The New Men (32 page)

‘Fancy the old thing pulling in a regular salary at last,’ she said.

‘Both of them have done pretty well for themselves,’ I replied.

She looked puzzled. I had to explain that ‘both of them’ meant Hankins and Martin, the two men who had meant most to her. They were coming to the top of their professions at the same time.

‘The top?’ she said.

‘The head of Barford,’ I replied.

‘Oh.’ She fixed me with a glance which seemed malicious, regretful, sympathetic.

‘And as for Hankins,’ I said, ‘so far as there is anything left of literary London, this job will put him in the middle of it.’

‘He’ll dote on that!’ she cried. Quietly she added: ‘And so should I.’

She spoke straight out: ‘It would suit me better than anything I have ever had with Martin, or anything that I could ever have.’

Once more she gave me a glance edged with fellow-feeling. Without explanation, with her expression malicious and ominous, she went on: ‘I’m not cut out for it. I can see Martin going on patiently and getting a bit drier every year. What sort of life do you think that means for me?’

We looked at each other, without speaking for some moments. I said: ‘But you’re going to live it, aren’t you?’

‘You don’t think I’m going off with E H?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I could stop his marriage. I could have everything I wanted ten years ago. Why shouldn’t I now?’

‘You won’t,’ I said.

‘You’re positive?’ Suddenly she slumped down, her hand fell on her breast, her tone no longer brittle, but flat, lazily flat, as she said: ‘You’re right.’

She went on: ‘I never knew where I was with E H. I never even knew if he needed me. While Martin doesn’t need me – he could get on without me or anyone else, but he wants me! He always has! I never had much faith that anyone would, until he came along.’

So at last, under the palm trees of that aseptic lounge, preoccupied by the suspicion, which she had provoked, of a crucial turn in Martin’s life, I was given a glimpse of what bound Irene to him. In the past I had speculated often. Why should she, in the ultimate run, be anchored to Martin instead of Hankins? I had looked for qualities in Martin which could make some women love him, rather than another man. They were present, but they did not count.

It was true that Martin was the stronger: it was true also that Martin was, if these cant terms mean anything, the more masculine. Hankins was one of those men, and they are not uncommon, who invest much emotion in the pursuit of women without having the nature for it; he thought he was searching for the body’s rapture, but his profoundest need was something less direct, the ambience of love, its meshes of unhappiness, its unfulfilled dreams, its tears for the past and its images of desire. Many women found it too delicate, but not Irene.

With her, there was a hypnotic charm about his capacity for feeling; he could feel as she did, he had the power to enter into, as all important, each emotion of love. It was that which she first loved in him, and which held her fascinated for years, her whom other women obtusely thought was searching only for a partner in bed. Against that emotional versatility Martin could not compete. Yet never once, if she had been faced with the choice, would she have left Martin.

The real reason which delivered her to Martin lay not in him, but in herself.

She had just told it to me, so simply that it was difficult to believe. In fact, Irene had suffered all her life from a diffidence which seemed at a first glance, the last one would expect in her. In her childhood, even more totally than with other girls, love and marriage filled her daydreams: those daydreams had not left her alone all her life; yet they had never been accompanied by the certainty of the fibres, that she had it in her to draw the love she coveted. More than most she studied herself in the looking-glass, but not with narcissistic pleasure; only with a mixture of contemptuous liking and nervousness that such a face, such a body, might never bring what she craved.

In the hotel lounge, hearing the revolving doors swing round, I thought of another woman so different from Irene that any resemblance seemed like a joke. Nora Luke, dowdy, professionally striving, in the home a scolding faithful housewife – Irene, once notorious for her love affairs, the most reckless of women – yet in secret they had found life difficult in the same manner. At the root of their nature they were sisters.

