The New Men (22 page)

Even though I agreed with almost all he said.

As I began to make the first opposing moves, which he was already expecting, I was thinking, his was a letter which an able man only writes when he is near breaking point. Only his mask was stoical, as he sat there, his fingers spread like a starfish on the arms of his chair. In his letter – whatever he had written I should be trying to suppress it – he had not made the best of his case.
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Yet I agreed with him in all that mattered. Looking back years later, I still agreed with him.

I felt it so, that afternoon, when I set myself to make Martin keep quiet. I shut away the sense of outrage, my own sense of outrage as well as his, and brought out the worldly wise official’s argument, such as we had displayed at Barford in July, such as he had used himself. It was not worthwhile making gestures for no result. One such gesture was all you were allowed; you ought to choose a time when it could do good. We had found ourselves in responsible positions; we could not give them up overnight; for everyone’s sake we had to get through the next few years without a war; then one could make gestures.

There was something in what I said, but they were not the reasons, they were nowhere near the reasons, why I was calling on each ounce of nature that I possessed to force him to conform. It was, in fact, incomparably more simple. For a brother as for a son, one’s concern is, in the long run, prosaic and crude. One is anxious about their making a living; one longs for their success, but one wants it to be success as the world knows it, reputation among solid men. For myself, my own ‘respectable’ ambitions had damped down by now, I should perhaps have been able, if the choice was sharp enough, to throw them away and face a scandal. For myself; but not for him.

I had seen friends throw away what most men clung to, respectability, money, fame. Roy Calvert: Charles March: even old Martineau. I understood why they had done it. I should have been the last to dissuade them. But they were friends, and Martin was a brother. The last thing you want with a brother is that he should fulfil a poetic destiny.

Martin met my argument point by point; we were getting nowhere. All of a sudden he began looking down beside his chair, under the desk, by the hat stand.

‘Did I bring in a briefcase?’ he said.

I said that I had not noticed, and he went on searching.

‘Does it matter?’ I was put out.

He said that it contained notes of the new method for extracting plutonium: it was top secret. He must trace it. He thought he remembered leaving it in his car: would I mind walking to the garage with him? Irritated at the interruption, I followed beside him, down Whitehall, across Victoria Street: Martin, his forehead lined with anxiety was walking faster than usual, and we were both silent. The offices, the red-brick houses of Great Smith Street, glowed shabby in the sunshine. Just as on the night before, I felt a tenderness for the dirty, unfriendly, ugly streets such as I had never felt before. I even felt something like remorse, because what had happened to another town might happen here.

The briefcase was not in the car. Martin said nothing, except that he must ring up Barford from my office. Back there, he sat leaning forward, as though by concentrating he could make the call come through. It was minutes before the telephone whirred. Martin was talking to his secretary, his words fast but even then polite. ‘Would you mind looking…?’ He waited, then cried out: ‘Thank God for that! With elaborate thanks he put the receiver down, and gave me a sharp, deprecating grin.

‘I never moved it. It’s sitting there in its proper place.’

‘It seemed a curious thing to worry about,’ I said.

For an instant he looked blank. Then his face broke into a laugh, the kind of noiseless laugh with which as children we used to receive family jokes. But soon his expression hardened. He asked, had I anything more to say before he sent the letter?

‘A good deal more,’ I said.

‘I wish you’d say it.’

His tone was so inflexible that I became more brutal.

‘How are you going to live?’ I said.

‘A decent scientist can make some sort of a living,’ he said.

‘Whatever trouble you get into?’

‘It wouldn’t be a good living, but I can make do.’

‘What does your wife think of that?’

There came a surprise. Martin smiled, not affectionately, but as though he held a trump which I had miscounted. He said: ‘As a matter of fact, she wants me to do it.’

He spoke with absolute confidence. I had made a stupid mistake. I should have remembered the way she welcomed his first risk. I tried another tack.

‘Have you thought of your son?’

‘Yes, I’ve thought of him,’ said Martin, He added: ‘I’ve also thought of you. I’m sorry if it harms you, and I know that it must.’ He said it formally.

