As soon as I woke, the night’s fiasco clinched itself out of the morning light. It was midday, not many hours since I left Martin outside his house.
Unable to keep myself away, hurrying to the laboratories to hear remarks that I did not want to hear, I found Luke and Martin already there. They might have been following old Bevill’s first rule for any kind of politics: if there is a crisis, if anyone can do you harm or good, he used to say, looking simple, never mind your dignity, never mind your nerves, but always be present in the flesh.
Even that morning, Martin might have had the self-control to act on such advice: but it was more likely, in Luke’s case certain, that they had come in order to argue a way through the criticisms and get to work the same day.
There were many criticisms. There was — to my ears, used to a different climate, less bracing and perhaps more hypocritical — astonishingly little sympathy. Most people had no thought to spare for Luke’s or Martin’s feelings; they were concerned with why the pile had not run last night, whether Luke’s diagnosis was correct, how long the ‘mods’ (modifications) would take.
There were scientists’ jokes. Was this, Mounteney asked, the most expensive negative result in scientific history? It was their own kind of jibing, abstract, not specially ill-natured. I would have preferred to go on listening, rather than return to London and make my report to Hector Rose.
Arriving in the office late that afternoon I found a message waiting for me: Sir Hector’s compliments, and, when I could spare the time, would I make an opportunity to call on him?
I went at once to get the interview over. Rose’s room, which was on the side of the building opposite to mine, looked over the trees of St James’s Park, stirring that evening in the wind, bright in the cold sunshine. Rose was standing up, bowing from the waist, greeting me with his elaborate courtesy.
‘It’s very, very good of you to spare me a minute, my dear Eliot.’ He put me in the armchair near his desk, from which I could smell the hyacinths on the little table by the window: even in wartime, he replaced his flowers each day. Then he offered me his cigarette case. It was like him to carry cigarettes for his visitors, though he did not smoke himself. Had my journey that afternoon been excessively uncomfortable, he asked, had I been able to get a reasonable luncheon?
Then he looked at me, his face still unnaturally youthful, expressionless, his eyes light.
‘I gather that everything did not go precisely according to expectation?’
I said that I was afraid not.
‘You will appreciate, my dear Eliot, that it is rather unfortunate. There has been slightly too much criticism of this project to be comfortable, all along.’
I was well aware of it.
‘It may have been a mistake,’ said Rose, ‘not to take the course of least resistance, and pack them all off to America.’
‘It may have been,’ I said. ‘If so, I helped to make it.’
‘I’m afraid you did,’ said Rose, with his usual cool justice. With the same justice, he added: ‘So did I.’
‘It may have been a mistake,’ he went on smoothly, ‘but it was Dr Luke and his comrades who led us up the garden path.’
Suddenly the smooth masterful official tone cracked: he had a blaze of ordinary human irritation.
‘Good Lord,’ he snapped, ‘they talk too much and do too little!’ But Rose had the gift of being able to switch off his disappointment. Sometimes I thought it the most useful gift a man of affairs could possess, sometimes the most chilling.
‘However,’ said Rose, ‘all that can wait. Now I should like to benefit by your advice, my dear Eliot. What do you suggest as the next step?’
I had been waiting for it.
I said, as honestly as I could, that there seemed to me two possible courses: one, to cut our losses, break up Barford, and distribute the scientists among the American projects (for Luke and Martin, that would be open failure): two, to reinvest in Luke.
‘What is your personal opinion?’
‘I’m not entirely impartial, you know,’ I said.
‘I’m perfectly sure that you can see the problem with your admirable detachment,’ said Rose. The remark had the sarcastic flick of his tongue: but it was not meant as a sarcasm. For Rose it was easy to eliminate a personal consideration, and he would have despised me if I could not do the same.
I tried to. I said, as was true, that most people at Barford believed the pile would ultimately work; it might take months, it might (if Luke’s diagnosis were wrong) take several years. There was a chance, how good I could not guess, that the pile would still work quickly; it meant giving Luke even more money, even more men.
‘If you’re not prepared for that,’ I said, hearing my voice sound remote, ‘I should be against any compromise. You’ve either got to show some faith now — or give the whole thing up in this country.’
‘Double or quits,’ said Rose, ‘If I haven’t misunderstood you, my dear chap?’
I nodded my head.
‘And again, if I haven’t misunderstood you, you’d have a shade of preference, but not a very decided shade, for doubling?’
I nodded my head once more.
Rose considered, assembling the threads of the problem, the scientific forecasts, the struggles on his committees, the Ministerial views.
‘This is rather an awkward one,’ he said. He stood up and gave his polite youthful bow.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m most indebted to you and I’m sorry to have taken so much of your valuable time. I must think this one out, but I’m extremely grateful for your suggestions.’
Though Hector Rose had left me in suspense about his intention, I did not worry much. Despite our mutual dislike I trusted his mind, and for a strong mind there was only one way open.
Thus Luke, in the midst of disapproval, got all he asked for, and went back to playing his piano. There were months to get through before the pile was refitted. He and Martin had to set themselves for another wait.
It was during that wait that I had my first intimation of a different kind of secret. One of the security branches had begun asking questions. They had some evidence (so it seemed, through the muffled hints) that there might have been a leakage.
As men spoke of it, their voices took on that hushed staccato in which all of us, even on the right side of the law, seemed like conspirators. None of us knew what the evidence was, and the only hints we received were not dramatic, merely that a Barford paper had ‘got loose’. We were not told where and the paper itself was unimportant. It was nothing but a 1943 estimate of the destructive power of the nuclear bomb. I looked it up in our secret files; it was signed by a refugee called Pavia, by Nora Luke and other mathematicians, and was called Appreciation of the Effects of Fission Weapons.
The typescript was faded, in the margin were some corrections in a high, thin, Italian hand. Much of the argument was in mathematical symbols, but, after twenty pages of calculation, some conclusions were set out in double spacing, in the military jargon of the day, with phrases like ‘casualization’, ‘ground zero’, ‘severe destruction’.
These conclusions meant that, in one explosion over the centre of a town, about 300,000 people would be killed instantly, and a similar number would later die of injuries. This was the standard Barford calculation at that time, and it was the figure that we had in mind when Mounteney, Martin, and I talked by the river at Stratford.
Anyone who worked on the inside of scientific war saw such documents. And most men took it as part of the day-by-day routine, without emotion; it had to be done, if you were living in society, if you were one ant in the anthill. In fact most men did not need to justify themselves, but just performed their duty to society, made the calculations they were asked to make, and passed the paper on.
Once, alone in my office in the middle of the war, it occurred to me: there must exist memoranda about concentration camps: people must be writing their views on the effects of a reduction in rations, comparing the death rate this year with last.
I heard of the leakage, I re-read the appreciation, I heard the name of Captain Smith. He was high up, as I already knew, in one of the intelligence services. I also knew that he was a naval officer on the retired list, several times decorated in the first war, the son of a bishop. But when he came to visit me, I did not know what to expect.
He was a man in the fifties, with fairish hair and a lean, athletic figure. His face was stiff and strained, both in the cheeks and mouth. His eyes seemed to protrude, but more exactly had a fixed, light-irised stare. He was dressed with the elegance of an actor. His whole hearing was still and soon after he came in, when a flying bomb grunted and vibrated outside, cut off, and then jarred the floor beneath us (it was by now the July of 1944), all the notice he took was a slight stiff inclination sideways, arms straight by his side.
That impression might have been both putting off and appropriate when one knew in advance his berserk record; but it did not last. It was destroyed, very oddly, by a smile which was so sudden, so artificial, that it might have been switched on. I had never seen a smile so false, and yet somehow it sweetened him.
He had come, he said, for a ‘little confab’ about some of our ‘mutual friends’ at Barford.
‘I’ve been told,’ I said, ‘that you’ve been having a bit of trouble.’
‘We don’t want to blot our copy book,’ said Captain Smith mysteriously, in a creaking and yet ingratiating voice.
‘Nothing very serious has got out, has it?’
‘I wish I knew: do you?’ he said with his formidable stare, then switched on his smile.
‘If one thing gets out, another can. That’s why we get all hot and bothered,’ he added.
Suddenly he asked: ‘Know anything of a young man called Sawbridge?’
I had imagined that he might bring out other names. I felt relief because this one meant little to me. I explained that I had been present at Sawbridge’s interview, and since then I had talked to him alone just once at Warwick, the night before the failure of the pile.
‘I didn’t get much out of him,’ I said.
‘I just thought you might have known him at home,’ said Smith.
He had found out — it was one up to his method — that Sawbridge’s family had lived close to mine, I said that, when I left the town for London in 1927, he could only have been eight or nine. My brother Martin was more likely to know him.
‘I haven’t forgotten M F Eliot,’ said Smith, with his false, endearing smile.
I had spent enough time with security officers to leave the talking to him: but he was too shrewd to do what some did, and bank on the mystery of his job. He stared at me.
‘I suspect you’re wondering what all this is in aid of,’ he said.
I said yes.
‘There are one or two straws in the wind, and we’ve got an idea that the young man may not have been altogether wise.’
He gave me two facts, maybe in order to conceal others. Sawbridge had attended anti-war meetings, organized by the Communist Party, in 1940–1: at the University he had been a member of a pro-Communist group.
‘He’s certainly gone off the rails a bit,’ said Smith.
At Barford they thought that Smith was a fool. They were quite wrong; he was highly intelligent, and very far, much further than many of the scientists, from being a commonplace man. The trouble was, he did not speak their language.
His axioms of behaviour were simple, though his character was not. Duty: obedience: if you were told to make a weapon you did so, and kept it secret. There was nothing more to it than that.
To him, the race in nuclear bombs was as natural as a race in building battleships. Your enemies were in it: so were you, so was Russia. You told no one anything, certainly not the Russians. Good fighters, yes, but almost a different species.
Intellectually, he knew something of communism; but he could no more imagine becoming a communist himself, or his friends or relations doing so, than I could imagine becoming a professional burglar.
He had not lived among scientists, their habits of feeling were foreign to him and his to them. As for his axioms of behaviour, most of the scientists, even those not far to the left, could not feel them so; what to him was instinct, to them meant a moral uneasiness at each single point.
Some days after Smith’s call, I talked to Martin. It was our first serious talk since the fiasco; his tone sounded unwilling and hard, though that could have been the effect of long-drawn-out suspense. For the first time, his face was pallid and carried anxious lines. He was waiting for the last batch of the purified uranium, with unfillable time on his hands.
I asked him if Captain Smith had interviewed him.
Martin nodded.
‘I think we ought to have a word,’ I said.
He would have liked to put me off. Without showing his usual even temper, he went with me into the Park; at times we felt a neurosis of security, and only talked freely in an open space.
The Park was empty. It was a windy afternoon with black and ragged clouds; in the distance we heard, as we took two chairs on to the patch of grass nearest the Mall, the cranking of a flying bomb. I said: ‘I suppose Smith told you about Sawbridge?’
‘Yes.’
‘How much is there in it?’
‘If you mean,’ said Martin, ‘that Smith has cleverly found out that Sawbridge is left wing, that’s not exactly news.’ He went on: ‘If Smith and his friends are going to eliminate all the left wing people working on fission here and in America, there won’t be enough of us left to finish off the job.’
‘Do you think Sawbridge has parted with any information?’
‘I haven’t the slightest idea.’
‘Would you say it was impossible?’
