The New Men (33 page)

‘You can see too much in personal causes,’ he said.

‘They exist,’ I said.

‘Without them,’ said Martin, ‘I
think
I should have done the same.’

‘I should like to be sure,’ I said.

‘Motives aren’t as important to me as they are to you,’ he said. ‘I’m more concerned with what one does.’

‘You have done some contradictory things,’ I said,

‘I can tell you this. That night we went to Pratt’s – it hasn’t affected me one way or the other. As far as I can answer for myself at all, I tell you that.’

He groped less when he spoke of his Sawbridge policy. He did not have to stumble; there we understood each other. We both knew the temptations of action, and how even clear-sighted men did not inquire what their left hand was doing. It was nonsense to think that Martin had been dissimulating all the time and that he had always intended to retire. Men were not clever enough to dissimulate for long.

He had, of course, been after the top job. Until quite recently he consciously intended to take it. For months he had been acting, as many men were acting on both sides of the great divide, out of the cynicism of self-preservation. Many men, delicate in their personal relations, had come to behave, and even to think, with that kind of cynicism, even though we concealed it from ourselves.

Some of us have been too delicate about personal relations,’ said Martin, back in my office, sitting by the window in the murky afternoon. ‘People matter; relations between them don’t matter much.’

I stood looking out of the window, where the lights scintillated under a sky ochreous and full of snow,

‘Lewis!’ His voice was quiet: it was rare, when we were alone, for us to use each other’s name.

‘That night after old Bevill left you said some true things,’ he said.

‘You also,’ I said.

‘I am colder hearted than you are. I care much less for the people round me.’

‘Why are you saying this?’

‘If it weren’t so, I couldn’t have made this choice.’

For any of us who had been concerned with the bomb, he repeated Luke’s earlier comment, there was no clear-cut way out. Unless you were a Sawbridge. For the rest of us, said Martin, there were just two conceivable ways. One was the way he had just taken: the other, to struggle on, as Luke was doing, and take our shame of what had been done and what might still be done, and hope that we might come out at the end of the tunnel. Being well meaning all the time, and thinking of nothing worse than our own safety.

‘For a warm-hearted man who’s affected by the people round him,’ said Martin, ‘perhaps it’s the only way. It’s the way you’re going, though you’re more far-sighted than they are.’

‘It wouldn’t be easy for me,’ I said after a pause, ‘to break right away.’

‘If you do choose their way,’ he said with sudden energy, ‘I’ve shown you how to do it.’

He meant that you could not compromise. If you accepted the bomb, the burnings alive, the secrets, the fighting point of power, you must take the consequences. You must face Sawbridge with an equal will. You were living in a power equilibrium, and you must not pretend; the relics of liberal humanism had no place there.

‘I completely disagree,’ I said.

‘You can’t find a compromise. But your personal ties keep you making them,’ said Martin. ‘That’s why you leave it to worse men to take the other way.’ He went on: ‘Sometimes it’s only the cold who can be useful.’

It had taken him a long time to be positive about what he must do: but now he spoke as though he had it in the palm of his hand. Previously he had wondered about leaving science altogether. He had contemplated ‘doing a Charles March’ (a friend of mine who, years before, had given up society and career in order to become a doctor) – but Martin decided that for him it was too ‘artificial’, too much out of his line. For him, there was only one course, to go back to pure science.

Most unusually for him, he showed a flicker of bravado.

‘I shall be just a little better than those pundits say,’ he said.

He had not many illusions, though perhaps, just as he contrived to see Irene both with realistic observation and also surrounded with a romantic aura, he could still feel, in the depth of his heart, a tremor of the magic that science had once evoked there.

He told me in so many words that he had not lost faith that science – though maybe not in his lifetime – would turn out for good. From some, after his history, it would have sounded a piece of facile scientists’ optimism. From him it had a different note. For to Martin it was jet-clear that, despite its emollients and its joys, individual life was tragic: a man was ineluctably alone, and it was a short way to the grave. But, believing that with stoical acceptance, Martin saw no reason why social life should also be tragic: social life lay within one’s power, as human loneliness and death did not, and it was the most contemptible of the false-profound to confuse the two.