I cast round again. He and I took too much responsibility on ourselves, I said. That was true in our human relations.

He stared at me, and for an instant I was silent.

I went on with the argument. We should be better men if we took less upon our shoulders. And scientists as a class had the same presumption. They thought too much of their responsibility. Martin that day had no more guilt to carry than any other man.

‘Again I disagree,’ said Martin. After a silence, he went on: ‘In any case, I can make a more effective noise.’

‘Yes,’ I said, feeling another spot to probe – he and Luke and the others would be listened to. But if he were patient, some day he would be listened to in a way that did effective good. Not now. It would be a nine days’ wonder, he would be ruined and powerless. But wait. In the next few years, if he and Luke brought their process to success, they would have more influence than most people. That was the only way in which Martin could gain authority: and then, if a protest had to be made, if a martyr were needed, then he could speak out without it being just a pathetic piece of defiance, a lonely voice in Hyde Park.

A girl brought us cups of tea. The argument went on, flashes crossed the wall from bus roofs reflected in the sun. Neither then nor afterwards did I detect the instant at which the hinge turned. Perhaps there was no such instant. Perhaps it was more like a turn of the tide. Towards the end of the afternoon, Martin knew, and I knew, that I had made him give up.

I did not, even then, believe that any reasons of mine had convinced him. Some had been sound: some were fabricated: some contradicted others. So far as reasons went, his were as good as mine. The only advantage I had was that, in resolving to stop him acting, I had nothing to dilute my purpose. Whereas he intended to act, but deep down he had his doubts. Some of these doubts I had brought into the open: the doubt that fed on responsibility, on caution, on self-interest, on a mixture of fears, including the fear of being disloyal.

As the afternoon sun made blazing shields of the windows across the street, Martin said: ‘Very well, I shall just do nothing.’

He spoke sadly, admitting what, for some time past, we had each known.

I asked him to have dinner with me, and stay in my flat. For a second his face had the look of refusal, but then his politeness came back. We were both constrained as we walked across the parks to Hyde Park Corner. In Green Park we stood for a while watching some boys of eight or nine play, in a clearing by the bandstand, a primitive game of cricket. The trees’ shadows stretched across the lumpy grass, and we saw something that had the convincing improbability of a dream; at three successive balls the batsman made a scooping shot, and gave a catch which went in a gentle curve, very softly, to point; the first catch was seriously and solemnly missed. So was the second. So was the third.

‘We shall never see that again,’ I said to Martin.

Usually he would have been amused, but now he only gave a token smile.

We walked along the path.

‘By the way,’ said Martin, in a tone dry and without feeling, ‘I heard one story about tactics that might interest you.’

He had heard it from someone present after the bomb was made.

‘There was a good deal of discussion,’ he said, ‘about how to drop it with maximum results. One ingenious idea was to start a really spectacularly pretty flare a few seconds before the bomb went off.’

‘Why?’

‘To make sure that everyone in the town was looking up.’

‘Why?’

‘To make sure they were all blinded.’

I cried out.

‘That’s where we’ve got to in the end,’ he said. He added: ‘But I agree with you, now I’ve got to let it go.’

We walked on, set apart and sad.

Two days later, as we drove down to Barford in the afternoon, Martin and I talked civilly of cricket and acquaintances, with no sign on the surface of our clash of wills.

In Banbury I bought an evening paper. I saw that another bomb had been dropped. Without speaking I passed the paper to Martin, sitting at the wheel, the car drawn up in the marketplace beside the kerb. He read the paragraph under the headline.

‘This is getting monotonous,’ he said,

His expression had not changed. We both took it for granted that the argument was not to be reopened. He was too stable a character to go back on his word. Instead, he commented, as we drove into Warwickshire, that this Nagasaki bomb must have been a plutonium one.

‘The only point of dropping the second,’ said Martin, his tone neutral, the last edge of feeling dried right out, ‘must have been for purposes of comparison.’

