The New Men (17 page)

Although none of us knew it at the time. Luke and Martin did not toss up. Even they themselves had not settled, until March was on them, which should ‘go first’: and how they settled it, they kept secret. It was long afterwards that I found out what had happened.

Martin had been as good as his word, no better, no worse. With his feeling for precision and formality, he had actually written Luke a note a week before the experiment, suggesting that they tossed up, defining what the toss should mean – heads Martin went first, tails Luke. Luke would not have it. Swearing at getting a letter from Martin whom he saw every day, he said that the extraction was his idea, his ‘bit of nonsense’, and the least he could do was have the ‘first sniff’.

Luke got his way. Martin did not pretend to himself that he was sorry to be overruled.

The results of his being overruled came so fast that even at Barford, much more so in London, they were hard to follow. First Luke decided that he could not begin the experiment without another pair of hands; after his and Martin’s arrangement with the Superintendent, which meant that Martin was excluded, they had to give Sawbridge his wish.

During the last waiting period, Luke had had a ‘hot’ laboratory built, rather like a giant caricature of a school laboratory, in which, instead of dissolving bits of iron in beakers under their noses, they had a stainless steel pot surrounded by walls of concrete into which they dropped rods of metal that they never dared to see. In each section of the hot laboratory were bell pushes, as though it were a bath arranged for a paralysed invalid who for safety was in need of a bell within inches of his head.

Luke and Sawbridge went alone into the hot laboratory on a morning in March. The next that Martin heard, just three hours later, was the sound of the bell. That same evening I received news that Luke and Sawbridge were both seriously ill. Luke much the worse. The doctors would have said not fatally, if they had known more of the pathology of radiation illness. So far, they looked like cases of severe sunstroke. It might be wise for their friends to be within reach.

Sawbridge had carried Luke away from the rods, and it was Sawbridge who had pushed the bell. The irony was, they had been knocked out by a sheer accident. They had got safely through the opening of the aluminium cans, in which the rods were taken from the pile; the cans had been stripped off under ten feet of water. Then something ‘silly’ happened, as Sawbridge said, which no one could have provided against. A container cracked. Luke went down, and Sawbridge – a matter of minutes afterwards.

The next day’s news was hopeful. Sawbridge seemed scarcely ill, and was a bad patient; Luke was able to talk about the changes they could make in the hot laboratory, before he or Martin had ‘another go’.

They went on like this for several days, without anything the doctors could call a symptom. Several times Luke wanted them to let him out of bed. Eight days after the stroke, he broke out: ‘
What is the matter with me?
’ Though he could not explain how, he felt physically uneasy; soon he was said to be low-spirited, a description which shocked anyone who knew him. He was restlessly tired, even as he lay in bed.

Within three more days he was ill, though no one had seen the disease before. His temperature went up; he was vomiting, he had diarrhoea, blood spots were forming under his skin; the count of his white blood cells had gone steeply down. In two more days, he was bleeding inside the mouth.

Sawbridge escaped some of the malaise, and the blood spots had not formed. Otherwise his condition seemed a milder variant of the same disease. I was ready to go to Barford at short notice to visit Luke, but during those days he was so depressed that he only wanted to be alone. Once a day he saw his wife; he sent for Martin but spoke very little when he came; he tried to give some instructions, but they were not intelligible. His chief comfort seemed to be in following the scientific observations of his illness. He and Sawbridge had been moved into a special ward at the establishment hospital; not only the Barford doctors, but others studying the clinical effects of radiation watched each measurement. There was a mutter from Luke’s sickbed which spread round Barford: ‘The only thing they (the doctors) still don’t know is whether to label mine a lethal dose or only near lethal.’

Mounteney told me that much, one afternoon in my office. More physically imaginative than most men, Mounteney was enraged at the thought of Luke’s illness. His eyes burnt more deeply in their sockets, his face looked more than ever Savonarola-like.

‘It oughtn’t to have been let happen, Eliot,’ he said. ‘It oughtn’t to have happened to anyone, let alone a man we can’t spare. Some of you people ought to have realized that
he’s
one of the men we
can’t
spare.’

Although his distress was genuine, it was like him to turn it into an attack. Somehow he implied that, instead of Luke being ill, Whitehall officials ought to be. But, as the afternoon went on, he became gentler though more harassed.

