The New Men (5 page)

‘Where is our wandering girl tonight?’

Hanna looked away, but Emma was hard to stop.

‘I wonder,’ she whispered, ‘if T—’ (a man I scarcely knew) ‘is on his lonesome.’

Martin was on the other side of the fire. I thought that he could not have heard. Nevertheless, before Puchwein began again, Martin apologized for Irene. She was finishing some work, he said; it must have taken longer than she reckoned, and it looked as though she might not get there at all. His composure was complete. I had once known a similar situation, but I had not summoned up half his self-command. Yet, as the talk clattered on, his eyes often gazed into the fire, and he was still listening for a ring at the door.

Martin had not spoken since his apology for her, and I wanted to shield him from going home with the Mounteneys, whose house (at Barford the scientists and their families were crammed on top of each other, as in a frontier town) he shared. So I invented a pretext for us to walk home together.

In the village street, all was quiet. A pencil of light edged the top of a blacked-out window frame. Otherwise the village was sleeping as it might have done on a Jacobean night, when some of these houses were built. Martin’s footsteps, slower and heavier than mine although he was the lighter man, seemed loud on the frosty road. I left him to break the silence. Our steps remained the only noise, until he remarked, as though casually: ‘Walter Luke didn’t say much tonight, did he?’

I agreed.

‘He must have had something in his mind. His experiment, I suppose.’ And that was all he said.

Martin was doing what we have all done, refer to ourselves, half apologize, half confide, by pretending an interest in another. If I had been an intimate friend but not a brother, perhaps even if I had been a stranger. I thought that just at that moment he would have unburdened himself. Often it is the reserved who, when a pain, or even more, a humiliation, has lived inside them too long, suddenly break out into a confidence to someone they scarcely know. But I was the last person to whom he could let go.

As we both showed when we first talked of his engagement, there was a delicacy in our kind of brothers’ love; and the closer we came to our sexual lives, the more that delicacy made us speak in terms of generalization and sarcasm. We knew each other very well by instinct. We could guess which women would attract the other, and often it was an attraction that we shared. Yet I had never told him any detail either of my married life or of a love affair. I should have felt it, not so much embarrassing to speak, though that would also have been true, but worse than embarrassing to force him to listen. It was the same from him to me. He could not tell me whom he suspected she went to bed with; he could not tell me what she was like in his own bed; and so it was no relief to speak at all.

At the crossroads he asked if I minded walking a few yards to the bridge; it was as though he wanted an excuse for not returning home (or was it superstition, as though, if he did not hurry back, all would be well?’). It was a moonless night, and the stars were faint, but there was a glimmer on the river. All of a sudden a November meteorite scorched its way across the sky, and then another.

‘More energy there than
we
shall make,’ said Martin, nodding in the direction of the establishment.

Now that my eyes were accustomed to the light I could make out the expression on his face. It was set and sad – and yet he was controlling his voice, he was beginning to speak seriously, about the project.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I suppose the people here are putting some pressure on you?’

I said yes.

‘They want you to invest in this place in a big way?’

Again I said yes.

‘As long as you all realize that
nothing
here is within years of being tested–’ He broke off, and then said: ‘It would be very nice for me if Rudd’s show came off. I should get some reflected glory, which I could do with.’

For a moment his voice was chilled, as though his secret thoughts were too strong: but I understood.

‘You don’t think it
will
come off?’

He paused.

‘I haven’t got the grasp some of these people have, you know, and most of them believe in it.’ Then he added: ‘But I shouldn’t like you to plump for it too far.’

‘What’s the matter with it?’

‘I think your own reputation will look nicer,’ he said, ‘if you go fairly slow this time.’

It was not until we were walking towards his house that he said: ‘I can’t explain why I’m not convinced. I wish I were better at this game, then perhaps I could.’

When we had mounted to his landing above the Mounteneys, there was no light under the door. As soon as we were inside the room Martin said, and for an instant his voice had become unrecognizable: ‘I detest living in other people’s houses.’

