by C. P. Snow
‘I should have done that in any case.’
Just then he was talking, not like an interrogator, but as though we were all officials together, getting to work on ‘a difficult one’. ‘It’s very curious.’ He was puzzled and distracted. When he went on with his questions, the snap had left him, like a man who is absent-minded because of trouble at home.
My record over the atomic bomb. Yes, I had known about it from the start. Yes, I had been close to the scientists all along. Yes, I had known Sawbridge, who gave away some secrets. Yes, he and my brother had been to school together. But Monteith was doing it mechanically: he knew that in the end it was my brother who had broken Sawbridge down.
Monteith was watchful again, as he talked of what I had done and thought about the dropping of the first bomb.
‘I’ve made it public. You’ve only got to read, you know,’ I said. ‘And you’ll find a certain amount more on the files.’
‘That has been done,’ replied Monteith. ‘But still, I should like to ask you.’
Hadn’t I, like many of the scientists, been actively opposed to the use of the bomb? Certainly, I said. Hadn’t I met the scientists, just before Hiroshima, to see how they could stop it? Certainly, I said. Wasn’t that going further than a civil servant should feel entitled to? ‘Civil servants have done more effective things than that,’ I said. ‘Often wish I had.’
Then I explained. While there was a chance of stopping the bomb being dropped, we had used every handle we could pull: this wasn’t improper unless (I couldn’t resist saying) it was improper to oppose in secret the use of any kind of bomb at any time.
When the thing had happened, we had two alternatives. Either to resign and make a row, or else stay inside and do our best. Most of us had stayed inside, as I had done. For what motives? Duty, discipline, even conformity? Perhaps we had been wrong. But, I thought, if I had to make the choice again, I should have done the same.
After that, the interrogation petered out. My second marriage. Hadn’t my father-in-law, before the war, before I knew either of them, belonged to various Fronts? asked Monteith, preoccupied once more. I didn’t know. He might have done. He was an old-fashioned intellectual liberal. Official life – nothing there, though he was curious about when I first knew Roger. It was past one o’clock. Suddenly he slapped both palms on the desk.
‘That is as far as I want to go.’ He leaped up, agile and quick, and gave me a lustrous glance. He said in a tone less formal, less respectful than when he began: ‘I believe what you have told me.’ He shook my hand and went out rapidly through the outer office, leaving me standing there.
It had all been very civil. He was an able, probably a likeable, man doing his job. Yet, back in my office through the January afternoon, I felt black. Not that I was worrying about the result. It was something more organic than that, almost like being told that one’s heart is not perfect, and that one has got to live carefully in order to survive. I did not touch a paper and did no work.
Much of the afternoon I looked out of the window, as though thinking, but not really thinking. I rang up Margaret. She alone knew that I should not shrug it off. She knew that in middle age I was still vain, that I did not find it tolerable to account for my actions except to myself. Over the telephone I told her that this ought to be nothing. A few hours of questions by a decent and responsible man. In the world we were living in, it was nothing. If you’re living in the middle of a religious war, you ought to expect to get shot at, unless you go away and hide. But it was no use sounding robust to Margaret. She knew me.
I should bring Francis back to dinner, I said, after they had finished with him. This she had not expected, and she was troubled. She had already invited young Arthur Plimpton, once more in London: partly out of fun, partly out of matchmaking.
‘I’d put him off,’ she said, ‘but I haven’t the slightest idea where he’s staying. Shall try to get him through the Embassy?’
‘Don’t bother,’ I told her. ‘At best, he may lighten the atmosphere.’
‘And there might be something of an atmosphere,’ she replied.
No, it was no use sounding robust to Margaret – but it was to Francis. As we drove home, under the lights of the Mall, he did not refer to my interrogation, although he knew of it. He believed me to be more worldly, less quixotic, than he was: which was quite true. He assumed that I took what came to me as all in the day’s work.
As for himself, he said: ‘I’m sorry that I let them do it.’
