The New Men (4 page)

I was taken off guard.

‘Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, said Luke. ‘We know all about
that
.’

Martin was smiling, as Luke began to talk to him. It was clear that Martin, though he was discreet, knew enough to horrify the Minister; as for Luke, he knew as much as anyone had heard.

For anyone used to Bevill’s precautions, this was startling to listen to. In terms of sense, it should not have been such a surprise. Word was going round among nuclear physicists, and Luke, young as he was, was one of the best of them. He had already been consulted on a scientific point; he could guess the rest.

I had to accept it. There was also an advantage in speaking in front of Martin; it might be the most natural way to draw him in.

At that moment, he was listening to Luke with a tucked-in, sarcastic smile, as though he were half-admiring Luke’s gifts, half-amused by him as a man.

‘Well,’ I said to Luke, ‘as you know so much, you probably know what I’ve been told to ask.’

‘I hadn’t heard anything,’ he replied, ‘but they must be after me.’

‘Would you be ready to go?’

Luke did not answer, but said: ‘Who else have they got?’

For the first time that afternoon, I was able to tell him something. The Superintendent, Drawbell, the engineering heads –

‘Good God alive,’ Luke interrupted, ‘Lewis,
who are these uncles
?’

A list of names of refugees – and then I mentioned Arthur Mounteney.

‘I’m glad they’ve got hold of one scientist, anyway,’ said Luke. ‘He did some nice work once. He’s just about finished, of course.’

‘Do you feel like going in?’ I asked.

Luke would not reply.

‘Why don’t they get hold of Martin?’ he said. ‘He’s wasted where he is.’

‘They’re not likely to ask for me,’ said Martin.

‘Your name keeps cropping up,’ I said to Luke.

Usually, when I had seen men offered jobs, they had decided within three minutes, even though they concealed it from themselves, even though they managed to prolong the pleasure of deciding. Just for once, it was not so.

‘It’s all very well,’ said Luke. ‘I just don’t know where I can be most use.’ He was not used to hesitating; he did not like it; he tried to explain himself. If he stayed where he was, he could promise us a ‘bit of hardware’ in eighteen months. Whereas, if he joined this ‘new party’ there was no guarantee that anything would happen for years.

There was nothing exaggerated in Luke’s tone just then. I was used to the rowdiness with which he judged his colleagues, especially his seniors; it was the same with most of the rising scientists; they had none of the convention of politeness that bureaucrats like Sir Hector Rose were trained to, and often Rose and his friends disliked them accordingly. Listening to Luke that afternoon, no one would have thought, for instance, that the poor old derelict Mounteney was in fact a Nobel prizewinner aged about forty. But on his own value Luke was neither boastful nor modest. He was a good scientist; good scientists counted in the war, and he was not going to see himself wasted. He had lost that tincture of the absurd which had made Martin smile. He spoke without nonsense, with the directness of a man who knows what he can and cannot do.

‘I wish some of you wise old men would settle it for me,’ he said to me.

I shook my head. I had put Bevill’s request, but that was as far as I felt justified in going. For what my judgement of the war was worth, I thought on balance that Luke should stay where he was.

He could not make up his mind. As the three of us walked across the Park towards my flat in Dolphin Square, he fell first into a spell of abstraction and then broke out suddenly into a kind of argument with himself, telling us of a new device in what we then called RDF and were later to call Radar. The evening was bright. A cool wind blew from the east, bringing the rubble dust to our nostrils, although it was some days since the last raid. Under our feet the grass was dust – greyed and dry. I was worried about the war that evening; I could see no end to it; it was a comfort to be with those two, in their different fashions steady-hearted and robust.

On the way home, and all the evening, Martin kept putting questions to Luke, steering him back to nuclear fission. I could feel, though, that he was waiting for Luke to leave. He had something to say to me in private

At last we took Luke to the bus stop, and Martin and I turned back towards St George’s Square. The full moon shone down on the lightless blind-faced streets, and the shadows were dark indigo. Flecks of cloud, as though scanning the short syllables in a line of verse, stood against the impenetrable sky. Under the moon, the roofs of Pimlico shone blue as steel. The wind had fallen. It was a silent, beautiful wartime night.

