The New Men

27: An Uneffaceable Afternoon

Big Ben had just struck, it must have been the half-hour, when Martin said: ‘I disagree.’

He continued to look at me.

‘I oughtn’t to have stopped Arthur Mounteney sending his letter,’ said Martin. Just then, that was the focus of his remorse.

‘It wouldn’t have done any good,’ I said.

‘It would have done the trick,’ said Martin.

I shook my head.

He said: ‘So now I shall have to send a letter myself.’

He added, in a tone that was casual, cold, almost hostile: ‘Perhaps you’d better have a look at it.’

He opened his wallet, and with his neat deliberate fingers unfolded a sheet of office paper. He leaned across and put it on my blotter. The words were written in his own handwriting. There were no corrections, and the letter looked like a fair copy. It read:

To the Editor of The Times (which failing, Daily Telegraph, Manchester Guardian). Sir, As a scientist who has been employed for four years on the fission bomb, I find it necessary to make two comments on the use of such a bomb on Hiroshima. First, it appears not to have been relevant to the war: informed persons are aware that, for some weeks past, the Japanese have been attempting to put forward proposals for surrender. Second, if this had not been so, or if the proposals came to nothing, a minimum respect for humanity required that a demonstration of the weapon should be given, e.g. by delivering a bomb on unpopulated territory, before one was used on an assembly of men, women, and children. The actual use of the bomb in cold blood on Hiroshima is the most horrible single act so far performed. States like Hitler’s Germany have done much wickedness over many years, but no State has ever before had both the power and the will to destroy so many lives in a few seconds. In this respect, our scientists and our government have been so closely interwoven with those of the USA that we have formed part of that power and that will…

‘You’ve not sent this?’ I said, before I had finished reading.

‘Not yet.’

‘How many people know you’ve written it?’

‘Only Irene.’

That was the reason, I thought, that he had not wished me to go to Barford.

If this letter were published, it meant the end of his career. I had to get him out of it. From the moment he said that he was proposing to act, I had known that I must prevent him.

Even though I agreed with almost all he said.

As I began to make the first opposing moves, which he was already expecting, I was thinking, his was a letter which an able man only writes when he is near breaking point. Only his mask was stoical, as he sat there, his fingers spread like a starfish on the arms of his chair. In his letter — whatever he had written I should be trying to suppress it — he had not made the best of his case.[1] Yet I agreed with him in all that mattered. Looking back years later, I still agreed with him.

I felt it so, that afternoon, when I set myself to make Martin keep quiet. I shut away the sense of outrage, my own sense of outrage as well as his, and brought out the worldly wise official’s argument, such as we had displayed at Barford in July, such as he had used himself. It was not worthwhile making gestures for no result. One such gesture was all you were allowed; you ought to choose a time when it could do good. We had found ourselves in responsible positions; we could not give them up overnight; for everyone’s sake we had to get through the next few years without a war; then one could make gestures.

There was something in what I said, but they were not the reasons, they were nowhere near the reasons, why I was calling on each ounce of nature that I possessed to force him to conform. It was, in fact, incomparably more simple. For a brother as for a son, one’s concern is, in the long run, prosaic and crude. One is anxious about their making a living; one longs for their success, but one wants it to be success as the world knows it, reputation among solid men. For myself, my own ‘respectable’ ambitions had damped down by now, I should perhaps have been able, if the choice was sharp enough, to throw them away and face a scandal. For myself; but not for him.

I had seen friends throw away what most men clung to, respectability, money, fame. Roy Calvert: Charles March: even old Martineau. I understood why they had done it. I should have been the last to dissuade them. But they were friends, and Martin was a brother. The last thing you want with a brother is that he should fulfil a poetic destiny.

Martin met my argument point by point; we were getting nowhere. All of a sudden he began looking down beside his chair, under the desk, by the hat stand.

‘Did I bring in a briefcase?’ he said.

I said that I had not noticed, and he went on searching.

‘Does it matter?’ I was put out.

He said that it contained notes of the new method for extracting plutonium: it was top secret. He must trace it. He thought he remembered leaving it in his car: would I mind walking to the garage with him? Irritated at the interruption, I followed beside him, down Whitehall, across Victoria Street: Martin, his forehead lined with anxiety was walking faster than usual, and we were both silent. The offices, the red-brick houses of Great Smith Street, glowed shabby in the sunshine. Just as on the night before, I felt a tenderness for the dirty, unfriendly, ugly streets such as I had never felt before. I even felt something like remorse, because what had happened to another town might happen here.

The briefcase was not in the car. Martin said nothing, except that he must ring up Barford from my office. Back there, he sat leaning forward, as though by concentrating he could make the call come through. It was minutes before the telephone whirred. Martin was talking to his secretary, his words fast but even then polite. ‘Would you mind looking…?’ He waited, then cried out: ‘Thank God for that! With elaborate thanks he put the receiver down, and gave me a sharp, deprecating grin.

‘I never moved it. It’s sitting there in its proper place.’

‘It seemed a curious thing to worry about,’ I said.

For an instant he looked blank. Then his face broke into a laugh, the kind of noiseless laugh with which as children we used to receive family jokes. But soon his expression hardened. He asked, had I anything more to say before he sent the letter?

‘A good deal more,’ I said.

‘I wish you’d say it.’

His tone was so inflexible that I became more brutal.

‘How are you going to live?’ I said.

‘A decent scientist can make some sort of a living,’ he said.

‘Whatever trouble you get into?’

‘It wouldn’t be a good living, but I can make do.’

‘What does your wife think of that?’

There came a surprise. Martin smiled, not affectionately, but as though he held a trump which I had miscounted. He said: ‘As a matter of fact, she wants me to do it.’

He spoke with absolute confidence. I had made a stupid mistake. I should have remembered the way she welcomed his first risk. I tried another tack.

‘Have you thought of your son?’

‘Yes, I’ve thought of him,’ said Martin, He added: ‘I’ve also thought of you. I’m sorry if it harms you, and I know that it must.’ He said it formally.

I cast round again. He and I took too much responsibility on ourselves, I said. That was true in our human relations.

He stared at me, and for an instant I was silent.

I went on with the argument. We should be better men if we took less upon our shoulders. And scientists as a class had the same presumption. They thought too much of their responsibility. Martin that day had no more guilt to carry than any other man.

‘Again I disagree,’ said Martin. After a silence, he went on: ‘In any case, I can make a more effective noise.’

‘Yes,’ I said, feeling another spot to probe — he and Luke and the others would be listened to. But if he were patient, some day he would be listened to in a way that did effective good. Not now. It would be a nine days’ wonder, he would be ruined and powerless. But wait. In the next few years, if he and Luke brought their process to success, they would have more influence than most people. That was the only way in which Martin could gain authority: and then, if a protest had to be made, if a martyr were needed, then he could speak out without it being just a pathetic piece of defiance, a lonely voice in Hyde Park.

A girl brought us cups of tea. The argument went on, flashes crossed the wall from bus roofs reflected in the sun. Neither then nor afterwards did I detect the instant at which the hinge turned. Perhaps there was no such instant. Perhaps it was more like a turn of the tide. Towards the end of the afternoon, Martin knew, and I knew, that I had made him give up.

I did not, even then, believe that any reasons of mine had convinced him. Some had been sound: some were fabricated: some contradicted others. So far as reasons went, his were as good as mine. The only advantage I had was that, in resolving to stop him acting, I had nothing to dilute my purpose. Whereas he intended to act, but deep down he had his doubts. Some of these doubts I had brought into the open: the doubt that fed on responsibility, on caution, on self-interest, on a mixture of fears, including the fear of being disloyal.

As the afternoon sun made blazing shields of the windows across the street, Martin said: ‘Very well, I shall just do nothing.’

He spoke sadly, admitting what, for some time past, we had each known.

I asked him to have dinner with me, and stay in my flat. For a second his face had the look of refusal, but then his politeness came back. We were both constrained as we walked across the parks to Hyde Park Corner. In Green Park we stood for a while watching some boys of eight or nine play, in a clearing by the bandstand, a primitive game of cricket. The trees’ shadows stretched across the lumpy grass, and we saw something that had the convincing improbability of a dream; at three successive balls the batsman made a scooping shot, and gave a catch which went in a gentle curve, very softly, to point; the first catch was seriously and solemnly missed. So was the second. So was the third.

‘We shall never see that again,’ I said to Martin.

Usually he would have been amused, but now he only gave a token smile.

We walked along the path.

‘By the way,’ said Martin, in a tone dry and without feeling, ‘I heard one story about tactics that might interest you.’

He had heard it from someone present after the bomb was made.

‘There was a good deal of discussion,’ he said, ‘about how to drop it with maximum results. One ingenious idea was to start a really spectacularly pretty flare a few seconds before the bomb went off.’

‘Why?’

‘To make sure that everyone in the town was looking up.’

‘Why?’

‘To make sure they were all blinded.’

I cried out.

‘That’s where we’ve got to in the end,’ he said. He added: ‘But I agree with you, now I’ve got to let it go.’

We walked on, set apart and sad.

28: ‘What Do You Expect from Him Now?’

Two days later, as we drove down to Barford in the afternoon, Martin and I talked civilly of cricket and acquaintances, with no sign on the surface of our clash of wills.

In Banbury I bought an evening paper. I saw that another bomb had been dropped. Without speaking I passed the paper to Martin, sitting at the wheel, the car drawn up in the marketplace beside the kerb. He read the paragraph under the headline.

‘This is getting monotonous,’ he said,

His expression had not changed. We both took it for granted that the argument was not to be reopened. He was too stable a character to go back on his word. Instead, he commented, as we drove into Warwickshire, that this Nagasaki bomb must have been a plutonium one.

‘The only point of dropping the second,’ said Martin, his tone neutral, the last edge of feeling dried right out, ‘must have been for purposes of comparison.’

As soon as we went inside the canteen at Barford he made a similar remark, and was immediately denounced by Luke as a cold fish. Martin caught my eye; just for an instant, his irony returned.

Inside that room, four floors up in the administration building, so that one looked out over the red-brick ranges towards the dipping sun and then back to the tea cups and the white linoleum on the tables, the voices were loud and harsh.

There were a dozen people there, Mary Pearson, Nora Luke, Luke himself, erect and stiff-backed as he had not been for a year; I had never seen them so angry.

The news of Hiroshima had sickened them; that afternoon had left them without consolation. Luke said: ‘If anyone had tried to defend the first bomb, then I might just have listened to him. But if anyone dares try to defend the second, then I’ll see him in hell before I listen to a single word.’

They all assumed, as Martin had done, that the plutonium bomb was dropped as an experiment, to measure its ‘effectiveness’ against the other.

‘It had to be dropped in a hurry,’ said someone, ‘because the war will be over and there won’t be another chance.’

‘Not just yet,’ said Luke.

I had known them rancorous before, morally indignant, bitter: but it was something new to hear them cynical — to hear that last remark of Luke’s, the least cynical of men.

Eric Pearson came in, smiled at his wife, nodded to others, threw back his quiff of hair. He sat down at the table, where most of us were standing. Suddenly I thought I should like to question him. Of them all, he was the only one who had worked directly on the actual bombs, that is, he had had a small part, a fractional part, in what they would call ‘the hardware’, the concrete objects that had been dropped on those towns. Even if it was only a thousandth part, I was thinking, that meant a good many lives.

‘How do you feel about it?’ I asked.

‘Nothing special,’ said Pearson.

As usual he irritated me with his off-hand manner, his diffidence, his superlative inner confidence.

‘I should have thought,’ I said, ‘you might wish it hadn’t happened?’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I haven’t lost any sleep about it.’

Suddenly his wife broke out, her face flaming, tears starting from her eyes: ‘Then you damned well ought to have!’

‘I’m sorry.’ His manner changed, he was no longer jaunty. ‘I only meant that it wasn’t my business.’

She brushed away the tears with the back of her hand, stared at him — and then went out of the room. Soon Pearson followed her. The others dismissed him as soon as he had gone, while I wondered how long that breach would last. Pitilessly they forgot him, and Luke was shouting to me: ‘Lewis, you may have to get me out of clink.’

He stood between the tables.

‘It’s no use bellyaching any more,’ he cried. ‘We’ve got to get something done.’

‘What is to be done?’ said a voice.

‘It stands out a mile what is to be done,’ said Luke. ‘We’ve got to make a few of these damned things ourselves, we’ve got to finish the job. Then if there’s going to be any more talking, we might have our share.’

In the midst of their indignation, the proposal did not startle them. Luke was a man of action, so were many of them. Political protests, associations of scientists — in their state of moral giddiness, they were looking for anything to clutch on to. For some, Luke was giving them another hold. He had always been the most nationalistic of them. Just as old Bevill kept the narrow patriotism of the officer elite, so Luke never quite forgot that he had been brought up in a naval dockyard, and kept the similar patriotism of the petty officer.

That afternoon the scientists responded to it.

‘Why is it going to lead you in clink?’ I cut across the argument.

‘Because if we don’t get the money to go ahead, I don’t mean next month, I don’t mean tomorrow, I mean now, I’m going to stump the country telling them just what they’re in for. Unless you old men’ — he was speaking to me — ‘get it into your heads that this is a new phase, and that if we don’t get in on the ground floor there are just two things that can happen to this country — the best is that we can fade out and become a slightly superior Spain, the worst is that we get wiped out like a mob of Zulus.’

