The New Men (11 page)

‘It’s silly, trying to knock towns out by high explosive,’ said Pearson, as we turned our backs to the blaze and walked towards Belgrave Road. ‘It just can’t be done,’ he said.

I had never known him so communicative, and I took advantage of it.

‘What about the other bomb?’

He turned his face towards me, and in the light of another, smaller fire, I saw his eyes, lazy, half suspicious.

‘What about it?’ he said.

‘What’s going to happen?’

After a pause, he did not mind answering:

‘We’re going to get it.’

‘Who is?’

‘Who do you think?’ He meant, of course, the American party he was working in. As with most of the scientists, nationalism in its restricted sense touched him very little – when he said ‘we’, he thought of nothing but his own group.

‘You’re sure?’ I asked, but he was always sure.

‘It stands to reason.’

Then I asked, expecting a flat answer: ‘So you don’t think anything will come of Luke’s affair?’ I was prepared for the flat answer; what I actually heard sounded too good to be true.

‘I shouldn’t like to go as far as that,’ he replied, looking in front of him indifferently.

‘You believe it might work?’ I said.

‘When he started talking about it, I thought he’d do himself a bit of no good.’ He gave a contented, contemptuous grin. ‘But it doesn’t seem to have been all hot air.’

‘You really think they’ll pull it off?’

‘I’m not a prophet.’

I asked him again.

‘Oh, well,’ said Pearson, ‘in time Master Luke might show a bit of return for his money. Though’ – he gave the same contemptuous grin again – ‘he won’t do it as soon as he thinks he will.’

I did not receive any greater assurance until the spring, when, in March, I received a note from Luke himself. It said:

The balloon is due to go up on the 22nd. The machine ought to work some time that afternoon, though I can’t tell you correct to the nearest hour. We want you to come and see the exhibition.

I had no doubt that Martin did not know of the letter; it would have seemed to him tempting fate. For myself, I felt the same kind of superstition, even a misgiving about going down to watch. If I were not there, all would happen according to plan, Luke triumph, Martin get some fame. If I sat by and watched – yet, of course, I should have to go.

The twenty-second was only a week away when, one evening just as I was leaving the office, Martin rang me up. He was at Barford; he sounded elaborate, round-about, as though he had something to ask.

‘I suppose you don’t happen to be free tonight?’

But I could not help interrupting: ‘Nothing wrong with the pile?’

(Although, over the telephone, I used a code word.)

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Everything fixed for next week?’

‘I hope so.’

For the first time, I was letting myself wonder what Martin would do with his success.

‘Shall you be in your flat tonight?’ He had come round to his question.

‘I could be,’ I said.

‘I wish you’d look after Irene a bit, if she comes in.’

‘Why should she?’

‘I think she will.’ He went on: ‘She’s in rather a state.’

I said I would do anything I could. I asked: ‘Is it serious?’

‘I’d rather you formed your own opinion.’

I had heard little emotion in his voice – maybe he was past it, I thought. But he apologized for inflicting this on me, and he was relieved to have someone to look after her.

Later that night, I was reading in my sitting-room when the bell rang. I went to open the door, and out of the darkness, into the blue-lit hall, came Irene.

‘I’m not popular, am I?’ she said, but the laugh was put on.

Without speaking, I led her in.

‘This room makes an enemy of me,’ she said, still trying to brazen it out. Then she said, not with her childish make-believe but without any pretence: ‘I couldn’t come to anyone but you. Martin knows about it.’

For a few moments I thought she had left him; as she went on speaking I realized it was not so simple. First she asked, as though the prosaic question drove out all others: ‘Have you got a telephone?’

She looked round the room, her pupils dilated, her eyes taking in nothing but the telephone she could not see.

‘Yes,’ I said, trying to soothe her.

It stood in the passage.

‘Can I use it?’

I said, of course.

Immediately, her eyes still blind, she went out, leaving the door open. I heard her dial, slowly because in the wartime glimmer she could hardly make out the figures. Then her voice: ‘Mrs Whelan, it’s me again. Is Mr Hankins back yet?’

