The New Men

39: Technique Behind a High Reward

I did not attend Sawbridge’s trial. Like the others of the series, it was cut as short as English law permitted; Sawbridge said the single word ‘Guilty’, and the only person who expressed emotion was the judge, in giving him two years longer than Smith had forecast.

The papers were full of it. Hankins wrote two more articles. Bevill said: ‘Now we can get back to the grindstone.’ I had not spoken to Martin since the night in St James’s Street, although I knew that several times he had walked down the corridor, on his way to private talks with Bevill.

It was the middle of October, and I had to arrange a programme of committees on the future of Barford. Outside the windows, after the wet summer the leaves were turning late. Rarely, a plane leaf floated down, in an autumnal air that was at the same time exhilarating and sad.

One morning, as I was consulting Rose, he said: ‘Your brother has been colloguing with Bevill a little.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I wondered if you happened to know.’ Rose was looking at me with what for him was a quizzical and mischievous glance.

‘Know what?’

‘My dear chap, it’s all perfectly proper, nothing could possibly have been done more according to the rules. I rather reproach myself I hadn’t started the ball rolling, but of course there was no conceivable chance of our forgetting you—’

‘Forgetting me?’ I said.

‘I shouldn’t have allowed that to happen, believe me, my dear Eliot.’

I said: ‘I know nothing about this, whatever it is.’

‘On these occasions,’ Rose was almost coy, the first time I had seen him so, ‘it’s always better not to know too much.’

I had to persuade him that I knew nothing at all. For some time he was unusually obtuse, preferring to put it down to discretion or delicacy on my part. At last he half-believed me. He said:

‘Well, it’s a matter of reckoning your deserts, my dear Eliot. The old gentleman is insisting — and I don’t think there will be anyone to gainsay him — that it’s high time you had a decoration.’

He paused, with a punctilious smile. ‘The only real question is exactly what decoration we should go for.’

This was what Martin had been prompting the old man about. I was not touched.

It might have appeared a piece of kindness. But he was being kind to himself, not to me. It was the sort of kindness which, when there is a gash in a close relationship, one performs to ease one’s conscience, to push any intimate responsibility away.

Meanwhile Martin’s own reward was coming near. The committee sat in Rose’s room, and on those autumn mornings of sun-through-mist, I went through the minutes that by this time I knew by heart. These men were fairer, and most of them a great deal abler, than the average: but you heard the same ripples below the words, as when any group of men chose anyone for any job. Put your ear to those meetings and you heard the intricate labyrinthine and unassuageable rapacity, even in the best of men, of the love of power. If you have heard it once — say, in electing the chairman of a tiny dramatic society, it does not matter where — you have heard it in colleges, in bishoprics, in ministries, in cabinets: men do not alter because the issues they decide are bigger scale.

The issues before Bevill and his committee were large enough, by the standards of this world. Barford: the production plant: a new whisper of what Bevill called the hydrogen bomb: many millions of pounds. ‘The people who run this place arc going to have plenty on their plate,’ said Bevill. ‘Sometimes I can’t help wondering — is one Top Man enough? I’m not sure we ought to put it all under one hat.’ Then they (Bevill, Rose, Getliffe, Mounteney, and three other scientists) got down to it. Drawbell must go.

‘That can be done,’ said Hector Rose, meaning that Drawbell would be slid into another job.

Next there was a proposal that Mounteney and another scientist did not like, but which would have gone straight through: it was that Francis Getliffe should go to Barford and also become what Bevill kept calling Top Man of atomic energy. It would have been a good appointment, but Francis did not want it; he hesitated; the more he dickered, the more desirable to the others the appointment seemed, but in the end he said No.

That left two possibilities: one, that Luke, who appeared to have partially recovered, though the doctors would not make a certain prognosis either way, should be given Barford, which he was known to want.

The other possibility had been privately ‘ventilated’ by Bevill and Rose ever since Rose mentioned it to me in the summer: assuming that there was a doubt about Luke, couldn’t one set up a supervisory committee and then put M F Eliot in as acting superintendent?

They were too capable to have brought up this scheme in the committee room, unless they had found support outside. But Rose mentioned it — ‘I’m just thinking aloud,’ he said — on a shining autumn morning.

For once Francis Getliffe spoke too soon.

‘I’m not happy about that idea,’ he said immediately.

‘This is just what we want to hear,’ said Bevill.

‘I know Luke has his faults.’ said Francis, ‘but he’s a splendid scientist.’

Mounteney put in: ‘Even if you’re right about Luke—’

‘You know I’m right,’ said Getliffe, forgetting to be judicious, a vein swelling angrily in his forehead.

‘He’s pretty good,’ said Mounteney, in the tone of one who is prepared to concede that Sir Isaac Newton had a modest talent, ‘but there’s no more real scientific thinking to be done at Barford now, it’s just a question of making it run smooth.’

‘That’s a dangerous argument. It’s always dangerous to be frightened of the first rate.’

I had seldom seen Francis so angry. He was putting the others off and he tried to collect himself. ‘I’m saying nothing against M F Eliot. He’s a very shrewd and able man, and if you want a competent administrator I expect he’s as good as they come.’

‘Administrators, of course, being a very lowly form of life,’ said Rose politely.

Francis flushed: somehow he, as a rule so effective in committee, could not put a foot right.

There was some technical argument among the scientists, taking up Mounteney’s point: weren’t the problems of Barford, from this time on, just engineering and administrative ones? Someone said that Martin, despite his calendar youth, was mentally the older of the two.

