The New Men (26 page)

Soon after came news, drifting up from Barford to the committees, that Luke was ill. ‘Poorly’ was the first description I heard. No one seemed to know what the matter was – though some guessed it might be an after effect of his ‘dose’ It did not sound serious; it did not immediately strike me that this put Martin in effective charge.

I thought so little of it that I did not write to inquire, until towards the end of March I was told by Francis Getliffe that Luke was on the ‘certain’ list for that year’s elections to the Royal Society. I asked if I could congratulate him. Yes, said Francis, if it were kept between us. Luke himself already knew. So I sent a note, but for some days received no reply. At last a letter came, but it was written by Nora Luke. She said that Walter was not well, and not up to writing his thanks himself; if I could spare the time to come down some day, he would like to talk to me. If I did this, wrote Nora in a strong inflexible handwriting, she asked me to be sure to see her first. Then she could give me ‘all the information’.

I went to Barford next morning, and found Nora in her laboratory office. On the door was a card on which the Indian ink gleamed jet bright: N Luke, and underneath PSO, for Nora had, not long before, been promoted and was at that time the only woman at Barford of her rank.

As soon as I saw her, I said: ‘This is serious, isn’t it?’

‘It may be,’ said Nora Luke.

She added: ‘He asked me to tell you. He knows what the doctors think.’

‘What do they think?’

Sitting at her desk, with her hair in a bun, wearing rimless spectacles, her fawn sweater, her notebook in front of her, she looked as she must have done when she was a student, and she and Luke first met. Steadily she answered: ‘The worst possibility is cancer of the bone.’

It was what he had feared, in his first attack.

‘That may not happen,’ Nora went on in a reasonable tone. ‘It seems to depend on whether this flare-up is caused by the gamma rays or whether it’s traces of plutonium that have stayed inside him and gone for the bone.’

‘When will you know?’

‘No one can give him any idea. They haven’t any experience to go on. If this bout passes off, he won’t have any guarantee that it’s not going to return.’

I muttered something: then I inquired how many people knew.

‘Most people here, I suppose,’ said Nora. Suddenly she was curious: ‘Why do you ask that?’

In my middle twenties, I also had been threatened with grave illness. I had tried to conceal it, because it might do me professional harm. Instead of telling Nora that, I just said how often I had seen people hide even the mention of cancer.

‘He wouldn’t have any patience with that,’ said Nora. ‘Nor should I. Even if the worst came to the worst’ – she stared straight at me ‘the sooner everyone here knows the dangers the more they can save themselves.’

How open she was, just as Luke was himself! Sometimes their openness made the ruses, the secretiveness, of such as I seem shabby. Yet even so, learning from Nora about her husband’s illness, I felt that she was too open, I was more embarrassed than if she could not get a word out, and so I was less use to her.

I asked where Luke was, and who was nursing him. In the establishment hospital as before, said Nora; Mrs Drawbell, also as before.

‘She’s better at it than I am,’ said Nora.

She added, her light eyes right in the middle of her lenses, her glance not leaving mine: ‘If he’s knocked out for years, I suppose I shall have some practice.’ She went on: ‘As a matter of fact, if I’ve got him lying on his back for keeps. I shall be grateful, as long as I’ve got him at all.’

She said it without a tear. She said it without varying her flat, sensible, methodical voice. Nevertheless, it made me realize how, even five minutes before, and always in the past, I had grossly misunderstood her. The last time Luke was ill, and she had left the ward, I had thought to myself that she was glad to escape, that like me she could not stand the sight of suffering. Nonsense: it was a carelessness I should not have committed about a wilder woman such as Irene; at forty I had fallen into the adolescent error of being deceived by the prosaic.

Actually Nora would have stayed chained to her husband’s bedside, had it kept the breath of life in him a second longer. She had the total devotion – which did not need to be passionate, or even emotional – of one who began with no confidence in her charms, who scarcely dared think of her charms at all. Her self-esteem she invested in her mind which in fact she thought, quite mistakenly, was in her husband’s class. But, in her heart, she was always incredulous that she had found a man for life. Rather than have him taken away she would accept any terms.

