The New Men (16 page)

Some of this repartee sounded as though they were repeating the morning’s argument, but, for a few moments past, they had seemed surprised by each other. Martin’s voice was sharp: ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that I can’t ask any of our chaps to put their hands inside the blasted stew,’ Luke replied. ‘If anyone is going to dabble in chemistry with the lid off it’s me.’

‘Just before Lewis arrived,’ said Martin, on his side producing something new, ‘someone was waiting to volunteer.’

‘Who?’

‘Sawbridge.’

‘Good for him,’ said Luke, ‘but I can’t let him.’

‘Yes, I’m quite sure,’ said Martin slowly, ‘we can’t ask any of the others, or even let them volunteer.’

Luke’s face was flushed; his tone was quiet and sincere. ‘I’m not even asking you,’ he said.

Martin considered, rubbing the back of his forefinger across his lip. He was steady with the well-being of success; but he was also resentful, pinched with shame, as a prudent man is on being rushed by a leader much braver than himself.

‘I wish I could let you risk it by yourself,’ said Martin. ‘If I thought it was quite justified, I think I might.’

‘I’d rather do it myself,’ said Luke.

‘It may not be possible to let you.’

Suddenly Luke jumped down from the desk.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s no need to make the decision yet awhile. It’s something that we should be fools to settle until we can look at it in cold blood.’

‘If you ask me,’ said Martin, rubbing his forefinger across his lip again, ‘I’m afraid the decision is already made.’

The decision was, in fact, already made. There were months in which to draw back, but no one suggested that Luke could or would. Even to those who disliked and envied him, he gave an impression of simple physical courage; it was the one virtue which, like any other group of men, the Barford scientists uncritically admired.

In those months, he received more respect than ever before.

‘Perhaps we ought to be
doing
something for Luke,’ I heard a rotund voice say in the Athenaeum. That meant, give him a decoration: he was passing into the ranks of solid respectable men.

Just about the same time, people at Barford noticed that Drawbell, whose Christian name no one had been known to utter, whose friends called him ‘C F’, had begun to sign himself with a large, plain, mesomorphic ‘Cyril Drawbell’.

‘A bad case of knight starvation,’ said someone. It was the kind of joke the scientists did not get tired of.

It was true that Drawbell spent many days in London, calling on Rose and the new Minister; no longer non-committal, but instead proclaiming ‘the success of our Barford policy’. With urgency he told Rose one day that the ‘team’ deserved some public credit. Rose, who had decided not to meet him halfway, responded with even more than his usual civility.

Drawbell tried his set of personal arts against Rose’s politeness, but could not get the response he was playing for. Yes, it was wonderfully exciting, yes, the Minister was well informed of the history of the project, Rose went on mellifluously, but gave no outright official praise to Drawbell, who, with the meeting inconclusive, returned with me to my room.

For once he looked dejected and tired, as though his vitality had sunk low. Suddenly he asked: ‘Eliot, do you hate this life?’ He meant the life of officials.

‘Sometimes I hate it,’ said Drawbell. He stared at me.

‘If anyone asked my reason for existence, what should I tell them?’ I tried to cheer him up, but he interrupted me: ‘I’m just a pedlar of
other men’s
dreams.’

Like many tricky men, he was wishing his character were simpler. He wished he were not self-seeking. But he did not exude the pathos one often finds in tricky men; his nature was harder than most of theirs. He was angry with himself, still more angry with Rose, and he took it out of me as Rose’s proxy.

At Barford he made one intervention, after trying to persuade Luke and Martin to go slow until the health risks were worked out. The only thing he had a right to insist on, he said, was this: they must not both expose themselves to danger at the same time. If one should happen to be laid out, the other must be left intact. It was reasonable and the two of them promised it.

All that winter they were experimenting with protective clothing, with various kinds of divers’ suits in order to do chemistry-at-a-distance. Sawbridge, who was still asserting his claim to take part, had developed a set of instruments for manipulating the rods out of sight.

Martin spent many of his evenings reading case histories of radiation illness. It seemed probable, he decided, that they would find, as well as the radiation hazards, that plutonium was also a chemical poison.

