure when I got into this bath than I’ve ever been.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It came to me. It was all right.’

Without altering his tone, still relaxed and joyful, he announced that he was going to leave off his efforts with the pumice; he would get out and join me soon. As I waited, although I was trying to think out ways and means, although I had a professional’s anxiety (how could we manoeuvre Luke’s scheme through?), although I could not keep my protectiveness down, yet I was enthused with hope. Already I was expecting more for him than he did himself.

I passed as a realistic man. In some senses it was true. But down at the springs of my life I hoped too easily and too much. As an official I could control it; but not always as I imagined my own future, even though by now I knew what had happened to me, I knew where I was weak. Least of all could I control it when I thought of Martin: with myself, I could not help remembering my weaknesses, but I could forget his. So, given the least excuse, as after listening to his voice from the bath, I imagined more glittering triumphs for him than ever, even fifteen years before, I had imagined for myself.

He came in wearing a dressing-gown of mine, and at once I was given enough excuse to hope as much as I could manage. As with most guarded faces, his did not lose its guard in moments of elation — that is, the lines of the mouth, the controlled expression, stayed the same; but his whole face, almost like one of the turnip masks that we used to make as children, seemed to be illuminated from within by a lamp of joy.

We did not begin at once to discuss tactics, for which he had come to London. Sometime that night we should have to; but just for this brief space we put the tactics out of our minds, we gave ourselves the satisfaction of letting it ride.

Martin had been visited by an experience which might not come to him again. So far as I could distinguish, there were two kinds of scientific experience, and a scientist was lucky if he was blessed by a visitation of either just once in his working life. The kind which most of them, certainly Martin, would have judged the higher was not the one he had just known: instead, the higher kind was more like (it was in my view the same as) the experience that the mystics had described so often, the sense of communion with all-being. Martin’s was quite different, not so free from self, more active: as though, instead of being one with the world, he held the world in the palm of his hand; as though he had, in his moment of insight, seen the trick by which he could toss it about. It did not matter that the trick had been invented by another; this was a pure experience, without self-regard, so pure that it brought to Martin’s smile, as well as joy, a trace of sarcastic surprise — ‘Why has this happened to me?’

He told me as much, for that evening there was complete confidence between us. Suddenly, he began to laugh outright.

I asked what was the matter.

‘I just thought what an absurdly suitable place it was, to feel like this.’

I was at a loss.

‘What was?’

‘Your bath.’

Then I remembered the legend of Archimedes.

‘He must have had the feeling often enough,’ said Martin.

With a smile, sharp-edged, still elated, now eager for the point of action, he added: ‘The trouble is, the old man was a better scientist than I am.’