The New Men (8 page)

‘I don’t know about you chaps’ – the Minister, who had been ambling on for some time, looked out of the window towards the west – ‘but whenever I see a beautiful sunset, I wonder whether there isn’t an Ideal Sunset outside Space and Time.’

His audience were getting impatient. But he thought they were taking a point.

‘Perhaps you’ll say, the Phenomenon is enough. Is the Phenomenon enough? I know it sometimes seems so, to all of us doesn’t it? – when you see a beloved woman and see from her smile that she loves you back. I know it seems enough,’ said Bevill earnestly and cheerfully.

All of a sudden, only half listening, for I had heard the Minister showing off his philosophy before, I saw the flush on Mary Pearson’s face, I saw the smile on Pearson’s as he glanced at her. I had not often seen a man so changed. When I met him, he had filled me with antipathy; it came as a shock to see his face radiant. Somewhere Bevill’s bumbling words had touched the trigger. The conceit had vanished the indifference about whether he pleased: it was just a face lit up by a mutual love. And so was hers. Her skin was flushed down to the neck of her dress, behind her spectacles her eyes were moist with joy.

Anyone watching as I was would have had no doubt: those two must be sharing erotic bliss. You can share erotic bliss with someone and still not be suffused by love as those two were, but the converse does not hold, and no husband and wife could be so melted by each other’s smile without the memory of bliss, and the certainty that it would soon be theirs again. I guessed that their physical happiness was out of the common run. It had been worth listening to the Minister’s philosophizing to see it shine.

I was not the only one who saw it shine, for, a few minutes afterwards, as the Minister was saying his goodbyes before we left for the railway station, Luke and I strolled in the lane outside and he said: ‘Funny what people see in each other.’

‘Is it?’

‘It’s lucky those two think each other wonderful, because I’m damned if anyone else would.’

He added, with a thoughtful, truculent grin: ‘Of course, they might say the same of me and Nora.’

As he walked beside me his whole bearing was jaunty, and many women, at a glance, would have judged him virile. Yet he was sexually a genuinely humble man. He did not believe that women noticed him, it would not have occurred to him to believe it.

‘I envy you, you know!’ he broke out.

‘Whatever for?’

‘You know that I am an innocent sort of chap. Why are you making me talk?’

For once, he had forgotten about the project. Like me, he had been stirred by the Pearsons’ smile. With his usual immoderation, he was bursting to confide. Confide he did, insisting often that I was pumping him.

‘I’ve kept myself out of things when I ought to have rushed in. I thought I couldn’t spare the time from science. It wasn’t ambition, I just felt I had to get on. And I didn’t know what I was missing. So now I’m batting about trying to make up my mind on problems which you must have coped with when you were twenty. I’m frightened of them, and I don’t like being frightened.’

I said that he had not done badly: he had made a happier marriage than most, while mine had been miserable.

‘But you know your way about. So does your brother Martin. Neither of you feel like some little brat with his nose up against the shop window and wondering what he has got to do to get inside.’

Totally immersed, he went on: ‘I can’t bear being left out of things. There are times when I want to see all the places and read all the books and fornicate with all the women. Now you’re certain where you stand about all that, you’ve had your share. What I want to know is, how do I get mine without hurting anyone else?’

I thought, in a way he was right about himself: how young he was. But it was more than calendar youth (at that time he was thirty-one), it was more than a life blinkered and concentrated by his vocation. Perhaps he would never lose his sense of being deprived, of being left out of the party – of being outside in the road, of seeing the lights of houses, homes of voluptuous delight denied to him.

‘I suppose I shall get my share in the long run,’ said Luke. ‘Somehow I must manage it. I’m damned well not going to die feeling I was too frightened to discover what it was all about.’ He was looking towards the establishment, and the energy seemed to be pulsing within him, so that in the softening light his sanguine colour became deeper, even his hair seemed to have more sheen.

‘Wait till I’ve got this scheme to go. There’s a time for everything,’ he said, ‘when we’ve tied this up!’