When we broke off for luncheon, Francis and I walked across the park together. For a time he strode on, in embarrassed silence, and then said: ‘Lewis, I’m very sorry I had to come out against Martin.’

‘Never mind,’ I said.

‘I couldn’t have done anything else,’ he said.

‘I know that,’ I said.

‘Do you agree with me?

By good luck, what I thought did not count. I said: ‘He’d do better than you’d give him credit for.’

‘But between him and Luke?’

‘Luke,’ I said.

Nevertheless, Francis had mishandled his case, and that afternoon and at the next meeting, it was Luke against whom opinion began to swell. Against Luke rather than for Martin, but in such a choice it was likely to be the antis who prevailed. They had, of course, a practical doubt, in Luke’s state of health. I was thinking, if you wanted a job, don’t be ill: for it had an almost superstitious effect, even on men as hard-headed as these; somehow, if you were ill, your mana was reduced.

‘Is it in Luke’s own best interests to ask him to take a strain like this?’ someone said.

It was not a close thing. Getliffe, who was a stubborn man, kept the committee arguing through several meetings, but in truth they had made up their minds long before. He twisted some concessions out of them: yes, Luke was to become a chief adviser, with a seat on the supervisory committee: yes, Luke would get ‘suitable recognition’ when his turn came round (Sir Walter Luke: Sir Francis Getliffe: Sir Arthur Mounteney: in five years’ time, those would be the styles). But the others would not give way any further. It was time a new arrangement was drawn up, and Bevill and Rose undertook, as a matter of form, to get Martin’s views.

On an afternoon in November, Martin came into Rose’s room. Bevill did not waste any words on flummery.

‘We’ve got a big job for you, young man,’ he burst out.

Martin sat still, his glance not deflecting for an instant towards me, as Bevill explained the scheme.

‘It’s an honour,’ said Martin. Neither his eyes nor mouth were smiling. He said: ‘May I have a few days to think it over?’

‘What do you want to think over?’ said Bevill. But he and Rose were both used to men pulling every string to get a job and then deliberating whether they could take it.

‘We should all be very, very delighted to see you installed there,’ said Rose.

Martin thanked him and said: ‘If I could give an answer next week?’

40: Visit to a Prisoner

The day after Bevill offered Martin the appointment, Captain Smith came into my office and unravelled one of his Henry James-like invitations, which turned out to be, would I go with him to Wandsworth Gaol and have a chat to Sawbridge? I tried to get out of it, but Smith was persistent. He was sensitive enough to feel that I did not like it; but after all, I was an official, I had to live with official duty, just as he did himself.

In the taxi, he told me that he was clearing up a point about the Puchweins. It was worth ‘having another try’ at Sawbridge, who occasionally talked, not giving anything away, more for the sake of company than because he was softening. As we drove through the south London streets in the November sunshine, he told me more of Sawbridge. He had not recanted; others of the scientific spies gave up their communism in prison, but not Sawbridge. For a few days, sitting opposite to Martin, he had been ‘rattled’. During that time he made his confession. He had blamed himself ever since.

‘He’s quite a lad, is our young friend. He doesn’t make any bones about it,’ said Smith with proprietorial pride, stiff on his seat while we rocked over the tram-lines, through the down-at-heel streets scurfy in the sun.

At the prison, Smith took me to an assistant-governor’s room, which in his view gave a ‘better atmosphere’ for his talks with Sawbridge. For myself, I should have preferred the dark and the wire screen. This room was bright, like a housemaster’s study, with a fire in the grate, photographs of children on the desk, and on the walls Medici prints. The smell of tobacco rested in the bright air. Outside the grated window, the morning was brighter still.

When a warder brought Sawbridge in, he gave a smile as he saw Smith and me standing by the window, a smile not specially truculent but knowing, assertive, and at the same time candid. Above his prison suit his face looked no paler than in the past, and he seemed to have put on a little weight.

Smith had arranged for the warder to leave us alone. We heard him close the door, but there were no steps down the passage. Sawbridge, who was listening, cocked his thumb, as though at the warder waiting behind the door, and repeated his smile.

Smith smiled back. With me, with his colleagues, he was never quite at ease; but he was far less put off inside that room than I was.

‘Here we are again,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Sawbridge.

Smith made him take the easy chair by the fire, while Smith sat at the desk and I brought up a hard-backed chair.

‘Have a gasper?’ said Smith.

‘I still don’t smoke,’ Sawbridge replied, with his curious rude substitute for humour.

Smith began inquiring into his welfare. Was he getting enough reading material? Would he like Smith to inquire if he could be allowed more?

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

Was he getting any scientific books?

‘I could do with more. Thanks,’ said Sawbridge.

Smith made a note; for once, Sawbridge was allowing himself to let slip a request.

Then Smith remarked that we had come down for a ‘spot of talk’.

‘What are you after?’

‘We should like to have a spot of talk about Puchwein,’ said Smith, surprisingly direct.

‘I’ve not got anything to say about him.’

‘You knew him and his wife, didn’t you?’

‘I knew them at Barford, like everybody else. I’ve not got anything to say.’

‘Never mind about that, old man,’ said Smith. ‘Let’s just talk round things a bit.’

