The New Men (9 page)

That was the reason I started into anxiety, the instant Hanna Puchwein inquired about Martin’s fate.

I was having dinner with the Puchweins at the Connaught, at the farewell party they gave me before Kurt Puchwein left for Chicago. They were standing me a lavish treat; as I sat by Hanna’s side, with her husband opposite, in the corner near the door, lights flashed on glass and sank cosily into the rosewood, and I was reflecting, if you were used to English fellow travellers, how incongruous Hanna Puchwein seemed. There was nothing of the self-abnegation of the English radical about her, none of the attempts, common among other acquaintances of mine, to imitate the manners of the working class. Hanna’s glossy head gleamed trimly in our corner, and she was the best-groomed woman in the room. She was in her early thirties. She had a small head, narrowing catlike to a pointed chin. Her forehead was white, bland, unlined; but her eyes flashed as she talked, and she had an air that was, I thought, at the same time cultivated and farouche.

Meanwhile Kurt was presenting me with gifts: he was a man who found it delectable to give, though not to receive. He liked doing good turns and letting one know it; but that had always seemed to me more amiable than not liking to do good turns at all. He gave me wine. He gave me his opinion that, out of Luke’s project, he and Martin would ‘do themselves good in the long run’.

Yet, although he was expending himself to make me cheerful, his own mood was overcast. He and Hanna spoke little to each other; and it occurred to me that probably in an unexacting friendship, such as he felt for me, one saw the best of him. In a closer relation, he could be violent, spoiled, bad tempered.

That night he went to bed early, leaving me and Hanna together, on the excuse that he had some last letters to write. He spun out his goodbye to me, pressing my hand.

‘It may be a long time before we meet again, my friend,’ he said. He was flying the Atlantic within forty-eight hours. I looked at him – his great prow of a nose, his mouth pinched in, as though with press-studs, that night.

‘Ah, well,’ he said. ‘We shall meet once again in the world.’

As soon as he had gone, I spoke to Hanna. Once or twice before I had talked to her intimately, as I had never done with Kurt. I asked, outright: ‘Why is Kurt so anxious to go to America?’

He could have stayed at Barford. Apart from Luke’s project, some others, including Rudd’s, had been left in being. Nothing official ever got closed down flat, old Bevill used to say.

Hanna stared at me, first with a blank, washed, open look (her temper was as formidable as his), then with an expression I could not read.

‘Why ask me?’ she said. Then quickly: ‘Why didn’t you persuade your brother to go also?’

It was then I started. She went on: ‘Wouldn’t it have been better for him?’

I said, at once hypersensitive, on the defensive: ‘It depends whether Luke’s scheme comes off – but a good many of them believe in it. You heard what Kurt said.’

Hanna said: ‘Oh that! You’re a most singleminded man.’

Her smile had an edge.

‘I didn’t mean that at all,’ she said.

‘What did you mean?’

‘If he went to America,’ she said, ‘he might be able to escape from that woman.’

‘I don’t know whether he wants to escape,’ I said.

‘I know that he ought to,’ said Hanna.

She reminded me that geographical distance, like time, helped one to recover from unhappy love. Three thousand miles could be as good as the passage of six months. Hanna’s eyes were flashing with impatience, in which there was, however, a trace of the pleasure with which a man and a woman, not attached but not totally unaware of each other, spread out before them the platitudes and generalizations of love.

I said that I hoped the child might heal their marriage.

‘Have you never known women have a child and leave their husbands flat?’

She went on: ‘With women like her, children break marriages more often than they save them.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘if she did leave him, you wouldn’t break your heart.’

‘Unless he’s got free of her first,’ she said, ‘he might break his.’

I was frowning, and she said: ‘I suppose you know that he’s been passionately in love with her? And may be still?’

‘I think I did know that,’ I said.

‘She is quite useless to him,’ she said. ‘If he isn’t lucky and doesn’t get away, she will destroy a great part of his life.’

