by C. P. Snow
I said yes.
‘It’s for him,’ she said. ‘It’s not for me. He wants to speak to me urgently, and there’s nowhere else I can safely wait.’
She stared at me.
‘I think he wants me back.’
I tried to steady her: ‘What can you tell him?’
‘What can I tell him?’ she cried, and added, half crying, half hysterical: ‘Can I tell him I’m defeated?’
The phrase sounded strange, I was mystified: and yet it was at this point I knew that she was not leaving Martin out of hand.
On the other hand, I knew also that she was reading in Hankins’ intentions just what she wanted to read. Did he truly want her back? Above all, she would like to believe that.
Perhaps it was commonplace. Did she, like so many other unfaithful wives, want the supreme satisfaction of coming to the crisis and then staying with her husband and turning her lover down?
For all her faults, I did not think she was as commonplace as that. Looking at her, as she sat on my sofa, breathing shortly and shallowly as she listened for the telephone, I did not feel that she was just enjoying the game of love. She was febrile: that proved nothing, she could have been febrile in a flirtation. Her heart was pounding with emotion; I had seen other women so, taking a last fervent goodbye of a lover, on their way back to the marriage bed. But she was also genuinely, wildly unhappy, unhappy because her life was being driven by forces she could not govern or even understand, and unhappy also for the most primal of reasons, because the telephone did not ring and she could not hear his voice.
I tried to comfort her. I spoke of the time, ten years before, when I knew Hankins. It was strange that he, I was thinking, should have been her grand passion, her infatuation, her romantic love – people gave it different names, according to how they judged her. Why should he be the one to get under the skin of this fickle, reckless woman?
No, that did not soothe her. I made a better shot when I talked of her and Martin. I assumed there was something left for both of them, which was what she wanted to hear. We talked of the child, which she fiercely loved.
I recalled the reason she had given, at her breakfast table, for marrying him. ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘why did he marry you?’
‘Oh, that’s simple,’ said Irene, ‘he just liked the look of me.’
For once that night she spoke with zest, something like triumph. Soon her anxiety came back. She asked: Should we hear the telephone bell through the wall? Several times she started up, thinking it was beginning to ring. Twice it did ring, and twice she went to the receiver. One call was for me, one a wrong number. The minutes passed, the half-hours. Midnight came, one o’clock. She had ceased trying to keep up any conversation long since.
It was not in me to condemn her. I scarcely thought of her as my brother’s wife. Faced with the sight of her nervous expectant face, pinched to the point where anxiety is turning into the dread of deprivation, I felt for her just the animal comradeship of those who have been driven to wait for news by telephone, to wait in fear of the post because there may not be a letter, to walk the streets at night waiting for a bedroom light to go out before they can go to sleep. To have lived, even for a time, helpless in the deep undertow of passionate love – at moments one thought that one must come home to it, even if it was a dreadful home, and anyone moving to that same home, as Irene was, seemed at such moments a sister among the others, among all the untroubled strangers going to their neater homes.
At half past two I persuaded her to go to bed. The next morning there was still no message: she wanted to ring up again, but some relic of pride, perhaps my presence and what she had said to me, prevented her. She put on her smart, brazen air to keep her courage up, and with a quip about having spent the night alone with me in my flat, took a taxi to Paddington and the next train back to Barford, waving with spirit till she was out of sight up Lupus Street.
Neither that morning, nor the previous night, had I wished, as I had often wished in the past, that Martin was rid of her.
16: Points on a Graph
Most people I met, even on the technical committees, were still ignorant about the whole uranium project. But some could not resist letting one know that they were in the secret too. In the lavatory of the Athenaeum a bald bland head turned to me from the adjacent stall.
‘March 22nd,’ came the whisper and a finger rose to the lips.
On the evening of the twenty-first, just as I was leaving to catch the last train to Barford, Hector Rose gave his ceremonious knock and came into my office.
‘Very best wishes, Eliot,’ he said. He was awkward; he was for once excited, and tried to hide it.
