‘She’d be a load on you.’
‘Why do you think that, particularly?’
He had the interested air of a man discussing the love affairs of an acquaintance, well liked, but for whom he had no intimate concern. It was assumed partly to vex me a little; but in part it was a protection against me.
‘Do you think that she’d be much good as a professional man’s wife?’
‘I can see that she would have her disadvantages,’ he said reasonably.
‘You need someone who’ll let you work in peace and for that you couldn’t find anyone worse.’
‘I think I could get my own way there,’ said Martin.
‘No, you couldn’t. Not if you care for her at all, which I presume you do, otherwise you wouldn’t be contemplating this piece of suicide.’
‘Yes, I do care for her,’ he said.
The coals fell suddenly, heaving a bright and fragile hollow in which the sparks stood still as fireflies. He leaned across to throw on coal. When he had sat back again I said: ‘Then imagine what it would be like. She’s rackety and you’re prudent. She’d have all the time in the world on her hands, and do you think she’s the woman to stay still? What do you think you’d find when you got home?’
‘It’s just possible that I might be able to settle her down.’
I was handling it badly, I knew. I said: ‘You know, I’m not a great expert on happy marriages. But on unhappy ones I do know as much as most men.’
Martin gave a friendly, sarcastic smile. I went on. He met each point on the plane of reason. He had reckoned them out himself; no one insured more carefully against the future. I was telling him nothing he did not know. I became angry again.
‘She’s pretty shallow, you know. I expect her loves are too.’ Martin did not reply.
‘She’s bright, but she’s not very clever.’
‘That doesn’t matter to me,’ he said.
‘You’d find her boring in time.’
‘I couldn’t have done less so up to now,’ said Martin.
‘Just imagine her being bright — for — ten years. In ten years you’d be sick and tired of her.’
‘Ten years,’ said Martin. He added: ‘If that’s the worst that happens!’
‘She’d be driving you off your head.’
‘If this fission affair works,’ said Martin, ‘we shall be lucky if we have any heads.’
That was the actual moment at which I first heard the rumour. There was a touch of irritation in Martin’s voice, because over his marriage I had pressed him too far.
He was putting me off. He had not spoken with any special weight, for he was thinking about Irene and my opposition; yet something in his tone brought me up sharp, and I had to inquire:
‘Is this anything new?’
‘Very new,’ said Martin. He was still trying to lead my attention away, but also he was half-caught up, as he said: ‘It’s very new, but I don’t know how everyone missed it. I might have seen it myself!’
He told me that, within the past fortnight, letters had been published in scientific journals in several countries, and that the Cavendish people and physicists everywhere were talking of nothing else. That I could understand. He then gave me an explanation which I could not understand, although I had heard plenty of the jargon of nuclear physics from him and Luke. ‘Fission’. ‘Neutrons’. ‘Chain reaction’. I could not follow. But I could gather that at last the sources of nuclear energy were in principle open to be set loose; and that it might be possible to make an explosive such as no one had realistically imagined.
‘Scientists always exaggerate,’ I said.
‘This isn’t exaggerated,’ said Martin. ‘If it happens, one of these bombs would blow up Cambridge. I mean, there’d be nothing left.’
‘Will it happen?’
‘It seems to be about an even chance,’
I had stood up, as I attempted to follow his explanation. Then I walked across the room and looked out of the window into the court, where the rain was blowing before the wind, forming great driven puddles along the verges of the grass; in a moment I returned to where Martin was still sitting by the fire, We were both sobered, but to me this piece of news, though it hung over us as we faced each other, seemed nothing but a red herring.
I came back, more gently now, to the prospect of his marriage. Had he really thought what, in terms of day-to-day living, it might mean? He was once more polite, sensible, brotherly. He would admit the force of any one of my doubts: he would say yes to each criticism. Although underneath I could feel his intention, embedded right in the core of his will, nevertheless he was ready to make any other concession to my worry.
Nothing said in anger would be remembered, he was as good as saying, with his good-natured, sarcastic smile. In fact, even in the bitterest moment of the quarrel, I had taken that for granted. It did not enter my mind that anything could touch the confidence between us.
2: A Code Name
MARTIN married Irene that autumn, but I could not visit them for some time afterwards. For the war had started: he was working at Rosyth in one of the first degaussing parties, and, as for me, I was already a temporary civil servant in London.
As the early months of war went by, I heard nothing, and thought little, about my brother’s marriage; but the piece of scientific news which, when I was trying to turn him against Irene, he had used as a false trail, came several times into my office work.
It happened so through some personal coincidences. It was because the Minister knew me that I went into his department, and it was because of his own singular position that we saw the minutes of the scientific committees. His name was Thomas Bevill, and he was a second cousin of Lord Boscastle. He had been a professional politician all his life without making much of a mark in public; in private, in any government milieu he was one of the most trusted of men. He had the unusual gift of being both familiar and discreet; forty years before, when he began his career, he had set himself never to give away a secret, and never to allow himself the bright remark that makes a needless enemy. So by 1939 he had become such a link as all governments needed, particularly at the beginning of a war, before the forms of administration had settled down: they needed a man like Thomas Bevill as the chairman of confidential committees, the man to be kept informed of what was going on, the supreme post office.
Just before war began, he asked me to join him as one of his personal assistants. He had met me two or three times with the Boscastles, which was a virtue in his eyes, and I had been trained as a lawyer, which was another. He thought I was suitable raw material to learn discretion. Gradually, in the first autumn of the war, he let me item by item into his confidential files. That was why, one autumn afternoon, he sent word that he would like a ‘little talk’ with Hector Rose and me.
The Minister’s room was only two doors from mine, and both, relics of the eighteenth-century Treasury, looked out over Whitehall itself, brilliant that afternoon with autumn sun that blazed from the windows opposite ours. The Minister was not in the room, but Sir Hector Rose was already sitting by the side of the coal fire. He was a man in the early forties, stocky, powerful, and youthful-looking, his official black coat and striped trousers cut to conceal his heavy muscles. The flesh of his cheeks shone as though untouched, and his face, hair, and eyes had the same lightness. He greeted me with his usual excessive politeness. Then he said: ‘I suppose you have no idea what our master is going to occupy us with?’
I said no, and it was clear that he had none.
‘Has anyone else been summoned, do you know, Eliot?’
I did not think so. Rose said: ‘That makes us a very cosy little party.’