by C. P. Snow
‘Yes, I do care for her,’ he said.
The coals fell suddenly, heaving a bright and fragile hollow in which the sparks stood still as fireflies. He leaned across to throw on coal. When he had sat back again I said: ‘Then imagine what it would be like. She’s rackety and you’re prudent. She’d have all the time in the world on her hands, and do you think she’s the woman to stay still? What do you think you’d find when you got home?’
‘It’s just possible that I might be able to settle her down.’
I was handling it badly, I knew. I said: ‘You know, I’m not a great expert on happy marriages. But on unhappy ones I do know as much as most men.’
Martin gave a friendly, sarcastic smile. I went on. He met each point on the plane of reason. He had reckoned them out himself; no one insured more carefully against the future. I was telling him nothing he did not know. I became angry again.
‘She’s pretty shallow, you know. I expect her loves are too.’ Martin did not reply.
‘She’s bright, but she’s not very clever.’
‘That doesn’t matter to me,’ he said.
‘You’d find her boring in time.’
‘I couldn’t have done less so up to now,’ said Martin.
‘Just imagine her being bright – for – ten years. In ten years you’d be sick and tired of her.’
‘Ten years,’ said Martin. He added: ‘If that’s the worst that happens!’
‘She’d be driving you off your head.’
‘If this fission affair works,’ said Martin, ‘we shall be lucky if we have any heads.’
That was the actual moment at which I first heard the rumour. There was a touch of irritation in Martin’s voice, because over his marriage I had pressed him too far.
He was putting me off. He had not spoken with any special weight, for he was thinking about Irene and my opposition; yet something in his tone brought me up sharp, and I had to inquire:
‘Is this anything new?’
‘Very new,’ said Martin. He was still trying to lead my attention away, but also he was half-caught up, as he said: ‘It’s very new, but I don’t know how everyone missed it. I might have seen it myself!’
He told me that, within the past fortnight, letters had been published in scientific journals in several countries, and that the Cavendish people and physicists everywhere were talking of nothing else. That I could understand. He then gave me an explanation which I could not understand, although I had heard plenty of the jargon of nuclear physics from him and Luke. ‘Fission’. ‘Neutrons’. ‘Chain reaction’. I could not follow. But I could gather that at last the sources of nuclear energy were in principle open to be set loose; and that it might be possible to make an explosive such as no one had realistically imagined.
‘Scientists always exaggerate,’ I said.
‘This isn’t exaggerated,’ said Martin. ‘If it happens, one of these bombs would blow up Cambridge. I mean, there’d be nothing left.’
‘Will it happen?’
‘It seems to be about an even chance,’
I had stood up, as I attempted to follow his explanation. Then I walked across the room and looked out of the window into the court, where the rain was blowing before the wind, forming great driven puddles along the verges of the grass; in a moment I returned to where Martin was still sitting by the fire, We were both sobered, but to me this piece of news, though it hung over us as we faced each other, seemed nothing but a red herring.
I came back, more gently now, to the prospect of his marriage. Had he really thought what, in terms of day-to-day living, it might mean? He was once more polite, sensible, brotherly. He would admit the force of any one of my doubts: he would say yes to each criticism. Although underneath I could feel his intention, embedded right in the core of his will, nevertheless he was ready to make any other concession to my worry.
Nothing said in anger would be remembered, he was as good as saying, with his good-natured, sarcastic smile. In fact, even in the bitterest moment of the quarrel, I had taken that for granted. It did not enter my mind that anything could touch the confidence between us.
2: A Code Name
MARTIN married Irene that autumn, but I could not visit them for some time afterwards. For the war had started: he was working at Rosyth in one of the first degaussing parties, and, as for me, I was already a temporary civil servant in London.
As the early months of war went by, I heard nothing, and thought little, about my brother’s marriage; but the piece of scientific news which, when I was trying to turn him against Irene, he had used as a false trail, came several times into my office work.
It happened so through some personal coincidences. It was because the Minister knew me that I went into his department, and it was because of his own singular position that we saw the minutes of the scientific committees. His name was Thomas Bevill, and he was a second cousin of Lord Boscastle. He had been a professional politician all his life without making much of a mark in public; in private, in any government milieu he was one of the most trusted of men. He had the unusual gift of being both familiar and discreet; forty years before, when he began his career, he had set himself never to give away a secret, and never to allow himself the bright remark that makes a needless enemy. So by 1939 he had become such a link as all governments needed, particularly at the beginning of a war, before the forms of administration had settled down: they needed a man like Thomas Bevill as the chairman of confidential committees, the man to be kept informed of what was going on, the supreme post office.
Just before war began, he asked me to join him as one of his personal assistants. He had met me two or three times with the Boscastles, which was a virtue in his eyes, and I had been trained as a lawyer, which was another. He thought I was suitable raw material to learn discretion. Gradually, in the first autumn of the war, he let me item by item into his confidential files. That was why, one autumn afternoon, he sent word that he would like a ‘little talk’ with Hector Rose and me.
