by C. P. Snow
‘Too long for you, dear?’ said Irene to me, mechanically asking for approval.
‘You won’t go back there, will you?’ said Martin to me.
I shook my head: we were each talking at random, the past and future both seemed close.
‘You’ll have to make your plans, this can’t last much longer,’ said Martin. We all knew that the war must soon end; as he spoke, Irene started to reply, but stopped herself, her eyes restive.
Martin asked her to bring in the child to say goodnight. As she carried him in he stayed quiet, and Martin took him in his arms. Their glances met, the child’s a model of the man’s, fixed, hard, transparently bright; then, with a grave expression, the child turned in to his father’s shoulder.
Martin’s glance did not move from the child’s head.
‘We must make some plans for you too,’ he said. ‘I’ve told you, we’ve made one or two plans for you already.’
It was after dinner that Martin spoke with an openness that came out of the blue, that I had not heard more than twice in his life. He was smoking a cigar, emblem of the celebration that night, but he had drunk little and was cold sober. He had just been mentioning Hector Rose, for whom perversely he had taken a liking – and I teased him about his friends at court.
Martin smiled and without any preliminary said: ‘It’s nice to have a little confidence.’
He said it simply, naturally, and with gratification.
‘I never had enough,’ he said to me.
Perhaps it was true, I was thinking: in his struggle to be a scientist, to live in the same air as Mounteney or Luke, he had never believed in himself.
He was still speaking to me: ‘I got a bad start.’
‘We both did,’ I said.
‘Mine was worse.’
‘How?’
He said: ‘You always overshadowed me, you know.’
It was so unexpected that I could not have left it there, but he went on: ‘This has done me good.’
I was just beginning to speak when Irene, who had been biting back a worry all the evening, could keep quiet no longer. She cried: ‘Then why don’t you sit tight when you’ve got it?’
‘That’s not so easy,’ said Martin.
‘Just when we’re getting everything we wanted, you’re ready to throw it away.’
He said to her: ‘We’ve talked this out, haven’t we?’
‘I can’t let you go on with this madness. Do you expect me just to sit quiet and wait for the end of the war to stop you? I suppose if the war does end you will have a glimmer of sense?’
‘If the war ended there wouldn’t be any necessity to go so fast,’ he said, curiously stiff. His smile had an edge to it: ‘I shouldn’t be sorry if the necessity didn’t arise.’
‘You know you’re frightened.’
‘I am extremely frightened,’ said Martin.
‘Then why don’t you think of yourself?’
‘I’ve told you.’
What had he told her? Probably the coldest motive – that, if he did not follow Luke’s lead, he would lose the ground he had won.
‘Why don’t you think of me?’
‘I’ve told you that, too.’
Her face puckered, she said: ‘All you’ve done is to think of Lewis (the baby). And I don’t know whether you believe it’s enough just to insure yourself for him. Do you believe it really matters whether he goes to the sort of school that you two didn’t go to?’
For the first time, Martin’s tone showed pain. He said: ‘I wish I could do more for him.’
Suddenly she switched off – to begin with it was so jarring that one’s flesh crept – into a wail for her life in London before her marriage. Though she was wailing for past love affairs, her manner was fervid, almost jaunty; she was talking of a taxi drive in the snow. I had a vivid picture of a girl going hot-faced on a night like this across the Park to a man’s flat. I believed, though she was just delicate enough not to mention the name, that she was describing her first meeting with Hankins, and that she was using private words so that Martin should know it. Bitterly she was provoking his jealousy. To an extent she succeeded, for neither then nor later was he unmoved by the sound of Hankins’ name.
As I listened, I thought I must do like other friends of his, and finish with her. Then I saw the look in her eyes – it was not lust, it was not malice, it was a plea. She had no self-control, she would always be strident – but this was the only way she knew to beg him to be as he used to be.
All of a sudden, I understood a little. I could hear her ‘I am defeated’ in my flat that night last year which, if it had led one to think that she was leaving Martin, was totally misleading. It was he before whom she felt defeat. I could hear the tone in which, ten minutes later, she had pressed him about the child. Their marriage was changing, in the sense that marriages which start with their disparities often do; the balance of power was altering; their marriage was changing, and she was beating about, lost, bewildered, frightened, trying to keep it in its old state, which to her was precious.
Perhaps it was that the birth of the child had, as Hanna Puchwein had foreseen, disturbed the bond between them. But if so, it had disturbed it in the diametrically opposite direction from that which Hanna had so shrewdly prophesied. It was Martin who was freer, not Irene.
It seemed possible that the birth of the child had removed or weakened one strand in his love for her. He still had love for her, but the protective part, so powerful in him, so much a part of his whole acceptance of her antics, had been diverted to another. Hearing him speak to his son that evening, or even hearing him, speak to her about his son, I felt – and now I knew she felt it also – that all his protective love had gone in love for the child. He would be too anxious about his son, I thought, he would care too much, live too much in him – just as I had at times lived too much in Martin,
So, although he had much feeling left for Irene, he no longer felt driven to look after her. All that was gone; he wanted her to be happy; in his meticulous fashion he had made arrangements for her future in case, in the March experiments, he should be incapacitated or killed; but when he thought of the danger, both of what he might lose and those who might miss him, his only fear that counted alongside his own animal fear was for the child.