As Smith foretold, Sawbridge was willing, and even mildly pleased, to chat. He had no objection to going over his story for yet another time. It occurred to me that he was simply lonely. He missed the company of his intellectual equals, and even talking to us was better than nothing. Methodically he went over the dates of his spying. As in each statement he had made, he would mention no name but his own: he had inculpated no one, and maintained all along that he was alone.

‘People remember seeing you at Mrs Puchwein’s,’ said Smith.

‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ said Sawbridge.

‘Don’t you think you ought to be surprised?’

‘I don’t see why.’

‘I can’t think of anything obvious you’ve got in common.’

‘Why should we have anything obvious in common?’

‘Why were you there?’

‘Social reasons.’

‘Did you ever pay any other social calls of any kind?’ Smith asked.

‘Not that you’d know of.’

‘Why were you there?’

‘As far as that goes,’ said Sawbridge, turning on me with his kind of stolid insolence,’ why were you?’

Smith gave a hearty, creaking laugh. He went on questioning Sawbridge about Puchwein — where had he met him first?

‘You soon found out that he was left wing?’ said Smith.

‘I tell you, I haven’t anything to say about him.’

Smith persisted.

‘When did you first hear that he was left wing?’

All of a sudden, Sawbridge broke into sullen anger.

‘I shouldn’t call him left wing?

‘What would you call him?’ I said.

‘He’s no better,’ said Sawbridge, ‘than you are.’

His voice was louder, at the same time impersonal and rancorous, as he let fly at Francis Getliffe, Luke, me, all liberal — minded men. People who had sold out to the enemy: people who would topple over at the first whistle of danger, that was what he thought of liberal men.

‘That chap Puchwein isn’t any better than your brother,’ said Sawbridge. Impersonally, he lumped Martin in with the rest of us, only different in that he was more effective, ‘I’m not sure he isn’t worse. All Puchwein knows is when it’s time to sit on the fence.’

‘I thought you’d nothing to tell us about him,’ said Smith.

‘Well, I’ve told you something, haven’t I?’ said Sawbridge. ‘We’ve got no use for chaps like that.’

Back in a café in Westminster, Smith, sipping China tea with his masquerade of preciousness, went over Sawbridge’s replies.

‘We didn’t get over much change out of our young friend,’ he said.

‘Very little,’ I replied.

‘No, I wouldn’t say that, old son,’ said Smith. But, as he argued. I was thinking of Sawbridge — and it was a proof of his spirit that, neither in his presence nor out of it, did I think of him with pity. Faith, hope, and hate: that was the troika which rushed him on: it was uncomfortable to remember that, for the point of action, hate was a virtue — but so also, which many of us were forgetting in those years, was hope.

Could one confront the Sawbridges without the same three forces? He was a man of almost flawless courage, moral and physical. Not many men would have bent as little. Then, against my will, for I was suppressing any comparison with Martin, I was teased by a thought in my brother’s favour, the first for long enough. It was difficult to imagine him taking Sawbridge’s risk; but, if he had had to pay Sawbridge’s penalty, his courage would have been as stoical and his will as hard to crack.

41: Lights Twinkling in the Cold

Two nights later (it was Sunday) I was walking up Wigmore Street towards Portman Square, hurrying because of the extreme cold. The weather had hardened, the lights twinkled frigidly across the square. I was paying attention to nothing except the minutes before I could get back to a warm room. There were few people in the square, and I did not notice the faces as I hurried past.

I did not notice the couple standing near the corner, in the half-shadow. Without knowing why, I looked over my shoulder. They were standing oblivious of the cold, the man’s overcoat drooping open, flapping round his knees. They were Irene and Hankins.

At once I turned my head and started down the side street, out of sight. A voice followed me, Irene’s — ‘What are you running away for?’

I had to go back. As they came towards me under the lamp, they both looked pinched, tired, smiling.

‘Why haven’t I seen you all these months?’ said Hankins. We went into a hotel close by and sat drinking in the lounge, among the palms and the sucking noise from the revolving door.

Hankins was quieter than usual, and when he spoke the words seemed dredged up through other thoughts. We asked about each other’s careers. He had just got a good job; he had made a reputation before, but now, for the first time in his life, he was free from worry about his next year’s rent, I congratulated him, but his thoughts absented themselves again.

Soon he looked at Irene with an odd expression. His face, like that of many with a quickly changing inner life, was emotional but hard to read, ‘I think I must be going now,’ he said. Her eyes sharpened.

‘Goodbye,’ said Hankins, and the revolving door sucked round behind him, sucking empty air.

He had gone so quickly that they might have arranged to meet again, when I was disposed of.

Irene stared at me with full eyes.

‘I had to see him,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t sit down under things any longer.’

‘What are you going to do?’

She did not reply, but continued to stare at me as though I knew. Just for a second, on her mouth there appeared a tart smile. She settled herself against the arm of her chair, and I noticed that her shoulders were getting rounder. In the last year she had thickened both in the throat and the upper arm. It was easy to imagine her in middle age, lolling in her dressing-gown.

‘Fancy the old thing pulling in a regular salary at last,’ she said.

‘Both of them have done pretty well for themselves,’ I replied.

She looked puzzled. I had to explain that ‘both of them’ meant Hankins and Martin, the two men who had meant most to her. They were coming to the top of their professions at the same time.

‘The top?’ she said.

‘The head of Barford,’ I replied.

‘Oh.’ She fixed me with a glance which seemed malicious, regretful, sympathetic.

‘And as for Hankins,’ I said, ‘so far as there is anything left of literary London, this job will put him in the middle of it.’

