IT was some weeks before either Luke or Martin could get to London, but then I arranged to see them both on the same afternoon in May.
Martin was the first to arrive. It was over a year since we had met, and, as we enquired about each other, there was the sense of well-being, the wiping away of anxiety’s fret, that one only gets with those who have become part of the deep habit of one’s life.
Soon I asked: ‘How is Irene?’
‘Very well,’ said Martin, looking straight into my eyes, giving nothing away.
He walked round my office, admiring the Regency mantelpiece and the view over Whitehall. He was rejoicing that I was having something of a success – for, entirely through the Minister’s backing, I had just been promoted. In a section of the war, I now had my bit of subfusc power. I was for shrugging it off; but Martin, however, set more store by official honours than I did.
‘Are you sure you’re making the most of it?’ he said, with a proprietorial, insistent air,
He was delighted, and in his delight there was no envy. Yet suddenly he was sounding knowledgeable and worldly; it was strange, out of the haze of family memories, to see him standing there, a calculating man. If he had a success himself, I thought, he would have all the tricks ready to exploit it.
Actually, he had nothing to exploit. I listened to him saying that, as far as his job went, there was still nothing whatever to report. No change. I was full of irritation, for, when you hope for someone as I did for him, you blame them for their own misfortunes.
‘So far as there’s been any luck in the family,’ I said, ‘I’ve had it.’
‘I don’t believe in luck to that extent,’ said Martin, without complaint.
‘You’ve had none,’ I said.
Then Martin smiled, and brought out a phrase which would have been meaningless to any but us two. ‘You’ve got someone to live up to.’ It was a phrase of our mother’s, holding me up before him as an example, for I had been her favourite son. I recalled her as she lay dying, instructing me sternly not to think too little of Martin. No injunction could ever have been less called for; but later I believed that she was making amends to herself for not having loved him more.
Martin was talking of her when, an hour before I expected him, Walter Luke came in. Ever since I had known him as a younger man – he was still not thirty – he had thrown the whole of his nature into everything he felt. I had seen him triumphant with every cell of his body, as a human integer of flesh and bone: and I had seen him angry. That afternoon he was ashamed of himself, and it was not possible for a man to throw more of his force into being ashamed.
‘Hallo, Lewis. Hallo, Martin,’ he said. ‘I’ve just been ticked off. I deserved it, and I got it, and I’m beginning to wonder when I shall manage to grow up.’
He slumped on to a chair, immersed in his dejection. His backbone usually so straight in his thick energetic frame, curved disconsolately against the leather; yet he exuded vigour, and both Martin and I were smiling at him. His cheeks were not as ruddy as when I first saw him at high table, five years before. In the last two years he had carried responsibility, and even on his physique the strain had told. Now he looked his age; there were grey hairs at his temples; but his voice remained eager, rich and youthful, still bearing a rumble from the Plymouth dockyard where he was brought up.
He had just come from one of the radio committees, where he had been arguing with someone he called a ‘stuffed shirt’ (and who was highly placed). The stuffed shirt had been canvassing his favourite idea, ‘and I tell you,’ said Luke, ‘if I’d been asked to think of something bloody silly, I couldn’t have thought up anything so fantastically bloody silly as that.’ Luke had apparently proceeded to say so, using his peculiar resources of eloquence. The chairman, who was even more highly placed than the stuffed shirt, had told him this was not the right spirit: he was thinking of his own ideas, and didn’t want the other’s to work.
‘The old bleeder was perfectly right,’ said Luke with simplicity. He went on: ‘I never know whether I’ve got cross because some imbecile is talking balderdash or whether my own precious ego is getting trampled on. I wish one of you shrewd chaps would teach me.’
Walter Luke was neither pretending nor laughing at himself; he was contrite. Then, with the same freshness and resilience, he had finished with his contrition. He sat up straight in his chair, and asked what I wanted to see him about.
I said we had better have a word alone. Luke said: ‘Why have we got to turf Martin out?’
‘Lewis is right,’ said Martin, getting ready to go.
‘It depends which surprise-packet he’s going to pull out of the bag,’ said Luke, with a broad, fresh grin. He looked at me: ‘Barford?’
I was taken off guard.
‘Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, said Luke. ‘We know all about that.’
Martin was smiling, as Luke began to talk to him. It was clear that Martin, though he was discreet, knew enough to horrify the Minister; as for Luke, he knew as much as anyone had heard.
For anyone used to Bevill’s precautions, this was startling to listen to. In terms of sense, it should not have been such a surprise. Word was going round among nuclear physicists, and Luke, young as he was, was one of the best of them. He had already been consulted on a scientific point; he could guess the rest.
I had to accept it. There was also an advantage in speaking in front of Martin; it might be the most natural way to draw him in.
At that moment, he was listening to Luke with a tucked-in, sarcastic smile, as though he were half-admiring Luke’s gifts, half-amused by him as a man.
