Charles Snow - The New Men

When I got inside their sitting-room, I found that she had just begun to wash her hair.

She asked, without leaving the bathroom, whether I would not go into the village and have a meal alone. No, I said, I was tired; any kind of snack, and I would rather stay. Still through the open door, she told me where to find bread and butter and tinned meat. Then she ignored me.

Sitting on the drawing-room sofa, I could see her across the passage, her hair, straight and fine, hanging down over the basin. Later, hooded in a towel, she was regarding herself in the looking-glass. Her face had thinned down and aged, the flesh had fallen away below the cheekbones, while on her body she had put on weight; some men would find excitement in the contrast, always latent in her, and now in her mid-thirties established, between the body, heavy, fleshly and strong, and the nervous, over-exhausted face.

In towel and dressing-gown she surveyed herself sternly, as though, after trying to improve her looks for years, she was still dissatisfied.

She had finished washing, there was no reason to prevent her chatting with me, but still she sat there, evaluating her features, not paying any attention that I had come. I had no doubt that it was deliberate; she must have decided on this toilet as soon as she heard that I was on the way. It was quite unlike her, whose first instinct was to be ready to get a smile out of me or any other man.

I could not resist calling out: ‘Aren’t you going to talk to me tonight?’

Her reply took me aback. Her profile still towards me, and gazing at her reflection, she said:

‘It could only make things worse.’

‘What is all this?’ I said roughly, as though she were sulky and needed shaking.

But she answered without the least glint of sex: ‘It will be better if we don’t talk until Martin comes back.’

It sounded like melodrama, of which she had her share: but also, like much melodrama, it was meant. I went into the bathroom and she turned to confront me, the towel making her face open and bald. She looked nervous, frowning, and contemptuous.

‘This isn’t going to clear up without speaking,’ I said.

She said: ‘You’ve done him harm, haven’t you?’

I was lost. For a second, I even thought she was speaking of Hankins, not Martin. She added: ‘He’s going to toe the line, isn’t he? And that can only be your doing.’

Then, in the scent of powder and bath salts, a remark swung back from the previous afternoon and I said: ‘You’d rather he ruined himself, would you?’

‘If that’s what you call it,’ said Irene.

Like the scientists in the canteen I was morally giddy that day.

‘He makes up his own mind,’ I said.

‘Except for you,’ she cried. She burst out, her eyes bright: with resentment, with an obscure triumph: ‘Oh, I haven’t fooled myself — and I should think you must have a glimmering by now — I’m perfectly well aware I haven’t any influence on him that’s worth a row of beans. Of course, he’s easy going, he’s always good-natured when it doesn’t cost him anything. If I want to go out for a drink, he never grumbles, he just puts down whatever he’s doing: but do you think on anything that he cares about, I could ever make him budge an inch?’

It was no use contradicting.

‘You can,’ she cried. ‘You’ve done it.’ She added: ‘I hope you’ll be satisfied with what happens to him.’

I said: ‘We’d better wait till we’ve got over this shock—’

‘Oh, never mind that ,’ she said. ‘I wash my hands of that. It’s him I’m thinking of.’

She looked at me with eyes narrowed.

‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I’m beginning to wonder whether you understand him at all?’

She broke off. ‘Don’t you like extravagant people?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Unless it comes too near home.’ She went on: ‘He’s one at heart, have you never seen that?’

She stared at her reflection again.

‘That’s why he gets on with me,’ she said, as though touching wood.

‘That might be true,’ I said.

‘He’s capable of being really extravagant,’ she broke out. ‘Why did you stop him this time? He’s capable of throwing the chains right off.’

She stared at me and said: ‘I suppose you were capable of it, once.’

It was said cruelly, and was intended to be cruel. For the first time in our relation she held the initiative. Through her envy of my intimacy with Martin, through her desire to be thought well of, through the attraction that smoulders often between in-laws, she could nevertheless feel that she was thinking only of him.

When I replied, I meant to tell her my real motive for influencing him, but I was inhibited.

Instead, I told her that he was not alone, he was not living in a vacuum, nor was I. What he did affected many others. Neither he nor I could live as though we were alone.

She said: ‘He could have done.’

I said: ‘Not this time.’

‘It would have been a glorious thing to do,’ she cried.

She rounded on me: ‘I’ve got one last word for you,’ she said. ‘You’ve stopped him doing what he wanted to. I won’t answer for the consequences. I should like to know what you expect from him now.’

One night soon after, coming out of the theatre at Stratford, I was forced to remember how — the evening the news of Hiroshima came through — I had walked through the West End streets in something like wretchedness. Now I was leaving the play, the sense of outrage had left me alone for days, I was one among a crowd, lively and content in the riverside lights. Around me was a knot of elderly women whom I had noticed in the theatre, who looked like schoolteachers and to whom, by some standard, life had not given much; yet their faces were kind, shining with a girlish, earnest happiness, they were making haste to their boarding house to look up the text.

It was there by the river, which was why I was forced to remember, why I became uncomfortable at being content under the lamplit trees, that Martin and Mounteney and I, on the dark wartime night, so tunnel-like by the side of this, agreed that there was no serious chance that the bomb could be used.

Yet I was light-hearted under the belts of stars.

How long can you sustain grief, guilt, remorse, for a horror far away?

If it were otherwise, if we could feel public miseries as we do private ones, our existences in those years would have been hard to endure. For anyone outside the circle of misery, it is a blessing that one’s public memory is so short; it is not such a blessing for those within.

Should we be left with only one reminder, that for thoughtful men there would stay, almost like a taste on the tongue, the grit of fear?

In the following days at Stratford, where I was taking my first leave that year, all I heard from the establishment was that Luke was driving his team as though in his full vigour, and that Martin was back in place as second in command. Martin had not spoken to me alone.

For most of that August there was no other news from Barford except that Mounteney had made his last appearance in the place, taken down the nameplate from his door, emptied his in-tray on top of his out-tray, as he and Luke had once promised, and gone straight back to his university chair.

A few days later, without any warning, Drawbell came into Stratford to see me with a rumour so ominous that he spoke in whispers in the empty street. The rumour was that there had been at least one ‘leakage’, perhaps more: that is, data about the American experiments, and probably the Barford ones also, had been got through to Russia.

Within a few hours of that rumour — it was the end of August, and my last week in Stratford — I received a telephone call at my hotel. It was from Luke: Martin and he had a point to raise with me. I said I could come over at any time, but Luke stopped me. ‘I don’t like the cloak and dagger stuff,’ he said, ‘but it might be better just this once if we happen to run across you.’