The New Men

8: Gambling by a Cautious Man

Soon after Martin’s visit, people in the secret began to become partisans about Luke’s scheme, either for or against. A decision could not be stalled off for long. Luke had managed to arouse passionate opposition; most of the senior scientists as well as Hector Rose, and his colleagues, wanted to kill the idea and despatch Luke and the others to America. But Francis Getliffe and a few other scientists were being passionate on the other side. And I also was totally committed, and, while they argued for Luke in the committee rooms, did what little I could elsewhere.

I made Hector Rose listen to the whole Luke case. Although we had come to dislike each other, he gave me a full hearing, but I did not shift him.

I did better with the Minister, who had in any case felt a sneaking sympathy with the scheme all the time. The difficulty was that he was losing his influence, and was above all concerned for his own job. While I was trying to persuade him to pay a visit to Barford, he was on edge for a telephone call from Downing Street, which, if it came, meant the end.

However, he agreed to pay the visit.

‘If I can see those prima donnas together, I might get some sense out of them,’ he said to Rose.

Rose politely agreed — but he was speculating on how many more weeks Bevill would stay in office. Rose had seen ministers come and go before, and he wanted all tidy in case there was a change.

Lesser functionaries than the Minister could have travelled down to Barford by government car; Hector Rose, who himself had no taste for show, would at least have reserved a compartment for the party so that he could talk and work. Bevill did neither. He sat in a crowded train, reading a set of papers of no importance, exactly like a conscientious clerk on the way to Birmingham.

The train trickled on in the sunshine; troops yobbed out on to the little platforms, and once or twice a station flower garden which had been left intact gave out the hot midsummer scents. There was no dining car on the train; after several hours of travelling the Minister pulled out a bag, and with his sly, gratified smile offered it first to Rose and then to me. It contained grey oatmeal cakes.

‘Bikkies,’ explained the Minister.

When Drawbell received us in his office, he did not spend any time on me, and not much (in which he was dead wrong) on Hector Rose. Drawbell had no illusions about the dangers to Barford. His single purpose was to get the Minister on his side; but his manner did not overdo it. It was firm, at times bantering and only obscurely deferential.

‘I’ve done one thing you could never do,’ he said to the Minister.

The Minister looked mild and surprised.

‘Just before the war,’ Drawbell went on, ‘I saw you on my television set.’

The Minister gave a happy innocent smile, He knew precisely what was going on, and what Drawbell wanted; he was used to flattery in its most bizarre forms, and, incidentally, always enjoyed it.

But Bevill knew exactly what he intended to do that afternoon. Drawbell’s plans for him he sidestepped; he did not want Rose or me; he had come down for a series of private talks with the scientists, and he was determined to have them.

It was not until half past five that Martin came out of the meeting, and then he had Mounteney with him, so that we could not exchange a private word. Old Bevill was still there talking to Rudd, and Mounteney was irritated.

‘This is sheer waste of time,’ he said to me as we began to walk towards their house, as though his disapproval of old Bevill included me. Although at Cambridge we had been somewhere between acquaintances and friends, he did at that moment disapprove of me.

He was tall and very thin, with a long face and cavernous eye sockets. It was a kind of face and body one often sees in those with a gift for conceptual thought; and Mounteney’s gift was a major one. He was a man of intense purity of feeling, a man quite unpadded either physically or mentally; and he had an almost total inability to say a softening word.

‘It would have been more honest if you had all come here in uniform,’ he said to me.

He meant that the government was favouring the forces at the expense of science, in particular at the expense of Barford. It seemed to him obvious — and obvious to anyone whose intelligence was higher than an ape’s — that government policy was wrong. He was holding me responsible for it. All other facts were irrelevant, including the fact that he knew me moderately well. It was shining clear to him that government policy was moronic, and probably ill-disposed. Here was I: the first thing was to tell me so.

I gathered that the Minister had talked to them both privately and in a group. Luke had been eloquent: his opponents had attacked him: Martin had spoken his mind. The discussion had been rambling, outspoken and inconclusive. Mounteney, although in theory above the battle, was not pleased.

‘Luke is quite bright,’ he said in a tone of surprise and injury, as though it was unreasonable to force him to give praise.

He then returned to denouncing me by proxy. Bevill had said what wonderful work they had done at Barford. Actually, said Mounteney, they had done nothing: the old man knew it; they knew it; they knew he knew it.

‘Why will you people say these things?’ asked Mounteney.

Irene was sitting in a deckchair in what had once been the garden behind their house, though by this time it was running wild. The bindweed was strangling the last of the phlox, the last ragged pansies; the paths were overgrown with weed. When Mounteney went in to his children, Martin and I sat beside her, on the parched grass, which was hot against the hand. At last Martin was free to give a grim smile.

‘Well,’ he said to me, ‘you’d better see that Luke’s scheme goes through.’

‘What have you been doing?’ she asked.

Martin was still smiling. ‘Not only for patriotic reasons,’ he went on.

‘What have you been doing?’ She sounded, for the moment, as she might have done if accusing him of some amatory adventure, her voice touched with mock reprobation and a secret pride.

‘Something that may not do us any good,’ he said, and let us hear the story. He had told Bevill, in front of Drawbell and Rudd, that he and the other young scientists were agreed: either they ought to concentrate on Luke’s scheme, or else shut Barford down.

‘If I had to do it, it was no use doing it half-heartedly,’ he said.

‘I’m glad you did it,’ she said, excited by the risk. The teasing air had faded; there was a high flush under her eyes.

‘Wait until we see whether it was worthwhile,’ said Martin.

‘Never mind that,’ she said, and turned to me. ‘Aren’t you glad he did it?’

Before I answered Martin looked at her and said: ‘We may not get our way, you know,’

‘I don’t care.’

‘It would be an odd time to move.’

They were glancing at each other with eyes half challenging, half salacious.

‘Why would it be so odd?’ I asked, but did not need an answer.

‘You can tell Lewis,’ said Martin.

‘I am going to have a child, dear,’ she said.

For the first time since their marriage, I felt nothing but warmth towards her, as I went to her chair and kissed her. Martin’s face was softened with delight. If he had not been my brother I should have envied him, for my marriage had been childless, and there were times, increasing as the years passed, when the deprivation nagged at me. And, buried deep within both Martin and me, there was a strong family sense, so that it was natural for him to say: ‘I’m glad there’ll be another generation.’

As he went indoors to fetch something to drink in celebration, Irene said to me: ‘If it’s a boy we’ll call it after you, Lewis dear. Even though you don’t approve of its mother.’

She added: ‘He is pleased, isn’t he? I did want to do something for him.’

‘It’s very good news,’ I said, as she got up from her chair in the low sunlight, and began to walk about the patch of derelict garden. The evening scents were growing stronger, mint and wormwood mingled in the scorched aromatic tang of the August night. Irene came to a clearing in the long grass, where a group of autumn crocuses shone out, amethyst and solitary, flowers that in my childhood I had heard called ‘naked ladies’. Irene bent and picked one, and then stood erect, as though she were no longer concealing the curve of her breast.

‘When I was a little girl,’ she said, ‘I always thought I should have a brood of children.’

‘Should you like them?’ I asked.

‘Time is going on,’ she said: but, in the smoothing amber light, she looked younger than I had seen her.

After Martin returned, and we sat there in the dipping sun, the three of us were at peace together as we had not been before. Our content was so strong that Martin did not disturb it when he began speculating again about transferring to Luke, and speaking out that afternoon; he did not disturb it in us, least of all in himself.

‘I don’t see what else I could have done,’ he said.

Martin went on with his thoughts. It was going to be a near thing whether Luke got his head: wasn’t that true? So if one could do anything to bring it about, one had to.

‘I should have been more sorry if I hadn’t spoken.’

If the luck went wrong, it meant a dim job for the rest of the war and probably after. If the luck went right, no one could tell — Martin smiled, his eyes glinted, and he said: ‘I’m not sorry that I’ve gone in with Luke.’

We all took it for granted that he was the most prudent of men, always reckoning out the future, not willing to allow himself a rash word, let alone a rash action. Even I assumed that as part of his flesh and bone. In a sense it was true. And yet none of us had made a wilder marriage, and now, over Barford and his career, he was gambling again.

9: View of a True Marriage

From Martin’s I went off to an evening party at Drawbell’s. Mrs Drawbell had set herself to catch old Bevill for a social engagement; he had refused tea or dinner, and insisted on returning to London that night, but he had not been able to elude this last invitation, a ‘little party’ before we caught the train.

Most of the senior Barford staff were already there, and I found my way to a corner next to Walter Luke. From near the window we looked into the centre of the room, where upon the hearthrug Mrs Drawbell, a heavy woman, massive as a monument upon the rug, waited for the Minister.

‘Where is this uncle?’ said Luke.

‘He’ll come,’ I said. The Minister has not been known to break a social engagement.

Luke’s thoughts became canalized once more.

‘Does he believe in Jojo?’ (Luke’s proposal already had a name.)

He corrected himself.

‘I don’t care whether he believes in it or not. The point is, will he do anything useful about it?’

I said that I thought he was well disposed, but would not find it easy to put through.

‘There are times,’ said Luke, ‘when I get sick and tired of you wise old men.’

Wholehearted and surgent, he said: ‘Well, I suppose I’d better mobilize some of the chaps who really know against all you stuffed shirts.’

I was warning him to go carefully (he would still listen to me, even when he was regarding me as a ‘wise old man’) when the Minister entered. With his unobtrusive trip Bevill went towards Mrs Drawbell.

‘I am sorry I haven’t been able to get out of the clutches of these fellows,’ he said, smiling innocently.

‘I am glad you were able to come to my party, Mr Bevill,’ she replied. Her voice was deep, her expression dense, gratified, and confident. She had looked forward to having him there; he had come. And now — she had nothing to say.

The Minister said, what a nice room. She agreed. He said, how refreshing to have a drink after a hot, tiring day. She was glad he liked it. He said, it was hard work, walking round the laboratories, especially hard work if you weren’t a scientist and didn’t understand much. She smiled, heavily, without comment. She had nothing to say to him.

It did not seem to depress her. She had him in her house, the grandson of the last Lord Boscastle but one (his being in the Cabinet had its own virtue, but did not give her the same collector’s joy). To her this visit was a prize which she would hoard.

She kept him to herself, standing together on the rug. It was not until she was forced to greet a new arrival that her eyes were distracted, and the Minister could slip away towards the window. He beckoned to us, so that we could make a circle round him; Luke, me, a couple of young scientists whom I did not know by name, Mary Pearson. He caught sight of Mary Pearson’s husband, and beckoned also to him.