He was very quiet. When we got into the flat, Arthur was waiting in the drawing-room, greeting us politely. He went on: ‘Sir Francis, you look as though you could use a drink.’ He took charge, installed us in the armchairs, poured out the whisky. He was more adept than Francis’ own son, I was thinking. Which didn’t make him more endearing to Francis. But just then, Francis was blaming him, not only for his charm, but for his country. As Francis sat there, silent, courteous, hidalgo-like, he was searching for culprits on whom to blame that afternoon.
With Arthur present, I couldn’t talk directly to Francis: nor, when Margaret came in, could she. She saw him, usually the most temperate of men, taking another drink, very stiff: she hated minuets, she longed to plunge in. As it was, she had to talk about Cambridge, the college, the family. Penelope was still in the United States – how was she? Quite well, when they last heard, said Francis, for once sounding not over-interested in his favourite daughter.
‘I heard from her on Sunday, Sir Francis,’ said Arthur, dead-pan, like a man scoring an unobtrusive point.
‘Did you,’ Francis replied, not as a question.
‘Yes, she put in a transatlantic call.’
Margaret could not resist it. ‘What did she say?’
‘She wanted to know which was the best restaurant in Baltimore.’
Arthur had spoken politely, impassively, and without a glint in his eye. Margaret’s colour rose, but she went on. What was he going to do himself? Was he going back to the United States? Yes, said Arthur, he had settled on his career. He had arranged to enter the electronic industry. He talked about his firm-to-be with dismaying confidence. He knew more about business than Francis and Margaret and I all rolled together.
‘So you’ll be home again soon?’ asked Margaret.
‘It’ll be fine,’ said Arthur. Suddenly, with an owlish look, he said: ‘Of course, I don’t know Penny’s plans.’
‘You don’t,’ said Margaret.
‘I suppose she won’t be back on this side?’
For once Margaret looked baffled. In Arthur’s craggy face, the blue eyes shone dazzlingly sincere: but under the flesh there was a lurking grin.
When he left us – out of good manners, because, listening, he had picked up what was unspoken in the air – I felt saddened. I looked at Francis, and saw, not the friend I had grown up with, but an ageing man, stern, not serene, not at all at peace. I had first met him when he was Arthur’s age. It had been pleasant – or so it seemed that night – to be arrogant and young.
‘Francis,’ said Margaret, ‘you’re being rather stupid about that boy.’
Francis gave an unprofessorial curse.
There was a silence.
‘I think,’ he spoke to her with trust and affection, as though it were a relief, ‘I’ve just about ceased to be useful. I think I’ve come to the limit.’
She said, that couldn’t be true.
‘I think it is,’ said Francis. He turned on me. ‘Lewis oughtn’t to have persuaded me. I ought to have got out of it straight away. I shouldn’t have been exposed to this.’
We began to quarrel. There was rancour in our voices. He blamed me, we both blamed Roger. Politicians never take care of their tools, said Francis, with increasing anger. You’re useful so long as you’re useful. Then you’re expendable. No doubt, said Francis bitterly, if things went wrong, Roger would play safe. In a gentlemanly fashion, he would go back to the fold: and in an equally gentlemanly fashion, his advisers would be disgrace
d.
‘You can’t be disgraced,’ said Margaret.
Francis began to talk to her in a more realistic tone. They would not keep him out just yet, he said. At least, he didn’t think so. They wouldn’t dare to say that he was a risk. And yet, when all this was over, win or lose, somehow it would be convenient for them not to involve him. The suggestion would go round that he didn’t quite fit in. It would be better to have safer men. As our kind of world went on, the men had to get safer and safer. You couldn’t afford to be different. No one could afford to have you, if you showed a trace of difference. The most valuable single gift was the ability to sing in unison. And so they would shut him out.
We went on quarrelling.
‘You’re too thin-skinned,’ I said, at my sharpest.
Margaret looked from him to me. She knew what in secret I had felt that day. She was wondering when, after Francis had gone, she could make a remark about the thinness of other skins.
