The New Men (2 page)

In fact, as I discovered later, she was overdoing it, partly because she had a vein of inverted snobbery and was exaggerating her misfortunes in front of us. Her father was living on his pension from the Indian Army, but some of the Brunskills could have been called county. In secret, Irene kept up her interest in the gradations of smartness among her smart friends.

She went on drinking, but, as we sat round the fire for our coffee, she took hold of herself and began questioning me about my plans. Was I going abroad that Easter vacation? When could she and Martin see me again? Wouldn’t I meet them in London? Wouldn’t I join them for a May Week ball?

‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ I said.

‘Do come. Wouldn’t you like being seen with me?’

‘My wife isn’t fit to dance just now,’ I said.

‘Bring someone else.’

It was obvious that Martin had not told her of my wife’s condition. She lived alone in London, and saw no one except me; increasingly those visits were hard to bear.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘You don’t want to dance with me. You’re quite right, I’m not much good.’

‘It must be seven or eight years since I went to a ball,’ I reflected. ‘Good Lord, time goes too fast.’

I had said it casually, platitudinously, but a line came between Irene’s brows and her voice sharpened.

‘That’s near the bone,’ she said.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I hate the thought of time.’

Quickly Martin smiled at her and was changing the subject, but she insisted.

‘Time’s winged chariot,’ she said and looked at me. ‘Do
you
like the thought of it?’

Soon she cheered up, and decided it was time to leave Martin and me together. She made some excuse; she might as well have invited us to discuss her.

I said goodbye to her in the little passage outside my gyp-cupboard, between the room door and the oak.

‘I’m afraid I’ve been horribly boring and talked too much,’ she said, as she pressed my hand.

I passed it off

‘I always talk too much when I’m nervous.’ She opened the outer door. Still she could not leave it alone; she glanced back over her shoulder, and called to me: ‘I’m very nervous today, Lewis. Believe me, I am.’

She was begging me not to speak against her. As I turned back into the room a gust of wind crashed the door shut behind me. The smoke had cleared from the fireplace, the coal was cherry-red in the iron wicker of the grate. Across the hearth Martin’s face was swept smooth in the unfluctuating glow.

He gave me a smile with his mouth tight and pulled down at one corner; it was a cagey, observant smile that he often wore, and which, together with his open expression and acute eyes, made his mood difficult to read.

His face was a young man’s, but one that would not alter much until he was old; the skin would not take lines easily, except round the eyes; he was fair, and the hair curled, crisp and thick, close to his skull. He was shorter than I was, and not more than an inch or two taller than Irene, but his shoulders, neck and wrists were strong.

Without speaking, I sat down opposite to him, then I said: ‘Well?’

‘Well?’ he replied.

His smile had not changed. His tone was easy. It would have been hard to tell how painfully he cared that I should approve of her; but I knew it.

Our sympathy had always been close, and was growing closer as we grew older. Between us there was a bond of trust. But much of our communication was unspoken, and it was rare for us to be direct with each other, especially about our deeper feelings.

It was partly that, like many men who appear spontaneous at a first meeting, we each had a vein of reserve. I sometimes broke loose from mine, but Martin’s seemed to be part of his nature, as though he would never cease making elaborate plans to hide his secrets, to over-insure against the chances of life. I was watching him develop into a cautious, subtle and far-sighted man.

It was partly that reserve which kept us from being direct with each other; but much more it was the special restraint and delicacy which is often found in brothers’ love.

‘I think she’s attractive,’ I said, ‘and distinctly good company.’

‘Yes, isn’t she?’ said Martin.

Already we were fencing.

‘Does she have a job of some kind?’

‘I believe she’s been someone’s secretary.’

‘Does that give her enough to hive on, in London?’

‘I’ve got an idea,’ said Martin, with an appearance of elaborate reflection, ‘that she shares a flat with another young woman.’

‘She must find it pretty hard to keep going,’ I said.

Martin agreed. ‘I suppose it’s genuinely difficult for them to make a living, isn’t it?’