A mutter from the instrument.

‘Not yet?’ Irene’s voice was high.

Another mutter.

‘Listen,’ said Irene, ‘I’ve got a telephone number where he can get me now.’

I heard her strike a match and give the Victoria number on my telephone.

Another mutter.

‘I’ll be here a couple of hours at least,’ replied Irene into the telephone. ‘Even if he’s late, tell him I’ll be here till one.

She came back into my room.

‘Is that all right?’ she asked, her eyes brighter now, focused on me.

I said yes.

‘It’s for him,’ she said. ‘It’s not for me. He wants to speak to me urgently, and there’s nowhere else I can safely wait.’

She stared at me.

‘I think he wants me back.’

I tried to steady her: ‘What can you tell him?’

‘What can I tell him?’ she cried, and added, half crying, half hysterical: ‘Can I tell him
I’m defeated
?’

The phrase sounded strange, I was mystified: and yet it was at this point I knew that she was not leaving Martin out of hand.

On the other hand, I knew also that she was reading in Hankins’ intentions just what she wanted to read. Did he truly want her back? Above all, she would like to believe that.

Perhaps it was commonplace. Did she, like so many other unfaithful wives, want the supreme satisfaction of coming to the crisis and then staying with her husband and turning her lover down?

For all her faults, I did not think she was as commonplace as that. Looking at her, as she sat on my sofa, breathing shortly and shallowly as she listened for the telephone, I did not feel that she was just enjoying the game of love. She was febrile: that proved nothing, she could have been febrile in a flirtation. Her heart was pounding with emotion; I had seen other women so, taking a last fervent goodbye of a lover, on their way back to the marriage bed. But she was also genuinely, wildly unhappy, unhappy because her life was being driven by forces she could not govern or even understand, and unhappy also for the most primal of reasons, because the telephone did not ring and she could not hear his voice.

I tried to comfort her. I spoke of the time, ten years before, when I knew Hankins. It was strange that he, I was thinking, should have been her grand passion, her infatuation, her romantic love – people gave it different names, according to how they judged her. Why should he be the one to get under the skin of this fickle, reckless woman?

No, that did not soothe her. I made a better shot when I talked of her and Martin. I assumed there was something left for both of them, which was what she wanted to hear. We talked of the child, which she fiercely loved.

I recalled the reason she had given, at her breakfast table, for marrying him. ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘why did
he
marry
you
?’

‘Oh, that’s simple,’ said Irene, ‘he just liked the look of me.’

For once that night she spoke with zest, something like triumph. Soon her anxiety came back. She asked: Should we hear the telephone bell through the wall? Several times she started up, thinking it was beginning to ring. Twice it did ring, and twice she went to the receiver. One call was for me, one a wrong number. The minutes passed, the half-hours. Midnight came, one o’clock. She had ceased trying to keep up any conversation long since.

It was not in me to condemn her. I scarcely thought of her as my brother’s wife. Faced with the sight of her nervous expectant face, pinched to the point where anxiety is turning into the dread of deprivation, I felt for her just the animal comradeship of those who have been driven to wait for news by telephone, to wait in fear of the post because there may not be a letter, to walk the streets at night waiting for a bedroom light to go out before they can go to sleep. To have lived, even for a time, helpless in the deep undertow of passionate love – at moments one thought that one must come home to it, even if it was a dreadful home, and anyone moving to that same home, as Irene was, seemed at such moments a sister among the others, among all the untroubled strangers going to their neater homes.

At half past two I persuaded her to go to bed. The next morning there was still no message: she wanted to ring up again, but some relic of pride, perhaps my presence and what she had said to me, prevented her. She put on her smart, brazen air to keep her courage up, and with a quip about having spent the night alone with me in my flat, took a taxi to Paddington and the next train back to Barford, waving with spirit till she was out of sight up Lupus Street.

Neither that morning, nor the previous night, had I wished, as I had often wished in the past, that Martin was rid of her.

Most people I met, even on the technical committees, were still ignorant about the whole uranium project. But some could not resist letting one know that they were in the secret too. In the lavatory of the Athenaeum a bald bland head turned to me from the adjacent stall.

