The New Men (27 page)

For once, Martin was taken unawares. He was disconcerted to see me, with my fingers on the bag, lost in an absent-minded content.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘Quite,’ I said.

Next day, the demonstration was conducted as though Martin and his staff did not know whether it would work.

At the end, however, Martin would not accept the congratulations, insisting that they were due to Luke, and he took Bevill and the others to Luke’s bedside.

Hector Rose and I followed behind.

‘Are you going with them, Eliot?’ said Rose.

I was surprised by the constraint in his voice.

‘I think we’d better,’ I said.

‘As a matter of fact, I think I’ll just take a stroll round the place,’ he said.

It was so impolite, so unlike him that I did not begin to understand. Although I accompanied him, I could get no hint of the reason. Later I picked it up, and it turned out to be simple, though to me unexpected. Hector Rose happened to feel a morbid horror of cancer; he tried to avoid so much as hearing the name of the disease.

By ourselves, in Drawbell’s office, he was for him relaxed, having extricated himself from an ordeal; he let fall what Bevill would have called one or two straws in the wind, about the future management at Barford. He and Bevill wanted to get it on a business footing: Drawbell was dead out of favour. If they made a change of superintendent, and if Luke were well, it would be difficult to sidetrack him – but none of the officials, and few of the elderly scientists, relished the idea. He had made mistakes: he talked too loud and too much: he was not their man.

Already they trusted Martin more. He was younger, he was not in the Royal Society, to give him the full job was not practical politics; but, if Luke’s health stayed uncertain, was there any device by which they could give Martin an acting command of Barford?

The luck was playing into Martin’s hand. I knew that he was ready, just as he had been ready since that night in the Stratford pub, to make the most of it. Even when he paid his tribute to Luke he had a double motive, he had one eye on his own future.

It was true that he was fair-minded, more so than most men, He would not receive more credit than he had earned. Better than anyone, he could estimate Luke’s share in the project, and he wanted it made clear.

But although what he said of Luke was truthful, he also knew that men required it. Men liked fairness: it was part of the amenities, if in Bevill’s and Rose’s world you wanted your own way.

Now Martin was coming to his last move but one.

To Drawbell’s room, Bevill and he and Drawbell himself returned from the sickbed. Mounteney and Getliffe accompanied them. Martin wanted those two on his side as well as the officials. If the opportunity did not arrive without forcing it, he was ready to wait. In fact, it came when Bevill asked about Luke’s health.

‘Is that poor chap,’ said Bevill, ‘going to get back into harness?’

‘I hope so,’ said Martin. ‘The doctors seem to think so.’

‘We just don’t know,’ said Drawbell

‘He may never come back, you mean?’ said Bevill.

‘I believe he will,’ said Martin, once more speaking out deliberately on Luke’s behalf.

‘Well,’ said Bevill to Drawbell, ‘I suppose Eliot will carry on?’

‘He’s been doing it for months,’ said Drawbell. ‘I always tell my team no one is indispensable. If any of you go there’s always a better man behind you!’

‘I suppose you can carry on, Eliot, my lad?’ said Bevill to Martin in a jollying tone.

At last Martin saw his opening.

Instead of giving a junior’s yes, he stared down at his hand, and then, after a pause, suddenly looked straight at Bevill with sharp, frowning eyes.

‘There is a difficulty,’ he said. ‘I don’t know whether this is the time to raise it.’

Drawbell bobbed and smiled. Now that the young man had grown up, he was having to struggle for his say.

‘I don’t see the difficulty,’ said Bevill. ‘You’ve been doing splendidly, why, you’ve been delivering the goods.’

‘It would ease my mind,’ said Martin, ‘if I could explain a little what I mean.’

Bevill said, ‘That’s what we’re here for.’

Martin said: ‘Well, sir, anyone who is asked to take responsibility for this project is taking responsibility for a good deal more. I think it may be unreasonable to ask him, if he can’t persuade his colleagues that we’re shutting our eyes to trouble.’

Bevill said: ‘The water is getting a bit deep for me.’

Martin asked a question: ‘Does anyone believe we can leave the Sawbridge question where it is?’

‘I see,’ said Bevill.

In fact, the old man had seen minutes before. He was playing stupid to help Martin on.

‘I am sorry to press this,’ said Martin, ‘but I couldn’t let myself be responsible for another Sawbridge.’