I was thinking: when I worried about the danger of Martin’s marriage, it had been for cruder reasons than these, it had been because Irene might do him ‘practical’ harm in terms of money and worldly standing and jobs. I had almost deliberately shut my eyes to what he felt for her: and it was left for Hanna, herself someone whom I had always thought a selfish woman, to show the consideration, the imaginative sympathy, in which I had failed.

It was partly that our loves are entirely serious only to ourselves; years of my own life had been corroded by a passion more wretched than Martin’s, and yet, as a spectator of his, I felt as my friends used to feel about mine. We would ‘get over it’, it was irritating to watch a man dulled by his own infatuation, it seemed, certainly not tragic, scarcely even pathetic, almost his own fault. In fact, all loves but one’s own have an element of the tiresome: and from the way I behaved about Martin’s until that evening when Hanna forced me to face it, I came to think that was even more true of a brother’s unhappy love than of a friend’s.

‘She gives him nothing he couldn’t get from any woman he picked up,’ she said. ‘And in self-defence he has learned to give nothing back.’

‘I think he can bear it,’ I said.

‘Of course he can bear it. But sometimes it is a greater danger to bear it than not to bear it.’

She went on: ‘One can stand so much that one gets frightened of anything better. Isn’t that true of you?’

‘There’s something in that,’ I said.

‘It isn’t noble,’ Hanna said, ‘It is just that one has become too frightened to choose, and then one goes on standing it. Well, I want to see Martin stop suffering patiently. I want to see him take himself in hand and make his choice.’

As I listened to her, speaking with the bite that sounded at the same time intimate and cross, I felt a touch of concern – for her. It was disturbing to hear her talk so intently of another – not through tenderness for Martin, though she had a little, not even because she was putting me off from talking of her husband, though that was also true. It was disturbing because she was really talking of herself. She was behaving like Martin that night when he and I walked towards his empty house; she was unable to say outright that she too was coming near a choice. About her there clung the desperation, the fragility, of a woman who still looks young but no longer feels it to herself – or rather who, still feeling young, becomes self-conscious that others are marking off the years – and who has become obsessed that she has only one choice to make, one, no more, before she is old.

Those in the secret did not talk easily with each other, and as the months passed and Luke’s ‘pile’ went up, it was hard to judge how many believed in him. In committee heads were shaken, not much was said, yet feelings ran high. Luke was one of those figures who have the knack, often surprising to themselves, of stirring up controversy; people who did not know him, who had no conception of his surgent, exuberant, often simple-hearted character, grew excited about him, as someone who would benefit the country or as a scandalous trifler with public money, almost as a crook.

Of his supporters, the most highly placed of all was lost in the April of 1943, when Bevill was at last told that his job was wanted for another.

Now that his suspense had ended, I was astonished by the old man’s resilience. He moved his papers from Whitehall the same day. Briskly he said goodbye to his staff and made a speech with a remarkable, indeed an excessive, lack of sentimentality. He was not thinking of his years in the old office; he was thinking of nothing but the future. Without any procrastination at all he refused a peerage. If he accepted it, he was accepting the fact that he was out of politics for good: at the age of seventy-four, he was, with the occupational hope of politicians, as difficult to kill as the hope of a consumptive, reckoning his chances of getting back again.

As soon as he left, my own personal influence diminished; I could intervene no more than other civil servants of my rank (in his last month of office, Bevill had got me promoted again, which Rose thought excessive). All I did had to go through Rose, and we were more than ever uneasy with each other.

Nevertheless, Rose intended not to waste my inside knowledge of Barford. He merely requested as a favour that I should report to him any ‘point of interest’ I picked up on my visits there.

Each of us was being punctilious. When I next went down to Barford, a month or two after Bevill’s dismissal, for the christening of Martin’s son, I set out to obey Rose to the letter. I held back one incident only and I did so because neither of us would have thought it worth our while.