I had had business talks with Pearson before, for he was one of the top men at Barford and was said to be their best electrical engineer. In those talks I had found him too pleased with himself to give more than a minimum reply. He was a man in the early thirties with a cowlick over his forehead and a wide lazy-looking mouth.

As Bevill crooked his finger, Pearson gave a relaxed smile and came unconcernedly into the ring.

‘Now, my friends, we can talk seriously, can’t we?’ said the Minister.

He basked in the company of the young, and felt quite natural with them. But, as often when he was natural, he was also mildly eccentric; with the intellectual young, he felt most completely at ease, and satisfied with himself, in discussing what he called ‘philosophy’. He took it for granted that this was their conception of serious conversation, too; and so the old man, so shrewd and cunning in practice, dug out his relics of idealist speculation, garbled from the philosophers of his youth, F H Bradley and McTaggart, and talked proudly on, forcing the young men to attend — while all they wanted, that night of all nights, was to cut the cackle and hear his intentions about Barford and Luke’s scheme.

‘I don’t know about you chaps’ — the Minister, who had been ambling on for some time, looked out of the window towards the west — ‘but whenever I see a beautiful sunset, I wonder whether there isn’t an Ideal Sunset outside Space and Time.’

His audience were getting impatient. But he thought they were taking a point.

‘Perhaps you’ll say, the Phenomenon is enough. Is the Phenomenon enough? I know it sometimes seems so, to all of us doesn’t it? — when you see a beloved woman and see from her smile that she loves you back. I know it seems enough,’ said Bevill earnestly and cheerfully.

All of a sudden, only half listening, for I had heard the Minister showing off his philosophy before, I saw the flush on Mary Pearson’s face, I saw the smile on Pearson’s as he glanced at her. I had not often seen a man so changed. When I met him, he had filled me with antipathy; it came as a shock to see his face radiant. Somewhere Bevill’s bumbling words had touched the trigger. The conceit had vanished the indifference about whether he pleased: it was just a face lit up by a mutual love. And so was hers. Her skin was flushed down to the neck of her dress, behind her spectacles her eyes were moist with joy.

Anyone watching as I was would have had no doubt: those two must be sharing erotic bliss. You can share erotic bliss with someone and still not be suffused by love as those two were, but the converse does not hold, and no husband and wife could be so melted by each other’s smile without the memory of bliss, and the certainty that it would soon be theirs again. I guessed that their physical happiness was out of the common run. It had been worth listening to the Minister’s philosophizing to see it shine.

I was not the only one who saw it shine, for, a few minutes afterwards, as the Minister was saying his goodbyes before we left for the railway station, Luke and I strolled in the lane outside and he said: ‘Funny what people see in each other.’

‘Is it?’

‘It’s lucky those two think each other wonderful, because I’m damned if anyone else would.’

He added, with a thoughtful, truculent grin: ‘Of course, they might say the same of me and Nora.’

As he walked beside me his whole bearing was jaunty, and many women, at a glance, would have judged him virile. Yet he was sexually a genuinely humble man. He did not believe that women noticed him, it would not have occurred to him to believe it.

‘I envy you, you know!’ he broke out.

‘Whatever for?’

‘You know that I am an innocent sort of chap. Why are you making me talk?’

For once, he had forgotten about the project. Like me, he had been stirred by the Pearsons’ smile. With his usual immoderation, he was bursting to confide. Confide he did, insisting often that I was pumping him.

‘I’ve kept myself out of things when I ought to have rushed in. I thought I couldn’t spare the time from science. It wasn’t ambition, I just felt I had to get on. And I didn’t know what I was missing. So now I’m batting about trying to make up my mind on problems which you must have coped with when you were twenty. I’m frightened of them, and I don’t like being frightened.’

I said that he had not done badly: he had made a happier marriage than most, while mine had been miserable.

‘But you know your way about. So does your brother Martin. Neither of you feel like some little brat with his nose up against the shop window and wondering what he has got to do to get inside.’

Totally immersed, he went on: ‘I can’t bear being left out of things. There are times when I want to see all the places and read all the books and fornicate with all the women. Now you’re certain where you stand about all that, you’ve had your share. What I want to know is, how do I get mine without hurting anyone else?’

I thought, in a way he was right about himself: how young he was. But it was more than calendar youth (at that time he was thirty-one), it was more than a life blinkered and concentrated by his vocation. Perhaps he would never lose his sense of being deprived, of being left out of the party — of being outside in the road, of seeing the lights of houses, homes of voluptuous delight denied to him.

‘I suppose I shall get my share in the long run,’ said Luke. ‘Somehow I must manage it. I’m damned well not going to die feeling I was too frightened to discover what it was all about.’ He was looking towards the establishment, and the energy seemed to be pulsing within him, so that in the softening light his sanguine colour became deeper, even his hair seemed to have more sheen.

‘Wait till I’ve got this scheme to go. There’s a time for everything,’ he said, ‘when we’ve tied this up!’

10: A Night at Pratt’s

Back in Whitehall, the Minister plumped in on Luke’s side. It was gallant for a man whose job was tottering, for it meant opposing those in power. It meant acting against Bevill’s own maxims — if those above had it in for you, never make a nuisance of yourself and never go away. For once in his life he disregarded them.

No one could understand why. With Bevill, everyone looked for some cunning political motive. I believed that, just this once, there was none. Underneath the politics, the old man had a vein of narrow, rigid, aristocratic patriotism. He had been convinced that Luke’s scheme might be good for the country; that may have been a reason why Bevill made enemies in order to give Luke his head.

A minister likely to be out of office next month had, however, not many cards to play. Probably his single effort in self-sacrifice did not count much either way; what was more decisive was Francis Getliffe’s conversation with Hector Rose. I was not present, but within a short time of that conversation, Rose, against his preconceived opinion, against most of his prejudices, changed his mind. He had concluded that the other side’s case, in particular Getliffe’s case, was stronger than his own. I wondered with some shame — for I could not like him — whether in his place I should have been so fair.

So the dispatch boxes went round, Rose lunched with his colleagues at the Athenaeum, the committees sat: on a night early in November, the Minister went off to a meeting. It was not a cabinet, but a sub-committee of ministers; he believed that, one way or the other, this would settle it. I remained in my office, waiting for him to return.

It was half past eight; in the pool of light from the reading lamp, the foolscap in my desk shone with a blue luminescence; I was too restless to work. I went across the passage to the little room where my new personal assistant was sitting. I had told her to go hours before, but she was over-conscientious; she was a young widow called Vera Allen, comely but reserved, too diffident to chat, stiff at being alone in the building with a man.

I heard the Minister scamper up the stairs, with the light trotting steps that sounded so youthful. I returned to my room. He put his head in, without taking off his bowler hat.

‘Still at it,’ he said.

He went on: ‘I think it’s all right, Eliot.’

I exclaimed with relief.

Bevill was flushed, looking curiously boyish in his triumph. He tipped his hat back on his thin grey hair.

‘We mustn’t count our eggs before they’re hatched, but I think it’s in the bag,’ he said.

In jubilation, he asked if I had eaten and took me off to Pratt’s.

He had taken me there before, when he was pleased. He only did it because he had a soft spot for me. For business, for talks with Rose, he went elsewhere; Pratt’s was reserved for friends, it was his fortress, his favourite club.

When he first took me inside, I had thought — it seemed strange — of my mother. She had been brought up in a gamekeeper’s cottage on a Lincolnshire estate; she was proud and snobbish and had great ambitions for me; she was dead years since, she had not seen what happened to me — but just the sight of me with Thomas Bevill, in his most jealously guarded club, eating with men whose names she had read in the papers, would have made her rejoice that her life was not in vain.

Yet if she could have seen me there, she would have been a little puzzled to observe that we were sitting with some discomfort in rooms remarkably like the cottage where she was born. A basement: a living room with a common table and a check cloth: a smoking kitchen with an open hearth: in fact, a landowner’s idea of his own gamekeeper’s quarters. That was the place to which Thomas Bevill went whenever he wanted to be sure of meeting no one but his aristocratic friends.

Looking at him after our meal, as he sat by the kitchen hearth, drinking a glass of port, I thought that unless one had the chance to see him so, one might be quite misled. People called him unassuming, unsnobbish, realistic, gentle. Unassuming: yes, that was genuine. Unsnobbish, realistic; that was genuine too; unlike his cousin, Lord Boscastle, he did not take refuge, as society evened itself out, in a fantastic and comic snobbery; yet in secret, he did take refuge with his friends here, in a cave-of-the-past, in a feeling, blended of fear, foresight and contempt, that he could preserve bits of his past and make them last his time. Gentle, a bit of an old woman; that was not genuine in the slightest; he was kind to his friends, but the deeper you dug into him the tougher and more impervious he became.

‘Well, if they’re going to sack me, Eliot,’ he said, ‘I’ve left them a nice kettle of fish.’ He was simmering in his triumph over Barford. He ordered more glasses of port.

‘One of these days,’ he said, ‘those chaps will blow us all up, and that will be the end of the story.’

The firelight winked in his glass; he held it up to admire the effect, brought it down carefully and looked into it from above.

‘It’s funny about those chaps,’ he reflected. ‘I used to think scientists were supermen. But they’re not supermen, are they? Some of them are brilliant, I grant you that. But between you and me, Eliot, a good many of them are like garage hands. Those are the chaps who are going to blow us all up.’

I said, for I was not speaking like a subordinate, that a good many of them had more imagination than his colleagues.

Bevill agreed, with cheerful indifference.

‘Our fellows can’t make much difference to the world, and those chaps can. Do you think it will be a better world, when they’ve finished with it?

I thought it might. Not for him, probably not for me and my kind: but for ninety per cent of the human race. ‘I don’t trust them,’ said Thomas Bevil. Then he said: ‘By the by, I like the look of your brother, Eliot.’

It was partly his good manners, having caught himself in a sweeping statement. But he said it as though he meant it.

‘He put the cat among the pigeons, you know, that afternoon down there. It’s just as well he did, or Master Drawbell mightn’t have seen the red light in time, and if they’d all gone on crabbing Luke I couldn’t have saved the situation.’

He began laughing, his curious, internal, happy laugh, as though he were smothering a dirty joke.

‘Those Drawbells! Between them they’d do anything to get a K, wouldn’t they?’

He meant a knighthood. He was constantly amused at the manoeuvres men engaged in to win titles, and no one understood them better.

‘Never mind, Eliot,’ he said. ‘We saved the situation, and now it’s up to those chaps not to let us down.’