Nora said: ‘When you see what the world is like, would that matter so much?’

‘It would matter to me,’ said Luke. Suddenly he gave up being a roughneck. ‘I know it seems as though any chance of a little decency in the world has been wiped out for good. All I can say is that, if we’re going to get any decency back, then first this country must have a bit of power.’

Someone asked how much time he needed.

‘It depends on the obstacles they put in our way,’ said Luke. He said to Martin: ‘What do you say, how long do we need?’

Since we entered the canteen Martin had been standing by the window, just outside the group, and as I turned my eyes with Luke’s question, I saw him, face half-averted, as though he were watching the western sky, the blocks of buildings beneath, rectangular, parallel, like the divisions in a battle map. It was many minutes since he had spoken.

He gazed at Luke with a blank face. Then, businesslike, as in a routine discussion, he replied: ‘Given the personnel we’ve got now?’

‘Double it,’ said Luke.

‘Two years, at the best,’ said Martin. (By this time, even Luke admitted that his early estimates had not been realistic.) ‘About three, allowing for an average instalment of bad luck.’

All he had promised me was to keep quiet. Now he was going further. He was taking the line I had most urged him to take. They began arguing about the programmes: and I left them to it.

As I walked along the path to Martin’s flat, where Irene had been told to expect me, the evening was serene; it should have been the end of a calm and nameless day. The sky was so clear that, as the first stars came out, I could distinguish one that did not twinkle, and was wondering which planet it was, as I made my way upstairs to Irene.

When I got inside their sitting-room, I found that she had just begun to wash her hair.

She asked, without leaving the bathroom, whether I would not go into the village and have a meal alone. No, I said, I was tired; any kind of snack, and I would rather stay. Still through the open door, she told me where to find bread and butter and tinned meat. Then she ignored me.

Sitting on the drawing-room sofa, I could see her across the passage, her hair, straight and fine, hanging down over the basin. Later, hooded in a towel, she was regarding herself in the looking-glass. Her face had thinned down and aged, the flesh had fallen away below the cheekbones, while on her body she had put on weight; some men would find excitement in the contrast, always latent in her, and now in her mid-thirties established, between the body, heavy, fleshly and strong, and the nervous, over-exhausted face.

In towel and dressing-gown she surveyed herself sternly, as though, after trying to improve her looks for years, she was still dissatisfied.

She had finished washing, there was no reason to prevent her chatting with me, but still she sat there, evaluating her features, not paying any attention that I had come. I had no doubt that it was deliberate; she must have decided on this toilet as soon as she heard that I was on the way. It was quite unlike her, whose first instinct was to be ready to get a smile out of me or any other man.

I could not resist calling out: ‘Aren’t you going to talk to me tonight?’

Her reply took me aback. Her profile still towards me, and gazing at her reflection, she said:

‘It could only make things worse.’

‘What is all this?’ I said roughly, as though she were sulky and needed shaking.

But she answered without the least glint of sex: ‘It will be better if we don’t talk until Martin comes back.’

It sounded like melodrama, of which she had her share: but also, like much melodrama, it was meant. I went into the bathroom and she turned to confront me, the towel making her face open and bald. She looked nervous, frowning, and contemptuous.

‘This isn’t going to clear up without speaking,’ I said.

She said: ‘You’ve done him harm, haven’t you?’

I was lost. For a second, I even thought she was speaking of Hankins, not Martin. She added: ‘He’s going to toe the line, isn’t he? And that can only be your doing.’

Then, in the scent of powder and bath salts, a remark swung back from the previous afternoon and I said: ‘You’d rather he ruined himself, would you?’

‘If that’s what you call it,’ said Irene.

Like the scientists in the canteen I was morally giddy that day.

‘He makes up his own mind,’ I said.

‘Except for you,’ she cried. She burst out, her eyes bright: with resentment, with an obscure triumph: ‘Oh, I haven’t fooled myself — and I should think you must have a glimmering by now — I’m perfectly well aware I haven’t any influence on him that’s worth a row of beans. Of course, he’s easy going, he’s always good-natured when it doesn’t cost him anything. If I want to go out for a drink, he never grumbles, he just puts down whatever he’s doing: but do you think on anything that he cares about, I could ever make him budge an inch?’

It was no use contradicting.

‘You can,’ she cried. ‘You’ve done it.’ She added: ‘I hope you’ll be satisfied with what happens to him.’

I said: ‘We’d better wait till we’ve got over this shock—’

‘Oh, never mind that,’ she said. ‘I wash my hands of that. It’s him I’m thinking of.’

She looked at me with eyes narrowed.

‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I’m beginning to wonder whether you understand him at all?’

She broke off. ‘Don’t you like extravagant people?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Unless it comes too near home.’ She went on: ‘He’s one at heart, have you never seen that?’

She stared at her reflection again.

‘That’s why he gets on with me,’ she said, as though touching wood.

‘That might be true,’ I said.

‘He’s capable of being really extravagant,’ she broke out. ‘Why did you stop him this time? He’s capable of throwing the chains right off.’

She stared at me and said: ‘I suppose you were capable of it, once.’

It was said cruelly, and was intended to be cruel. For the first time in our relation she held the initiative. Through her envy of my intimacy with Martin, through her desire to be thought well of, through the attraction that smoulders often between in-laws, she could nevertheless feel that she was thinking only of him.

When I replied, I meant to tell her my real motive for influencing him, but I was inhibited.

Instead, I told her that he was not alone, he was not living in a vacuum, nor was I. What he did affected many others. Neither he nor I could live as though we were alone.

She said: ‘He could have done.’

I said: ‘Not this time.’

‘It would have been a glorious thing to do,’ she cried.

She rounded on me: ‘I’ve got one last word for you,’ she said. ‘You’ve stopped him doing what he wanted to. I won’t answer for the consequences. I should like to know what you expect from him now.’

29: Hushed Voices Under the Beams

One night soon after, coming out of the theatre at Stratford, I was forced to remember how — the evening the news of Hiroshima came through — I had walked through the West End streets in something like wretchedness. Now I was leaving the play, the sense of outrage had left me alone for days, I was one among a crowd, lively and content in the riverside lights. Around me was a knot of elderly women whom I had noticed in the theatre, who looked like schoolteachers and to whom, by some standard, life had not given much; yet their faces were kind, shining with a girlish, earnest happiness, they were making haste to their boarding house to look up the text.

It was there by the river, which was why I was forced to remember, why I became uncomfortable at being content under the lamplit trees, that Martin and Mounteney and I, on the dark wartime night, so tunnel-like by the side of this, agreed that there was no serious chance that the bomb could be used.

Yet I was light-hearted under the belts of stars.

How long can you sustain grief, guilt, remorse, for a horror far away?

If it were otherwise, if we could feel public miseries as we do private ones, our existences in those years would have been hard to endure. For anyone outside the circle of misery, it is a blessing that one’s public memory is so short; it is not such a blessing for those within.

Should we be left with only one reminder, that for thoughtful men there would stay, almost like a taste on the tongue, the grit of fear?

In the following days at Stratford, where I was taking my first leave that year, all I heard from the establishment was that Luke was driving his team as though in his full vigour, and that Martin was back in place as second in command. Martin had not spoken to me alone.

For most of that August there was no other news from Barford except that Mounteney had made his last appearance in the place, taken down the nameplate from his door, emptied his in-tray on top of his out-tray, as he and Luke had once promised, and gone straight back to his university chair.

A few days later, without any warning, Drawbell came into Stratford to see me with a rumour so ominous that he spoke in whispers in the empty street. The rumour was that there had been at least one ‘leakage’, perhaps more: that is, data about the American experiments, and probably the Barford ones also, had been got through to Russia.

Within a few hours of that rumour — it was the end of August, and my last week in Stratford — I received a telephone call at my hotel. It was from Luke: Martin and he had a point to raise with me. I said I could come over at any time, but Luke stopped me. ‘I don’t like the cloak and dagger stuff,’ he said, ‘but it might be better just this once if we happen to run across you.’

They drove into Stratford that evening, and we met at the play. In the intervals, there were people round us; even outside on the terrace in the cool night, we could not begin to talk. Afterwards, with the wind blowing like winter, we went to the hotel sitting-room, but there for a long time, while Luke breathed hard with impatience, a couple of families were eating sandwiches after the theatre. The wind moaned outside, we drank beer, the beams of the low room pressed down on us as we waited; it was a night on which one was oppressed by a sense of the past.

At last we had the room to ourselves. Luke gave an irritable sigh, but when he spoke his voice, usually brazen, was as quiet as Martin’s.

‘This is Martin’s show,’ he said.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Martin.

‘Damn it,’ said Luke, and it was curious to hear him angry in an undertone, as we sat with heads bent forward over the gate-legged table, ‘we can’t pass the buck as though we were blooming well persuading each other to sing.’

‘No,’ said Martin, ‘I’d speak first if I had the responsibility.’

Luke glowered at him. Martin looked blank-faced.

‘The problem,’ said Luke brusquely, ‘is security. Or at least you’ — he thrust his lip towards Martin — ‘are making it a problem.’

‘I’m not making it,’ said Martin. ‘The world’s doing that.’

‘Blast the world,’ said Luke. Luke was frowning: he uttered ‘security’ like a swearword, but he could not shrug it off: in the fortnight since the dropping of the bombs, it had fallen upon them more pervasively than ever in the war. Now they knew, as I did, that the rumour of the leakages was more than a rumour. So far as one could trust the intelligence sources, it was true.

Already that day, Luke had been forced to concede one of Martin’s points. Kurt Puchwein, who had been working at Berkeley, had recently arrived back in England, and wanted to return to Barford as Luke’s chief chemist. Luke had admitted that it was too dangerous to take him. None of us believed that Puchwein had been spying, but he was a platform figure of the Left; if the leakages became public, Martin had made Luke agree, they could not stand the criticism of having re-engaged him at Barford. So Puchwein had arrived home, found that Hanna was finally leaving him and that he had no job. As for the latter, Luke said that he was ‘taking care’ of that; there were a couple of universities who would be glad to find a research readership for Puchwein; it would happen without commotion, one of those English tricks that Puchwein, for all his intellect and father-in-Israel shrewdness, could never completely understand.

That point was settled, but there was another.

‘Martin is suggesting,’ said Luke, ‘that I ought to victimize someone.’ Our heads were close together, over the table; but Martin looked at neither of us, he seemed to be set within his carapace, guarded, official, decided.

‘I think that’s fair comment,’ he said.

‘You want to dismiss someone?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ said Martin.

‘On suspicion,’ said Luke.

‘It may save trouble,’ said Martin.

They were speaking of Sawbridge. I had heard nothing of Captain Smith’s investigations for over a year. I had no idea whether Sawbridge was still suspected.

‘Do you know anything I don’t?’ I said to Martin.

For once he replied directly to me, his eyes hard and with no give in them at all.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

All they knew was that, in the last few months, since his recovery, Sawbridge had spoken like a milk-and-water member of the Labour Party.

‘What does that prove?’ said Martin.

‘All right, what does it prove?’ said Luke. ‘He might have gone underground. How do you know that I haven’t, as far as that goes? How do I know that you haven’t been for years — both of you? I expect we were all tempted, ten years ago.’

‘This isn’t getting us very far,’ said Martin.

‘Do you think you’re getting us very far? You want me to get rid of my best radio-chemist—’ Luke said it with anger (his professional feeling had risen up, he was thinking of the project, of the delay that losing Sawbridge might mean), and then lowered his voice again. ‘I don’t pretend that as a chap he’s much my cup of tea, but he’s been in this thing with us, he’s entitled to his rights.’

Luke was not a sentimental man. He did not mention that Sawbridge had taken his share of the risks, and had suffered for it.

‘We’ve got to balance his rights against the danger,’ said Martin without expression.

‘You’ve not given one single piece of evidence that he’s got anything to do with the leakage,’ said Luke.

‘I don’t intend to. That’s not the point.’

‘What is the point?’

‘I’ve made it clear enough before. I’m not prepared to say whether he is or is not connected with the leakage, or whether there’s any danger that he ever will be. I’m saying something quite different and much simpler. For the purpose of anyone running Barford, the world has divided itself into two halves. Sawbridge belongs to the other. If we keep him at Barford, it is likely to do the place finite harm. And it may not be nice for you and me.’

‘I’ve told you before, and I will tell you again,’ said Luke, ‘you’re asking me to throw Sawbridge out because a lot of old women may see bogies. Well, I’m not prepared to do it, unless someone can give me a better reason than that. There’s only one reason that I should be ready to listen to. That is, is he going to give anything away?’

We all knew that Martin was right in his analysis. The world had split in two, and men like us, who kept any loyalty to their past or their hopes, did not like it. Years before, people such as Luke or Francis Getliffe or I had sometimes faced the alternative — if you had to choose between a Hitler world or a communist world, which was it to be? We had had no doubt of the answer. It had seemed to us that the communists had done ill that good might come. We could not change all the shadows of those thoughts in an afternoon.

It had been different, of course, with men like Thomas Bevill and his friends, or many of my old colleagues at Cambridge and the Bar. Most of them, in their hearts, would have given the opposite answer: communism was the enemy absolute: incidentally, it said something for the patriotism of their class that, full of doubts about the German war, knowing what it meant for them, win or lose, they nevertheless fought it.

