‘It won’t be good for my soul, will it?’
‘Why not?’
It was nerve-racking that he thought so much of the future.
‘I like power too much, I’m just discovering that. I shall like it more, when I’ve got my way for the next few years.’
He broke off: ‘No, it won’t be good for my soul, but if I do something useful, if I can win us a breathing space, what the hell does it matter about my soul?’
He had not once inquired about Martin or referred to him, except perhaps (I was not sure) when he spoke of internal enemies.
He made an attempt to ask about my affairs, but, with the compulsion of illness, came back to himself. He said, in a quiet, curiously wistful voice: ‘I once told you I had never had time for much fun. I wonder when I shall.’
A memory, not sharp, came back to me. Luke, younger than now, in the jauntiness of his health, grumbling outside a Barford window.
From his bed he frowned at me.
‘When these people told me I might die,’ he said, ‘I cursed because I was thinking of all the things I hadn’t done. If they happen to be right, which I don’t believe, I tell you, I shall go out thinking of all the fun I’ve wasted. That’s the one thought I can’t bear.’
Just for an instant his courage left him. Once again, just as outside Drawbell’s gate (the memory was sharper now) he was thinking of women, of how he was still longing to possess them, of how he felt cheated because his marriage had hemmed him in. His marriage had been a good one, he loved his children, he was getting near middle age; yet now he was craving for a woman, as though he were a virgin dying with the intolerable thought that he had missed the supreme joy, the joy greater in imagination than any realized love could ever be, as though he were Keats cursing fate because he had not had Fanny Brawne.
In those that I had seen die, the bitterest thought was what they had left undone.
And, as a matter of truth, though it was not always an easy truth to take, I had observed what others had observed before — I could not recall of those who had known more than their share of the erotic life, one who, when the end came, did not think that his time had been tolerably well spent.
34: Warm to the Touch
Martin was the last man to overplay his hand. The summer came, Sawbridge was still working in the plutonium laboratory, there was nothing new from Captain Smith. From Luke’s ward there came ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory reports; some doctors thought that it was a false alarm. Whoever was right, Martin could count on months in control. The press kept up articles on traitors, and espionage, but Barford was having a respite out of the news.
In July, Martin let us know that the first laboratory extraction of plutonium metal was ready for test. Drawbell issued invitations to the committee, as though he were trying to imitate each detail of the fiasco with the pile. The day was fixed for the 26th July, and Bevill was looking forward to it like a child,
‘I believe tomorrow is going to be what I should call a red-letter day,’ he said earnestly, as soon as he met the scientists at Barford, as though he had invented the phrase. At dinner that night, where there came Drawbell, Martin, Francis Getliffe, Mounteney, Hector Rose, Nora Luke, ten more Barford scientists and committee members, he made a long speech retracing the history of the project from what he called the ‘good old days’, a speech sentimental, nostalgic, full of nursery images, in which with the utmost sincerity he paid tribute to everyone’s good intentions, including those people whom he regarded as twisters and blackguards.
As we were standing about after dinner, Martin touched my arm. He took me to the edge of the crowd and whispered: ‘There’s no need to worry about tomorrow.’
Looking at him, I saw his mouth correct, his eyes secretive and merry. I did not need any explanation. In estrangement, it was still possible to read each other’s feelings; he had just considered mine with a kind of formal courtesy, as he would not have needed to consider a friend’s.
I was not staying with him that night, but he asked me to escape from the party for a quarter of an hour. ‘We went inside the establishment wire, and walked quickly along the sludgy paths.
In an empty room of the hot laboratory, he found me a set of rubber clothes, cloak, cowl, gloves, and goloshes, and put on his own. He took me down a passage marked DANGER. ‘Never mind that,’ said Martin. He unlocked a steel door which gave into a slit of a room, empty except for what looked like a meat-safe. Martin twiddled the combination, opened the panel, and took out a floppy bag made of some yellowish substance, rather smaller than a woman’s shopping basket. As he held the bag, one corner was weighed down, as though by a small heavy object, it might have been a lead pellet.
‘That’s plutonium,’ said Martin.
‘How much?’
‘Not much. I suppose it’s worth a few hundred thousand pounds.’
He looked at the bag with a possessive, and almost sensual glance.
I had seen collectors look like that.
‘Touch it,’ he said.
I put two fingers on the bag and astonishingly was taken into an irrelevant bliss.
Under the bag’s surface, the metal was hot to the touch — and, yes, pushing under memories, I had it, I knew why I was happy. It brought back the moment, the grass and earth hot under my hand, when Martin and Irene told me she was going to have a child; so, like Irene in the Park under the fog-wrapped lights, I had been made a present of a Proustian moment, and the touch of the metal, whose heat might otherwise have seemed sinister, levitated me to the forgotten happiness of a joyous summer night.
For once, Martin was taken unawares. He was disconcerted to see me, with my fingers on the bag, lost in an absent-minded content.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘Quite,’ I said.
Next day, the demonstration was conducted as though Martin and his staff did not know whether it would work.
At the end, however, Martin would not accept the congratulations, insisting that they were due to Luke, and he took Bevill and the others to Luke’s bedside.
Hector Rose and I followed behind.
‘Are you going with them, Eliot?’ said Rose.
I was surprised by the constraint in his voice.
‘I think we’d better,’ I said.
‘As a matter of fact, I think I’ll just take a stroll round the place,’ he said.
It was so impolite, so unlike him that I did not begin to understand. Although I accompanied him, I could get no hint of the reason. Later I picked it up, and it turned out to be simple, though to me unexpected. Hector Rose happened to feel a morbid horror of cancer; he tried to avoid so much as hearing the name of the disease.
By ourselves, in Drawbell’s office, he was for him relaxed, having extricated himself from an ordeal; he let fall what Bevill would have called one or two straws in the wind, about the future management at Barford. He and Bevill wanted to get it on a business footing: Drawbell was dead out of favour. If they made a change of superintendent, and if Luke were well, it would be difficult to sidetrack him — but none of the officials, and few of the elderly scientists, relished the idea. He had made mistakes: he talked too loud and too much: he was not their man.
Already they trusted Martin more. He was younger, he was not in the Royal Society, to give him the full job was not practical politics; but, if Luke’s health stayed uncertain, was there any device by which they could give Martin an acting command of Barford?
The luck was playing into Martin’s hand. I knew that he was ready, just as he had been ready since that night in the Stratford pub, to make the most of it. Even when he paid his tribute to Luke he had a double motive, he had one eye on his own future.