It was his own uniquely flat expression of delight: but his face was rosy, he did not look like a man of seventy-three, he was revelling in his victory, the hot room, the mildly drunken night.

‘If this country gets a superbomb,’ he said cheerfully, ‘no one will remember me.’

He swung his legs under his chair.

‘It’s funny about the bomb,’ he said. ‘If we manage to get it, what do we do with it then?’

This was not the first time that I heard the question: once or twice recently people at Barford had raised it. It was too far away for the scientists to speculate much, even the controversialists like Mounteney, but several of them agreed that we should simply notify the enemy that we possessed the bomb, and give some evidence: that would be enough to end the war. I repeated this view to Bevill.

‘I wonder,’ he said.

‘I wonder,’ he repeated. ‘Has there ever been a weapon that someone did not want to let off?’

I said, though the issue seemed remote, that this was different in kind. We had both seen the current estimate, that one fission bomb would kill three hundred thousand people at a go.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Bevill. ‘Think of what we’re trying to do with bombing. We’re trying to kill men, women, and children. It’s worse than anything Genghis Khan ever did.’

He said it without relish, without blame, with neutrality.

Soon the room grew warmer, the port went round again, as men came in from a late night meeting. A couple of them were ministers, and Bevill looked towards them with a politician’s insatiable hope. Had they any news for him? He could not help hoping. He was old, he had made such reputation as he could, if he stayed in office he would not add a syllable to it; he knew how irretrievably he was out of favour, and he did not expect to last three months; yet still, on that happy night, he wondered if he might not hear of a reprieve, if he might not hear that he was being kept on, perhaps in an obscurer post.

I saw that his flicker of hope did not last long. From their manner he knew they had nothing to tell him. It did not weigh him down, he was pleased with himself that night. And they brought other news: the invasion fleet was safely out of Gibraltar, and all looked well for the North African landing.

A little later, Bevill and I went out into St James’s Street. He twirled his umbrella, a slight little figure in a bowler hat, under the full moon; an old man, slightly drunk, expecting the sack, and full of well-being. He said to me with an extra sweep of his umbrella: ‘Isn’t it nice to be winning?’

I was not sure whether he was talking about Barford, or the war.

He repeated it, resoundingly, to the empty street: ‘Isn’t it nice to be winning?’

11: Two Kinds of Danger

After the Minister’s night of victory, there was for months nothing I could do for Luke and Martin. I had to set myself to wait, picking up any rumour from Barford, any straw in the wind. Because I could do nothing, the suspense nagged at me more.

That was the reason I started into anxiety, the instant Hanna Puchwein inquired about Martin’s fate.

I was having dinner with the Puchweins at the Connaught, at the farewell party they gave me before Kurt Puchwein left for Chicago. They were standing me a lavish treat; as I sat by Hanna’s side, with her husband opposite, in the corner near the door, lights flashed on glass and sank cosily into the rosewood, and I was reflecting, if you were used to English fellow travellers, how incongruous Hanna Puchwein seemed. There was nothing of the self-abnegation of the English radical about her, none of the attempts, common among other acquaintances of mine, to imitate the manners of the working class. Hanna’s glossy head gleamed trimly in our corner, and she was the best-groomed woman in the room. She was in her early thirties. She had a small head, narrowing catlike to a pointed chin. Her forehead was white, bland, unlined; but her eyes flashed as she talked, and she had an air that was, I thought, at the same time cultivated and farouche.

Meanwhile Kurt was presenting me with gifts: he was a man who found it delectable to give, though not to receive. He liked doing good turns and letting one know it; but that had always seemed to me more amiable than not liking to do good turns at all. He gave me wine. He gave me his opinion that, out of Luke’s project, he and Martin would ‘do themselves good in the long run’.

Yet, although he was expending himself to make me cheerful, his own mood was overcast. He and Hanna spoke little to each other; and it occurred to me that probably in an unexacting friendship, such as he felt for me, one saw the best of him. In a closer relation, he could be violent, spoiled, bad tempered.

That night he went to bed early, leaving me and Hanna together, on the excuse that he had some last letters to write. He spun out his goodbye to me, pressing my hand.

‘It may be a long time before we meet again, my friend,’ he said. He was flying the Atlantic within forty-eight hours. I looked at him — his great prow of a nose, his mouth pinched in, as though with press-studs, that night.

‘Ah, well,’ he said. ‘We shall meet once again in the world.’

As soon as he had gone, I spoke to Hanna. Once or twice before I had talked to her intimately, as I had never done with Kurt. I asked, outright: ‘Why is Kurt so anxious to go to America?’

He could have stayed at Barford. Apart from Luke’s project, some others, including Rudd’s, had been left in being. Nothing official ever got closed down flat, old Bevill used to say.

Hanna stared at me, first with a blank, washed, open look (her temper was as formidable as his), then with an expression I could not read.

‘Why ask me?’ she said. Then quickly: ‘Why didn’t you persuade your brother to go also?’

It was then I started. She went on: ‘Wouldn’t it have been better for him?’

I said, at once hypersensitive, on the defensive: ‘It depends whether Luke’s scheme comes off — but a good many of them believe in it. You heard what Kurt said.’

Hanna said: ‘Oh that! You’re a most singleminded man.’

Her smile had an edge.

‘I didn’t mean that at all,’ she said.

‘What did you mean?’

‘If he went to America,’ she said, ‘he might be able to escape from that woman.’

‘I don’t know whether he wants to escape,’ I said.

‘I know that he ought to,’ said Hanna.

She reminded me that geographical distance, like time, helped one to recover from unhappy love. Three thousand miles could be as good as the passage of six months. Hanna’s eyes were flashing with impatience, in which there was, however, a trace of the pleasure with which a man and a woman, not attached but not totally unaware of each other, spread out before them the platitudes and generalizations of love.

I said that I hoped the child might heal their marriage.

‘Have you never known women have a child and leave their husbands flat?’

She went on: ‘With women like her, children break marriages more often than they save them.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘if she did leave him, you wouldn’t break your heart.’

‘Unless he’s got free of her first,’ she said, ‘he might break his.’

I was frowning, and she said: ‘I suppose you know that he’s been passionately in love with her? And may be still?’

‘I think I did know that,’ I said.

‘She is quite useless to him,’ she said. ‘If he isn’t lucky and doesn’t get away, she will destroy a great part of his life.’

I was thinking: when I worried about the danger of Martin’s marriage, it had been for cruder reasons than these, it had been because Irene might do him ‘practical’ harm in terms of money and worldly standing and jobs. I had almost deliberately shut my eyes to what he felt for her: and it was left for Hanna, herself someone whom I had always thought a selfish woman, to show the consideration, the imaginative sympathy, in which I had failed.

It was partly that our loves are entirely serious only to ourselves; years of my own life had been corroded by a passion more wretched than Martin’s, and yet, as a spectator of his, I felt as my friends used to feel about mine. We would ‘get over it’, it was irritating to watch a man dulled by his own infatuation, it seemed, certainly not tragic, scarcely even pathetic, almost his own fault. In fact, all loves but one’s own have an element of the tiresome: and from the way I behaved about Martin’s until that evening when Hanna forced me to face it, I came to think that was even more true of a brother’s unhappy love than of a friend’s.

‘She gives him nothing he couldn’t get from any woman he picked up,’ she said. ‘And in self-defence he has learned to give nothing back.’

‘I think he can bear it,’ I said.

‘Of course he can bear it. But sometimes it is a greater danger to bear it than not to bear it.’

She went on: ‘One can stand so much that one gets frightened of anything better. Isn’t that true of you?’

‘There’s something in that,’ I said.

‘It isn’t noble,’ Hanna said, ‘It is just that one has become too frightened to choose, and then one goes on standing it. Well, I want to see Martin stop suffering patiently. I want to see him take himself in hand and make his choice.’

As I listened to her, speaking with the bite that sounded at the same time intimate and cross, I felt a touch of concern — for her. It was disturbing to hear her talk so intently of another — not through tenderness for Martin, though she had a little, not even because she was putting me off from talking of her husband, though that was also true. It was disturbing because she was really talking of herself. She was behaving like Martin that night when he and I walked towards his empty house; she was unable to say outright that she too was coming near a choice. About her there clung the desperation, the fragility, of a woman who still looks young but no longer feels it to herself — or rather who, still feeling young, becomes self-conscious that others are marking off the years — and who has become obsessed that she has only one choice to make, one, no more, before she is old.

12: A Routine Interview

Those in the secret did not talk easily with each other, and as the months passed and Luke’s ‘pile’ went up, it was hard to judge how many believed in him. In committee heads were shaken, not much was said, yet feelings ran high. Luke was one of those figures who have the knack, often surprising to themselves, of stirring up controversy; people who did not know him, who had no conception of his surgent, exuberant, often simple-hearted character, grew excited about him, as someone who would benefit the country or as a scandalous trifler with public money, almost as a crook.

Of his supporters, the most highly placed of all was lost in the April of 1943, when Bevill was at last told that his job was wanted for another.

Now that his suspense had ended, I was astonished by the old man’s resilience. He moved his papers from Whitehall the same day. Briskly he said goodbye to his staff and made a speech with a remarkable, indeed an excessive, lack of sentimentality. He was not thinking of his years in the old office; he was thinking of nothing but the future. Without any procrastination at all he refused a peerage. If he accepted it, he was accepting the fact that he was out of politics for good: at the age of seventy-four, he was, with the occupational hope of politicians, as difficult to kill as the hope of a consumptive, reckoning his chances of getting back again.

As soon as he left, my own personal influence diminished; I could intervene no more than other civil servants of my rank (in his last month of office, Bevill had got me promoted again, which Rose thought excessive). All I did had to go through Rose, and we were more than ever uneasy with each other.

Nevertheless, Rose intended not to waste my inside knowledge of Barford. He merely requested as a favour that I should report to him any ‘point of interest’ I picked up on my visits there.

Each of us was being punctilious. When I next went down to Barford, a month or two after Bevill’s dismissal, for the christening of Martin’s son, I set out to obey Rose to the letter. I held back one incident only and I did so because neither of us would have thought it worth our while.

It was a morning late in May, the sky bright and pale, with an east wind that took the scent out of the wisteria, when I went into the hangar with Martin, in order to see the pile going up before we went to church. The tarpaulins in the roof, still not repaired, flapped in the wind. In the hangar it was cold; I had not known it anything else; but, instead of the dripping floor of winter, it had suddenly gone dusty, and grit blew about in the spring air. Labourers, wearing jerseys, were working in the bleak half light; they were laying bricks for an outer wall, while farther away one could see a kind of box, about eight feet each way; outside was another wall, the first part of the concrete case. Farther down still, Luke’s experimental structure lay deserted. Between stood some tables, one or two screened off, stacked with radio valves and circuits; on others, as though abandoned, were strewn metal tubing and tea cups. There was no sign of busyness. Labourers padded on, muttering among themselves. The foreman had his hand on the concrete shield, and was listening to Luke.

