Charles Snow - The New Men

Everyone in the room agreed; they were active men, and they were soothed by action for its own sake. Getliffe could arrange for an official aircraft within twenty-four hours. Who should go? There was a proposal, backed by Mounteney, that it should be Luke and Martin, the people who had done the work.

Luke was willing to agree, but Martin would not have it. Neither of them was known in America, said Martin: it was no use sending local reputations. Whereas Mounteney had his Nobel prize and Francis Getliffe a great name in Washington for his war work: they were the two who might count.

It was agreed. They would be in America by July 29th. Francis Getliffe said that they would hope to send us news before the middle of August.

On those first days of August, I had little to do in the office except wait for news. The ‘leave season’ had set in, as it had not done for six years; rooms round me were empty; the files ended ‘cd we discuss on my return?’

When I arrived in the morning, I looked for a despatch from America: but none came. I got through my work in an hour. Then I rang up Martin at Barford, hoping that Getliffe might have signalled to them and not to London: no news. There was nothing to do. Often, in the afternoons, I went off by myself to Lord’s.

It was the week before Bank Holiday. The days were like the other days: a sharp cool wind was blowing, more like April than full summer, the clouds streamed across the sky, at the cricket ground one watched for the blue fringe behind them.

On the Friday, I had still had no word from America; when I telephoned Martin (it was becoming a routine), nor had he. ‘We’re bound to hear before long,’ he said.

Saturday was the same. On the Sunday I stayed in my flat all day, half-expecting that Martin was right, that a message was on the way.

Next morning I was restless; once more I went off (half-thinking as when one waits for a letter in a love affair, that if I were out of the way, a message was more likely to arrive) to St John’s Wood, and sat there watching the game.

The ground was shabby that summer. The pavilion was unpainted; like the high Victorian afternoon of which it might have been the symbol, it had sunk into decay. Yet the smell of the grass was a comfort; it helped me to tell myself that though I had cares on my mind, they were not the deepest. Like the scientists, more often than not I felt this trouble about the bomb could be resolved. And in myself I was lonely rather than unhappy; at forty I had not reshaped my life. Perhaps that was why I took to heart this trouble at one remove. So I sat, watching those hours of cricket in the flashing rain-sharp sunshine, taken over by well-being, thoughtless, and secure.

It must have been about a quarter to six when I left Lord’s. I walked in a meaningless reverie down to Baker Street and then along the Marylebone Road; the light was brilliant after rain, and in it the faces of passers-by stood out sharp-edged. At last I went at random into a pub in Portland Place. I heard my name. There, standing at the bar beside a man in a polo sweater, was Hankins.

I began by saying something banal, about not meeting for years and then twice in a month, but he cried loudly:

‘This is my producer. I’ve just been giving a talk on Current Shakespeareana .’

He said that he had had only one drink, but his bright, heavy face was glistening, he was talking as if he were half drunk.

‘And all the time I was thinking of my words going out to the villages and the country towns and clever young women saying “That was a good point!” or “I should like to take that up with him”.

And then I came out of the studio and met the man who had been reading the six o’clock news just before I went on.’

‘Is there any news?’ I asked.

‘There is,’ said Hankins.

I knew.

‘So they’ve dropped it, have they?’ I asked dully. I felt blank, tired out.

‘Were you expecting something then?’ said Hankins. But his inquisitiveness for once was swamped: yes, the six o’clock news had contained the announcement about the bomb and he, in innocence, had broadcast just after.

‘I wonder how many people listened to my immortal prose!’ cried Hankins. ‘ Current Shakespeareana . I wish it had been something slightly more obscure. The influence of the Duino Elegies on the later work of C P Cavafy — that’s how I should like to have added the only comment literary culture was entitled to make on this promising new age.’

He was upset and hilarious, he wanted an audience, human bodies round him, drink.

‘The chief virtue of this promising new age, and perhaps the only one so far as I can tell, is that from here on we needn’t pretend to be any better than anyone else. For hundreds of years we’ve told ourselves in the west, with that particular brand of severity which ends up an paying yourself a handsome compliment, that of course we cannot live up to our moral pretensions, that of course we’ve established ethical standards which are too high for men. We’ve always assumed, all the people of whom you,’ he grinned at the producer and me, ‘and I are the ragtag and bobtail, all the camp followers of western civilization, we have taken it for granted that, even if we did not live up to those exalted ethical standards, we did a great deal better than anyone else. Well, anyone who says that today isn’t a fool, because no one could be so foolish. He isn’t a liar, because no one could tell such lies. He’s just a singer of comic songs.’

The producer said that next day he had a programme on the care of backward children. ‘One can’t help thinking,’ he said, ‘whether there’ll be any children left to care for.’

Hankins suddenly clapped a hand to his head.

‘I suppose this wasn’t the piece of scientific policy we were interested in, you and I, Lewis, last time we met?’

‘It was.’

‘You said it was important,’ he said, as though in reproof. I nodded. ‘Well, perhaps I could concede it a degree of importance. What is important, after all?’ He had a writer’s memory for the words we had each spoken. ‘Did Irene know about this?’ he flashed out.

‘No.’

‘Did your brother and the rest of them?’

‘None of them knew that this bomb was going to be dropped.’

‘But they’d been working heroically on it, I suppose,’ said Hankins. ‘And now they’re getting the reward for their labours. It must be strange to be in their shoes tonight.’

It was also strange to hear him speak with such kindness, with his own curious inquisitive imagination.

We went on drinking, as Hankins talked.

‘The party’s nearly over,’ he said. ‘The party for our kind of people, for dear old western man — it’s been a good party, but the host’s getting impatient and it’s nearly time to go. And there are lots of people waiting for our blood in the square outside. Particularly as we’ve kept up the maddening habit of making improving speeches from the window. It may be a long time before anyone has such a good party again.’

If I had stayed I should have got drunk, but I wanted to escape. I went out into the streets, on which the anonymous crowds were jostling in the summer evening. For a while I lost myself among them, without a name, among many who had no name, a unit among the numbers, listening but hearing no comment on the news. In the crowd I walked down Oxford Street, was carried by the stream along Charing Cross Road: lights shone in the theatre foyers, the plays had all begun, in the wind relics of newsprint scuffled among our feet.

Near Leicester Square I drifted out of the crowd, into another pub. There some had heard the news, and as they talked I could pick out the common denominator of fear, sheer simple fear, which, whatever else we thought, was present in us all, Hankins and his producer, the seedy travellers, agents, homosexuals in the Leicester Square bar. Hankins’ rhetoric that night: Francis Getliffe’s bare words on the way down to Barford: they were different men, but just for once their feelings coincided, they meant the same things.