Martin said: ‘You know him nearly as well as I do.’
I said: ‘Do you like him any better?’
Martin shook his head.
‘He’s a bit of a clod.’
That was my impression. Heavy: opaque: ungracious. I asked if Martin could imagine him fanatical enough to give secrets away.
Martin said: ‘In some circumstances, I can imagine better men giving them away — can’t you?’
Just for an instant he was speaking without constraint. At that time, his politics were like mine, liberal, considerably to the right of Mounteney, a little to the left of Luke. He had more patience than either with the practical running of the state machine, he was less likely to dismiss Smith out of hand.
Nevertheless, as he heard Smith’s inquiries, he felt, almost as sharply as Mounteney, that his scientific code was being treated with contempt.
Martin was a secretive man; but keeping scientific secrets, which to Smith seemed so natural, was to him a piece of evil, even if a necessary evil. In war you had to do it, but you could not pretend to like it. Science was done in the open, that was a reason why it had conquered; if it dwindled away into little secret groups hoarding their results away from each other, it would become no better than a set of recipes, and within a generation would have lost all its ideals and half its efficacy.
Martin, who was out of comparison more realistic than Mounteney or even Luke, knew as well as I did that a good many scientists congratulated themselves on their professional ethic and acted otherwise: in the twenties and thirties, the great days of free science, there had been plenty of men jealous of priority, a few falsifying their results, some pinching their pupils.
But it had been free science, without secrets, without much national feeling. Men like Mounteney hankered after it as in a murky northern winter one longs for the south of France. In the twenties and thirties, Mounteney had felt more at home with foreigners working in his own subject than he ever could with Captain Smith or Rose or Bevill.
Some of that spirit had come down to the younger men. Pure science was not national; the truth was the truth, and, in a sensible world, should not be withheld; science belonged to mankind. A good many scientists were as unselfconscious as Victorians in speaking of their ideals as though they were due to their own personal excellence. But the ideals existed. That used to be science; if you were ashamed of a sense of super-national dedication, men like Mounteney had no use for you; in the future, that must be science again.
Meanwhile, the war had forced their hands; but they often felt, even the most realistic of them, that they were mucking away in the dark. Though they saw no option but to continue, there were times, at this talk of secrets, leakages, espionage, when they turned their minds away.
It was startling to hear Martin break out, because of a violated ideal. In most respects, I thought of him as more earthbound than I was myself. But he would not take part in any more discussion about Sawbridge.
Soon he fell silent, the thoughts of pure science drained away, and he was brooding over the next test of the pile. His nerves had stayed steady throughout the fiasco, but now, within months or weeks of the second chance, they were fraying at last. In the windy August afternoon, the low black clouds drove on.
‘If it doesn’t go this time,’ he said to me, more angrily than he had spoken after the failure, as though holding me to blame, ‘you needn’t reckon on my future any more.’
Night after night that September I stayed by my sitting-room window with the curtains open, watching the swathe of light glisten on the dusty bushes in the square. The flying bombs had ceased, and it should have been easy to sleep; often I was wondering when I should get a message from Barford, giving the date of the second attempt to start the pile.
I decided that this time I would not go — but was the date already fixed? From Martin’s state I felt it could not be far off.
Sitting by the open window, tasting the autumn nights for the first time since 1939, I thought with regret of my own past troubles — with regret, not because I had undergone them, but because I was living through a quiet, lonely patch. Occasionally I thought of Martin: how many months in his adult life had been free from some ordeal approaching? Was this new one the biggest? Sometimes, from my quiet, I wished I were in his place.
One night at the end of the month, the telephone slowly woke me out of a deep sleep. Faintly it burred, in the hall, as though far away. When at last I understood the noise, I went towards it with dread.
The blue paint had not yet been taken from the hall bulb. In the crepuscular, livid light, I found the receiver: I heard Martin’s voice, active, repeating ‘Hallo, hallo, hallo.’ Up to that moment I had not thought of him, just of the pounce of bad news, any bad news.
As I muttered his voice came: ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s all right.’
I was stupefied, half awake, half comprehending:
‘What’s all right?’
I heard: ‘The pile began to run an hour ago. 3.5 a.m., the night of September 27–28 — just for purposes of reference.’
The words had been steady, but the flourish gave his joy away.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were starting?’ I answered with exultation, yet heard my temper rise.
‘I thought it was better like this.’
Then I congratulated him.
‘Yes, it’s something. They can’t take this from us.’
In his voice I could hear pure triumph, the words came out with the attack of triumph. At last he held success in his hands. If I had heard a friend speak so, even a most intimate friend, I should have known a splinter of rancour — the jag of the question: ‘Why hasn’t this happened to me?’
Listening to a brother in the pride of triumph, you could not feel even that splinter. It had been the same when I heard the news of his child. Just as in ‘unselfish’ love you can be crueller (as I was in Martin’s failure, which we had neither of us forgotten), so for the same reason you can be less envious. The more unassailable they are in success, the more total your rejoicing: for it is your own.
He could not resist telling me some details, there and then, in the middle of the night. It had been his idea to hold a ‘dress rehearsal’. During the summer, they had built a syphoning plant for the heavy water, so they had not required many hands: even of those present, few realized that this was the ‘real thing’. They had begun just after midnight, and the filling was still going on. For ten minutes, at the halfway stage, the graph points seemed to be going wrong again. ‘That was pretty hard to take,’ said Martin. Then the points began to come out according to calculation. In fact, they were coming out slightly better than calculation. Martin for once forgot his listener, and broke into technical language: ‘The k is 1.2 already, it’s too hot to put in more than three-quarters of the heavy water.
‘It’s embarrassing that it’s gone too well,’ he added. ‘Still, it’s quite a tolerable way to be embarrassed.’
The following afternoon, when he met me at the station, he was just as happy. It was no longer self-discipline that kept his expression firm; one could see the happiness beneath the skin; he was not a man to lose appetite for triumph the moment he had it.
We shook hands, which we did not often do.
‘The pile, I think,’ said Martin, without asking me where we should go first. He said, as we walked along: ‘When it looked as though we were due for another fiasco last night — that was getting near the bone.’
Contentedly browsing over past dramas, Martin led me into a hangar. It was empty, not a single human being in sight; it was noiseless, the pile standing silent in the airy space.
‘There she goes,’ said Martin. But he did not see the curious sinister emptiness of the place. He was thinking not of the silent, blank-faced pile but of the reaction going on within. He took me to the control room, a cubbyhole full of shining valves with one kitchen chair placed, domestic and incongruous, in front of a panel of indicators. Sitting there was the only other man I had seen that afternoon.
‘All well?’ asked Martin.
‘All well, Dr Eliot,’ said the duty officer.
‘I still can’t quite believe it,’ Martin said to me.
As we went out, there was a hallooing from close by, and Luke, who had just tramped in, called us into his office.
‘Well, Lewis,’ he said, ‘this is a bit better.’
‘To say the least of it,’ I said.
‘They ought to have known it was the neatest way to do it.’
‘They’ were Luke’s collection of enemies and detractors, and without malice, or even much interest, he dismissed them. He was sitting on his desk, and suddenly his whole face and body became vigorous.
‘There’s only one thing that matters now, as I’ve been saying to Martin this morning,’ he said, ‘and that is, how soon can we finish it off?’
Martin smiled. For himself, he would have been glad of a breathing space, to luxuriate in the success; to him, it was real success, the first he had had. But then Martin, less humble than Luke as a man, was far more so as a scientist. Luke knew his powers; he knew that this project had not stretched them; it had tested his character, but in terms of scientific imagination, it had needed little. He did not take much pride in the achievement; this was no place to rest; with all his energies, he wanted to push on.
‘We’ve got to make the bloody bomb while we’re about it,’ said Luke. ‘Until we’ve got the plutonium out, I shan’t be able to put my in-tray on top of my out-tray and go back to something worth doing.’
As I already knew, making the pile work was only the first stage, though the most important, in producing a bomb; second by second, the pile was now changing minute amounts of uranium into plutonium. In a hundred and fifty to two hundred days, they calculated, the transformation would have gone far enough: the slugs could then be taken out to cool: in another ninety days Luke and Martin could begin extracting the plutonium. Luke said they might cut a little off those periods, but not much,
‘Perhaps we can begin extracting in March,’ he said. ‘Which leaves one question sticking out, when is the war going to end?’
This was late September 1944: we all agreed that there was no chance of an end that year. The intelligence teams in Germany were reporting that the Germans had got nowhere with their pile — but Luke and others at Barford found it hard to credit.
‘What we can do, so can they,’ said Luke. ‘Which is one reason why I want to whip that plutonium out. It would be too damn silly if they lifted this one out of the bag before us.’
‘What are the other reasons?’
Luke said quietly: ‘To tell you the truth, Lewis, I’d rather we got it first — so that we should have some influence in case any maniac wants to use the damned thing.’
It was the first time I had heard Luke talk about anyone using the bomb.
‘That is a point,’ said Martin.
‘But it isn’t the real point,’ said Luke, his face open and truculent once more. ‘Let’s come clean with you, Lewis. That’s a very good reason, but it isn’t the real reason, and you both know that as well as I do. The real reason is just that I can’t bear not to come in first.’
They could not touch the rods before March 1st; what was the earliest possible date to possess the plutonium?
Martin said: ‘The operative word is “possible”.’
Luke said: ‘I’ll get that stuff out in six weeks from March 1st if it’s the last thing I do.’
Martin said: ‘It may be.’
‘What is the matter?’ I said.
Luke and Martin looked at each other.
‘There are some hazards,’ said Luke.
That was the term they used for physical danger. Luke went on being frank. The ‘hazards’ might be formidable. No one knew much about handling plutonium; it might well have obscure toxic properties. There would not be time to test each step for safety, they might expose themselves to illness: conceivably grave illness, or worse.
‘Is that fair?’ Luke said to Martin, when he had finished.
‘Quite fair,’ said Martin.
There was a silence, which Martin broke: ‘I agree with you,’ he said, speaking straight to Luke. ‘There are good reasons for pushing ahead.’
‘I’m glad you admit it at last, anyway,’ said Luke.
‘I also agree that we’ve got to take certain hazards,’ said Martin. ‘I’m not happy about it, but I’m prepared to take a few modest risks. I don’t think, though, that I’m prepared to take the risks you are. I don’t believe the reasons justify them.’
‘They’re ninety per cent conclusive,’ said Luke.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Martin.
‘I haven’t thought it out yet,’ said Luke. ‘I must get it clear with myself where I stand about the risks. But I think I shall take them.’
‘You’re not the only person involved,’ said Martin.
‘Look here,’ Luke said, ‘this is going to be like walking blindfold, and I am not beginning to answer for anyone but myself’.’
Some of this repartee sounded as though they were repeating the morning’s argument, but, for a few moments past, they had seemed surprised by each other. Martin’s voice was sharp: ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that I can’t ask any of our chaps to put their hands inside the blasted stew,’ Luke replied. ‘If anyone is going to dabble in chemistry with the lid off it’s me.’
‘Just before Lewis arrived,’ said Martin, on his side producing something new, ‘someone was waiting to volunteer.’
‘Who?’
‘Sawbridge.’
‘Good for him,’ said Luke, ‘but I can’t let him.’
‘Yes, I’m quite sure,’ said Martin slowly, ‘we can’t ask any of the others, or even let them volunteer.’