The Minister’s room was only two doors from mine, and both, relics of the eighteenth-century Treasury, looked out over Whitehall itself, brilliant that afternoon with autumn sun that blazed from the windows opposite ours. The Minister was not in the room, but Sir Hector Rose was already sitting by the side of the coal fire. He was a man in the early forties, stocky, powerful, and youthful-looking, his official black coat and striped trousers cut to conceal his heavy muscles. The flesh of his cheeks shone as though untouched, and his face, hair, and eyes had the same lightness. He greeted me with his usual excessive politeness. Then he said: ‘I suppose you have no idea what our master is going to occupy us with?’
I said no, and it was clear that he had none.
‘Has anyone else been summoned, do you know, Eliot?’
I did not think so. Rose said: ‘That makes us a very cosy little party.’
He spoke with a flick of the tongue, but he did not mean that it was strange for him, the Permanent Secretary, to be invited along with someone many rungs lower (I had started as what the Civil Service called a principal). Rose was too confident a man to bother about trivialities like that; he was himself formal, but he only objected to informality in others when it interfered with his administrative power.
The Minister came in, carrying a coalscuttle, on his hand a grimy cloth glove. He knelt by the grate, picked out lumps of coal and built up the fire. He was naturally familiar and unobtrusive in manner, but sometimes I thought he had developed it into an act. When people called on him in Whitehall, he would take their hats and coats and stow them punctiliously away in his cupboard. Kneeling by the fire, he looked thin-shouldered, wispy, like an elderly clerk.
‘I just wanted to have a word with you two,’ he said, still bending down.
‘An old boy came in to see me a day or two ago,’ he went on, as he pulled up a chair between us, round the fire. The ‘old boy’ was an eminent physicist, not more than sixty, that is, ten years Bevill’s junior. And the visit
had taken place a week before: Bevill had been thinking things out.
‘I think I ought to put you two in the swim,’ he said. ‘Though, as you may have gathered, I’m a great believer in no one knowing more than he’s got to know to do his job. And I don’t mind telling you that I’ve wondered whether either of you have got to know this time. But Eliot must, if he’s going to be much use to me, and there may be some action for you, Rose, not now, perhaps in a year or so’s time.’
‘If you think it wiser that I shouldn’t know till then, Minister,’ said Rose. Underneath the courtesy, he was irked by Bevill’s talent for using two words where one would do. I thought that he underrated the old man, particularly when, as now, he settled down comfortably to another Polonius-like discourse on security. The first thing, said the Minister, was to forget all about the official hierarchy, the next was to forget that you had any relatives. If you possess a secret, he said, your secretary may have to know: but not your second-in-command: and not your wife.
‘If you decide to leave me out at this stage, I shall perfectly well understand,’ said Rose, getting back to relevance.
‘No, my dear chap. It wouldn’t be practical,’ said the Minister. ‘I shouldn’t be able to pull the wool over your ears.’
The Minister sometimes got his idioms mixed up. Rose went on watching him with pale, heavy-lidded eyes, which met the old man’s frank, ingenuous, blue ones. With the same simple frank expression, Bevill said: ‘As a matter of fact, some of these scientists believe they can present us with a great big bang. Like thousands of tons of TNT. That would be a futurist war, if you like. That old boy the other day said we ought to be ready to put some money on it.’
It sounded like the gossip I had heard in Cambridge, and I said so.
‘Ought you to have heard?’ said Bevill, who thought of science in nothing but military terms. ‘These chaps will talk. Whatever you do, you can’t stop them talking. But they’re pushing on with it. I’ve collected three appreciations already. Forget all I tell you until you have to remember – that’s what I do. But the stuff to watch is what they call a uranium isotope.’
He said the words slowly as though separating the syllables for children to spell. ‘U.235,’ he added, as though domesticating a foreign name. To each of the three of us, the words and symbols might as well have been in Hittite, though Rose and I would have been regarded as highly educated men.
The Minister went on to say that, though the scientists ‘as usual’ were disagreeing among themselves, some of them believed that making a ‘superbomb’ was now only a matter of a series of techniques. They also believed that whichever side got the weapon first would win the war.
‘These people always think that it’s easier to win wars than I do,’ he added imperturbably.
‘How soon before it’s a feasible proposition?’ Rose asked him.
‘Not tomorrow,’ said Bevill. ‘Anything up to ten years.’
‘That’s a very long-term prospect,’ said Rose.
‘I’m not an optimist,’ the Minister replied. ‘It may be a very long-term war. But I agree with you, my dear chap, it doesn’t sound like business for this time. Still it won’t do any harm to watch out and keep our powder dry.’
‘Many thanks for giving me the warning, Minister,’ said Rose, deciding there was nothing more of use to be learned that afternoon. ‘Many, many thanks.’
But before Rose could get away, Bevill showed us his private dossier of the uranium project. We must not refer to it again by that name, he said: as with all other projects of high secrecy, he copied out the ‘appreciations’ in his own hand, keeping no copies: the documents were then mounted in a loose-leaf cover, on which he printed a pet name.