In that instant his face was white with temper. Was he thinking that Emma Mounteney would know the exact time that Irene climbed up the stairs? Then he spoke, once more calmly: ‘I think I’d better wait up for her. I don’t think she’s taken a key.’

NEXT morning I woke out of heavy sleep, and was dragged at by a memory of muttering (it might have been a dream, or else something heard in the distance) from the bedroom next door. When I got up and went into breakfast, Irene told me that Martin had already left for the laboratory. She was wearing a dressing-gown, her voice was quiet but tight; without her make-up, she looked both drabber and younger.

In silence I ate the toast and jam of a wartime breakfast. Looking down from the window into the sunny morning, I could see the river flash through the elm branches. I was aware that her gaze was fixed on me.

Suddenly she cried out: ‘Why do you dislike me so?’

‘I don’t,’ I said.

‘I can’t bear not to be liked.’

Very quickly, almost as though she had been rehearsing it, she told me a story of how, when she was twelve, she went to stay with a ‘glamorous’ school friend, and how the other girl had been asked by an aunt. ‘Who is your best friend? Is Irene your best friend?’ And the answer had come, polite and putting-off, ‘Oh, Irene has so many friends.’

‘I couldn’t face her again,’ said Irene, and then: ‘I wish
you
would like me.’

‘It doesn’t matter to either of us.’

‘I want you to.’ Her tone was at the same time penitent, shameless, provocative; it was easy to imagine how she spoke to her husband.

I had to rouse myself.

‘You want it both ways, you know,’ I said.

‘What have I done against you?’ she burst out defiantly.

‘Nothing.’

‘Then why can’t we get on?’

‘You know as well as I do. Do you expect me to approve of you as my brother’s wife?’

‘So that’s it,’ she said.

‘Don’t pretend that’s news,’ I said. ‘Why have you started this –
this morning
?’

She had crossed over to the window seat, and was watching me with sharp eyes, which were beginning to fill with tears.

‘You’ve taken against me, just because I couldn’t stand the very thought of those people last night.’

‘You know perfectly well that’s not all.’

‘Would you like me to tell you what I was really doing?

I shook my head. ‘You’re not a fool. You must realize that you’re damaging him–’

‘I suppose my
dear
friends were wondering who I’d taken to bed, weren’t they?’

‘Of course.’

‘Who did they think?’

I would not reply.

‘Whose name did you hear?’ she cried.

Impatiently I repeated Emma’s question about T—. She gave a yelp of laughter. She was for an instant in high spirits, nothing but amused.

‘They can’t think that!’

She stared at me: the tears had gone.

‘You won’t believe me, but they’re wrong. It wasn’t him, it wasn’t anyone. I just couldn’t stand their faces any more. I had to get out on my own. They’re hopelessly wrong. Please believe me!’

I said: ‘Whether they’re right or wrong – in a place like this you mustn’t given anyone an excuse to gossip, it doesn’t matter whether it’s justified or not.’

‘How often I’ve heard that,’ she said with a glint in her eyes.

‘When?’

‘All night long. Do you think you’re the
first
to scold me?’ She looked at me, and went on: ‘He was specially angry because
you
were here to see.’

After a moment, I said: ‘That’s neither here nor there.’

‘Isn’t it?’ said Irene.

‘The only thing I’ve got a right to talk about,’ I said, ‘are the practical consequences. Unless you want to damage his career, the least you can do for Martin is behave yourself on the outside.’

‘I promised him that this morning,’ she said in a thin voice.

‘Can you keep your promise?’

‘You needn’t worry.’ Her voice was thinner still.

Then she stood up, shook herself, went to the looking-glass and remained there, studying her reflection.

‘We ought to be moving soon,’ she said, her voice full again, brisk, and matter-of-fact. ‘These people aren’t altogether wrong about me. I may as well tell you that, though I expect you know.’

I was getting up, but she said no, and sat down opposite me.

‘They’ve got the idea right, but it’s my past coming back on me.’ She added, without emotion: ‘I’ve been a bad girl. I’ve had some men.’

