The New Men (24 page)

‘I’ve told you before, and I will tell you again,’ said Luke, ‘you’re asking me to throw Sawbridge out because a lot of old women may see bogies. Well, I’m not prepared to do it, unless someone can give me a better reason than that. There’s only one reason that I should be ready to listen to. That is, is he going to give anything away?’

We all knew that Martin was right in his analysis. The world had split in two, and men like us, who kept any loyalty to their past or their hopes, did not like it. Years before, people such as Luke or Francis Getliffe or I had sometimes faced the alternative – if you had to choose between a Hitler world or a communist world, which was it to be? We had had no doubt of the answer. It had seemed to us that the communists had done ill that good might come. We could not change all the shadows of those thoughts in an afternoon.

It had been different, of course, with men like Thomas Bevill and his friends, or many of my old colleagues at Cambridge and the Bar. Most of them, in their hearts, would have given the opposite answer: communism was the enemy absolute: incidentally, it said something for the patriotism of their class that, full of doubts about the German war, knowing what it meant for them, win or lose, they nevertheless fought it.

Now it was men like Luke and Francis Getliffe and me who felt the doubts, the scientists most of all. Often they were sick at heart, although despair was unnatural to them and they believed that the split in the world – the split which seemed to them the anti-hope – would not last for ever.

Martin said: ‘I’ve explained to you, that doesn’t begin to be the point.’

‘For me,’ Luke’s voice became loud, ‘it’s the beginning and the end. Here’s someone who, as far as you know, will never be any closer to a leakage than you or me. And you’re saying we ought to find a bogus reason for putting him in the street – just because some old women might natter. I’m simply not playing that game. Nor would Lewis. If we have to start insuring ourselves like that, we might as well pack up.’

As he knew, my sympathies were on his side. It was he, not Martin, who had insisted on seeing me that night – because he wanted my support. But also he had asked for my advice as an official, and I had to give it. No prudent man could ignore Martin’s case. True, the responsibility for security rested with Captain Smith and his service: true, also, that Martin’s proposal to get rid of the man out of hand was indefensible. But the risks were as great as Martin said.

As I was advising Luke (I wanted him at the least to talk to the new Chairman), I watched them both and thought – yes, Martin’s case was clear, he was showing his usual foresight, and yet there was another motive behind it. Luke was frowning, his head bent over the table; Martin was sitting slightly back, his forehead unlined, more controlled, more like an official, than the other two of us that night. He seemed remote from any sign or memory of the conflict in my office, only three weeks before. But, though he was remote, I believed I could see his motive.

As the hushed voices, his and Luke’s and mine, whispered and hissed under the beams, I saw him for a moment with the insight of kinship: I thought I knew what he was aiming at. If I were right, I did not like it.

We had talked for a long time, when Luke pushed the table away. He had just repeated that he would not budge unless someone gave him new evidence; this was the finish.

‘I’m damned if I get rid of Sawbridge,’ he said, and his force was formidable.

Martin replied, unmoved: ‘In that case I shall send you my views on paper.’

‘Damn it, man,’ for the third time Luke forgot to be quiet, ‘we’ve talked it out, I don’t want any bumf.’

Martin said: ‘I’m sorry, but I want to have it on the record.’

That autumn it was strange to hear the scientists alone, trying to examine their consciences, and then round a committee table. Outsiders thought them complacent, opaque: of those that I knew best, it was not true.

‘There aren’t any easy solutions,’ said Luke. ‘Otherwise we should all take them.’

He was speaking first of scientists, but also of all others in a time of violence; for the only root-and-branch ‘solutions’ which could give a man an absolute reason for not working at Barford on the bomb, were not open to many. Unqualified pacificism or Communism – if you believed either, your course was clear. But no other faith touched the problem. Among the new recruits to Barford, there were a number who were religious, but none of the churches gave them a direction.

Either/or, said Luke. Either you retired and helped to leave your country defenceless. Or you made a weapon which might burn men, women, and children in tens of thousands. What was a man to do?

‘I don’t think we’ve got any option,’ said Francis Getliffe to me in the club, one night after his return from America. ‘Luke’s right, the Barford boys are right, we’ve got to make the infernal thing.’

