12: A Routine Interview
Those in the secret did not talk easily with each other, and as the months passed and Luke’s ‘pile’ went up, it was hard to judge how many believed in him. In committee heads were shaken, not much was said, yet feelings ran high. Luke was one of those figures who have the knack, often surprising to themselves, of stirring up controversy; people who did not know him, who had no conception of his surgent, exuberant, often simple-hearted character, grew excited about him, as someone who would benefit the country or as a scandalous trifler with public money, almost as a crook.
Of his supporters, the most highly placed of all was lost in the April of 1943, when Bevill was at last told that his job was wanted for another.
Now that his suspense had ended, I was astonished by the old man’s resilience. He moved his papers from Whitehall the same day. Briskly he said goodbye to his staff and made a speech with a remarkable, indeed an excessive, lack of sentimentality. He was not thinking of his years in the old office; he was thinking of nothing but the future. Without any procrastination at all he refused a peerage. If he accepted it, he was accepting the fact that he was out of politics for good: at the age of seventy-four, he was, with the occupational hope of politicians, as difficult to kill as the hope of a consumptive, reckoning his chances of getting back again.
As soon as he left, my own personal influence diminished; I could intervene no more than other civil servants of my rank (in his last month of office, Bevill had got me promoted again, which Rose thought excessive). All I did had to go through Rose, and we were more than ever uneasy with each other.
Nevertheless, Rose intended not to waste my inside knowledge of Barford. He merely requested as a favour that I should report to him any ‘point of interest’ I picked up on my visits there.
Each of us was being punctilious. When I next went down to Barford, a month or two after Bevill’s dismissal, for the christening of Martin’s son, I set out to obey Rose to the letter. I held back one incident only and I did so because neither of us would have thought it worth our while.
It was a morning late in May, the sky bright and pale, with an east wind that took the scent out of the wisteria, when I went into the hangar with Martin, in order to see the pile going up before we went to church. The tarpaulins in the roof, still not repaired, flapped in the wind. In the hangar it was cold; I had not known it anything else; but, instead of the dripping floor of winter, it had suddenly gone dusty, and grit blew about in the spring air. Labourers, wearing jerseys, were working in the bleak half light; they were laying bricks for an outer wall, while farther away one could see a kind of box, about eight feet each way; outside was another wall, the first part of the concrete case. Farther down still, Luke’s experimental structure lay deserted. Between stood some tables, one or two screened off, stacked with radio valves and circuits; on others, as though abandoned, were strewn metal tubing and tea cups. There was no sign of busyness. Labourers padded on, muttering among themselves. The foreman had his hand on the concrete shield, and was listening to Luke.
The paradox was that, as they worked against time, as they studied the German intelligence reports or heard gossip from America (news had come through that the Chicago pile had already run, in the previous December), Luke had nothing like enough to do.
Once he had had his idea, there was no more room for flair or scientific imagination for months, perhaps years to come: the rest was a matter of getting the machine built. It was a matter of organization, extreme attention to detail, knowing when a contractor could not work faster and when he could be pressed. It was a matter of organization that differed only in scale and in what depended on it, but not at all in kind, from being the clerk of works to some new public baths. Any competent man could do it, and Martin was there to do it as efficiently as Luke and with less fuss. Luke, who was as lavish with praise as abuse, admitted this. But he could not keep his hands off. Engineers, going as fast as men could within the human limits, heard his swearwords over the telephone. They did no great harm. It meant an expense of temper. It meant that, for the most critical months of Luke’s working life, he still had nothing to do.
When he came across to speak to me, I noticed that the colour of his face had gone more sallow and that, although the skin under his eyes was fresh and full, without the roughness of true anxiety, it had taken on a bruised, a faint purple tint. He was restless on the balls of his feet. He did not offer to come to church. When he left us, I asked Martin what Luke was going off to do. Martin gave an amused, half-indulgent smile.
‘He’s going to play the piano,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Just now,’ said Martin, ‘he plays the piano all day. Five or six hours a day, at least, except when he’s having a row.’
‘Does he play well?’
‘Oh, no,’ Martin replied. ‘He never learned after he was ten. He plays his old Associated Board pieces.’
In church, with a beam of early afternoon sun falling across the font, a beam in which the motes spun and jiggled and in which Martin’s hair was turned to silver gilt, I thought he was standing the strain better than Luke. He smiled at the child with a love more open than he ever showed for his wife.
Just for a moment, though, Martin’s smile altered. The parson and Irene and the baby had already left the church, and Martin and I were following, when an old woman entered with a busy air. Martin asked what she was doing, and she replied, full of well-being: ‘There’s a corpse coming in here soon, sir, and I just wanted to see that everything was nice for him.’
Martin smiled at me, and we followed the others into the sunlight. He did not need to explain; we both had a superstitious sense. He smiled at the thought of the old woman, and did not like it.
It was in the afternoon that I attended to the piece of business which seemed just routine, not interesting enough to discuss with Rose. Drawbell had invited me to what they called an ‘allocation meeting’ at which they interviewed some of that year’s intake of young men. His motive was to demonstrate how few and poor they were, but worn-out argument could get no further. He sat behind a table with his heads of sections on each side; Rudd was there, Mounteney, a couple of Jewish refugees and Martin, deputizing for Luke. Increasingly Luke left the chores to Martin. I could understand it. I could remember being underworked and overanxious, doing so little that one needed to do less.
As the interviews went on, the only flicker of interest for me was that one of the young men came from the same town as Martin and myself and had attended the same grammar school. His family had lived not far from ours in the red-brick streets, and Martin could recall him as a small boy. His name, which was Eric Sawbridge, had a flat, comfortable Midland note.
As he answered questions, he spoke with the faintly aggressive, reproving tone that one often heard at interviews. He was twenty-four, large, heavy, mature, with a single thick line across his forehead; he was a lighter blond than Martin, and might have been a Scandinavian sailor. He had got his First three years before, and had gone on to research. His answers sounded competent, not over-gracious; Martin made a reference to school-days and Sawbridge’s expression was, for a second, less suspicious. Then Drawbell took the general questioning out of Martin’s hands.