‘This may be a mildly historic occasion,’ he said. ‘We may all qualify for a footnote to history, which would be somewhat peculiar, don’t you think?’
Next morning, sitting opposite to Mrs Drawbell at the breakfast table, I thought there was one person at least immune from the excitement. Drawbell had left for the laboratory, so full of animation that he let the diablerie show through: ‘If I were giving honours, Eliot, I shouldn’t give them to the prima donnas – no, just to the people who do the good, hard, slogging work.’ He gave his melon-lipped grin; he was thinking of his own rewards to come; more than ever, he felt the resentment of a middle man for those who make his fortune. When he went out, the psychological temperature fell.
Mrs Drawbell watched me, heavy and confident in her silence. She said: ‘I hope you are enjoying your kipper,’ and returned to impassivity again. I said: ‘Everyone will be glad when today is over, won’t they?’
The women at Barford had had to be told that an experiment was taking place that day; Mrs Drawbell did not know what it was, but she knew this was a crisis. Nevertheless, mine seemed a new idea.
‘Perhaps they will,’ said Mrs Drawbell.
‘It’s going to be a strain,’ I said.
She gave an opaque smile.
‘It’s a strain on your husband,’ I said.
‘He’s used to it,’ said Mrs Drawbell.
Had she any feeling for him, I wondered? She was his ally; in her immobile fashion, she tried to help him on: it was she who, finding that Martin and Irene had no room to spare, had invited me to stay. Yet she spoke of him with less tenderness than many women speak of their doctors.
Then she talked of Mary Pearson’s children; Mrs Drawbell was looking after them for the day. She was confident that their mother’s treatment was wrong and her own right. Densely, confidently, with a curious air of being about to offer affection, she pressed her case upon me and was demanding my moral support. I could not help remembering her on my way to the hangar, irritated as I was in any period of suspense that other lives should be going on, with their own egotisms, claiming one’s attention, intruding their desires.
I felt my suspense about that day’s experiment increase, having been forced to think of something else. When I saw Mary Pearson, sitting at a bench close to the pile, I was short to her; her skin flushed, her eyes clouded behind her spectacles. I made some sort of apology. I could not explain that I felt more keyed up because her name had distracted me,
The hangar was noisy that morning, like a cathedral echoing a party of soldiers. Workmen, mechanics, young scientists, went in and out through the door in the pile’s outer wall; Luke was shouting to someone on top of the pile; Martin and a couple of assistants were disentangling the wire from an electrical apparatus on the floor. There were at least twenty men in the hangar, and Mary Pearson was the only woman. And in the middle, white-walled, about three times the height of a man, stood – catching our eyes as though it were a sacred stone – the pile.
Luke greeted me. He was wearing a windjacket tucked into his grey flannel trousers.
‘Well, Lewis,’ he shouted, ‘we’re in the hell of a mess.’
‘It will be all right on the night,’ said someone. There was a burst of laughter, laughter noisy, exultant, with just a prickle of nerves.
The ‘pipery’ (Luke meant the pi
pes, but his scientific idiom was getting richer as he grew more triumphant) had ‘stood up to’ all tests. The uranium slugs were in place. In the past week, Martin had put in a dribble of heavy water, and a test sample had picked up no impurities. But there was one ‘bloody last-minute snag’ like finding just at the critical moment that you have forgotten – Luke produced a bedroom simile. Most of the ‘circuitry’, like the pipery, was in order: there was trouble with one switch of the control rods.
‘We can’t start without them,’ said Luke. Martin joined us: I did not wish to ask questions, any question seemed to delay the issue, but they told me how the control rods worked. ‘If the pile gets too hot, then they automatically shut the whole thing off,’ said Luke.
‘Otherwise,’ said Martin, ‘there is a finite danger that the reaction would be uncontrollable.’
That meant – I knew enough to follow – the pile might turn into something like a nuclear bomb.
