Charles Snow - The New Men

‘First light,’ said Martin.

I could not help myself. I broke out of control: ‘Is this ever going to come off?’

‘Is what ever going to come off?’

It was one of his stoical tricks, to pretend not to understand.

‘You know what I mean.’

Martin paused.

‘I should think your guess is about as good as mine,’ he said.

I tried, but I could not keep quiet: ‘Perhaps it’s a pity that you burned your boats.’

‘That’s possible,’ said Martin.

‘Perhaps it wasn’t sensible to invest all your future in one man.’

‘I’ve thought of that,’ said Martin.

‘Luke’s enemies have always said that he’d make one big mistake,’ I said. I could hear in my own voice, and could not hold it down, the special cruelty that can break out of any ‘unselfish’ love, of a father’s or a brother’s, with anyone who is asking nothing for himself — except that the other person should fulfil one’s dreams, often one’s self-identificatory dreams. If you see yourself in another, you see all you would like to be: so you can be more self-sacrificing than in any other human relation, because it does not seem like sacrifice: for the same reason you can be more cruel.

‘I’ve thought of that also.’

‘Is this going to be his big mistake?’ I asked.

For the first time, Martin turned against me; his voice was quieter but as bitter as mine.

‘You’re not making it any easier,’ he said.

Ashamed, suddenly stricken by his misery, I said that I was sorry, and we walked in silence, making our way towards the Drawbells’ house. We had quarrelled only once before, when I interfered over his marriage, and that had been just skin deep. Finding I could not put the words together to comfort him or tell him my regret for the past minutes, I muttered that I would see him home.

‘Do,’ said Martin.

Neither of us said much, as we walked along the footpath in the cold, slow dawn. What we had said could not be taken back; yet it seemed to have passed. Once Martin made a formal attempt to console me. He said: ‘Don’t worry too much: it may turn out all right.’

A little later, he said: ‘If I had the choice about Luke to make all over again, I should do exactly the same as before.’

The hedges smelled wet, the blackthorn blossom was ectoplasmic on the morning dark. We came to the little road that led to Martin’s. In front of us, stretching from the path to a cottage roof, was the dim shape of a ladder. As I went under, I could feel Martin hesitate and then take three quick steps round. He said, with a sarcastic smile: ‘I need all the luck I can get.’

Making out his face in the twilight, I was wondering whether he, too, in that moment of superstition, had thought of our mother: who also had been superstitious: who, with her toes pointed out, would go round any ladder: who possessed just his kind of stoicism, invented to conceal an insatiable romantic hope: and who in his place, this morning after the fiasco, would be cherishing the first new pictures of wonderful triumphs to come.

It was strange to think that the same might be true of him.

As soon as I woke, the night’s fiasco clinched itself out of the morning light. It was midday, not many hours since I left Martin outside his house.

Unable to keep myself away, hurrying to the laboratories to hear remarks that I did not want to hear, I found Luke and Martin already there. They might have been following old Bevill’s first rule for any kind of politics: if there is a crisis, if anyone can do you harm or good, he used to say, looking simple, never mind your dignity, never mind your nerves, but always be present in the flesh .

Even that morning, Martin might have had the self-control to act on such advice: but it was more likely, in Luke’s case certain, that they had come in order to argue a way through the criticisms and get to work the same day.

There were many criticisms. There was — to my ears, used to a different climate, less bracing and perhaps more hypocritical — astonishingly little sympathy. Most people had no thought to spare for Luke’s or Martin’s feelings; they were concerned with why the pile had not run last night, whether Luke’s diagnosis was correct, how long the ‘mods’ (modifications) would take.

There were scientists’ jokes. Was this, Mounteney asked, the most expensive negative result in scientific history? It was their own kind of jibing, abstract, not specially ill-natured. I would have preferred to go on listening, rather than return to London and make my report to Hector Rose.

Arriving in the office late that afternoon I found a message waiting for me: Sir Hector’s compliments, and, when I could spare the time, would I make an opportunity to call on him?

I went at once to get the interview over. Rose’s room, which was on the side of the building opposite to mine, looked over the trees of St James’s Park, stirring that evening in the wind, bright in the cold sunshine. Rose was standing up, bowing from the waist, greeting me with his elaborate courtesy.

‘It’s very, very good of you to spare me a minute, my dear Eliot.’ He put me in the armchair near his desk, from which I could smell the hyacinths on the little table by the window: even in wartime, he replaced his flowers each day. Then he offered me his cigarette case. It was like him to carry cigarettes for his visitors, though he did not smoke himself. Had my journey that afternoon been excessively uncomfortable, he asked, had I been able to get a reasonable luncheon?

Then he looked at me, his face still unnaturally youthful, expressionless, his eyes light.

‘I gather that everything did not go precisely according to expectation?’

I said that I was afraid not.

‘You will appreciate, my dear Eliot, that it is rather unfortunate. There has been slightly too much criticism of this project to be comfortable, all along.’

I was well aware of it.

‘It may have been a mistake,’ said Rose, ‘not to take the course of least resistance, and pack them all off to America.’

‘It may have been,’ I said. ‘If so, I helped to make it.’

‘I’m afraid you did,’ said Rose, with his usual cool justice. With the same justice, he added: ‘So did I.’

‘It may have been a mistake,’ he went on smoothly, ‘but it was Dr Luke and his comrades who led us up the garden path.’

Suddenly the smooth masterful official tone cracked: he had a blaze of ordinary human irritation.

‘Good Lord,’ he snapped, ‘they talk too much and do too little!’ But Rose had the gift of being able to switch off his disappointment. Sometimes I thought it the most useful gift a man of affairs could possess, sometimes the most chilling.

‘However,’ said Rose, ‘all that can wait. Now I should like to benefit by your advice, my dear Eliot. What do you suggest as the next step?’

I had been waiting for it.

I said, as honestly as I could, that there seemed to me two possible courses: one, to cut our losses, break up Barford, and distribute the scientists among the American projects (for Luke and Martin, that would be open failure): two, to reinvest in Luke.

‘What is your personal opinion?’

‘I’m not entirely impartial, you know,’ I said.

‘I’m perfectly sure that you can see the problem with your admirable detachment,’ said Rose. The remark had the sarcastic flick of his tongue: but it was not meant as a sarcasm. For Rose it was easy to eliminate a personal consideration, and he would have despised me if I could not do the same.

I tried to. I said, as was true, that most people at Barford believed the pile would ultimately work; it might take months, it might (if Luke’s diagnosis were wrong) take several years. There was a chance, how good I could not guess, that the pile would still work quickly; it meant giving Luke even more money, even more men.