‘As long as the worst things don’t happen–’ said Martin. ‘That’s why some of us must get clear of office and friends and anything that ties our hands.’

‘Is that what you thought of most?’

‘I hope they’ll leave me alone,’ he said. ‘But there may come a time when people like me have to make a nuisance of themselves.’

He went on: ‘I’m the last man for the job. It may be dangerous and I’m not cut out for that.’

It might not be necessary, I said. In my view, the danger was overrated and the betting was against it.

‘All the better,’ said Martin. ‘All the more reason for having a few sensible men who aren’t committed.’

He meant, good could happen as well as evil; men might run into a little luck; if we were too much hypnotized by the violence we had lived through, if each man of good will was mobilized, paid and silenced, we might let the luck slip.

That, may be the best reason of all for getting outside the machine,’ said Martin. ‘If a few of us are waiting for the chance, we might do a little good.’

He turned in his chair. In the tenebrous afternoon, the room had gone dark outside the zone of the desk light; and past the window, flakes of snow were dawdling down on to the Whitehall pavement.

He was looking at me. Suddenly, with no explanation necessary between us, he said: ‘You know, I shall never have the success you wanted me to have.’ Again we were speaking without ease, as though each word had to be searched for.

‘If I had not wanted it for you, would you have liked it more?’

‘I said before, you can see too much in personal causes.’

‘Have they made it harder for you?’

‘That doesn’t matter,’ he replied. ‘In the end, I should have done what I am doing now.’

Our intimacy had not returned, but we were speaking of ourselves more deeply than we had done before.

That afternoon, at last, Martin was answerable to no one. Speaking of his future, he had lost the final residue of a younger brother’s tone, and took on that of equal to equal, contemporary to contemporary, self-made to self-made.

Martin left Barford at the end of the year: Luke became Chief Superintendent the following May. A few weeks later, I went down to do some business with him on my way to Cambridge, where Martin had invited me to a college feast.

The Drawbells had not yet finished moving house, although Drawbell’s own new appointment had been announced. It was a come down. Perhaps that was why, more bullyingly even than in the past, he insisted that I should stay my night at Barford with them, not with the Lukes. I could not say no: in his decline he was hard to resist, partly because his personality was one of those that swell, become more menacing, the more he saw his expectations fade away.

He and his wife had waited for each post the preceding November, looking for a letter about the New Year’s honours list; and they were doing it again before the birthday list. There was nothing for them. They still pretended to expect it. At breakfast, in a room with covers on some of the chairs, ready to move that week, Drawbell made believe to threaten me, fixing me with his sound eye.

‘My patience is exhausted,’ he said, as though making a public speech – but it was the kind of joke which is not a joke. ‘It’s high time the Government did its duty.’

He may have suspected that I knew his chances. I did. But, for the last time with Drawbell, I had to follow his lead, do my best to be hearty and say nothing.

For his chances were nil. I had heard Hector Rose rule him out. It was the only time I had known Rose be, by his own standards, less than just. By Rose’s standards, Drawbell had done enough for a knighthood: Barford had ‘made its contribution’, as Rose said, and Drawbell had been in charge for five years. According to the rules, the top man got the top decoration; but for once Rose would not have it so. He asked cold questions about who had done the work; with the methodicalness of a recording angel, he put down to Drawbell’s credit the occasions when he had backed the right horse – and then turned to the other side of the sheet. The final account, in Rose’s mind, did not add up to a knighthood.

At the breakfast table, Drawbell, still ignorant of that decision, hoping against hope, put on his jocular act, and threatened me. His wife regarded me, monumental, impassive; she was looking forward to getting Mr Thomas Bevill down to the new establishment. Between her and her husband, I had never seen more than a thread of that friendliness-cum-dislike which comes in lifelong marriages that are wrong at the core: yet she remained his loyal and heavy-footed ally. She was no more defeated than he was. And when finally his last hope wilted, they would, without knowing it, be supports to each other.