As soon as we went inside the canteen at Barford he made a similar remark, and was immediately denounced by Luke as a cold fish. Martin caught my eye; just for an instant, his irony returned.

Inside that room, four floors up in the administration building, so that one looked out over the red-brick ranges towards the dipping sun and then back to the tea cups and the white linoleum on the tables, the voices were loud and harsh.

There were a dozen people there, Mary Pearson, Nora Luke, Luke himself, erect and stiff-backed as he had not been for a year; I had never seen them so angry.

The news of Hiroshima had sickened them; that afternoon had left them without consolation. Luke said: ‘If anyone had tried to defend the first bomb, then I might just have listened to him. But if anyone dares try to defend the second, then I’ll see him in hell before I listen to a single word.’

They all assumed, as Martin had done, that the plutonium bomb was dropped as an experiment, to measure its ‘effectiveness’ against the other.

‘It had to be dropped in a hurry,’ said someone, ‘because the war will be over and there won’t be another chance.’

‘Not just yet,’ said Luke.

I had known them rancorous before, morally indignant, bitter: but it was something new to hear them cynical – to hear that last remark of Luke’s, the least cynical of men.

Eric Pearson came in, smiled at his wife, nodded to others, threw back his quiff of hair. He sat down at the table, where most of us were standing. Suddenly I thought I should like to question him. Of them all, he was the only one who had worked directly on the actual bombs, that is, he had had a small part, a fractional part, in what they would call ‘the hardware’, the concrete objects that had been dropped on those towns. Even if it was only a thousandth part, I was thinking, that meant a good many lives.

‘How do you feel about it?’ I asked.

‘Nothing special,’ said Pearson.

As usual he irritated me with his off-hand manner, his diffidence, his superlative inner confidence.

‘I should have thought,’ I said, ‘you might wish it hadn’t happened?’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I haven’t lost any sleep about it.’

Suddenly his wife broke out, her face flaming, tears starting from her eyes: ‘Then you damned well ought to have!’

‘I’m sorry.’ His manner changed, he was no longer jaunty. ‘I only meant that it wasn’t my business.’

She brushed away the tears with the back of her hand, stared at him – and then went out of the room. Soon Pearson followed her. The others dismissed him as soon as he had gone, while I wondered how long that breach would last. Pitilessly they forgot him, and Luke was shouting to me: ‘Lewis, you may have to get me out of clink.’

He stood between the tables.

‘It’s no use bellyaching any more,’ he cried. ‘We’ve got to get something done.’

‘What is to be done?’ said a voice.

‘It stands out a mile what is to be done,’ said Luke. ‘We’ve got to make a few of these damned things ourselves, we’ve got to finish the job. Then if there’s going to be any more talking, we might have our share.’

In the midst of their indignation, the proposal did not startle them. Luke was a man of action, so were many of them. Political protests, associations of scientists – in their state of moral giddiness, they were looking for anything to clutch on to. For some, Luke was giving them another hold. He had always been the most nationalistic of them. Just as old Bevill kept the narrow patriotism of the officer elite, so Luke never quite forgot that he had been brought up in a naval dockyard, and kept the similar patriotism of the petty officer.

That afternoon the scientists responded to it.

‘Why is it going to lead you in clink?’ I cut across the argument.

‘Because if we don’t get the money to go ahead, I don’t mean next month, I don’t mean tomorrow, I mean
now
, I’m going to stump the country telling them just what they’re in for. Unless you old men’ – he was speaking to me – ‘get it into your heads that this is a new phase, and that if we don’t get in on the ground floor there are just two things that can happen to this country – the best is that we can fade out and become a slightly superior Spain, the worst is that we get wiped out like a mob of Zulus.’

Nora said: ‘When you see what the world is like, would that matter so much?’

‘It would matter to me,’ said Luke. Suddenly he gave up being a roughneck. ‘I know it seems as though any chance of a little decency in the world has been wiped out for good. All I can say is that, if we’re going to get any decency back, then first this country must have a bit of power.’