Now it was men like Luke and Francis Getliffe and me who felt the doubts, the scientists most of all. Often they were sick at heart, although despair was unnatural to them and they believed that the split in the world — the split which seemed to them the anti-hope — would not last for ever.

Martin said: ‘I’ve explained to you, that doesn’t begin to be the point.’

‘For me,’ Luke’s voice became loud, ‘it’s the beginning and the end. Here’s someone who, as far as you know, will never be any closer to a leakage than you or me. And you’re saying we ought to find a bogus reason for putting him in the street — just because some old women might natter. I’m simply not playing that game. Nor would Lewis. If we have to start insuring ourselves like that, we might as well pack up.’

As he knew, my sympathies were on his side. It was he, not Martin, who had insisted on seeing me that night — because he wanted my support. But also he had asked for my advice as an official, and I had to give it. No prudent man could ignore Martin’s case. True, the responsibility for security rested with Captain Smith and his service: true, also, that Martin’s proposal to get rid of the man out of hand was indefensible. But the risks were as great as Martin said.

As I was advising Luke (I wanted him at the least to talk to the new Chairman), I watched them both and thought — yes, Martin’s case was clear, he was showing his usual foresight, and yet there was another motive behind it. Luke was frowning, his head bent over the table; Martin was sitting slightly back, his forehead unlined, more controlled, more like an official, than the other two of us that night. He seemed remote from any sign or memory of the conflict in my office, only three weeks before. But, though he was remote, I believed I could see his motive.

As the hushed voices, his and Luke’s and mine, whispered and hissed under the beams, I saw him for a moment with the insight of kinship: I thought I knew what he was aiming at. If I were right, I did not like it.

We had talked for a long time, when Luke pushed the table away. He had just repeated that he would not budge unless someone gave him new evidence; this was the finish.

‘I’m damned if I get rid of Sawbridge,’ he said, and his force was formidable.

Martin replied, unmoved: ‘In that case I shall send you my views on paper.’

‘Damn it, man,’ for the third time Luke forgot to be quiet, ‘we’ve talked it out, I don’t want any bumf.’

Martin said: ‘I’m sorry, but I want to have it on the record.’

30: A Joyous Moment in the Fog

That autumn it was strange to hear the scientists alone, trying to examine their consciences, and then round a committee table. Outsiders thought them complacent, opaque: of those that I knew best, it was not true.

‘There aren’t any easy solutions,’ said Luke. ‘Otherwise we should all take them.’

He was speaking first of scientists, but also of all others in a time of violence; for the only root-and-branch ‘solutions’ which could give a man an absolute reason for not working at Barford on the bomb, were not open to many. Unqualified pacificism or Communism — if you believed either, your course was clear. But no other faith touched the problem. Among the new recruits to Barford, there were a number who were religious, but none of the churches gave them a direction.

Either/or, said Luke. Either you retired and helped to leave your country defenceless. Or you made a weapon which might burn men, women, and children in tens of thousands. What was a man to do?

‘I don’t think we’ve got any option,’ said Francis Getliffe to me in the club, one night after his return from America. ‘Luke’s right, the Barford boys are right, we’ve got to make the infernal thing.’

After these conversations, I saw the same men in their places on the committees, experienced in business after six years of war, many of them, including Getliffe himself and Martin, having become skilful at the committee arts, disposing of great budgets, all caught up, without so much as a stumble of reservation, on getting the plutonium made at Barford. No body of men could have sounded less introspective; as their new Chairman said, with the jubilation of a housemaster who sees the second eleven at the nets, they were the keenest committee he had ever had.

The new Chairman was — to the irritation of his own friends and the Government backbenchers — old Thomas Bevill. In those first months of office, the Government had a habit of resurrecting figures from early in the war. Bevill was an ex-minister, a Tory, but atomic energy had started under him; now it was in the limelight, he might soften criticism; so he was brought out of retirement like an old man of the tribe. On his side, he havered about taking a job under a Labour administration, but he was by this time seventy-six, they would be in for five years, he might never get another job and he just could not resist it.

At his first committee he slipped unobtrusively, happily into the chair, as though in literal truth, not in his own inexorable cliché, he was ‘glad to be back in the saddle’. He gazed round the table and greeted each man by name. No one was less effusive by nature, but he always felt that effusiveness was called for on such occasions, and so he called out ‘Dr Getliffe! old friend!’ and so on clockwise round the table. ‘Mr Drawbell! old friend!’ ‘Dr Luke! old friend!’ and finally round to me, at his right hand: ‘Our secretary, Mr Eliot! old friend!’

Mounteney, sitting near me, was disgusted. One might have asked why he was there at all, after his disappearance from Barford, never to return. Actually, Mounteney’s self-exile from atomic energy had lasted exactly two months. He remained in his professorship, but accepted a seat on the committee. He was so austere that no one dared to ask why. Duty? Yes. The desire that real scientists should have a voice? No doubt. But for myself, I believed that his chief motive was the same as Bevill’s, whom he so much despised — that he could not bear to be out of things.

So, in the autumn of 1945, Bevill was listening to the scientists, hearing Mounteney’s minority opinion, trotting round the corner to the Treasury with Rose. It was on one of his committee afternoons, the technical sub-committee which I did not attend, that Irene came up with Martin for the day. On this committee Martin had a place as well as Luke, and as I took Irene out through the Park, in the foggy afternoon, to tea, I pointed up to a window whose lights streamed out into the whirling white.

‘There they are,’ I said.

‘Busy as beavers,’ said Irene.

She was smiling with a tenderness unusual in her. Perhaps she felt the safety we all snuggle in, when someone about whom we worry is for a couple of hours securely locked away. Certainly she was gratified that he was up there, in the lighted room, among the powerful. Had her prediction — ‘I should like to know what you expect from him now’ — been nothing more than hitting out at random? She had not seen him that night at Stratford; she showed no concern for what he might be planning.

Although she had been behind him in his outburst, had quarrelled with me so bitterly that we had not been reconciled till that afternoon, she nevertheless, with a superb inconsistency, had blotted all that out and now simmered with content because he was ‘getting on’.

But her smile, tender, coming from within, held more than that.

‘I love the fog, don’t you?’ she said. She said a little more: and I realized that this scene of subfusc grandeur, the back of Whitehall with window lights tumbling out in the fog of St James’s Park, at first lay heavy on her mind, as though there were a name she had forgotten and yet was lurking near her tongue, and then suddenly lifted, to let rise a memory not so grand but full of mellowing joy: another foggy afternoon years before, a street in Bayswater, the high shabby genteel houses, the joy of a childhood autumn.

Under a lamp in the Mall, I looked at her, and thought I had never seen her face so happy. Her youth was going, she still had her dash, she still looked a strapping, reckless woman — and on her mouth was a tender, expectant, astonished smile. I wonder if she had smiled so before she began her adventures. I wondered if she had come to the end of them, if she were what she called ‘settled down’?

How would she take it, when that end came? I had not yet seen a woman, or a man either, who had lived a life of sexual adventure, give it up without a bitter pang that the last door had clanged to. Nevertheless, I had a suspicion that she might struggle less than most. I did not believe that she was, in the elemental sense, passionate. There were many reasons which sent people off on their sexual travels, and sheer passion was one of the less common. If you were searching for a woman moved by passion, you would be more likely to find her in someone like Mary Pearson, who had not been to bed with a man except her husband. Of these two, it was not Mary Pearson, it was Irene, who had racketed so long, it was she who would in the long run, and not unwillingly, give way to age and put her feet up with a sigh.

If that day came, I wondered — walking through the fog, taking her to tea as a sign that there was peace between us — whether she and I would at last cease to grate on each other? Was that walk through the Park a foretaste? I had not noticed her restlessness, she spoke as though she trusted me, remembering in the sight of the lighted window a spate of joy which seemed, as such joys of memory seem to us all, like the intimation of a better life from which we have been inexplicably cut off.

31: Situation Designed for a Clear Head

On New Year’s Eve, just as the Whitehall lamps were coming out, Bevill sent for me. The room which had been found for him as chairman was at the end of the passage, and even more unpretentious than his room as Minister; Bevill did not grumble, he had never in his life grumbled at a minor slight, he settled there and called it his ‘hutch’. But that afternoon, as soon as I entered, I saw his face heavily flushed, with an angry blood pressure flush that one did not often see in so spare a man, the relics of grey hair twisted over his head so that he looked like a ferocious cockatoo.

Rose was sitting with him, arms folded, unaffected except that the pouches under his eyes seemed darker.

‘This is a nasty one,’ Rose was saying. ‘Yes, it is a distinctly nasty one.’

‘The swine,’ said Thomas Bevill.

‘Well, sir,’ said Rose, ‘it means some publicity that we could do without, but we can cope with that.’

‘It knocks the feet from under you, that’s what it does,’ said Bevill. In the war, whatever the news was like, he had been eupeptic, sturdily hopeful — not once rattled as he was that afternoon.

He turned to me, his eyes fierce, bewildered.

‘Captain Hook’s just been in,’ he said.

‘Captain Hook’ was his name — partly one of his nursery jokes, partly for secrecy’s sake — for Smith, the retired naval captain, the chief of the security branch. ‘One of your scientists has been giving us away to the Russians. A chap who’s just come back from Canada. They’re going to put him inside soon, but it’s locking the stable door after the horse is lost.’

I asked who it was.

‘I didn’t get the name. One of your Cambridge men.’ Bevill said it accusingly, as though I were responsible for them all.

Rose told me that it was a man who had at no time been employed at Barford.

‘That isn’t the half of it,’ said Bevill. ‘There’s another of them at least who they’re waiting for. They oughtn’t to have to wait,’ he burst out. ‘We’re too soft, any other country in the world would have risked a bit of injustice! Sometimes I think we shall go under just because we put too high a price on justice. I tell you that, Rose, though I don’t want it to go outside this room.’ He said to me: ‘This chap’s still knocking about at Barford now. He’s a young chap called Sawbridge. Do you know him?’

‘A little,’ I said.

‘Is he English?’ said Bevill.

‘As English as I am,’ I said.

The blood was still heavy in Bevill’s temples, as he shook his head.

‘I can’t understand it.’

He shook his head again. ‘I don’t want to set up as better than anyone else, and I can understand most things at a pinch. I expect we’ve all thought of murder, haven’t we?’ said the old man, who as a rule looked so mild. He went on, forgetting his nursery prattle, and speaking like a Hanoverian. ‘As for rape and’ — he listed the vices of the flesh — ‘anyone could do them.’

Hector Rose said, surprisingly: ‘We’re none of us spotless.’

‘But as for giving away your country, I can’t understand it,’ said Bevill. ‘I could have done the other things, but I couldn’t have done that.

‘I don’t want to put the clock back,’ he said. ‘But if it were in my hands, I should hang them. I should hang them in Trafalgar Square.’

At Barford next day, Bevill himself sat in with Captain Smith as he broke the news to the leading scientists one by one. He interviewed them, not in Drawbell’s office, but his secretary’s, sitting on typing stools among the hooded typewriters and dictaphones; sometimes I was called in to hear the same half-explanations, the same half-questions.

It was only Drawbell, sitting alone with me during the morning, who let out a spontaneous cry. This was the first day of 1946, which in Drawbell’s private calendar marked the last stage of the plutonium process, with luck the last year of plain Mr Drawbell. He had to complain to somebody, and he cried out: ‘This isn’t the kind of New Year’s gift I bargained for!’

And then again: ‘This isn’t the time to drop bricks. They couldn’t have picked a worse time to drop bricks!’

When I heard Smith talking to scientist after scientist, the monotony, the strain, seemed to resonate with each other, so that the light in the little room became dazzling on the eyes.

To the seniors, Smith had to tell more than he liked. In his creaking, faded, vicarage voice, he said that his ‘people’ knew that Sawbridge had passed information on.

‘How do you know?’ said one of them.

‘Steady on, old son,’ said Captain Smith. He would not explain, but said that beyond doubt they knew.

They also knew which information had ‘gone over’.

Another of the scientists speculated on how much time that data would save the Russians. Not long, he thought; a few months at the most.

Bevill could not contain himself. He burst out: ‘If our people are killed by their bomb, it will be this man’s doing.’ The scientist contradicted him, astonished that laymen should not realize how little scientific secrets were worth. He and Bevill could not understand each other.

Bevill did not have to put on his indignation; it was not just the kind of politician’s horror which sounded as though it had been learnt by heart. He was speaking as he had done yesterday, and as I was to hear others speak, not only among the old ruling classes, but among the humble and obscure for years to come. Bevill had not been shocked by the dropping of the bomb; but this was a blow to the viscera.

Whereas, as they heard the first news of the spies, the scientists were unhappy, but unhappy in a different tone from Bevill’s. They had been appalled by Hiroshima, still more by Nagasaki, and, sitting in that typist’s office, I thought that some at least had got beyond being appalled any more. They were shocked; confused; angry that this news would put them all back in the dark. They felt trapped.

To two of them, Smith, for reasons I did not know, said that one arrest, of the man who had been working in Canada, would happen within days. There had been at least three scientific spies, whom most of the men Smith interviewed that day had known as friendly acquaintances.

For once even Luke was at a loss. Smith seemed to be wasting his time. He had come for two purposes, first to satisfy himself about some of the scientists whom we knew least, and second, to get help in proving his case against Sawbridge. But all he discovered were men shocked, bewildered, sullen.