The paradox was that, as they worked against time, as they studied the German intelligence reports or heard gossip from America (news had come through that the Chicago pile had already run, in the previous December), Luke had nothing like enough to do.

Once he had had his idea, there was no more room for flair or scientific imagination for months, perhaps years to come: the rest was a matter of getting the machine built. It was a matter of organization, extreme attention to detail, knowing when a contractor could not work faster and when he could be pressed. It was a matter of organization that differed only in scale and in what depended on it, but not at all in kind, from being the clerk of works to some new public baths. Any competent man could do it, and Martin was there to do it as efficiently as Luke and with less fuss. Luke, who was as lavish with praise as abuse, admitted this. But he could not keep his hands off. Engineers, going as fast as men could within the human limits, heard his swearwords over the telephone. They did no great harm. It meant an expense of temper. It meant that, for the most critical months of Luke’s working life, he still had nothing to do.

When he came across to speak to me, I noticed that the colour of his face had gone more sallow and that, although the skin under his eyes was fresh and full, without the roughness of true anxiety, it had taken on a bruised, a faint purple tint. He was restless on the balls of his feet. He did not offer to come to church. When he left us, I asked Martin what Luke was going off to do. Martin gave an amused, half-indulgent smile.

‘He’s going to play the piano,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Just now,’ said Martin, ‘he plays the piano all day. Five or six hours a day, at least, except when he’s having a row.’

‘Does he play well?’

‘Oh, no,’ Martin replied. ‘He never learned after he was ten. He plays his old Associated Board pieces.’

In church, with a beam of early afternoon sun falling across the font, a beam in which the motes spun and jiggled and in which Martin’s hair was turned to silver gilt, I thought he was standing the strain better than Luke. He smiled at the child with a love more open than he ever showed for his wife.

Just for a moment, though, Martin’s smile altered. The parson and Irene and the baby had already left the church, and Martin and I were following, when an old woman entered with a busy air. Martin asked what she was doing, and she replied, full of well-being: ‘There’s a corpse coming in here soon, sir, and I just wanted to see that everything was nice for him.’

Martin smiled at me, and we followed the others into the sunlight. He did not need to explain; we both had a superstitious sense. He smiled at the thought of the old woman, and did not like it.

It was in the afternoon that I attended to the piece of business which seemed just routine, not interesting enough to discuss with Rose. Drawbell had invited me to what they called an ‘allocation meeting’ at which they interviewed some of that year’s intake of young men. His motive was to demonstrate how few and poor they were, but worn-out argument could get no further. He sat behind a table with his heads of sections on each side; Rudd was there, Mounteney, a couple of Jewish refugees and Martin, deputizing for Luke. Increasingly Luke left the chores to Martin. I could understand it. I could remember being underworked and overanxious, doing so little that one needed to do less.

As the interviews went on, the only flicker of interest for me was that one of the young men came from the same town as Martin and myself and had attended the same grammar school. His family had lived not far from ours in the red-brick streets, and Martin could recall him as a small boy. His name, which was Eric Sawbridge, had a flat, comfortable Midland note.

As he answered questions, he spoke with the faintly aggressive, reproving tone that one often heard at interviews. He was twenty-four, large, heavy, mature, with a single thick line across his forehead; he was a lighter blond than Martin, and might have been a Scandinavian sailor. He had got his First three years before, and had gone on to research. His answers sounded competent, not over-gracious; Martin made a reference to school-days and Sawbridge’s expression was, for a second, less suspicious. Then Drawbell took the general questioning out of Martin’s hands.

‘Have you any outside interests?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Did you belong to any societies at the university?’

‘One or two.’ He mentioned a film society in wartime Oxford.

‘Do you play any games?’

‘I prefer the cycle.’

‘Do you read anything?’

‘I haven’t had much time.’

The scientists smiled. These non-technical questions and answers were perfunctory on both sides of the table. Anything outside science was a frippery. That was all. As soon as Sawbridge went out of the room, he was being competed for. Perhaps he was the ablest on view: but Rudd wanted him because he was English, after a Pole, two German Jews, an Irishman. An argument blew up, Rudd suddenly violent. Rudd wanted him: Mounteney wanted him: but Martin got him.

It was a piece of domestic routine, and I felt I could have spent the three hours better. I should have been astonished to know that, two years later, I was forcing my memory to recall that interview with Sawbridge. When it actually happened, I wrote it off. On the other hand, I could not dismiss the conversation I had with Mounteney and Martin late that night.

13: Beside the Smooth Water

After the interviews, Mounteney had come away intransigent. He was irritated because he had lost over Sawbridge, and could not understand just where Martin had been more adroit. He also could not understand why Martin, like himself an unbeliever, had allowed his son to be baptized.

‘Rain making!’ said Mounteney. He went on denouncing Martin: if traditions led to decent men telling lies (‘what else have you been doing except tell lies?’) then they made us all mentally corrupt.

His affection for Martin did not soften Mounteney’s remarks, nor, when we returned to the house, did his wife’s gaze, at once cocky and longing for a transformation, as though she expected him to give up controversy and say that he had come home in search of her. In fact, he and Martin and I drove in by ourselves to Stratford, where, since there was no room for me in Martin’s house, I was staying the night. There all of a sudden Mounteney became gentler.

The three of us had had dinner, and walked down past the theatre to the river’s edge. There was little light in the sky, and over towards Clopton Bridge the dim shapes of swans moved upon the dark water. Under the willows, the river smell brought back a night, not here, but in Cambridge: I had been thinking of Cambridge all through dinner, after Martin had mentioned a friend of mine who had been killed that spring.

On our way past the dark theatre, I heard Mounteney whisper to Martin: to my astonishment he seemed to be asking what was the matter with me. At any rate, as we stood by the river, he tried, with a curious brusque delicacy, to distract me: that was how the conversation began.

So awkwardly that he did not sound kind, Mounteney asked me if I were satisfied with the way I had spent my life — and at once started off saying that recently he had been examining his own. What had made him a scientist? How would he justify it? Ought his son and Martin’s to be scientists, too?

Soon we were talking intimately. Science, said Mounteney, had been the one permanent source of happiness in his life; and really the happiness was a private, if you like a selfish, one. It was just the happiness he deprived from seeing how nature worked; it would not have lost its strength if nothing he had done added sixpence to practical human betterment. Martin agreed. That was the obscure link between them, who seemed as different as men could be. Deep down, they were contemplatives, utterly unlike Luke, who was as fine a scientist as Mounteney and right out of Martin’s reach. For Luke, contemplation was a means, not a joy in itself; his happiness was to ‘make Mother Nature sit up and beg’. He wanted power over nature so that human beings had a better time.

Both Mounteney and Martin wished that they shared Luke’s pleasure. For by this time, their own was beginning to seem too private, not enough justification for a life. Mounteney would have liked to say, as he might have done in less austere times, that science was good in itself; he felt it so; but in the long run he had to fall back on the justification for himself and other scientists, that their work and science in general did practical good to human lives.

‘I suppose it has done more practical good than harm to human lives?’ I said.

Mounteney’s dialectic was not scathing that night. Everyone asked these questions in wartime, he said, but whatever the appearance there was no doubt about the answer. It was true that science was responsible for killing a certain number in war — Mounteney broke off and apologized: ‘I am sorry to bring this up.’

The friend we had talked of, Roy Calvert, had been killed flying.

‘Go on,’ I said.

We got the numbers out of proportion, he said. Science killed a certain number: it kept alive a much larger number, something of a quite different order. Taking into account war danger, now and in the future, this child of Martin’s had an actuarial expectation of life of at least sixty-five years. In the eighteenth century, before organized science got going, it would have been about twenty-five. That was the major practical effect of science.

‘It’s such a big thing,’ said Mounteney, ‘that it makes minor grumbles insignificant. It will go on whatever happens.’

It was then that I mentioned the fission bomb.

‘If you people bring that off—’

‘I’ve done nothing useful towards it,’ said Mounteney counter-suggestibly.

‘If someone possesses the bomb,’ I said, ‘mightn’t that make a difference?

There was a pause.

‘It could,’ said Mounteney.

‘Yes, it could,’ said Martin, looking up from the water.

The river-smell was astringent in the darkened air. Somewhere down the stream, a swan unfolded its wings and flapped noisily for a moment before settling again and sailing away.

‘If those bombs were used in war,’ said Mounteney, ‘they might be as lethal as an epidemic.’ He added: ‘But that won’t happen.’

‘It mustn’t happen,’ said Martin.

I told them how, in my conversation with old Bevill at Pratt’s, he could not think it incredible that the bomb would be used.

‘What else do you expect,’ said Mounteney, ‘of a broken-down reactionary politician?’

‘He wasn’t approving,’ I said. ‘He was just saying what might happen.’

‘Do you believe it could?’

I was thinking of what the Third Reich had done, and said so.

‘That’s why we’re fighting them,’ said Mounteney. Mounteney had brought some buns for his family. Martin begged one and scattered crumbs on the water, so that swans sailed towards him out of the dark, from the bridge, from down the Avon where it was too dark to make out the church; they moved with a lapping sound, the bow waves catching glimmers of light like scratches on a mirror.

Did I believe it would be used?

‘Do you believe it?’ Mounteney returned to the question.

‘Assuming that it’s our side which gets it—’

‘Of course,’ said Mounteney.

‘If anyone gets it,’ said Martin, touching wood. It was his turn to ask me: ‘You don’t believe that we could use it?’

I took some time to answer.

‘I find it almost incredible,’ I said.

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Mounteney. ‘Particularly as you’re a pessimistic man.’

‘I think it is incredible,’ said Martin.

His voice was harsh. He was more moved than Mounteney who, despite his cantankerousness, was a gentle man, to whom any kind of cruelty seemed like a visitation from another planet. Mounteney had never had to struggle with a sadic strain in his own nature. It is men who have had to struggle so who hate cruelty most. Suddenly, listening to the revulsion in Martin’s voice, I knew he was one of them.

Sternly, he went on speaking: ‘But we ought to take a few sensible steps, just to make sure. I suppose they can be taught to realize what dropping one bomb means.’

We all knew the estimates of deaths the bomb would cause: we knew also the manner of those deaths.

