Charles Snow - The New Men

I said, hearing my voice over-hearty as though he were deaf: ‘You’ll soon get in touch again. It won’t take you a week, when you get out of here.’

Luke replied: ‘I may not be good for much when I get out of here.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said.

‘Are you thinking of that again?’ said Nora.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘He’s worried that he might be sterile,’ said Nora.

Luke did not deny it.

‘Are you having that old jag again?’ said his wife.

‘The dose must have been just about big enough,’ he said blankly, as though he had nothing new to say.

‘I’ve told you,’ said Nora, ‘as soon as the doctors say yes we’ll make them have a look. I shall be very much surprised if anything is wrong.’

With the obstinacy of the miserable, Luke shook his head.

‘I told you that if by any miracle there is anything wrong, which I don’t credit for a minute, well, it doesn’t matter very much,’ said Nora. ‘We’ve got our two. We never wanted any more.’

She sounded tough, robust, maternal.

Luke lay quiet, his face so drawn with illness that one could not read it.

I tried to change the subject, but Nora knew him better and had watched beside him longer.

She said suddenly: ‘You’re thinking something worse, aren’t you?’

Very slightly, he inclined his head.

‘Which one is it?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘You’d better say,’ she said.

‘There must be a chance,’ he said, ‘that some of this stuff will settle in the bone.’

There was a silence. Nora said: ‘I wish I could tell you there wasn’t a chance. But no one knows one way or the other, No one can possibly know.’

Luke said: ‘If I get through this bout, I shall have that hanging over me.’

He lay there, imagining the disease that might lie ahead of him. Nora sat beside him, settled and patient, without speaking. Sawbridge coughed, over by the wall, and then the room stayed so quiet that I could hear a match struck outside. We were still silent when Mrs Drawbell entered. Martin had come to visit Dr Luke; only two people were allowed in the ward at a time; when one of us left, Martin could take his place. Quickly Nora got up. She would be back tomorrow, whereas this was my only time with Luke. I thought that she was, like anyone watching another’s irremovable sadness, glad to go.

With a glance towards Sawbridge, Martin walked across the floor towards Luke’s bed. As he came, it struck me — it was strange to notice such a thing for the first time — that his feet turned out, more than one would expect in a good player of games. He looked young, erect, and well. With bright, hard eyes he scrutinized Luke, but his voice was gentle as he asked: ‘How are you?’

‘Not so good,’ replied Luke from a long way off.

‘You seem a bit better than when I saw you last.’

‘I wish I believed it,’ said Luke.

Martin went on to inquire about the symptoms — the hair falling out, the ulcers, the bleeding.

‘That (the bleeding) may have dropped off a bit,’ said Luke.

‘That’s very important,’ Martin said. ‘Don’t you see how important it is?’ He was easier with illness than I was, ready to scold as well as to be gentle. But after he had learned about the symptoms — he was so thorough that I longed for him to stop — he could not persuade Luke to talk any more than Nora or I could. Luke lay still and we could not reach the thoughts behind his eyes.

Martin gave me a glance, for once tentative and lost. He said quietly to Luke: ‘We’re tiring you a bit. We’ll have a word with Sawbridge over there.’

Luke did not reply, as Martin, with me following, tiptoed over to the other bed.

‘I’m not asleep,’ said Sawbridge, in a scornful and unwelcoming tone. We stood by the bed and looked down on him; his skin in health had its thick nordic pallor, and the transformation was not as shocking as in Luke; but the bald patches of scalp shone through, his eyes were filmed over, half opaque. When Martin inquired about him, he said: ‘I’m all right.’

Martin was reading the charts — white blood counts, red blood counts, temperature — over the bed head.

‘Never mind that,’ said Sawbridge, ‘I tell you, I’m all right.’

‘The figures look encouraging,’ said Martin.

‘I’ve never been as bad as he was—’ Sawbridge inclined a heavy eye towards Luke’s bed.

‘We’ve been worried about you, all the same.’

‘There was no need.’ Sawbridge said it with anger — and suddenly, under the shroud of illness, under the familiar loutishness, I felt his bitter pride. He did not want to admit that he was ill or afraid; he had heard the fears that Luke let fall, he could not help but share them; but neither to the doctors nor his relatives, certainly not to his fellow sufferer or to us, would he give a sign.

It was a kind of masculine pride that did not make him more endearing, I was thinking; in fact that it made him more raw and forbidding; it had no style. Until this accident I had heard little of him from Martin. No one had mentioned the security inquiries, which I assumed had come to nothing; the little that Martin said had not been friendly, and at the bedside he was still put off. But he managed to keep, what Sawbridge could not have borne, all pity out of his voice.

Of the three in the ward, the two invalids and Martin, Luke and Sawbridge were beyond comparison the braver men. Like many brave men, they did not bear a grudge against the timid. But, like many ill men, they resented the well. Sawbridge was angry with Martin, and with me also, for being able to walk upright in the sun.

Martin could feel it, but he would not let silence fall. Both he and Sawbridge cultivated an amateur interest in botany, and he mentioned flowers that he had seen on his way to the hospital.

‘There’s a saxifrage in the bottom hedge,’ he said.

‘Is there?’

‘It seems early, but there’s one spire out on the flowering chestnut.’

Then Sawbridge broke out, slowly, methodically, not hysterically but with a curious impersonal anger, swearing at the flowering chestnut. The swearwords of the midland streets ground into the room, each word followed by the innocent tree, ‘—the flowering chestnut.’ The swearing went on and on. Strangely, it did not sound as though Sawbridge were losing his head. It did not even sound as though he were trying to keep his courage up. Somehow it came, certainly to me, as the voice of a man cursing his fate, dislikeable, but quite undefeated.

It must have come to Luke so, for during a break in Sawbridge’s machine-like swearing, there sounded a husky whisper from the other bed.

‘Bugger the flowering chestnut,’ whispered Luke. Somehow the younger man’s brand of courage had tightened his.

We all listened to him, and soon Sawbridge’s voice stopped, while Martin stood between the beds. Luke’s face had changed from blankness to pain, but there was sight in his eyes. He spoke fast and rationally, lying there supine, calling on his fibres for an effort they could scarcely make, calling on the will behind his fibres.

‘How fast are you getting on with the new bay?’ he croaked to Martin.

After a moment’s stupefaction, Martin replied as coolly as though they were in the hangar.

‘How long are you going to take about it?’ said Luke. ‘Good Christ, how long?’

‘The new hot laboratory,’ said Martin, ‘should be ready by June.’

‘It’s too long.’

There was a voice from Sawbridge’s bed. ‘It’s absolutely essential not to let the others get years ahead.’

Luke strained himself to the effort. He and Martin, with one or two interruptions from Sawbridge, talked sharp and quick, words coming out like ‘hazard points’, ‘extracts’, ‘cupferron’.