At half past two I persuaded her to go to bed. The next morning there was still no message: she wanted to ring up again, but some relic of pride, perhaps my presence and what she had said to me, prevented her. She put on her smart, brazen air to keep her courage up, and with a quip about having spent the night alone with me in my flat, took a taxi to Paddington and the next train back to Barford, waving with spirit till she was out of sight up Lupus Street.
Neither that morning, nor the previous night, had I wished, as I had often wished in the past, that Martin was rid of her.
16: Points on a Graph
Most people I met, even on the technical committees, were still ignorant about the whole uranium project. But some could not resist letting one know that they were in the secret too. In the lavatory of the Athenaeum a bald bland head turned to me from the adjacent stall.
‘March 22nd,’ came the whisper and a finger rose to the lips.
On the evening of the twenty-first, just as I was leaving to catch the last train to Barford, Hector Rose gave his ceremonious knock and came into my office.
‘Very best wishes, Eliot,’ he said. He was awkward; he was for once excited, and tried to hide it.
‘This may be a mildly historic occasion,’ he said. ‘We may all qualify for a footnote to history, which would be somewhat peculiar, don’t you think?’
Next morning, sitting opposite to Mrs Drawbell at the breakfast table, I thought there was one person at least immune from the excitement. Drawbell had left for the laboratory, so full of animation that he let the diablerie show through: ‘If I were giving honours, Eliot, I shouldn’t give them to the prima donnas — no, just to the people who do the good, hard, slogging work.’ He gave his melon-lipped grin; he was thinking of his own rewards to come; more than ever, he felt the resentment of a middle man for those who make his fortune. When he went out, the psychological temperature fell.
Mrs Drawbell watched me, heavy and confident in her silence. She said: ‘I hope you are enjoying your kipper,’ and returned to impassivity again. I said: ‘Everyone will be glad when today is over, won’t they?’
The women at Barford had had to be told that an experiment was taking place that day; Mrs Drawbell did not know what it was, but she knew this was a crisis. Nevertheless, mine seemed a new idea.
‘Perhaps they will,’ said Mrs Drawbell.
‘It’s going to be a strain,’ I said.
She gave an opaque smile.
‘It’s a strain on your husband,’ I said.
‘He’s used to it,’ said Mrs Drawbell.
Had she any feeling for him, I wondered? She was his ally; in her immobile fashion, she tried to help him on: it was she who, finding that Martin and Irene had no room to spare, had invited me to stay. Yet she spoke of him with less tenderness than many women speak of their doctors.
Then she talked of Mary Pearson’s children; Mrs Drawbell was looking after them for the day. She was confident that their mother’s treatment was wrong and her own right. Densely, confidently, with a curious air of being about to offer affection, she pressed her case upon me and was demanding my moral support. I could not help remembering her on my way to the hangar, irritated as I was in any period of suspense that other lives should be going on, with their own egotisms, claiming one’s attention, intruding their desires.
I felt my suspense about that day’s experiment increase, having been forced to think of something else. When I saw Mary Pearson, sitting at a bench close to the pile, I was short to her; her skin flushed, her eyes clouded behind her spectacles. I made some sort of apology. I could not explain that I felt more keyed up because her name had distracted me,
The hangar was noisy that morning, like a cathedral echoing a party of soldiers. Workmen, mechanics, young scientists, went in and out through the door in the pile’s outer wall; Luke was shouting to someone on top of the pile; Martin and a couple of assistants were disentangling the wire from an electrical apparatus on the floor. There were at least twenty men in the hangar, and Mary Pearson was the only woman. And in the middle, white-walled, about three times the height of a man, stood — catching our eyes as though it were a sacred stone — the pile.
Luke greeted me. He was wearing a windjacket tucked into his grey flannel trousers.
‘Well, Lewis,’ he shouted, ‘we’re in the hell of a mess.’
‘It will be all right on the night,’ said someone. There was a burst of laughter, laughter noisy, exultant, with just a prickle of nerves.
The ‘pipery’ (Luke meant the pipes, but his scientific idiom was getting richer as he grew more triumphant) had ‘stood up to’ all tests. The uranium slugs were in place. In the past week, Martin had put in a dribble of heavy water, and a test sample had picked up no impurities. But there was one ‘bloody last-minute snag’ like finding just at the critical moment that you have forgotten — Luke produced a bedroom simile. Most of the ‘circuitry’, like the pipery, was in order: there was trouble with one switch of the control rods.
‘We can’t start without them,’ said Luke. Martin joined us: I did not wish to ask questions, any question seemed to delay the issue, but they told me how the control rods worked. ‘If the pile gets too hot, then they automatically shut the whole thing off,’ said Luke.
‘Otherwise,’ said Martin, ‘there is a finite danger that the reaction would be uncontrollable.’
That meant — I knew enough to follow — the pile might turn into something like a nuclear bomb.
Both Luke and Martin were themselves working on the circuits. A couple of radio engineers wanted Luke to let them improvise a switch.
‘Think again,’ said Luke. ‘That cut-off is going to work as we intended it to work, if it means plugging away at the circuits until this time tomorrow.’
Someone went on arguing.
‘Curtains,’ said Luke.
As Martin returned to the labyrinth of wires, both he and Luke ready to finger valves for hours to come, I wished I had stayed away or that they had a job for me. All I could do was drag up a chair to Mary Pearson’s bench. She was self-conscious, perhaps because I had been brusque, perhaps because, with her husband away, she was uncomfortable in the presence of men. Already that morning I had seen some of the youths, gauche but virile, eyeing her. When I sat beside her, though she was not comfortable herself, it was in her nature to try to make me so.
In front of her were instruments which she had been taught to read; she was a competent girl, I thought, she would have made an admirable nurse. There was one of the counters whose ticking I had come to expect in any Barford laboratory; there was a logarithmic amplifier, a DC amplifier, with faces like speedometers, which would give a measure — she had picked up some of the jargon — of the ‘neutron flux’.
On the bench was pinned a sheet of graph paper and it was there that she was to plot the course of the experiment. As the heavy water was poured in, the neutron flux would rise: the points on the graph would lead down to a spot where the pile had started to run, where the chain reaction had begun:
‘That’s going to be the great moment,’ said Mary
The tap and rattle, the curses and argument, the dashes of light, went on round us. I continued to talk to Mary, lowering my voice — though there was no need, for the scientists were shouting. Once or twice she contradicted me, her kind mouth showed a touch of sexual obstinacy. She was totally faithful to Pearson; like many passionate women she was chaste; but she was not chaste because she did not know the temptation; she could have made many men happy, and been happy herself with many men. She would stay faithful to her husband, however long he was kept away, and she was edgy when her eyes brightened in his absence. Again like many happy, passionate, good-natured women, she had just a trace more than her fair share of self-regard. The morning ticked on, midday, the early afternoon, none of us had spoken of eating. It must have been after two o’clock when one of the refugees discovered the fault.