He and his wife had waited for each post the preceding November, looking for a letter about the New Year’s honours list; and they were doing it again before the birthday list. There was nothing for them. They still pretended to expect it. At breakfast, in a room with covers on some of the chairs, ready to move that week, Drawbell made believe to threaten me, fixing me with his sound eye.
‘My patience is exhausted,’ he said, as though making a public speech — but it was the kind of joke which is not a joke. ‘It’s high time the Government did its duty.’
He may have suspected that I knew his chances. I did. But, for the last time with Drawbell, I had to follow his lead, do my best to be hearty and say nothing.
For his chances were nil. I had heard Hector Rose rule him out. It was the only time I had known Rose be, by his own standards, less than just. By Rose’s standards, Drawbell had done enough for a knighthood: Barford had ‘made its contribution’, as Rose said, and Drawbell had been in charge for five years. According to the rules, the top man got the top decoration; but for once Rose would not have it so. He asked cold questions about who had done the work; with the methodicalness of a recording angel, he put down to Drawbell’s credit the occasions when he had backed the right horse — and then turned to the other side of the sheet. The final account, in Rose’s mind, did not add up to a knighthood.
At the breakfast table, Drawbell, still ignorant of that decision, hoping against hope, put on his jocular act, and threatened me. His wife regarded me, monumental, impassive; she was looking forward to getting Mr Thomas Bevill down to the new establishment. Between her and her husband, I had never seen more than a thread of that friendliness-cum-dislike which comes in lifelong marriages that are wrong at the core: yet she remained his loyal and heavy-footed ally. She was no more defeated than he was. And when finally his last hope wilted, they would, without knowing it, be supports to each other.
That morning, Drawbell gave just one open sign of recognition that he was on the way down. He refused to come with me to his old office, which Luke was already occupying. He could not face the sight of someone who had passed him, who had — in Drawbell’s eyes and the world’s — arrived.
Yet Luke himself would have had his doubts, I thought, sitting beside his desk, behind which, in his shirtsleeves, he tilted back in his chair — in that room where he had made his first proposal about the pile. He would have had his doubts about his arrival, if ever he had spared time to consider it, which — as he remained a humble and an immediate man — he was most unlikely to.
He knew that he would not now leave much of a scientific memorial behind him. You could not do real scientific work and become a ‘stuffed shirt’, as he used to argue rudely in the past. Ironically, he, so richly endowed for the pure scientific life, had, unlike Martin, put it behind him. There were times when he felt his greatest gift was rusting. His corpus of work would not stand a chance of competing with Mounteney’s.
Nevertheless, Luke was enjoying himself. His chair tilted back against the wall, he gave the answer I had come for. Gave it with the crispness of one, who in reveries, had imagined himself as a tycoon. Once or twice he shot a response out of the side of his mouth.
‘Curtains,’ he said once, indicating that the discussion was at an end.
‘Come off it, Walter,’ I said.
Luke looked startled. As always, he had got into the skin of his part. Then he gave a huge cracked grin.
I had come to clear up one or two administrative tangles, which in Martin’s time would have been dealt with at Barford, and we were talking of getting Luke a second in command to tidy up after him. Luke was determined to appoint Rudd, who had, as soon as Drawbell was superseded, transferred his devotion to the new boss.
‘He’s a snurge,’ said Luke. ‘But he can be a very useful snurge.’
Was he the man that Luke wanted? In my view, Luke needed someone to stand up to him.
‘No,’ said Luke. ‘I can make something of him. I can make a difference to that chap.’
Already, I thought, Luke was showing just a trace of how power corrodes. As we walked round the establishment, in the drizzling rain, I teased him, bringing up against him his old ribald curses at ‘stuffed shirts’.
‘If ever you think I’m becoming one, Lewis,’ said Luke, ‘you come and kick my behind.’
He was limping as he walked. His knee was still giving him pain, and at the back of his mind there was the ache of not knowing whether he had recovered. Nevertheless, limping, grey at the temples, not disguising his fear of whether his life was going to be cut short, he seemed physically to expand as he took me into bay after bay of the new buildings. By this time they stretched for many acres on both sides of the river: in and out of the rain we dodged, as he took me to see the new piles being built, where the floors were busy with scientists and artisans. Then he took me to the two piles already working, working in the humanless space. The building looked less crude now; above was a large chimney, and there hummed the faint noise of fans. This had become Luke’s empire.
Like any sentient man, he had had his hesitations about this project (for my benefit, he was reckoning up, as we stood beside the working pile, just how many such machines existed in the world). He had given his reasons why he went on with it, and why he believed all might turn out well. But now he had shut both doubts and justifications within him. He was not one of those who can work and at the same time remain detached about whether or not they are doing good. This was Luke’s empire, and as he looked over it he thought of nothing but how best to make it run.
44: Two Brothers
‘That evening, in Martin’s rooms in Cambridge, which by a touch of college sentiment were those I had lived in before the war, I described that talk with Luke. Martin and I were alone, and there was an hour before dinner; only the first fringe of rain had reached Cambridge, and the sun was shining, after a shower which filled the room with a smell of wisteria from the court beneath.
There, in the high room, which the sunlight did not reach, Martin questioned me about Luke: how was his régime turning out? How were the latest plans working? For Martin, although he had changed his life, did not pretend that he could will away his interest, and liked to talk of the place where he had had an influence which would not come to him again.
He disagreed with one of Luke’s arrangements and gave his reason, which sounded sensible.
‘Why doesn’t someone tell him so?’ he said.
‘Some people are going to get more than they bargained for,’ I said.
‘It’s not necessary,’ Martin was not displeased to find fault. I said that, though Luke’s methods might be rough and ready, under him Barford would be a success.
‘Poor old Walter!’ Martin said, with a smile, with an edge of envy. Martin had not gone back on his choice, although by this time be knew, what one can never imagine until one lives it, the wear and tear, hour by hour and day by day, as one tries to reshape a life. He knew precisely what it was like to work in the same laboratory as his juniors, and realize that they were outclassing him He came to them as a man with a big outside reputation, and felt a nobody. At colloquia and laboratory teas he became nervous in front of young men whose confidence, unlike his own, was absolute.
He believed now that his critics were right: from every practical point of view, his choice had been stupid: he would stay there, doing his college teaching, without a realistic chance of achievement for the rest of his life.