34: The Purity of Being Persecuted
The next evening, Margaret and I got out of the taxi on the Embankment and walked up into the Temple gardens. All day news had come prodding in, and I was jaded. The chief Government Whip had called on Roger. Some backbenchers, carrying weight inside the party, had to be reassured. Roger would have to meet them. Two Opposition leaders had been making speeches in the country the night before. No one could interpret the public opinion polls.
Yes, we were somewhere near a crisis, I thought with a kind of puzzlement, as I looked over the river at the lurid city sky. How far did it reach? Maybe in a few months’ time, some of the offices in this part of London would carry different names. Was that all? Maybe other lives stood to lose, lives stretched out under the lit-up sky. Roger and the others thought so: one had to think it, or it was harder to go on.
Those other lives did not respond much. A few did, not many. Perhaps they sent their messages to the corridors very rarely, when the dangers were on top of them: otherwise, perhaps the messages came not at all.
Back towards the Strand, the hall of my old Inn blazed out like a church on a Sunday night. We were on our way to a Bar concert. In the Inn buildings, lighted windows were shining here and there, oblongs of brilliance in a bulk of darkness. We passed the set of chambers where I had worked as a young man. Some of the names were still there, as they had been in my time. Mr H Getliffe: Mr W Allen. On the next staircase, I noticed the name of a contemporary: Sir H Salisbury. That was out of date: he had just been appointed Lord Justice of Appeal. Margaret, feeling that I was distracted, pressed my arm. This was a part of my life she hadn’t known; she was apt to be jealous of it, and, as we walked past the building in the sharp air, she believed that I was homesick. She was wrong. I had felt something more like irritation. The Bar had never really suited me, I had not once thought of going back. And yet, if I could have been content with it, I should have had a smoother time. Like Salisbury. I shouldn’t be in the middle of this present crisis.
The Hall was draughty. Chairs, white programmes gleaming on them as at a Church wedding, had been set in lines and then pushed into disorder, as people leaned over to talk. The event, though it didn’t sound it, was an occasion of privilege. Several Members from both front benches were there: Lord Lufkin and his entourage were there; so was Diana Skidmore, who had come with Monty Cave. As they shouted to one another, white-tied, bedecked, no one would have thought they were in a crisis. Much less that any of them resented, as I did, the moment in which we stood. They were behaving as though this was the kind of trouble politicians got into. They made jokes. They behaved as if these places were going to stay their own: while as for the rest – well, one could be reminded of them by the russet light of the City sky.
They weren’t preoccupied with the coming debate, except to make some digs at Roger. What they were really interested in at this moment – or at least, what Diana and her friends were really interested in – was a job. The job, somewhat bewilderingly, was a Regius Professorship of History. Diana had recovered some of her spirits. There was a rumour that she had determined to make Monty Cave divorce his wife. Having become high-spirited once again, Diana had also, once again, become importunate. Her friends had to do what she told them: and what she told them was to twist the Prime Minister’s arm. The PM had to hear her candidate’s name from all possible angles. This name was Thomas Orbell.
It was not that Diana was a specially good judge of academic excellence. She would have been just as likely to have a candidate for a bishopric. She treated academic persons with reverence, as though they were sacred cows: but, though they might be sacred cows, they did not seem to her quite serious. That didn’t stop her getting excited about the claims of Dr Orbell, and didn’t stop her friends getting excited for him or against. Not that they were wrapped up in the academic life. It was nice to toss the jobs around, it was nice to spot winners. This was one of the pleasures of the charmed circle. Margaret, who had been brought up among scholars, was uneasy. She knew Orbell and did not want to spoil his chances. She was certain that he wasn’t good enough.
‘He’s brilliant,’ said Diana, herself resplendent in white, like the fairy on a Christmas tree.
In fact, Diana’s enthusiasm, the cheerful, cherubim-chanting of a couple of her ministerial friends, Margaret’s qualms, were likely all to be beside the point. True, the Prime Minister would listen; true, he would listen with porcine competence. Orbell’s supporters might get words of encouragement. At exactly the same moment, a lantern-jawed young man in the private office, trained by Osbaldiston, would be collecting opinions with marmoreal calm. My private guess was that Tom Orbell stood about as much chance for this Chair as he did for the Headship of the Society of Jesus.
