Charles Snow - The New Men

The real reason which delivered her to Martin lay not in him, but in herself.

She had just told it to me, so simply that it was difficult to believe. In fact, Irene had suffered all her life from a diffidence which seemed at a first glance, the last one would expect in her. In her childhood, even more totally than with other girls, love and marriage filled her daydreams: those daydreams had not left her alone all her life; yet they had never been accompanied by the certainty of the fibres, that she had it in her to draw the love she coveted. More than most she studied herself in the looking-glass, but not with narcissistic pleasure; only with a mixture of contemptuous liking and nervousness that such a face, such a body, might never bring what she craved.

In the hotel lounge, hearing the revolving doors swing round, I thought of another woman so different from Irene that any resemblance seemed like a joke. Nora Luke, dowdy, professionally striving, in the home a scolding faithful housewife — Irene, once notorious for her love affairs, the most reckless of women — yet in secret they had found life difficult in the same manner. At the root of their nature they were sisters.

Irene had spoken simply, and maybe it was as simple as she said. Hankins, so tentative and undecided himself, she had never had the confidence to reach for; while Martin, all else forgotten, was the one man who wanted enough to stay with her at any cost, to give the assurance, so far as she was capable of accepting it, that he would stay steady, that he would be there to make her feel that she was as lovable as, her nerves twitching under the adventuress’ skin, she had never since she was a child been able to believe,

That night, she had sent Hankins away. It was only after he had gone that I realized this was the end between them, that under the lamps of Portman Square they had spoken the last words. Hankins pushing round the door might have been leaving her for half an hour; in fact, they would not meet again: it was curious that he, at any other time so eloquent, had gone in silence.

Irene smiled at me, as though, sitting before her looking-glass, she was putting on her dashing face.

‘He will have me on his hands,’ she said. She was speaking of Martin.

She added: ‘I shall be a drag on him in this new game.’

She was keeping me in the dark, she was obscurely triumphant.

‘What are you telling me?’ I asked.

‘You knew, of course you knew, about this offer that Martin had last week?’

I said yes.

‘You knew he expected it before it came?’

‘He must have expected it for weeks.’

‘I guessed as much.’

She went on, not knowing the break between Martin and me, but knowing something I did not. For days (it must have been during the first sittings of the Committee, and he might have had inside information, probably from Mounteney) he was excited that the job was coming his way. She said that he was lively, active, restless with high spirits; she remembered how he had talked to his son one evening, talked to the three-year-old-boy as though they were both adults and he was letting himself boast.

‘Well, Lewis,’ Martin had said to the child, ‘now I’m going further than anyone in the family’s ever gone. It will give you a good start. You’ll be able to build on it, won’t you?’

In the next few days Irene felt a change. She could not ask him; with her, in his own home, he let his moods run more than I had seen him, but she dared not to try to penetrate them. It was still several days before the offer was made. For the only time she could remember, Martin stayed away from the laboratory without a reason. The weather had turned foggy; he sat silent by the fire. He did not ask her advice, but occasionally spoke of the advantages of being the Barford superintendent, of the entertaining she could do there. Occasionally also he spoke of some disadvantages, as though laughing them off.

‘He wouldn’t talk about them,’ Irene flared out. ‘But I didn’t need him to. I hadn’t forgotten the letter he didn’t send.’

One foggy afternoon, he suddenly said: ‘The head of Barford is just as much part of the machine as any of the others.’

He went on: ‘If I take the job, I shan’t have the trouble of thinking for myself again.’

Irene said to me, simply and quietly: ‘Then I knew that he would never take it.’

That had happened the previous Saturday, three days before the offer came. I asked how he had behaved when he actually had the offer in his hand.

‘He was shaken,’ said Irene. ‘He was terribly shaken.’

With the fog outside the windows, he had sat by the fire so absent that he let it go out. Then she made it up, and I imagined the firelight reflected into the room from the fog-backed window. Martin only roused himself from that paralysis of the nerves to play again with the little boy — the two of them under the window, young Lewis shouting, Martin patiently rolling a ball, and still silent.

Both Irene and I, through our different kinds of knowledge of him, took it for granted that he would not alter his resolve.

‘I don’t pretend to understand it,’ she said to me. ‘Do you?’

I shook my head, and, as lost and open as she was, I asked: ‘What do you think he intends to do?’

‘I don’t think, I know,’ she replied.

During the past weeks, so as to be ready, he had been making inquiries, unknown to me, of our college. If he decided to give up his work at Barford and return to pure science, could they find a niche for him?

‘It’ll be funny for him, not having any power,’ she said.

She added: ‘He’s going into dimness, isn’t he? He won’t make much of a go of it?’

She went on asking, what were his chances in pure science? Would he do enough to console himself?

‘They all say he hasn’t got quite the talent,’ I replied. He would publish a few respectable papers, he would not get into the Royal Society. For a man as realistic as Martin, it would be failure.

‘He’s got a real talent for his present job,’ I said.

‘It’ll be difficult for him to lead a dim life,’ she said, ‘having had a taste of something different.’

She said it in a matter-of — fact tone, without any sign of tenderness.

I broke out: ‘And I suppose you’re glad about it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You wanted him to make his protest. I suppose this is the next best thing?’

Irene was flushing down the neckline of her dress. With difficult honesty she turned her eyes away, and said: ‘No. I’m not cut out for this.’

‘Why aren’t you?’

‘I’m a sprinter. I could have stood a major row, it would have been something to live through. I should have been more use to him than any of you.’

I said: ‘I believe you would.’

She flashed out: ‘It isn’t often you pay me a compliment.’

‘It was meant,’ I said.

‘But you mustn’t give me too much credit. I’m not high-minded. I shouldn’t have worried if Martin had become the boss at Barford. I should have enjoyed the flah-flah.’

Then she asked: ‘Why ever is he doing it? I wish you’d tell me that.’

I was confused.

‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘he’s just trying to be a good man?’

‘I should like to believe it,’ I said.

‘You think he’s got another motive, do you?’

‘We usually have.’

To my astonishment, she burst out laughing, with her high-pitched yelps of glee.

‘I believe you think,’ she cried, ‘that he’s doing it to take it out of me. Just to show me that things have changed since he married me, and that he holds the whip hand now.’

It had not even crossed my mind.

‘You’re wrong!’ she shouted. ‘If he’s reacting against anyone, it isn’t me!’