Charles Snow - The New Men

The twenty-second was only a week away when, one evening just as I was leaving the office, Martin rang me up. He was at Barford; he sounded elaborate, round-about, as though he had something to ask.

‘I suppose you don’t happen to be free tonight?’

But I could not help interrupting: ‘Nothing wrong with the pile?’

(Although, over the telephone, I used a code word.)

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Everything fixed for next week?’

‘I hope so.’

For the first time, I was letting myself wonder what Martin would do with his success.

‘Shall you be in your flat tonight?’ He had come round to his question.

‘I could be,’ I said.

‘I wish you’d look after Irene a bit, if she comes in.’

‘Why should she?’

‘I think she will.’ He went on: ‘She’s in rather a state.’

I said I would do anything I could. I asked: ‘Is it serious?’

‘I’d rather you formed your own opinion.’

I had heard little emotion in his voice — maybe he was past it, I thought. But he apologized for inflicting this on me, and he was relieved to have someone to look after her.

Later that night, I was reading in my sitting-room when the bell rang. I went to open the door, and out of the darkness, into the blue-lit hall, came Irene.

‘I’m not popular, am I?’ she said, but the laugh was put on.

Without speaking, I led her in.

‘This room makes an enemy of me,’ she said, still trying to brazen it out. Then she said, not with her childish make-believe but without any pretence: ‘I couldn’t come to anyone but you. Martin knows about it.’

For a few moments I thought she had left him; as she went on speaking I realized it was not so simple. First she asked, as though the prosaic question drove out all others: ‘Have you got a telephone?’

She looked round the room, her pupils dilated, her eyes taking in nothing but the telephone she could not see.

‘Yes,’ I said, trying to soothe her.

It stood in the passage.

‘Can I use it?’

I said, of course.

Immediately, her eyes still blind, she went out, leaving the door open. I heard her dial, slowly because in the wartime glimmer she could hardly make out the figures. Then her voice: ‘Mrs Whelan, it’s me again. Is Mr Hankins back yet?’

A mutter from the instrument.

‘Not yet?’ Irene’s voice was high.

Another mutter.

‘Listen,’ said Irene, ‘I’ve got a telephone number where he can get me now.’

I heard her strike a match and give the Victoria number on my telephone.

Another mutter.

‘I’ll be here a couple of hours at least,’ replied Irene into the telephone. ‘Even if he’s late, tell him I’ll be here till one.

She came back into my room.

‘Is that all right?’ she asked, her eyes brighter now, focused on me.

I said yes.

‘It’s for him,’ she said. ‘It’s not for me. He wants to speak to me urgently, and there’s nowhere else I can safely wait.’

She stared at me.

‘I think he wants me back.’

I tried to steady her: ‘What can you tell him?’

‘What can I tell him?’ she cried, and added, half crying, half hysterical: ‘Can I tell him I’m defeated ?’

The phrase sounded strange, I was mystified: and yet it was at this point I knew that she was not leaving Martin out of hand.

On the other hand, I knew also that she was reading in Hankins’ intentions just what she wanted to read. Did he truly want her back? Above all, she would like to believe that.

Perhaps it was commonplace. Did she, like so many other unfaithful wives, want the supreme satisfaction of coming to the crisis and then staying with her husband and turning her lover down?

For all her faults, I did not think she was as commonplace as that. Looking at her, as she sat on my sofa, breathing shortly and shallowly as she listened for the telephone, I did not feel that she was just enjoying the game of love. She was febrile: that proved nothing, she could have been febrile in a flirtation. Her heart was pounding with emotion; I had seen other women so, taking a last fervent goodbye of a lover, on their way back to the marriage bed. But she was also genuinely, wildly unhappy, unhappy because her life was being driven by forces she could not govern or even understand, and unhappy also for the most primal of reasons, because the telephone did not ring and she could not hear his voice.

I tried to comfort her. I spoke of the time, ten years before, when I knew Hankins. It was strange that he, I was thinking, should have been her grand passion, her infatuation, her romantic love — people gave it different names, according to how they judged her. Why should he be the one to get under the skin of this fickle, reckless woman?

No, that did not soothe her. I made a better shot when I talked of her and Martin. I assumed there was something left for both of them, which was what she wanted to hear. We talked of the child, which she fiercely loved.

I recalled the reason she had given, at her breakfast table, for marrying him. ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘why did he marry you ?’

‘Oh, that’s simple,’ said Irene, ‘he just liked the look of me.’

For once that night she spoke with zest, something like triumph. Soon her anxiety came back. She asked: Should we hear the telephone bell through the wall? Several times she started up, thinking it was beginning to ring. Twice it did ring, and twice she went to the receiver. One call was for me, one a wrong number. The minutes passed, the half-hours. Midnight came, one o’clock. She had ceased trying to keep up any conversation long since.

It was not in me to condemn her. I scarcely thought of her as my brother’s wife. Faced with the sight of her nervous expectant face, pinched to the point where anxiety is turning into the dread of deprivation, I felt for her just the animal comradeship of those who have been driven to wait for news by telephone, to wait in fear of the post because there may not be a letter, to walk the streets at night waiting for a bedroom light to go out before they can go to sleep. To have lived, even for a time, helpless in the deep undertow of passionate love — at moments one thought that one must come home to it, even if it was a dreadful home, and anyone moving to that same home, as Irene was, seemed at such moments a sister among the others, among all the untroubled strangers going to their neater homes.

At half past two I persuaded her to go to bed. The next morning there was still no message: she wanted to ring up again, but some relic of pride, perhaps my presence and what she had said to me, prevented her. She put on her smart, brazen air to keep her courage up, and with a quip about having spent the night alone with me in my flat, took a taxi to Paddington and the next train back to Barford, waving with spirit till she was out of sight up Lupus Street.

Neither that morning, nor the previous night, had I wished, as I had often wished in the past, that Martin was rid of her.

Most people I met, even on the technical committees, were still ignorant about the whole uranium project. But some could not resist letting one know that they were in the secret too. In the lavatory of the Athenaeum a bald bland head turned to me from the adjacent stall.

‘March 22nd,’ came the whisper and a finger rose to the lips.

On the evening of the twenty-first, just as I was leaving to catch the last train to Barford, Hector Rose gave his ceremonious knock and came into my office.

‘Very best wishes, Eliot,’ he said. He was awkward; he was for once excited, and tried to hide it.