Luke’s face was flushed; his tone was quiet and sincere. ‘I’m not even asking you,’ he said.
Martin considered, rubbing the back of his forefinger across his lip. He was steady with the well-being of success; but he was also resentful, pinched with shame, as a prudent man is on being rushed by a leader much braver than himself.
‘I wish I could let you risk it by yourself,’ said Martin. ‘If I thought it was quite justified, I think I might.’
‘I’d rather do it myself,’ said Luke.
‘It may not be possible to let you.’
Suddenly Luke jumped down from the desk.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s no need to make the decision yet awhile. It’s something that we should be fools to settle until we can look at it in cold blood.’
‘If you ask me,’ said Martin, rubbing his forefinger across his lip again, ‘I’m afraid the decision is already made.’
The decision was, in fact, already made. There were months in which to draw back, but no one suggested that Luke could or would. Even to those who disliked and envied him, he gave an impression of simple physical courage; it was the one virtue which, like any other group of men, the Barford scientists uncritically admired.
In those months, he received more respect than ever before.
‘Perhaps we ought to be doing something for Luke,’ I heard a rotund voice say in the Athenaeum. That meant, give him a decoration: he was passing into the ranks of solid respectable men.
Just about the same time, people at Barford noticed that Drawbell, whose Christian name no one had been known to utter, whose friends called him ‘C F’, had begun to sign himself with a large, plain, mesomorphic ‘Cyril Drawbell’.
‘A bad case of knight starvation,’ said someone. It was the kind of joke the scientists did not get tired of.
It was true that Drawbell spent many days in London, calling on Rose and the new Minister; no longer non-committal, but instead proclaiming ‘the success of our Barford policy’. With urgency he told Rose one day that the ‘team’ deserved some public credit. Rose, who had decided not to meet him halfway, responded with even more than his usual civility.
Drawbell tried his set of personal arts against Rose’s politeness, but could not get the response he was playing for. Yes, it was wonderfully exciting, yes, the Minister was well informed of the history of the project, Rose went on mellifluously, but gave no outright official praise to Drawbell, who, with the meeting inconclusive, returned with me to my room.
For once he looked dejected and tired, as though his vitality had sunk low. Suddenly he asked: ‘Eliot, do you hate this life?’ He meant the life of officials.
‘Sometimes I hate it,’ said Drawbell. He stared at me.
‘If anyone asked my reason for existence, what should I tell them?’ I tried to cheer him up, but he interrupted me: ‘I’m just a pedlar of other men’s dreams.’
Like many tricky men, he was wishing his character were simpler. He wished he were not self-seeking. But he did not exude the pathos one often finds in tricky men; his nature was harder than most of theirs. He was angry with himself, still more angry with Rose, and he took it out of me as Rose’s proxy.
At Barford he made one intervention, after trying to persuade Luke and Martin to go slow until the health risks were worked out. The only thing he had a right to insist on, he said, was this: they must not both expose themselves to danger at the same time. If one should happen to be laid out, the other must be left intact. It was reasonable and the two of them promised it.
All that winter they were experimenting with protective clothing, with various kinds of divers’ suits in order to do chemistry-at-a-distance. Sawbridge, who was still asserting his claim to take part, had developed a set of instruments for manipulating the rods out of sight.
Martin spent many of his evenings reading case histories of radiation illness. It seemed probable, he decided, that they would find, as well as the radiation hazards, that plutonium was also a chemical poison.
Luke scoffed at what he called Martin’s ‘visits to the morgue’. To him, if you could do nothing about a danger, it was best to forget it. But Martin’s attitude was the exact opposite; if he were going to face a danger, he wanted to live with it beforehand. If he could become familiar in advance with the radioactive pathologies, he could more easily bear the moment of test. His clinical researches, which seemed to the others morbid, stiffened his resolve. With nothing like Luke’s or Sawbridge’s bravery of the fibres, Martin was training himself to face the March experiments with resignation.
Meanwhile, he continued to enjoy his taste of success. He was getting rather more than the credit due to Luke’s right-hand man; scientific elder statesmen, civil servants like Rose, found him comfortable to talk to, after Luke; he was cagey in speech, he showed some respect for etiquette, he had good manners; they were glad when he attended London committees instead of his chief, and on those visits he was taken to the Athenaeum more frequently than Luke had ever been.
He liked it. He seemed to view this official life with detachment, but really he saw it through a magnifying glass. I thought to myself that those like Martin, who were born worthy, were always half taken in by the world.
Even with March 1st coming on him, he still kept his satisfaction at having, in a modest sense, ‘arrived’. In January, he and Irene, when they came to London for a week’s leave, stood me a celebratory dinner. They had borrowed a flat in the first stretch of the Bayswater Road, just opposite the Albion Gate; it was still a luxury to let light stream out across the pavements, striking blue that night from the unswept snow. As we looked out, the middle of the road was dark, for the street lamps had not yet been lit.
We were saying (it was the kind of commonplace that we did not want to escape, since we were so content) how time had slipped by unnoticed, how the street lamps had now been dark for five and a half years. It was six years since Irene and I first met in my old rooms in Cambridge.
‘Too long for you, dear?’ said Irene to me, mechanically asking for approval.
‘You won’t go back there, will you?’ said Martin to me.
I shook my head: we were each talking at random, the past and future both seemed close.
‘You’ll have to make your plans, this can’t last much longer,’ said Martin. We all knew that the war must soon end; as he spoke, Irene started to reply, but stopped herself, her eyes restive.
Martin asked her to bring in the child to say goodnight. As she carried him in he stayed quiet, and Martin took him in his arms. Their glances met, the child’s a model of the man’s, fixed, hard, transparently bright; then, with a grave expression, the child turned in to his father’s shoulder.
Martin’s glance did not move from the child’s head.
‘We must make some plans for you too,’ he said. ‘I’ve told you, we’ve made one or two plans for you already.’
It was after dinner that Martin spoke with an openness that came out of the blue, that I had not heard more than twice in his life. He was smoking a cigar, emblem of the celebration that night, but he had drunk little and was cold sober. He had just been mentioning Hector Rose, for whom perversely he had taken a liking — and I teased him about his friends at court.
Martin smiled and without any preliminary said: ‘It’s nice to have a little confidence.’
He said it simply, naturally, and with gratification.
‘I never had enough,’ he said to me.
Perhaps it was true, I was thinking: in his struggle to be a scientist, to live in the same air as Mounteney or Luke, he had never believed in himself.
He was still speaking to me: ‘I got a bad start.’
‘We both did,’ I said.
‘Mine was worse.’
‘How?’
He said: ‘You always overshadowed me, you know.’
It was so unexpected that I could not have left it there, but he went on: ‘This has done me good.’
I was just beginning to speak when Irene, who had been biting back a worry all the evening, could keep quiet no longer. She cried: ‘Then why don’t you sit tight when you’ve got it?’
‘That’s not so easy,’ said Martin.
‘Just when we’re getting everything we wanted, you’re ready to throw it away.’
He said to her: ‘We’ve talked this out, haven’t we?’
‘I can’t let you go on with this madness. Do you expect me just to sit quiet and wait for the end of the war to stop you? I suppose if the war does end you will have a glimmer of sense?’
‘If the war ended there wouldn’t be any necessity to go so fast,’ he said, curiously stiff. His smile had an edge to it: ‘I shouldn’t be sorry if the necessity didn’t arise.’
‘You know you’re frightened.’
‘I am extremely frightened,’ said Martin.
‘Then why don’t you think of yourself?’
‘I’ve told you.’
What had he told her? Probably the coldest motive — that, if he did not follow Luke’s lead, he would lose the ground he had won.
‘Why don’t you think of me?’
‘I’ve told you that, too.’
Her face puckered, she said: ‘All you’ve done is to think of Lewis (the baby). And I don’t know whether you believe it’s enough just to insure yourself for him. Do you believe it really matters whether he goes to the sort of school that you two didn’t go to?’
For the first time, Martin’s tone showed pain. He said: ‘I wish I could do more for him.’
Suddenly she switched off — to begin with it was so jarring that one’s flesh crept — into a wail for her life in London before her marriage. Though she was wailing for past love affairs, her manner was fervid, almost jaunty; she was talking of a taxi drive in the snow. I had a vivid picture of a girl going hot-faced on a night like this across the Park to a man’s flat. I believed, though she was just delicate enough not to mention the name, that she was describing her first meeting with Hankins, and that she was using private words so that Martin should know it. Bitterly she was provoking his jealousy. To an extent she succeeded, for neither then nor later was he unmoved by the sound of Hankins’ name.
As I listened, I thought I must do like other friends of his, and finish with her. Then I saw the look in her eyes — it was not lust, it was not malice, it was a plea. She had no self-control, she would always be strident — but this was the only way she knew to beg him to be as he used to be.
All of a sudden, I understood a little. I could hear her ‘I am defeated’ in my flat that night last year which, if it had led one to think that she was leaving Martin, was totally misleading. It was he before whom she felt defeat. I could hear the tone in which, ten minutes later, she had pressed him about the child. Their marriage was changing, in the sense that marriages which start with their disparities often do; the balance of power was altering; their marriage was changing, and she was beating about, lost, bewildered, frightened, trying to keep it in its old state, which to her was precious.
Perhaps it was that the birth of the child had, as Hanna Puchwein had foreseen, disturbed the bond between them. But if so, it had disturbed it in the diametrically opposite direction from that which Hanna had so shrewdly prophesied. It was Martin who was freer, not Irene.
It seemed possible that the birth of the child had removed or weakened one strand in his love for her. He still had love for her, but the protective part, so powerful in him, so much a part of his whole acceptance of her antics, had been diverted to another. Hearing him speak to his son that evening, or even hearing him, speak to her about his son, I felt — and now I knew she felt it also — that all his protective love had gone in love for the child. He would be too anxious about his son, I thought, he would care too much, live too much in him — just as I had at times lived too much in Martin,
So, although he had much feeling left for Irene, he no longer felt driven to look after her. All that was gone; he wanted her to be happy; in his meticulous fashion he had made arrangements for her future in case, in the March experiments, he should be incapacitated or killed; but when he thought of the danger, both of what he might lose and those who might miss him, his only fear that counted alongside his own animal fear was for the child.
While Irene, who when he loved her passionately and protectively had wanted to get away from the protective clutch, now wished it back. She wished him to think first of her, she was anxious about him with all the hungers of vanity, self-esteem, habit, anything that makes us want someone who has drawn into himself.
With another switch, she began asking, with a nagging insistence, about, the programme for March.
‘This is supposed to be a celebration,’ said Martin.
She nagged on. As both she and I knew, the date for the first dissolving of the rods had been put back from March 1st to March 10th.
‘That’s all right,’ she said, ‘but which of you is going to make a fool of himself first?’
‘Unless anyone insists, which won’t be me, I suppose we might have to toss up for it.’
‘Have you settled that?’ she cried.
He shook his head. ‘I haven’t spoken to Walter Luke about it recently.’
It was the flat truth.
Wildly she turned to me. I was her last hope. Could not I make him behave decently?
I knew that it was no use. Both he and I were behaving with consideration for each other, but any authority I had had was worn away. For me to interfere in his life again would be too much of a risk. I knew it, and so did he. I had to accept that it was not only marriage relations which changed.
Although none of us knew it at the time. Luke and Martin did not toss up. Even they themselves had not settled, until March was on them, which should ‘go first’: and how they settled it, they kept secret. It was long afterwards that I found out what had happened.