There was one man, however, who was not shocked nor bewildered nor sullen. It was Martin. His mind was cool, he heard the news as though he had foreseen it and made his calculations. I did not need to look at him, as Smith brought out his elaborate piece of partial explanation. I had expected Martin to see it as his time to act.

Smith asked to have a ‘confab’ with him and Luke together, since Sawbridge was working directly under them. As they sat on the secretary’s desk, he told them, speaking frankly but as though giving an impersonation of frankness, that Sawbridge’s was the most thorough piece of spying so far. The difficulty was, to bring it out against him. Smith’s conclusive evidence could not be produced. The only way was to break him down.

‘You’ve tried?’ said Luke.

‘We should be remiss if we haven’t, said Smith, with his false smile.

‘Without any result?’

‘He’s a tough one,’ said Smith.

‘What does he say?’

‘He just denies it flat and laughs at us, said Smith.

Bevill’s voice and Luke’s sounded soggy with exasperation, but not Martin’s, as he asked:

‘How long can he keep that up?’

His eyes met Smith’s, but Luke disturbed them.

‘Anyway,’ Luke was saying, ‘the first thing is to get this chap out of the laboratory before we shut up shop tonight.’

‘I don’t think that’s right,’ said Martin.

‘What are you getting at, Eliot?’ asked Bevill.

‘I suggest that the sensible thing, sir,’ said Martin, speaking both modestly and certainly, ‘is to leave him exactly where he is.’

‘With great respect,’ Smith said to Luke, after a pause, ‘I wonder if that isn’t the wisest course?’

‘I won’t have him in my lab a day longer,’ said Luke.

‘He might get away with your latest stuff,’ cried old Bevill.

Martin answered him quietly: ‘That can be taken care of, sir.’

‘If we move him,’ Smith appeared to be thinking aloud, ‘we’ve got to make some excuse, and if he isn’t rattled he might require a very good excuse.’

‘How in God’s name can you expect us to work,’ Luke shouted, ‘with a man we can’t talk in front of?’

‘If we leave him where he is,’ said Martin, without a sign of excitement, ‘he would be under my eyes.’

He added: ‘I should very much prefer it so.’

In the middle of the argument, the telephone rang on the far table. It was from Drawbell’s personal assistant, the only person who could get through to us; she was asking to speak to me urgently. In a whisper, only four feet from old Bevill, I took the call.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Eliot,’ she said, ‘but Hanna Puchwein is pressing me, she says that she must speak to you and your brother this afternoon. I said that I mightn’t be able to find you.’

‘That’s right,’ I said.

‘I suppose you can’t speak to her?’

‘No,’ I said with routine prudence.

‘She said, if I couldn’t get you, that I was to leave a message. She’s most anxious. She told me to say it was urgent for her — for you and Dr Eliot (Martin) to see her before dinner tonight.’

I went back to my place, wrote down the message, put it in an envelope (it was curious how the fug of secrecy caught hold of one, how easy it was to feel like a criminal) and had it passed across the room to Martin. I watched him staring at the note, with his pen raised. Without his face changing, he wrote: ‘No, not until we have discussed it with Smith M.’

Uncertain of himself as I had not seen him, Luke soon gave way. Sawbridge was to stay under observation, and we left Smith alone with Luke and Martin, making arrangements about how Sawbridge must be watched.

Although Martin and I had not once talked without reserve since the August afternoon, I was staying, as usual, in his house. So I waited for him in his laboratory, while he finished the interview with Captain Smith.

As I waited there alone, I could not help trying to catch a glimpse of Sawbridge. His state of jeopardy, of being in danger of hearing a captor’s summons (next week? next month?), drew me with a degrading fascination of which I was ashamed.

It was the same with others, even with Smith, who should have been used to it. The sullen, pale face had only to come within sight — and it was hard to force one’s glance away. It might have been a school through which there moved, catching eyes afraid, ashamed, desiring, a boy of superlative attraction. On the plane of reason, I detested our secret; yet I found myself scratching at it, coming back to it.

Waiting for Martin, I manufactured an excuse to pass through Sawbridge’s laboratory, so that I could study him.

He knew his danger. Just like us who were watching him, he was apprehending when the time — the precise instant of time — would come. It seemed that at moments he was holding his breath, and he found himself taking care of ordinary involuntary physical acts. Instead of walking about the laboratory with his heavy, confident clatter, he went lightly and jaggedly, sometimes on tiptoe, like a man in trepidation by a sickbed. He had grown a moustache, fair against the large-pored skin. He was working on, taking his measurements, writing results in his stationery office notebook. He knew that we were watching. He knew all we knew. He was a brave man, and his opaque, sky-blue eyes looked back with contempt.

Martin, sooner than I counted on, found me there. He called Sawbridge: ‘How is it coming out?’

‘Eighty per cent reliable.’

‘Pretty,’ said Martin.

They looked at each other, and as Martin took me out he called good night.

32: Distress Out of Proportion

As soon as we reached Martin’s laboratory, he switched on the light behind an opalescent screen. He apologized for keeping me, said that he wanted to have a look at a spectroscopic plate; he stood there, fixing the negative on to the bright screen, peering down at the regiments of lines.

I believed his work was an excuse. He did not intend to talk about his action that day. I was out of proportion distressed.

Though nothing had been admitted, we both took it for granted that there was a break between us; but it was not that in itself which weighed on me. Reserve, separation, the withdrawal of intimacy — the relation of brothers, which is at the same time tough and not overblown, can stand them all. And yet that night, as we did not speak, as he stood over the luminous screen, I was heavy-hearted. The reason did not seem sufficient; I disliked what he planned to do about Sawbridge; but I could not have explained why I minded so much.

I had had no doubt what he intended, from that night at Stratford, when he put forward his case in front of Luke. He had foreseen the danger about Sawbridge: he had also foreseen how to turn it to his own use. It was clear to him, as in his place it might have been clear to me, that he could gain much from joining in the hunt.

It was cynical, but I could not lay that against him. It might be the cynicism of the rebound, for which I was at least in part responsible.

His suggestion at Stratford had been unscrupulous, but it would have saved trouble now. And I could not lay it against him that now he wanted to put Sawbridge away. We had never talked of it, but we both had the patriotism, slightly shamefaced, more inhibited than Bevill’s, of our kind and age.

We took it out in tart, tough-sounding sentiments, that as we had to live in this country, we might as well make it as safe as could be. In fact, when we heard of the spies, we were more shaken than we showed.

Concealing our sense of outrage, men like Martin and Francis Getliffe and I said to each other, in the dry, analytic language of the day — none of us liked the situation in which we found ourselves, but in that situation all societies had their secrets — any society which permitted its secrets to be stolen was obsolescent — we could not let it happen.

But accepting that necessity was one thing, making a career of it another.

Yet was that enough to make me, watching him, so wretched?

Was it even enough that he was throwing other scruples away, of the kind that my friends and I valued more? Among ourselves, we tried to be kind and loyal. Whereas I had no doubt that Martin was planning to climb at Luke’s expense, making the most out of the contrast between Luke’s mistake of judgement over Sawbridge and Martin’s own foresight. That day he had taken advantage of Luke’s confusion, in front of Bevill. And Martin had a card or two still to play.

Was that enough reason for my distress?

Carefully Martin packed the photographic plate in the box, made a note on the outside, and turned to me. He apologized again for keeping me waiting; he was expecting a result from another laboratory in ten minutes, and then he would be ready to go.

We made some conversation with our thoughts elsewhere. Then, without a preliminary and also without awkwardness, he said: ‘I’m sorry we had to brush Hanna off.’

I said yes.

‘I’m sure it was wise,’ said Martin.

‘Is there any end to this business?’

‘Not yet.’

He went on: ‘Hanna will understand. She’s a match for most of us.’ I glanced at him, his face lit from below by the shining screen. He was wearing a reflective, sarcastic smile. He said: ‘Why don’t you and I marry women like that?’

I caught his tone. My own marriage had been even more untranquil than his.

‘Because we wanted a quiet life,’ I said. It was the kind of irony that we could still share.

‘Exactly,’ said Martin.

We seemed close enough to speak. It was for me to take the first step if we were to be reconciled. I said: ‘We look like being in an unpleasant situation soon.’

Martin said: ‘Which one?’

I said: ‘About Sawbridge.’

‘Maybe,’ said Martin.

‘It would be a help to me if I knew what you were thinking.’

‘How, quite?’

‘These are times when one needs some help. So far as I’m concerned I need it very much.’

After a pause, Martin said: ‘The trouble is, we’re not likely to agree.’

Without roughness, he turned the appeal away. He began asking questions about the new flat into which I was just arranging to move.

33: Wife and Husband

The spring came, and Sawbridge remained at liberty. But the scientist about whom the warning came through on New Year’s Eve had been arrested, had come up at the Old Bailey, pleaded guilty and been given ten years. His name, which Bevill had forgotten that day, made headlines in the newspapers.

Later, I realized that most of us on the inside hid from ourselves how loud the public clamour was. We knew that people were talking nonsense, were exaggerating out of all meaning the practical results; and so, just like other officials in the inside of a scandal, we shut our ears off from any remark we heard about it, in the train, at the club bar, in the theatre-foyer, as though we were deaf men who had conveniently switched off our hearing aid.

Myself; I went into court for the trial. Little was said there; for many people it was enough, as it had been for Bevill, to add to the gritty taste of fear.

Always quick off the mark, Hankins, in his profession the most businesslike of men, got in with the first article, which he called The Final Treason. It was a moving and eloquent piece, the voice of those who felt left over from their liberal youth, to whom the sweetness of life had ceased with the twenties, and now seemed to themselves to be existing in no-man’s-land. For me, it had a feature of special interest. That was a single line in which he wrote, like many writers before him, a private message. He was signalling to Irene reminding her that she had not always lived among ‘the new foreigners’ — that is, the English scientists. For Hankins had come to think of them as a different race.

Soon after came news, drifting up from Barford to the committees, that Luke was ill. ‘Poorly’ was the first description I heard. No one seemed to know what the matter was — though some guessed it might be an after effect of his ‘dose’ It did not sound serious; it did not immediately strike me that this put Martin in effective charge.

I thought so little of it that I did not write to inquire, until towards the end of March I was told by Francis Getliffe that Luke was on the ‘certain’ list for that year’s elections to the Royal Society. I asked if I could congratulate him. Yes, said Francis, if it were kept between us. Luke himself already knew. So I sent a note, but for some days received no reply. At last a letter came, but it was written by Nora Luke. She said that Walter was not well, and not up to writing his thanks himself; if I could spare the time to come down some day, he would like to talk to me. If I did this, wrote Nora in a strong inflexible handwriting, she asked me to be sure to see her first. Then she could give me ‘all the information’.

I went to Barford next morning, and found Nora in her laboratory office. On the door was a card on which the Indian ink gleamed jet bright: N Luke, and underneath PSO, for Nora had, not long before, been promoted and was at that time the only woman at Barford of her rank.

As soon as I saw her, I said: ‘This is serious, isn’t it?’

‘It may be,’ said Nora Luke.

She added: ‘He asked me to tell you. He knows what the doctors think.’

‘What do they think?’

Sitting at her desk, with her hair in a bun, wearing rimless spectacles, her fawn sweater, her notebook in front of her, she looked as she must have done when she was a student, and she and Luke first met. Steadily she answered: ‘The worst possibility is cancer of the bone.’

It was what he had feared, in his first attack.

‘That may not happen,’ Nora went on in a reasonable tone. ‘It seems to depend on whether this flare-up is caused by the gamma rays or whether it’s traces of plutonium that have stayed inside him and gone for the bone.’

‘When will you know?’

‘No one can give him any idea. They haven’t any experience to go on. If this bout passes off, he won’t have any guarantee that it’s not going to return.’

I muttered something: then I inquired how many people knew.

‘Most people here, I suppose,’ said Nora. Suddenly she was curious: ‘Why do you ask that?’

In my middle twenties, I also had been threatened with grave illness. I had tried to conceal it, because it might do me professional harm. Instead of telling Nora that, I just said how often I had seen people hide even the mention of cancer.

‘He wouldn’t have any patience with that,’ said Nora. ‘Nor should I. Even if the worst came to the worst’ — she stared straight at me ‘the sooner everyone here knows the dangers the more they can save themselves.’

How open she was, just as Luke was himself! Sometimes their openness made the ruses, the secretiveness, of such as I seem shabby. Yet even so, learning from Nora about her husband’s illness, I felt that she was too open, I was more embarrassed than if she could not get a word out, and so I was less use to her.

I asked where Luke was, and who was nursing him. In the establishment hospital as before, said Nora; Mrs Drawbell, also as before.

‘She’s better at it than I am,’ said Nora.

She added, her light eyes right in the middle of her lenses, her glance not leaving mine: ‘If he’s knocked out for years, I suppose I shall have some practice.’ She went on: ‘As a matter of fact, if I’ve got him lying on his back for keeps. I shall be grateful, as long as I’ve got him at all.’

She said it without a tear. She said it without varying her flat, sensible, methodical voice. Nevertheless, it made me realize how, even five minutes before, and always in the past, I had grossly misunderstood her. The last time Luke was ill, and she had left the ward, I had thought to myself that she was glad to escape, that like me she could not stand the sight of suffering. Nonsense: it was a carelessness I should not have committed about a wilder woman such as Irene; at forty I had fallen into the adolescent error of being deceived by the prosaic.