‘I should like anyone who’s ever talked about using the nuclear bomb to have a look at Luke now,’ he said.

I was thinking of that night in Stratford, which now seemed far away and tranquil, when Martin fed the swans.

‘It would teach them what it means. If ever a nuclear bomb went off, this is exactly what would happen to the people it didn’t kill straight off.’ He added: ‘There are enough diseases in the world, Eliot. It’s no business of science to produce a new one.’

That visit from Mounteney took place three weeks after Luke and Sawbridge were pulled out of the hot laboratory. In another few days – E + 29, as the scientists called it in the jargon of the day, meaning twenty-nine days after the exposure – Luke was said to be brighter, the bleeding had lessened. It might only be an intermission, but at least he was glad of people at his bedside.

Although I arrived in Barford the day I got that message, I was not allowed in the ward until the following morning. And, just as I was going inside, Mrs Drawbell, watching from the nurses’ anteroom, intercepted me. Her husband detested Luke; when he was healthy she herself had never shown any interest in him; but now – now there was a chance to nurse. Triumphantly she had argued with Nora Luke. Nora had a piece of mathematical work to finish: anyone could do part-time nursing, only Nora could complete that paper. The wives who had no careers of their own criticized Nora, but it was Mrs Drawbell who became installed as nurse.

‘You mustn’t tire him, Mr Eliot,’ she said accusingly. She (Nora Luke) was already in the ward, Mrs Drawbell said. She went on, stern and obscurely contented: ‘They used to be such fine strong men!’

I had not heard her so articulate. She said: ‘It’s a case of the wheel of fortune.’

The first time I heard Luke’s voice, it sounded husky but loud and defiant. I was only just inside the door; the ward was small, with a screen between the two beds, Sawbridge’s in the shade and further from the window. The light spring sunshine fell across Nora sitting by the other bed, but I could not see Luke’s face.

‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you, Lewis,’ he said.

It was the kind of greeting that I used to expect from him. He went on: ‘We must have more bods.’

‘Bods’ meant bodies, people, any kind of staff: scientists were bods, so were floor cleaners, but as a rule Luke used the words in demanding more scientists.

I felt better, hearing him so truculent – until I noticed Nora’s expression. At a first glance, she had looked, not cheerful, certainly, but settled; it was the set tender expression one sees in many wives by a husband’s sick-bed, but that some would have been surprised to see in Nora. But, as Luke shouted at me, pretending to be his old rude, resilient self, that expression changed on the instant to nothing but pain.

As I moved out of the sunlight I saw Luke. For a moment I remembered him as I had first met him, in the combination room of our college, when he was being inspected as a fellowship candidate ten years before. Then he had been ruddy, well fleshed, muscular, brimming with a young man’s vigour – and (it seemed strange to remember now) passionately self-effacing in his desire to get on. Now he was pale, not with an ordinary pallor but as though drained of blood; he was emaciated, so that his cheeks fell in and his neck was like an old man’s; there were two ulcers by the left-hand corner of his mouth; bald patches shone through the hair on the top of his head, as in an attack of alopecia.

But these changes were nothing beside the others. I said, answering his attempt to talk business: ‘We’ll go into that any time you like. You’ll get all the people you want.’

Luke stared at me, trying to concentrate.

‘I can’t think what we want,’ he said.

He added, in a sad, exhausted tone: ‘You’d better settle it all with Martin. I am a bit out of touch.’

He could not get used to the depression. Into his sanguine nature it seemed to grow, as though it was seeping his spirits away; he had never had to struggle against a mood before, much less to feel that he was losing the struggle.

Propped up by his pillows, his back had gone limp. His eyes did not focus on Nora or me nor on the trees in the hospital garden.

I said, hearing my voice over-hearty as though he were deaf: ‘You’ll soon get in touch again. It won’t take you a week, when you get out of here.’

Luke replied: ‘I may not be good for much when I get out of here.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said.

‘Are you thinking of
that
again?’ said Nora.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘He’s worried that he might be sterile,’ said Nora.

Luke did not deny it.

‘Are you having that old jag again?’ said his wife.