Martin had been as good as his word, no better, no worse. With his feeling for precision and formality, he had actually written Luke a note a week before the experiment, suggesting that they tossed up, defining what the toss should mean — heads Martin went first, tails Luke. Luke would not have it. Swearing at getting a letter from Martin whom he saw every day, he said that the extraction was his idea, his ‘bit of nonsense’, and the least he could do was have the ‘first sniff’.
Luke got his way. Martin did not pretend to himself that he was sorry to be overruled.
The results of his being overruled came so fast that even at Barford, much more so in London, they were hard to follow. First Luke decided that he could not begin the experiment without another pair of hands; after his and Martin’s arrangement with the Superintendent, which meant that Martin was excluded, they had to give Sawbridge his wish.
During the last waiting period, Luke had had a ‘hot’ laboratory built, rather like a giant caricature of a school laboratory, in which, instead of dissolving bits of iron in beakers under their noses, they had a stainless steel pot surrounded by walls of concrete into which they dropped rods of metal that they never dared to see. In each section of the hot laboratory were bell pushes, as though it were a bath arranged for a paralysed invalid who for safety was in need of a bell within inches of his head.
Luke and Sawbridge went alone into the hot laboratory on a morning in March. The next that Martin heard, just three hours later, was the sound of the bell. That same evening I received news that Luke and Sawbridge were both seriously ill. Luke much the worse. The doctors would have said not fatally, if they had known more of the pathology of radiation illness. So far, they looked like cases of severe sunstroke. It might be wise for their friends to be within reach.
Sawbridge had carried Luke away from the rods, and it was Sawbridge who had pushed the bell. The irony was, they had been knocked out by a sheer accident. They had got safely through the opening of the aluminium cans, in which the rods were taken from the pile; the cans had been stripped off under ten feet of water. Then something ‘silly’ happened, as Sawbridge said, which no one could have provided against. A container cracked. Luke went down, and Sawbridge — a matter of minutes afterwards.
The next day’s news was hopeful. Sawbridge seemed scarcely ill, and was a bad patient; Luke was able to talk about the changes they could make in the hot laboratory, before he or Martin had ‘another go’.
They went on like this for several days, without anything the doctors could call a symptom. Several times Luke wanted them to let him out of bed. Eight days after the stroke, he broke out: ‘What is the matter with me?’ Though he could not explain how, he felt physically uneasy; soon he was said to be low-spirited, a description which shocked anyone who knew him. He was restlessly tired, even as he lay in bed.
Within three more days he was ill, though no one had seen the disease before. His temperature went up; he was vomiting, he had diarrhoea, blood spots were forming under his skin; the count of his white blood cells had gone steeply down. In two more days, he was bleeding inside the mouth.
Sawbridge escaped some of the malaise, and the blood spots had not formed. Otherwise his condition seemed a milder variant of the same disease. I was ready to go to Barford at short notice to visit Luke, but during those days he was so depressed that he only wanted to be alone. Once a day he saw his wife; he sent for Martin but spoke very little when he came; he tried to give some instructions, but they were not intelligible. His chief comfort seemed to be in following the scientific observations of his illness. He and Sawbridge had been moved into a special ward at the establishment hospital; not only the Barford doctors, but others studying the clinical effects of radiation watched each measurement. There was a mutter from Luke’s sickbed which spread round Barford: ‘The only thing they (the doctors) still don’t know is whether to label mine a lethal dose or only near lethal.’
Mounteney told me that much, one afternoon in my office. More physically imaginative than most men, Mounteney was enraged at the thought of Luke’s illness. His eyes burnt more deeply in their sockets, his face looked more than ever Savonarola-like.
‘It oughtn’t to have been let happen, Eliot,’ he said. ‘It oughtn’t to have happened to anyone, let alone a man we can’t spare. Some of you people ought to have realized that he’s one of the men we can’t spare.’
Although his distress was genuine, it was like him to turn it into an attack. Somehow he implied that, instead of Luke being ill, Whitehall officials ought to be. But, as the afternoon went on, he became gentler though more harassed.
‘I should like anyone who’s ever talked about using the nuclear bomb to have a look at Luke now,’ he said.
I was thinking of that night in Stratford, which now seemed far away and tranquil, when Martin fed the swans.
‘It would teach them what it means. If ever a nuclear bomb went off, this is exactly what would happen to the people it didn’t kill straight off.’ He added: ‘There are enough diseases in the world, Eliot. It’s no business of science to produce a new one.’
That visit from Mounteney took place three weeks after Luke and Sawbridge were pulled out of the hot laboratory. In another few days — E + 29, as the scientists called it in the jargon of the day, meaning twenty-nine days after the exposure — Luke was said to be brighter, the bleeding had lessened. It might only be an intermission, but at least he was glad of people at his bedside.
Although I arrived in Barford the day I got that message, I was not allowed in the ward until the following morning. And, just as I was going inside, Mrs Drawbell, watching from the nurses’ anteroom, intercepted me. Her husband detested Luke; when he was healthy she herself had never shown any interest in him; but now — now there was a chance to nurse. Triumphantly she had argued with Nora Luke. Nora had a piece of mathematical work to finish: anyone could do part-time nursing, only Nora could complete that paper. The wives who had no careers of their own criticized Nora, but it was Mrs Drawbell who became installed as nurse.
‘You mustn’t tire him, Mr Eliot,’ she said accusingly. She (Nora Luke) was already in the ward, Mrs Drawbell said. She went on, stern and obscurely contented: ‘They used to be such fine strong men!’
I had not heard her so articulate. She said: ‘It’s a case of the wheel of fortune.’
The first time I heard Luke’s voice, it sounded husky but loud and defiant. I was only just inside the door; the ward was small, with a screen between the two beds, Sawbridge’s in the shade and further from the window. The light spring sunshine fell across Nora sitting by the other bed, but I could not see Luke’s face.
‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you, Lewis,’ he said.
It was the kind of greeting that I used to expect from him. He went on: ‘We must have more bods.’
‘Bods’ meant bodies, people, any kind of staff: scientists were bods, so were floor cleaners, but as a rule Luke used the words in demanding more scientists.
I felt better, hearing him so truculent — until I noticed Nora’s expression. At a first glance, she had looked, not cheerful, certainly, but settled; it was the set tender expression one sees in many wives by a husband’s sick-bed, but that some would have been surprised to see in Nora. But, as Luke shouted at me, pretending to be his old rude, resilient self, that expression changed on the instant to nothing but pain.
As I moved out of the sunlight I saw Luke. For a moment I remembered him as I had first met him, in the combination room of our college, when he was being inspected as a fellowship candidate ten years before. Then he had been ruddy, well fleshed, muscular, brimming with a young man’s vigour — and (it seemed strange to remember now) passionately self-effacing in his desire to get on. Now he was pale, not with an ordinary pallor but as though drained of blood; he was emaciated, so that his cheeks fell in and his neck was like an old man’s; there were two ulcers by the left-hand corner of his mouth; bald patches shone through the hair on the top of his head, as in an attack of alopecia.
But these changes were nothing beside the others. I said, answering his attempt to talk business: ‘We’ll go into that any time you like. You’ll get all the people you want.’
Luke stared at me, trying to concentrate.
‘I can’t think what we want,’ he said.
He added, in a sad, exhausted tone: ‘You’d better settle it all with Martin. I am a bit out of touch.’
He could not get used to the depression. Into his sanguine nature it seemed to grow, as though it was seeping his spirits away; he had never had to struggle against a mood before, much less to feel that he was losing the struggle.
Propped up by his pillows, his back had gone limp. His eyes did not focus on Nora or me nor on the trees in the hospital garden.
I said, hearing my voice over-hearty as though he were deaf: ‘You’ll soon get in touch again. It won’t take you a week, when you get out of here.’
Luke replied: ‘I may not be good for much when I get out of here.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said.
‘Are you thinking of that again?’ said Nora.
‘What is it?’ I said.
‘He’s worried that he might be sterile,’ said Nora.
Luke did not deny it.
‘Are you having that old jag again?’ said his wife.
‘The dose must have been just about big enough,’ he said blankly, as though he had nothing new to say.
‘I’ve told you,’ said Nora, ‘as soon as the doctors say yes we’ll make them have a look. I shall be very much surprised if anything is wrong.’
With the obstinacy of the miserable, Luke shook his head.
‘I told you that if by any miracle there is anything wrong, which I don’t credit for a minute, well, it doesn’t matter very much,’ said Nora. ‘We’ve got our two. We never wanted any more.’
She sounded tough, robust, maternal.
Luke lay quiet, his face so drawn with illness that one could not read it.
I tried to change the subject, but Nora knew him better and had watched beside him longer.
She said suddenly: ‘You’re thinking something worse, aren’t you?’
Very slightly, he inclined his head.
‘Which one is it?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘You’d better say,’ she said.
‘There must be a chance,’ he said, ‘that some of this stuff will settle in the bone.’
There was a silence. Nora said: ‘I wish I could tell you there wasn’t a chance. But no one knows one way or the other, No one can possibly know.’
Luke said: ‘If I get through this bout, I shall have that hanging over me.’
He lay there, imagining the disease that might lie ahead of him. Nora sat beside him, settled and patient, without speaking. Sawbridge coughed, over by the wall, and then the room stayed so quiet that I could hear a match struck outside. We were still silent when Mrs Drawbell entered. Martin had come to visit Dr Luke; only two people were allowed in the ward at a time; when one of us left, Martin could take his place. Quickly Nora got up. She would be back tomorrow, whereas this was my only time with Luke. I thought that she was, like anyone watching another’s irremovable sadness, glad to go.
With a glance towards Sawbridge, Martin walked across the floor towards Luke’s bed. As he came, it struck me — it was strange to notice such a thing for the first time — that his feet turned out, more than one would expect in a good player of games. He looked young, erect, and well. With bright, hard eyes he scrutinized Luke, but his voice was gentle as he asked: ‘How are you?’
‘Not so good,’ replied Luke from a long way off.
‘You seem a bit better than when I saw you last.’
‘I wish I believed it,’ said Luke.
Martin went on to inquire about the symptoms — the hair falling out, the ulcers, the bleeding.
‘That (the bleeding) may have dropped off a bit,’ said Luke.
‘That’s very important,’ Martin said. ‘Don’t you see how important it is?’ He was easier with illness than I was, ready to scold as well as to be gentle. But after he had learned about the symptoms — he was so thorough that I longed for him to stop — he could not persuade Luke to talk any more than Nora or I could. Luke lay still and we could not reach the thoughts behind his eyes.
Martin gave me a glance, for once tentative and lost. He said quietly to Luke: ‘We’re tiring you a bit. We’ll have a word with Sawbridge over there.’
Luke did not reply, as Martin, with me following, tiptoed over to the other bed.
‘I’m not asleep,’ said Sawbridge, in a scornful and unwelcoming tone. We stood by the bed and looked down on him; his skin in health had its thick nordic pallor, and the transformation was not as shocking as in Luke; but the bald patches of scalp shone through, his eyes were filmed over, half opaque. When Martin inquired about him, he said: ‘I’m all right.’
Martin was reading the charts — white blood counts, red blood counts, temperature — over the bed head.
‘Never mind that,’ said Sawbridge, ‘I tell you, I’m all right.’
‘The figures look encouraging,’ said Martin.