Actually Nora would have stayed chained to her husband’s bedside, had it kept the breath of life in him a second longer. She had the total devotion — which did not need to be passionate, or even emotional — of one who began with no confidence in her charms, who scarcely dared think of her charms at all. Her self-esteem she invested in her mind which in fact she thought, quite mistakenly, was in her husband’s class. But, in her heart, she was always incredulous that she had found a man for life. Rather than have him taken away she would accept any terms.

Illness, decay, breakdown — if only he suffered them in her care, then she was spared the intolerable deprivation of losing him. It was those total devotions which sprang from total diffidence that were the most possessive of all. Between having him as an abject invalid, and having him in his full manhood but apart from her, there would not have been the most infinitesimal flicker of a choice for Nora.

When I entered Luke’s ward, the room was dark, rain was seeping down outside, he seemed asleep. As I crossed the floor, there was a rustle in the bed; he switched on the reading lamp and looked at me with a flushed, tousled face. The last patch of alopecia had gone, his hair was as thick as it used to be, the flush mimicked his old colour, but had a dead pallor behind it.

‘I’ve heard the doctors’ opinions,’ I said, searching for some way of bringing out regret. To my amazement, Luke said: ‘They don’t know much. If only there hadn’t been more interesting things to do, Lewis, I’d have liked to have a shot at medicine. I might have put some science into it.’

I could not tell whether he was braving it out — even when he went on: ‘I shall be surprised if they’re going to finish me off this time. I don’t put the carcinoma theory higher than a twenty per cent chance.’

If that was his spirit, I could only play up. So I congratulated him again on the Royal Society election.

‘Now that’s the only bloody thing that really frightens me,’ said Luke, with a grim, jaunty laugh. ‘When the old men give you your ticket a year or two early, it makes you wonder whether they’re hurrying to get in before the funeral.’

‘I haven’t heard any whispers of that,’ I said.

‘Are you lying?’

‘No.’ He had been elected on his second time up, while not yet thirty-five.

‘That’s a relief,’ said Luke. ‘I tell you, I shall believe that I’m done for when I see it.’

I thought, how easy he was to reassure.

‘One thing about people trying to dispose of you like this,’ said Luke, ‘it gives you time to think.’

Half-heartedly (I did not feel much like an argument) I asked what he had been thinking about.

‘Oh, the way I’ve spent my life so far,’ said Luke. ‘And what I ought to do with the rest of it.’

He was not speaking with his old truculence.

‘I couldn’t help being a scientist, could I? It was what I was made for. If I had my time over again, I should do the same. But none of us are really going to be easy about that blasted bomb. It’s the penalty for being born when we were — but whenever we have to look into the bloody mirror to shave, we shan’t be a hundred per cent pleased with what we see there.’

He added: ‘But what else could we do? You know the whole story, what else could chaps like me do?’

I mentioned that I had once heard Hector Rose say — Hector Rose, who stood for so much that Luke detested — that ‘events may get too big for men’.

‘Did he? Perhaps he’s not such a stuffed shirt after all. Of course we’ve all thought events may be too big for us.’

He fell silent. Then he said: ‘It may be so. But we’ve got to act as though they’re not.’

He knew that I agreed.

‘Curiously enough,’ said Luke, ‘it isn’t so easy to lose hope for the world — if there’s a chance that you’re going to die pretty soon. The moment you feel these things aren’t going to be your concern much longer, then you think how you could have made a difference.’

He said: ‘When I get over this, I shall make a difference. And if I don’t, I don’t know who can.’

He was so natural that I teased him. I inserted the name of the younger Pitt, but Luke knew no history.

He went on: ‘I’ve been lowering my sights, Lewis. I want to get us through the next twenty years without any of us dropping the bomb on each other. I think if we struggle on, day by day, centimetre by centimetre, we can just about do that. I’ve got to get the bomb produced, I’ve got to make the military understand what they can and cannot do with it, I shall have some fights on my hands, inside this place as well as outside, but I believe I can get away with it. Twenty years of peace would give us all a chance.’

He sat up against his pillows with a grin.

‘It won’t be good for my soul, will it?’

‘Why not?’

It was nerve-racking that he thought so much of the future.

‘I like power too much, I’m just discovering that. I shall like it more, when I’ve got my way for the next few years.’

He broke off: ‘No, it won’t be good for my soul, but if I do something useful, if I can win us a breathing space, what the hell does it matter about my soul?’

He had not once inquired about Martin or referred to him, except perhaps (I was not sure) when he spoke of internal enemies.

He made an attempt to ask about my affairs, but, with the compulsion of illness, came back to himself. He said, in a quiet, curiously wistful voice: ‘I once told you I had never had time for much fun. I wonder when I shall.’

A memory, not sharp, came back to me. Luke, younger than now, in the jauntiness of his health, grumbling outside a Barford window.

From his bed he frowned at me.

‘When these people told me I might die,’ he said, ‘I cursed because I was thinking of all the things I hadn’t done. If they happen to be right, which I don’t believe, I tell you, I shall go out thinking of all the fun I’ve wasted. That’s the one thought I can’t bear.’

Just for an instant his courage left him. Once again, just as outside Drawbell’s gate (the memory was sharper now) he was thinking of women, of how he was still longing to possess them, of how he felt cheated because his marriage had hemmed him in. His marriage had been a good one, he loved his children, he was getting near middle age; yet now he was craving for a woman, as though he were a virgin dying with the intolerable thought that he had missed the supreme joy, the joy greater in imagination than any realized love could ever be, as though he were Keats cursing fate because he had not had Fanny Brawne.

In those that I had seen die, the bitterest thought was what they had left undone.

And, as a matter of truth, though it was not always an easy truth to take, I had observed what others had observed before — I could not recall of those who had known more than their share of the erotic life, one who, when the end came, did not think that his time had been tolerably well spent.

34: Warm to the Touch

Martin was the last man to overplay his hand. The summer came, Sawbridge was still working in the plutonium laboratory, there was nothing new from Captain Smith. From Luke’s ward there came ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory reports; some doctors thought that it was a false alarm. Whoever was right, Martin could count on months in control. The press kept up articles on traitors, and espionage, but Barford was having a respite out of the news.

In July, Martin let us know that the first laboratory extraction of plutonium metal was ready for test. Drawbell issued invitations to the committee, as though he were trying to imitate each detail of the fiasco with the pile. The day was fixed for the 26th July, and Bevill was looking forward to it like a child,

‘I believe tomorrow is going to be what I should call a red-letter day,’ he said earnestly, as soon as he met the scientists at Barford, as though he had invented the phrase. At dinner that night, where there came Drawbell, Martin, Francis Getliffe, Mounteney, Hector Rose, Nora Luke, ten more Barford scientists and committee members, he made a long speech retracing the history of the project from what he called the ‘good old days’, a speech sentimental, nostalgic, full of nursery images, in which with the utmost sincerity he paid tribute to everyone’s good intentions, including those people whom he regarded as twisters and blackguards.

As we were standing about after dinner, Martin touched my arm. He took me to the edge of the crowd and whispered: ‘There’s no need to worry about tomorrow.’

Looking at him, I saw his mouth correct, his eyes secretive and merry. I did not need any explanation. In estrangement, it was still possible to read each other’s feelings; he had just considered mine with a kind of formal courtesy, as he would not have needed to consider a friend’s.

I was not staying with him that night, but he asked me to escape from the party for a quarter of an hour. ‘We went inside the establishment wire, and walked quickly along the sludgy paths.

In an empty room of the hot laboratory, he found me a set of rubber clothes, cloak, cowl, gloves, and goloshes, and put on his own. He took me down a passage marked DANGER. ‘Never mind that,’ said Martin. He unlocked a steel door which gave into a slit of a room, empty except for what looked like a meat-safe. Martin twiddled the combination, opened the panel, and took out a floppy bag made of some yellowish substance, rather smaller than a woman’s shopping basket. As he held the bag, one corner was weighed down, as though by a small heavy object, it might have been a lead pellet.

‘That’s plutonium,’ said Martin.

‘How much?’

‘Not much. I suppose it’s worth a few hundred thousand pounds.’

He looked at the bag with a possessive, and almost sensual glance.

I had seen collectors look like that.

‘Touch it,’ he said.

I put two fingers on the bag and astonishingly was taken into an irrelevant bliss.

Under the bag’s surface, the metal was hot to the touch — and, yes, pushing under memories, I had it, I knew why I was happy. It brought back the moment, the grass and earth hot under my hand, when Martin and Irene told me she was going to have a child; so, like Irene in the Park under the fog-wrapped lights, I had been made a present of a Proustian moment, and the touch of the metal, whose heat might otherwise have seemed sinister, levitated me to the forgotten happiness of a joyous summer night.

For once, Martin was taken unawares. He was disconcerted to see me, with my fingers on the bag, lost in an absent-minded content.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘Quite,’ I said.

Next day, the demonstration was conducted as though Martin and his staff did not know whether it would work.

At the end, however, Martin would not accept the congratulations, insisting that they were due to Luke, and he took Bevill and the others to Luke’s bedside.

Hector Rose and I followed behind.

‘Are you going with them, Eliot?’ said Rose.

I was surprised by the constraint in his voice.

‘I think we’d better,’ I said.

‘As a matter of fact, I think I’ll just take a stroll round the place,’ he said.

It was so impolite, so unlike him that I did not begin to understand. Although I accompanied him, I could get no hint of the reason. Later I picked it up, and it turned out to be simple, though to me unexpected. Hector Rose happened to feel a morbid horror of cancer; he tried to avoid so much as hearing the name of the disease.

By ourselves, in Drawbell’s office, he was for him relaxed, having extricated himself from an ordeal; he let fall what Bevill would have called one or two straws in the wind, about the future management at Barford. He and Bevill wanted to get it on a business footing: Drawbell was dead out of favour. If they made a change of superintendent, and if Luke were well, it would be difficult to sidetrack him — but none of the officials, and few of the elderly scientists, relished the idea. He had made mistakes: he talked too loud and too much: he was not their man.

Already they trusted Martin more. He was younger, he was not in the Royal Society, to give him the full job was not practical politics; but, if Luke’s health stayed uncertain, was there any device by which they could give Martin an acting command of Barford?

The luck was playing into Martin’s hand. I knew that he was ready, just as he had been ready since that night in the Stratford pub, to make the most of it. Even when he paid his tribute to Luke he had a double motive, he had one eye on his own future.

It was true that he was fair-minded, more so than most men, He would not receive more credit than he had earned. Better than anyone, he could estimate Luke’s share in the project, and he wanted it made clear.

But although what he said of Luke was truthful, he also knew that men required it. Men liked fairness: it was part of the amenities, if in Bevill’s and Rose’s world you wanted your own way.

Now Martin was coming to his last move but one.

To Drawbell’s room, Bevill and he and Drawbell himself returned from the sickbed. Mounteney and Getliffe accompanied them. Martin wanted those two on his side as well as the officials. If the opportunity did not arrive without forcing it, he was ready to wait. In fact, it came when Bevill asked about Luke’s health.

‘Is that poor chap,’ said Bevill, ‘going to get back into harness?’

‘I hope so,’ said Martin. ‘The doctors seem to think so.’

‘We just don’t know,’ said Drawbell

‘He may never come back, you mean?’ said Bevill.

‘I believe he will,’ said Martin, once more speaking out deliberately on Luke’s behalf.

‘Well,’ said Bevill to Drawbell, ‘I suppose Eliot will carry on?’

‘He’s been doing it for months,’ said Drawbell. ‘I always tell my team no one is indispensable. If any of you go there’s always a better man behind you!’

‘I suppose you can carry on, Eliot, my lad?’ said Bevill to Martin in a jollying tone.

At last Martin saw his opening.

Instead of giving a junior’s yes, he stared down at his hand, and then, after a pause, suddenly looked straight at Bevill with sharp, frowning eyes.

‘There is a difficulty,’ he said. ‘I don’t know whether this is the time to raise it.’

Drawbell bobbed and smiled. Now that the young man had grown up, he was having to struggle for his say.

‘I don’t see the difficulty,’ said Bevill. ‘You’ve been doing splendidly, why, you’ve been delivering the goods.’

‘It would ease my mind,’ said Martin, ‘if I could explain a little what I mean.’

Bevill said, ‘That’s what we’re here for.’

Martin said: ‘Well, sir, anyone who is asked to take responsibility for this project is taking responsibility for a good deal more. I think it may be unreasonable to ask him, if he can’t persuade his colleagues that we’re shutting our eyes to trouble.’

Bevill said: ‘The water is getting a bit deep for me.’

Martin asked a question: ‘Does anyone believe we can leave the Sawbridge question where it is?’

‘I see,’ said Bevill.

In fact, the old man had seen minutes before. He was playing stupid to help Martin on.

‘I am sorry to press this,’ said Martin, ‘but I couldn’t let myself be responsible for another Sawbridge.’

‘God forbid,’ said Bevill.

‘Is there any evidence of another?’ said Getliffe.

‘None that I know of,’ said Martin. He was speaking as though determined not to overstate his case. ‘But if we can’t touch this man, it seems to me not impossible that we should have someone follow suit before we’re through.’

‘It’s not impossible.’ Francis Getliffe had to give him the point.

‘It’s not exactly our fault that we haven’t touched your present colleague,’ said Rose.