‘The dose must have been just about big enough,’ he said blankly, as though he had nothing new to say.

‘I’ve told you,’ said Nora, ‘as soon as the doctors say yes we’ll make them have a look. I shall be very much surprised if anything is wrong.’

With the obstinacy of the miserable, Luke shook his head.

‘I told you that if by any miracle there is anything wrong, which I don’t credit for a minute, well, it doesn’t matter very much,’ said Nora. ‘We’ve got our two. We never wanted any more.’

She sounded tough, robust, maternal.

Luke lay quiet, his face so drawn with illness that one could not read it.

I tried to change the subject, but Nora knew him better and had watched beside him longer.

She said suddenly: ‘You’re thinking something worse, aren’t you?’

Very slightly, he inclined his head.

‘Which one is it?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘You’d better say,’ she said.

‘There must be a chance,’ he said, ‘that some of this stuff will settle in the bone.’

There was a silence. Nora said: ‘I wish I could tell you there wasn’t a chance. But no one knows one way or the other, No one can possibly know.’

Luke said: ‘If I get through this bout, I shall have that hanging over me.’

He lay there, imagining the disease that might lie ahead of him. Nora sat beside him, settled and patient, without speaking. Sawbridge coughed, over by the wall, and then the room stayed so quiet that I could hear a match struck outside. We were still silent when Mrs Drawbell entered. Martin had come to visit Dr Luke; only two people were allowed in the ward at a time; when one of us left, Martin could take his place. Quickly Nora got up. She would be back tomorrow, whereas this was my only time with Luke. I thought that she was, like anyone watching another’s irremovable sadness, glad to go.

With a glance towards Sawbridge, Martin walked across the floor towards Luke’s bed. As he came, it struck me – it was strange to notice such a thing for the first time – that his feet turned out, more than one would expect in a good player of games. He looked young, erect, and well. With bright, hard eyes he scrutinized Luke, but his voice was gentle as he asked: ‘How are you?’

‘Not so good,’ replied Luke from a long way off.

‘You seem a bit better than when I saw you last.’

‘I wish I believed it,’ said Luke.

Martin went on to inquire about the symptoms – the hair falling out, the ulcers, the bleeding.

‘That (the bleeding) may have dropped off a bit,’ said Luke.

‘That’s very important,’ Martin said. ‘Don’t you see how important it is?’ He was easier with illness than I was, ready to scold as well as to be gentle. But after he had learned about the symptoms – he was so thorough that I longed for him to stop – he could not persuade Luke to talk any more than Nora or I could. Luke lay still and we could not reach the thoughts behind his eyes.

Martin gave me a glance, for once tentative and lost. He said quietly to Luke: ‘We’re tiring you a bit. We’ll have a word with Sawbridge over there.’

Luke did not reply, as Martin, with me following, tiptoed over to the other bed.

‘I’m not asleep,’ said Sawbridge, in a scornful and unwelcoming tone. We stood by the bed and looked down on him; his skin in health had its thick nordic pallor, and the transformation was not as shocking as in Luke; but the bald patches of scalp shone through, his eyes were filmed over, half opaque. When Martin inquired about him, he said: ‘I’m all right.’

Martin was reading the charts – white blood counts, red blood counts, temperature – over the bed head.

‘Never mind that,’ said Sawbridge, ‘I tell you, I’m all right.’

‘The figures look encouraging,’ said Martin.

‘I’ve never been as bad as he was–’ Sawbridge inclined a heavy eye towards Luke’s bed.

‘We’ve been worried about you, all the same.’

‘There was no need.’ Sawbridge said it with anger – and suddenly, under the shroud of illness, under the familiar loutishness, I felt his bitter pride. He did not want to admit that he was ill or afraid; he had heard the fears that Luke let fall, he could not help but share them; but neither to the doctors nor his relatives, certainly not to his fellow sufferer or to us, would he give a sign.

It was a kind of masculine pride that did not make him more endearing, I was thinking; in fact that it made him more raw and forbidding; it had no style. Until this accident I had heard little of him from Martin. No one had mentioned the security inquiries, which I assumed had come to nothing; the little that Martin said had not been friendly, and at the bedside he was still put off. But he managed to keep, what Sawbridge could not have borne, all pity out of his voice.