‘By the way,’ said Martin, with constraint in his voice.

‘Yes?’

‘I’d be grateful if you could get me in to this project somehow.’

I had never known him ask favour of this kind before. He had not once come to me for official help, either at Cambridge or since. Now he was driven – scruple, pride, made his voice stiff, but he was driven.

‘I was going to suggest it,’ I said. ‘Of course, I’ll–’

‘I really would be grateful.’

My manoeuvre had come off; but as he spoke I felt no pleasure. I had taken it on myself to interfere; from now on I should have some responsibility for what happened to him.

Now the trigger had been touched, he was intent on going: why it meant so much, I could not tell, His career? – something of that, perhaps, but he was not reckoning the chances that night. Concern about his wife? – he would not volunteer anything. No: simple though the explanation might seem for a man like Martin, it was the science itself that drew him. Though he might have no great talent, nuclear physics had obsessed him since he was a boy. He did not know, that night, what he could add at Barford; he only knew that he wanted to be there.

He admitted as much; but he had more practical matters to deal with. Having swallowed his pride, he did not intend to prostrate himself for nothing.

‘You’re sure that you can get me in? I should have thought the first move was to persuade someone else to suggest me. Walter Luke would do…’ Could I write to Luke that night? Could I, as an insurance, remind Mounteney that Martin and I were brothers?

It was late before we went to bed; by that time Martin had written out an aide memoire of the people I was to see, write to, and telephone next day.

MARTIN’S transfer went through smoothly, and he had begun work at Barford by June. With Luke, it took months longer.

In November I paid them an official visit. The Superintendent was still demanding men, and some of his sponsors in Whitehall had become more active; they even began to say that one of the schemes at Barford might give results within two years.

Francis Getliffe and the other scientific statesmen were sceptical. They were so discouraging that the Minister did not feel it worthwhile to inspect Barford himself; but, with his usual desire to keep all doors open, he sent me down instead.

I spent a morning and afternoon walking round laboratories listening to explanations I only one-tenth comprehended, listening also to the clicking, like one-fingered typewriting, of Geiger counters. But I comprehended one thing clearly. There were two main lines at Barford – one which Luke had set up on his own, with a few assistants, mine the other led by a man called Rudd. Rudd was the second-in-command of the establishment; his line was, in principle, to separate the isotope, and they were attempting several methods; it was one of these, on which Martin and a team of scientists were working, which Rudd was trying to sell. As an official, I had been exposed to a good deal of salesmanship, but this, for unremitting obsessive concentration, was in a class by itself.

It was having an effect on me. Next morning I was due for a conference with the Superintendent, and I needed to clear my head. So, as an excuse, I went off by myself to call on Luke.

It meant a walk through a country lane leading from the mansion, which had been turned into the administrative headquarters, to the airfield. The hedges were brittle and dark with the coming winter, the only touch of brightness was the green of the ivy flowers. At the top of the rise the mist was shredding a way, and suddenly, on the plateau, the huts, hangars, half-built brick ranges, stood out in the light of the cold and silvery sun.

Inside Luke’s hangar, the vista was desolate. A quarter of the roof was open to the sky, and a piece of canvas was hanging down like a velarium. The only construction in sight was a cube of concrete, about six feet high, with a small door in it standing slightly ajar, through which a beam of light escaped. The afternoon had turned cold, and in the half-light, lit only by that beam on the wet floor and a naked bulb on the side of the hangar, the chill struck like the breath of a cave. No place looked less like an engine room of the scientific future; it might have been the relic of a civilization far gone in decay.

There was not a person in sight. In a moment, as though he had heard me, Luke came out of the cube door, muttering to someone within. He was wearing a windjacket, which made him seem more than ever square, like an Eskimo, like a Polar explorer. He beat his arms across his chest and blew on his fingers.

‘Hello, Lewis,’ he said. ‘It’s bloody cold, and this blasted experiment won’t go, and I want to run away and cry.’

