by C. P. Snow
It would have been pleasant to have been walking that night as allies, with his name made.
We were further from allies than we had ever been. I was bitter, the bitterness was too strong for me. As we walked by the club windows I could think of nothing else.
Nevertheless, the habits of the human bond stayed deeper than the words one spoke. I was not attempting – as I had attempted on New Year’s Day – to end the difference between us. Yet the habit endured, and as I said ‘I can’t help it’ under the St James’s Street lights, I had a flash of realization that I was still longing for his success even then. And, looking into his face, less closed that it had been for months, I realized with the same certainty that he was still longing for my approval even then.
‘I think you ought to leave it alone, now,’ I said.
‘How?’
‘You ought to have nothing more to do with the Sawbridge affair.’
‘I can’t do that,’ said Martin.
‘It’s given you all you expected from it.’
‘What did I expect from it?’
‘Credit,’ I said.
‘You think that’s all?’
‘You would never have done it if you hadn’t seen your chance.’
‘That may be true.’ He was trying to be reasonable, to postpone the quarrel. ‘But I think I should also say that I can see the logic of the situation, which others won’t recognize. Including you.’
‘I distrust seeing the logic of the situation,’ I said, ‘when it’s very much to your own advantage.’
‘Are you in a position to speak?’
‘I’ve done bad things,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think I could have done some of the things you’ve done.’
We were still speaking reasonably. I accepted the ‘logic of the situation’ about Sawbridge, I said. I asked a question to which I knew the answer: ‘I take it the damage he’s done is smaller than outsiders will believe?’
‘Much smaller,’ said Martin.
Led on by his moderation, I repeated: ‘I think you should leave it alone now?’
‘I don’t agree,’ said Martin.
‘It can only do you harm.’
‘What kind of harm?’
‘You can’t harden yourself by an act of will, and you’ll suffer for it.’
On the instant, Martin’s control broke down. He cried out: ‘You say that to me?’
Not even in childhood, perhaps because I was so much the older, had we let our tempers loose at each other. They were of the same kind, submerged, suppressed; we could not quarrel pleasurably with anyone, let alone with one another. In the disagreement which had cut us apart, we had not said a hard word. For us both, we knew what a quarrel cost. Now we were in it.
I brought out my sharpest accusation. Climbing on the Sawbridge case was bad enough – but climbing at Luke’s expense, foreseeing the mistake that Luke’s generous impulse led him into, taking tactical advantage both of that mistake and his illness – I might have done the rest, but if I had done that I could not have lived with myself.
‘I never had much feeling for Luke,’ he said.
‘Then you’re colder even than I thought you were.’
‘I had an example to warn me off the opposite,’ he said.
‘You didn’t need any warning.’
‘I admit that you’re a man of strong feeling,’ he said. ‘Of strong feeling for people, that is. I’ve had the example of how much harm that’s done.’
We were standing still, facing each other, at the corner where the street ran into Piccadilly; for a second an association struck me, it brought back the corner of that other street to which Sawbridge walked in a provincial town. Our voices rose and fell; sometimes the bitterest remark was a whisper, often I heard his voice and mine echo back across the wide road. We shouted in the pain, in the special outrage of a family quarrel, so much an outrage because one is naked to oneself.
Instead of the stretch of Piccadilly, empty except for the last taxis, the traffic lights blinking as we shouted, I might have been plunged back into the pain of some forgotten disaster in the dark little ‘front room’ of our childhood, with the dying laburnum outside the windows. Pain, outrage, the special insight of those who wish to hurt and who know the nerve to touch. In the accusations we made against each other, there was the outrage of those bitter reproaches which, when we were at our darkest, we made against ourselves.
He said that I had forgotten how to act. He said that I understood the people round me, and in the process let them carry me along. I had wasted my promise. I had been too self-indulgent – friends, personal relations, I had spent myself over them and now it was all no use.
I said that he was so self-centred that no human being mattered to him – not a friend, not his wife, not even his son. He would sacrifice anyone of them for his next move. He had been a failure so long that he had not a glimmer of warmth left.
There were lulls, when our voices fell quiet or silent, even one lull where for a moment we exchanged a commonplace remark. Without noticing it we made our way down the street again, near the corner where (less than half an hour before) Martin had said goodnight, in sight of the door out of which we had flanked old Thomas Bevill.
I said: What could he do with his job, after the means by which he had won it? Was he just going to look on human existence as a problem in logistics? He didn’t have friends, but he had colleagues; was that going to be true of them all?
I said: In the long run he had no loyalty. In the long run he would turn on anyone above him. As I said those words, I knew they could not be revoked. For, in the flickering light of the quarrel, they exposed me as well as him. With a more painful anger than any I had heard that night, he asked me: ‘Who have you expected me to be loyal to?’
I did not answer.
He cried: ‘To you?’
I did not answer.
He said: ‘You made it too difficult.’
He went on: I appeared to be unselfish, but what I wanted from anyone I was fond of was, in the last resort, my own self-glorification.
