‘I doubt if Luke’s scheme will ever see the light of day,’ I cried.
‘It must.’
‘How many people believe in it?’
‘It’s the way to do it.’
There was a pause. Once more, there came a tinkle on the bathroom floor, meaning that he had missed his aim again.
‘Do you really think that?’ I said.
‘I’m sure.’
‘How long have you been sure?’
‘I was more sure when I got into this bath than I’ve ever been.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It came to me. It was all right.’
Without altering his tone, still relaxed and joyful, he announced that he was going to leave off his efforts with the pumice; he would get out and join me soon. As I waited, although I was trying to think out ways and means, although I had a professional’s anxiety (how could we manoeuvre Luke’s scheme through?), although I could not keep my protectiveness down, yet I was enthused with hope. Already I was expecting more for him than he did himself.
I passed as a realistic man. In some senses it was true. But down at the springs of my life I hoped too easily and too much. As an official I could control it; but not always as I imagined my own future, even though by now I knew what had happened to me, I knew where I was weak. Least of all could I control it when I thought of Martin: with myself, I could not help remembering my weaknesses, but I could forget his. So, given the least excuse, as after listening to his voice from the bath, I imagined more glittering triumphs for him than ever, even fifteen years before, I had imagined for myself.
He came in wearing a dressing-gown of mine, and at once I was given enough excuse to hope as much as I could manage. As with most guarded faces, his did not lose its guard in moments of elation — that is, the lines of the mouth, the controlled expression, stayed the same; but his whole face, almost like one of the turnip masks that we used to make as children, seemed to be illuminated from within by a lamp of joy.
We did not begin at once to discuss tactics, for which he had come to London. Sometime that night we should have to; but just for this brief space we put the tactics out of our minds, we gave ourselves the satisfaction of letting it ride.
Martin had been visited by an experience which might not come to him again. So far as I could distinguish, there were two kinds of scientific experience, and a scientist was lucky if he was blessed by a visitation of either just once in his working life. The kind which most of them, certainly Martin, would have judged the higher was not the one he had just known: instead, the higher kind was more like (it was in my view the same as) the experience that the mystics had described so often, the sense of communion with all-being. Martin’s was quite different, not so free from self, more active: as though, instead of being one with the world, he held the world in the palm of his hand; as though he had, in his moment of insight, seen the trick by which he could toss it about. It did not matter that the trick had been invented by another; this was a pure experience, without self-regard, so pure that it brought to Martin’s smile, as well as joy, a trace of sarcastic surprise — ‘Why has this happened to me?’
He told me as much, for that evening there was complete confidence between us. Suddenly, he began to laugh outright.
I asked what was the matter.
‘I just thought what an absurdly suitable place it was, to feel like this.’
I was at a loss.
‘What was?’
‘Your bath.’
Then I remembered the legend of Archimedes.
‘He must have had the feeling often enough,’ said Martin.
With a smile, sharp-edged, still elated, now eager for the point of action, he added: ‘The trouble is, the old man was a better scientist than I am.’
Part Two
The Experiment
8: Gambling by a Cautious Man
Soon after Martin’s visit, people in the secret began to become partisans about Luke’s scheme, either for or against. A decision could not be stalled off for long. Luke had managed to arouse passionate opposition; most of the senior scientists as well as Hector Rose, and his colleagues, wanted to kill the idea and despatch Luke and the others to America. But Francis Getliffe and a few other scientists were being passionate on the other side. And I also was totally committed, and, while they argued for Luke in the committee rooms, did what little I could elsewhere.
I made Hector Rose listen to the whole Luke case. Although we had come to dislike each other, he gave me a full hearing, but I did not shift him.
I did better with the Minister, who had in any case felt a sneaking sympathy with the scheme all the time. The difficulty was that he was losing his influence, and was above all concerned for his own job. While I was trying to persuade him to pay a visit to Barford, he was on edge for a telephone call from Downing Street, which, if it came, meant the end.
However, he agreed to pay the visit.
‘If I can see those prima donnas together, I might get some sense out of them,’ he said to Rose.
Rose politely agreed — but he was speculating on how many more weeks Bevill would stay in office. Rose had seen ministers come and go before, and he wanted all tidy in case there was a change.
Lesser functionaries than the Minister could have travelled down to Barford by government car; Hector Rose, who himself had no taste for show, would at least have reserved a compartment for the party so that he could talk and work. Bevill did neither. He sat in a crowded train, reading a set of papers of no importance, exactly like a conscientious clerk on the way to Birmingham.
The train trickled on in the sunshine; troops yobbed out on to the little platforms, and once or twice a station flower garden which had been left intact gave out the hot midsummer scents. There was no dining car on the train; after several hours of travelling the Minister pulled out a bag, and with his sly, gratified smile offered it first to Rose and then to me. It contained grey oatmeal cakes.
‘Bikkies,’ explained the Minister.
When Drawbell received us in his office, he did not spend any time on me, and not much (in which he was dead wrong) on Hector Rose. Drawbell had no illusions about the dangers to Barford. His single purpose was to get the Minister on his side; but his manner did not overdo it. It was firm, at times bantering and only obscurely deferential.
‘I’ve done one thing you could never do,’ he said to the Minister.
The Minister looked mild and surprised.
‘Just before the war,’ Drawbell went on, ‘I saw you on my television set.’
The Minister gave a happy innocent smile, He knew precisely what was going on, and what Drawbell wanted; he was used to flattery in its most bizarre forms, and, incidentally, always enjoyed it.
But Bevill knew exactly what he intended to do that afternoon. Drawbell’s plans for him he sidestepped; he did not want Rose or me; he had come down for a series of private talks with the scientists, and he was determined to have them.
It was not until half past five that Martin came out of the meeting, and then he had Mounteney with him, so that we could not exchange a private word. Old Bevill was still there talking to Rudd, and Mounteney was irritated.
‘This is sheer waste of time,’ he said to me as we began to walk towards their house, as though his disapproval of old Bevill included me. Although at Cambridge we had been somewhere between acquaintances and friends, he did at that moment disapprove of me.
He was tall and very thin, with a long face and cavernous eye sockets. It was a kind of face and body one often sees in those with a gift for conceptual thought; and Mounteney’s gift was a major one. He was a man of intense purity of feeling, a man quite unpadded either physically or mentally; and he had an almost total inability to say a softening word.