Yes, she would have liked to be an adventuress: but somehow she hadn’t managed it. ‘Perhaps you’ve got to be cooler than I am to bring it off,’ she said, half-mystified.

It was she who had been used, not her lovers; and there was one who, when she thought of him, still had power over her.

‘Martin knew about him before we married,’ she said. ‘Have you heard of Edgar Hankins?’

I had not only heard of him, but ten years before had known him fairly well.

‘I loved him very much,’ she said. She went on: ‘I ought to have made him marry me.’

‘Was it a matter of will?’ I said, feeling more tender to her.

‘No,’ said Irene, ‘I’ve got the will, but I can’t trust my nerves.’

Then I asked why she had married Martin. She began not by answering the question, but by saying: ‘You shouldn’t worry too much about Martin.’

‘Why not?’

‘I fancy he’s a harder man than you are.’

She said it as though she were praising him. Reverting to her businesslike manner, she went on about her reasons for the marriage. She had found some of her friends competing for him, she said; and that provoked her. But most of all she wanted safety.

‘I was getting notorious,’ she said. ‘When people heard my name, they were beginning to say “Oh, her”.’

Curiously, by this time she and I were on easy terms. Nevertheless, I did not know how much to believe. She was anxious not to give herself the benefit of the doubt, she was putting herself in the coldest light. Nearly always, I thought, there was something men or women were protecting, when deliberately, and with pride, almost with conceit, they showed you their most callous side.

All of a sudden she looked at me with her eyes narrowed and frightened.

‘Why did you ask me – about marrying him?’

I tried to put her off.

‘Do you want him to leave me?’

‘That’s not my business,’ I said.

‘Are you trying to take him away?’ Her tone had been brittle, the tears had been near again, and she sighed.

Then she threw her head back, and put on her matey, hard-baked smile. ‘You can try anything you like,’ she said. ‘Nothing will have any effect on him, you ought to know that by now.’

Within ten minutes we were walking along the footpath to the laboratories, Irene’s face groomed as though nothing were more impossible than tears or anger, both of us talking as though there had been no scene between us. Just once, she referred back to it, when she commented out of the blue: ‘Mornings before the office.’

It was her phrase for any kind of morning drama: it was a phrase that only had meaning if your working life was disciplined, as all of ours had by this time become. Whatever was left behind at home, the files were waiting. As we walked along the country footpath, I was myself sorting out my official thoughts, collecting what I could safely say to Drawbell.

Before I called on Drawbell, I said goodbye to Martin. He was standing in his laboratory, looking at one of the counters: tiny neon lamps, the size of buttons, flickered in and out, the noise tapped on, on the indicator the figures moved like a taxi register.

‘Any progress?’ I asked.

‘Nothing new,’ said Martin patiently. He and others had already explained to me that what was true of pure scientific research was truer still of this: that the days of crisis were few: that it was only after long periods of preparation, measured in months, not days, that they came to a ‘result’ – one day of excitement, and afterwards another period of building, routine, long-drawn-out suspense.

In the office where Drawbell’s secretaries worked, I was kept waiting among the typing stools and dictaphones before I could see him. I suspected that he was doing it on purpose, as I went on chatting to Hanna Puchwein and her assistant, Mary Pearson, the wife of one of the chief engineers, a young woman who at that first impression seemed just spectacled and flushing. At last the bell trilled on Hanna’s desk, and she took me in.

Drawbell’s office had in the past been the main drawing-room of the Barford house. On the high walls, where the white paint was chipping from the panels, were pinned charts, tables of organization, graphs, diagrams. The room was so long that there was time to notice my footsteps on the parquet as I went towards Drawbell’s desk. He sat, steadily regarding me, watching me come towards him without changing his expression or making a sound.

All this was put on. I had met him several times, in that office as well as in London. He was not an academic, and Luke and the others said, with their usual boisterous lack of respect, that he was not a scientist at all. In peacetime he had been head of another government station. Though I knew that he was not unformidable, I knew also that he was a bit of a humbug and a bit of a clown.