Back in Whitehall, the Minister plumped in on Luke’s side. It was gallant for a man whose job was tottering, for it meant opposing those in power. It meant acting against Bevill’s own maxims – if those above had it in for you, never make a nuisance of yourself and never go away. For once in his life he disregarded them.

No one could understand why. With Bevill, everyone looked for some cunning political motive. I believed that, just this once, there was none. Underneath the politics, the old man had a vein of narrow, rigid, aristocratic patriotism. He had been convinced that Luke’s scheme might be good for the country; that may have been a reason why Bevill made enemies in order to give Luke his head.

A minister likely to be out of office next month had, however, not many cards to play. Probably his single effort in self-sacrifice did not count much either way; what was more decisive was Francis Getliffe’s conversation with Hector Rose. I was not present, but within a short time of that conversation, Rose, against his preconceived opinion, against most of his prejudices, changed his mind. He had concluded that the other side’s case, in particular Getliffe’s case, was stronger than his own. I wondered with some shame – for I could not like him – whether in his place I should have been so fair.

So the dispatch boxes went round, Rose lunched with his colleagues at the Athenaeum, the committees sat: on a night early in November, the Minister went off to a meeting. It was not a cabinet, but a sub-committee of ministers; he believed that, one way or the other, this would settle it. I remained in my office, waiting for him to return.

It was half past eight; in the pool of light from the reading lamp, the foolscap in my desk shone with a blue luminescence; I was too restless to work. I went across the passage to the little room where my new personal assistant was sitting. I had told her to go hours before, but she was over-conscientious; she was a young widow called Vera Allen, comely but reserved, too diffident to chat, stiff at being alone in the building with a man.

I heard the Minister scamper up the stairs, with the light trotting steps that sounded so youthful. I returned to my room. He put his head in, without taking off his bowler hat.

‘Still at it,’ he said.

He went on: ‘I think it’s all right, Eliot.’

I exclaimed with relief.

Bevill was flushed, looking curiously boyish in his triumph. He tipped his hat back on his thin grey hair.

‘We mustn’t count our eggs before they’re hatched, but I think it’s in the bag,’ he said.

In jubilation, he asked if I had eaten and took me off to Pratt’s.

He had taken me there before, when he was pleased. He only did it because he had a soft spot for me. For business, for talks with Rose, he went elsewhere; Pratt’s was reserved for friends, it was his fortress, his favourite club.

When he first took me inside, I had thought – it seemed strange – of my mother. She had been brought up in a gamekeeper’s cottage on a Lincolnshire estate; she was proud and snobbish and had great ambitions for me; she was dead years since, she had not seen what happened to me – but just the sight of me with Thomas Bevill, in his most jealously guarded club, eating with men whose names she had read in the papers, would have made her rejoice that her life was not in vain.

Yet if she could have seen me there, she would have been a little puzzled to observe that we were sitting with some discomfort in rooms remarkably like the cottage where she was born. A basement: a living room with a common table and a check cloth: a smoking kitchen with an open hearth: in fact, a landowner’s idea of his own gamekeeper’s quarters. That was the place to which Thomas Bevill went whenever he wanted to be sure of meeting no one but his aristocratic friends.

Looking at him after our meal, as he sat by the kitchen hearth, drinking a glass of port, I thought that unless one had the chance to see him so, one might be quite misled. People called him unassuming, unsnobbish, realistic, gentle. Unassuming: yes, that was genuine. Unsnobbish, realistic; that was genuine too; unlike his cousin, Lord Boscastle, he did not take refuge, as society evened itself out, in a fantastic and comic snobbery; yet in secret, he did take refuge with his friends here, in a cave-of-the-past, in a feeling, blended of fear, foresight and contempt, that he could preserve bits of his past and make them last his time. Gentle, a bit of an old woman; that was not genuine in the slightest; he was kind to his friends, but the deeper you dug into him the tougher and more impervious he became.

‘Well, if they’re going to sack me, Eliot,’ he said, ‘I’ve left them a nice kettle of fish.’ He was simmering in his triumph over Barford. He ordered more glasses of port.

‘One of these days,’ he said, ‘those chaps will blow us all up, and that will be the end of the story.’