It was a morning late in May, the sky bright and pale, with an east wind that took the scent out of the wisteria, when I went into the hangar with Martin, in order to see the pile going up before we went to church. The tarpaulins in the roof, still not repaired, flapped in the wind. In the hangar it was cold; I had not known it anything else; but, instead of the dripping floor of winter, it had suddenly gone dusty, and grit blew about in the spring air. Labourers, wearing jerseys, were working in the bleak half light; they were laying bricks for an outer wall, while farther away one could see a kind of box, about eight feet each way; outside was another wall, the first part of the concrete case. Farther down still, Luke’s experimental structure lay deserted. Between stood some tables, one or two screened off, stacked with radio valves and circuits; on others, as though abandoned, were strewn metal tubing and tea cups. There was no sign of busyness. Labourers padded on, muttering among themselves. The foreman had his hand on the concrete shield, and was listening to Luke.

The paradox was that, as they worked against time, as they studied the German intelligence reports or heard gossip from America (news had come through that the Chicago pile had already run, in the previous December), Luke had nothing like enough to do.

Once he had had his idea, there was no more room for flair or scientific imagination for months, perhaps years to come: the rest was a matter of getting the machine built. It was a matter of organization, extreme attention to detail, knowing when a contractor could not work faster and when he could be pressed. It was a matter of organization that differed only in scale and in what depended on it, but not at all in kind, from being the clerk of works to some new public baths. Any competent man could do it, and Martin was there to do it as efficiently as Luke and with less fuss. Luke, who was as lavish with praise as abuse, admitted this. But he could not keep his hands off. Engineers, going as fast as men could within the human limits, heard his swearwords over the telephone. They did no great harm. It meant an expense of temper. It meant that, for the most critical months of Luke’s working life, he still had nothing to do.

When he came across to speak to me, I noticed that the colour of his face had gone more sallow and that, although the skin under his eyes was fresh and full, without the roughness of true anxiety, it had taken on a bruised, a faint purple tint. He was restless on the balls of his feet. He did not offer to come to church. When he left us, I asked Martin what Luke was going off to do. Martin gave an amused, half-indulgent smile.

‘He’s going to play the piano,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Just now,’ said Martin, ‘he plays the piano all day. Five or six hours a day, at least, except when he’s having a row.’

‘Does he play well?’

‘Oh, no,’ Martin replied. ‘He never learned after he was ten. He plays his old Associated Board pieces.’

In church, with a beam of early afternoon sun falling across the font, a beam in which the motes spun and jiggled and in which Martin’s hair was turned to silver gilt, I thought he was standing the strain better than Luke. He smiled at the child with a love more open than he ever showed for his wife.

Just for a moment, though, Martin’s smile altered. The parson and Irene and the baby had already left the church, and Martin and I were following, when an old woman entered with a busy air. Martin asked what she was doing, and she replied, full of well-being: ‘There’s a corpse coming in here soon, sir, and I just wanted to see that everything was nice for him.’

Martin smiled at me, and we followed the others into the sunlight. He did not need to explain; we both had a superstitious sense. He smiled at the thought of the old woman, and did not like it.

It was in the afternoon that I attended to the piece of business which seemed just routine, not interesting enough to discuss with Rose. Drawbell had invited me to what they called an ‘allocation meeting’ at which they interviewed some of that year’s intake of young men. His motive was to demonstrate how few and poor they were, but worn-out argument could get no further. He sat behind a table with his heads of sections on each side; Rudd was there, Mounteney, a couple of Jewish refugees and Martin, deputizing for Luke. Increasingly Luke left the chores to Martin. I could understand it. I could remember being underworked and overanxious, doing so little that one needed to do less.

As the interviews went on, the only flicker of interest for me was that one of the young men came from the same town as Martin and myself and had attended the same grammar school. His family had lived not far from ours in the red-brick streets, and Martin could recall him as a small boy. His name, which was Eric Sawbridge, had a flat, comfortable Midland note.

As he answered questions, he spoke with the faintly aggressive, reproving tone that one often heard at interviews. He was twenty-four, large, heavy, mature, with a single thick line across his forehead; he was a lighter blond than Martin, and might have been a Scandinavian sailor. He had got his First three years before, and had gone on to research. His answers sounded competent, not over-gracious; Martin made a reference to school-days and Sawbridge’s expression was, for a second, less suspicious. Then Drawbell took the general questioning out of Martin’s hands.