Charles Snow - Homecomings

‘Oh, that will be a nine days’ wonder. If I’m useful to them, they’ll still want me. And the minute I’m not useful they’ll kick me, whether I’ve got a coronet or not.’

He gave a savage, creaking chuckle.

‘Most of them would give their eyes for one, anyway. The main advantage about these tinpot honours — which I still think it’s time we got rid of—’ he put in, getting it both ways, as so often, ‘isn’t the pleasure they cause to the chaps who get them: it’s the pain they cause to the chaps who don’t.’

He was very happy, and I congratulated him. I was pleased: he was as able in his own line as anyone I knew, in the world’s eye he had gone the farthest, and I had an inexplicable liking for him.

I inquired what title he would choose.

‘Yes, that’s the rub,’ said Lufkin.

‘Haven’t you settled it?’

‘I suppose it will have to be the Baron Lufkin of somewhere or other. Lord Lufkin. It’s a damned awful name, but I don’t see how I can hide it. It might be different if I believed in all this flummery. It would have been rather fun to have a decent-sounding name.’

‘Now’s your chance,’ I teased him, but he snapped: ‘No. We’re too late for that. It’s no use rich merchants putting on fancy dress. It’s damned well got to be Lord Lufkin.’

He had the shamefaced, almost lubricious, grin of a man caught in a bout of day-dreaming. He had been writing down names on his blotter: Bury St Edmunds was his birthplace, how would Lord St Edmunds look? Thurlow, Belchamp, Lavenham, Cavendish, Clare, the villages he knew as a boy: with his submerged romanticism, he wanted to take a title from them. He read them out to me.

‘Pretty names,’ he said, inarticulate as ever. That was all the indication he could emit that they were his Tansonville, his Méséglise, his Combray.

‘Why not have one?’ Just for once I wanted him to indulge himself.

‘It’s out of the question,’ he said bleakly.

I thought he was in a good mood for my mission. I said I had a favour to ask him.

‘Go ahead.’

‘I should like to talk to you about Gilbert Cooke.’

‘I shouldn’t.’ Instantaneously the gracious manner — fingertips together, Lufkin obliging a friend — had broken up. All at once he was gritty with anger.

As though not noticing him, I tried to put my case: Cooke had done well in the Civil Service, he was highly thought of by Hector Rose and the rest –

‘I don’t think we need waste much time on this,’ Lufkin interrupted. ‘You mean, you’re asking me to give Cooke his job back?’

‘I wanted you to hear—’

‘That’s what it boils down to isn’t it?’

I nodded.

‘Well, my answer is short and simple. I wouldn’t pay Cooke in washers.’

It was no use. Implacable, tied up in his anger, as rude as I had seen him, he cut me short.

When I reported the answer to Gilbert, he said: ‘That’s burnt it.’ His face flushed, he went on: ‘I never ought to have let him get the smallest blasted bleat from my direction, I never ought to have let you go near the man. There it is!

‘Well,’ he said defiantly, ‘I’d better make sure that the chaps here want me. I’ve always said that in business you’ve either got to be a tycoon or a born slave, and damn it, I’m not either. I once told P L that.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Offered me a three-year contract.’

On his disappointment Gilbert put a dashing face; when he turned it towards me it was still pursed with comradely malignance. I fancied that, whether I brought him good news or bad from Lufkin, he would not have relented. He had so often relished letting slip a piece of gossip, but he was relishing even more holding on to one.

Before I could search for another link with Margaret there happened what at the time seemed a wild coincidence, a thousand-to-one against chance. One Saturday morning, thinking nothing of it, I was rung up by old Bevill, who, after a period of what he himself described as ‘the wilderness’, had returned to Whitehall as chairman of the atomic energy project. He was just off to the country for the weekend, he said: he had a ‘little job’ he wanted to ‘unload’ on to me: would I mind going with him as far as Charing Cross?

In the circumstances, I thought he might have risen to a taxi: but no, Bevill stood at the bus-stop, briefcase in hand, bowler hat on head, getting a modest pleasure out of his unpretentiousness. At last we mounted a bus, the top deck of which was empty, so that Bevill, instead of waiting until the platform at Charing Cross, was able to confide.

‘I’m being chased, Lewis,’ he said, looking over his shoulder to make sure no one was coming up, and somehow giving the impression that he was really on the run.

‘Who by?’

‘People who always know better than anyone else,’ the old man replied. ‘I don’t know about you, Lewis, but I don’t like people who’re always positive you’re wrong and they’re right. Particularly intellectuals, as I believe they’re called nowadays, or else have the impertinence to call themselves. The nigger in the woodpile is, they can make a hell of a lot of noise.’

‘What do they want?’

‘Do you remember that fellow Sawbridge?’ The question was rhetorical; old Bevill, my brother, and the Barford scientists, Hector Rose, and I were not likely to forget Sawbridge, who had not long since been sent to jail for espionage.

The bus in front of us disappeared out of Whitehall with a swishing scarlet flash: we were stopped at the traffic lights, and Bevill stared up at Nelson’s statue.

‘Now that chap up there, he was a different kettle of fish from Sawbridge. You can’t make me believe he would have betrayed his country.’ In action, the old man could be as capable and cynical as most men: in speech he could be just as banal.

‘You can’t make me believe he would have had any use for intellectuals,’ Bevill went on darkly. ‘Kicked them in the pants, that’s what he would have done.’

As we curved round Trafalgar Square, Bevill told me that some people unspecified were asking ‘silly questions’ about the trials of the atomic spies: why had they all pleaded guilty, why were the prison terms so long?

‘Long,’ said Bevill. ‘If you ask me, they were lucky to get away with their necks.

‘But I tell you, Lewis,’ he went on, more like his patient political self, ‘some people are asking questions, all in the name of civil liberties if you please, and we don’t want any more questions than we can help because of the effect on our friends over the other side. And so it may be a case where a bit of private conversation can save a lot of public fuss, even if it does seem like eating humble-pie.’

He gave a furtive grin, and said: ‘That’s where you come in, my lad.’

‘You want me to talk to them?’

‘No, Lewis, I want you to listen to them. Listening never did any of us any harm, and talking usually does,’ said Bevill, in one of his Polonian asides. ‘Someone’s got to listen to one of those fellows, and you’re the man for the job.

‘You see,’ said Bevill, staring uncomplainingly down at a traffic block, ‘they might trust you, which they’d never begin to do with Rose or me. They’d never get it out of their heads that I was an old die-hard who didn’t understand what they were talking about and didn’t care a kipper for what was bothering them. And I’m not sure,’ said Bevill, with his customary realism and humility, ‘I’m not sure that they’d be far wrong.’

‘Who is it,’ I asked, marking down a tiresome, tricky, but not important date for the following week, ‘that you want me to see?’

‘One of those fellows who write about pictures,’ Bevill replied, pointing intelligently at the National Gallery. ‘His name is Austin Davidson. I expect you’ve heard of him.’