He was capable of stonewalling indefinitely. Trying another line, I asked whether he had decided anything about his own future. His research grant ran out by the summer, and, if there were no war (our habitual phrase that year), he would have to find a job. He would get a decent one, but, we both knew by this time, there were three or four contemporaries ahead of him, who would take the plums. His research was sound, so Walter Luke said, who supervised him: but Luke added that, judged by high standards, he was turning out good but not quite good enough.

I was more disappointed than I wanted Martin to see, for I had invested much hope in him, including hopes of my own that had been frustrated. His expectations, however, seemed to be humbler than mine. He was ready to come to terms with his talents, to be sorry they were not greater, but to make the best of them. If he believed that he might surprise us all, he hid it. He accepted Luke’s opinion as just. That afternoon he thought the likelihood was that he would get a post in a provincial university.

‘If you thought of marrying,’ I said, ‘you couldn’t very well manage on that.’

‘I suppose it has been done,’ he replied.

Then I asked: ‘As a matter of fact, are you intending to marry her?’

There was a pause.

‘It’s not completely out of the question,’ he said.

His tone stayed even, but just for an instant his open, attentive expression broke, and I saw his eyes flash. They were dark blue, hard, transparently bright, of a kind common in our family. As they met mine, I knew in my heart that his resolve was formed. Yet I could not help arguing against it. My temper was fraying; as I tried not to sound clucking and protective, I could hear with dislike the urge in my own voice.

‘I must say,’ I broke out, ‘that I think it would be very unwise.’

‘I wondered if you would feel that,’ said Martin.

‘She’d be a load on you.’

‘Why do you think that, particularly?’

He had the interested air of a man discussing the love affairs of an acquaintance, well liked, but for whom he had no intimate concern. It was assumed partly to vex me a little; but in part it was a protection against me.

‘Do you think that she’d be much good as a professional man’s wife?’

‘I can see that she would have her disadvantages,’ he said reasonably.

‘You need someone who’ll let you work in peace and for that you couldn’t find anyone worse.’

‘I think I could get my own way there,’ said Martin.

‘No, you couldn’t. Not if you care for her at all, which I presume you do, otherwise you wouldn’t be contemplating this piece of suicide.’

‘Yes, I do care for her,’ he said.

The coals fell suddenly, heaving a bright and fragile hollow in which the sparks stood still as fireflies. He leaned across to throw on coal. When he had sat back again I said: ‘Then imagine what it would be like. She’s rackety and you’re prudent. She’d have all the time in the world on her hands, and do you think she’s the woman to stay still? What do you think you’d find when you got home?’

‘It’s just possible that I might be able to settle her down.’

I was handling it badly, I knew. I said: ‘You know, I’m not a great expert on happy marriages. But on unhappy ones I do know as much as most men.’

Martin gave a friendly, sarcastic smile. I went on. He met each point on the plane of reason. He had reckoned them out himself; no one insured more carefully against the future. I was telling him nothing he did not know. I became angry again.

‘She’s pretty shallow, you know. I expect her loves are too.’ Martin did not reply.

‘She’s bright, but she’s not very clever.’

‘That doesn’t matter to me,’ he said.

‘You’d find her boring in time.’

‘I couldn’t have done less so up to now,’ said Martin.

‘Just imagine her being bright – for – ten years. In ten years you’d be sick and tired of her.’

‘
Ten years
,’ said Martin. He added: ‘If that’s the worst that happens!’

‘She’d be driving you off your head.’

‘If this fission affair works,’ said Martin, ‘we shall be lucky if we have any heads.’

That was the actual moment at which I first heard the rumour. There was a touch of irritation in Martin’s voice, because over his marriage I had pressed him too far.

He was putting me off. He had not spoken with any special weight, for he was thinking about Irene and my opposition; yet something in his tone brought me up sharp, and I had to inquire:

‘Is this anything new?’

