He was, however, happy with the evening’s talk. He foresaw that, when he had the power, he would be plunged in a network of what he called ‘closed’ politics, the politics of the civil servants, the scientists, the industrialists, before he got any scrap of his policy through. He thought I could be useful to him there. After this evening, he believed that he could rely on me.
When we had said good night in St James’s Street, and I made my way up that moderate incline (with a vestigial memory of how, when I was younger and had spent nights at Pratt’s, it had sometimes seemed uncomfortably steep) I was thinking that he did not find his own personality easy to handle. It was not neat or sharp, any more than his face was. Like a lot of subtle men, he must often have been too clever by half, and taken in no one but himself. Nevertheless, when he spoke about what he wanted to do, he had not been clever at all. He knew, and took it for granted that I knew, that in their deep concerns men aren’t clever enough to dissimulate. Neither of us had been dissimulating that night.
5: The Scientists
Within two days of that dinner at the Carlton, Roger asked me to make some arrangements. He wanted us to have lunch with Francis Getliffe and Walter Luke — ‘in a private room’, he specified. After lunch, we would all pay a visit to Brodzinski. As I stood with Getliffe and Luke in the room at the Hyde Park Hotel, looking down at the Row and the bronzing trees, I was puzzled and the others more so. There was nothing specially mysterious about the private room, if we were to discuss secret projects: but Roger met them both regularly on one of the defence committees. Why should he make an occasion of it now? Neither of them had any inclination to spend time with Brodzinski, nor saw any value in it.
As we waited for Roger, Francis was vexed. He was getting more irritable, more occupied with punctilio, as he grew older. He and I had been friends since our early twenties. At this time he was fifty-two, and already an elder statesman of science. He had thought more effectively about military-scientific strategy than anyone had, and it was his views which had influenced us most. But now he had to force himself to produce them. He had found a new field of research, and was working as obsessively as when he was a young man. It was a physical strain to be torn away from it, to be dragged up from Cambridge for that lunch. He stood by the window, his face sculptured, hidalgo-like, his fingers nervous, as he spun the stem of a glass.
By his side, Walter Luke looked seamed, confident, grizzled, low-slung, more prosaic. Yet the scientists said that he had been unlucky: he had a scientific imagination as powerful as Francis’, or more so: in a peaceful world, he might have done work of genius. As it was, he had been busy on what he called ‘hardware’ since 1939: he was still not forty-four, but he had been head of the Atomic Energy establishment for years. He was not as vexed as Francis, but was swearing like the dockyard hand his father used to be. When Roger arrived, he was friendly, business-like, but did not exert his personal arts on either of them. As we ate, he was asking them questions about Brodzinski’s project — as though refreshing his memory, or making certain they had not changed their minds, for in fact he had heard their opinions times before and knew them off by heart.
‘I go on saying,’ said Walter Luke, ‘I believe technically it might be on. At least, there’s a fifty-fifty chance it might be on. Brod’s no fool, he’s got a touch of the real stuff. And if we had these bloody things, we could call ourselves independent in nuclear weapons, which we’re not now except for guff, and which we’re probably never going to be. The whole point is, we kept coming back to it — what price are you willing to pay for that?’
‘What price are you?’
‘Not this.’
Luke bristled with energy. From his manner, no one would have guessed that he hadn’t enjoyed coming down on this side. He had a simple, integral patriotism. He had shared the scientists’ moral concern, but if his country could have kept the highest military power, he would have made any sacrifice. His tough mind, though, told him it was impossible, and he put the regret behind him. ‘We just can’t play in this league. If we spent everything we’ve got, that is, everything we now spend on defence, and I mean everything, we might bring this off — and what the bloody hell have we bought at the end of it? The priceless thought that we could take out Moscow and New York simultaneously. The only thing that scares me is that too many people never grow up.’
Roger turned to Francis Getliffe.
‘You know what I think, Parliamentary Secretary,’ said Francis with stiff courtesy. ‘This business of Brodzinski’s is a nonsense. And so are the views of more important people.’
Francis, who did not often go in for public controversy, had not long before screwed himself up to write a pamphlet. In it he had said that there was no military rationale behind the nuclear policy. This analysis had got him into trouble, mostly in America, but also in England. In some Right-thinking circles, it had seemed not only preposterous, but also heretical, and something like wicked.
As we drove through the autumnal streets to the Imperial College, I was still not sure why Roger was playing it this way. What was he aiming at? Was he reckoning that Brodzinski, that lover of English flummery, would be softened by the attentions, the paraphernalia?
If so, sitting in Brodzinski’s room, gazing out at the lonely-looking Colcutt tower, the pale green dome making the aesthetic protest in the solitude of sky, I thought that Roger had reckoned wrong. It was true that Brodzinski loved English flummery, with a passion that made Roger’s more conservative friends look like austere revolutionaries. He had been a refugee from Poland in the late ’thirties. During the war he had made a name, working in one of the Admiralty scientific departments. Afterwards he had spent some years at Barford, had quarrelled with Luke and others, and recently taken a professorship. It was true that he had immersed himself, with fanatical devotion, in what he thought of as English life. He knew all the English snobberies, and loved them so much that they seemed to him morally right. He had dedicated himself to the politics of the English ultra-right. He addressed Francis Getliffe and Walter Luke, with extreme relish, as Sir Francis, and Sir Walter. Despite all that, or perhaps because of it, he was unyielding about his idea, and, instead of listening to Quaife’s persuasions, he was determined to make Quaife listen to him.
He was a tallish man, very thick in the chest and thighs, and his muscles filled his clothes. His voice boomed against the walls of his office. He had beautiful pure transparent eyes, in a flat Slavic face; his fair hair, now mingled with grey, was the colour of dust. He was always on the lookout for enemies, and yet he was vulnerable to help, appealing for it, certain that anyone, not already an enemy, given intelligence and willingness, would be convinced that he was right.
He explained the project over again. ‘I must inform you, Parliamentary Secretary,’ (he was as familiar with English official etiquette as any of us) ‘that there is nothing technically novel here! There is nothing that we do not know. Sir Walter will tell you that I am not over-stating my case.’
‘With reservations,’ said Luke.
‘With what reservations?’ Brodzinski burst out, brilliant with suspicion. ‘What reservations, Sir Walter? Tell me that, now?’
‘Come off it, Brod,’ Luke was beginning, ready to settle down to a good harsh scientific argument. But Roger would not let it start. He was treating Brodzinski with a mixture of deference and flattery — or perhaps not pure flattery, but an extreme empathy. Just as Brodzinski felt a brilliance of suspicion when Walter Luke spoke, so with Roger he felt a brilliance of reassurance. Here was someone who knew what he had to fight against, who knew his urgencies.