‘I have a view on that,’ said Martin quietly.

‘We want to hear,’ said Bevill, still keeping the court for Martin.

‘Everything I say here is privileged?’

‘Within these four walls,’ the old man replied.

‘I think there’s a chance that Sawbridge can be broken down,’ said Martin.

‘Captain Hook has tried long enough.’

‘That’s true,’ said Martin, ‘but I think there’s a chance.’

‘How do you see it happening?’

‘It could only be done by someone who knows him.’

‘Who?’

‘I’m ready to try,’ said Martin.

Martin, in the same tone, went on to state his terms. If Sawbridge stayed at large in the project, it was not reasonable to ask Martin, feeling as he did, to take the responsibility. If he were to take it, he needed sanction to join Captain Smith and try to settle ‘the Sawbridge question’ for good and all.

Bevill was enthusiastically in favour; Rose thought it a fair proposal. ‘We want two things,’ said Rose. ‘The first is safety, and the second is as little publicity as we can humanly manage. We should be eternally grateful, my dear Eliot,’ (he was speaking to Martin) ‘if only you could keep us out of the papers.’

‘That won’t be possible,’ said Martin.

‘You mean, there’ll be another trial?’ said Getliffe.

‘It’s necessary,’ said Martin.

Martin had counted on support front Bevill and Rose; he had also set himself to get acquiescence from the scientists. Suddenly he got more than acquiescence, he got wholehearted support where one would have looked for it last. It came from Mounteney. It happened that Mounteney possessed, as well as his scientific ideals, a passionate sense of a man’s pledged word. He forgot about national secrecy (which he loathed) and communism (which in principle he approved of) in his horror that a man like Sawbridge could sign the undertaking of secrecy and then break it. In his pure unpadded integrity Mounteney saw nothing but the monstrosity of breaking one’s oath, and, like Thomas Bevill whom he resembled in no other conceivable fashion, he cried out: ‘I should shoot them! The sooner we shoot them the better!’

In that instant I understood at last the mystery of Mounteney’s surrender before the bomb was dropped, the reason his protest fizzled out.

It was Francis Getliffe who took longest to come round.

‘I should have thought it was enough,’ he said, ‘for you to give Smith all the information you can. I don’t see why you should get involved further than that.’

‘I’m afraid that I must,’ said Martin patiently.

‘There are a great many disadvantages, and no advantages to put against them, in scientists becoming mixed up in police work, even now.’

‘From a long-term view, I think that’s right,’ said Martin.

‘Good work,’ said Francis Getliffe.

‘But,’ said Martin, ‘there are times when one can’t think of the long term, and I suggest this is one.’

‘Why?’

‘Because otherwise no one will make this man confess.’

‘It isn’t proved that you can make the difference.’

‘No,’ Martin replied. ‘I may fail. But I suggest that is not a reason for stopping me.’

At last Francis shook his head, unwittingly assenting, and said: ‘We’ve gone so far, someone was bound to go the whole distance.’ He, who carried so much authority, sounded for once indecisive: as though the things he and others had been forced to do had prepared the way for younger, harder men.

Then Martin put in his last word that afternoon: ‘I think, before we settle it, that I ought to mention Luke and I have not been in complete agreement on this problem.’

‘That’s appreciated,’ said Hector Rose.

Martin spoke as fairly, as firmly, as when he had been giving the credit to Luke.

‘I proposed easing Sawbridge out last summer,’ he remarked. ‘I felt sufficiently strongly about it to put it on the file.’

‘I take it,’ asked Rose, ‘that Luke resisted?’

‘It’s no use crying over spilt milk,’ said Bevill. ‘Now you put us straight.

35: The Brilliance of Suspicion

The day after Martin’s piece of persuasion I did what, at any previous time, I should not have thought twice about. Now I did it deliberately. It was a little thing: I invited Kurt Puchwein to dinner.

As a result, I was snubbed. I received by return a letter in Puchwein’s flowing Teutonic script:

‘My friend, that is what I should have called you when Roy Calvert brought us together ten years ago. I realize that in volunteering to be seen with me again you were taking a risk: I am unwilling to be the source of risk to anyone while there is a shred of friendship left. In the life that you and your colleagues are now leading, it is too dangerous to have friends.’

The letter ended:

‘You can do one last thing for me which I hope is neither dangerous for yourself, nor, like your invitation, misplaced charity. Please, if you should see Hanna, put in a word for me. The divorce is going through, but there is still time for her to come back.’

Within a few hours Hanna herself rang up, as though by a complete coincidence, for so far as I knew she had not been near her husband for months. It was the same message as at Barford on New Year’s Day — could she speak to me urgently? I hesitated; caution, suspiciousness, nagged at me — and resentment of my brother. I had to tell myself that, if I could not afford to behave openly, few men could.

In my new flat Hanna sat on the sofa, the sun, on the summer evening still high over Hyde Park, falling across her but leaving her from the shoulders up in shadow. Dazzled, I could still see her eyes snapping, as angrily she asked me: ‘Won’t you stop Martin doing this beastly job?’

I would not begin on those terms.

‘It’s shabby! It’s rotten!’ Her face was crumbled with rage.

‘Look, Hanna,’ I said, ‘you’d better tell me how it affects you.’

‘You ought to stop him out of decency.’

Without replying, I asked about a rumour which I had picked up at Barford: for years Hanna’s name had been linked with that of Rudd, Martin’s first chief. Martin, who knew him well, was sure that she had picked wrong. She was looking for someone to master her; she thought she had found it in Rudd, who to his subordinates was a bully; yet with a woman he would be dependent. I asked, did she intend to marry him?

‘Yes,’ said Hanna.

‘I was afraid so,’ I said.

‘You have never liked him.’

‘That isn’t true.’

‘Martin has never forgiven him.’

‘I wouldn’t mind about that,’ I said, ‘if he were right for you.’

‘Why isn’t he right for me?’

‘You still think you’d like some support?’

‘Oh, God, yes!’

‘You had to bolster up Kurt for years, and now you’re going to do the same again.’

‘Somehow I can make it work,’ she said, with an obstinate toss of her head.

She was set on it: it was useless, and unkind, to say more.

‘That is,’ she said, ‘if Martin will let me marry him without doing him harm.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that it may be fatal to anyone at Barford to have a wife with my particular record.’

She seemed to be trying to say: ‘I want this man. It’s my last chance. Let me have him.’ But she was extraordinarily inhibited about speaking from the heart. Both she and Irene, whom the wives at Barford envied for their sophistication, could have taken lessons from a good many of those wives in the direct emotional appeal. Anger, Hanna could express without self-consciousness, but not much else.

I asked if Rudd knew of her political past. Yes, she said. I told her (it was the only reassurance I could give her) that I had not heard her name in any discussion at Barford.

‘Whose names have you heard?’

I told her no more than she already knew.

‘Why don’t you drag Martin out of the whole wretched business?’

I did not reply.

‘I suppose he has decided that persecution is a paying line.’

Again I did not reply.

‘If you will forgive a Jew for saying so,’ she said with a bitter grin, ‘it seems rather like St Paul going in the opposite direction.’

She went on: ‘Does Martin know that he has been converted the wrong way round?’

Just then the rays of the sun, which had declined to the tops of the trees, began streaming into her eyes, and I drew the curtains across the furthest window. As I glanced at her, her face was open and bleached, as many faces are in anger, grief, pain.

She cried: ‘Is there no way of shifting him?’

Then she said: ‘Do you know, Lewis, I could have had him once.’

It might be true, I was thinking. When he had been at his unhappiest over Irene, in the first year at Barford — then perhaps Hanna could have taken him away. She threw back her neat small head, with a look that seemed most of all surprised. She said something more; she had considered him for herself; but turned him down because she had not thought him strong enough. Intelligent but lacking insight, with a strong will that had so long searched for a stronger, she had never been able to help underrating the men she met, especially those of whom she got fond. It came to her with consternation, almost with shame, that, now her will had come up in earnest against Martin’s, she, who in the past had thought him pliable, did not stand a chance. She was outraged by his behaviour, and yet in her anger and surprise she wished that when they first met she had seen him with these fresh eyes.

She made another attack on me.

‘He cannot like what he is doing,’ she said. ‘It cannot be good for him.’

She turned full on me, when I was sitting near the window with my back to the sunlight.

‘I always thought you were more heavyweight than he was — but that he was the finer man.’

Making her last attempt, she was using that oblique form of flattery, which delights a father by telling him how stupid he is compared to his son. But for once it had no effect. I had no room for any thoughts but two.

The first was, the time would have to come when Martin and I faced each other.

The second — it was so sharp that it dulled even the prospect of a final quarrel — was nothing but suspicion, the sharp-edged, pieces-fitting-together, unreal suspicion of one plumped in the room where a crime had taken place. How did Hanna know so much of Martin’s actions? What was she after? How close was she really to Puchwein nowadays? Was their separation a blind?

In that brilliance of suspicion, one lost one’s judgement altogether. Everything seemed as probable, as improbable, as anything else. It seemed conceivable, that afternoon, that Hanna had lived years of her life in a moment-by-moment masquerade, more complete than any I had heard of. If one had to live close to official secrets (or, what sounded different but produced the same effect, to a crime of violence) one knew what it must be like to be a paranoiac. The beautiful detective-story spider-web of suspicion, the facts of everyday clearer-edged than they have ever been, no glue of sense to stick them in their place.

That evening, each action of Puchwein’s and Hanna’s for years past, stood out with a double interpretation — on one hand, the plunging about of wilful human beings, on the other, the master cover of spies. The residue of sense pulled me down to earth, and yet, the suspicions rearranged themselves — silly, ingenious, unrealistic, exciting, feelingless.

36: A Cartoon-like Resemblance

The same evening that Hanna visited me, Martin was talking to Captain Smith. Sawbridge was called by telephone some hours later, and ‘invited to a conference’, which was Smith’s expression, on the following day. Smith rang me up also; he wanted me there for the first morning (he assumed that the interrogation would go on for days) in order to retrace once more the facts of how Sawbridge first entered Barford.

In past interrogations Smith had questioned Sawbridge time and again about his movements, for those days and hours when Smith was certain (though he could not prove it in a court) that Sawbridge had walked down a street in Birmingham, watched for a man carrying two evening papers, exchanged a word, given over his information; and this, or something close to it, had happened not once but three times, and possibly four.

In the morning we waited for him. Smith had borrowed a room in an annexe outside New Scotland Yard, behind Whitehall on the side opposite my offices. The room smelt of paint, and contained a table, half a dozen shiny pitch-pine chairs, a small desk where a shorthand writer could sit; the walls were bare, except for a band of hat pegs and a map of Italy. I did not know why, but it brought back the vestry of the church where my mother used to go, holding her own through the bankruptcy, still attending parish meetings and committees for sales-of-work.

Smith walked about the room, with his actor’s stride; he was wearing a new elegant suit. Most of the conversation, as we waited, was made by an old acquaintance of mine, a man called Maxwell, whom I had known when I practised at the Common Law Bar. He had just become a detective inspector in the Special Branch. He was both fat and muscular, beautifully poised on small, strong, high-arched feet. His eyes, which were hot and inquisitive, looked from Martin to me. We were both quiet, and apart from a good-morning had not spoken to each other.

To Smith, Martin talked in a matter-of-fact tone, as though this were just another morning. His face was composed, but I thought I noted, running up from eyebrow to temple, a line which had not fixed itself before.

Sawbridge was brought in. He had expected to see Smith but not the rest of us; he stared at Martin; he did not show any fear, but a touch of perplexity, as though this was a social occasion, and he did not know the etiquette.

The smell of paint seemed stronger. I felt the nerves plucking in my elbows.

‘Hallo, old son,’ said Smith in his creaking voice.

‘Are you all right?’ Sawbridge responded. It was the greeting that Martin and I used to hear on midland cricket grounds.

‘Let’s get round the table, shall we?’ said Smith.

We sat down, Smith between Sawbridge and Martin. He shot from one to the other his switched-on, transfiguring smile.

‘You two knew each other before ever you went to Cambridge, didn’t you?’

Sharply Martin said: ‘Oh yes, we peed up against the same wall.’

It might have been another man speaking. I had not heard him false-hearty before; and, as a rule, no one knew better how to wait. Just then, I knew for certain the effort he was making.

In fact, the phrase was intended to recall our old headmaster, who used it as his ultimate statement of social equality. Sawbridge took it at its face value, and grinned.

‘I thought,’ said Captain Smith, ‘that it mightn’t be a bad idea to have another yarn.’

‘What’s the point of it?’

‘Perhaps we shall see the point of it, shan’t we?’

Sawbridge shrugged his shoulders, but Martin held his eye, and began: ‘You knew about how the Canadian stuff was given away?’

‘No more than you do?

‘We’re interested in one or two details.’

‘I’ve got nothing to say about that.’

‘You knew—’ (the man convicted that spring), ‘didn’t you?’

‘No more than you did.’

‘Your ring was independent of that one, was it?’

I could hear that Martin’s opening had been worked out. He was master of himself again, at the same time acute and ready to sit talking for days. To my surprise Sawbridge was willing, though he made his flat denials, to go on answering back. If I had been advising him (I thought, as though I were a professional lawyer again), I should have said: At all costs, keep your mouth shut. But Sawbridge did not mind telling his story.