‘He’ll dote on that!’ she cried. Quietly she added: ‘And so should I.’

She spoke straight out: ‘It would suit me better than anything I have ever had with Martin, or anything that I could ever have.’

Once more she gave me a glance edged with fellow-feeling. Without explanation, with her expression malicious and ominous, she went on: ‘I’m not cut out for it. I can see Martin going on patiently and getting a bit drier every year. What sort of life do you think that means for me?’

We looked at each other, without speaking for some moments. I said: ‘But you’re going to live it, aren’t you?’

‘You don’t think I’m going off with E H?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I could stop his marriage. I could have everything I wanted ten years ago. Why shouldn’t I now?’

‘You won’t,’ I said.

‘You’re positive?’ Suddenly she slumped down, her hand fell on her breast, her tone no longer brittle, but flat, lazily flat, as she said: ‘You’re right.’

She went on: ‘I never knew where I was with E H. I never even knew if he needed me. While Martin doesn’t need me — he could get on without me or anyone else, but he wants me! He always has! I never had much faith that anyone would, until he came along.’

So at last, under the palm trees of that aseptic lounge, preoccupied by the suspicion, which she had provoked, of a crucial turn in Martin’s life, I was given a glimpse of what bound Irene to him. In the past I had speculated often. Why should she, in the ultimate run, be anchored to Martin instead of Hankins? I had looked for qualities in Martin which could make some women love him, rather than another man. They were present, but they did not count.

It was true that Martin was the stronger: it was true also that Martin was, if these cant terms mean anything, the more masculine. Hankins was one of those men, and they are not uncommon, who invest much emotion in the pursuit of women without having the nature for it; he thought he was searching for the body’s rapture, but his profoundest need was something less direct, the ambience of love, its meshes of unhappiness, its unfulfilled dreams, its tears for the past and its images of desire. Many women found it too delicate, but not Irene.

With her, there was a hypnotic charm about his capacity for feeling; he could feel as she did, he had the power to enter into, as all important, each emotion of love. It was that which she first loved in him, and which held her fascinated for years, her whom other women obtusely thought was searching only for a partner in bed. Against that emotional versatility Martin could not compete. Yet never once, if she had been faced with the choice, would she have left Martin.

The real reason which delivered her to Martin lay not in him, but in herself.

She had just told it to me, so simply that it was difficult to believe. In fact, Irene had suffered all her life from a diffidence which seemed at a first glance, the last one would expect in her. In her childhood, even more totally than with other girls, love and marriage filled her daydreams: those daydreams had not left her alone all her life; yet they had never been accompanied by the certainty of the fibres, that she had it in her to draw the love she coveted. More than most she studied herself in the looking-glass, but not with narcissistic pleasure; only with a mixture of contemptuous liking and nervousness that such a face, such a body, might never bring what she craved.

In the hotel lounge, hearing the revolving doors swing round, I thought of another woman so different from Irene that any resemblance seemed like a joke. Nora Luke, dowdy, professionally striving, in the home a scolding faithful housewife — Irene, once notorious for her love affairs, the most reckless of women — yet in secret they had found life difficult in the same manner. At the root of their nature they were sisters.

Irene had spoken simply, and maybe it was as simple as she said. Hankins, so tentative and undecided himself, she had never had the confidence to reach for; while Martin, all else forgotten, was the one man who wanted enough to stay with her at any cost, to give the assurance, so far as she was capable of accepting it, that he would stay steady, that he would be there to make her feel that she was as lovable as, her nerves twitching under the adventuress’ skin, she had never since she was a child been able to believe,

That night, she had sent Hankins away. It was only after he had gone that I realized this was the end between them, that under the lamps of Portman Square they had spoken the last words. Hankins pushing round the door might have been leaving her for half an hour; in fact, they would not meet again: it was curious that he, at any other time so eloquent, had gone in silence.

Irene smiled at me, as though, sitting before her looking-glass, she was putting on her dashing face.

‘He will have me on his hands,’ she said. She was speaking of Martin.

She added: ‘I shall be a drag on him in this new game.’

She was keeping me in the dark, she was obscurely triumphant.

‘What are you telling me?’ I asked.

‘You knew, of course you knew, about this offer that Martin had last week?’

I said yes.

‘You knew he expected it before it came?’

‘He must have expected it for weeks.’

‘I guessed as much.’

She went on, not knowing the break between Martin and me, but knowing something I did not. For days (it must have been during the first sittings of the Committee, and he might have had inside information, probably from Mounteney) he was excited that the job was coming his way. She said that he was lively, active, restless with high spirits; she remembered how he had talked to his son one evening, talked to the three-year-old-boy as though they were both adults and he was letting himself boast.

‘Well, Lewis,’ Martin had said to the child, ‘now I’m going further than anyone in the family’s ever gone. It will give you a good start. You’ll be able to build on it, won’t you?’

In the next few days Irene felt a change. She could not ask him; with her, in his own home, he let his moods run more than I had seen him, but she dared not to try to penetrate them. It was still several days before the offer was made. For the only time she could remember, Martin stayed away from the laboratory without a reason. The weather had turned foggy; he sat silent by the fire. He did not ask her advice, but occasionally spoke of the advantages of being the Barford superintendent, of the entertaining she could do there. Occasionally also he spoke of some disadvantages, as though laughing them off.

‘He wouldn’t talk about them,’ Irene flared out. ‘But I didn’t need him to. I hadn’t forgotten the letter he didn’t send.’