In the library after the performance, where we had herded for sandwiches and wine, I noticed Diana, her diamonds flashing, talk for a moment to Caro alone. Just before we left, Caro spoke to me and passed a message on.
Diana had been talking to Reggie Collingwood. He had said they would all have to ‘feel their way’. It was conceivable that Roger would have to ‘draw in his horns’ a bit. If so, they could look after him.
It sounded, and was meant to sound, casual and confident. But it was also deliberate. Collingwood wasn’t given to indiscretion. Nor, when it came to confidences, was Diana. This remark was intended to reach Roger: and Caro was making sure that it reached me. As she told me, she took me by the arm, walking towards the door, and gazed at me with bold eyes. This was not a display of affection. She did not like me any better, she was no warmer to Roger’s advisers, as she walked on my arm, her shoulders, because she was a strapping woman, not far below my own. But she was making certain that I wasn’t left out.
The Bar concert had taken place on a Thursday night. On the Saturday morning I was alone in our drawing-room, the children back at school, Margaret off for a day with her father, now both ill and valetudinarian, when the telephone rang. It was David Rubin.
This was not, in itself, a surprise. I had heard the day before that he was over on one of his State Department visits. I expected that he and I would find ourselves at the same meeting on Saturday afternoon. That turned out to be true, and David expressed his courteous gratification. But it was a surprise to hear him insisting that I arrange an interview with Roger. Apparently he had tried Roger’s office the day before and had been rebuffed. It was odd enough for anyone to rebuff him: much odder for him to come back afterwards. ‘This isn’t just an idea of visiting with him. I want to say something to him.’
‘I rather gathered that,’ I said. Over the phone came a reluctant cachinnation.
He was flying out next morning. The interview would have to be fixed for some time that night. I did my best. First of all, Caro would not put me through to Roger. When at last I made her, he greeted me as though I had brought bad news. Did I know that Parliament met next week? Did I by any chance remember that he was preparing for a Debate? He wanted to see no one. I said (our voices were petty with strain) that he could be
rude to me, though I didn’t pretend to like it. But it was unwise to be rude to David Rubin.
When I saw Rubin that afternoon, for the first time in a year, he did not look so formidable. He was sitting at a table, between Francis Getliffe and another scientist, in one of the Royal Society’s rooms in Burlington House. The room smelled musty, lined with bound volumes of periodicals, like an unused library. The light was dim. Rubin, lemur-like circles under his eyes, looked fastidious and depressed. When I passed a note along, saying that we were due at Lord North Street after dinner, he gave a nod, as from one who had to endure much before he slept.
He had to endure this meeting. He was by now too much of a Government figure to hope for a great deal. He was more pessimistic than anyone there. It was not an official meeting. Everyone in the room, at least in form, had attended as a private citizen. Nearly all were scientists who had been, or still were, concerned with the nuclear projects. They were trying to find a way of talking directly to their Soviet counterparts. Several men in the room had won world fame – there were the great academic physicists, Mounteney, who was chairman, Rubin himself, an old friend of mine called Constantine. There were also Government scientists, such as Walter Luke, who had demanded to take part.
All three Governments knew what was going on. Several officials, including me, had been invited. I remembered other meetings in these musty-smelling rooms, nearly twenty years before, when scientists told us that the nuclear bomb might work.
David Rubin sat like one who has listened often enough. Then, all of a sudden, he became interested. Scientific good will, legalisms, formulations – they vanished. For the door opened, and to everyone’s astonishment, there came into the room Brodzinski. Soft-footed, for all his bulk, he walked to the table, his barrel chest thrust out. His eyes were stretched wide, as he looked at Arthur Mounteney. In his strong voice, in his off-English, he said, ‘I’m sorry to be late, Mr Chairman.’
Each person round the table knew of his speeches in America and knew that Getliffe and Luke had been damaged. Men like Mounteney detested him and all he stood for. For him to enter, and then make this little apology – it irritated them all, it was a ridiculous anti-climax.