‘We can teach them,’ said Mounteney. ‘We’d better see that the scientists are ready to assert themselves in case there is any whisper of nonsense.’

I said: ‘Why scientists specially?’

Mounteney answered: ‘Because no one could do it if they could imagine the consequences. The scientists can imagine the consequences.’ He gave an ironic smile, unfamiliar on him. ‘After all, scientists are no worse than other men.’

Martin smiled. It all seemed far in the future, the shadow of horror passed away.

Suddenly Martin exclaimed. ‘It’s a mistake to be absent-minded,’ he said. We asked him what the matter was.

The swan was stretching his neck, asking for more. ‘I’ve just given him a piece from the palm of my hand,’ Martin remarked. ‘I’m glad he left my fingers on.’

He threw the last piece of bun into the water, then stood up.

‘It wouldn’t do any harm,’ he said, returning to the discussion, but only out of his habit of precaution, ‘to drop a word in high quarters if we get a chance.’

14: Unexpected Encouragement

I decided to report that conversation about the use of the bomb to Hector Rose. To him it seemed almost unbelievably academic.

‘I fancy our masters will cross that bridge when they come to it,’ he said. He was as impatient as he ever allowed himself to be. Scientists talked too much; here they were, speculating about ethical dilemmas which might never arise, as though they were back in their student days. ‘But I’m grateful to you for keeping me in the picture, my dear Eliot, many, many thanks,’

To Rose, Barford did not present any problems for decision, either then or for months to come. The pile was going up, the first instalment of heavy water had arrived; so far, so good. He was immune to the excitement that had infected me, and, as 1943 went on, I had nothing new to tell him. On my visits, I could see no change. Luke paid a visit to Canada, but otherwise was still fretting his nerves away, unoccupied, playing his piano. Martin spent much time on the hangar floor, watching the builders putting up the frame inch by inch, correct to a thousandth, making a progress perceptible to them and himself, but not to me.

By this time he was showing the strain though in a fashion opposite to Luke’s. Instead of blowing and cursing, Martin sank into a kind of frozen quietness. He was more capable of pretending than Luke, and was still reasonable company. He and Irene seemed friendly when I saw them together; she was a better mother than many people were willing to believe, and the scandal about her had died down. At Barford her name was mentioned without malicious gossip, and in consequence with disappointment, lack of tone and interest.

Often, alone with Martin, I wondered how much in those months of waiting and semi-idleness, he harassed himself about her. How right was Hanna? Was he living with that suspense, as well as the public one?

Even the public one he kept clamped down, but occasionally he was remote, as though thinking of nothing but the day when they would test the pile.

I was beginning to feel confident for him, even confident enough to ask Pearson’s opinion, the most certain of all to be discouraging, when he called at my flat one evening that autumn.

He was just leaving for Los Alamos, and had come to fetch some papers. I had not been into the office that day, because of an attack of lumbago: Pearson had no more taste for conversation than usual, and intended to take the documents and depart without the unnecessary intermediate stage of sitting down. But, as he was glancing the papers over, the sirens blew, and we heard gunfire in the distance: it sounded like the start of one of the short, sharp air raids that were becoming common that November.

‘I think you’d better stay a little while,’ I said.

‘I might as well,’ said Pearson.

He sat down, without having taken off his mackintosh. He sat as though he were quite comfortable; he did not speak until we heard the crunch of bombs, probably some way the other side of the river. Pearson looked at me through glasses which magnified his calm eyes.

‘How old is this house?’

That summer I had moved from the Dolphin block into a square close by. As I told Pearson, the houses must be about a hundred years old, run up when Pimlico was a new residential district, now left with the stucco peeling off the porticos.

‘A bit too old to stand up well,’ said Pearson.

We heard the whine of a bomb, then the jar and rumble. The light bulbs swung, and flecks of plaster fell on to the carpet.

‘About a quarter of a mile away,’ said Pearson, after a second’s consideration. He picked a spicule of plaster off his lapel.

I said I often wish that I had not moved from the steel and concrete of Dolphin Square.

Twice we heard the whine of bombs.

‘What floor was yours?’ asked Pearson, with impassive interest.

‘The fourth.’

‘The factor of safety was about eight times what you’ve got here.’ I was frightened, as I was whenever bombs fell; I could not get used to it. I disliked being frightened in the presence of Pearson, who happened to be brave.

Four bombs: one, Pearson guessed, nearer than a quarter of a mile: then the gunfire slackened overhead and we could hear it tailing away down the estuary.

‘If I were you,’ he remarked, ‘and they began to drop them near this house, I should get a bit nervous,’

Soon he got up.

‘That’s all for tonight,’ he said.

But even Pearson felt a touch of the elation which came to one after an air raid. He was not quite unaffected; because bombs had been dropping near us, he was a little warmer to me. When I suggested that I should walk part of the way to Victoria, he said, more considerately than I had heard him speak: ‘Of course, if you feel up to it.’

In the square the night was misty, but illuminated across the river by a pillar of fire, rose and lilac round an inner tongue of gold, peacefully beautiful. It seemed to be near Nine Elms, but might have been a little farther off, perhaps at Battersea.

‘It’s silly, trying to knock towns out by high explosive,’ said Pearson, as we turned our backs to the blaze and walked towards Belgrave Road. ‘It just can’t be done,’ he said.

I had never known him so communicative, and I took advantage of it.

‘What about the other bomb?’

He turned his face towards me, and in the light of another, smaller fire, I saw his eyes, lazy, half suspicious.

‘What about it?’ he said.

‘What’s going to happen?’

After a pause, he did not mind answering:

‘We’re going to get it.’

‘Who is?’

‘Who do you think?’ He meant, of course, the American party he was working in. As with most of the scientists, nationalism in its restricted sense touched him very little — when he said ‘we’, he thought of nothing but his own group.

‘You’re sure?’ I asked, but he was always sure.

‘It stands to reason.’

Then I asked, expecting a flat answer: ‘So you don’t think anything will come of Luke’s affair?’ I was prepared for the flat answer; what I actually heard sounded too good to be true.

‘I shouldn’t like to go as far as that,’ he replied, looking in front of him indifferently.

‘You believe it might work?’ I said.

‘When he started talking about it, I thought he’d do himself a bit of no good.’ He gave a contented, contemptuous grin. ‘But it doesn’t seem to have been all hot air.’

‘You really think they’ll pull it off?’

‘I’m not a prophet.’

I asked him again.

‘Oh, well,’ said Pearson, ‘in time Master Luke might show a bit of return for his money. Though’ — he gave the same contemptuous grin again — ‘he won’t do it as soon as he thinks he will.’

I did not receive any greater assurance until the spring, when, in March, I received a note from Luke himself. It said:

The balloon is due to go up on the 22nd. The machine ought to work some time that afternoon, though I can’t tell you correct to the nearest hour. We want you to come and see the exhibition.

I had no doubt that Martin did not know of the letter; it would have seemed to him tempting fate. For myself, I felt the same kind of superstition, even a misgiving about going down to watch. If I were not there, all would happen according to plan, Luke triumph, Martin get some fame. If I sat by and watched — yet, of course, I should have to go.

15: Sister-in-Law

The twenty-second was only a week away when, one evening just as I was leaving the office, Martin rang me up. He was at Barford; he sounded elaborate, round-about, as though he had something to ask.

‘I suppose you don’t happen to be free tonight?’

But I could not help interrupting: ‘Nothing wrong with the pile?’

(Although, over the telephone, I used a code word.)

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Everything fixed for next week?’

‘I hope so.’

For the first time, I was letting myself wonder what Martin would do with his success.

‘Shall you be in your flat tonight?’ He had come round to his question.

‘I could be,’ I said.

‘I wish you’d look after Irene a bit, if she comes in.’

‘Why should she?’

‘I think she will.’ He went on: ‘She’s in rather a state.’

I said I would do anything I could. I asked: ‘Is it serious?’

‘I’d rather you formed your own opinion.’

I had heard little emotion in his voice — maybe he was past it, I thought. But he apologized for inflicting this on me, and he was relieved to have someone to look after her.

Later that night, I was reading in my sitting-room when the bell rang. I went to open the door, and out of the darkness, into the blue-lit hall, came Irene.

‘I’m not popular, am I?’ she said, but the laugh was put on.

Without speaking, I led her in.

‘This room makes an enemy of me,’ she said, still trying to brazen it out. Then she said, not with her childish make-believe but without any pretence: ‘I couldn’t come to anyone but you. Martin knows about it.’

For a few moments I thought she had left him; as she went on speaking I realized it was not so simple. First she asked, as though the prosaic question drove out all others: ‘Have you got a telephone?’

She looked round the room, her pupils dilated, her eyes taking in nothing but the telephone she could not see.

‘Yes,’ I said, trying to soothe her.

It stood in the passage.

‘Can I use it?’

I said, of course.

Immediately, her eyes still blind, she went out, leaving the door open. I heard her dial, slowly because in the wartime glimmer she could hardly make out the figures. Then her voice: ‘Mrs Whelan, it’s me again. Is Mr Hankins back yet?’

A mutter from the instrument.

‘Not yet?’ Irene’s voice was high.

Another mutter.

‘Listen,’ said Irene, ‘I’ve got a telephone number where he can get me now.’

I heard her strike a match and give the Victoria number on my telephone.

Another mutter.

‘I’ll be here a couple of hours at least,’ replied Irene into the telephone. ‘Even if he’s late, tell him I’ll be here till one.

She came back into my room.

‘Is that all right?’ she asked, her eyes brighter now, focused on me.

I said yes.

‘It’s for him,’ she said. ‘It’s not for me. He wants to speak to me urgently, and there’s nowhere else I can safely wait.’

She stared at me.

‘I think he wants me back.’

I tried to steady her: ‘What can you tell him?’

‘What can I tell him?’ she cried, and added, half crying, half hysterical: ‘Can I tell him I’m defeated?’

The phrase sounded strange, I was mystified: and yet it was at this point I knew that she was not leaving Martin out of hand.

On the other hand, I knew also that she was reading in Hankins’ intentions just what she wanted to read. Did he truly want her back? Above all, she would like to believe that.

Perhaps it was commonplace. Did she, like so many other unfaithful wives, want the supreme satisfaction of coming to the crisis and then staying with her husband and turning her lover down?

For all her faults, I did not think she was as commonplace as that. Looking at her, as she sat on my sofa, breathing shortly and shallowly as she listened for the telephone, I did not feel that she was just enjoying the game of love. She was febrile: that proved nothing, she could have been febrile in a flirtation. Her heart was pounding with emotion; I had seen other women so, taking a last fervent goodbye of a lover, on their way back to the marriage bed. But she was also genuinely, wildly unhappy, unhappy because her life was being driven by forces she could not govern or even understand, and unhappy also for the most primal of reasons, because the telephone did not ring and she could not hear his voice.