‘God forbid,’ said Bevill.

‘Is there any evidence of another?’ said Getliffe.

‘None that I know of,’ said Martin. He was speaking as though determined not to overstate his case. ‘But if we can’t touch this man, it seems to me not impossible that we should have someone follow suit before we’re through.’

‘It’s not impossible.’ Francis Getliffe had to give him the point.

‘It’s not exactly our fault that we haven’t touched your present colleague,’ said Rose.

‘I have a view on that,’ said Martin quietly.

‘We want to hear,’ said Bevill, still keeping the court for Martin.

‘Everything I say here is privileged?’

‘Within these four walls,’ the old man replied.

‘I think there’s a chance that Sawbridge can be broken down,’ said Martin.

‘Captain Hook has tried long enough.’

‘That’s true,’ said Martin, ‘but I think there’s a chance.’

‘How do you see it happening?’

‘It could only be done by someone who knows him.’

‘Who?’

‘I’m ready to try,’ said Martin.

Martin, in the same tone, went on to state his terms. If Sawbridge stayed at large in the project, it was not reasonable to ask Martin, feeling as he did, to take the responsibility. If he were to take it, he needed sanction to join Captain Smith and try to settle ‘the Sawbridge question’ for good and all.

Bevill was enthusiastically in favour; Rose thought it a fair proposal. ‘We want two things,’ said Rose. ‘The first is safety, and the second is as little publicity as we can humanly manage. We should be eternally grateful, my dear Eliot,’ (he was speaking to Martin) ‘if only you could keep us out of the papers.’

‘That won’t be possible,’ said Martin.

‘You mean, there’ll be another trial?’ said Getliffe.

‘It’s necessary,’ said Martin.

Martin had counted on support front Bevill and Rose; he had also set himself to get acquiescence from the scientists. Suddenly he got more than acquiescence, he got wholehearted support where one would have looked for it last. It came from Mounteney. It happened that Mounteney possessed, as well as his scientific ideals, a passionate sense of a man’s pledged word. He forgot about national secrecy (which he loathed) and communism (which in principle he approved of) in his horror that a man like Sawbridge could sign the undertaking of secrecy and then break it. In his pure unpadded integrity Mounteney saw nothing but the monstrosity of breaking one’s oath, and, like Thomas Bevill whom he resembled in no other conceivable fashion, he cried out: ‘I should shoot them! The sooner we shoot them the better!’

In that instant I understood at last the mystery of Mounteney’s surrender before the bomb was dropped, the reason his protest fizzled out.

It was Francis Getliffe who took longest to come round.

‘I should have thought it was enough,’ he said, ‘for you to give Smith all the information you can. I don’t see why you should get involved further than that.’

‘I’m afraid that I must,’ said Martin patiently.

‘There are a great many disadvantages, and no advantages to put against them, in scientists becoming mixed up in police work, even now.’

‘From a long-term view, I think that’s right,’ said Martin.

‘Good work,’ said Francis Getliffe.

‘But,’ said Martin, ‘there are times when one can’t think of the long term, and I suggest this is one.’

‘Why?’

‘Because otherwise no one will make this man confess.’

‘It isn’t proved that you can make the difference.’

‘No,’ Martin replied. ‘I may fail. But I suggest that is not a reason for stopping me.’

At last Francis shook his head, unwittingly assenting, and said: ‘We’ve gone so far, someone was bound to go the whole distance.’ He, who carried so much authority, sounded for once indecisive: as though the things he and others had been forced to do had prepared the way for younger, harder men.

Then Martin put in his last word that afternoon: ‘I think, before we settle it, that I ought to mention Luke and I have not been in complete agreement on this problem.’

‘That’s appreciated,’ said Hector Rose.

Martin spoke as fairly, as firmly, as when he had been giving the credit to Luke.

‘I proposed easing Sawbridge out last summer,’ he remarked. ‘I felt sufficiently strongly about it to put it on the file.’

‘I take it,’ asked Rose, ‘that Luke resisted?’

‘It’s no use crying over spilt milk,’ said Bevill. ‘Now you put us straight.

The day after Martin’s piece of persuasion I did what, at any previous time, I should not have thought twice about. Now I did it deliberately. It was a little thing: I invited Kurt Puchwein to dinner.