One foggy afternoon, he suddenly said: ‘The head of Barford is just as much part of the machine as any of the others.’

He went on: ‘If I take the job, I shan’t have the trouble of thinking for myself again.’

Irene said to me, simply and quietly: ‘Then I knew that he would never take it.’

That had happened the previous Saturday, three days before the offer came. I asked how he had behaved when he actually had the offer in his hand.

‘He was shaken,’ said Irene. ‘He was terribly shaken.’

With the fog outside the windows, he had sat by the fire so absent that he let it go out. Then she made it up, and I imagined the firelight reflected into the room from the fog-backed window. Martin only roused himself from that paralysis of the nerves to play again with the little boy — the two of them under the window, young Lewis shouting, Martin patiently rolling a ball, and still silent.

Both Irene and I, through our different kinds of knowledge of him, took it for granted that he would not alter his resolve.

‘I don’t pretend to understand it,’ she said to me. ‘Do you?’

I shook my head, and, as lost and open as she was, I asked: ‘What do you think he intends to do?’

‘I don’t think, I know,’ she replied.

During the past weeks, so as to be ready, he had been making inquiries, unknown to me, of our college. If he decided to give up his work at Barford and return to pure science, could they find a niche for him?

‘It’ll be funny for him, not having any power,’ she said.

She added: ‘He’s going into dimness, isn’t he? He won’t make much of a go of it?’

She went on asking, what were his chances in pure science? Would he do enough to console himself?

‘They all say he hasn’t got quite the talent,’ I replied. He would publish a few respectable papers, he would not get into the Royal Society. For a man as realistic as Martin, it would be failure.

‘He’s got a real talent for his present job,’ I said.

‘It’ll be difficult for him to lead a dim life,’ she said, ‘having had a taste of something different.’

She said it in a matter-of — fact tone, without any sign of tenderness.

I broke out: ‘And I suppose you’re glad about it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You wanted him to make his protest. I suppose this is the next best thing?’

Irene was flushing down the neckline of her dress. With difficult honesty she turned her eyes away, and said: ‘No. I’m not cut out for this.’

‘Why aren’t you?’

‘I’m a sprinter. I could have stood a major row, it would have been something to live through. I should have been more use to him than any of you.’

I said: ‘I believe you would.’

She flashed out: ‘It isn’t often you pay me a compliment.’

‘It was meant,’ I said.

‘But you mustn’t give me too much credit. I’m not high-minded. I shouldn’t have worried if Martin had become the boss at Barford. I should have enjoyed the flah-flah.’

Then she asked: ‘Why ever is he doing it? I wish you’d tell me that.’

I was confused.

‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘he’s just trying to be a good man?’

‘I should like to believe it,’ I said.

‘You think he’s got another motive, do you?’

‘We usually have.’

To my astonishment, she burst out laughing, with her high-pitched yelps of glee.

‘I believe you think,’ she cried, ‘that he’s doing it to take it out of me. Just to show me that things have changed since he married me, and that he holds the whip hand now.’

It had not even crossed my mind.

‘You’re wrong!’ she shouted. ‘If he’s reacting against anyone, it isn’t me!’

Her eyes glinted triumphant, good-natured, malicious at my expense. She said: ‘You won’t be able to influence him now, will you?’

42: A Place to Stand?

Martin did not give his answer to Bevill until the last day of his period of grace. He called in my office first, just as he used to — but we were both constrained, On the window the frost, coming early that winter, masked the buses in Whitehall. Martin swept a pane with his sleeve, saying that after he had had the interview with Bevill and Rose, he would like to talk to me.

He assumed that I knew what his answer was going to be. When he actually delivered it, he spent (so I learned later) much skill in saving his supporters’ credit. He did not once suggest a moral choice; he just used the pretext that, unless he did some real science soon, he never would; in which case his usefulness would be finished in ten years.

The scientists took the explanation at its face value. It was only Bevill who smelt that there was something wrong. In his experience men did not turn down good jobs unless by doing so they got a better. So he fell back on what was always his last resource, and put the blame on to Martin’s wife.

Bevill and Rose had been too long at their craft not to recognize the inevitable; that morning, while Martin was on his way back to my office, they had already decided that now, well or ill, wild man or not, it had to be Luke. Rose’s sense of justice made him insist that they could not even attempt to put Luke in leading strings, as they had Martin. Thus it was to be Luke in full power.

Meanwhile Martin had returned to my room. His gestures were relaxed, as though to light a cigarette were a pleasure to be taken slowly; yet we could not speak to each other with ease. With anyone else, I felt, he would be smiling with jubilation, with a trace of sadness too.

With me, he could not be so natural.

‘That’s settled,’ he said.

He asked if he could waste the rest of the afternoon for me and I said: ‘Of course.’ I added, meaninglessly ‘Can you spare the time?’

‘Very soon,’ said Martin, with a sarcastic grin, ‘I shall have plenty of time.’

For many minutes we sat there, looking down over Whitehall, saying nothing to the point, often falling into silence. It was not until we took a walk in the icy park that Martin made his first effort.

‘I’m happy about this,’ he said, as we trod along the path where, on the verges, each blade of grass stood out separated by the frost.

He added: ‘It’s a change from the last time.’

He meant the last time we had walked there, the day after the bomb had dropped. It had been sixteen mouths before. The leaves had been thick then; now we looked past the bare trees, into the mist fuming above the leaden water.