That morning, Drawbell gave just one open sign of recognition that he was on the way down. He refused to come with me to his old office, which Luke was already occupying. He could not face the sight of someone who had passed him, who had – in Drawbell’s eyes and the world’s – arrived.

Yet Luke himself would have had his doubts, I thought, sitting beside his desk, behind which, in his shirtsleeves, he tilted back in his chair – in that room where he had made his first proposal about the pile. He would have had his doubts about his arrival, if ever he had spared time to consider it, which – as he remained a humble and an immediate man – he was most unlikely to.

He knew that he would not now leave much of a scientific memorial behind him. You could not do real scientific work and become a ‘stuffed shirt’, as he used to argue rudely in the past. Ironically, he, so richly endowed for the pure scientific life, had, unlike Martin, put it behind him. There were times when he felt his greatest gift was rusting. His corpus of work would not stand a chance of competing with Mounteney’s.

Nevertheless, Luke was enjoying himself. His chair tilted back against the wall, he gave the answer I had come for. Gave it with the crispness of one, who in reveries, had imagined himself as a tycoon. Once or twice he shot a response out of the side of his mouth.

‘Curtains,’ he said once, indicating that the discussion was at an end.

‘Come off it, Walter,’ I said.

Luke looked startled. As always, he had got into the skin of his part. Then he gave a huge cracked grin.

I had come to clear up one or two administrative tangles, which in Martin’s time would have been dealt with at Barford, and we were talking of getting Luke a second in command to tidy up after him. Luke was determined to appoint Rudd, who had, as soon as Drawbell was superseded, transferred his devotion to the new boss.

‘He’s a snurge,’ said Luke. ‘But he can be a very useful snurge.’

Was he the man that Luke wanted? In my view, Luke needed someone to stand up to him.

‘No,’ said Luke. ‘I can make something of him. I can make a difference to that chap.’

Already, I thought, Luke was showing just a trace of how power corrodes. As we walked round the establishment, in the drizzling rain, I teased him, bringing up against him his old ribald curses at ‘stuffed shirts’.

‘If ever you think I’m becoming one, Lewis,’ said Luke, ‘you come and kick my behind.’

He was limping as he walked. His knee was still giving him pain, and at the back of his mind there was the ache of not knowing whether he had recovered. Nevertheless, limping, grey at the temples, not disguising his fear of whether his life was going to be cut short, he seemed physically to expand as he took me into bay after bay of the new buildings. By this time they stretched for many acres on both sides of the river: in and out of the rain we dodged, as he took me to see the new piles being built, where the floors were busy with scientists and artisans. Then he took me to the two piles already working, working in the humanless space. The building looked less crude now; above was a large chimney, and there hummed the faint noise of fans. This had become Luke’s empire.

Like any sentient man, he had had his hesitations about this project (for my benefit, he was reckoning up, as we stood beside the working pile, just how many such machines existed in the world). He had given his reasons why he went on with it, and why he believed all might turn out well. But now he had shut both doubts and justifications within him. He was not one of those who can work and at the same time remain detached about whether or not they are doing good. This was Luke’s empire, and as he looked over it he thought of nothing but how best to make it run.

‘That evening, in Martin’s rooms in Cambridge, which by a touch of college sentiment were those I had lived in before the war, I described that talk with Luke. Martin and I were alone, and there was an hour before dinner; only the first fringe of rain had reached Cambridge, and the sun was shining, after a shower which filled the room with a smell of wisteria from the court beneath.

There, in the high room, which the sunlight did not reach, Martin questioned me about Luke: how was his régime turning out? How were the latest plans working? For Martin, although he had changed his life, did not pretend that he could will away his interest, and liked to talk of the place where he had had an influence which would not come to him again.