After these conversations, I saw the same men in their places on the committees, experienced in business after six years of war, many of them, including Getliffe himself and Martin, having become skilful at the committee arts, disposing of great budgets, all caught up, without so much as a stumble of reservation, on getting the plutonium made at Barford. No body of men could have sounded less introspective; as their new Chairman said, with the jubilation of a housemaster who sees the second eleven at the nets, they were the keenest committee he had ever had.

The new Chairman was – to the irritation of his own friends and the Government backbenchers – old Thomas Bevill. In those first months of office, the Government had a habit of resurrecting figures from early in the war. Bevill was an ex-minister, a Tory, but atomic energy had started under him; now it was in the limelight, he might soften criticism; so he was brought out of retirement like an old man of the tribe. On his side, he havered about taking a job under a Labour administration, but he was by this time seventy-six, they would be in for five years, he might never get another job and he just could not resist it.

At his first committee he slipped unobtrusively, happily into the chair, as though in literal truth, not in his own inexorable cliché, he was ‘glad to be back in the saddle’. He gazed round the table and greeted each man by name. No one was less effusive by nature, but he always felt that effusiveness was called for on such occasions, and so he called out ‘Dr Getliffe! old friend!’ and so on clockwise round the table. ‘Mr Drawbell! old friend!’ ‘Dr Luke! old friend!’ and finally round to me, at his right hand: ‘Our secretary, Mr Eliot! old friend!’

Mounteney, sitting near me, was disgusted. One might have asked why he was there at all, after his disappearance from Barford, never to return. Actually, Mounteney’s self-exile from atomic energy had lasted exactly two months. He remained in his professorship, but accepted a seat on the committee. He was so austere that no one dared to ask why. Duty? Yes. The desire that real scientists should have a voice? No doubt. But for myself, I believed that his chief motive was the same as Bevill’s, whom he so much despised – that he could not bear to be out of things.

So, in the autumn of 1945, Bevill was listening to the scientists, hearing Mounteney’s minority opinion, trotting round the corner to the Treasury with Rose. It was on one of his committee afternoons, the technical sub-committee which I did not attend, that Irene came up with Martin for the day. On this committee Martin had a place as well as Luke, and as I took Irene out through the Park, in the foggy afternoon, to tea, I pointed up to a window whose lights streamed out into the whirling white.

‘There they are,’ I said.

‘Busy as beavers,’ said Irene.

She was smiling with a tenderness unusual in her. Perhaps she felt the safety we all snuggle in, when someone about whom we worry is for a couple of hours securely locked away. Certainly she was gratified that he was up there, in the lighted room, among the powerful. Had her prediction – ‘I should like to know what you expect from him now’ – been nothing more than hitting out at random? She had not seen him that night at Stratford; she showed no concern for what he might be planning.

Although she had been behind him in his outburst, had quarrelled with me so bitterly that we had not been reconciled till that afternoon, she nevertheless, with a superb inconsistency, had blotted all that out and now simmered with content because he was ‘getting on’.

But her smile, tender, coming from within, held more than that.

‘I love the fog, don’t you?’ she said. She said a little more: and I realized that this scene of subfusc grandeur, the back of Whitehall with window lights tumbling out in the fog of St James’s Park, at first lay heavy on her mind, as though there were a name she had forgotten and yet was lurking near her tongue, and then suddenly lifted, to let rise a memory not so grand but full of mellowing joy: another foggy afternoon years before, a street in Bayswater, the high shabby genteel houses, the joy of a childhood autumn.

Under a lamp in the Mall, I looked at her, and thought I had never seen her face so happy. Her youth was going, she still had her dash, she still looked a strapping, reckless woman – and on her mouth was a tender, expectant, astonished smile. I wonder if she had smiled so before she began her adventures. I wondered if she had come to the end of them, if she were what she called ‘settled down’?