‘Since then,’ said Martin, ‘I haven’t found a place to stand.’

He spoke slowly, as though with the phrase he recalled that afternoon when, in the Dolphin Square bathroom, he saw the scientific way ahead.

He went on: ‘Up till now.’

In return I made my effort.

‘I hope,’ I said, ‘that I haven’t made it harder for you to find it.’

There seemed a long interval before Martin replied. Our steps rang in the frost. We were both evasive, reticent men, who used irony to cheat out of its importance the moment in which we breathed: each of us that afternoon had set ourselves to speak without easing the moment away. That was why we stumbled so.

‘You can see too much in personal causes,’ he said.

‘They exist,’ I said.

‘Without them,’ said Martin, ‘I think I should have done the same.’

‘I should like to be sure,’ I said.

‘Motives aren’t as important to me as they are to you,’ he said. ‘I’m more concerned with what one does.’

‘You have done some contradictory things,’ I said,

‘I can tell you this. That night we went to Pratt’s — it hasn’t affected me one way or the other. As far as I can answer for myself at all, I tell you that.’

He groped less when he spoke of his Sawbridge policy. He did not have to stumble; there we understood each other. We both knew the temptations of action, and how even clear-sighted men did not inquire what their left hand was doing. It was nonsense to think that Martin had been dissimulating all the time and that he had always intended to retire. Men were not clever enough to dissimulate for long.

He had, of course, been after the top job. Until quite recently he consciously intended to take it. For months he had been acting, as many men were acting on both sides of the great divide, out of the cynicism of self-preservation. Many men, delicate in their personal relations, had come to behave, and even to think, with that kind of cynicism, even though we concealed it from ourselves.

Some of us have been too delicate about personal relations,’ said Martin, back in my office, sitting by the window in the murky afternoon. ‘People matter; relations between them don’t matter much.’

I stood looking out of the window, where the lights scintillated under a sky ochreous and full of snow,

‘Lewis!’ His voice was quiet: it was rare, when we were alone, for us to use each other’s name.

‘That night after old Bevill left you said some true things,’ he said.

‘You also,’ I said.

‘I am colder hearted than you are. I care much less for the people round me.’

‘Why are you saying this?’

‘If it weren’t so, I couldn’t have made this choice.’

For any of us who had been concerned with the bomb, he repeated Luke’s earlier comment, there was no clear-cut way out. Unless you were a Sawbridge. For the rest of us, said Martin, there were just two conceivable ways. One was the way he had just taken: the other, to struggle on, as Luke was doing, and take our shame of what had been done and what might still be done, and hope that we might come out at the end of the tunnel. Being well meaning all the time, and thinking of nothing worse than our own safety.

‘For a warm-hearted man who’s affected by the people round him,’ said Martin, ‘perhaps it’s the only way. It’s the way you’re going, though you’re more far-sighted than they are.’

‘It wouldn’t be easy for me,’ I said after a pause, ‘to break right away.’

‘If you do choose their way,’ he said with sudden energy, ‘I’ve shown you how to do it.’

He meant that you could not compromise. If you accepted the bomb, the burnings alive, the secrets, the fighting point of power, you must take the consequences. You must face Sawbridge with an equal will. You were living in a power equilibrium, and you must not pretend; the relics of liberal humanism had no place there.

‘I completely disagree,’ I said.

‘You can’t find a compromise. But your personal ties keep you making them,’ said Martin. ‘That’s why you leave it to worse men to take the other way.’ He went on: ‘Sometimes it’s only the cold who can be useful.’

It had taken him a long time to be positive about what he must do: but now he spoke as though he had it in the palm of his hand. Previously he had wondered about leaving science altogether. He had contemplated ‘doing a Charles March’ (a friend of mine who, years before, had given up society and career in order to become a doctor) — but Martin decided that for him it was too ‘artificial’, too much out of his line. For him, there was only one course, to go back to pure science.

Most unusually for him, he showed a flicker of bravado.

‘I shall be just a little better than those pundits say,’ he said.

He had not many illusions, though perhaps, just as he contrived to see Irene both with realistic observation and also surrounded with a romantic aura, he could still feel, in the depth of his heart, a tremor of the magic that science had once evoked there.

He told me in so many words that he had not lost faith that science — though maybe not in his lifetime — would turn out for good. From some, after his history, it would have sounded a piece of facile scientists’ optimism. From him it had a different note. For to Martin it was jet-clear that, despite its emollients and its joys, individual life was tragic: a man was ineluctably alone, and it was a short way to the grave. But, believing that with stoical acceptance, Martin saw no reason why social life should also be tragic: social life lay within one’s power, as human loneliness and death did not, and it was the most contemptible of the false-profound to confuse the two.

‘As long as the worst things don’t happen—’ said Martin. ‘That’s why some of us must get clear of office and friends and anything that ties our hands.’

‘Is that what you thought of most?’

‘I hope they’ll leave me alone,’ he said. ‘But there may come a time when people like me have to make a nuisance of themselves.’

He went on: ‘I’m the last man for the job. It may be dangerous and I’m not cut out for that.’

It might not be necessary, I said. In my view, the danger was overrated and the betting was against it.

‘All the better,’ said Martin. ‘All the more reason for having a few sensible men who aren’t committed.’

He meant, good could happen as well as evil; men might run into a little luck; if we were too much hypnotized by the violence we had lived through, if each man of good will was mobilized, paid and silenced, we might let the luck slip.

