Charles Snow - Homecomings

Nevertheless, the grooves of habit were worn deep. Hearing of Hollis, even though her face was holding nothing back, I wished that I had asked her to marry me half an hour before, when there was not this vestigial cramp keeping me still, when I had not this temptation, growing out of former misery and out of a weakness that I was born with, to retreat into passiveness and irony.

I was gazing at her, sitting by the bedside in the cold and browning light. Slowly, as her eyes studied mine, her mouth narrowed and from it edged away the smile of a loving girl, the smile of a mother. Upon us seeped — an instant suddenly enlarged in the rest and happiness of the afternoon — the sense of misunderstanding, injustice, illimitable distance, loss.

In time she said, still grave: ‘It’s all right.’

‘Yes,’ I answered.

She began to smile again and asked, putting Gilbert’s dilemma aside, what I was going to do about Lufkin and how much I minded. She had never pressed me before about what I should choose to do when the war ended. I could break with the past now, there were different ways of earning a living ahead of me, she had been content to leave it so; but now in the half-light, her hands pressing mine, she wanted me to talk about it.

THE Minister tended to get irritated with me when there was an issue which he had to settle but wished to go on pretending did not exist. His manner remained matey and unpretentious but, when I had to remind him that the Barford contract must be placed within a fortnight, that two major firms as well as Lufkin’s were pressing for an answer, Bevill looked at me as though I had made a remark in bad taste.

‘First things first,’ he said mysteriously, as though drawing on fifty years of political wisdom, the more mysteriously since in the coming fortnight he had nothing else to do.

In fact, he strenuously resented having to disappoint two or three influential men. Even those like me who were fond of the old man did not claim that political courage was his most marked virtue. To most people’s astonishment, he had shown some of it in the struggle over Barford; he had actually challenged opinion in the Cabinet and had both prevailed and kept his job; now that was over, he felt it unjust to be pushed into more controversy, to be forced to make more enemies. Enemies — old Bevill hated even the word. He wished he could give the contract to everyone who wanted it.

Meanwhile, Sir Hector Rose was making up his own mind. The secret Barford file came down to me, with a request from Rose for my views on the contract.

It did not take me much time to think over. I talked to Gilbert, who knew the inside of Lufkin’s firm more recently than I did. He was more emphatic than I was, but on the same side. It was an occasion, I decided without worry, to play safe both for my own sake and the job’s.

So at last I did not hedge, but wrote that we ought not to take risks; this job did not need the special executive flair that Lufkin would give it, but hundreds of competent chemical engineers, where the big chemical firms could outclass him; at this stage he should be ruled out.

I suspected that Rose had already come to the same opinion. All he committed himself to, however, were profuse thanks on the telephone and an invitation to come myself, and bring Cooke, to what he called ‘a parley with Lufkin and his merry men’.

The ‘parley’ took place on a bitter December morning in one of the large rooms at the back of our office, with windows looking out over the Horse Guards towards the Admiralty: but at this date most of the glass had been blown in, the windows were covered with plasterboard, so that little light entered but only the freezing air. The chandeliers shone on to the dusty chairs: through the one sound window the sky was glacial blue: the room was so cold that Gilbert Cooke, not over-awed enough to ignore his comfort, went back for his greatcoat.

Lufkin had brought a retinue of six, most of them his chief technicians; Rose had only five, of whom a Deputy Secretary, myself and Cooke came from the Department and two scientists from Barford. The Minister sat between the two parties, his legs twisted round each other, his toes not touching the ground; turning to his right where Lufkin was sitting, he began a speech of complicated cordiality. ‘It’s always a pleasure, indeed it’s sometimes the only pleasure of what they choose to call office,’ he said, ‘to be able to sit down round a table with our colleagues in industry. You’re the chaps who deliver the goods and we know a willing horse when we see one and we all know what to do with willing horses.’ The Minister continued happily, if a trifle obscurely; he had never been a speaker, his skill was the skill of private talks but he enjoyed his own speech and did not care whether he sounded as though his head were immersed in cotton-wool. He made a tangential reference to a ‘certain project about which the less said the better’, but he admitted that there was an engineering job to be done. He thought, and he hoped Mr Lufkin would agree, that nothing but good could accrue if they all got together round the table and threw their ideas into the pool.

Then he said blandly, with his innocent old man’s smile, ‘But now I’ve got to say something which upsets me, though I don’t expect it will worry anyone else.’

‘Minister?’ said Lufkin.

‘ I’m afraid I must slip away ,’ said Bevill. ‘We all have our masters, you know.’ He spoke at large to Lufkin’s staff. ‘You have my friend Lufkin, and I’m sure he is an inspiring one. I have mine and he wants me just on the one morning when I was looking forward to a really friendly useful talk.’ He was on his feet, shaking hands with Lufkin, saying that they would never miss him with his friend and colleague, Hector Rose to look after them, speaking with simple, sincere regret at having to go, but determined not to stay in that room five minutes longer. Spry and active, he shook hands all the way round and departed down the cold corridor, his voice echoing briskly back, ‘Goodbye all, goodbye all!’

Rose moved into the chair. ‘I think the ceremonies can be regarded as having been properly performed,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it would set us going if I try to clear the air.’ For once he was not at his most elaborately polite. I felt certain it was only just before the meeting that he had heard of the Minister’s intention to flit. But his statement was as lucid and fair as usual, and no one there could have guessed whether he was coming down for or against Lufkin. There was just one single job to be performed, he said; not much could be said, but, to make possible some kind of rational exchange, he took it on his own responsibility to tell Lufkin’s technicians a bare minimum. There was no money in it; the Government would pay as for a development contract. Further, the best expert opinion did not think this method economically viable in peacetime.

‘So that, whoever we ask to take this job on, we are not exactly conferring a benefit on them.’

‘It is a matter of duty,’ said Lufkin, sounding hypocritical and yet believing every word. ‘That’s why I’m prepared to undertake it.’

‘You could do it, with your existing resources?’

Lufkin replied: ‘I could do it.’

When he spoke like that, off-handedly but with confidence and weight, men could not help but feel his power, not just the power of position, but of his nature.

For some time the parties exchanged questions, most of them technical: how long to build a plant in Canada, how pure must the heavy water be, what was the maximum output. Listening, I thought there was an odd difference between the Civil Servants and the businessmen. Lufkin’s staff treated him with extreme, almost feudal deference, did not put questions on their own account, but made their comments to him. Whereas the Civil Servants, flat opposite to the others’ stereotype of them, spoke with the democratic air of everyone having his say, and as though each man’s opinion was as worth having as Sir Hector Rose’s.