Charles Snow - The New Men

Illness, decay, breakdown — if only he suffered them in her care, then she was spared the intolerable deprivation of losing him. It was those total devotions which sprang from total diffidence that were the most possessive of all. Between having him as an abject invalid, and having him in his full manhood but apart from her, there would not have been the most infinitesimal flicker of a choice for Nora.

When I entered Luke’s ward, the room was dark, rain was seeping down outside, he seemed asleep. As I crossed the floor, there was a rustle in the bed; he switched on the reading lamp and looked at me with a flushed, tousled face. The last patch of alopecia had gone, his hair was as thick as it used to be, the flush mimicked his old colour, but had a dead pallor behind it.

‘I’ve heard the doctors’ opinions,’ I said, searching for some way of bringing out regret. To my amazement, Luke said: ‘They don’t know much. If only there hadn’t been more interesting things to do, Lewis, I’d have liked to have a shot at medicine. I might have put some science into it.’

I could not tell whether he was braving it out — even when he went on: ‘I shall be surprised if they’re going to finish me off this time. I don’t put the carcinoma theory higher than a twenty per cent chance.’

If that was his spirit, I could only play up. So I congratulated him again on the Royal Society election.

‘Now that’s the only bloody thing that really frightens me,’ said Luke, with a grim, jaunty laugh. ‘When the old men give you your ticket a year or two early, it makes you wonder whether they’re hurrying to get in before the funeral.’

‘I haven’t heard any whispers of that,’ I said.

‘Are you lying?’

‘No.’ He had been elected on his second time up, while not yet thirty-five.

‘That’s a relief,’ said Luke. ‘I tell you, I shall believe that I’m done for when I see it.’

I thought, how easy he was to reassure.

‘One thing about people trying to dispose of you like this,’ said Luke, ‘it gives you time to think.’

Half-heartedly (I did not feel much like an argument) I asked what he had been thinking about.

‘Oh, the way I’ve spent my life so far,’ said Luke. ‘And what I ought to do with the rest of it.’

He was not speaking with his old truculence.

‘I couldn’t help being a scientist, could I? It was what I was made for. If I had my time over again, I should do the same. But none of us are really going to be easy about that blasted bomb. It’s the penalty for being born when we were — but whenever we have to look into the bloody mirror to shave, we shan’t be a hundred per cent pleased with what we see there.’

He added: ‘But what else could we do? You know the whole story, what else could chaps like me do?’

I mentioned that I had once heard Hector Rose say — Hector Rose, who stood for so much that Luke detested — that ‘events may get too big for men’.

‘Did he? Perhaps he’s not such a stuffed shirt after all. Of course we’ve all thought events may be too big for us.’

He fell silent. Then he said: ‘It may be so. But we’ve got to act as though they’re not .’

He knew that I agreed.

‘Curiously enough,’ said Luke, ‘it isn’t so easy to lose hope for the world — if there’s a chance that you’re going to die pretty soon. The moment you feel these things aren’t going to be your concern much longer, then you think how you could have made a difference.’

He said: ‘When I get over this, I shall make a difference. And if I don’t, I don’t know who can.’

He was so natural that I teased him. I inserted the name of the younger Pitt, but Luke knew no history.

He went on: ‘I’ve been lowering my sights, Lewis. I want to get us through the next twenty years without any of us dropping the bomb on each other. I think if we struggle on, day by day, centimetre by centimetre, we can just about do that. I’ve got to get the bomb produced, I’ve got to make the military understand what they can and cannot do with it, I shall have some fights on my hands, inside this place as well as outside, but I believe I can get away with it. Twenty years of peace would give us all a chance.’

He sat up against his pillows with a grin.

‘It won’t be good for my soul, will it?’

‘Why not?’

It was nerve-racking that he thought so much of the future.

‘I like power too much, I’m just discovering that. I shall like it more, when I’ve got my way for the next few years.’

He broke off: ‘No, it won’t be good for my soul, but if I do something useful, if I can win us a breathing space, what the hell does it matter about my soul?’

He had not once inquired about Martin or referred to him, except perhaps (I was not sure) when he spoke of internal enemies.

He made an attempt to ask about my affairs, but, with the compulsion of illness, came back to himself. He said, in a quiet, curiously wistful voice: ‘I once told you I had never had time for much fun. I wonder when I shall.’

A memory, not sharp, came back to me. Luke, younger than now, in the jauntiness of his health, grumbling outside a Barford window.

From his bed he frowned at me.

‘When these people told me I might die,’ he said, ‘I cursed because I was thinking of all the things I hadn’t done. If they happen to be right, which I don’t believe, I tell you, I shall go out thinking of all the fun I’ve wasted. That’s the one thought I can’t bear.’

Just for an instant his courage left him. Once again, just as outside Drawbell’s gate (the memory was sharper now) he was thinking of women, of how he was still longing to possess them, of how he felt cheated because his marriage had hemmed him in. His marriage had been a good one, he loved his children, he was getting near middle age; yet now he was craving for a woman, as though he were a virgin dying with the intolerable thought that he had missed the supreme joy, the joy greater in imagination than any realized love could ever be, as though he were Keats cursing fate because he had not had Fanny Brawne.

In those that I had seen die, the bitterest thought was what they had left undone.

And, as a matter of truth, though it was not always an easy truth to take, I had observed what others had observed before — I could not recall of those who had known more than their share of the erotic life, one who, when the end came, did not think that his time had been tolerably well spent.

Martin was the last man to overplay his hand. The summer came, Sawbridge was still working in the plutonium laboratory, there was nothing new from Captain Smith. From Luke’s ward there came ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory reports; some doctors thought that it was a false alarm. Whoever was right, Martin could count on months in control. The press kept up articles on traitors, and espionage, but Barford was having a respite out of the news.

In July, Martin let us know that the first laboratory extraction of plutonium metal was ready for test. Drawbell issued invitations to the committee, as though he were trying to imitate each detail of the fiasco with the pile. The day was fixed for the 26th July, and Bevill was looking forward to it like a child,

‘I believe tomorrow is going to be what I should call a red-letter day,’ he said earnestly, as soon as he met the scientists at Barford, as though he had invented the phrase. At dinner that night, where there came Drawbell, Martin, Francis Getliffe, Mounteney, Hector Rose, Nora Luke, ten more Barford scientists and committee members, he made a long speech retracing the history of the project from what he called the ‘good old days’, a speech sentimental, nostalgic, full of nursery images, in which with the utmost sincerity he paid tribute to everyone’s good intentions, including those people whom he regarded as twisters and blackguards.