On the other side there was no pretence that anyone thought him innocent. As in most investigations, Smith kept on assuming that Sawbridge had done it, that it was only necessary for him to admit the facts that Smith produced.

Smith talked to him like an old friend going over anecdotes familiar to them both and well liked. ‘That was the time you took the drawings…’ ‘…but you had met — before, hadn’t you?’… Smith, trying to understand his opponent, had come to have a liking for him — the only one of us to do so.

Even that morning, Smith was fascinated by the discovery he kept making afresh — that, at the identical time when (as Smith repeated, without getting tired of it) Sawbridge was carrying secrets of the Barford project to a contact man, he was nevertheless deeply concerned for its success. He had worked night and day for it; few scientists had been more devoted and wholehearted in their science; such scientific ability as he had, he had put into the common task.

I remembered the night of Luke’s fiasco; it did not matter personally to Sawbridge, and he was not a man who displayed much emotion; but it was he who had been crying.

Smith shook his head, half-gratified, as when one sees a friend repeat an inexplicable oddity; but to Martin it did not seem an oddity at all. Science had its own imperatives; if you were working on a problem, you could not help but crave for it to ‘come out’. If you could be of use yourself it was unnatural not to. It was not Sawbridge alone, but most of the scientific spies who had their own share, sometimes a modestly distinguished share, in producing results which soon after (like Sawbridge, walking to a commonplace street corner, looking for a man with a daily paper) they, as spies, stole away.

All this Martin understood much better than I did. Watching him and Sawbridge facing each other across the table, I could hear them speaking the same language. The two young men stared at each other without expression, with the faces of men who had learned, more deeply than their seniors, to give nothing away. They did not even show dislike. At that moment, there was a cartoon-like resemblance between them, both fair, both blue-eyed: but Sawbridge’s face was heavier than Martin’s and his eyes glaucous instead of bright. Of the two, though at twenty-nine he was three years younger, he looked — although for the first time his expression was bitten into with anxiety — the more unalterable.

Martin’s eyes did not leave him. He could understand much that to me was alien; to do so, one, had to be both a scientist and young. Even a man like Francis Getliffe was set back by the hopes of his youth — whereas Martin by an effort seemed able to throw those hopes away, and accept secrets, spying, the persistence of the scientific drive, the closed mind, the two world-sides, persecution, as facts of life.

How long had it been since he made such an effort? I thought, watching him without sympathy, though once or twice with a pulse of kinship. Was it his hardest?

37: The Lonely Men

I left the room at midday, and saw no more of him for several days, although I knew that he was going on with the interrogation. Irene did not know even that, nor why he was staying so long in London.

One afternoon, while Martin was sitting with Captain Smith and Sawbridge in the paint-smelling room, she had tea with me and asked about him, but casually, without anxiety.

In fact, she showed both enjoyment at his rise to fame, and also that sparkle of ridicule and incredulity which lurks in some high-spirited wives when their men come off. It was much the same incredulity as when she told me that ‘E H’ (Hankins) was at last on the edge of getting married.

‘Caught!’ she said. ‘Of course the old boy can still slip out of it. But he’s getting on, perhaps he’s giving up the unequal struggle.’

Her unrest was past and buried, she was saying — but even so she was not as amused as she sounded. I was thinking that she, to whom marriage had sometimes not seemed so much of a confining bond, regarded it in her old lover with the same finality as her mother might have done. Like most of us, she was more voracious than she admitted to herself; even if he had been a trivial capture, the news of his marriage would have cost her a wrench. As for Hankins — though I listened to the squeal of glee with which she laughed at him, within weeks of being domesticated at last — I felt that she was half-thinking — ‘If I wanted, I should still have time to break it up!’

Although she did not know it, I read that night, as on each night for a week past, what her husband was doing. Evening by evening Captain Smith walked along from the room to my office with the verbatim report of what he called ‘the day’s proceedings’. Those reports had the curious sodden flatness which I had come to recognize years ago at the Bar in conversation taken down word by word. Most of the speeches were repetitive, bumbling, broken-backed. The edge was taken off Martin’s tongue, and the others sounded maundering. There was also, as in all investigations I had been anywhere near, very little in the way of intellectual interchange. Martin and Sawbridge were men trained in abstract thought, and Martin could use the dialectic as well as Sawbridge; but in practice neither of them found this the time to do so.

Over ninety per cent of all those words, day by day for more than a week already, were matter-of-fact. Captain Smith’s organization was certain, from the sources they could not reveal, that Sawbridge had walked down a named street on a named day, and passed over papers. Ninety per cent, probably ninety-five per cent, of the records consisted of questions and answers upon actions as prosaic as that.

Out of the first day’s transcript I read nothing but details. ‘You were in Birmingham, at the corner of Corporation Street and High Street, on October 17th, ’43?’ (that was only a few months after Sawbridge arrived at Barford). Flat negatives — but one or two were broken down by ordinary police facts. Who could remember the events of an afternoon three years ago, anyway? Why not be vague?

Sawbridge denied being in Birmingham on any day that month: then he fumbled: Maxwell produced a carbon copy of a receipt (dated not October 17th but October 22nd) given him by a Birmingham bookshop.

The next impression, of the later days of the first week, was that Martin was taking more and more of the examination. It looked as though Smith and the Special Branch between them had run out of facts, certainly of producible facts. Was Sawbridge experienced enough to guess it? Or did he expect there was evidence to come?

From the first, Martin’s questions were more intimate than the others. He took it for granted that, as soon as Sawbridge knew that Barford was trying to make the fission bomb, he did not feel much doubt about how to act.

E. (Martin). Did you in fact know what Barford was set up for before you arrived?

SA. (In the record, this symbol was used throughout to distinguish Sawbridge from Smith.) No.

E. Hadn’t you thought about it? (i.e. the bomb).

SA. I read the papers, but I thought it was too far off.

E. When did you change your mind?

SA. As soon as I was appointed there and heard about the background.

E. Then you believed it would happen?

SA. Of course I did, just like you all did.

E. That is, you believed this country or America would have the bomb within 3–4 years?

SA. We all did.

E. And you thought of the effect on politics?

SA. I’m not sure what you mean by politics.

E. You thought of the possibility that the West would have the bomb, and the Soviet Union wouldn’t?

(Despite Sawbridge’s last remark, Martin was using ‘politics’ in a communist sense, just as he steadily referred to the Soviet Union, as though out of politeness to the other man.)

SA. I thought if we’d seen that the thing might work then the Soviet physicists must have done the same.

E. But you didn’t know?

SA. What do you take them for? Do you think you’re all that better than they are?

E. No, but there are more of us. Anyway, you’d have felt safer if they knew what we were doing?

SA. I thought it was wrong to keep secrets from allies, if that’s what you mean.

E. The Soviet Union wouldn’t be safe until someone told them?

SA. I didn’t say that.

E. But you thought it might be your duty to make certain?

SA. I thought it was the Government’s duty.

E. You knew that wouldn’t happen. You knew that the Soviet Union might be more at a disadvantage than they’ve been since the civil war?

SA. I didn’t think they’d be far behind.

E. But they would be behind. They had to be kept up to date — even if none of them was able to extend to us a similar courtesy?

(That was the only sarcasm of Martin’s that came through the record.)

SA. They weren’t in the same position.

E. You were thinking all this within a month of getting to Barford, weren’t you? Or it didn’t take as long as a month?

SA. There wasn’t much difficulty about the analysis.

E. You talked to a contact straight away, then?

SA. No.

All through that exchange, Martin assumed that in origin Sawbridge’s choice had been simple. To introduce national terms, or words like treachery, was making things difficult for yourself not for Sawbridge. He did not think of the Soviet Union as a nation, opposed to other nations; his duty to it overrode all others, or rather included all others. It was by doing his duty to the Soviet Union that he would, in the long run, be doing his duty to the people round him. There was no conflict there; and those who, preoccupied with their own conflicts, transposed them to Sawbridge, could not make sense of the labyrinths they themselves invented in him. It was Martin’s strength that he invented none: from the start, he treated Sawbridge as a man simple and tough, someone quite unlike a figure out of Amiel or Kierkegaard, much more like Thomas Bevill in reverse.

In fact, Martin assumed Sawbridge did not think twice about his duty until he acted on it. Then he felt, not doubt, but the strain of any man alone with his danger — walking the streets of Birmingham under the autumn sun, the red brick gleaming, the Victorian gothic, the shop fronts — so similar to the streets of the town twenty miles away, where both he and Martin had waited at other street corners. The cosy, commonplace, ugly street — the faces indifferent, the busy footsteps — no one isolated or in any danger, except one man alone, looking out for an evening paper, the homely evening paper which, not many years ago, he would have bought for the football results. That was the loneliness of action, the extreme loneliness of a man who was cutting himself off from his kind.

From Martin’s questions, he understood that too, as pitilessly he kept on, waiting for an admission.

What had sent Sawbridge on those walks, cut off from the others safe on the busy street? I could not find a satisfactory answer. Nearly everyone found him dislikeable, but in a dull, unspecific fashion. His virtues were the more unglamorous ones — reliability, abstinence, honesty in private relations, In some respects he resembled my bête noire, Pearson, and like Pearson he was a man of unusual courage. He possessed also a capacity for faith and at the same instant for rancour.

No doubt it was the rancour which made him a dynamist. Compare him, for example, with Puchwein, whose communism sprang from a magnanimous root — who was vain, impatient, wanted to be benevolent in a hurry. And, just as with many Romans who turned to Christianity in the fourth century, Puchwein wanted to be on the side of history. He had no question intellectually that, in the long run, the communists must win. But those motives were not so compelling as to drive him into danger; to go into action as Sawbridge did, benevolence was not enough.

Then what was? The hidden wound, people said: the wound from which he never took the bandages and which gave him his sullen temper, his rancour. None of us knew him well enough to reach it.

Did Martin see the wound clearer than I did? Did he feel any resemblance to himself?

If so, he shut it away. Behaviour matters, not motive — doing what he was doing, he could have no other thought.

The visits to Birmingham, the autumn transaction (giving the news that the pile was being built), the three visits in the spring, one just before Sawbridge had accompanied Luke into the hot laboratory: on each visit, what data had he given over?

Denial, denial again.

Martin increased the strain.

He knew, via Captain Smith, the information that had passed. He knew, which no one else but Luke could, that one piece of that information was false; while waiting for the rods to cool, they had decided on which solvent to use for the plutonium — and then, a good deal later, had changed their minds. It was the first method which had been told to the agent; only Luke, Sawbridge, and Martin could know the exact circumstances in which it had been decided on, and also given up.

Martin asked Sawbridge about those decisions. For the first and only time in the investigation, Martin gained an advantage through being on the inside. So far as I could judge, he used his technical familiarity with his usual deliberate nerve; but that was not the major weight with which he was wearing Sawbridge down.

The major weight came from his use of Sawbridge’s loneliness, and his sense of how it was growing as the days dripped by. Against it Martin brought down, not only his bits of technical knowledge, not only the facts of the meetings at the Corporation Street corner — but also all the opinions of Barford, every sign that men working there were willing to dismiss Sawbridge from their minds, so that he should feel separate even from those among whom he had been most at home.

No one knew better than Martin how even the hardest suffer the agoraphobia of being finally alone.

On the seventh day, the record ran:

E. I suppose you have got your notebooks about the work at Barford?

SA. Yes.

E. We shall want them.

SA. I shall want them if I go back.

E. Do you think you will go back?

SA. I hope you realize what it will mean to Barford if I do not.

E. You might have thought of that before.

SA. I thought of it more than you have given me credit for.

E. After you made the first contact with—’

SA. I have not admitted that.

E. After you made the first contact, or before?

SA. I thought of it all along.

For those seven nights running Captain Smith brought the record into my office. He made excuses to stay with me as I read; it looked like a refinement of security, but afterwards he liked to go out with me for a drink, taking his time about it. I discovered that he had a valetudinarian wife, for whom, without letting out a complaint, he had sacrificed his pleasure ever since he was a young man; but even he was not above stealing a pretext for half an hour away from her.

On the eighth night, which was Thursday, September 23rd, he came into my office hand on hip, and, as he gave me the typescript, said: ‘Now we shan’t be long.’

‘What?’

‘Our friend is beginning to crack.’

‘Is it definite?’

‘Once they begin to crack, they never take hold of themselves again.’

He said it in his parsonical tone, without any trace of elation.

I felt — visceral pity; a complex of satisfactions: anxiety that the time was near (I neither wanted to nor could have done it while the issue was not settled) when I must speak to Martin.

‘How long will he get?’ I asked.

‘About the same as the other one.’

He stared at me.

‘Ten years, there or thereabouts,’ he went on. ‘It’s a long time for a young man.’

I nodded.

‘We’ve got to do it,’ he said, in exactly the same neutral creaking tone. He had not spoken of Sawbridge’s sentence with sentimentality, but as a matter of fact; but also I had not heard him condemn Sawbridge. Smith had more moral taste than most persons connected with crime and punishment; the country had a right to guard itself, to make sure that men like Sawbridge were caught; but, in his view, it had no right to insult them.

The next night, the Friday, Smith was late arriving at my office. When he did so, fingering the rolled-up record as though it were a flute, he said: ‘Our friend is going to make a complete statement on Monday morning.’

38: Words in the Open

Smith decided that we ought to take the news at once to Bevill and Rose. I followed him down the corridor to Rose’s room, where, as Smith began a preamble about having a ‘confab’, I glanced out of the window into the dark and muggy twilight, with the lights already shining (although it was only half past six on a September evening) from windows in Birdcage Walk.