I tried to comfort her. I spoke of the time, ten years before, when I knew Hankins. It was strange that he, I was thinking, should have been her grand passion, her infatuation, her romantic love — people gave it different names, according to how they judged her. Why should he be the one to get under the skin of this fickle, reckless woman?

No, that did not soothe her. I made a better shot when I talked of her and Martin. I assumed there was something left for both of them, which was what she wanted to hear. We talked of the child, which she fiercely loved.

I recalled the reason she had given, at her breakfast table, for marrying him. ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘why did he marry you?’

‘Oh, that’s simple,’ said Irene, ‘he just liked the look of me.’

For once that night she spoke with zest, something like triumph. Soon her anxiety came back. She asked: Should we hear the telephone bell through the wall? Several times she started up, thinking it was beginning to ring. Twice it did ring, and twice she went to the receiver. One call was for me, one a wrong number. The minutes passed, the half-hours. Midnight came, one o’clock. She had ceased trying to keep up any conversation long since.

It was not in me to condemn her. I scarcely thought of her as my brother’s wife. Faced with the sight of her nervous expectant face, pinched to the point where anxiety is turning into the dread of deprivation, I felt for her just the animal comradeship of those who have been driven to wait for news by telephone, to wait in fear of the post because there may not be a letter, to walk the streets at night waiting for a bedroom light to go out before they can go to sleep. To have lived, even for a time, helpless in the deep undertow of passionate love — at moments one thought that one must come home to it, even if it was a dreadful home, and anyone moving to that same home, as Irene was, seemed at such moments a sister among the others, among all the untroubled strangers going to their neater homes.

At half past two I persuaded her to go to bed. The next morning there was still no message: she wanted to ring up again, but some relic of pride, perhaps my presence and what she had said to me, prevented her. She put on her smart, brazen air to keep her courage up, and with a quip about having spent the night alone with me in my flat, took a taxi to Paddington and the next train back to Barford, waving with spirit till she was out of sight up Lupus Street.

Neither that morning, nor the previous night, had I wished, as I had often wished in the past, that Martin was rid of her.

16: Points on a Graph

Most people I met, even on the technical committees, were still ignorant about the whole uranium project. But some could not resist letting one know that they were in the secret too. In the lavatory of the Athenaeum a bald bland head turned to me from the adjacent stall.

‘March 22nd,’ came the whisper and a finger rose to the lips.

On the evening of the twenty-first, just as I was leaving to catch the last train to Barford, Hector Rose gave his ceremonious knock and came into my office.

‘Very best wishes, Eliot,’ he said. He was awkward; he was for once excited, and tried to hide it.

‘This may be a mildly historic occasion,’ he said. ‘We may all qualify for a footnote to history, which would be somewhat peculiar, don’t you think?’

Next morning, sitting opposite to Mrs Drawbell at the breakfast table, I thought there was one person at least immune from the excitement. Drawbell had left for the laboratory, so full of animation that he let the diablerie show through: ‘If I were giving honours, Eliot, I shouldn’t give them to the prima donnas — no, just to the people who do the good, hard, slogging work.’ He gave his melon-lipped grin; he was thinking of his own rewards to come; more than ever, he felt the resentment of a middle man for those who make his fortune. When he went out, the psychological temperature fell.

Mrs Drawbell watched me, heavy and confident in her silence. She said: ‘I hope you are enjoying your kipper,’ and returned to impassivity again. I said: ‘Everyone will be glad when today is over, won’t they?’

The women at Barford had had to be told that an experiment was taking place that day; Mrs Drawbell did not know what it was, but she knew this was a crisis. Nevertheless, mine seemed a new idea.

‘Perhaps they will,’ said Mrs Drawbell.

‘It’s going to be a strain,’ I said.

She gave an opaque smile.

‘It’s a strain on your husband,’ I said.

‘He’s used to it,’ said Mrs Drawbell.

Had she any feeling for him, I wondered? She was his ally; in her immobile fashion, she tried to help him on: it was she who, finding that Martin and Irene had no room to spare, had invited me to stay. Yet she spoke of him with less tenderness than many women speak of their doctors.

Then she talked of Mary Pearson’s children; Mrs Drawbell was looking after them for the day. She was confident that their mother’s treatment was wrong and her own right. Densely, confidently, with a curious air of being about to offer affection, she pressed her case upon me and was demanding my moral support. I could not help remembering her on my way to the hangar, irritated as I was in any period of suspense that other lives should be going on, with their own egotisms, claiming one’s attention, intruding their desires.

I felt my suspense about that day’s experiment increase, having been forced to think of something else. When I saw Mary Pearson, sitting at a bench close to the pile, I was short to her; her skin flushed, her eyes clouded behind her spectacles. I made some sort of apology. I could not explain that I felt more keyed up because her name had distracted me,

The hangar was noisy that morning, like a cathedral echoing a party of soldiers. Workmen, mechanics, young scientists, went in and out through the door in the pile’s outer wall; Luke was shouting to someone on top of the pile; Martin and a couple of assistants were disentangling the wire from an electrical apparatus on the floor. There were at least twenty men in the hangar, and Mary Pearson was the only woman. And in the middle, white-walled, about three times the height of a man, stood — catching our eyes as though it were a sacred stone — the pile.

Luke greeted me. He was wearing a windjacket tucked into his grey flannel trousers.

‘Well, Lewis,’ he shouted, ‘we’re in the hell of a mess.’

‘It will be all right on the night,’ said someone. There was a burst of laughter, laughter noisy, exultant, with just a prickle of nerves.

The ‘pipery’ (Luke meant the pipes, but his scientific idiom was getting richer as he grew more triumphant) had ‘stood up to’ all tests. The uranium slugs were in place. In the past week, Martin had put in a dribble of heavy water, and a test sample had picked up no impurities. But there was one ‘bloody last-minute snag’ like finding just at the critical moment that you have forgotten — Luke produced a bedroom simile. Most of the ‘circuitry’, like the pipery, was in order: there was trouble with one switch of the control rods.

‘We can’t start without them,’ said Luke. Martin joined us: I did not wish to ask questions, any question seemed to delay the issue, but they told me how the control rods worked. ‘If the pile gets too hot, then they automatically shut the whole thing off,’ said Luke.

‘Otherwise,’ said Martin, ‘there is a finite danger that the reaction would be uncontrollable.’

That meant — I knew enough to follow — the pile might turn into something like a nuclear bomb.

Both Luke and Martin were themselves working on the circuits. A couple of radio engineers wanted Luke to let them improvise a switch.

‘Think again,’ said Luke. ‘That cut-off is going to work as we intended it to work, if it means plugging away at the circuits until this time tomorrow.’

Someone went on arguing.

‘Curtains,’ said Luke.

As Martin returned to the labyrinth of wires, both he and Luke ready to finger valves for hours to come, I wished I had stayed away or that they had a job for me. All I could do was drag up a chair to Mary Pearson’s bench. She was self-conscious, perhaps because I had been brusque, perhaps because, with her husband away, she was uncomfortable in the presence of men. Already that morning I had seen some of the youths, gauche but virile, eyeing her. When I sat beside her, though she was not comfortable herself, it was in her nature to try to make me so.

In front of her were instruments which she had been taught to read; she was a competent girl, I thought, she would have made an admirable nurse. There was one of the counters whose ticking I had come to expect in any Barford laboratory; there was a logarithmic amplifier, a DC amplifier, with faces like speedometers, which would give a measure — she had picked up some of the jargon — of the ‘neutron flux’.

On the bench was pinned a sheet of graph paper and it was there that she was to plot the course of the experiment. As the heavy water was poured in, the neutron flux would rise: the points on the graph would lead down to a spot where the pile had started to run, where the chain reaction had begun:

‘That’s going to be the great moment,’ said Mary

The tap and rattle, the curses and argument, the dashes of light, went on round us. I continued to talk to Mary, lowering my voice — though there was no need, for the scientists were shouting. Once or twice she contradicted me, her kind mouth showed a touch of sexual obstinacy. She was totally faithful to Pearson; like many passionate women she was chaste; but she was not chaste because she did not know the temptation; she could have made many men happy, and been happy herself with many men. She would stay faithful to her husband, however long he was kept away, and she was edgy when her eyes brightened in his absence. Again like many happy, passionate, good-natured women, she had just a trace more than her fair share of self-regard. The morning ticked on, midday, the early afternoon, none of us had spoken of eating. It must have been after two o’clock when one of the refugees discovered the fault.

At once a conference sprang up, between Mary Pearson’s bench and the pile. If they wanted a ‘permanent solution’, so that they need not worry about the control rods for the next year, it would take twenty-four hours; on the other hand it would be very little risk to patch up a circuit for a trial run, and that could be ready by evening.

Luke stood by himself, square, toeing the floor, his lips chewed in. ‘No,’ he said loudly, ‘there are some risks you have got to take and there are some you haven’t. A week might possibly matter, but a day damned well can’t. We’ll get it right before we start.’

A voice complained: ‘We said we should be running on the twenty-second.’

Luke said: ‘Well, we now say that we shall be running on the twenty-third.’

He was right. They all knew it. It was only Martin, who, as he and Luke came out of the scrimmage towards me, said, in a tone that the others could not hear: ‘It’s a pity for the sake of public relations.’

‘You’d better look after them,’ said Luke. For a moment, his energy had left him. Everyone who was working there trusted him, because they felt (as his seniors did not) that underneath his brashness there was a bedrock of sense. But for Luke himself it took an effort for the sense to win.

‘Tell them we’ve called it a day,’ said Luke with fatigue. ‘They can see the fireworks about teatime tomorrow.’

‘Not earlier than eight tomorrow night,’ said Martin.

For an hour, Martin went off to play politics: explaining to the senior men at Barford, Drawbell, Mounteney, and the rest, who were expected to come to the ‘opening’ that night, the reason for the delay; telephoning Rose and others in London. I offered to get the news through to Rose myself, but Martin chose to do it all.

Mary Pearson left to fetch sandwiches, voices blew about the hangar, Luke and his team were stripping a lead on top of the pile, and I was able to slip away.

Out of duty, I visited Irene and the child, who was just a year old. Irene said nothing of our last meeting, but as I was playing with the baby she remarked, all of a sudden: ‘Lewis, you’d rather be alone, wouldn’t you?’

I asked what she meant.

‘You and Martin are very much alike, you know. You’d like to hide until this thing is settled, wouldn’t you?’