‘Well,’ I said to Luke, ‘as you know so much, you probably know what I’ve been told to ask.’
‘I hadn’t heard anything,’ he replied, ‘but they must be after me.’
‘Would you be ready to go?’
Luke did not answer, but said: ‘Who else have they got?’
For the first time that afternoon, I was able to tell him something. The Superintendent, Drawbell, the engineering heads –
‘Good God alive,’ Luke interrupted, ‘Lewis, who are these uncles?’
A list of names of refugees – and then I mentioned Arthur Mounteney.
‘I’m glad they’ve got hold of one scientist, anyway,’ said Luke. ‘He did some nice work once. He’s just about finished, of course.’
‘Do you feel like going in?’ I asked.
Luke would not reply.
‘Why don’t they get hold of Martin?’ he said. ‘He’s wasted where he is.’
‘They’re not likely to ask for me,’ said Martin.
‘Your name keeps cropping up,’ I said to Luke.
Usually, when I had seen men offered jobs, they had decided within three minutes, even though they concealed it from themselves, even though they managed to prolong the pleasure of deciding. Just for once, it was not so.
‘It’s all very well,’ said Luke. ‘I just don’t know where I can be most use.’ He was not used to hesitating; he did not like it; he tried to explain himself. If he stayed where he was, he could promise us a ‘bit of hardware’ in eighteen months. Whereas, if he joined this ‘new party’ there was no guarantee that anything would happen for years.
There was nothing exaggerated in Luke’s tone just then. I was used to the rowdiness with which he judged his colleagues, especially his seniors; it was the same with most of the rising scientists; they had none of the convention of politeness that bureaucrats like Sir Hector Rose were trained to, and often Rose and his friends disliked them accordingly. Listening to Luke that afternoon, no one would have thought, for instance, that the poor old derelict Mounteney was in fact a Nobel prizewinner aged about forty. But on his own value Luke was neither boastful nor modest. He was a good scientist; good scientists counted in the war, and he was not going to see himself wasted. He had lost that tincture of the absurd which had made Martin smile. He spoke without nonsense, with the directness of a man who knows what he can and cannot do.
‘I wish some of you wise old men would settle it for me,’ he said to me.
I shook my head. I had put Bevill’s request, but that was as far as I felt justified in going. For what my judgement of the war was worth, I thought on balance that Luke should stay where he was.
He could not make up his mind. As the three of us walked across the Park towards my flat in Dolphin Square, he fell first into a spell of abstraction and then broke out suddenly into a kind of argument with himself, telling us of a new device in what we then called RDF and were later to call Radar. The evening was bright. A cool wind blew from the east, bringing the rubble dust to our nostrils, although it was some days since the last raid. Under our feet the grass was dust – greyed and dry. I was worried about the war that evening; I could see no end to it; it was a comfort to be with those two, in their different fashions steady-hearted and robust.
On the way home, and all the evening, Martin kept putting questions to Luke, steering him back to nuclear fission. I could feel, though, that he was waiting for Luke to leave. He had something to say to me in private
At last we took Luke to the bus stop, and Martin and I turned back towards St George’s Square. The full moon shone down on the lightless blind-faced streets, and the shadows were dark indigo. Flecks of cloud, as though scanning the short syllables in a line of verse, stood against the impenetrable sky. Under the moon, the roofs of Pimlico shone blue as steel. The wind had fallen. It was a silent, beautiful wartime night.
‘By the way,’ said Martin, with constraint in his voice.
‘Yes?’
‘I’d be grateful if you could get me in to this project somehow.’
I had never known him ask favour of this kind before. He had not once come to me for official help, either at Cambridge or since. Now he was driven – scruple, pride, made his voice stiff, but he was driven.
‘I was going to suggest it,’ I said. ‘Of course, I’ll–’
‘I really would be grateful.’
My manoeuvre had come off; but as he spoke I felt no pleasure. I had taken it on myself to interfere; from now on I should have some responsibility for what happened to him.
Now the trigger had been touched, he was intent on going: why it meant so much, I could not tell, His career? – something of that, perhaps, but he was not reckoning the chances that night. Concern about his wife? – he would not volunteer anything. No: simple though the explanation might seem for a man like Martin, it was the science itself that drew him. Though he might have no great talent, nuclear physics had obsessed him since he was a boy. He did not know, that night, what he could add at Barford; he only knew that he wanted to be there.
He admitted as much; but he had more practical matters to deal with. Having swallowed his pride, he did not intend to prostrate himself for nothing.
‘You’re sure that you can get me in? I should have thought the first move was to persuade someone else to suggest me. Walter Luke would do…’ Could I write to Luke that night? Could I, as an insurance, remind Mounteney that Martin and I were brothers?
It was late before we went to bed; by that time Martin had written out an aide memoire of the people I was to see, write to, and telephone next day.