That, may be the best reason of all for getting outside the machine,’ said Martin. ‘If a few of us are waiting for the chance, we might do a little good.’

He turned in his chair. In the tenebrous afternoon, the room had gone dark outside the zone of the desk light; and past the window, flakes of snow were dawdling down on to the Whitehall pavement.

He was looking at me. Suddenly, with no explanation necessary between us, he said: ‘You know, I shall never have the success you wanted me to have.’ Again we were speaking without ease, as though each word had to be searched for.

‘If I had not wanted it for you, would you have liked it more?’

‘I said before, you can see too much in personal causes.’

‘Have they made it harder for you?’

‘That doesn’t matter,’ he replied. ‘In the end, I should have done what I am doing now.’

Our intimacy had not returned, but we were speaking of ourselves more deeply than we had done before.

That afternoon, at last, Martin was answerable to no one. Speaking of his future, he had lost the final residue of a younger brother’s tone, and took on that of equal to equal, contemporary to contemporary, self-made to self-made.

43: A New Empire

Martin left Barford at the end of the year: Luke became Chief Superintendent the following May. A few weeks later, I went down to do some business with him on my way to Cambridge, where Martin had invited me to a college feast.

The Drawbells had not yet finished moving house, although Drawbell’s own new appointment had been announced. It was a come down. Perhaps that was why, more bullyingly even than in the past, he insisted that I should stay my night at Barford with them, not with the Lukes. I could not say no: in his decline he was hard to resist, partly because his personality was one of those that swell, become more menacing, the more he saw his expectations fade away.

He and his wife had waited for each post the preceding November, looking for a letter about the New Year’s honours list; and they were doing it again before the birthday list. There was nothing for them. They still pretended to expect it. At breakfast, in a room with covers on some of the chairs, ready to move that week, Drawbell made believe to threaten me, fixing me with his sound eye.

‘My patience is exhausted,’ he said, as though making a public speech — but it was the kind of joke which is not a joke. ‘It’s high time the Government did its duty.’

He may have suspected that I knew his chances. I did. But, for the last time with Drawbell, I had to follow his lead, do my best to be hearty and say nothing.

For his chances were nil. I had heard Hector Rose rule him out. It was the only time I had known Rose be, by his own standards, less than just. By Rose’s standards, Drawbell had done enough for a knighthood: Barford had ‘made its contribution’, as Rose said, and Drawbell had been in charge for five years. According to the rules, the top man got the top decoration; but for once Rose would not have it so. He asked cold questions about who had done the work; with the methodicalness of a recording angel, he put down to Drawbell’s credit the occasions when he had backed the right horse — and then turned to the other side of the sheet. The final account, in Rose’s mind, did not add up to a knighthood.

At the breakfast table, Drawbell, still ignorant of that decision, hoping against hope, put on his jocular act, and threatened me. His wife regarded me, monumental, impassive; she was looking forward to getting Mr Thomas Bevill down to the new establishment. Between her and her husband, I had never seen more than a thread of that friendliness-cum-dislike which comes in lifelong marriages that are wrong at the core: yet she remained his loyal and heavy-footed ally. She was no more defeated than he was. And when finally his last hope wilted, they would, without knowing it, be supports to each other.

That morning, Drawbell gave just one open sign of recognition that he was on the way down. He refused to come with me to his old office, which Luke was already occupying. He could not face the sight of someone who had passed him, who had — in Drawbell’s eyes and the world’s — arrived.

Yet Luke himself would have had his doubts, I thought, sitting beside his desk, behind which, in his shirtsleeves, he tilted back in his chair — in that room where he had made his first proposal about the pile. He would have had his doubts about his arrival, if ever he had spared time to consider it, which — as he remained a humble and an immediate man — he was most unlikely to.

He knew that he would not now leave much of a scientific memorial behind him. You could not do real scientific work and become a ‘stuffed shirt’, as he used to argue rudely in the past. Ironically, he, so richly endowed for the pure scientific life, had, unlike Martin, put it behind him. There were times when he felt his greatest gift was rusting. His corpus of work would not stand a chance of competing with Mounteney’s.

Nevertheless, Luke was enjoying himself. His chair tilted back against the wall, he gave the answer I had come for. Gave it with the crispness of one, who in reveries, had imagined himself as a tycoon. Once or twice he shot a response out of the side of his mouth.

‘Curtains,’ he said once, indicating that the discussion was at an end.

‘Come off it, Walter,’ I said.

Luke looked startled. As always, he had got into the skin of his part. Then he gave a huge cracked grin.

I had come to clear up one or two administrative tangles, which in Martin’s time would have been dealt with at Barford, and we were talking of getting Luke a second in command to tidy up after him. Luke was determined to appoint Rudd, who had, as soon as Drawbell was superseded, transferred his devotion to the new boss.

‘He’s a snurge,’ said Luke. ‘But he can be a very useful snurge.’

Was he the man that Luke wanted? In my view, Luke needed someone to stand up to him.

‘No,’ said Luke. ‘I can make something of him. I can make a difference to that chap.’

Already, I thought, Luke was showing just a trace of how power corrodes. As we walked round the establishment, in the drizzling rain, I teased him, bringing up against him his old ribald curses at ‘stuffed shirts’.

‘If ever you think I’m becoming one, Lewis,’ said Luke, ‘you come and kick my behind.’