With her eyes fixed on me, I admitted it.

‘So would he,’ said Irene.

With the half-malicious understanding that was springing up between us, she sent me off on my own. I did not want to speak to anyone I knew at Barford, not Mounteney, not Luke, Martin least of all. I made an excuse to Mrs Drawbell that some old acquaintance had asked me out to dinner, but in fact I took the bus to Warwick and spent the evening in a public house.

There I saw only one person from Barford — young Sawbridge, whom we had interviewed twelve months before. Somehow I was driven to be friendly, to get some response of goodwill out of him, as though he were a mascot for the following night.

I stood him a drink, and said something about our native town,

‘I’ve not got much use for it,’ said Sawbridge.

It would have soothed me to be sentimental that night. I mentioned some of my friends of the twenties — George Passant — no, Sawbridge had never heard of him.

I kept affectionate memories of the town then, and said so.

‘You just lump it down anywhere in America,’ said Sawbridge with anger, ‘and no one could tell the difference.’

I gave it up, and asked him to have another drink.

‘I don’t mind if I do,’ said Sawbridge.

The next day I got through the hours in the same fashion, sitting in the library, walking by the riverside. The afternoon was quiet, there was no wind; it would have been pleasant to be strolling so, waiting for nothing, with that night’s result behind me. The elm twigs were thickening, the twigs in the hedges were dense and black, but there were no leaves anywhere. All was dusky, just before the break of the leaf — except for a patch where the blackthorn shone white, solid, and bare, standing out before the sullen promise of the hedgerow.

I went straight from the blackthorn blossom and the leafless hedge back to the hangar, where the shadow of the pile lay black on the geometrically levelled floor. Martin and Luke were drinking tea on a littered bench close to Mary’s and someone was calling instructions by numbers.

They told me that all was ready ‘bar the juice’. The juice was heavy water, and it took the next hour to carry it into the hangar. I went with some of the scientists in the first carrying party; they walked among the huts in the spring evening laughing like students on their way back from the laboratory. The heavy-water depot stood on the edge of the airfield, a red brick cube with two sentries at the door; there was a hiatus, then, because the young men had no sense of form but the storekeeper had. He was an old warrant officer with protruding eyes; his instructions said that he could not deliver heavy water except on certain signatures. Against curses, against the rational, nagging, contentious, scientific argument, he just pointed to his rubric, and Martin had to be fetched. He was polite with the storekeeper; to me, he smiled, the only smile of detachment on his face in those two days. The scientists followed into the depot one by one, and came out with what looked like enormous Thermos flasks, which were the containers of heavy water.

Casually the young men joggled back, the silver flasks flashing in the cold green twilight. About it all there was an overwhelming air of jauntiness and youth; it might have been a party of hikers carrying bottles of beer. It was a scene that, even as it took place, I felt obliged to remember — the file in sweaters and grey flannel trousers, swinging the silver flasks, the faces young, thin, disrespectful, masculine.

‘Each of those flasks cost God knows what,’ said Martin as we watched. He did some mental arithmetic. ‘About two thousand pounds.’

By seven o’clock some hundreds of flasks were standing behind the pile. When I discovered that the heavy water from those flasks was going to be poured in by hand, it did not strike me as foreign. It was like much that I had picked up in the air at Cambridge and which Luke and Mounteney and Martin had carried with them. The pile, engineered to a thousandth of an inch; the metals, analytically pure as metals had not been pure before; the whole structure, the most perfect example of the quantitative accuracy of the age; and then Martin and his men were going to slop in the heavy water as though filling up a bath with buckets. They did not mind being slapdash when it did not matter; they took a certain pride in it, like the older generation of Cambridge scientists; the next pile they made, they conceded, they would have the ‘juice’ syphoned in.

‘All set, I think,’ said Martin to Luke. Mary Pearson was sitting at her bench, an assistant watching another instrument at her side. Martin’s team formed a knot by the pile door. The wall close by was filling with the rest of Luke’s staff, for word had gone round that the experiment was due to begin. Drawbell was also there and — it seemed a gallant gesture — Rudd. Mounteney had sent a message that he would come ‘as soon as things got significant’ (all knew that, for an hour or so, till the pile was half full of heavy water, no one could tell whether it was about to ‘run’).

Drawbell and the security officers had thought it unrealistic to keep the experiment secret within the establishment. Anyone was allowed in the hangar who would normally have been let in there in the course of business — so that several of the wives, employed in the Barford offices, came in.

The women in the hangar were wearing jerseys and overcoats to guard against the sharp night. Among the blur of faces I saw Hanna Puchwein’s glossy head close to young Sawbridge’s. Nora Luke, her hair piled up in a bun, had gone pallid with the months of tension which had not lined, but puffed out, her face.

At half past seven there were about seventy people in the hangar, perhaps a third of them spectators. They occupied a crescent that left the pile and the instrument tables free, encroached nowhere near the ranks of heavy-water flasks and the filling station, and which marked out a kind of quarter deck where Luke could walk to and fro, from the pile to Mary Pearson’s graph.

He was there alone, now that Martin had gone to the filling place.

Luke had slept three hours the night before. He was still wearing the windjacket and crumpled trousers, but he made the quick exercising movements of a man about to start a long-distance race.

‘Anything stopping you?’ he called to Martin.

‘Nothing at all,’ said Martin.

‘Then let her go.’

For an hour it was anticlimax. We could not see much of it, just the scurry of Martin and the others behind the pile, pouring in flask after flask. ‘A quarter full,’ Martin said at eight o’clock.

Mary Pearson read the flux and made a point on the graph. Luke and Martin nodded; all was as it should be. Martin said: ‘My turn to do some more pouring.’

‘Glug glug,’ said Luke.

As the level of heavy water rose, they poured more slowly. At last: ‘Half full.’ Mary scrutinized the indicator and inked in another point. Did she know, I was thinking, exactly where those points should fall to mean success? Luke looked over her shoulder.

‘There or thereabouts,’ he said quietly to Mounteney, who had come in a quarter of an hour before.

Although he had spoken in a low tone, somehow the crowd picked up the first intimation of good news. The excitement was sharper, they were quiet, they were on edge for something to cheer. Once more Martin came round and also studied the graph. ‘Not so bad,’ he whispered to Luke, raising an eyebrow, and then called out to the man at the filling place: ‘Slowly now. Only when I say.’

Flask by flask, the level went up from half way. Mary was reading the flux each minute now. To the first points after half way, neither Luke nor Martin paid much attention. Then, as the minutes went on, they both stood by her watching each point. No one else went near the instrument. The excitement stayed, they were ready for Luke to say — ‘In — minutes from now the chain reaction will begin.’

Luke and Martin were staring down at the graph. I could not see their faces. I had almost no fears left. Certainly I did not watch Mary’s hand as the level went up to 0.55 inserting a point as though her fingers were weighed down. As her pen stopped above the next point, Luke and Martin straightened themselves and looked at each other. Still the mood round me, the expectancy and elation, had not changed. Luke’s glance at Martin might have told me nothing; but Martin’s at Luke in one instant let me know the worst.

17: Quarrel at First Light

As Martin and Luke looked at each other, no one round realized what the graph had told them. Someone threw in a scientific jibe about ‘cooking’ and Luke replied. He said to the men at the filling place: ‘Hold it for a minute.’ Even then, no one, not even Mounteney suspected.

He left Mary’s bench, pushed through the crowd, and, his stiff strong back straight, walked rapidly to his little office at the hangar side. That was nothing startling; he had done so three times since the experiment began. Martin remained on the ‘quarter deck’ space, strolled over to the pile and back to Mary’s instrument bench, then, with an air of casualness, as it were absent-mindedly, followed Luke. The scientists were chattering round me, relaxed until Luke came back; I did not attract attention, when in a moment I also followed.

In the office Martin was sitting on a chair, his arms rigid by his sides, while Luke paced from the window to the door, three stamping steps, turned, three steps to the window, like a wild dog in the zoo.

As I went in, Martin did not move, greeted me only with his eyes.

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘If only I’d made the whole thing bigger!’ Luke was saying, in a grinding voice.

‘In fact we didn’t,’ said Martin.

‘How bad is it?’ I had to ask.

‘It’s pretty bad,’ said Martin.

Luke cried: ‘If only I’d made the thing fifty per cent bigger. Then whatever’s gone wrong, it would still have worked!’

‘I can’t blame ourselves for that,’ said Martin. His tone was bitter.

‘What do you blame us for?’ Luke stopped and rounded on him.

‘We spoke too soon,’ said Martin.

‘You mean,’ said Luke, ‘that I never know when to keep my mouth shut.’

‘It doesn’t matter what caused it,’ said Martin, and his temper for once was ready to match Luke’s. ‘We’ve got to take the consequences.’

‘Yes,’ Luke broke out, ‘you’re going to look a fool because of me.’ They both felt the fury of collaborators. The fabric of businesslike affection opened, and one saw — Martin’s anger at having been led astray, his dislike of trusting his leader too far, perhaps his dislike of having a leader at all, perhaps a flicker of the obscure, destructive satisfaction that comes to a junior partner in a failure for which he is not to blame. One saw Luke’s resentment at the partner to whom he had done harm, the ferocious resentment of the leader to someone he has led into failure. Luke was a responsible, confident man, he knew Martin had served him with complete loyalty: in disaster he was choked with anger at the sight of Martin’s face.

But those feelings were not their deepest. Each was face to face with his own disaster. Each was raking it in his own fashion. I did not know which was being hurt more.

Martin said: ‘It will give some simple pleasure in various quarters.’

He had tried to teach himself not to be proud, he had set out to be sensible, calculating, prepared to risk snubs, but there was a nerve of pride hidden beneath. Now he was preparing himself for a humiliation. He had tried to be content with little, but this time he had believed that what he wanted was in his hands; he was composing himself again to expect nothing.

To Luke, even to me, his stoicism seemed enviable. To himself, it was like an invalid pretending to feel better for the benefit of his visitors and then sinking down when they had gone.

Luke made no attempt at stoicism, less so than most men. He assumed that he was the more wretched, that he would jib more at the humiliation.

‘Why are the wise old jaw-bacons always right?’ he cried, repeating criticisms that had been made of him, dwelling on them, sometimes agreeing with them. ‘When shall I learn not to make a mess of things? If ever the jaw-bacons had a good idea, they would handle it without any of this nonsense. How can I go and tell them that their damn silly short-sighted fatuous bloody ignorant criticism has just turned out right all the time?’