‘March 22nd,’ came the whisper and a finger rose to the lips.

On the evening of the twenty-first, just as I was leaving to catch the last train to Barford, Hector Rose gave his ceremonious knock and came into my office.

‘Very best wishes, Eliot,’ he said. He was awkward; he was for once excited, and tried to hide it.

‘This may be a mildly historic occasion,’ he said. ‘We may all qualify for a footnote to history, which would be somewhat peculiar, don’t you think?’

Next morning, sitting opposite to Mrs Drawbell at the breakfast table, I thought there was one person at least immune from the excitement. Drawbell had left for the laboratory, so full of animation that he let the diablerie show through: ‘If I were giving honours, Eliot, I shouldn’t give them to the prima donnas – no, just to the people who do the good, hard, slogging work.’ He gave his melon-lipped grin; he was thinking of his own rewards to come; more than ever, he felt the resentment of a middle man for those who make his fortune. When he went out, the psychological temperature fell.

Mrs Drawbell watched me, heavy and confident in her silence. She said: ‘I hope you are enjoying your kipper,’ and returned to impassivity again. I said: ‘Everyone will be glad when today is over, won’t they?’

The women at Barford had had to be told that an experiment was taking place that day; Mrs Drawbell did not know what it was, but she knew this was a crisis. Nevertheless, mine seemed a new idea.

‘Perhaps they will,’ said Mrs Drawbell.

‘It’s going to be a strain,’ I said.

She gave an opaque smile.

‘It’s a strain on your husband,’ I said.

‘He’s used to it,’ said Mrs Drawbell.

Had she any feeling for him, I wondered? She was his ally; in her immobile fashion, she tried to help him on: it was she who, finding that Martin and Irene had no room to spare, had invited me to stay. Yet she spoke of him with less tenderness than many women speak of their doctors.

Then she talked of Mary Pearson’s children; Mrs Drawbell was looking after them for the day. She was confident that their mother’s treatment was wrong and her own right. Densely, confidently, with a curious air of being about to offer affection, she pressed her case upon me and was demanding my moral support. I could not help remembering her on my way to the hangar, irritated as I was in any period of suspense that other lives should be going on, with their own egotisms, claiming one’s attention, intruding their desires.

I felt my suspense about that day’s experiment increase, having been forced to think of something else. When I saw Mary Pearson, sitting at a bench close to the pile, I was short to her; her skin flushed, her eyes clouded behind her spectacles. I made some sort of apology. I could not explain that I felt more keyed up because her name had distracted me,

The hangar was noisy that morning, like a cathedral echoing a party of soldiers. Workmen, mechanics, young scientists, went in and out through the door in the pile’s outer wall; Luke was shouting to someone on top of the pile; Martin and a couple of assistants were disentangling the wire from an electrical apparatus on the floor. There were at least twenty men in the hangar, and Mary Pearson was the only woman. And in the middle, white-walled, about three times the height of a man, stood – catching our eyes as though it were a sacred stone – the pile.

Luke greeted me. He was wearing a windjacket tucked into his grey flannel trousers.

‘Well, Lewis,’ he shouted, ‘we’re in the hell of a mess.’

‘It will be all right on the night,’ said someone. There was a burst of laughter, laughter noisy, exultant, with just a prickle of nerves.

The ‘pipery’ (Luke meant the pipes, but his scientific idiom was getting richer as he grew more triumphant) had ‘stood up to’ all tests. The uranium slugs were in place. In the past week, Martin had put in a dribble of heavy water, and a test sample had picked up no impurities. But there was one ‘bloody last-minute snag’ like finding just at the critical moment that you have forgotten – Luke produced a bedroom simile. Most of the ‘circuitry’, like the pipery, was in order: there was trouble with one switch of the control rods.

‘We can’t start without them,’ said Luke. Martin joined us: I did not wish to ask questions, any question seemed to delay the issue, but they told me how the control rods worked. ‘If the pile gets too hot, then they automatically shut the whole thing off,’ said Luke.