He was limping as he walked. His knee was still giving him pain, and at the back of his mind there was the ache of not knowing whether he had recovered. Nevertheless, limping, grey at the temples, not disguising his fear of whether his life was going to be cut short, he seemed physically to expand as he took me into bay after bay of the new buildings. By this time they stretched for many acres on both sides of the river: in and out of the rain we dodged, as he took me to see the new piles being built, where the floors were busy with scientists and artisans. Then he took me to the two piles already working, working in the humanless space. The building looked less crude now; above was a large chimney, and there hummed the faint noise of fans. This had become Luke’s empire.

Like any sentient man, he had had his hesitations about this project (for my benefit, he was reckoning up, as we stood beside the working pile, just how many such machines existed in the world). He had given his reasons why he went on with it, and why he believed all might turn out well. But now he had shut both doubts and justifications within him. He was not one of those who can work and at the same time remain detached about whether or not they are doing good. This was Luke’s empire, and as he looked over it he thought of nothing but how best to make it run.

44: Two Brothers

‘That evening, in Martin’s rooms in Cambridge, which by a touch of college sentiment were those I had lived in before the war, I described that talk with Luke. Martin and I were alone, and there was an hour before dinner; only the first fringe of rain had reached Cambridge, and the sun was shining, after a shower which filled the room with a smell of wisteria from the court beneath.

There, in the high room, which the sunlight did not reach, Martin questioned me about Luke: how was his régime turning out? How were the latest plans working? For Martin, although he had changed his life, did not pretend that he could will away his interest, and liked to talk of the place where he had had an influence which would not come to him again.

He disagreed with one of Luke’s arrangements and gave his reason, which sounded sensible.

‘Why doesn’t someone tell him so?’ he said.

‘Some people are going to get more than they bargained for,’ I said.

‘It’s not necessary,’ Martin was not displeased to find fault. I said that, though Luke’s methods might be rough and ready, under him Barford would be a success.

‘Poor old Walter!’ Martin said, with a smile, with an edge of envy. Martin had not gone back on his choice, although by this time be knew, what one can never imagine until one lives it, the wear and tear, hour by hour and day by day, as one tries to reshape a life. He knew precisely what it was like to work in the same laboratory as his juniors, and realize that they were outclassing him He came to them as a man with a big outside reputation, and felt a nobody. At colloquia and laboratory teas he became nervous in front of young men whose confidence, unlike his own, was absolute.

He believed now that his critics were right: from every practical point of view, his choice had been stupid: he would stay there, doing his college teaching, without a realistic chance of achievement for the rest of his life.

He had always been quiet, but in the days of his power it had been the quietness, trained and confident, of a high functionary, the quietness of Hector Rose. Now it had changed; it had the special quality that you see in one who has learned something from life and who has lost his high spirits during the lesson. His interest had become passive. Sitting in the darkness of his room, looking out of the window at the court brilliant in the rain-clear sunlight, he had none of the authority of action that men like Luke carried on their brow.

But he was happy. It was a curious kind of happiness that had come upon him almost without his knowing it. It occurred to me that I had seen others make renunciations similar in kind to his: in each case they gained happiness. It might have been otherwise, it might have been one of the ironies of the human condition that, when you throw away the game with a chance of winning it, you regret it ever after: but, in the cases I had seen, it proved the contrary.

I was glad that he should be happy. Suddenly I thought that, hoping so much for him, with the fraternal concern that identified myself in him, I had worried little about his happiness. Even now — in the room where he had first mentioned the proof of fission, which had led us both to the fringe of such events as had darkened our consciences and given him the chance of secret power — he could not, now that he had resigned the power and found his happiness, share any part of it with me.

My concern for him had, in the midst of those convulsions, shown the flaw which exists in any of its kind, which, if we had been luckier, might not have come out so clear.

If we had been luckier, if events had not taken hold of us, there might have been no occasion for him to tell me, as he had done in St James’s Street, when I said that I had wanted much for him:

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

It was the truth; it was the reason why the most sacrificial of human affections twist into the most self-seeking of all. It can cripple those who receive it, and those who give can never find anything of what they seek.

I had looked to him to go the way I chose for him. In the Sawbridge affair, he had done the opposite, and, whichever of us was right in the abstract, that was why I had felt it like a betrayal. It was clear now. As men went, we were sensible and did not expect over much from human beings: but events had taken hold of us, and had shown up the nature of my concern.

As Irene perceived, with the insight of jealousy, the time came when he had to cut himself quite free.

If you identify yourself in another, however tough the tie between you, he cannot feel as you do, and then you go through (you who have been living your life in another) a state for which the old Japanese found a name, which they used to describe the sadness of a parent’s love: a darkness of the heart.

I ought to have known it, for my mother had tried to relive her life in me; and I had not been able to return that kind of love. I too had been compelled to cut myself quite free.

It was a little thing, the human price that Martin and I had paid, as a result of those events which Hector Rose called ‘too big for men’ — and yet that was what I thought of sitting in that dark room, the sky brilliant over the roofs opposite, waiting for the college bell. Through being forced together in our corner of those events, I had out of the nature of my affection done him harm. I had brought some sadness on myself. We were both too realistic to expect that our intimacy could be complete again.

The dinner bell began to toll, Martin gave an indrawn, sarcastic smile. As we stood up I was thinking that, though we had paid our modest price, we had regained most of the ease of old habit in each other’s company. We were on our way to repairing something of what had happened between us. Of the human relations I had so far known, I had found, despite our mistakes, none more steady and comforting than that with my brother; I hoped that in time he would feel the same.