Both Luke and Martin were themselves working on the circuits. A couple of radio engineers wanted Luke to let them improvise a switch.
‘Think again,’ said Luke. ‘That cut-off is going to work as we intended it to work, if it means plugging away at the circuits until this time tomorrow.’
Someone went on arguing.
‘Curtains,’ said Luke.
As Martin returned to the labyrinth of wires, both he and Luke ready to finger valves for hours to come, I wished I had stayed away or that they had a job for me. All I could do was drag up a chair to Mary Pearson’s bench. She was self-conscious, perhaps because I had been brusque, perhaps because, with her husband away, she was uncomfortable in the presence of men. Already that morning I had seen some of the youths, gauche but virile, eyeing her. When I sat beside her, though she was not comfortable herself, it was in her nature to try to make me so.
In front of her were instruments which she had been taught to read; she was a competent girl, I thought, she would have made an admirable nurse. There was one of the counters whose ticking I had come to expect in any Barford laboratory; there was a logarithmic amplifier, a DC amplifier, with faces like speedometers, which would give a measure – she had picked up some of the jargon – of the ‘neutron flux’.
On the bench was pinned a sheet of graph paper and it was there that she was to plot the course of the experiment. As the heavy water was poured in, the neutron flux would rise: the points on the graph would lead down to a spot where the pile had started to run, where the chain reaction had begun:
‘That’s going to be the great moment,’ said Mary
The tap and rattle, the curses and argument, the dashes of light, went on round us. I continued to talk to Mary, lowering my voice – though there was no need, for the scientists were shouting. Once or twice she contradicted me, her kind mouth showed a touch of sexual obstinacy. She was totally faithful to Pearson; like many passionate women she was chaste; but she was not chaste because she did not know the temptation; she could have made many men happy, and been happy herself with many men. She would stay faithful to her husband, however long he was kept away, and she was edgy when her eyes brightened in his absence. Again like many happy, passionate, good-natured women, she had just a trace more than her fair share of self-regard. The morning ticked on, midday, the early afternoon, none of us had spoken of eating. It must have been after two o’clock when one of the refugees discovered the fault.
At once a conference sprang up, between Mary Pearson’s bench and the pile. If they wanted a ‘permanent solution’, so that they need not worry about the control rods for the next year, it would take twenty-four hours; on the other hand it would be very little risk to patch up a circuit for a trial run, and that could be ready by evening.
Luke stood by himself, square, toeing the floor, his lips chewed in. ‘No,’ he said loudly, ‘there are some risks you have got to take and there are some you haven’t. A week might possibly matter, but a day damned well can’t. We’ll get it right before we start.’
A voice complained: ‘We said we should be running on the twenty-second.’
Luke said: ‘Well, we now say that we shall be running on the twenty-third.’
He was right. They all knew it. It was only Martin, who, as he and Luke came out of the scrimmage towards me, said, in a tone that the others could not hear: ‘It’s a pity for the sake of public relations.’
‘You’d better look after them,’ said Luke. For a moment, his energy had left him. Everyone who was working there trusted him, because they felt (as his seniors did not) that underneath his brashness there was a bedrock of sense. But for Luke himself it took an effort for the sense to win.
‘Tell them we’ve called it a day,’ said Luke with fatigue. ‘They can see the fireworks about teatime tomorrow.’
‘Not earlier than eight tomorrow night,’ said Martin.
For an hour, Martin went off to play politics: explaining to the senior men at Barford, Drawbell, Mounteney, and the rest, who were expected to come to the ‘opening’ that night, the reason for the delay; telephoning Rose and others in London. I offered to get the news through to Rose myself, but Martin chose to do it all.
Mary Pearson left to fetch sandwiches, voices blew about the hangar, Luke and his team were stripping a lead on top of the pile, and I was able to slip away.
Out of duty, I visited Irene and the child, who was just a year old. Irene said nothing of our last meeting, but as I was playing with the baby she remarked, all of a sudden: ‘Lewis, you’d rather be alone, wouldn’t you?’
I asked what she meant.
‘You and Martin are very much alike, you know. You’d like to hide until this thing is settled, wouldn’t you?’
With her eyes fixed on me, I admitted it.
‘So would he,’ said Irene.
With the half-malicious understanding that was springing up between us, she sent me off on my own. I did not want to speak to anyone I knew at Barford, not Mounteney, not Luke, Martin least of all. I made an excuse to Mrs Drawbell that some old acquaintance had asked me out to dinner, but in fact I took the bus to Warwick and spent the evening in a public house.
There I saw only one person from Barford – young Sawbridge, whom we had interviewed twelve months before. Somehow I was driven to be friendly, to get some response of goodwill out of him, as though he were a mascot for the following night.
I stood him a drink, and said something about our native town,
‘I’ve not got much use for it,’ said Sawbridge.
It would have soothed me to be sentimental that night. I mentioned some of my friends of the twenties – George Passant – no, Sawbridge had never heard of him.
I kept affectionate memories of the town then, and said so.
‘You just lump it down anywhere in America,’ said Sawbridge with anger, ‘and no one could tell the difference.’
I gave it up, and asked him to have another drink.
‘I don’t mind if I do,’ said Sawbridge.
The next day I got through the hours in the same fashion, sitting in the library, walking by the riverside. The afternoon was quiet, there was no wind; it would have been pleasant to be strolling so, waiting for nothing, with that night’s result behind me. The elm twigs were thickening, the twigs in the hedges were dense and black, but there were no leaves anywhere. All was dusky, just before the break of the leaf – except for a patch where the blackthorn shone white, solid, and bare, standing out before the sullen promise of the hedgerow.
I went straight from the blackthorn blossom and the leafless hedge back to the hangar, where the shadow of the pile lay black on the geometrically levelled floor. Martin and Luke were drinking tea on a littered bench close to Mary’s and someone was calling instructions by numbers.
They told me that all was ready ‘bar the juice’. The juice was heavy water, and it took the next hour to carry it into the hangar. I went with some of the scientists in the first carrying party; they walked among the huts in the spring evening laughing like students on t
heir way back from the laboratory. The heavy-water depot stood on the edge of the airfield, a red brick cube with two sentries at the door; there was a hiatus, then, because the young men had no sense of form but the storekeeper had. He was an old warrant officer with protruding eyes; his instructions said that he could not deliver heavy water except on certain signatures. Against curses, against the rational, nagging, contentious, scientific argument, he just pointed to his rubric, and Martin had to be fetched. He was polite with the storekeeper; to me, he smiled, the only smile of detachment on his face in those two days. The scientists followed into the depot one by one, and came out with what looked like enormous Thermos flasks, which were the containers of heavy water.
Casually the young men joggled back, the silver flasks flashing in the cold green twilight. About it all there was an overwhelming air of jauntiness and youth; it might have been a party of hikers carrying bottles of beer. It was a scene that, even as it took place, I felt obliged to remember – the file in sweaters and grey flannel trousers, swinging the silver flasks, the faces young, thin, disrespectful, masculine.
‘Each of those flasks cost God knows what,’ said Martin as we watched. He did some mental arithmetic. ‘About two thousand pounds.’
By seven o’clock some hundreds of flasks were standing behind the pile. When I discovered that the heavy water from those flasks was going to be poured in by hand, it did not strike me as foreign. It was like much that I had picked up in the air at Cambridge and which Luke and Mounteney and Martin had carried with them. The pile, engineered to a thousandth of an inch; the metals, analytically pure as metals had not been pure before; the whole structure, the most perfect example of the quantitative accuracy of the age; and then Martin and his men were going to slop in the heavy water as though filling up a bath with buckets. They did not mind being slapdash when it did not matter; they took a certain pride in it, like the older generation of Cambridge scientists; the next pile they made, they conceded, they would have the ‘juice’ syphoned in.