‘Whether that’s true or not,’ I cried, ‘I shouldn’t have chosen for you the way you seemed so pleased with.’
‘You never cared for a single moment whether I was pleased or not.’
‘I have wanted a good deal for you,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You have wanted a good deal for yourself.’
Part Five
Two Brothers
39: Technique Behind a High Reward
I did not attend Sawbridge’s trial. Like the others of the series, it was cut as short as English law permitted; Sawbridge said the single word ‘Guilty’, and the only person who expressed emotion was the judge, in giving him two years longer than Smith had forecast.
The papers were full of it. Hankins wrote two more articles. Bevill said: ‘Now we can get back to the grindstone.’ I had not spoken to Martin since the night in St James’s Street, although I knew that several times he had walked down the corridor, on his way to private talks with Bevill.
It was the middle of October, and I had to arrange a programme of committees on the future of Barford. Outside the windows, after the wet summer the leaves were turning late. Rarely, a plane leaf floated down, in an autumnal air that was at the same time exhilarating and sad.
One morning, as I was consulting Rose, he said: ‘Your brother has been colloguing with Bevill a little.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I wondered if you happened to know.’ Rose was looking at me with what for him was a quizzical and mischievous glance.
‘Know what?’
‘My dear chap, it’s all perfectly proper, nothing could possibly have been done more according to the rules. I rather reproach myself I hadn’t started the ball rolling, but of course there was no conceivable chance of our forgetting you–’
‘Forgetting me?’ I said.
‘I shouldn’t have allowed that to happen, believe me, my dear Eliot.’
‘On these occasions,’ Rose was almost coy, the first time I had seen him so, ‘it’s always better not to know too much.’
I had to persuade him that I knew nothing at all. For some time he was unusually obtuse, preferring to put it down to discretion or delicacy on my part. At last he half-believed me. He said:
‘Well, it’s a matter of reckoning your deserts, my dear Eliot. The old gentleman is insisting – and I don’t think there will be anyone to gainsay him – that it’s high time you had a decoration.’
He paused, with a punctilious smile. ‘The only real question is exactly what decoration we should go for.’
This was what Martin had been prompting the old man about. I was not touched.
It might have appeared a piece of kindness. But he was being kind to himself, not to me. It was the sort of kindness which, when there is a gash in a close relationship, one performs to ease one’s conscience, to push any intimate responsibility away.
Meanwhile Martin’s own reward was coming near. The committee sat in Rose’s room, and on those autumn mornings of sun-through-mist, I went through the minutes that by this time I knew by heart. These men were fairer, and most of them a great deal abler, than the average: but you heard the same ripples below the words, as when any group of men chose anyone for any job. Put your ear to those meetings and you heard the intricate labyrinthine and unassuageable rapacity, even in the best of men, of the love of power. If you have heard it once – say, in electing the chairman of a tiny dramatic society, it does not matter where – you have heard it in colleges, in bishoprics, in ministries, in cabinets: men do not alter because the issues they decide are bigger scale.
The issues before Bevill and his committee were large enough, by the standards of this world. Barford: the production plant: a new whisper of what Bevill called the hydrogen bomb: many millions of pounds. ‘The people who run this place arc going to have plenty on their plate,’ said Bevill. ‘Sometimes I can’t help wondering – is one Top Man enough? I’m not sure we ought to put it all under one hat.’ Then they (Bevill, Rose, Getliffe, Mounteney, and three other scientists) got down to it. Drawbell must go.
‘That can be done,’ said Hector Rose, meaning that Drawbell would be slid into another job.
Next there was a proposal that Mounteney and another scientist did not like, but which would have gone straight through: it was that Francis Getliffe should go to Barford and also become what Bevill kept calling Top Man of atomic energy. It would have been a good appointment, but Francis did not want it; he hesitated; the more he dickered, the more desirable to the others the appointment seemed, but in the end he said No.
That left two possibilities: one, that Luke, who appeared to have partially recovered, though the doctors would not make a certain prognosis either way, should be given Barford, which he was known to want.
The other possibility had been privately ‘ventilated’ by Bevill and Rose ever since Rose mentioned it to me in the summer: assuming that there was a doubt about Luke, couldn’t one set up a supervisory committee and then put M F Eliot in as acting superintendent?
They were too capable to have brought up this scheme in the committee room, unless they had found support outside. But Rose mentioned it – ‘I’m just thinking aloud,’ he said – on a shining autumn morning.
For once Francis Getliffe spoke too soon.
‘I’m not happy about that idea,’ he said immediately.
‘This is just what we want to hear,’ said Bevill.
‘I know Luke has his faults.’ said Francis, ‘but he’s a splendid scientist.’
Mounteney put in: ‘Even if you’re right about Luke–’
‘You know I’m right,’ said Getliffe, forgetting to be judicious, a vein swelling angrily in his forehead.
‘He’s pretty good,’ said Mounteney, in the tone of one who is prepared to concede that Sir Isaac Newton had a modest talent, ‘but there’s no more real scientific thinking to be done at Barford now, it’s just a question of making it run smooth.’