Illness, decay, breakdown – if only he suffered them in her care, then she was spared the intolerable deprivation of losing him. It was those total devotions which sprang from total diffidence that were the most possessive of all. Between having him as an abject invalid, and having him in his full manhood but apart from her, there would not have been the most infinitesimal flicker of a choice for Nora.

When I entered Luke’s ward, the room was dark, rain was seeping down outside, he seemed asleep. As I crossed the floor, there was a rustle in the bed; he switched on the reading lamp and looked at me with a flushed, tousled face. The last patch of alopecia had gone, his hair was as thick as it used to be, the flush mimicked his old colour, but had a dead pallor behind it.

‘I’ve heard the doctors’ opinions,’ I said, searching for some way of bringing out regret. To my amazement, Luke said: ‘They don’t know much. If only there hadn’t been more interesting things to do, Lewis, I’d have liked to have a shot at medicine. I might have put some science into it.’

I could not tell whether he was braving it out – even when he went on: ‘I shall be surprised if they’re going to finish me off this time. I don’t put the carcinoma theory higher than a twenty per cent chance.’

If that was his spirit, I could only play up. So I congratulated him again on the Royal Society election.

‘Now that’s the only bloody thing that really frightens me,’ said Luke, with a grim, jaunty laugh. ‘When the old men give you your ticket a year or two early, it makes you wonder whether they’re hurrying to get in before the funeral.’

‘I haven’t heard any whispers of that,’ I said.

‘Are you lying?’

‘No.’ He had been elected on his second time up, while not yet thirty-five.

‘That’s a relief,’ said Luke. ‘I tell you, I shall believe that I’m done for when I see it.’

I thought, how easy he was to reassure.

‘One thing about people trying to dispose of you like this,’ said Luke, ‘it gives you time to think.’

Half-heartedly (I did not feel much like an argument) I asked what he had been thinking about.

‘Oh, the way I’ve spent my life so far,’ said Luke. ‘And what I ought to do with the rest of it.’

He was not speaking with his old truculence.

‘I couldn’t help being a scientist, could I? It was what I was made for. If I had my time over again, I should do the same. But none of us are really going to be easy about that blasted bomb. It’s the penalty for being born when we were – but whenever we have to look into the bloody mirror to shave, we shan’t be a hundred per cent pleased with what we see there.’

He added: ‘But what else could we do? You know the whole story, what else could chaps like me do?’

I mentioned that I had once heard Hector Rose say – Hector Rose, who stood for so much that Luke detested – that ‘events may get too big for men’.

‘Did he? Perhaps he’s not such a stuffed shirt after all. Of course we’ve all thought events may be too big for us.’

He fell silent. Then he said: ‘It may be so.
But we’ve got to act as though they’re not
.’

He knew that I agreed.

‘Curiously enough,’ said Luke, ‘it isn’t so easy to lose hope for the world – if there’s a chance that you’re going to die pretty soon. The moment you feel these things aren’t going to be your concern much longer, then you think how you could have made a difference.’

He said: ‘When I get over this, I shall make a difference. And if I don’t, I don’t know who can.’

He was so natural that I teased him. I inserted the name of the younger Pitt, but Luke knew no history.

He went on: ‘I’ve been lowering my sights, Lewis. I want to get us through the next twenty years without any of us dropping the bomb on each other. I think if we struggle on, day by day, centimetre by centimetre, we can just about do that. I’ve got to get the bomb produced, I’ve got to make the military understand what they can and cannot do with it, I shall have some fights on my hands, inside this place as well as outside, but I believe I can get away with it. Twenty years of peace would give us all a chance.’

He sat up against his pillows with a grin.

‘It won’t be good for my soul, will it?’

‘Why not?’

It was nerve-racking that he thought so much of the future.

‘I like power too much, I’m just discovering that. I shall like it more, when I’ve got my way for the next few years.’

He broke off: ‘No, it won’t be good for my soul, but if I do something useful, if I can win us a breathing space, what the hell does it matter about my soul?’

He had not once inquired about Martin or referred to him, except perhaps (I was not sure) when he spoke of internal enemies.

He made an attempt to ask about my affairs, but, with the compulsion of illness, came back to himself. He said, in a quiet, curiously wistful voice: ‘I once told you I had never had time for much fun. I wonder when I shall.’