Yet, though he might feel more ashamed than Martin, though he would have no guard at all when he heard what Mounteney and the others had to say, he would recover sooner. Even in his wretchedness, his powers were beginning to reassert themselves. It was frustration to him to feel those powers deprived, to know that through his own fault he had not fulfilled them; until the pile was running, he would know self-reproach like a hunger of flesh and bone; but underneath the misery and self-accusation his resolve was taking shape.

‘It was just on the edge of being right,’ he said. ‘Why in God’s name didn’t I get it quite right?

‘What is stopping them (the neutrons)?

‘Brother Rudd will have a nice sleep tonight. Well, I can’t grudge him that.

‘The heavy water is all right.

‘The electronics are all right.

‘The engineering is all right.

‘I only hope the Germans are capable of making bloody fools of themselves like this. Or anyone else who gets as far. I tell you we’ve got as near as kiss your hand.

‘The engineering is all right.

‘The heavy water is all right.

‘The uranium is all right.

‘The uranium is all right.

‘No, it blasted well can’t be.

‘That must be it. It must be the uranium — there’s something left there stopping the neuts.’

Martin, who had been sitting so still that he might not have heard Luke’s outburst, suddenly broke in. From the beginning they had known that the uranium had to be pure to a degree that made them need a new metallurgy. After all, that still might not be pure enough. Was there an impurity, present in minute quantities, which happened to have great stopping power? I heard names strange to me. One Luke kept repeating (it was gadolinium, though on the spot my ear did not pick it up). ‘That’s it,’ he cried.

‘There might be others,’ said Martin.

‘No,’ said Luke. ‘That’s it.’

‘I’m not convinced,’ said Martin.

But he was. Even that night, Luke’s authority had surged up again. Later, other scientists said there was nothing wonderful about Luke’s diagnosis; anyone would have reached it, given a cool head and a little time. What some of them did praise (even those who only passed compliments on those securely dead) was his recuperative power.

They did not see him just a moment after his flare of certainty. He knew what was wrong, he could stiffen himself to months’ more work: but there was something to do first.

He stopped his pacing, put a hand on the desk and spoke to Martin.

‘Do you think they rumbled?’

(He meant the other scientists waiting by the pile.)

‘I doubt it,’ said Martin.

‘I should have thought they must. They must be thinking that I’ve given them the laugh of a lifetime.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Martin.

‘They’ve got to be told.’

Martin nodded. His own face pale, he was watching Luke’s. Luke broke out: ‘I can’t do it.’ His bounce had quitted him; his active nature had gone dead.

Martin pressed in his lips.

‘I’ll do it,’ he said.

Then Luke took hold of the desk and shook himself, shook his heavy shoulders like a dog on the beach.

‘No, I must do it,’ he said. ‘You’ve got more nerve than I have, but you’d be too diplomatic. It’s a mistake to be diplomatic about a bloody fiasco.’

‘You’re right,’ said Martin. For the first time since I came into that office, there was a comradely glance between them.

Luke went straight to the door.

‘Here we go,’ he said.

But, as they stood in the open hangar, with the crowd between them and the pile, Luke muttered: ‘I’m going to try another reading, just on the off chance.’

Even now he was hoping for a miracle to save him. He walked, arms swinging, to the instrument bench, and once more studied the graph. He called out: ‘Take her up to.6.’ Martin stood by his side. They had been gone less than twenty minutes. There was a stir in the spectators round me, but I did not hear any word of doubt. Mary Pearson’s hair was close to the table as she read the indicator. With a slow sweep, like the movement of someone drugged, retarded but not jerky, her hand moved over the graph paper. The instant her pen point came to rest, Luke snatched the sheet from her. He glanced — showed it to Martin — threw it on to the bench — more quickly than a man could light a cigarette. He took a step forward, and in a loud, slow, inflexible voice said: ‘It’s a flop. That’s all for tonight. We’ll get it right, but it’s going to take some time.’

A hush. An hysterical laugh. A gasp. Men talking at once. Pushing up her glasses, Mary Pearson began to sob, tears rolling down her face. I caught sight of young Sawbridge, his mouth open with pain like a Marathon runner’s: for once I saw emotion on his face, he too was nearly crying.

Drawbell, Rudd, and Mounteney pushed towards the graph.

‘What is all this?’ Mounteney was asking irritably. ‘What has the k got up to?’

Rudd said to Martin: ‘Never mind, old chap. It might happen to anyone.’

‘Not quite like this,’ said Martin, looking straight into Rudd’s eyes, in search of the gloating that he expected in all eyes just then.

In the hubbub, the high questions, the hot wash of feeling more alive that men get from any catastrophe not their own, Drawbell took command. Mounting on Mary Pearson’s chair he shouted for attention; and as they huddled round him, as round an orator in Hyde Park, he stood quite still with an expression steady, friendly, undisturbed.

When they were looking up at him, he spoke, with the same steadiness: ‘Now I’m going to send you home. We’ll begin the inquest tomorrow, and I shall give you a statement all in good time. But I don’t want you to go home tonight in the wrong frame of mind. It’s true that the experiment hasn’t worked according to plan, and Luke was right to tell us so. I’m not going to raise false hopes, so I shan’t say any more about that. But I do tell you something else: that even if the worst comes to the worst, this experiment has taught us more about our job than any establishment in the world, except our friends across the Atlantic. We shall finish up better because we’ve had our setbacks. This isn’t the end, this is the beginning.’

Without a flash of his own disappointments, free from the honours receding from him that night, without tremor of schadenfreude at Luke’s fall, Drawbell stood there, happier with a crowd than ever with a single person, engrossed in infecting them with his own curious courage, delighted (as the complex sometimes are) because he was behaving well. It was he who cleared the hangar, to allow Luke and Martin to get back to their office undisturbed. Outside on the floor round the pile, there was soon no one left, except Nora Luke; we looked at each other without a word, unable to go away.

‘We’d better ask,’ she said at last, as we stood helplessly there, ‘whether we can be any use.’

In the office, Luke and Martin were both sitting down. As Nora saw her husband she said, awkwardly, wishing from the bottom of her heart that she could let herself go: ‘Bad luck.’

It was Martin who replied, picking up Drawbell’s speech with harsh irony: ‘We shall finish up better because we’ve had our set-backs.’

To his wife, Luke said, ‘Let’s have some tea.’

That was the first pot of tea. Nora made five others before the night ended. Like other men of action, Luke talked more as he grew more tired. What to do? — decisions of his kind were not made in monosyllables, they were made in repetitious soliloquies, often in speeches that got nowhere, that were more like singing than the ordinary give and take of talk. Yet out of that welter sprang, several times that night, a new resolve, one more point ticked off.

Meanwhile, Nora sat by, calculating for him how many (if his assumption were right) uranium slugs would have to be replaced, before the pile would run. It was a long calculation; she carried it out like the professional mathematician that she was; sometimes she glanced at Luke, distrusting herself, thinking that another woman might have given him rest. But she was wrong. His bad time was behind him, of us all he was the least broken.

As Luke talked more, Martin became more silent. He took in each new plan, he answered questions; but through the small hours lie sat volunteering no words of his own, giving his opinion when Luke asked for it, like a sensible second-in-command — and yet each time I heard that controlled voice I knew that he was eating himself up with hopes in retrospect, with that singular kind of might-have-been that twists one’s bowels because it still grips one like a hope.

As I looked at Martin, my disappointment for him, which had started anew, the instant I caught the glance between him and Luke over the graph, was growing so that it drained me of all other feelings, of patience, of sympathy, of affection. This might have been the night of his success. Now it came to the test, that was my only hunger. I had none to spare for the project; on the other hand, I did not give a thought for our forebodings with Mounteney by the river. I had none of the frustration that Luke felt and perhaps Martin also, because they were being kept at arm’s length from a piece of scientific truth. For me, this ought to have been the night of Martin’s success. I was bitter with him because it had gone wrong.

At last Luke said, his voice still resonant, that we had done enough for one night, and Martin and I walked together out of the hangar door. The sky was dark, without any stars, but in the east there was a pallor that seemed less comforting.

‘First light,’ said Martin.

I could not help myself. I broke out of control: ‘Is this ever going to come off?’

‘Is what ever going to come off?’

It was one of his stoical tricks, to pretend not to understand.

‘You know what I mean.’

Martin paused.

‘I should think your guess is about as good as mine,’ he said.

I tried, but I could not keep quiet: ‘Perhaps it’s a pity that you burned your boats.’

‘That’s possible,’ said Martin.

‘Perhaps it wasn’t sensible to invest all your future in one man.’

‘I’ve thought of that,’ said Martin.

‘Luke’s enemies have always said that he’d make one big mistake,’ I said. I could hear in my own voice, and could not hold it down, the special cruelty that can break out of any ‘unselfish’ love, of a father’s or a brother’s, with anyone who is asking nothing for himself — except that the other person should fulfil one’s dreams, often one’s self-identificatory dreams. If you see yourself in another, you see all you would like to be: so you can be more self-sacrificing than in any other human relation, because it does not seem like sacrifice: for the same reason you can be more cruel.

‘I’ve thought of that also.’

‘Is this going to be his big mistake?’ I asked.

For the first time, Martin turned against me; his voice was quieter but as bitter as mine.

‘You’re not making it any easier,’ he said.

Ashamed, suddenly stricken by his misery, I said that I was sorry, and we walked in silence, making our way towards the Drawbells’ house. We had quarrelled only once before, when I interfered over his marriage, and that had been just skin deep. Finding I could not put the words together to comfort him or tell him my regret for the past minutes, I muttered that I would see him home.

‘Do,’ said Martin.

Neither of us said much, as we walked along the footpath in the cold, slow dawn. What we had said could not be taken back; yet it seemed to have passed. Once Martin made a formal attempt to console me. He said: ‘Don’t worry too much: it may turn out all right.’

A little later, he said: ‘If I had the choice about Luke to make all over again, I should do exactly the same as before.’

The hedges smelled wet, the blackthorn blossom was ectoplasmic on the morning dark. We came to the little road that led to Martin’s. In front of us, stretching from the path to a cottage roof, was the dim shape of a ladder. As I went under, I could feel Martin hesitate and then take three quick steps round. He said, with a sarcastic smile: ‘I need all the luck I can get.’

Making out his face in the twilight, I was wondering whether he, too, in that moment of superstition, had thought of our mother: who also had been superstitious: who, with her toes pointed out, would go round any ladder: who possessed just his kind of stoicism, invented to conceal an insatiable romantic hope: and who in his place, this morning after the fiasco, would be cherishing the first new pictures of wonderful triumphs to come.

It was strange to think that the same might be true of him.