‘That’s a dangerous argument. It’s always dangerous to be frightened of the first rate.’
I had seldom seen Francis so angry. He was putting the others off and he tried to collect himself. ‘I’m saying nothing against M F Eliot. He’s a very shrewd and able man, and if you want a competent administrator I expect he’s as good as they come.’
‘Administrators, of course, being a very lowly form of life,’ said Rose politely.
Francis flushed: somehow he, as a rule so effective in committee, could not put a foot right.
There was some technical argument among the scientists, taking up Mounteney’s point: weren’t the problems of Barford, from this time on, just engineering and administrative ones? Someone said that Martin, despite his calendar youth, was mentally the older of the two.
When we broke off for luncheon, Francis and I walked across the park together. For a time he strode on, in embarrassed silence, and then said: ‘Lewis, I’m very sorry I had to come out against Martin.’
‘Never mind,’ I said.
‘I couldn’t have done anything else,’ he said.
‘I know that,’ I said.
‘Do you agree with me?
By good luck, what I thought did not count. I said: ‘He’d do better than you’d give him credit for.’
‘But between him and Luke?’
‘Luke,’ I said.
Nevertheless, Francis had mishandled his case, and that afternoon and at the next meeting, it was Luke against whom opinion began to swell. Against Luke rather than for Martin, but in such a choice it was likely to be the antis who prevailed. They had, of course, a practical doubt, in Luke’s state of health. I was thinking, if you wanted a job, don’t be ill: for it had an almost superstitious effect, even on men as hard-headed as these; somehow, if you were ill, your mana was reduced.
‘Is it in Luke’s own best interests to ask him to take a strain like this?’ someone said.
It was not a close thing. Getliffe, who was a stubborn man, kept the committee arguing through several meetings, but in truth they had made up their minds long before. He twisted some concessions out of them: yes, Luke was to become a chief adviser, with a seat on the supervisory committee: yes, Luke would get ‘suitable recognition’ when his turn came round (Sir Walter Luke: Sir Francis Getliffe: Sir Arthur Mounteney: in five years’ time, those would be the styles). But the others would not give way any further. It was time a new arrangement was drawn up, and Bevill and Rose undertook, as a matter of form, to get Martin’s views.
On an afternoon in November, Martin came into Rose’s room. Bevill did not waste any words on flummery.
‘We’ve got a big job for you, young man,’ he burst out.
Martin sat still, his glance not deflecting for an instant towards me, as Bevill explained the scheme.
‘It’s an honour,’ said Martin. Neither his eyes nor mouth were smiling. He said: ‘May I have a few days to think it over?’
‘What do you want to think over?’ said Bevill. But he and Rose were both used to men pulling every string to get a job and then deliberating whether they could take it.
‘We should all be very, very delighted to see you installed there,’ said Rose.
Martin thanked him and said: ‘If I could give an answer next week?’
40: Visit to a Prisoner
The day after Bevill offered Martin the appointment, Captain Smith came into my office and unravelled one of his Henry James-like invitations, which turned out to be, would I go with him to Wandsworth Gaol and have a chat to Sawbridge? I tried to get out of it, but Smith was persistent. He was sensitive enough to feel that I did not like it; but after all, I was an official, I had to live with official duty, just as he did himself.
In the taxi, he told me that he was clearing up a point about the Puchweins. It was worth ‘having another try’ at Sawbridge, who occasionally talked, not givin
g anything away, more for the sake of company than because he was softening. As we drove through the south London streets in the November sunshine, he told me more of Sawbridge. He had not recanted; others of the scientific spies gave up their communism in prison, but not Sawbridge. For a few days, sitting opposite to Martin, he had been ‘rattled’. During that time he made his confession. He had blamed himself ever since.
‘He’s quite a lad, is our young friend. He doesn’t make any bones about it,’ said Smith with proprietorial pride, stiff on his seat while we rocked over the tram-lines, through the down-at-heel streets scurfy in the sun.
At the prison, Smith took me to an assistant-governor’s room, which in his view gave a ‘better atmosphere’ for his talks with Sawbridge. For myself, I should have preferred the dark and the wire screen. This room was bright, like a housemaster’s study, with a fire in the grate, photographs of children on the desk, and on the walls Medici prints. The smell of tobacco rested in the bright air. Outside the grated window, the morning was brighter still.
When a warder brought Sawbridge in, he gave a smile as he saw Smith and me standing by the window, a smile not specially truculent but knowing, assertive, and at the same time candid. Above his prison suit his face looked no paler than in the past, and he seemed to have put on a little weight.
Smith had arranged for the warder to leave us alone. We heard him close the door, but there were no steps down the passage. Sawbridge, who was listening, cocked his thumb, as though at the warder waiting behind the door, and repeated his smile.
Smith smiled back. With me, with his colleagues, he was never quite at ease; but he was far less put off inside that room than I was.
‘Here we are again,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Sawbridge.
Smith made him take the easy chair by the fire, while Smith sat at the desk and I brought up a hard-backed chair.