How would she take it, when that end came? I had not yet seen a woman, or a man either, who had lived a life of sexual adventure, give it up without a bitter pang that the last door had clanged to. Nevertheless, I had a suspicion that she might struggle less than most. I did not believe that she was, in the elemental sense, passionate. There were many reasons which sent people off on their sexual travels, and sheer passion was one of the less common. If you were searching for a woman moved by passion, you would be more likely to find her in someone like Mary Pearson, who had not been to bed with a man except her husband. Of these two, it was not Mary Pearson, it was Irene, who had racketed so long, it was she who would in the long run, and not unwillingly, give way to age and put her feet up with a sigh.

If that day came, I wondered – walking through the fog, taking her to tea as a sign that there was peace between us – whether she and I would at last cease to grate on each other? Was that walk through the Park a foretaste? I had not noticed her restlessness, she spoke as though she trusted me, remembering in the sight of the lighted window a spate of joy which seemed, as such joys of memory seem to us all, like the intimation of a better life from which we have been inexplicably cut off.

On New Year’s Eve, just as the Whitehall lamps were coming out, Bevill sent for me. The room which had been found for him as chairman was at the end of the passage, and even more unpretentious than his room as Minister; Bevill did not grumble, he had never in his life grumbled at a minor slight, he settled there and called it his ‘hutch’. But that afternoon, as soon as I entered, I saw his face heavily flushed, with an angry blood pressure flush that one did not often see in so spare a man, the relics of grey hair twisted over his head so that he looked like a ferocious cockatoo.

Rose was sitting with him, arms folded, unaffected except that the pouches under his eyes seemed darker.

‘This is a nasty one,’ Rose was saying. ‘Yes, it is a distinctly nasty one.’

‘The swine,’ said Thomas Bevill.

‘Well, sir,’ said Rose, ‘it means some publicity that we could do without, but we can cope with that.’

‘It knocks the feet from under you, that’s what it does,’ said Bevill. In the war, whatever the news was like, he had been eupeptic, sturdily hopeful – not once rattled as he was that afternoon.

He turned to me, his eyes fierce, bewildered.

‘Captain Hook’s just been in,’ he said.

‘Captain Hook’ was his name – partly one of his nursery jokes, partly for secrecy’s sake – for Smith, the retired naval captain, the chief of the security branch. ‘One of your scientists has been giving us away to the Russians. A chap who’s just come back from Canada. They’re going to put him inside soon, but it’s locking the stable door after the horse is lost.’

I asked who it was.

‘I didn’t get the name.
One of your Cambridge men
.’ Bevill said it accusingly, as though I were responsible for them all.

Rose told me that it was a man who had at no time been employed at Barford.

‘That isn’t the half of it,’ said Bevill. ‘There’s another of them at least who they’re waiting for.
They oughtn’t to have to wait
,’ he burst out. ‘We’re too soft, any other country in the world would have risked a bit of injustice! Sometimes I think we shall go under just because we put too high a price on justice. I tell you that, Rose, though I don’t want it to go outside this room.’ He said to me: ‘This chap’s still knocking about at Barford now. He’s a young chap called Sawbridge. Do you know him?’

‘A little,’ I said.

‘Is he English?’ said Bevill.

‘As English as I am,’ I said.

The blood was still heavy in Bevill’s temples, as he shook his head.

‘I can’t understand it.’

He shook his head again. ‘I don’t want to set up as better than anyone else, and I can understand most things at a pinch. I expect we’ve all thought of murder, haven’t we?’ said the old man, who as a rule looked so mild. He went on, forgetting his nursery prattle, and speaking like a Hanoverian. ‘As for rape and’ – he listed the vices of the flesh – ‘anyone could do them.’

Hector Rose said, surprisingly: ‘We’re none of us spotless.’

‘But as for giving away your country, I can’t understand it,’ said Bevill. ‘I could have done the other things, but I couldn’t have done that.

‘I don’t want to put the clock back,’ he said. ‘But if it were in my hands, I should hang them. I should hang them in Trafalgar Square.’

At Barford next day, Bevill himself sat in with Captain Smith as he broke the news to the leading scientists one by one. He interviewed them, not in Drawbell’s office, but his secretary’s, sitting on typing stools among the hooded typewriters and dictaphones; sometimes I was called in to hear the same half-explanations, the same half-questions.