‘Very new,’ said Martin. He was still trying to lead my attention away, but also he was half-caught up, as he said: ‘It’s very new, but I don’t know how everyone missed it. I might have seen it myself!’

He told me that, within the past fortnight, letters had been published in scientific journals in several countries, and that the Cavendish people and physicists everywhere were talking of nothing else. That I could understand. He then gave me an explanation which I could not understand, although I had heard plenty of the jargon of nuclear physics from him and Luke. ‘Fission’. ‘Neutrons’. ‘Chain reaction’. I could not follow. But I could gather that at last the sources of nuclear energy were in principle open to be set loose; and that it might be possible to make an explosive such as no one had realistically imagined.

‘Scientists always exaggerate,’ I said.

‘This isn’t exaggerated,’ said Martin. ‘If it happens, one of these bombs would blow up Cambridge. I mean, there’d be
nothing
left.’

‘Will it happen?’

‘It seems to be about an even chance,’

I had stood up, as I attempted to follow his explanation. Then I walked across the room and looked out of the window into the court, where the rain was blowing before the wind, forming great driven puddles along the verges of the grass; in a moment I returned to where Martin was still sitting by the fire, We were both sobered, but to me this piece of news, though it hung over us as we faced each other, seemed nothing but a red herring.

I came back, more gently now, to the prospect of his marriage. Had he really thought what, in terms of day-to-day living, it might mean? He was once more polite, sensible, brotherly. He would admit the force of any one of my doubts: he would say yes to each criticism. Although underneath I could feel his intention, embedded right in the core of his will, nevertheless he was ready to make any other concession to my worry.

Nothing said in anger would be remembered, he was as good as saying, with his good-natured, sarcastic smile. In fact, even in the bitterest moment of the quarrel, I had taken that for granted. It did not enter my mind that anything could touch the confidence between us.

MARTIN married Irene that autumn, but I could not visit them for some time afterwards. For the war had started: he was working at Rosyth in one of the first degaussing parties, and, as for me, I was already a temporary civil servant in London.

As the early months of war went by, I heard nothing, and thought little, about my brother’s marriage; but the piece of scientific news which, when I was trying to turn him against Irene, he had used as a false trail, came several times into my office work.

It happened so through some personal coincidences. It was because the Minister knew me that I went into his department, and it was because of his own singular position that we saw the minutes of the scientific committees. His name was Thomas Bevill, and he was a second cousin of Lord Boscastle. He had been a professional politician all his life without making much of a mark in public; in private, in any government milieu he was one of the most trusted of men. He had the unusual gift of being both familiar and discreet; forty years before, when he began his career, he had set himself never to give away a secret, and never to allow himself the bright remark that makes a needless enemy. So by 1939 he had become such a link as all governments needed, particularly at the beginning of a war, before the forms of administration had settled down: they needed a man like Thomas Bevill as the chairman of confidential committees, the man to be kept informed of what was going on, the supreme post office.

Just before war began, he asked me to join him as one of his personal assistants. He had met me two or three times with the Boscastles, which was a virtue in his eyes, and I had been trained as a lawyer, which was another. He thought I was suitable raw material to learn discretion. Gradually, in the first autumn of the war, he let me item by item into his confidential files. That was why, one autumn afternoon, he sent word that he would like a ‘little talk’ with Hector Rose and me.

The Minister’s room was only two doors from mine, and both, relics of the eighteenth-century Treasury, looked out over Whitehall itself, brilliant that afternoon with autumn sun that blazed from the windows opposite ours. The Minister was not in the room, but Sir Hector Rose was already sitting by the side of the coal fire. He was a man in the early forties, stocky, powerful, and youthful-looking, his official black coat and striped trousers cut to conceal his heavy muscles. The flesh of his cheeks shone as though untouched, and his face, hair, and eyes had the same lightness. He greeted me with his usual excessive politeness. Then he said: ‘I suppose you have no idea what our master is going to occupy us with?’

I said no, and it was clear that he had none.

‘Has anyone else been summoned, do you know, Eliot?’