While Irene, who when he loved her passionately and protectively had wanted to get away from the protective clutch, now wished it back. She wished him to think first of her, she was anxious about him with all the hungers of vanity, self-esteem, habit, anything that makes us want someone who has drawn into himself.
With another switch, she began asking, with a nagging insistence, about, the programme for March.
‘This is supposed to be a celebration,’ said Martin.
She nagged on. As both she and I knew, the date for the first dissolving of the rods had been put back from March 1st to March 10th.
‘That’s all right,’ she said, ‘but which of you is going to make a fool of himself first?’
‘Unless anyone insists, which won’t be me, I suppose we might have to toss up for it.’
‘Have you settled that?’ she cried.
He shook his head. ‘I haven’t spoken to Walter Luke about it recently.’
It was the flat truth.
Wildly she turned to me. I was her last hope. Could not I make him behave decently?
I knew that it was no use. Both he and I were behaving with consideration for each other, but any authority I had had was worn away. For me to interfere in his life again would be too much of a risk. I knew it, and so did he. I had to accept that it was not only marriage relations which changed.
22: Swearing in a Hospital Ward
Although none of us knew it at the time. Luke and Martin did not toss up. Even they themselves had not settled, until March was on them, which should ‘go first’: and how they settled it, they kept secret. It was long afterwards that I found out what had happened.
Martin had been as good as his word, no bett
er, no worse. With his feeling for precision and formality, he had actually written Luke a note a week before the experiment, suggesting that they tossed up, defining what the toss should mean – heads Martin went first, tails Luke. Luke would not have it. Swearing at getting a letter from Martin whom he saw every day, he said that the extraction was his idea, his ‘bit of nonsense’, and the least he could do was have the ‘first sniff’.
Luke got his way. Martin did not pretend to himself that he was sorry to be overruled.
The results of his being overruled came so fast that even at Barford, much more so in London, they were hard to follow. First Luke decided that he could not begin the experiment without another pair of hands; after his and Martin’s arrangement with the Superintendent, which meant that Martin was excluded, they had to give Sawbridge his wish.
During the last waiting period, Luke had had a ‘hot’ laboratory built, rather like a giant caricature of a school laboratory, in which, instead of dissolving bits of iron in beakers under their noses, they had a stainless steel pot surrounded by walls of concrete into which they dropped rods of metal that they never dared to see. In each section of the hot laboratory were bell pushes, as though it were a bath arranged for a paralysed invalid who for safety was in need of a bell within inches of his head.
Luke and Sawbridge went alone into the hot laboratory on a morning in March. The next that Martin heard, just three hours later, was the sound of the bell. That same evening I received news that Luke and Sawbridge were both seriously ill. Luke much the worse. The doctors would have said not fatally, if they had known more of the pathology of radiation illness. So far, they looked like cases of severe sunstroke. It might be wise for their friends to be within reach.
Sawbridge had carried Luke away from the rods, and it was Sawbridge who had pushed the bell. The irony was, they had been knocked out by a sheer accident. They had got safely through the opening of the aluminium cans, in which the rods were taken from the pile; the cans had been stripped off under ten feet of water. Then something ‘silly’ happened, as Sawbridge said, which no one could have provided against. A container cracked. Luke went down, and Sawbridge – a matter of minutes afterwards.
The next day’s news was hopeful. Sawbridge seemed scarcely ill, and was a bad patient; Luke was able to talk about the changes they could make in the hot laboratory, before he or Martin had ‘another go’.
They went on like this for several days, without anything the doctors could call a symptom. Several times Luke wanted them to let him out of bed. Eight days after the stroke, he broke out: ‘What is the matter with me?’ Though he could not explain how, he felt physically uneasy; soon he was said to be low-spirited, a description which shocked anyone who knew him. He was restlessly tired, even as he lay in bed.
Within three more days he was ill, though no one had seen the disease before. His temperature went up; he was vomiting, he had diarrhoea, blood spots were forming under his skin; the count of his white blood cells had gone steeply down. In two more days, he was bleeding inside the mouth.
Sawbridge escaped some of the malaise, and the blood spots had not formed. Otherwise his condition seemed a milder variant of the same disease. I was ready to go to Barford at short notice to visit Luke, but during those days he was so depressed that he only wanted to be alone. Once a day he saw his wife; he sent for Martin but spoke very little when he came; he tried to give some instructions, but they were not intelligible. His chief comfort seemed to be in following the scientific observations of his illness. He and Sawbridge had been moved into a special ward at the establishment hospital; not only the Barford doctors, but others studying the clinical effects of radiation watched each measurement. There was a mutter from Luke’s sickbed which spread round Barford: ‘The only thing they (the doctors) still don’t know is whether to label mine a lethal dose or only near lethal.’
Mounteney told me that much, one afternoon in my office. More physically imaginative than most men, Mounteney was enraged at the thought of Luke’s illness. His eyes burnt more deeply in their sockets, his face looked more than ever Savonarola-like.