Bland behind his desk, Rose was bringing Smith to the point, but, as he did so, there was a familiar step outside, a step brisk and active, which did not sound like an old man pretending to be young — and Bevill came in, with a flushed happy look. He left the door open, and in a moment Martin entered.

‘This is good news for us all,’ said Bevill.

With one question, aside to me, Rose grasped what news they brought.

‘It’s jolly good work,’ said Bevill.

‘I suppose, in the circumstances, it is the best solution,’ said Rose, and added, with his customary coolness: ‘Of course, it will mean a good many awkward questions.’

‘I hope this will encourage the others,’ said Bevill.

‘There mustn’t be any more,’ said Martin, speaking for the first time since he came in.

Bevill, who had been congratulating Smith, turned to Martin. ‘You needn’t think we don’t know how much we’ve got to thank you for.’ The old man beamed at him.

Martin shook his head.

Rose said: ‘It’s been a real contribution, and we’re very grateful. Many, many congratulations.’

‘What I like,’ said Bevill, ‘is that you’ve done it without any fuss. Some of your chaps make such a fuss whatever they do, and that’s just what we wanted to avoid. I call you a public benefactor.’ Bevill was rosy with content.

The party broke up, Smith leaving first. As Martin and I walked away down the corridor, not speaking, I heard the brisk step behind us.

‘Just a word,’ said Bevill, but waited until we reached my room.

‘This is a clever brother you’ve got, Lewis,’ said the old man paternally. ‘Look, I want to stand you both a dinner. Let’s go to my little club. I didn’t ask friend Rose up the passage, because I knew he wouldn’t want to come.’

It was completely untrue, and Bevill knew it; Rose would have loved to be taken to Pratt’s. But Bevill still refused to introduce his Whitehall acquaintances there. In his heart, though he could get on with all men, he did not like them, especially Rose. It was a fluke that he happened to like me, and now Martin.

The evening was sultry, and it was like a greenhouse in the club kitchen, where the fire blazed in the open grate. The little parlour was empty, when we had dinner at the common table off the check tablecloth; but one or two men were drinking in the kitchen.

That night, as on other occasions when I had watched him there, Bevill was unbuttoned; he stopped being an unobtrusive democrat the instant he passed the porter in the hall. His well-being was so bubbling that I could not resist it, though I had resolved to speak to Martin before the end of the night. Nevertheless, that seemed far away; and I felt light-hearted.

Bevill shouted to his friends through the parlour door. He was too natural to assume that Martin would know them by their Christian names, or alternatively would not be curious about the company he was in. Accordingly, Bevill enunciated a couple of the famous English titles: Martin attended to him. Looking at them, sharing some of the old man’s euphoria (the evening was still early), I thought of the young Proust.

Unlike the young Proust, Martin was drinking pints of bitter. He appeared to be enjoying himself without reserve, without any sign of the journey that had brought him there.

Bevill, who still had a taste for a night’s drinking, was having our tankards filled before we went on to port. For a time, while we sat alone round the table, he became elated with drink and could not resist a bit of philosophy.

‘What do all our concerns matter, you two, when you put them in their proper place? They’re just phenomena, taking place in time — what I call false time — and everything essential exists in a different and more wonderful world, doesn’t it, right outside of space and time? That’s what you ought to think of, Martin, when you’re worried about fellows like Sawbridge, or your project. All our real lives happen out of time.

‘That isn’t to say,’ he said, coming down to earth, ‘that it won’t be nice when you people at Barford give us a good big bang.

‘Fine words butter no parsnips,’ went on Bevill gravely, waving a finger at Martin, who in fact had not spoken. ‘You chaps have got to deliver the goods.’

‘That’s bound to happen. It’s cut and dried, and nothing can stop it now,’ said Martin.

‘I’m glad to hear you say so.’ Bevill looked from Martin to me. ‘You know, you chaps have got something on your hands.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘It’s not so easy pulling this old country through as it was when I was your age. If chaps like you don’t take over pretty soon, it’s not a very bright lookout.’

Martin and I both replied to him direct, not talking across to each other. But we agreed. Obviously the major power, which he had known, had gone: the country would have to live by its wits: it could be done: better men had known worse fates.

Bevill gave a cherubic, approving nod.

‘You two ought to know, I shouldn’t call myself a socialist,’ he said, as though making an astonishing but necessary revelation, ‘but I don’t care all that much what these fellows (the government) do, as long as we keep going.’

It was spoken in drink, but it happened to be true. Half drunk myself, I loved him for it.

Cheerful, naïf (one could forget that he was a cunning old intriguer), he rambled on ‘philosophizing’ again to his heart’s content, until in the kitchen, with sweat pouring down his face and mine, and beads at the roots of Martin’s hair, he said: ‘I want to say something, Martin, before I get beyond it.’

He said it in a different tone, sharp and businesslike.

Perhaps Martin did not know what I did — that when it came to action, it did not matter what state Bevill was in, or what nonsense he had been talking. On serious matters, like jobs or promises, he would nor say a word out of turn or one he did not mean.

Martin listened as though he knew it too.

‘You’re sitting pretty at Barford, young man,’ said Bevill.

‘I suppose I am,’ said Martin.

‘I’m telling you, you are. We shan’t forget what you’ve done for us, and it’s time we did something for you.’

Bevill went on: ‘There are different views on how to run the place — and who’s to do it, I needn’t tell you that. But I can tell you that whatever arrangement we make, it won’t be to your disadvantage. You can just sit back and wait and see.’

‘I didn’t expect this,’ said Martin.

‘Didn’t you? You must have been working things out,’ said Bevill.

I thought once more, that in such matters he was no man’s fool.

He continued: ‘Now you can forget everything that I’ve told you. But a nod’s as good as a wink to a blind horse.’

Few men who have longed for success can have known the exact minute when it came; but Martin must have known it, sitting at the side of the baking hearth at Pratt’s, with the old man lifting his glass of port, and someone from the foot of the staircase calling out ‘Tommy’, so that Bevill, flushed, still businesslike, said to Martin, ‘That’s tipped you the wink,’ and turned his head and began talking loudly to his acquaintance at the door.

I looked at Martin, leaning back while Bevill talked across him. One side of his face was tinged by the fire: his mouth was tucked in, in a sarcastic smile: his eyes were lit up.

I wished that the party would stretch on. Anyway, why should I ask him anything? It was not like me, or him either, to speak for the sake of speaking; as soon as one admitted out loud a break in the human relation, one made it wider.

I went on drinking, joining in Bevill’s reminiscences of how he saved Barford years before. I told a story of my own which exaggerated Martin’s influence and judgement at that time, giving him credit for remarks which Francis Getliffe made, or that I had made myself.

At last the old man said: ‘Time for bye-byes!’ We helped him up the stairs, found him a taxi, received triumphant goodbyes, and watched as the rear lamp climbed the slope of St James’s Street up to Piccadilly. Martin and I exchanged a smile, and I said something to the effect that the old man’s ancestors must have gone up this street many times, often drunker than that.

‘Occasionally soberer,’ said Martin.

We looked across the road, where the lights of Boodle’s shone on to the moist pavement. After the room we had left, the humid night was sweet. We stood together, and I thought for an instant that Martin expected me to speak.

‘Well, then, good night,’ he said, and began walking down the street towards the palace. He was staying in Chelsea; I hesitated, before turning in the opposite direction, on my way north of the park.

Martin had gone ten paces along the pavement. I called out: ‘No, I want a word with you.’

He turned, not jerkily, and walked with slow steps back. He did not pretend to be puzzled, but said, with an expression open, concerned, as intimate as in the past: ‘Don’t you think it would be better not to?’

‘It’s too late for that.’

‘I am sure that we shall both regret it.’

Mechanically, for no reason, we dawdled side by side along the pavement, while I waited to reply. We had gone past Brooks’ before I said: ‘I can’t help it.’

It was true, though neither of us at that moment could have defined what drove us on. Yes, I was half sad because of what he had done; but there was hypocrisy in the sadness. In warm blood, listening to Bevill, I should not have repined because a brother had stamped down his finer feelings and done himself well out of it. Success did not come often enough to those one was fond of that one’s responses could be so delicate.

It would have been pleasant to have been walking that night as allies, with his name made.

We were further from allies than we had ever been. I was bitter, the bitterness was too strong for me. As we walked by the club windows I could think of nothing else.

Nevertheless, the habits of the human bond stayed deeper than the words one spoke. I was not attempting — as I had attempted on New Year’s Day — to end the difference between us. Yet the habit endured, and as I said ‘I can’t help it’ under the St James’s Street lights, I had a flash of realization that I was still longing for his success even then. And, looking into his face, less closed that it had been for months, I realized with the same certainty that he was still longing for my approval even then.

‘I think you ought to leave it alone, now,’ I said.

‘How?’

‘You ought to have nothing more to do with the Sawbridge affair.’

‘I can’t do that,’ said Martin.

‘It’s given you all you expected from it.’

‘What did I expect from it?’

‘Credit,’ I said.

‘You think that’s all?’

‘You would never have done it if you hadn’t seen your chance.’

‘That may be true.’ He was trying to be reasonable, to postpone the quarrel. ‘But I think I should also say that I can see the logic of the situation, which others won’t recognize. Including you.’

‘I distrust seeing the logic of the situation,’ I said, ‘when it’s very much to your own advantage.’

‘Are you in a position to speak?’

‘I’ve done bad things,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think I could have done some of the things you’ve done.’

We were still speaking reasonably. I accepted the ‘logic of the situation’ about Sawbridge, I said. I asked a question to which I knew the answer: ‘I take it the damage he’s done is smaller than outsiders will believe?’

‘Much smaller,’ said Martin.

Led on by his moderation, I repeated: ‘I think you should leave it alone now?’

‘I don’t agree,’ said Martin.

‘It can only do you harm.’

‘What kind of harm?’

‘You can’t harden yourself by an act of will, and you’ll suffer for it.’

On the instant, Martin’s control broke down. He cried out: ‘You say that to me?’

Not even in childhood, perhaps because I was so much the older, had we let our tempers loose at each other. They were of the same kind, submerged, suppressed; we could not quarrel pleasurably with anyone, let alone with one another. In the disagreement which had cut us apart, we had not said a hard word. For us both, we knew what a quarrel cost. Now we were in it.

I brought out my sharpest accusation. Climbing on the Sawbridge case was bad enough — but climbing at Luke’s expense, foreseeing the mistake that Luke’s generous impulse led him into, taking tactical advantage both of that mistake and his illness — I might have done the rest, but if I had done that I could not have lived with myself.

‘I never had much feeling for Luke,’ he said.

‘Then you’re colder even than I thought you were.’

‘I had an example to warn me off the opposite,’ he said.

‘You didn’t need any warning.’

‘I admit that you’re a man of strong feeling,’ he said. ‘Of strong feeling for people, that is. I’ve had the example of how much harm that’s done.’

We were standing still, facing each other, at the corner where the street ran into Piccadilly; for a second an association struck me, it brought back the corner of that other street to which Sawbridge walked in a provincial town. Our voices rose and fell; sometimes the bitterest remark was a whisper, often I heard his voice and mine echo back across the wide road. We shouted in the pain, in the special outrage of a family quarrel, so much an outrage because one is naked to oneself.

Instead of the stretch of Piccadilly, empty except for the last taxis, the traffic lights blinking as we shouted, I might have been plunged back into the pain of some forgotten disaster in the dark little ‘front room’ of our childhood, with the dying laburnum outside the windows. Pain, outrage, the special insight of those who wish to hurt and who know the nerve to touch. In the accusations we made against each other, there was the outrage of those bitter reproaches which, when we were at our darkest, we made against ourselves.

He said that I had forgotten how to act. He said that I understood the people round me, and in the process let them carry me along. I had wasted my promise. I had been too self-indulgent — friends, personal relations, I had spent myself over them and now it was all no use.

I said that he was so self-centred that no human being mattered to him — not a friend, not his wife, not even his son. He would sacrifice anyone of them for his next move. He had been a failure so long that he had not a glimmer of warmth left.

There were lulls, when our voices fell quiet or silent, even one lull where for a moment we exchanged a commonplace remark. Without noticing it we made our way down the street again, near the corner where (less than half an hour before) Martin had said goodnight, in sight of the door out of which we had flanked old Thomas Bevill.

I said: What could he do with his job, after the means by which he had won it? Was he just going to look on human existence as a problem in logistics? He didn’t have friends, but he had colleagues; was that going to be true of them all?

I said: In the long run he had no loyalty. In the long run he would turn on anyone above him. As I said those words, I knew they could not be revoked. For, in the flickering light of the quarrel, they exposed me as well as him. With a more painful anger than any I had heard that night, he asked me: ‘Who have you expected me to be loyal to?’

I did not answer.

He cried: ‘To you?’

I did not answer.

He said: ‘You made it too difficult.’

He went on: I appeared to be unselfish, but what I wanted from anyone I was fond of was, in the last resort, my own self-glorification.

‘Whether that’s true or not,’ I cried, ‘I shouldn’t have chosen for you the way you seemed so pleased with.’

‘You never cared for a single moment whether I was pleased or not.’

‘I have wanted a good deal for you,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You have wanted a good deal for yourself.’