I was interrupting him, he was fretting to get back to work; a voice from inside the cube asked about the next move. For minutes together, Luke gave orders for a new start the following day. ‘What shall we do tonight?’ came the voice.

Luke considered. For once he did not find the words. At last he said: ‘
We’ll just
go home
.’

I walked back with him, for he and his wife had invited some of my old acquaintances to meet me at their house that evening. He was so dejected that I did not like to press him, and yet I had to confirm what everyone was telling me – that he was getting nowhere. Even so, my own question sounded flat in the bitter air.

‘How is it going, Walter?’

Luke swore. ‘How do
you
think it’s going?’

‘Is it going to come out?’

‘Does it look like it?’ he replied.

I told him that I should be talking next morning to Drawbell, that nothing I could say would signify much, but it all helped to form opinion.

‘You didn’t do much good bringing me here, did you?’

Then he corrected himself, though his tone was still dejected. ‘That’s not fair,’ he said.

I asked more about his method (which aimed at plutonium, not the isotope).

‘I’m not promising anything,’ said Luke.

‘Will it work in time?’

‘I can’t see the way tonight,’ he said, with another curse.

‘Shall you?

He said, half depressed, half boastful: ‘What do you think I’m here for?’

But that was his only burst of arrogance, and in the party at his house he sat preoccupied. So did Martin, for a different reason: for Irene had arranged to meet him there, and, when everyone else had arrived, still did not come.

Each time the door opened Martin looked round, only to see the Mounteneys enter, then the Puchweins. And yet, though he was saying little and Luke brooded as he went round filling glasses from a jug of beer, the evening was a cosy one. Out of doors, the countryside was freezing. It was a winter night, the fields stretching in frosted silence. Outside was the war, but within our voices and the light of the fire. It was a night on which one felt lapped in safeness to the fingertips.

Ideas, hopes, floated in the domestic air. For the first time at Barford, I heard an argument about something other than the project. After science, in those wartime nights, men like Puchwein and Mounteney had a second favourite subject. They argued as naturally as most of us drink, I was thinking, feeling an obscure fondness for them as I listened to them getting down to their second subject, which was politics.

For Puchwein, in fact, I had the peculiar fondness one bears someone to whom one has done a good turn. A close friend of mine called Roy Calvert had taken risks to smuggle Puchwein out of Berlin in 1938, and several of us had helped support him. But Puchwein was not in the least got down by having to accept charity. His manner remained patriarchal, it was he who dispensed the patronage. He had a reputation as a chemist. He was a very big man, bald and grey, though still under forty. When he took off his spectacles his eyes slanted downward, so that he always seemed about to weep. Actually, he was cheerful, kind, and so uxorious that his wife was showing lines of temper. But he forgot her, he was immersed, as he and she and Mounteney, and sometimes Nora Luke and I, threw the political phrases to and fro in front of the fire.

Some of those phrases, as used by both Puchweins and Mounteney but by no one else in the room, would have given me a clue if I had not known already. ‘The party’ for the Communist Party, ‘Soviet’ is an adjective for Russian, ‘Fascists’ as a collective term to include National-Socialists, ‘The Daily’ for the
Daily Worker
, ‘social democrats’ to describe members of the Labour Party such as Luke, or even unorthodox liberals such as Martin and me – all those were shibboleths, and meant, if one had ever listened to the dialect of intellectual communism, that those who used them were not far from the party line.

Neither Puchwein nor Mounteney concealed it. Throughout the thirties it had been nothing to conceal. They did not hold party tickets, so far as anyone knew; but they were in sympathy, Mounteney in slightly irregular sympathy. None of us was surprised or concerned that it should be so, certainly not in that November of 1941, when not only to the Puchweins but to conservative-minded Englishmen, it seemed self-evident that the war was being won or lost on Russian land.

Just then Luke went round with the beer again, the argument suddenly quietened, and I heard Emma Mounteney whispering to Hanna Puchwein with a glance in Martin’s direction: