by C. P. Snow
‘What are you getting at, Eliot?’ asked Bevill.
‘I suggest that the sensible thing, sir,’ said Martin, speaking both modestly and certainly, ‘is to leave him exactly where he is.’
‘With great respect,’ Smith said to Luke, after a pause, ‘I wonder if that isn’t the wisest course?’
‘I won’t have him in my lab a day longer,’ said Luke.
‘He might get away with your latest stuff,’ cried old Bevill.
Martin answered him quietly: ‘That can be taken care of, sir.’
‘If we move him,’ Smith appeared to be thinking aloud, ‘we’ve got to make some excuse, and if he isn’t rattled he might require a very good excuse.’
‘How in God’s name can you expect us to work,’ Luke shouted, ‘with a man we can’t talk in front of?’
‘If we leave him where he is,’ said Martin, without a sign of excitement, ‘he would be under my eyes.’
He added: ‘I should very much prefer it so.’
In the middle of the argument, the telephone rang on the far table. It was from Drawbell’s personal assistant, the only person who could get through to us; she was asking to speak to me urgently. In a whisper, only four feet from old Bevill, I took the call.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Eliot,’ she said, ‘but Hanna Puchwein is pressing me, she says that she must speak to you and your brother this afternoon. I said that I mightn’t be able to find you.’
‘That’s right,’ I said.
‘I suppose you can’t speak to her?’
‘No,’ I said with routine prudence.
‘She said, if I couldn’t get you, that I was to leave a message. She’s most anxious. She told me to say it was urgent for her – for you and Dr Eliot (Martin) to see her before dinner tonight.’
I went back to my place, wrote down the message, put it in an envelope (it was curious how the fug of secrecy caught hold of one, how easy it was to feel like a criminal) and had it passed across the room to Martin. I watched him staring at the note, with his pen raised. Without his face changing, he wrote: ‘No, not until we have discussed it with Smith M.’
Uncertain of himself as I had not seen him, Luke soon gave way. Sawbridge was to stay under observation, and we left Smith alone with Luke and Martin, making arrangements about how Sawbridge must be watched.
Although Martin and I had not once talked without reserve since the August afternoon, I was staying, as usual, in his house. So I waited for him in his laboratory, while he finished the interview with Captain Smith.
As I waited there alone, I could not help trying to catch a glimpse of Sawbridge. His state of jeopardy, of being in danger of hearing a captor’s summons (next week? next month?), drew me with a degrading fascination of which I was ashamed.
It was the same with others, even with Smith, who should have been used to it. The sullen, pale face had only to come within sight – and it was hard to force one’s glance away. It might have been a school through which there moved, catching eyes afraid, ashamed, desiring, a boy of superlative attraction. On the plane of reason, I detested our secret; yet I found myself scratching at it, coming back to it.
Waiting for Martin, I manufactured an excuse to pass through Sawbridge’s laboratory, so that I could study him.
He knew his danger. Just like us who were watching him, he was apprehending when the time – the precise instant of time – would come. It seemed that at moments he was holding his breath, and he found himself taking care of ordinary involuntary physical acts. Instead of walking about the laboratory with his heavy, confident clatter, he went lightly and jaggedly, sometimes on tiptoe, like a man in trepidation by a sickbed. He had grown a moustache, fair against the large-pored skin. He was working on, taking his measurements, writing results in his stationery office notebook. He knew that we were watching. He knew all we knew. He was a brave man, and his opaque, sky-blue eyes looked back with contempt.
Martin, sooner than I counted on, found me there. He called Sawbridge: ‘How is it coming out?’
‘Eighty per cent reliable.’
‘Pretty,’ said Martin.
They looked at each other, and as Martin took me out he called good night.
32: Distress Out of Proportion
As soon as we reached Martin’s laboratory, he switched on the light behind an opalescent screen. He apologized for keeping me, said that he wanted to have a look at a spectroscopic plate; he stood there, fixing the negative on to the bright screen, peering down at the regiments of lines.
I believed his work was an excuse. He did not intend to talk about his action that day. I was out of proportion distressed.
Though nothing had been admitted, we both took it for granted that there was a break between us; but it was not that in itself which weighed on me. Reserve, separation, the withdrawal of intimacy – the relation of brothers, which is at the same time tough and not overblown, can stand them all. And yet that night, as we did not speak, as he stood over the luminous screen, I was heavy-hearted. The reason did not seem sufficient; I disliked what he planned to do about Sawbridge; but I could not have explained why I minded so much.
I had had no doubt what he intended, from that night at Stratford, when he put forward his case in front of Luke. He had foreseen the danger about Sawbridge: he had also foreseen how to turn it to his own use. It was clear to him, as in his place it might have been clear to me, that he could gain much from joining in the hunt.
It was cynical, but I could not lay that against him. It might be the cynicism of the rebound, for which I was at least in part responsible.
His suggestion at Stratford had been unscrupulous, but it would have saved trouble now. And I could not lay it against him that now he wanted to put Sawbridge away. We had never talked of it, but we both had the patriotism, slightly shamefaced, more inhibited than Bevill’s, of our kind and age.
We took it out in tart, tough-sounding sentiments, that as we had to live in this country, we might as well make it as safe as could be. In fact, when we heard of the spies, we were more shaken than we showed.
Concealing our sense of outrage, men like Martin and Francis Getliffe and I said to each other, in the dry, analytic language of the day – none of us liked the situation in which we found ourselves, but in that situation all societies had their secrets – any society which permitted its secrets to be stolen was obsolescent – we could not let it happen.
But accepting that necessity was one thing, making a career of it another.
Yet was that enough to make me, watching him, so wretched?
Was it even enough that he was throwing other scruples away, of the kind that my friends and I valued more? Among ourselves, we tried to be kind and loyal. Whereas I had no doubt that Martin was planning to climb at Luke’s expense, making the most out of the contrast between Luke’s mistake of judgement over Sawbridge and Martin’s own foresight. That day he had taken advantage of Luke’s confusion, in front of Bevill. And Martin had a card or two still to play.
Was that enough reason for my distress?
Carefully Martin packed the photographic plate in the box, made a note on the outside, and turned to me. He apologized again for keeping me waiting; he was expecting a result from another laboratory in ten minutes, and then he would be ready to go.
We made some conversation with our thoughts elsewhere. Then, without a preliminary and also without awkwardness, he said: ‘I’m sorry we had to brush Hanna off.’
I said yes.
‘I’m sure it was wise,’ said Martin.
‘Is there any end to this business?’
‘Not yet.’
He went on: ‘Hanna will understand. She’s a match for most of us.’ I glanced at him, his face lit from below by the shining screen. He was wearing a reflective, sarcastic smile. He said: ‘Why don’t you and I marry women like that?’
I caught his tone. My own marriage had been even more untranquil than his.
‘Because we wanted a quiet life,’ I said. It was the kind of irony
that we could still share.
‘Exactly,’ said Martin.
We seemed close enough to speak. It was for me to take the first step if we were to be reconciled. I said: ‘We look like being in an unpleasant situation soon.’
Martin said: ‘Which one?’
I said: ‘About Sawbridge.’
‘Maybe,’ said Martin.
‘It would be a help to me if I knew what you were thinking.’
‘How, quite?’
‘These are times when one needs some help. So far as I’m concerned I need it very much.’
After a pause, Martin said: ‘The trouble is, we’re not likely to agree.’
Without roughness, he turned the appeal away. He began asking questions about the new flat into which I was just arranging to move.
33: Wife and Husband
The spring came, and Sawbridge remained at liberty. But the scientist about whom the warning came through on New Year’s Eve had been arrested, had come up at the Old Bailey, pleaded guilty and been given ten years. His name, which Bevill had forgotten that day, made headlines in the newspapers.
Later, I realized that most of us on the inside hid from ourselves how loud the public clamour was. We knew that people were talking nonsense, were exaggerating out of all meaning the practical results; and so, just like other officials in the inside of a scandal, we shut our ears off from any remark we heard about it, in the train, at the club bar, in the theatre-foyer, as though we were deaf men who had conveniently switched off our hearing aid.
Myself; I went into court for the trial. Little was said there; for many people it was enough, as it had been for Bevill, to add to the gritty taste of fear.
Always quick off the mark, Hankins, in his profession the most businesslike of men, got in with the first article, which he called The Final Treason. It was a moving and eloquent piece, the voice of those who felt left over from their liberal youth, to whom the sweetness of life had ceased with the twenties, and now seemed to themselves to be existing in no-man’s-land. For me, it had a feature of special interest. That was a single line in which he wrote, like many writers before him, a private message. He was signalling to Irene reminding her that she had not always lived among ‘the new foreigners’ – that is, the English scientists. For Hankins had come to think of them as a different race.
Soon after came news, drifting up from Barford to the committees, that Luke was ill. ‘Poorly’ was the first description I heard. No one seemed to know what the matter was – though some guessed it might be an after effect of his ‘dose’ It did not sound serious; it did not immediately strike me that this put Martin in effective charge.
I thought so little of it that I did not write to inquire, until towards the end of March I was told by Francis Getliffe that Luke was on the ‘certain’ list for that year’s elections to the Royal Society. I asked if I could congratulate him. Yes, said Francis, if it were kept between us. Luke himself already knew. So I sent a note, but for some days received no reply. At last a letter came, but it was written by Nora Luke. She said that Walter was not well, and not up to writing his thanks himself; if I could spare the time to come down some day, he would like to talk to me. If I did this, wrote Nora in a strong inflexible handwriting, she asked me to be sure to see her first. Then she could give me ‘all the information’.
I went to Barford next morning, and found Nora in her laboratory office. On the door was a card on which the Indian ink gleamed jet bright: N Luke, and underneath PSO, for Nora had, not long before, been promoted and was at that time the only woman at Barford of her rank.
As soon as I saw her, I said: ‘This is serious, isn’t it?’
‘It may be,’ said Nora Luke.
She added: ‘He asked me to tell you. He knows what the doctors think.’
‘What do they think?’
Sitting at her desk, with her hair in a bun, wearing rimless spectacles, her fawn sweater, her notebook in front of her, she looked as she must have done when she was a student, and she and Luke first met. Steadily she answered: ‘The worst possibility is cancer of the bone.’
It was what he had feared, in his first attack.
‘That may not happen,’ Nora went on in a reasonable tone. ‘It seems to depend on whether this flare-up is caused by the gamma rays or whether it’s traces of plutonium that have stayed inside him and gone for the bone.’
‘When will you know?’
‘No one can give him any idea. They haven’t any experience to go on. If this bout passes off, he won’t have any guarantee that it’s not going to return.’
I muttered something: then I inquired how many people knew.
‘Most people here, I suppose,’ said Nora. Suddenly she was curious: ‘Why do you ask that?’
In my middle twenties, I also had been threatened with grave illness. I had tried to conceal it, because it might do me professional harm. Instead of telling Nora that, I just said how often I had seen people hide even the mention of cancer.
‘He wouldn’t have any patience with that,’ said Nora. ‘Nor should I. Even if the worst came to the worst’ – she stared straight at me ‘the sooner everyone here knows the dangers the more they can save themselves.’
How open she was, just as Luke was himself! Sometimes their openness made the ruses, the secretiveness, of such as I seem shabby. Yet even so, learning from Nora about her husband’s illness, I felt that she was too open, I was more embarrassed than if she could not get a word out, and so I was less use to her.
I asked where Luke was, and who was nursing him. In the establishment hospital as before, said Nora; Mrs Drawbell, also as before.