Irene had spoken simply, and maybe it was as simple as she said. Hankins, so tentative and undecided himself, she had never had the confidence to reach for; while Martin, all else forgotten, was the one man who wanted enough to stay with her at any cost, to give the assurance, so far as she was capable of accepting it, that he would stay steady, that he would be there to make her feel that she was as lovable as, her nerves twitching under the adventuress’ skin, she had never since she was a child been able to believe,

That night, she had sent Hankins away. It was only after he had gone that I realized this was the end between them, that under the lamps of Portman Square they had spoken the last words. Hankins pushing round the door might have been leaving her for half an hour; in fact, they would not meet again: it was curious that he, at any other time so eloquent, had gone in silence.

Irene smiled at me, as though, sitting before her looking-glass, she was putting on her dashing face.

‘He will have me on his hands,’ she said. She was speaking of Martin.

She added: ‘I shall be a drag on him in this new game.’

She was keeping me in the dark, she was obscurely triumphant.

‘What are you telling me?’ I asked.

‘You knew, of course you knew, about this offer that Martin had last week?’

I said yes.

‘You knew he expected it before it came?’

‘He must have expected it for weeks.’

‘I guessed as much.’

She went on, not knowing the break between Martin and me, but knowing something I did not. For days (it must have been during the first sittings of the Committee, and he might have had inside information, probably from Mounteney) he was excited that the job was coming his way. She said that he was lively, active, restless with high spirits; she remembered how he had talked to his son one evening, talked to the three-year-old-boy as though they were both adults and he was letting himself boast.

‘Well, Lewis,’ Martin had said to the child, ‘now I’m going further than anyone in the family’s ever gone. It will give you a good start. You’ll be able to build on it, won’t you?’

In the next few days Irene felt a change. She could not ask him; with her, in his own home, he let his moods run more than I had seen him, but she dared not to try to penetrate them. It was still several days before the offer was made. For the only time she could remember, Martin stayed away from the laboratory without a reason. The weather had turned foggy; he sat silent by the fire. He did not ask her advice, but occasionally spoke of the advantages of being the Barford superintendent, of the entertaining she could do there. Occasionally also he spoke of some disadvantages, as though laughing them off.

‘He wouldn’t talk about them,’ Irene flared out. ‘But I didn’t need him to. I hadn’t forgotten the letter he didn’t send.’

One foggy afternoon, he suddenly said: ‘The head of Barford is just as much part of the machine as any of the others.’

He went on: ‘If I take the job, I shan’t have the trouble of thinking for myself again.’

Irene said to me, simply and quietly: ‘Then I knew that he would never take it.’

That had happened the previous Saturday, three days before the offer came. I asked how he had behaved when he actually had the offer in his hand.

‘He was shaken,’ said Irene. ‘He was terribly shaken.’

With the fog outside the windows, he had sat by the fire so absent that he let it go out. Then she made it up, and I imagined the firelight reflected into the room from the fog-backed window. Martin only roused himself from that paralysis of the nerves to play again with the little boy – the two of them under the window, young Lewis shouting, Martin patiently rolling a ball, and still silent.

Both Irene and I, through our different kinds of knowledge of him, took it for granted that he would not alter his resolve.

‘I don’t pretend to understand it,’ she said to me. ‘Do you?’

I shook my head, and, as lost and open as she was, I asked: ‘What do you think he intends to do?’

‘I don’t think, I know,’ she replied.

During the past weeks, so as to be ready, he had been making inquiries, unknown to me, of our college. If he decided to give up his work at Barford and return to pure science, could they find a niche for him?

‘It’ll be funny for him, not having any power,’ she said.

She added: ‘He’s going into dimness, isn’t he? He won’t make much of a go of it?’

She went on asking, what were his chances in pure science? Would he do enough to console himself?

‘They all say he hasn’t got quite the talent,’ I replied. He would publish a few respectable papers, he would not get into the Royal Society. For a man as realistic as Martin, it would be failure.

‘He’s got a real talent for his present job,’ I said.

‘It’ll be difficult for him to lead a dim life,’ she said, ‘having had a taste of something different.’

She said it in a matter-of–fact tone, without any sign of tenderness.

I broke out: ‘And I suppose you’re glad about it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You wanted him to make his protest. I suppose this is the next best thing?’