Luke scoffed at what he called Martin’s ‘visits to the morgue’. To him, if you could do nothing about a danger, it was best to forget it. But Martin’s attitude was the exact opposite; if he were going to face a danger, he wanted to live with it beforehand. If he could become familiar in advance with the radioactive pathologies, he could more easily bear the moment of test. His clinical researches, which seemed to the others morbid, stiffened his resolve. With nothing like Luke’s or Sawbridge’s bravery of the fibres, Martin was training himself to face the March experiments with resignation.

Meanwhile, he continued to enjoy his taste of success. He was getting rather more than the credit due to Luke’s right-hand man; scientific elder statesmen, civil servants like Rose, found him comfortable to talk to, after Luke; he was cagey in speech, he showed some respect for etiquette, he had good manners; they were glad when he attended London committees instead of his chief, and on those visits he was taken to the Athenaeum more frequently than Luke had ever been.

He liked it. He seemed to view this official life with detachment, but really he saw it through a magnifying glass. I thought to myself that those like Martin, who were born worthy, were always half taken in by the world.

Even with March 1st coming on him, he still kept his satisfaction at having, in a modest sense, ‘arrived’. In January, he and Irene, when they came to London for a week’s leave, stood me a celebratory dinner. They had borrowed a flat in the first stretch of the Bayswater Road, just opposite the Albion Gate; it was still a luxury to let light stream out across the pavements, striking blue that night from the unswept snow. As we looked out, the middle of the road was dark, for the street lamps had not yet been lit.

We were saying (it was the kind of commonplace that we did not want to escape, since we were so content) how time had slipped by unnoticed, how the street lamps had now been dark for five and a half years. It was six years since Irene and I first met in my old rooms in Cambridge.

‘Too long for you, dear?’ said Irene to me, mechanically asking for approval.

‘You won’t go back there, will you?’ said Martin to me.

I shook my head: we were each talking at random, the past and future both seemed close.

‘You’ll have to make your plans, this can’t last much longer,’ said Martin. We all knew that the war must soon end; as he spoke, Irene started to reply, but stopped herself, her eyes restive.

Martin asked her to bring in the child to say goodnight. As she carried him in he stayed quiet, and Martin took him in his arms. Their glances met, the child’s a model of the man’s, fixed, hard, transparently bright; then, with a grave expression, the child turned in to his father’s shoulder.

Martin’s glance did not move from the child’s head.

‘We must make some plans for you too,’ he said. ‘I’ve told you, we’ve made one or two plans for you already.’

It was after dinner that Martin spoke with an openness that came out of the blue, that I had not heard more than twice in his life. He was smoking a cigar, emblem of the celebration that night, but he had drunk little and was cold sober. He had just been mentioning Hector Rose, for whom perversely he had taken a liking – and I teased him about his friends at court.

Martin smiled and without any preliminary said: ‘It’s nice to have a little confidence.’

He said it simply, naturally, and with gratification.

‘I never had enough,’ he said to me.

Perhaps it was true, I was thinking: in his struggle to be a scientist, to live in the same air as Mounteney or Luke, he had never believed in himself.

He was still speaking to me: ‘I got a bad start.’

‘We both did,’ I said.

‘Mine was worse.’

‘How?’

He said: ‘You always overshadowed me, you know.’

It was so unexpected that I could not have left it there, but he went on: ‘This has done me good.’

I was just beginning to speak when Irene, who had been biting back a worry all the evening, could keep quiet no longer. She cried: ‘Then why don’t you sit tight when you’ve got it?’

‘That’s not so easy,’ said Martin.

‘Just when we’re getting everything we wanted, you’re ready to throw it away.’

He said to her: ‘We’ve talked this out, haven’t we?’

‘I can’t let you go on with this madness. Do you expect me just to sit quiet and wait for the end of the war to stop you? I suppose if the war does end you will have a glimmer of sense?’

‘If the war ended there wouldn’t be any necessity to go so fast,’ he said, curiously stiff. His smile had an edge to it: ‘I shouldn’t be sorry if the necessity didn’t arise.’

