Charles Snow - The New Men

It was half past eight; in the pool of light from the reading lamp, the foolscap in my desk shone with a blue luminescence; I was too restless to work. I went across the passage to the little room where my new personal assistant was sitting. I had told her to go hours before, but she was over-conscientious; she was a young widow called Vera Allen, comely but reserved, too diffident to chat, stiff at being alone in the building with a man.

I heard the Minister scamper up the stairs, with the light trotting steps that sounded so youthful. I returned to my room. He put his head in, without taking off his bowler hat.

‘Still at it,’ he said.

He went on: ‘I think it’s all right, Eliot.’

I exclaimed with relief.

Bevill was flushed, looking curiously boyish in his triumph. He tipped his hat back on his thin grey hair.

‘We mustn’t count our eggs before they’re hatched, but I think it’s in the bag,’ he said.

In jubilation, he asked if I had eaten and took me off to Pratt’s.

He had taken me there before, when he was pleased. He only did it because he had a soft spot for me. For business, for talks with Rose, he went elsewhere; Pratt’s was reserved for friends, it was his fortress, his favourite club.

When he first took me inside, I had thought — it seemed strange — of my mother. She had been brought up in a gamekeeper’s cottage on a Lincolnshire estate; she was proud and snobbish and had great ambitions for me; she was dead years since, she had not seen what happened to me — but just the sight of me with Thomas Bevill, in his most jealously guarded club, eating with men whose names she had read in the papers, would have made her rejoice that her life was not in vain.

Yet if she could have seen me there, she would have been a little puzzled to observe that we were sitting with some discomfort in rooms remarkably like the cottage where she was born. A basement: a living room with a common table and a check cloth: a smoking kitchen with an open hearth: in fact, a landowner’s idea of his own gamekeeper’s quarters. That was the place to which Thomas Bevill went whenever he wanted to be sure of meeting no one but his aristocratic friends.

Looking at him after our meal, as he sat by the kitchen hearth, drinking a glass of port, I thought that unless one had the chance to see him so, one might be quite misled. People called him unassuming, unsnobbish, realistic, gentle. Unassuming: yes, that was genuine. Unsnobbish, realistic; that was genuine too; unlike his cousin, Lord Boscastle, he did not take refuge, as society evened itself out, in a fantastic and comic snobbery; yet in secret, he did take refuge with his friends here, in a cave-of-the-past, in a feeling, blended of fear, foresight and contempt, that he could preserve bits of his past and make them last his time. Gentle, a bit of an old woman; that was not genuine in the slightest; he was kind to his friends, but the deeper you dug into him the tougher and more impervious he became.

‘Well, if they’re going to sack me, Eliot,’ he said, ‘I’ve left them a nice kettle of fish.’ He was simmering in his triumph over Barford. He ordered more glasses of port.

‘One of these days,’ he said, ‘those chaps will blow us all up, and that will be the end of the story.’

The firelight winked in his glass; he held it up to admire the effect, brought it down carefully and looked into it from above.

‘It’s funny about those chaps,’ he reflected. ‘I used to think scientists were supermen. But they’re not supermen, are they? Some of them are brilliant, I grant you that. But between you and me, Eliot, a good many of them are like garage hands. Those are the chaps who are going to blow us all up.’

I said, for I was not speaking like a subordinate, that a good many of them had more imagination than his colleagues.

Bevill agreed, with cheerful indifference.

‘Our fellows can’t make much difference to the world, and those chaps can. Do you think it will be a better world, when they’ve finished with it?

I thought it might. Not for him, probably not for me and my kind: but for ninety per cent of the human race. ‘I don’t trust them,’ said Thomas Bevil. Then he said: ‘By the by, I like the look of your brother, Eliot.’

It was partly his good manners, having caught himself in a sweeping statement. But he said it as though he meant it.

‘He put the cat among the pigeons, you know, that afternoon down there. It’s just as well he did, or Master Drawbell mightn’t have seen the red light in time, and if they’d all gone on crabbing Luke I couldn’t have saved the situation.’

He began laughing, his curious, internal, happy laugh, as though he were smothering a dirty joke.

‘Those Drawbells! Between them they’d do anything to get a K, wouldn’t they?’

He meant a knighthood. He was constantly amused at the manoeuvres men engaged in to win titles, and no one understood them better.

‘Never mind, Eliot,’ he said. ‘We saved the situation, and now it’s up to those chaps not to let us down.’

It was his own uniquely flat expression of delight: but his face was rosy, he did not look like a man of seventy-three, he was revelling in his victory, the hot room, the mildly drunken night.

‘If this country gets a superbomb,’ he said cheerfully, ‘no one will remember me.’

He swung his legs under his chair.

‘It’s funny about the bomb,’ he said. ‘If we manage to get it, what do we do with it then?’

This was not the first time that I heard the question: once or twice recently people at Barford had raised it. It was too far away for the scientists to speculate much, even the controversialists like Mounteney, but several of them agreed that we should simply notify the enemy that we possessed the bomb, and give some evidence: that would be enough to end the war. I repeated this view to Bevill.

‘I wonder,’ he said.

‘I wonder,’ he repeated. ‘Has there ever been a weapon that someone did not want to let off?’

I said, though the issue seemed remote, that this was different in kind. We had both seen the current estimate, that one fission bomb would kill three hundred thousand people at a go.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Bevill. ‘Think of what we’re trying to do with bombing. We’re trying to kill men, women, and children. It’s worse than anything Genghis Khan ever did.’

He said it without relish, without blame, with neutrality.

Soon the room grew warmer, the port went round again, as men came in from a late night meeting. A couple of them were ministers, and Bevill looked towards them with a politician’s insatiable hope. Had they any news for him? He could not help hoping. He was old, he had made such reputation as he could, if he stayed in office he would not add a syllable to it; he knew how irretrievably he was out of favour, and he did not expect to last three months; yet still, on that happy night, he wondered if he might not hear of a reprieve, if he might not hear that he was being kept on, perhaps in an obscurer post.

I saw that his flicker of hope did not last long. From their manner he knew they had nothing to tell him. It did not weigh him down, he was pleased with himself that night. And they brought other news: the invasion fleet was safely out of Gibraltar, and all looked well for the North African landing.

A little later, Bevill and I went out into St James’s Street. He twirled his umbrella, a slight little figure in a bowler hat, under the full moon; an old man, slightly drunk, expecting the sack, and full of well-being. He said to me with an extra sweep of his umbrella: ‘Isn’t it nice to be winning?’

I was not sure whether he was talking about Barford, or the war.

He repeated it, resoundingly, to the empty street: ‘Isn’t it nice to be winning?’