Irene was flushing down the neckline of her dress. With difficult honesty she turned her eyes away, and said: ‘No. I’m not cut out for this.’

‘Why aren’t you?’

‘I’m a sprinter. I could have stood a major row, it would have been something to live through. I should have been more use to him than any of you.’

I said: ‘I believe you would.’

She flashed out: ‘It isn’t often you pay me a compliment.’

‘It was meant,’ I said.

‘But you mustn’t give me too much credit. I’m not high-minded. I shouldn’t have worried if Martin had become the boss at Barford. I should have enjoyed the flah-flah.’

Then she asked: ‘Why ever is he doing it? I wish you’d tell me that.’

I was confused.

‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘he’s just trying to be a good man?’

‘I should like to believe it,’ I said.

‘You think he’s got another motive, do you?’

‘We usually have.’

To my astonishment, she burst out laughing, with her high-pitched yelps of glee.

‘I believe you think,’ she cried, ‘that he’s doing it to take it out of me. Just to show me that things have changed since he married me, and that he holds the whip hand now.’

It had not even crossed my mind.

‘You’re wrong!’ she shouted. ‘If he’s reacting against anyone, it isn’t me!’

Her eyes glinted triumphant, good-natured, malicious at my expense. She said: ‘You won’t be able to influence him now, will you?’

Martin did not give his answer to Bevill until the last day of his period of grace. He called in my office first, just as he used to – but we were both constrained, On the window the frost, coming early that winter, masked the buses in Whitehall. Martin swept a pane with his sleeve, saying that after he had had the interview with Bevill and Rose, he would like to talk to me.

He assumed that I knew what his answer was going to be. When he actually delivered it, he spent (so I learned later) much skill in saving his supporters’ credit. He did not once suggest a moral choice; he just used the pretext that, unless he did some real science soon, he never would; in which case his usefulness would be finished in ten years.

The scientists took the explanation at its face value. It was only Bevill who smelt that there was something wrong. In his experience men did not turn down good jobs unless by doing so they got a better. So he fell back on what was always his last resource, and put the blame on to Martin’s wife.

Bevill and Rose had been too long at their craft not to recognize the inevitable; that morning, while Martin was on his way back to my office, they had already decided that now, well or ill, wild man or not, it had to be Luke. Rose’s sense of justice made him insist that they could not even attempt to put Luke in leading strings, as they had Martin. Thus it was to be Luke in full power.

Meanwhile Martin had returned to my room. His gestures were relaxed, as though to light a cigarette were a pleasure to be taken slowly; yet we could not speak to each other with ease. With anyone else, I felt, he would be smiling with jubilation, with a trace of sadness too.

With me, he could not be so natural.

‘That’s settled,’ he said.

He asked if he could waste the rest of the afternoon for me and I said: ‘Of course.’ I added, meaninglessly ‘Can you spare the time?’

‘Very soon,’ said Martin, with a sarcastic grin, ‘I shall have plenty of time.’

For many minutes we sat there, looking down over Whitehall, saying nothing to the point, often falling into silence. It was not until we took a walk in the icy park that Martin made his first effort.

‘I’m happy about this,’ he said, as we trod along the path where, on the verges, each blade of grass stood out separated by the frost.

He added: ‘It’s a change from the last time.’

He meant the last time we had walked there, the day after the bomb had dropped. It had been sixteen mouths before. The leaves had been thick then; now we looked past the bare trees, into the mist fuming above the leaden water.

‘Since then,’ said Martin, ‘I haven’t found a place to stand.’

He spoke slowly, as though with the phrase he recalled that afternoon when, in the Dolphin Square bathroom, he saw the scientific way ahead.

He went on: ‘Up till now.’

In return I made my effort.

‘I hope,’ I said, ‘that I haven’t made it harder for you to find it.’

There seemed a long interval before Martin replied. Our steps rang in the frost. We were both evasive, reticent men, who used irony to cheat out of its importance the moment in which we breathed: each of us that afternoon had set ourselves to speak without easing the moment away. That was why we stumbled so.