‘I’ve never been as bad as he was—’ Sawbridge inclined a heavy eye towards Luke’s bed.
‘We’ve been worried about you, all the same.’
‘There was no need.’ Sawbridge said it with anger — and suddenly, under the shroud of illness, under the familiar loutishness, I felt his bitter pride. He did not want to admit that he was ill or afraid; he had heard the fears that Luke let fall, he could not help but share them; but neither to the doctors nor his relatives, certainly not to his fellow sufferer or to us, would he give a sign.
It was a kind of masculine pride that did not make him more endearing, I was thinking; in fact that it made him more raw and forbidding; it had no style. Until this accident I had heard little of him from Martin. No one had mentioned the security inquiries, which I assumed had come to nothing; the little that Martin said had not been friendly, and at the bedside he was still put off. But he managed to keep, what Sawbridge could not have borne, all pity out of his voice.
Of the three in the ward, the two invalids and Martin, Luke and Sawbridge were beyond comparison the braver men. Like many brave men, they did not bear a grudge against the timid. But, like many ill men, they resented the well. Sawbridge was angry with Martin, and with me also, for being able to walk upright in the sun.
Martin could feel it, but he would not let silence fall. Both he and Sawbridge cultivated an amateur interest in botany, and he mentioned flowers that he had seen on his way to the hospital.
‘There’s a saxifrage in the bottom hedge,’ he said.
‘Is there?’
‘It seems early, but there’s one spire out on the flowering chestnut.’
Then Sawbridge broke out, slowly, methodically, not hysterically but with a curious impersonal anger, swearing at the flowering chestnut. The swearwords of the midland streets ground into the room, each word followed by the innocent tree, ‘—the flowering chestnut.’ The swearing went on and on. Strangely, it did not sound as though Sawbridge were losing his head. It did not even sound as though he were trying to keep his courage up. Somehow it came, certainly to me, as the voice of a man cursing his fate, dislikeable, but quite undefeated.
It must have come to Luke so, for during a break in Sawbridge’s machine-like swearing, there sounded a husky whisper from the other bed.
‘Bugger the flowering chestnut,’ whispered Luke. Somehow the younger man’s brand of courage had tightened his.
We all listened to him, and soon Sawbridge’s voice stopped, while Martin stood between the beds. Luke’s face had changed from blankness to pain, but there was sight in his eyes. He spoke fast and rationally, lying there supine, calling on his fibres for an effort they could scarcely make, calling on the will behind his fibres.
‘How fast are you getting on with the new bay?’ he croaked to Martin.
After a moment’s stupefaction, Martin replied as coolly as though they were in the hangar.
‘How long are you going to take about it?’ said Luke. ‘Good Christ, how long?’
‘The new hot laboratory,’ said Martin, ‘should be ready by June.’
‘It’s too long.’
There was a voice from Sawbridge’s bed. ‘It’s absolutely essential not to let the others get years ahead.’
Luke strained himself to the effort. He and Martin, with one or two interruptions from Sawbridge, talked sharp and quick, words coming out like ‘hazard points’, ‘extracts’, ‘cupferron’.
‘By the end of June at the outside, we must start again,’ said Luke. Hoarsely he went on:
‘I expect it will have to be you this time.’
‘Yes,’ said Martin. He had been studying Luke and Sawbridge with a clinical curiosity that unnerved me, because he wanted to know what might happen to himself. But, as Luke made his effort, as he called on an ultimate reserve of hope when his body had none, for an end which to them all seemed at that moment as simple as getting first to the top of a mountain, Martin lost the last peg of his detachment.
It was not that he felt fonder of Luke or overwhelmed with sorrow for him; just then none of these three men was interested in another; there was something to do, that was all; in this they were one.
Luke was tired out, but as we stood over the bed, he still kept up a harsh whisper.
‘We must have more bods. Tell them we must have more bods.’
I was in suspense during the last days of the German war. The scientific teams in Germany had reported, months before, that the Germans had got nowhere with their pile; but now, when one could count days to the surrender, I kept thinking could there have been one hidden? In terms of reason, I told myself, it was impossible, it was superstitious nonsense — but during those last few days I became nervous when I heard an aircraft.
It was not until the formal end that I could go to my flat and sleep twelve hours in anticlimax and relief. It was because the anticlimax stayed with me, because I did not want to share the sadness of the first weeks of peace, that I saw nothing of my Barford friends that May. Later I wished that I had heard them talk, immediately the German war finished. All I heard in fact was that the new laboratories were being built ready for the second attempt in June: that Sawbridge was a good deal better, and that Luke was now definitely expected to live.
Then came the morning of Pearson’s news.
The rain had just stopped; through the windows of Rose’s room drifted the smell of wet leaves from the Park. It was right at the end of May, and the kind of dark warm morning which brought back days of childhood, waiting at the county ground for the umpires to come out again. Instead, Rose was meeting his five senior colleagues on a problem of reconstruction — ‘an untidy one’, he said. We were getting towards the end of the morning, when his personal assistant brought in a note for Rose. He read it, and passed it to me. It said:
Dr Pearson has just arrived back from Los Alamos, and says he wants to see the Perm Sec at once. He says it can’t wait.
Rose glanced at me under his lids. Himself the most ceremonious of men in dealing with others’ dignity, he never stood on his own.
He said: ‘I really am most apologetic, but this is something I probably ought to attend to, and perhaps we’ve got nearly as far as we can go today. I do apologize.’ He asked me to stay, and, when the others had left, Rose and I sat looking out over the rain-washed trees. Just once Rose, who did not spare time for useless speculation, remarked: ‘I wonder if there really is anything in the wind, or whether this man has just dropped in to pass the time of day.’
As soon as the girl brought Pearson in, Rose was on his feet, bowing, showing Pearson the armchair opposite mine, hoping that he had had a pleasant journey.
‘As pleasant as flying the Atlantic in bumpy weather can be,’ said Pearson.
‘When did you actually arrive?’
‘I wanted to get rid of this commission’ (‘commission’ was one of their formal words, and simply meant that he had been asked to give news by word of mouth), ‘so I came straight here.’
‘That was very, very good of you, Dr Pearson, and I can’t tell you how extremely grateful I am. I do hope you’re not too tired?’
‘As tired as I want to be, thanks. I shan’t be sorry to sleep in my own bed tonight,’
Rose, unwearying in politeness, said: ‘We are grateful to you for many other reasons, of course, Dr Pearson. We have heard the most glowing accounts of you from the American authorities. They told us that you’ve been of inestimable value, and it’s very nice to have you and some of our other friends putting up our stock over there. I do congratulate you and thank you.’
It was all true. Pearson had been a great success in America, working on the actual fixing mechanism of the bomb.
‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ he said, with a diffidence that was awkward and genuine, but lay on top of his lazy, invulnerable confidence.
‘You may not know, but we do,’ said Hector Rose. Then lightly: ‘You said you had a little business for us, did you?’
Pearson did not reply at once but glanced edgewise through his spectacles at me. He said to Rose: ‘I’ve got a piece of information that I am to give you.’
‘Yes, Dr Pearson,’ said Rose.
‘I’ve no authority to give it to anyone else,’ said Pearson.
Rose was considering.
‘I take it,’ he said, ‘this information is to go to the committee?’
‘The sooner the better,’ said Pearson.
‘Then I can authorize you to speak in front of Eliot, with many thanks for your precautions. Because you see, Dr Pearson, Eliot is part of the secretariat of the committee, and in any case I should have to pass him this information at once.’
Pearson tilted back his head. He did not care for me, but that was not moving him; he was a rigid, literal, security-minded man. On the other hand, he was a practical one.
‘If Eliot’s got to channel it through the committee, he might as well know now as after lunch, I suppose,’ he said,
‘That would be my view,’ said Hector Rose.
‘As long as it’s understood that this is a time when there mustn’t be one word out of school. I’m not authorized to speak to anyone at Barford, and neither are you. This is for the committee and no one else in this country.’
‘We take that point, Dr Pearson.’ Rose inclined his head.
‘Oh, well then,’ said Pearson, in a flat casual tone, ‘we’ve got a bomb.’
He announced it as though it were an off-hand matter of fact, as though he were informing two people, neither of whom he thought much of, that he had bought a new house.
Rose’s first reply was just as flat.
‘Have you indeed?’ he said. Then he recovered himself: ‘I really must congratulate you and our American colleagues. Most warmly.’
‘We’re just putting the final touches to the hardware,’ said Pearson. ‘It’s nearly ready for delivery.’
Rose looked from Pearson’s face, pale from travel but relaxed, out to the soft, dank, muggy morning. Under the low sky the grass shone with a brilliant, an almost artificial sheen.
‘It really is a remarkable thought,’ said Rose.
‘I always expected we should get it,’ said Pearson.
I broke in: ‘What happens now?’
‘Oh, before we make many more, there are lots of loose ends to tie up,’ said Pearson.
I said: ‘I didn’t mean that. What happens to the bombs that do exist?’
Pearson pushed up his spectacles.
‘They’re going to explode one in the desert soon,’ he said, ‘just to see if it goes off all right.’
‘And the others?’
‘I didn’t have much to do with the military,’ he said, in the same offended tone, ‘but there’s some talk they’ll try one on the Japs.’
I said: ‘How do the scientists over there take that?’
‘Some of them are getting a bit restive.’ He might not have heard the feeling in my question, but he was not a fool, he knew what lay behind it. ‘Some of the people at Barford will get restive, too,’ he said. ‘That’s why they mustn’t hear until there’s proper authority for them to do so.’
It was no use arguing just then. Instead, I asked about friends of mine working on the American projects, O—, S—, Kurt Puchwein.
‘Puchwein moved from Chicago to Los Alamos,’ said Pearson. ‘He was said to have done a good job.’
He yawned, stretched his legs, and announced, ‘Oh, well, I think that’s all, I may as well be going.’
‘Thank you very, very much for coming here so promptly this morning,’ said Rose. ‘I’m immensely grateful to you, many, many, many thanks.’
When Pearson had shut the door, we heard his slow steps lolloping down the corridor. Rose was sitting with his arms folded on his desk, his glance meeting mine; we were each thinking out consequences, and some of our thoughts were the same.
‘I must say I’m sorry we didn’t get in first,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s clear to me that the Pearson man is right. This information is restricted to us and the committee, and that there’s nothing that we can usefully do at this juncture.’
‘When can we do anything?’
‘I think I know what’s on your mind,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
Rose said: ‘Now that the American party has produced this bomb, you’re thinking it’s obviously unreasonable for our people to break their necks trying to save a couple of months. I need hardly say that I agree with you. I propose to take it upon myself to prevent it happening.’ He added in a polite, harsh, uneasy tone: ‘Please don’t think I’m taking care of this arrangement for the sake of your brother. We simply want to avoid unnecessary waste, that’s all.’
I thanked him, uneasy in my turn. Even that morning, we could not be natural to each other. Curiously, although Rose had picked out and settled what was most likely to be worrying me, at that moment it happened to be taking second place.
‘It’s important,’ I broke out, ‘that the Barford people should know what we’ve just heard.’
‘Why is it important, Eliot?’ asked Rose in his coolest voice.
