The New Men (29 page)

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.’

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.’