Charles Snow - The New Men

She kept him to herself, standing together on the rug. It was not until she was forced to greet a new arrival that her eyes were distracted, and the Minister could slip away towards the window. He beckoned to us, so that we could make a circle round him; Luke, me, a couple of young scientists whom I did not know by name, Mary Pearson. He caught sight of Mary Pearson’s husband, and beckoned also to him.

I had had business talks with Pearson before, for he was one of the top men at Barford and was said to be their best electrical engineer. In those talks I had found him too pleased with himself to give more than a minimum reply. He was a man in the early thirties with a cowlick over his forehead and a wide lazy-looking mouth.

As Bevill crooked his finger, Pearson gave a relaxed smile and came unconcernedly into the ring.

‘Now, my friends, we can talk seriously, can’t we?’ said the Minister.

He basked in the company of the young, and felt quite natural with them. But, as often when he was natural, he was also mildly eccentric; with the intellectual young, he felt most completely at ease, and satisfied with himself, in discussing what he called ‘philosophy’. He took it for granted that this was their conception of serious conversation, too; and so the old man, so shrewd and cunning in practice, dug out his relics of idealist speculation, garbled from the philosophers of his youth, F H Bradley and McTaggart, and talked proudly on, forcing the young men to attend — while all they wanted, that night of all nights, was to cut the cackle and hear his intentions about Barford and Luke’s scheme.

‘I don’t know about you chaps’ — the Minister, who had been ambling on for some time, looked out of the window towards the west — ‘but whenever I see a beautiful sunset, I wonder whether there isn’t an Ideal Sunset outside Space and Time.’

His audience were getting impatient. But he thought they were taking a point.

‘Perhaps you’ll say, the Phenomenon is enough. Is the Phenomenon enough? I know it sometimes seems so, to all of us doesn’t it? — when you see a beloved woman and see from her smile that she loves you back. I know it seems enough,’ said Bevill earnestly and cheerfully.

All of a sudden, only half listening, for I had heard the Minister showing off his philosophy before, I saw the flush on Mary Pearson’s face, I saw the smile on Pearson’s as he glanced at her. I had not often seen a man so changed. When I met him, he had filled me with antipathy; it came as a shock to see his face radiant. Somewhere Bevill’s bumbling words had touched the trigger. The conceit had vanished the indifference about whether he pleased: it was just a face lit up by a mutual love. And so was hers. Her skin was flushed down to the neck of her dress, behind her spectacles her eyes were moist with joy.

Anyone watching as I was would have had no doubt: those two must be sharing erotic bliss. You can share erotic bliss with someone and still not be suffused by love as those two were, but the converse does not hold, and no husband and wife could be so melted by each other’s smile without the memory of bliss, and the certainty that it would soon be theirs again. I guessed that their physical happiness was out of the common run. It had been worth listening to the Minister’s philosophizing to see it shine.

I was not the only one who saw it shine, for, a few minutes afterwards, as the Minister was saying his goodbyes before we left for the railway station, Luke and I strolled in the lane outside and he said: ‘Funny what people see in each other.’

‘Is it?’

‘It’s lucky those two think each other wonderful, because I’m damned if anyone else would.’

He added, with a thoughtful, truculent grin: ‘Of course, they might say the same of me and Nora.’

As he walked beside me his whole bearing was jaunty, and many women, at a glance, would have judged him virile. Yet he was sexually a genuinely humble man. He did not believe that women noticed him, it would not have occurred to him to believe it.

‘I envy you, you know!’ he broke out.

‘Whatever for?’

‘You know that I am an innocent sort of chap. Why are you making me talk?’

For once, he had forgotten about the project. Like me, he had been stirred by the Pearsons’ smile. With his usual immoderation, he was bursting to confide. Confide he did, insisting often that I was pumping him.

‘I’ve kept myself out of things when I ought to have rushed in. I thought I couldn’t spare the time from science. It wasn’t ambition, I just felt I had to get on. And I didn’t know what I was missing. So now I’m batting about trying to make up my mind on problems which you must have coped with when you were twenty. I’m frightened of them, and I don’t like being frightened.’

I said that he had not done badly: he had made a happier marriage than most, while mine had been miserable.

‘But you know your way about. So does your brother Martin. Neither of you feel like some little brat with his nose up against the shop window and wondering what he has got to do to get inside.’

Totally immersed, he went on: ‘I can’t bear being left out of things. There are times when I want to see all the places and read all the books and fornicate with all the women. Now you’re certain where you stand about all that, you’ve had your share. What I want to know is, how do I get mine without hurting anyone else?’

I thought, in a way he was right about himself: how young he was. But it was more than calendar youth (at that time he was thirty-one), it was more than a life blinkered and concentrated by his vocation. Perhaps he would never lose his sense of being deprived, of being left out of the party — of being outside in the road, of seeing the lights of houses, homes of voluptuous delight denied to him.

‘I suppose I shall get my share in the long run,’ said Luke. ‘Somehow I must manage it. I’m damned well not going to die feeling I was too frightened to discover what it was all about.’ He was looking towards the establishment, and the energy seemed to be pulsing within him, so that in the softening light his sanguine colour became deeper, even his hair seemed to have more sheen.

‘Wait till I’ve got this scheme to go. There’s a time for everything,’ he said, ‘when we’ve tied this up!’

Back in Whitehall, the Minister plumped in on Luke’s side. It was gallant for a man whose job was tottering, for it meant opposing those in power. It meant acting against Bevill’s own maxims — if those above had it in for you, never make a nuisance of yourself and never go away. For once in his life he disregarded them.

No one could understand why. With Bevill, everyone looked for some cunning political motive. I believed that, just this once, there was none. Underneath the politics, the old man had a vein of narrow, rigid, aristocratic patriotism. He had been convinced that Luke’s scheme might be good for the country; that may have been a reason why Bevill made enemies in order to give Luke his head.

A minister likely to be out of office next month had, however, not many cards to play. Probably his single effort in self-sacrifice did not count much either way; what was more decisive was Francis Getliffe’s conversation with Hector Rose. I was not present, but within a short time of that conversation, Rose, against his preconceived opinion, against most of his prejudices, changed his mind. He had concluded that the other side’s case, in particular Getliffe’s case, was stronger than his own. I wondered with some shame — for I could not like him — whether in his place I should have been so fair.

So the dispatch boxes went round, Rose lunched with his colleagues at the Athenaeum, the committees sat: on a night early in November, the Minister went off to a meeting. It was not a cabinet, but a sub-committee of ministers; he believed that, one way or the other, this would settle it. I remained in my office, waiting for him to return.