Watching me as I remained silent, he went on, sounding as competent as ever:
‘I think I can go some of the way with you. If there is any temptation to make a practical demonstration of this weapon — on the whole I shall believe that when I see it — then the scientists are likely to have their own views. In fact, they might have more influence with the soldiers and politicians than any of us would have. In that case, I suggest to you that two points arise: first, the scientists concerned won’t be listened to if they get the information through a security leakage; second, that there is every conceivable advantage in the scientists acting entirely by themselves. I put it to you that, even if you and I were free agents, which we’re very far from being, the balance of sense would be in favour of leaving it strictly to the scientists.’
I was looking at him, without being ready to say yes or no.
‘Mind you,’ said Rose, ‘I can appreciate the argument that it’s totally unreasonable for scientists to make a fuss at this stage. A good many people hold the perfectly tenable view that all weapons are scientific nowadays and you can’t draw a division between those we’ve already used and this new one. It’s arguable that any scientific hullabaloo on this affair would be a classical case of straining at the gnat and swallowing the camel.’
‘I can’t see it as quite so simple,’ I said.
I was thinking, this was what official people might come to. Rose was always one jump ahead of official opinion; that was why they called him a man of judgement. His judgement was never too far-sighted for solid men, it led them by a little but not too much, it never differed in kind from theirs.
Yet, as we sat together beside his desk, he gave me a heavy glance.
‘There are times, it seems to me,’ he said, ‘when events get too big for men.’
He said it awkwardly, almost stuttering, in nothing like his usual brisk tone; if I had taken the cue, we might have spoken off guard for once. Almost immediately he went on: ‘That may conceivably be the trouble with us all, if so, the only course that I can see is to play one’s particular game according to the rules.’
It was one of his rare moments of self-doubt, the sharpest I had seen in him. Neither then nor later did I know whether that morning he had any sense of the future.
He got up from his chair and looked out at the sky, so dark and even that one could not see the rim of any cloud.
‘At any rate,’ he said, ‘our first job is to call the committee at once. Perhaps you will be good enough to look after that?’
I said that I would do it first thing in the afternoon.
‘Many, many thanks.’ He put on his neat raincoat, his black trilby hat.
‘I suppose I can’t have the pleasure of giving you luncheon at the Athenaeum?’
It was not just his formal cordiality; the news had been a shock, and he wanted a companion — while I, after the same shock, wanted first of all to be alone.
The news rippled out. More scientists followed Pearson across. By the end of June, not only the Whitehall Committee, but the top men at Barford all knew that completed bombs were in existence: that the trial was fixed for the end of July: that there was a proposal, if the trial went according to plan, to use a bomb on a Japanese town. Of my acquaintances, perhaps thirty were in possession of those facts.
Among those I was closest to, the first responses were variegated. Several men of good will felt above all excitement and wonder. In the committees there was a whiff almost of intoxication; the other conquests of nature were small beside this one; we were within listening distance of the biggest material thing that human beings had done. Among people who had been flying throughout the war between America and England, who had been giving a hand on both sides and who had, like so many scientists, little national feeling, there was a flash of — later I did not wish to over-state it, but I thought the emotion was — awe; a not unpleasurable, a self-congratulatory awe.
In the first days of the news reaching London, I did not catch much political prevision. But I did hear someone say: ‘This will crack Russia wide open.’
At Barford, the response was, from the moment the news arrived, more complex. For Luke and Martin, it was a time of desolating disappointment, so that they had hours of that dull weight of rancour, of mindless, frustrating loss, that Scott and his party felt as, only a few miles away, they saw the ski marks of Amundsen’s party and then the black dot of the tent at the South Pole.
To Luke it seemed that he had wasted years of his life, and perhaps his health for good, just to have all snatched away within sight of the end. On the other hand, Martin found considerable comfort for himself. There were great consolations, he remarked, in reverting to being as timid as he chose. Beside that relief, the disappointment had an agreeable look, and he began to count his blessings.
But Martin, like others at Barford, showed one radical difference from those I met round committee tables, waiting for the news from America. They all heard the bomb might ‘conceivably’ or ‘according to military requirements’ be used on Japan. It was mentioned only as a possibility, and most people reacted much like Hector Rose; they did not believe it, or alternatively felt there was nothing they could do. ‘War is war’, someone said.
The Barford scientists were nothing like so resigned. Rumour of the bomb coming into action reached them late in June, and there was some sort of confirmation on July 3rd. From that day they took it seriously; like their elders on the committees, some believed that it could not happen, that the report was misjudged: but none of them was for sitting still. Some of the engineers, such as Pearson and Rudd, held off, but the leading scientists were unanimous. Drawbell tried to cajole them — it was not their business, he cried, it would do Barford harm — but they threw him over.
On July 4th they held a meeting in Luke’s hospital ward. How long had they got? The trial would not take place before July 20th, and American scientists had sent messages about a joint deputation. Was there a better way to stop it? How could they make themselves heard?
No one in London knew what they intended — and only those they trusted, such as Francis Getliffe and I, knew that they intended anything. All through that July, my information lagged days behind the events.
On July 5th I received a telephone call from my office: it was Emma Mounteney, whom I had known at Cambridge, but had scarcely had a word with since: she wanted to see me urgently, and had a confidential note for me. I was surprised that they should use her as a messenger, but asked her to come round at once. She entered, wearing her youthful, worn, cheeky smile, dressed in a summer frock and a pre-war picture hat. She slid a letter on to my blotting pad, and said: ‘Billet-doux for you.’
I was cross with her. I was even more cross when I saw that the envelope was addressed in Irene’s handwriting. As soon as I opened it, I saw that it had no connection with the scientists’ plans — it just said (so I gathered at the first glance) that she could not worry Martin when he was worried enough, that Hankins was still at her to pick up where they left off, would I explain as much to him as I safely could?
Unless I had seen Irene, that evening of our celebration in the Albion Gate flat, I should have wondered why she was brandishing bad behaviour to prove that she could be temporarily decent. There was no need for it; she could have turned Hankins down by letter (even if her story were true); she could have avoided this rackety fuss. The answer was that, once she felt part of Martin’s love had slipped away, she was losing her confidence: once you lost your confidence in a love relation, you made by instinct, not the right move, but the one furthest from being right.
She was trying to prove to Martin, through me, that she was thinking of his well-being. She was trying, in case the day came when she was going to be judged, to accumulate a little evidence to speak for her.
A few days later, as a result of Irene’s letter, I was giving dinner to Edgar Hankins. It was years since we had met, and at once he was exuding his own brand of interest, his bubbling malicious fun. He was getting fat now (he was five years older than I was), his fair hair had gone pepper-and-salt; as in the past, so that night, as soon as he came to my table in the restaurant, we enjoyed each other’s company. It was only when we parted that neither of us felt like meeting again.
Hearing him flatter me, recognizing that more than most men he raised the temperature of life, I had to remind myself that his literary personality contained little but seedy, dispirited, homesick despair. He was a literary journalist of the kind not uncommon in those years, who earned a professional income not so much by writing as through broadcasting, giving official lectures, advising publishers, being, as it were, high up in the civil service of literature.
We had a good many friends in common, and, sitting in a corner at the White Tower, we began to exchange gossip. Very soon we were talking intimately; I realized, finally, that part of Irene’s stories was true. There was no doubt about it; he could not get her out of his imagination, he was, despite his hesitations and comings-and-goings, in love with her.
‘It was only after she married that I realized her husband was your brother,’ he said.
‘That doesn’t make it easier to say what I’ve got to say,’ I said.
‘I don’t think that should make it any harder,’ said Hankins. He was apprehensive, but stayed considerate
‘I’d rather you told me,’ he said. Then, with the defiance of a man who is keeping his courage up: ‘But don’t if it’s embarrassing. If you don’t, I shall have to make her see me.’
I looked at him.
‘That is the trouble,’ I said.
‘Isn’t she going to see me?’
‘I’ve got to tell you that she can’t see you: that she asks you not to write: that she wants to stop communication between you, but can’t tell you why.’
‘Can you tell me why?’
For a moment he had the excitement, the excitement that is almost pleasure, of someone in touch with the person he loves, even if he is going to hear bad news. I thought how the phenomena of love did not lose their edge as one got older. Here was this middle-aged, experienced man feeling as he had felt at twenty. Perhaps it got harder to bear, that was all.
‘I can tell you the reason she gave me,’ I said. ‘My brother is in the middle of a piece of scientific politics. She says she’s not prepared to do anything that might put him off his stroke.’
Hankins’ face went heavy.
‘That’s not the real reason,’ he said. After a moment, he said: ‘There aren’t many reasons for not seeing someone you want to. What does it sound like to you?’
I shook my head.
He was too subtle a man to bluff.
‘All I can say is that she is speaking the truth—’
‘What on?’
‘There is a scientific struggle going on, and my brother is mixed up in it. I can’t tell you anything about it, except to say that she isn’t exaggerating.’
‘How do you know?’ He was the most inquisitive of men; even at that moment he could not resist the smell of a secret. I put him off, and he asked: ‘Is it important?’
‘Yes.’
Hankins’ interest faded, his head sank down, the flesh bulged under his chin.
‘It was futile, asking you whether it was important. What is important? If you were lying ill, and expected to die, what use is it if one of your scientific friends comes bounding up and says, “Old chap, I’ve got wonderful news! I’ve found a way — which won’t come into effect for a few years as a matter of fact — of prolonging the life of the human race”.’
A smile, malicious, fanciful, twisted his lips.
‘What is important? Is your brother’s piece of politics important? Is it important to know whether Irene is shouting goodbye or whether she’s just expecting me to press her?’ He continued to smile at me. ‘Would you consider that an important question, Lewis, or is it the most trivial one you’ve ever heard?’
For a fortnight after my dinner with Hankins there was no firm news from America. One rumour was, that the decision about using the bomb had been postponed. Among the people that I met, no one knew the truth, not ministers nor Hector Rose nor any of the scientists.
Late in July — from a record I could later place it as the morning of July 27th — Francis Getliffe entered my office.
He was a thin-faced, fine-looking man, with whom I had been friendly since we were both young. He was a good scientist, who had come into his own during the war. As he entered he gave a creased smile, but his face, as a young man’s high-strung and quixotic, had grown more closed. Now we usually did not speak to each other out of our immediate experience. In recent years, he had carried much responsibility, and I some; in public and in private we had each had to hide a good deal; we were becoming middle-aged.
Before he said anything to the point, he walked with his plunging stride across my room, from door to window, back again, back to the window. He made some small talk, staring down Whitehall, so that I could see his knave of diamonds profile. Then he turned full on me.
‘Look, Lewis,’ he said, ‘it might be useful if you came down to Barford with me, Can you make it?’
‘When?’
‘At once.’
I looked at my in-tray, then shook myself out of the neurosis of routine; Francis was not the man to invite one for a jaunt.
I nodded. ‘Yes, that’s all right.’
‘Good work,’ said Francis.
I asked: ‘Is anything new happening?’
‘Slightly,’ said Francis. He added: ‘We’ve just had a signal from New Mexico.’ That meant the trial.
‘It went off?’
‘Oh yes, it went off.’
Neither of us spoke, then I said: ‘What happens now?’
‘I wish I knew.’
He had telephoned the Barford scientists (who heard this kind of official news later than we did in the London offices) and they asked him to go down. As we were driven out of London, in Francis’ departmental car, along the Bayswater Road, I asked: ‘Why do they want me too?’
‘I don’t know that they do,’ Francis said. ‘But I thought you might help.’
‘Why?’
‘In case they try to do something silly. I don’t mind them doing something silly if it achieves the object — but I’m afraid they might do it just because there’s nothing else to do.’