‘It oughtn’t to have been let happen, Eliot,’ he said. ‘It oughtn’t to have happened to anyone, let alone a man we can’t spare. Some of you people ought to have realized that he’s one of the men we can’t spare.’
Although his distress was genuine, it was like him to turn it into an attack. Somehow he implied that, instead of Luke being ill, Whitehall officials ought to be. But, as the afternoon went on, he became gentler though more harassed.
‘I should like anyone who’s ever talked about using the nuclear bomb to have a look at Luke now,’ he said.
I was thinking of that night in Stratford, which now seemed far away and tranquil, when Martin fed the swans.
‘It would teach them what it means. If ever a nuclear bomb went off, this is exactly what would happen to the people it didn’t kill straight off.’ He added: ‘There are enough diseases in the world, Eliot. It’s no business of science to produce a new one.’
That visit from Mounteney took place three weeks after Luke and Sawbridge were pulled out of the hot laboratory. In another few days – E + 29, as the scientists called it in the jargon of the day, meaning twenty-nine days after the exposure – Luke was said to be brighter, the bleeding had lessened. It might only be an intermission, but at least he was glad of people at his bedside.
Although I arrived in Barford the day I got that message, I was not allowed in the ward until the following morning. And, just as I was going inside, Mrs Drawbell, watching from the nurses’ anteroom, intercepted me. Her husband detested Luke; when he was healthy she herself had never shown any interest in him; but now – now there was a chance to nurse. Triumphantly she had argued with Nora Luke. Nora had a piece of mathematical work to finish: anyone could do part-time nursing, only Nora could complete that paper. The wives who had no careers of their own criticized Nora, but it was Mrs Drawbell who became installed as nurse.
‘You mustn’t tire him, Mr Eliot,’ she said accusingly. She (Nora Luke) was already in the ward, Mrs Drawbell said. She went on, stern and obscurely contented: ‘They used to be such fine strong men!’
I had not heard her so articulate. She said: ‘It’s a case of the wheel of fortune.’
The first time I heard Luke’s voice, it sounded husky but loud and defiant. I was only just inside the door; the ward was small, with a screen between the two beds, Sawbridge’s in the shade and further from the window. The light spring sunshine fell across Nora sitting by the other bed, but I could not see Luke’s face.
‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you, Lewis,’ he said.
It was the kind of greeting that I used to expect from him. He went on: ‘We must have more bods.’
‘Bods’ meant bodies, people, any kind of staff: scientists were bods, so were floor cleaners, but as a rule Luke used the words in demanding more scientists.
I felt better, hearing him so truculent – until I noticed Nora’s expression. At a first glance, she had looked, not cheerful, certainly, but settled; it was the set tender expression one sees in many wives by a husband’s sick-bed, but that some would have been surprised to see in Nora. But, as Luke shouted at me, pretending to be his old rude, resilient self, that expression changed on the instant to nothing but pain.
As I moved out of the sunlight I saw Luke. For a moment I remembered him as I had first met him, in the combination room of our college, when he was being inspected as a fellowship candidate ten years before. Then he had been ruddy, well fleshed, muscular, brimming with a young man’s vigour – and (it seemed strange to remember now) passionately self-effacing in his desire to get on. Now he was pale, not with an ordinary pallor but as though drained of blood; he was emaciated, so that his cheeks fell in and his neck was like an old man’s; there were two ulcers by the left-hand corner of his mouth; bald patches shone through the hair on the top of his head, as in an attack of alopecia.
But these chan
ges were nothing beside the others. I said, answering his attempt to talk business: ‘We’ll go into that any time you like. You’ll get all the people you want.’
Luke stared at me, trying to concentrate.
‘I can’t think what we want,’ he said.
He added, in a sad, exhausted tone: ‘You’d better settle it all with Martin. I am a bit out of touch.’
He could not get used to the depression. Into his sanguine nature it seemed to grow, as though it was seeping his spirits away; he had never had to struggle against a mood before, much less to feel that he was losing the struggle.
Propped up by his pillows, his back had gone limp. His eyes did not focus on Nora or me nor on the trees in the hospital garden.
I said, hearing my voice over-hearty as though he were deaf: ‘You’ll soon get in touch again. It won’t take you a week, when you get out of here.’
Luke replied: ‘I may not be good for much when I get out of here.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said.
‘Are you thinking of that again?’ said Nora.
‘What is it?’ I said.
‘He’s worried that he might be sterile,’ said Nora.
Luke did not deny it.
‘Are you having that old jag again?’ said his wife.
‘The dose must have been just about big enough,’ he said blankly, as though he had nothing new to say.
‘I’ve told you,’ said Nora, ‘as soon as the doctors say yes we’ll make them have a look. I shall be very much surprised if anything is wrong.’
With the obstinacy of the miserable, Luke shook his head.
‘I told you that if by any miracle there is anything wrong, which I don’t credit for a minute, well, it doesn’t matter very much,’ said Nora. ‘We’ve got our two. We never wanted any more.’
She sounded tough, robust, maternal.
Luke lay quiet, his face so drawn with illness that one could not read it.