As a result, I was snubbed. I received by return a letter in Puchwein’s flowing Teutonic script:

‘My friend, that is what I should have called you when Roy Calvert brought us together ten years ago. I realize that in volunteering to be seen with me again you were taking a risk: I am unwilling to be the source of risk to anyone while there is a shred of friendship left. In the life that you and your colleagues are now leading, it is too dangerous to have friends.’

The letter ended:

‘You can do one last thing for me which I hope is neither dangerous for yourself, nor, like your invitation, misplaced charity. Please, if you should see Hanna, put in a word for me. The divorce is going through, but there is still time for her to come back.’

Within a few hours Hanna herself rang up, as though by a complete coincidence, for so far as I knew she had not been near her husband for months. It was the same message as at Barford on New Year’s Day – could she speak to me urgently? I hesitated; caution, suspiciousness, nagged at me – and resentment of my brother. I had to tell myself that, if I could not afford to behave openly, few men could.

In my new flat Hanna sat on the sofa, the sun, on the summer evening still high over Hyde Park, falling across her but leaving her from the shoulders up in shadow. Dazzled, I could still see her eyes snapping, as angrily she asked me: ‘Won’t you stop Martin doing this beastly job?’

I would not begin on those terms.

‘It’s shabby! It’s rotten!’ Her face was crumbled with rage.

‘Look, Hanna,’ I said, ‘you’d better tell me how it affects you.’

‘You ought to stop him out of decency.’

Without replying, I asked about a rumour which I had picked up at Barford: for years Hanna’s name had been linked with that of Rudd, Martin’s first chief. Martin, who knew him well, was sure that she had picked wrong. She was looking for someone to master her; she thought she had found it in Rudd, who to his subordinates was a bully; yet with a woman he would be dependent. I asked, did she intend to marry him?

‘Yes,’ said Hanna.

‘I was afraid so,’ I said.

‘You have never liked him.’

‘That isn’t true.’

‘Martin has never forgiven him.’

‘I wouldn’t mind about that,’ I said, ‘if he were right for you.’

‘Why isn’t he right for me?’

‘You still think you’d like some support?’

‘Oh, God, yes!’

‘You had to bolster up Kurt for years, and now you’re going to do the same again.’

‘Somehow I can make it work,’ she said, with an obstinate toss of her head.

She was set on it: it was useless, and unkind, to say more.

‘That is,’ she said, ‘if Martin will let me marry him without doing him harm.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that it may be fatal to anyone at Barford to have a wife with my particular record.’

She seemed to be trying to say: ‘I want this man. It’s my last chance. Let me have him.’ But she was extraordinarily inhibited about speaking from the heart. Both she and Irene, whom the wives at Barford envied for their sophistication, could have taken lessons from a good many of those wives in the direct emotional appeal. Anger, Hanna could express without self-consciousness, but not much else.

I asked if Rudd knew of her political past. Yes, she said. I told her (it was the only reassurance I could give her) that I had not heard her name in any discussion at Barford.

‘Whose names have you heard?’

I told her no more than she already knew.

‘Why don’t you drag Martin out of the whole wretched business?’

I did not reply.

‘I suppose he has decided that persecution is a paying line.’

Again I did not reply.

‘If you will forgive a Jew for saying so,’ she said with a bitter grin, ‘it seems rather like St Paul going in the opposite direction.’

She went on: ‘Does Martin know that he has been converted the wrong way round?’

Just then the rays of the sun, which had declined to the tops of the trees, began streaming into her eyes, and I drew the curtains across the furthest window. As I glanced at her, her face was open and bleached, as many faces are in anger, grief, pain.

She cried: ‘Is there no way of shifting him?’

Then she said: ‘Do you know, Lewis, I could have had him once.’

It might be true, I was thinking. When he had been at his unhappiest over Irene, in the first year at Barford – then perhaps Hanna could have taken him away. She threw back her neat small head, with a look that seemed most of all
surprised
. She said something more; she had considered him for herself; but turned him down because she had not thought him strong enough. Intelligent but lacking insight, with a strong will that had so long searched for a stronger, she had never been able to help underrating the men she met, especially those of whom she got fond. It came to her with consternation, almost with shame, that, now her will had come up in earnest against Martin’s, she, who in the past had thought him pliable, did not stand a chance. She was outraged by his behaviour, and yet in her anger and surprise she wished that when they first met she had seen him with these fresh eyes.