The shabby streets, the peeling house fronts, shrank under the steady sun. In that wet and windy summer it was one of the few halcyon days — out in the country the hedges were still as though they were painted, over the river meadows the air quivered like a water mark.
Suddenly, after neither of us had spoken for some miles, Francis said: ‘They can’t be such fools.’
For an instant, I imagined he was still thinking of the Barford scientists, but he went on: ‘You can’t expect decency from any collection of people with power in their hands, but surely you can expect a modicum of sense.’
‘Have we seen much of that?’ I asked.
‘They can’t drop the bomb.’
The car drove on, past the unshaded fields. Francis went on to say that, even if we left moral judgements out, even then it was unthinkable for a sensible man to drop the bomb. Non-scientists never understood, he said, for how short a time you could keep a technical lead. Within five years any major country could make these bombs for itself. If we dropped them first.
At the establishment, which lay well ordered in the sunlight, by this time as neat, as hard, as a factory in a garden suburb, Francis left me in the room where we were to meet. It was a room in a red-brick range, a single storey high; between the ranges were lawns, lush after the weeks of rain, with standard roses each few yards looking like presentation bouquets wired by an unimaginative florist. I remained alone in the room, which was trim, hygienic, as the rest of the establishment had become, with a blackboard on the wall in a pitch pine frame. From the windows one saw the roses, the lawns, the next red-brick range, the roof of the new hot laboratory, all domesticated, all resting in the sun.
Martin was the first to join me; but before we had done more than greet each other, Hanna Puchwein followed him in. She came so quickly after him that she might have been keeping watch — and almost at once there was another constraint in the room.
‘Where have you been these days?’ she said to Martin. ‘You knew I wanted to see you.’
As she spoke, she realized that I was also there. She gave a smile, curiously tomboyish for anyone so careful of herself. I found Martin guiding the conversation, leading me so as not to mention her husband’s name. I could not tell whether he just guessed that she and Puchwein had finally parted.
Then I found him guiding the conversation in another sense.
‘What brings you down here, Lewis?’ she asked in a light tone.
Quickly, but as though indifferently, Martin replied for me:
‘Oh, just an ordinary visit from headquarters.’
‘I didn’t know we had much to visit, till you and Walter had got going again,’ she said. She said it with a toss of her head that made her seem both bad-tempered and young. In fact, she was standing the years better than any of us, with her small strong bones, her graceful Hamitic head.
‘I don’t think there is much to visit,’ said Martin, telling her it was no good going on.
‘Why are you wasting your time?’ she turned on me. But, as I was replying, she flashed out at Martin: ‘Do you really believe that no one has any idea what’s in the wind?’
‘No, I don’t believe that,’ he said, and in the same breath began to talk of what we should do the following day.
Hanna’s eyes filled with what seemed like tears of anger. Just for a second, as Mounteney and others entered the room and she left us, Martin glanced at me. He was frowning. Even when he had been snubbing her, he had sounded as though they had once been in each other’s confidence, to an extent which came as a surprise.
The room was noisy, as the scientists sat themselves at the desks, one or two banging the lids, like a rowdy class at school. Most of them wore open-necked shirts, one or two were in shorts.
It struck me that all the top scientists sat Barford were present, but none of the engineers. As an outsider, it had taken me years to understand this rift in technical society. To begin with, I had expected scientists and engineers to share the same response to life. In fact, the difference in the response between the physicists and engineers often seemed sharper than the difference between the engineers and such men as Hector Rose.
The engineers, the Rudds and Pearsons, the people who make the hardware, who used existing knowledge to make something go, were, in nine cases out of ten, conservatives in politics, acceptant of any régime in which they found themselves, interested in making their machine work, indifferent to long-term social guesses.
Whereas the physicists, whose whole intellectual life was spent in seeking new truths, found it uncongenial to stop seeking when they had a look at society. They were rebellious, questioning, protestant, curious for the future and unable to resist shaping it. The engineers buckled to their jobs and gave no trouble, in America, in Russia, in Germany; it was not from them, but from the scientists, that came heretics, forerunners, martyrs, traitors.
Luke was the last to arrive, a stick supporting him on one side and his wife on the other. If one had seen him near his worst, one no longer thought of him as ill, though the improvement made him look grotesque, for his hair had begun to grow again in tufts, shades fairer than the wings over his ears. With an attempt at jauntiness, he raised his stick before he sat down, while men asked him if he had heard details of the New Mexico explosion.
Luke shook his head.
‘All I know is that the bloody balloon went up all right.’
Someone said, with more personal sympathy than the rest: ‘It’s a pity it wasn’t yours.’
‘Ours ought to go a bit higher when it does go,’ replied Luke.
Francis Getliffe sat on a desk, looked down the small room, began to talk about reports from America — the argument was still going on, the scientists there were pressing the case against using the bomb, the military for; and all the statements for and against most of us knew by heart.
Then there was an interruption.
Mounteney leaned back, protruded his lean prow of a chin, and said, with unexpected formality: ‘Before we go on, I should like to know who invited L S Eliot to this meeting.’
‘I did,’ said Francis Getliffe. ‘I take it no one objects.’
‘I do,’ said Mounteney.
For a second, I thought it was a scientist’s joke, but Mounteney was continuing: ‘I understood that this was a meeting of scientists to find ways of stopping a misuse of science. We’ve got to stop the people who don’t understand science from making nonsense of everything we’ve said, and performing the greatest perversion of science that we’ve ever been threatened with. It’s the general class of people like Eliot who are trying to use the subject for a purpose none of us can tolerate, and I don’t see the point in having one of them join in this discussion. Not that I mean anything against L S Eliot, of course. I don’t suppose he personally would actually authorize using the fission bomb.’
It was only later that I remembered that he liked me, and that this was a triumph of impersonality.
Getliffe raised his voice. ‘We all know that Eliot thinks as we do. He also knows a great deal more than any of us about the government machines. That’s why he can be useful this afternoon.’
‘I don’t want anyone who knows anything about government machines,’ said Mounteney. ‘People who know about government machines all end up by doing what the machine wants, and that is the trouble we have got ourselves in today.’
Luke and Martin were exchanging glances, and Luke spoke.
‘We want Lewis Eliot in on this,’ he said.
‘Why?’ asked Mounteney.
‘Because you’re a wild man, Arthur, and he’s a cunning old dog.’
‘If you really do want him,’ said Mounteney, ‘I suppose I’m prepared to stay.’
‘I should think you are.’
‘But I still object in principle.’
Later, a good many scientists, not so wild as Mounteney, would have considered that in principle he was right.
Getliffe returned to the arguments in America. For weeks everyone in that room had thrashed them out.
Some of them gave an absolute no to the use of the bomb for reasons which were too instinctive to express. For any cause on earth, they could not bear to destroy hundreds of thousands of people at a go.
Many of them gave something near to an absolute no for reasons which, at root, were much the same; the fission bomb was the final product of scientific civilization; if it were used at once to destroy, neither science nor the civilization of which science was bone and fibre, would be free from guilt again.
Many, probably the majority, gave a conditional no with much the same feeling behind it: but if there were no other way of saving the war against Hitler, they would be prepared to drop the bomb. I believed that that was the position of Francis Getliffe; it was certainly Luke’s.
None of those attitudes were stated at this meeting. They had been agreed on long before, and they gave us much common ground. But those who answered with a conditional no could not dismiss the military counter argument out of hand. In America, so Getliffe said, those in favour of the bomb were saying: Our troops have got to invade Japan. This bomb will save our men’s lives; a soldier must do anything, however atrocious, if by doing so he could save one single life under his command.
As Getliffe said, that was a case which one had to respect. And it was the only case one could respect. Using the bomb to forestall the Russians or for any kind of diplomatic motive — that was beneath the human level.
Yet, if the dropping of a bomb could make the Japanese surrender, the knowledge that we possessed it might do the same?
‘Several of us,’ said Francis Getliffe, ‘had made a scheme, in case we had it before the end of the German war. Step one. Inform the enemy that the bomb was made, and give them enough proof. Step two. Drop one bomb where it will not kill people. Step three. If the enemy government will not budge, then’ — Getliffe had faced his own thoughts — ‘drop the next on a town.’
By this time, the meeting was in a state of deep emotion. If there is any sense or feeling left,’ said Francis Getliffe (it was only afterwards that I recalled that ‘sense and feeling’ was the one emotional phrase in his speech), ‘don’t begin by using this bomb on human beings.’
That was the case which scientists were putting up in Washington.
‘How are they taking it?’ asked a refugee.
‘Some are listening,’ said Francis.
‘Is that going to be good enough?’ said someone.
‘No one knows yet,’ said Francis, He added: ‘We’ve had one optimistic message.’
‘Who from?’
Getliffe gave the name.
Luke shook his head.
‘He’d believe anything that a blooming general told him. I must say, it doesn’t sound safe enough to leave.’
‘I agree,’ said Francis Getliffe.
‘What more can we do?’ came a voice.
‘There’s plenty we can do,’ said Luke,
‘There’s plenty we can do,’ said Mounteney, speaking into space, but there’s only one way we can make it impossible for them.’
‘What’s that?’ said Francis.
‘Issue a statement saying what has happened about the bomb and what is proposed. That will settle it in one.’
‘Who is to issue the statement?’ said Nora Luke.
‘We are.’
‘Breaking the law?’ said Francis.
‘I know that,’ said Mounteney.
‘Breaking our oaths?’ said Francis.
Mounteney hesitated for some moments, ‘I don’t like that. But there’s no other way.’
‘We’re still at war,’ said Luke. ‘We shall never get the statement out.’
‘I think we should,’ said Mounreney.
‘It’d all be hushed up. A few of us would be in jug, and the whole bloody game would be discredited,’
‘We might be unlucky,’ said Mounteney. ‘In that case a few scientists would be discredited. If we do nothing, then all scientists will be discredited. I can understand some of you fighting shy of signing the statement. I shan’t mind putting it out by myself.’
That was a false note. He was a daring man, but so were others there. He was a man of absolute integrity, but most of them did not trust his judgement. Just at that turning point, they were undecided.
Francis Getliffe had expected some such suggestion all along; for himself, he was too disciplined to act on it. So was Luke. But it was Martin who spoke.
‘No, Arthur,’ he said, smiling to Mounteney. ‘That’s not fair. What’s more important, it isn’t realistic, you know. We couldn’t let you do it unless (a) it was certain to work, (b) there was no alternative. It just wouldn’t work. The only result would be that a Nobel prizewinner would be locked up for trying to break the Official Secrets Act, and the rest of us wouldn’t be able to open our mouths. Don’t you see that, if you try something illegal and it doesn’t come off — then we’ve completely shot our bolt? Whatever governments decided to do with the bombs, we should have lost any influence we might have had.’
There was a murmur in the room. If you were used to meetings, then you knew that they were on Martin’s side. I was astonished at the authority he carried with them.
It happened to be one of those occasions when it was easier to make a prudent case than a wild one. Nearly everyone there was uneasy about breaking an oath — uneasy both out of fear and out of conscience.
They were not men to whom gesture-making came lightly: they could not believe, that sunny afternoon, that it was demanded of them. So they took Martin as their spokesman.
But also, I thought, he was speaking with an inner authority of his own; his bit of success had been good for him; he carried the weight of one who is, for the first time, all of a piece.
‘I don’t see any other way,’ said Mounteney.