‘I’m going to show you my name for this new stunt,’ he said, with a smile that was frank, shy and eager. And into that smile there crept the almost salacious pleasure that many men show as they talk of secrets.
He turned over the cover, and we saw, painted in bold capitals, the words:
MR TOAD
‘That’s what we’ll call it here, if you don’t mind,’ he added.
3: What Might Have Been Foresight
IT still did not seem significant. That winter, one or two of us who were in the secret discussed it, but, although we looked round the room before we spoke, it did not catch hold of us as something real.
Once Francis Getliffe, whom I had known longer than the other scientists, said to me: ‘I hope it’s never possible.’
But even he, though he did not want any men anywhere to possess this power, spoke without heaviness, as if it were a danger of the future, a piece of science fiction, like the earth running into a comet’s path.
All the arrangements of those first months of Mr Toad were on the pettiest scale – a handful of scientists, nearly all of them working part time, scattered round three or four university laboratories; a professor wondering whether he might spend three hundred and fifty pounds for some extra help; an improvised committee, meeting once a month, sending its minutes to the Minister in longhand.
In the summer of 1940, on one of those mornings of steady, indifferent sunshine that left upon some of us, for years afterwards, an inescapable memory, I was walking down Piccadilly and noticed half a dozen men coming out of the Royal Society’s door in Burlington House. I knew most of them by sight. They were scientists, nearly all youngish men: one or two were carrying continental briefcases; they might have been coming from an examiners’ meeting. In fact, they were the committee, and the sight of them brought back the Minister’s pet name, which, with the war news dragging like an illness, did not seem much of a joke.
Soon afterwards, in the Minister’s office we received intelligence that the Germans were working on the bomb. Although we had all assumed it, the news was sharp: it added another fear. Also it roughened the tongues of those who were crusading for the project. Step by step they won for it a little more attention. By the spring of 1941 they obtained sanction for a research establishment – not a grand establishment like those working on radio and the immediate weapons of war, but one with perhaps a hundred scientists to their thousands. For a site, they picked on a place called Barford – which I had not heard of, but found to be a village in Warwickshire, a few miles from Stratford-on-Avon.
It became one of my duties to help them collect staff. I could hardly have had a more niggling job, for almost all scientists were by this time caught up in the war. Even for projects of high priority it was difficult enough to extract them, and so far as priority was concerned, the Barford project still had none at all. The only good scientists not yet employed were refugees, and it was clear that they would have to form the nucleus of Barford.
Accepting those facts, the Barford superintendent and his backers still made a claim, a modest claim, for at least one or two of the better young Englishmen. It was thus that I was asked to sound Walter Luke; if we could get him released from his radio work, would he be willing to move to Barford?
Then I wondered about Martin. I had heard little from him. I should have heard, if things had been going well, if like a good many scientists of his age, he had fallen on his feet. For eighteen months he had been doing a piece of technical routine. He seemed to be doing it just as competently, neither less nor more, than a hundred other young men in the naval ports. From a distance I had been watching, without being able to help.
I could not say much about Barford; in any case I knew that in this matter his temperament would work like mine; we said yes, but we did not like to be managed. Nevertheless, I could drop a hint. He could see for himself that it might give him a chance.
Later, my memory tended to cheat; it made me look as though I had the gift of foresight. That was quite untrue. In the spring of 1941, there were several other projects on Bevill’s files which seemed to me of a different order of importance from Mr Toad. As for Barford, I did not believe that anything would come of it, and my chief interest was that it might give Martin a better chance.
IT was some weeks before either Luke or Martin could get to London, but then I arranged to see them both on the same afternoon in May.
Martin was the first to arrive. It was over a year since we had met, and, as we enquired about each other, there was the sense of well-being, the wiping away of anxiety’s fret, that one only gets with those who have become part of the deep habit of one’s life.
Soon I asked: ‘How is Irene?’
‘Very well,’ said Martin, looking straight into my eyes, giving nothing away.
He walked round my office, admiring the Regency mantelpiece and the view over Whitehall. He was rejoicing that I was having something of a success – for, entirely through the Minister’s backing, I had just been promoted. In a section of the war, I now had my bit of subfusc power. I was for shrugging it off; but Martin, however, set more store by official honours than I did.
‘Are you sure you’re making the most of it?’ he said, with a proprietorial, insistent air,
He was delighted, and in his delight there was no envy. Yet suddenly he was sounding knowledgeable and worldly; it was strange, out of the haze of family memories, to see him standing there, a calculating man. If he had a success himself, I thought, he would have all the tricks ready to exploit it.
Actually, he had nothing to exploit. I listened to him saying that, as far as his job went, there was still nothing whatever to report. No change. I was full of irritation, for, when you hope for someone as I did for him, you blame them for their own misfortunes.
‘So far as there’s been any luck in the family,’ I said, ‘I’ve had it.’
‘I don’t believe in luck to that extent,’ said Martin, without complaint.
‘You’ve had none,’ I said.