‘You know you’re frightened.’

‘I am extremely frightened,’ said Martin.

‘Then why don’t you think of yourself?’

‘I’ve told you.’

What had he told her? Probably the coldest motive – that, if he did not follow Luke’s lead, he would lose the ground he had won.

‘Why don’t you think of me?’

‘I’ve told you that, too.’

Her face puckered, she said: ‘All you’ve done is to think of Lewis (the baby). And I don’t know whether you believe it’s enough just to insure yourself for him. Do you believe it really matters whether he goes to the sort of school that you two didn’t go to?’

For the first time, Martin’s tone showed pain. He said: ‘I wish I could do more for him.’

Suddenly she switched off – to begin with it was so jarring that one’s flesh crept – into a wail for her life in London before her marriage. Though she was wailing for past love affairs, her manner was fervid, almost jaunty; she was talking of a taxi drive in the snow. I had a vivid picture of a girl going hot-faced on a night like this across the Park to a man’s flat. I believed, though she was just delicate enough not to mention the name, that she was describing her first meeting with Hankins, and that she was using private words so that Martin should know it. Bitterly she was provoking his jealousy. To an extent she succeeded, for neither then nor later was he unmoved by the sound of Hankins’ name.

As I listened, I thought I must do like other friends of his, and finish with her. Then I saw the look in her eyes – it was not lust, it was not malice, it was a plea. She had no self-control, she would always be strident – but this was the only way she knew to beg him to be as he used to be.

All of a sudden, I understood a little. I could hear her ‘I am defeated’ in my flat that night last year which, if it had led one to think that she was leaving Martin, was totally misleading. It was he before whom she felt defeat. I could hear the tone in which, ten minutes later, she had pressed him about the child. Their marriage was changing, in the sense that marriages which start with their disparities often do; the balance of power was altering; their marriage was changing, and she was beating about, lost, bewildered, frightened, trying to keep it in its old state, which to her was precious.

Perhaps it was that the birth of the child had, as Hanna Puchwein had foreseen, disturbed the bond between them. But if so, it had disturbed it in the diametrically opposite direction from that which Hanna had so shrewdly prophesied. It was Martin who was freer, not Irene.

It seemed possible that the birth of the child had removed or weakened one strand in his love for her. He still had love for her, but the protective part, so powerful in him, so much a part of his whole acceptance of her antics, had been diverted to another. Hearing him speak to his son that evening, or even hearing him, speak to her about his son, I felt – and now I knew she felt it also – that all his protective love had gone in love for the child. He would be too anxious about his son, I thought, he would care too much, live too much in him – just as I had at times lived too much in Martin,

So, although he had much feeling left for Irene, he no longer felt driven to look after her. All that was gone; he wanted her to be happy; in his meticulous fashion he had made arrangements for her future in case, in the March experiments, he should be incapacitated or killed; but when he thought of the danger, both of what he might lose and those who might miss him, his only fear that counted alongside his own animal fear was for the child.

While Irene, who when he loved her passionately and protectively had wanted to get away from the protective clutch, now wished it back. She wished him to think first of her, she was anxious about him with all the hungers of vanity, self-esteem, habit, anything that makes us want someone who has drawn into himself.

With another switch, she began asking, with a nagging insistence, about, the programme for March.

‘This is supposed to be a celebration,’ said Martin.

She nagged on. As both she and I knew, the date for the first dissolving of the rods had been put back from March 1st to March 10th.

‘That’s all right,’ she said, ‘but which of you is going to make a fool of himself first?’

‘Unless anyone insists, which won’t be me, I suppose we might have to toss up for it.’

‘Have you settled that?’ she cried.

He shook his head. ‘I haven’t spoken to Walter Luke about it recently.’

It was the flat truth.

Wildly she turned to me. I was her last hope. Could not I make him behave decently?

I knew that it was no use. Both he and I were behaving with consideration for each other, but any authority I had had was worn away. For me to interfere in his life again would be too much of a risk. I knew it, and so did he. I had to accept that it was not only marriage relations which changed.