‘She’s better at it than I am,’ said Nora.
She added, her light eyes right in the middle of her lenses, her glance not leaving mine: ‘If he’s knocked out for years, I suppose I shall have some practice.’ She went on: ‘As a matter of fact, if I’ve got him lying on his back for keeps. I shall be grateful, as long as I’ve got him at all.’
She said it without a tear. She said it without varying her flat, sensible, methodical voice. Nevertheless, it made me realize how, even five minutes before, and always in the past, I had grossly misunderstood her. The last time Luke was ill, and she had left the ward, I had thought to myself that she was glad to escape, that like me she could not stand the sight of suffering. Nonsense: it was a carelessness I should not have committed about a wilder woman such as Irene; at forty I had fallen into the adolescent error of being deceived by the prosaic.
Actually Nora would have stayed chained to her husband’s bedside, had it kept the breath of life in him a second longer. She had the total devotion – which did not need to be passionate, or even emotional – of one who began with no confidence in her charms, who scarcely dared think of her charms at all. Her self-esteem she invested in her mind which in fact she thought, quite mistakenly, was in her husband’s class. But, in her heart, she was always incredulous that she had found a man for life. Rather than have him taken away she would accept any terms.
Illness, decay, breakdown – if only he suffered them in her care, then she was spared the intolerable deprivation of losing him. It was those total devotions which sprang from total diffidence that were the most possessive of all. Between having him as an abject invalid, and having him in his full manhood but apart from her, there would not have been the most infinitesimal flicker of a choice for Nora.
When I entered Luke’s ward, the room was dark, rain was seeping down outside, he seemed asleep. As I crossed the floor, there was a rustle in the bed; he switched on the reading lamp and looked at me with a flushed, tousled face. The last patch of alopecia had gone, his hair was as thick as it used to be, the flush mimicked his old colour, but had a dead pallor behind it.
‘I’ve heard the doctors’ opinions,’ I said, searching for some way of bringing out regret. To my amazement, Luke said: ‘They don’t know much. If only there hadn’t been more interesting things to do, Lewis, I’d have liked to have a shot a
t medicine. I might have put some science into it.’
I could not tell whether he was braving it out – even when he went on: ‘I shall be surprised if they’re going to finish me off this time. I don’t put the carcinoma theory higher than a twenty per cent chance.’
If that was his spirit, I could only play up. So I congratulated him again on the Royal Society election.
‘Now that’s the only bloody thing that really frightens me,’ said Luke, with a grim, jaunty laugh. ‘When the old men give you your ticket a year or two early, it makes you wonder whether they’re hurrying to get in before the funeral.’
‘I haven’t heard any whispers of that,’ I said.
‘Are you lying?’
‘No.’ He had been elected on his second time up, while not yet thirty-five.
‘That’s a relief,’ said Luke. ‘I tell you, I shall believe that I’m done for when I see it.’
I thought, how easy he was to reassure.
‘One thing about people trying to dispose of you like this,’ said Luke, ‘it gives you time to think.’
Half-heartedly (I did not feel much like an argument) I asked what he had been thinking about.
‘Oh, the way I’ve spent my life so far,’ said Luke. ‘And what I ought to do with the rest of it.’
He was not speaking with his old truculence.
‘I couldn’t help being a scientist, could I? It was what I was made for. If I had my time over again, I should do the same. But none of us are really going to be easy about that blasted bomb. It’s the penalty for being born when we were – but whenever we have to look into the bloody mirror to shave, we shan’t be a hundred per cent pleased with what we see there.’
He added: ‘But what else could we do? You know the whole story, what else could chaps like me do?’
I mentioned that I had once heard Hector Rose say – Hector Rose, who stood for so much that Luke detested – that ‘events may get too big for men’.
‘Did he? Perhaps he’s not such a stuffed shirt after all. Of course we’ve all thought events may be too big for us.’