There was not a person in sight. In a moment, as though he had heard me, Luke came out of the cube door, muttering to someone within. He was wearing a windjacket, which made him seem more than ever square, like an Eskimo, like a Polar explorer. He beat his arms across his chest and blew on his fingers.
‘Hello, Lewis,’ he said. ‘It’s bloody cold, and this blasted experiment won’t go, and I want to run away and cry.’
I was interrupting him, he was fretting to get back to work; a voice from inside the cube asked about the next move. For minutes together, Luke gave orders for a new start the following day. ‘What shall we do tonight?’ came the voice.
Luke considered. For once he did not find the words. At last he said: ‘We’ll just go home.’
I walked back with him, for he and his wife had invited some of my old acquaintances to meet me at their house that evening. He was so dejected that I did not like to press him, and yet I had to confirm what everyone was telling me — that he was getting nowhere. Even so, my own question sounded flat in the bitter air.
‘How is it going, Walter?’
Luke swore. ‘How do you think it’s going?’
‘Is it going to come out?’
‘Does it look like it?’ he replied.
I told him that I should be talking next morning to Drawbell, that nothing I could say would signify much, but it all helped to form opinion.
‘You didn’t do much good bringing me here, did you?’
Then he corrected himself, though his tone was still dejected. ‘That’s not fair,’ he said.
I asked more about his method (which aimed at plutonium, not the isotope).
‘I’m not promising anything,’ said Luke.
‘Will it work in time?’
‘I can’t see the way tonight,’ he said, with another curse.
‘Shall you?
He said, half depressed, half boastfuclass="underline" ‘What do you think I’m here for?’
But that was his only burst of arrogance, and in the party at his house he sat preoccupied. So did Martin, for a different reason: for Irene had arranged to meet him there, and, when everyone else had arrived, still did not come.
Each time the door opened Martin looked round, only to see the Mounteneys enter, then the Puchweins. And yet, though he was saying little and Luke brooded as he went round filling glasses from a jug of beer, the evening was a cosy one. Out of doors, the countryside was freezing. It was a winter night, the fields stretching in frosted silence. Outside was the war, but within our voices and the light of the fire. It was a night on which one felt lapped in safeness to the fingertips.
Ideas, hopes, floated in the domestic air. For the first time at Barford, I heard an argument about something other than the project. After science, in those wartime nights, men like Puchwein and Mounteney had a second favourite subject. They argued as naturally as most of us drink, I was thinking, feeling an obscure fondness for them as I listened to them getting down to their second subject, which was politics.
For Puchwein, in fact, I had the peculiar fondness one bears someone to whom one has done a good turn. A close friend of mine called Roy Calvert had taken risks to smuggle Puchwein out of Berlin in 1938, and several of us had helped support him. But Puchwein was not in the least got down by having to accept charity. His manner remained patriarchal, it was he who dispensed the patronage. He had a reputation as a chemist. He was a very big man, bald and grey, though still under forty. When he took off his spectacles his eyes slanted downward, so that he always seemed about to weep. Actually, he was cheerful, kind, and so uxorious that his wife was showing lines of temper. But he forgot her, he was immersed, as he and she and Mounteney, and sometimes Nora Luke and I, threw the political phrases to and fro in front of the fire.
Some of those phrases, as used by both Puchweins and Mounteney but by no one else in the room, would have given me a clue if I had not known already. ‘The party’ for the Communist Party, ‘Soviet’ is an adjective for Russian, ‘Fascists’ as a collective term to include National-Socialists, ‘The Daily’ for the Daily Worker, ‘social democrats’ to describe members of the Labour Party such as Luke, or even unorthodox liberals such as Martin and me — all those were shibboleths, and meant, if one had ever listened to the dialect of intellectual communism, that those who used them were not far from the party line.
Neither Puchwein nor Mounteney concealed it. Throughout the thirties it had been nothing to conceal. They did not hold party tickets, so far as anyone knew; but they were in sympathy, Mounteney in slightly irregular sympathy. None of us was surprised or concerned that it should be so, certainly not in that November of 1941, when not only to the Puchweins but to conservative-minded Englishmen, it seemed self-evident that the war was being won or lost on Russian land.
Just then Luke went round with the beer again, the argument suddenly quietened, and I heard Emma Mounteney whispering to Hanna Puchwein with a glance in Martin’s direction:
‘Where is our wandering girl tonight?’
Hanna looked away, but Emma was hard to stop.
‘I wonder,’ she whispered, ‘if T—’ (a man I scarcely knew) ‘is on his lonesome.’
Martin was on the other side of the fire. I thought that he could not have heard. Nevertheless, before Puchwein began again, Martin apologized for Irene. She was finishing some work, he said; it must have taken longer than she reckoned, and it looked as though she might not get there at all. His composure was complete. I had once known a similar situation, but I had not summoned up half his self-command. Yet, as the talk clattered on, his eyes often gazed into the fire, and he was still listening for a ring at the door.
Martin had not spoken since his apology for her, and I wanted to shield him from going home with the Mounteneys, whose house (at Barford the scientists and their families were crammed on top of each other, as in a frontier town) he shared. So I invented a pretext for us to walk home together.
In the village street, all was quiet. A pencil of light edged the top of a blacked-out window frame. Otherwise the village was sleeping as it might have done on a Jacobean night, when some of these houses were built. Martin’s footsteps, slower and heavier than mine although he was the lighter man, seemed loud on the frosty road. I left him to break the silence. Our steps remained the only noise, until he remarked, as though casually: ‘Walter Luke didn’t say much tonight, did he?’
I agreed.
‘He must have had something in his mind. His experiment, I suppose.’ And that was all he said.
Martin was doing what we have all done, refer to ourselves, half apologize, half confide, by pretending an interest in another. If I had been an intimate friend but not a brother, perhaps even if I had been a stranger. I thought that just at that moment he would have unburdened himself. Often it is the reserved who, when a pain, or even more, a humiliation, has lived inside them too long, suddenly break out into a confidence to someone they scarcely know. But I was the last person to whom he could let go.
As we both showed when we first talked of his engagement, there was a delicacy in our kind of brothers’ love; and the closer we came to our sexual lives, the more that delicacy made us speak in terms of generalization and sarcasm. We knew each other very well by instinct. We could guess which women would attract the other, and often it was an attraction that we shared. Yet I had never told him any detail either of my married life or of a love affair. I should have felt it, not so much embarrassing to speak, though that would also have been true, but worse than embarrassing to force him to listen. It was the same from him to me. He could not tell me whom he suspected she went to bed with; he could not tell me what she was like in his own bed; and so it was no relief to speak at all.