Charles Snow - The New Men

He was still speaking to me: ‘I got a bad start.’

‘We both did,’ I said.

‘Mine was worse.’

‘How?’

He said: ‘You always overshadowed me, you know.’

It was so unexpected that I could not have left it there, but he went on: ‘This has done me good.’

I was just beginning to speak when Irene, who had been biting back a worry all the evening, could keep quiet no longer. She cried: ‘Then why don’t you sit tight when you’ve got it?’

‘That’s not so easy,’ said Martin.

‘Just when we’re getting everything we wanted, you’re ready to throw it away.’

He said to her: ‘We’ve talked this out, haven’t we?’

‘I can’t let you go on with this madness. Do you expect me just to sit quiet and wait for the end of the war to stop you? I suppose if the war does end you will have a glimmer of sense?’

‘If the war ended there wouldn’t be any necessity to go so fast,’ he said, curiously stiff. His smile had an edge to it: ‘I shouldn’t be sorry if the necessity didn’t arise.’

‘You know you’re frightened.’

‘I am extremely frightened,’ said Martin.

‘Then why don’t you think of yourself?’

‘I’ve told you.’

What had he told her? Probably the coldest motive — that, if he did not follow Luke’s lead, he would lose the ground he had won.

‘Why don’t you think of me?’

‘I’ve told you that, too.’

Her face puckered, she said: ‘All you’ve done is to think of Lewis (the baby). And I don’t know whether you believe it’s enough just to insure yourself for him. Do you believe it really matters whether he goes to the sort of school that you two didn’t go to?’

For the first time, Martin’s tone showed pain. He said: ‘I wish I could do more for him.’

Suddenly she switched off — to begin with it was so jarring that one’s flesh crept — into a wail for her life in London before her marriage. Though she was wailing for past love affairs, her manner was fervid, almost jaunty; she was talking of a taxi drive in the snow. I had a vivid picture of a girl going hot-faced on a night like this across the Park to a man’s flat. I believed, though she was just delicate enough not to mention the name, that she was describing her first meeting with Hankins, and that she was using private words so that Martin should know it. Bitterly she was provoking his jealousy. To an extent she succeeded, for neither then nor later was he unmoved by the sound of Hankins’ name.

As I listened, I thought I must do like other friends of his, and finish with her. Then I saw the look in her eyes — it was not lust, it was not malice, it was a plea. She had no self-control, she would always be strident — but this was the only way she knew to beg him to be as he used to be.

All of a sudden, I understood a little. I could hear her ‘I am defeated’ in my flat that night last year which, if it had led one to think that she was leaving Martin, was totally misleading. It was he before whom she felt defeat. I could hear the tone in which, ten minutes later, she had pressed him about the child. Their marriage was changing, in the sense that marriages which start with their disparities often do; the balance of power was altering; their marriage was changing, and she was beating about, lost, bewildered, frightened, trying to keep it in its old state, which to her was precious.

Perhaps it was that the birth of the child had, as Hanna Puchwein had foreseen, disturbed the bond between them. But if so, it had disturbed it in the diametrically opposite direction from that which Hanna had so shrewdly prophesied. It was Martin who was freer, not Irene.

It seemed possible that the birth of the child had removed or weakened one strand in his love for her. He still had love for her, but the protective part, so powerful in him, so much a part of his whole acceptance of her antics, had been diverted to another. Hearing him speak to his son that evening, or even hearing him, speak to her about his son, I felt — and now I knew she felt it also — that all his protective love had gone in love for the child. He would be too anxious about his son, I thought, he would care too much, live too much in him — just as I had at times lived too much in Martin,

So, although he had much feeling left for Irene, he no longer felt driven to look after her. All that was gone; he wanted her to be happy; in his meticulous fashion he had made arrangements for her future in case, in the March experiments, he should be incapacitated or killed; but when he thought of the danger, both of what he might lose and those who might miss him, his only fear that counted alongside his own animal fear was for the child.

While Irene, who when he loved her passionately and protectively had wanted to get away from the protective clutch, now wished it back. She wished him to think first of her, she was anxious about him with all the hungers of vanity, self-esteem, habit, anything that makes us want someone who has drawn into himself.

With another switch, she began asking, with a nagging insistence, about, the programme for March.

‘This is supposed to be a celebration,’ said Martin.

She nagged on. As both she and I knew, the date for the first dissolving of the rods had been put back from March 1st to March 10th.

‘That’s all right,’ she said, ‘but which of you is going to make a fool of himself first?’

‘Unless anyone insists, which won’t be me, I suppose we might have to toss up for it.’

‘Have you settled that?’ she cried.

He shook his head. ‘I haven’t spoken to Walter Luke about it recently.’

It was the flat truth.

Wildly she turned to me. I was her last hope. Could not I make him behave decently?

I knew that it was no use. Both he and I were behaving with consideration for each other, but any authority I had had was worn away. For me to interfere in his life again would be too much of a risk. I knew it, and so did he. I had to accept that it was not only marriage relations which changed.

Although none of us knew it at the time. Luke and Martin did not toss up. Even they themselves had not settled, until March was on them, which should ‘go first’: and how they settled it, they kept secret. It was long afterwards that I found out what had happened.

Martin had been as good as his word, no better, no worse. With his feeling for precision and formality, he had actually written Luke a note a week before the experiment, suggesting that they tossed up, defining what the toss should mean — heads Martin went first, tails Luke. Luke would not have it. Swearing at getting a letter from Martin whom he saw every day, he said that the extraction was his idea, his ‘bit of nonsense’, and the least he could do was have the ‘first sniff’.

Luke got his way. Martin did not pretend to himself that he was sorry to be overruled.

The results of his being overruled came so fast that even at Barford, much more so in London, they were hard to follow. First Luke decided that he could not begin the experiment without another pair of hands; after his and Martin’s arrangement with the Superintendent, which meant that Martin was excluded, they had to give Sawbridge his wish.

During the last waiting period, Luke had had a ‘hot’ laboratory built, rather like a giant caricature of a school laboratory, in which, instead of dissolving bits of iron in beakers under their noses, they had a stainless steel pot surrounded by walls of concrete into which they dropped rods of metal that they never dared to see. In each section of the hot laboratory were bell pushes, as though it were a bath arranged for a paralysed invalid who for safety was in need of a bell within inches of his head.