A memory, not sharp, came back to me. Luke, younger than now, in the jauntiness of his health, grumbling outside a Barford window.

From his bed he frowned at me.

‘When these people told me I might die,’ he said, ‘I cursed because I was thinking of all the things I hadn’t done. If they happen to be right, which I don’t believe, I tell you, I shall go out thinking of all the fun I’ve wasted. That’s the one thought I can’t bear.’

Just for an instant his courage left him. Once again, just as outside Drawbell’s gate (the memory was sharper now) he was thinking of women, of how he was still longing to possess them, of how he felt cheated because his marriage had hemmed him in. His marriage had been a good one, he loved his children, he was getting near middle age; yet now he was craving for a woman, as though he were a virgin dying with the intolerable thought that he had missed the supreme joy, the joy greater in imagination than any realized love could ever be, as though he were Keats cursing fate because he had not had Fanny Brawne.

In those that I had seen die, the bitterest thought was what they had left undone.

And, as a matter of truth, though it was not always an easy truth to take, I had observed what others had observed before – I could not recall of those who had known more than their share of the erotic life, one who, when the end came, did not think that his time had been tolerably well spent.

Martin was the last man to overplay his hand. The summer came, Sawbridge was still working in the plutonium laboratory, there was nothing new from Captain Smith. From Luke’s ward there came ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory reports; some doctors thought that it was a false alarm. Whoever was right, Martin could count on months in control. The press kept up articles on traitors, and espionage, but Barford was having a respite out of the news.

In July, Martin let us know that the first laboratory extraction of plutonium metal was ready for test. Drawbell issued invitations to the committee, as though he were trying to imitate each detail of the fiasco with the pile. The day was fixed for the 26th July, and Bevill was looking forward to it like a child,

‘I believe tomorrow is going to be what I should call a red-letter day,’ he said earnestly, as soon as he met the scientists at Barford, as though he had invented the phrase. At dinner that night, where there came Drawbell, Martin, Francis Getliffe, Mounteney, Hector Rose, Nora Luke, ten more Barford scientists and committee members, he made a long speech retracing the history of the project from what he called the ‘good old days’, a speech sentimental, nostalgic, full of nursery images, in which with the utmost sincerity he paid tribute to everyone’s good intentions, including those people whom he regarded as twisters and blackguards.

As we were standing about after dinner, Martin touched my arm. He took me to the edge of the crowd and whispered: ‘There’s no need to worry about tomorrow.’

Looking at him, I saw his mouth correct, his eyes secretive and merry. I did not need any explanation. In estrangement, it was still possible to read each other’s feelings; he had just considered mine with a kind of formal courtesy, as he would not have needed to consider a friend’s.

I was not staying with him that night, but he asked me to escape from the party for a quarter of an hour. ‘We went inside the establishment wire, and walked quickly along the sludgy paths.

In an empty room of the hot laboratory, he found me a set of rubber clothes, cloak, cowl, gloves, and goloshes, and put on his own. He took me down a passage marked DANGER. ‘Never mind that,’ said Martin. He unlocked a steel door which gave into a slit of a room, empty except for what looked like a meat-safe. Martin twiddled the combination, opened the panel, and took out a floppy bag made of some yellowish substance, rather smaller than a woman’s shopping basket. As he held the bag, one corner was weighed down, as though by a small heavy object, it might have been a lead pellet.

‘That’s plutonium,’ said Martin.

‘How much?’

‘Not much. I suppose it’s worth a few hundred thousand pounds.’

He looked at the bag with a possessive, and almost sensual glance.

I had seen collectors look like that.

‘Touch it,’ he said.

I put two fingers on the bag and astonishingly was taken into an irrelevant bliss.

Under the bag’s surface, the metal was hot to the touch – and, yes, pushing under memories, I had it, I knew why I was happy. It brought back the moment, the grass and earth hot under my hand, when Martin and Irene told me she was going to have a child; so, like Irene in the Park under the fog-wrapped lights, I had been made a present of a Proustian moment, and the touch of the metal, whose heat might otherwise have seemed sinister, levitated me to the forgotten happiness of a joyous summer night.