The firelight winked in his glass; he held it up to admire the effect, brought it down carefully and looked into it from above.

‘It’s funny about those chaps,’ he reflected. ‘I used to think scientists were supermen. But they’re not supermen, are they? Some of them are brilliant, I grant you that. But between you and me, Eliot, a good many of them are like garage hands. Those are the chaps who are going to blow us all up.’

I said, for I was not speaking like a subordinate, that a good many of them had more imagination than his colleagues.

Bevill agreed, with cheerful indifference.

‘Our fellows can’t make much difference to the world, and those chaps can. Do you think it will be a better world, when they’ve finished with it?

I thought it might. Not for him, probably not for me and my kind: but for ninety per cent of the human race. ‘I don’t trust them,’ said Thomas Bevil. Then he said: ‘By the by, I like the look of your brother, Eliot.’

It was partly his good manners, having caught himself in a sweeping statement. But he said it as though he meant it.

‘He put the cat among the pigeons, you know, that afternoon down there. It’s just as well he did, or Master Drawbell mightn’t have seen the red light in time, and if they’d all gone on crabbing Luke I couldn’t have saved the situation.’

He began laughing, his curious, internal, happy laugh, as though he were smothering a dirty joke.

‘Those Drawbells! Between them they’d do anything to get a K, wouldn’t they?’

He meant a knighthood. He was constantly amused at the manoeuvres men engaged in to win titles, and no one understood them better.

‘Never mind, Eliot,’ he said. ‘We saved the situation, and now it’s up to those chaps not to let us down.’

It was his own uniquely flat expression of delight: but his face was rosy, he did not look like a man of seventy-three, he was revelling in his victory, the hot room, the mildly drunken night.

‘If this country gets a superbomb,’ he said cheerfully, ‘no one will remember me.’

He swung his legs under his chair.

‘It’s funny about the bomb,’ he said. ‘If we manage to get it, what do we do with it then?’

This was not the first time that I heard the question: once or twice recently people at Barford had raised it. It was too far away for the scientists to speculate much, even the controversialists like Mounteney, but several of them agreed that we should simply notify the enemy that we possessed the bomb, and give some evidence: that would be enough to end the war. I repeated this view to Bevill.

‘I wonder,’ he said.

‘I wonder,’ he repeated. ‘Has there ever been a weapon that someone did not want to let off?’

I said, though the issue seemed remote, that this was different in kind. We had both seen the current estimate, that one fission bomb would kill three hundred thousand people at a go.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Bevill. ‘Think of what we’re trying to do with bombing. We’re trying to kill men, women, and children. It’s worse than anything Genghis Khan ever did.’

He said it without relish, without blame, with neutrality.

Soon the room grew warmer, the port went round again, as men came in from a late night meeting. A couple of them were ministers, and Bevill looked towards them with a politician’s insatiable hope. Had they any news for him? He could not help hoping. He was old, he had made such reputation as he could, if he stayed in office he would not add a syllable to it; he knew how irretrievably he was out of favour, and he did not expect to last three months; yet still, on that happy night, he wondered if he might not hear of a reprieve, if he might not hear that he was being kept on, perhaps in an obscurer post.

I saw that his flicker of hope did not last long. From their manner he knew they had nothing to tell him. It did not weigh him down, he was pleased with himself that night. And they brought other news: the invasion fleet was safely out of Gibraltar, and all looked well for the North African landing.

A little later, Bevill and I went out into St James’s Street. He twirled his umbrella, a slight little figure in a bowler hat, under the full moon; an old man, slightly drunk, expecting the sack, and full of well-being. He said to me with an extra sweep of his umbrella: ‘Isn’t it nice to be winning?’

I was not sure whether he was talking about Barford, or the war.

He repeated it, resoundingly, to the empty street: ‘Isn’t it nice to be winning?’

After the Minister’s night of victory, there was for months nothing I could do for Luke and Martin. I had to set myself to wait, picking up any rumour from Barford, any straw in the wind. Because I could do nothing, the suspense nagged at me more.