‘We do,’ said Martin.
Mounteney, as well as being cantankerous, was the most obstinate of men. We were ready for him to argue for hours. Yet without explanation he gave way. I did not even wonder how mysterious his surrender was; we were too much in the middle of events to care.
Immediately, Martin brought out his proposal: that two or three English scientists should be flown over to America to say again what they had said that afternoon. It was known that a number of the scientists working on the American project had signed a protest: the English emissaries would take over a corresponding list of names. Those names were already known — of the scientists at Barford, everyone was willing to sign except Drawbell himself and two obscure chemists. There would also be some signatures, but a much smaller proportion, from the engineers and technicians.
Everyone in the room agreed; they were active men, and they were soothed by action for its own sake. Getliffe could arrange for an official aircraft within twenty-four hours. Who should go? There was a proposal, backed by Mounteney, that it should be Luke and Martin, the people who had done the work.
Luke was willing to agree, but Martin would not have it. Neither of them was known in America, said Martin: it was no use sending local reputations. Whereas Mounteney had his Nobel prize and Francis Getliffe a great name in Washington for his war work: they were the two who might count.
It was agreed. They would be in America by July 29th. Francis Getliffe said that they would hope to send us news before the middle of August.
On those first days of August, I had little to do in the office except wait for news. The ‘leave season’ had set in, as it had not done for six years; rooms round me were empty; the files ended ‘cd we discuss on my return?’
When I arrived in the morning, I looked for a despatch from America: but none came. I got through my work in an hour. Then I rang up Martin at Barford, hoping that Getliffe might have signalled to them and not to London: no news. There was nothing to do. Often, in the afternoons, I went off by myself to Lord’s.
It was the week before Bank Holiday. The days were like the other days: a sharp cool wind was blowing, more like April than full summer, the clouds streamed across the sky, at the cricket ground one watched for the blue fringe behind them.
On the Friday, I had still had no word from America; when I telephoned Martin (it was becoming a routine), nor had he. ‘We’re bound to hear before long,’ he said.
Saturday was the same. On the Sunday I stayed in my flat all day, half-expecting that Martin was right, that a message was on the way.
Next morning I was restless; once more I went off (half-thinking as when one waits for a letter in a love affair, that if I were out of the way, a message was more likely to arrive) to St John’s Wood, and sat there watching the game.
The ground was shabby that summer. The pavilion was unpainted; like the high Victorian afternoon of which it might have been the symbol, it had sunk into decay. Yet the smell of the grass was a comfort; it helped me to tell myself that though I had cares on my mind, they were not the deepest. Like the scientists, more often than not I felt this trouble about the bomb could be resolved. And in myself I was lonely rather than unhappy; at forty I had not reshaped my life. Perhaps that was why I took to heart this trouble at one remove. So I sat, watching those hours of cricket in the flashing rain-sharp sunshine, taken over by well-being, thoughtless, and secure.
It must have been about a quarter to six when I left Lord’s. I walked in a meaningless reverie down to Baker Street and then along the Marylebone Road; the light was brilliant after rain, and in it the faces of passers-by stood out sharp-edged. At last I went at random into a pub in Portland Place. I heard my name. There, standing at the bar beside a man in a polo sweater, was Hankins.
I began by saying something banal, about not meeting for years and then twice in a month, but he cried loudly:
‘This is my producer. I’ve just been giving a talk on Current Shakespeareana.’
He said that he had had only one drink, but his bright, heavy face was glistening, he was talking as if he were half drunk.
‘And all the time I was thinking of my words going out to the villages and the country towns and clever young women saying “That was a good point!” or “I should like to take that up with him”.
And then I came out of the studio and met the man who had been reading the six o’clock news just before I went on.’
‘Is there any news?’ I asked.
‘There is,’ said Hankins.
I knew.
‘So they’ve dropped it, have they?’ I asked dully. I felt blank, tired out.
‘Were you expecting something then?’ said Hankins. But his inquisitiveness for once was swamped: yes, the six o’clock news had contained the announcement about the bomb and he, in innocence, had broadcast just after.
‘I wonder how many people listened to my immortal prose!’ cried Hankins. ‘Current Shakespeareana. I wish it had been something slightly more obscure. The influence of the Duino Elegies on the later work of C P Cavafy — that’s how I should like to have added the only comment literary culture was entitled to make on this promising new age.’
He was upset and hilarious, he wanted an audience, human bodies round him, drink.
‘The chief virtue of this promising new age, and perhaps the only one so far as I can tell, is that from here on we needn’t pretend to be any better than anyone else. For hundreds of years we’ve told ourselves in the west, with that particular brand of severity which ends up an paying yourself a handsome compliment, that of course we cannot live up to our moral pretensions, that of course we’ve established ethical standards which are too high for men. We’ve always assumed, all the people of whom you,’ he grinned at the producer and me, ‘and I are the ragtag and bobtail, all the camp followers of western civilization, we have taken it for granted that, even if we did not live up to those exalted ethical standards, we did a great deal better than anyone else. Well, anyone who says that today isn’t a fool, because no one could be so foolish. He isn’t a liar, because no one could tell such lies. He’s just a singer of comic songs.’
The producer said that next day he had a programme on the care of backward children. ‘One can’t help thinking,’ he said, ‘whether there’ll be any children left to care for.’
Hankins suddenly clapped a hand to his head.
‘I suppose this wasn’t the piece of scientific policy we were interested in, you and I, Lewis, last time we met?’
‘It was.’
‘You said it was important,’ he said, as though in reproof. I nodded. ‘Well, perhaps I could concede it a degree of importance. What is important, after all?’ He had a writer’s memory for the words we had each spoken. ‘Did Irene know about this?’ he flashed out.
‘No.’
‘Did your brother and the rest of them?’
‘None of them knew that this bomb was going to be dropped.’
‘But they’d been working heroically on it, I suppose,’ said Hankins. ‘And now they’re getting the reward for their labours. It must be strange to be in their shoes tonight.’
It was also strange to hear him speak with such kindness, with his own curious inquisitive imagination.
We went on drinking, as Hankins talked.
‘The party’s nearly over,’ he said. ‘The party for our kind of people, for dear old western man — it’s been a good party, but the host’s getting impatient and it’s nearly time to go. And there are lots of people waiting for our blood in the square outside. Particularly as we’ve kept up the maddening habit of making improving speeches from the window. It may be a long time before anyone has such a good party again.’
If I had stayed I should have got drunk, but I wanted to escape. I went out into the streets, on which the anonymous crowds were jostling in the summer evening. For a while I lost myself among them, without a name, among many who had no name, a unit among the numbers, listening but hearing no comment on the news. In the crowd I walked down Oxford Street, was carried by the stream along Charing Cross Road: lights shone in the theatre foyers, the plays had all begun, in the wind relics of newsprint scuffled among our feet.
Near Leicester Square I drifted out of the crowd, into another pub. There some had heard the news, and as they talked I could pick out the common denominator of fear, sheer simple fear, which, whatever else we thought, was present in us all, Hankins and his producer, the seedy travellers, agents, homosexuals in the Leicester Square bar. Hankins’ rhetoric that night: Francis Getliffe’s bare words on the way down to Barford: they were different men, but just for once their feelings coincided, they meant the same things.
But in the pub there were also some indifferent. They had heard, and thrown it off already.
One, an elderly man with a fine ascetic face, sat with strained eyes focused on the doors. From a passing remark, I gathered that he was waiting for a young man, who had been due at six.
I walked across Piccadilly Circus, up Vigo Street and then west of Bond Street, through the deserted fringes of Mayfair, towards my club. As soon as I entered, acquaintances spoke to me with interest, with resignation, with the same damped-down fear. Had I known? Was there a chance that we could make ourselves safe again? What would happen to this country in another war? To this town? There was one interruption, as I stood in a party of four or five, standing round the empty grate. A young member, elected that year, asked if he could have a word with me. He had been invalided out of the Navy, his face was sallow, he had a high-strung, delicate, humorous look. But he spoke with urgency:
‘Is this bomb all they say?’
I answered yes, so far as I knew.
‘Do you think it will finish the Japanese? Do you think the war’s going to stop?’
‘I should have thought so,’ I replied.
‘I don’t believe it. Bombs don’t end wars.’
I was puzzled, but the explanation was straightforward. He was arguing against his own hopes. He had an elder brother, who was booked to fight in the invasion of Malaya. He could not let himself believe that the war would end in time.
When I left the club, I began to walk across London, trying to tire myself. But soon the energy of distress left me, almost between one step and another: although it was not yet eleven I found myself tired out. I took a taxi back to Pimlico, where from the houses in the square the lights were shining, as serene as on any other night of peace, as enticing to a lonely man outside.
I went straight off to sleep, woke before four, and did not get to sleep again. It was not a bad test of how public and private worries compare in depth, I thought, when I remembered the nights I had lain awake because of private trouble. Public trouble — how many such nights of insomnia had that given me? The answer was, just one. On the night after Munich, I had lain sleepless — and perhaps, as I went through the early hours of August 7th, I could fairly count another half.
As I lay there, I wished that I were able to speak to someone I was close to. The thoughts, the calculations of the future, pressed on me out of the morning dusk; it might have taken the edge off them if I could have admitted them to Martin. Soon after breakfast, I rang him up.
‘So this is it,’ I said.
‘Yes, this is it,’ came his voice, without any stress.
For some instants neither of us spoke, and I went on: ‘I think I should like to come down. Can you put up with me?’
A pause.
‘It might be better if I came to London, he replied. ‘Will that do?’
‘I can come down straight away,’ I said.
‘The other might be better. Is it all right for you?’
I said it was, but I was restless all morning, wondering why he had put me off. It was just after one when he came into my room.
As soon as I saw him, I felt, as often when we met, the familiar momentary wiping away of fret. I had felt the same, over five years before, when he visited me in that office, and we talked of the bomb, and I induced him to work on it.
‘Well, it’s happened,’ I said.
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Martin.
It was a curious phrase, inadequate and polite.
‘I don’t find it easy to take,’ I said.
‘It’s not pretty,’ said Martin.
I looked at him. His eyes were hard, bright, and steady, the corners of his mouth tucked in. I felt a jolt of disappointment; I was repelled by his stoicism. I had turned to him for support, and we had nothing to say to each other.
Without pretending to be light-hearted, Martin kept up the same level, disciplined manner. He made some comments about his journey, then he asked where we should eat.
‘Where you like,’ I said.
His eyes searched mine.
‘Would you rather wait a bit?’
‘I don’t care,’ I said.
‘I mean,’ said Martin, his eyes harder, ‘would you rather wait and talk? Because if so it may take some time.’
‘It depends what we talk about—’
‘What do you think I’m going to talk about?’
His voice was not raised — but suddenly I realized it was unsteady with anger.
‘I thought you felt it wasn’t any use—’
‘It may be a great deal of use,’ said Martin. His voice was still quiet, his temper utterly let go.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You don’t expect me to sit by and hear about this performance, and not say that I should like my dissent recorded in the minutes?’
‘I’ve felt the same,’ I said.
‘I know you have,’ said Martin. ‘But the question is: what is a man to do?’
‘I doubt if you can do anything,’ I said.
Martin said: ‘I think I can.’
‘It’s happened now,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing to do.’
‘I disagree.’
At that moment, each of us, staring into the other’s eyes, shared the other’s feeling, and knew that our wills must cross.