Charles Snow - Homecomings

He added: ‘I can’t promise anything, my dear chap, but I’ll put in a word in the right quarter.’

Uneasily I felt that they were under-rating each other. Bevill was an aristocrat; he had an impersonal regard for big business, but in his heart rarely liked the company of a businessman. In Lufkin’s presence, as in the presence of most others of the human race, Bevill could sound matey; he was not feeling so, he wanted to keep on amiable terms because that was the general principle of his life, but in fact he longed to bolt off to his club. While Lufkin, who had made his way by scholarships and joined his firm at seventeen, felt for politicians like Bevill something between envy and contempt, only softened by a successful man’s respect for others’ success.

Nevertheless, although he made Bevill uncomfortable, as he did most people, he was not uncomfortable himself. He had come for a purpose and he was moving into it.

He said: ‘There is one other point, Minister.’

‘My dear chap?’

‘You don’t bring us into your projects soon enough.’

‘You’re preaching to the converted, you know. I’ve sown seeds in that direction ever since the war started — and I’ve still got hope that one or two of them may come home to roost.’

The old man’s quiff of hair was standing up, cockatoo-like; Lufkin gazed at him, and said: ‘I’m glad to hear you say that, Minister.’ He went on, and suddenly he had brought all his weight and will into the words: ‘I’m not supposed to know what you’re doing at Barford. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know until it’s time for me to do so. But I do know this — if you’re going to get any results in time for this war, you ought to bring us in the instant you believe you can produce anything. Your people can’t do big-scale chemical engineering. We can. We should have gone out of business if we couldn’t.’

‘Well, that’s a prospect that’s never cost any of us an hour’s sleep,’ said Bevill, gaining time to think, smiling with open blue eyes. In fact, the old man was worried, almost shocked. For Lufkin was speaking as though he knew more than he should. Barford was the name of the establishment where the first experiments on atomic fission had been started, nine months before; apart from the scientists on the spot, only a handful of people were supposed to have a glimmer of the secret, a few Ministers, Civil Servants, academic scientists, less than fifty in all. To Bevill, the most discreet of men, it was horrifying that even the rumour of a rumour should have reached Lufkin. Bevill never quite understood the kind of informal intelligence service that radiated from an industrialist of Lufkin’s power; and he did not begin to understand that it was one of Lufkin’s gifts, perhaps his most valuable one, to pick up hints that were floating through the technical air. For recognizing others’ feelings Lufkin had no antennae; but he had an extra set, more highly sensitized than those of anyone round him, for catching the first wave of a new idea.

That morning Bevill was determined to play for time, hiding behind his smoke-screen of platitudes like an amiable old man already a bit ga-ga. Even if the Barford project came off, even if they had to invoke the big firms, he was not sure whether he would include Lufkin. For the present he was not prepared to trust him, or anyone outside the secret, with so much as a speculation about Barford.

‘My dear chap,’ he said, more innocent than a child, ‘I’m not feeling so inclined to count my chickens yet awhile, and believe me, if we don’t mention any of these little games to our colleagues in industry, or want anyone else to breathe a word about them ’ (that was Bevill’s way of telling a tycoon to keep his mouth shut) ‘it’s because it is all Lombard Street to a china orange that they’ll turn out to be nothing but hot air.’

‘I suggest that it’s a mistake,’ said Lufkin, ‘to act on the basis that you’re going to fail.’

‘No, but we think too much of you to waste your time—’

‘Don’t you think we’re capable of judging that?’

‘Your great company,’ said the Minister, ‘is doing so much for us already.’

‘That isn’t a reason,’ replied Lufkin, deliberately losing his temper, ‘why you should leave us out of what may be the most important business you’ll ever be responsible for.’

The tempers of men of action, even the hard contrived temper of Lufkin, had no effect on Bevill, except to make him seem slightly more woolly. But he was now realizing — it was my only reassurance that morning — that Lufkin was a formidable man, and that he would not be able to stonewall forever. Expert in judging just how much protests were going to matter, Bevill knew that, if he consulted other firms before Lufkin’s, there was certain to be trouble, and probably trouble of a kind that no politician of sense would walk into.

He knew that Lufkin was set in his purpose. It was not simply that, if the Barford project turned into hardware, there would be, not in a year, not during the war, but perhaps in twenty years, millions of pounds in it for firms like Lufkin’s. It was not simply that — though Lufkin calculated it and wanted more than his share. It was also that, with complete confidence, he believed he was the man to carry it out. His self-interest did not make him hesitate, nothing would have seemed to him more palsied. On the contrary his self-interest and his sense of his own powers fused, and gave him a kind of opaque moral authority.

Throughout that interview with the Minister, despite the old man’s wiliness, flattery and distrust, it was Lufkin who held the moral initiative.

ON the ceiling, the wash of firelight brightened; a shadow quivered and bent among the benign and rosy light; there was the noise of a piece of coal falling, the ceiling flickered, faded, and then glowed. It might have been a holiday long forgotten or an illness in childhood, as I lay there in a content so absolute that it was itself a joy, not just a successor of joy, gazing up at the ceiling. In the crook of my arm Margaret’s neck was resting; she too was gazing up.

Despite the blaze the air in the room was cold, for Margaret had to eke out her ration of coal, and the fire had not been lighted until we arrived. Under the bedclothes our skins touched each other. It was nine o’clock, and we had come to her room two hours before, as we had done often on those winter evenings. The room was on the ground floor of a street just off Lancaster Gate, and in the distance, through the cold wartime night, came the sough of traffic, washing and falling like the tide over a pebbly beach.

She was speaking, in spasms of talk that trailed luxuriously away, of her family, and how blissful and intimate they had been. Her hair on my shoulder, her hip against mine, that other bliss was close too; she had slipped into talking of it, once I had given her a cue. For I had mentioned, grumbling lazily in bed, that soon I should have some quite unnecessary exertion, since the Chelsea house I used to live in had been damaged in a raid the year before and its effective owner had begun pestering me with another list of suggestions.

‘That’s Sheila’s father?’ Margaret had said.

I said yes, for an instant disturbed because I had let the name creep in. Without any constraint, she asked: ‘How did they get on?’

‘Not well.’

‘No, I shouldn’t have thought they would,’ she said.

Running through my mind were letters from the rectory, business-like, ingenious, self-pitying, assuming that my time was at Mr Knight’s disposal. Reflectively, Margaret was saying: ‘It was different with me.’ She had always loved her father — and her sister also. She spoke of them, both delicately and naturally; she was not inhibited by the comparison with Sheila; she had brought it to the front herself.