“I can manage any time that suits you,” her voice came back, agreeable, not at all put off.
I said that I might be freer after Christmas, but she replied that “we” were only in London for a short time. She went on: “You were in Cambridge a few weeks ago, weren’t you? Yes, I heard about that. I do wish I’d had a chance to see you there.”
She must, I thought, have revised her first impression of me. Presumably she had made enquiries and people had told her that I might be useful. I had a feeling that she didn’t in the least mind her judgment being wrong. She just wiped the slate clean, and resolved to chase me down.
Margaret was smiling. She found it funny to see me overborne, cut off from all escape routes.
Aside, I said to her: “What in God’s name ought I to do?”
“You’re under no obligation to spend five minutes on her, of course you’re not,” said Margaret. Then her face looked for a second less decorous. “But I don’t know how you’re going to avoid it, I’m damned if I do.”
“It’s intolerable,” I said, cross with her for not keeping her sense of humour down.
“Look here,” said Margaret, “you’d better ask her round here and get it over. Then you’ve done everything that she can possibly want you to.”
That was not quite so. Laura was also set on having me meet her husband. Since his dismissal, she told me over the telephone, he had been teaching in a school in Cambridge: that was the reason he could not often get to London. In the end, I had to invite them both to dinner later that same week.
When they arrived, and I looked at Howard for the first time — for now I realised that I had not once, visiting the college while he was still a Fellow, so much as caught sight of him — I thought how curiously unprepossessing he was. The skin of his face was coarse and pale; he had a long nose and not much chin. His eyes were a washed-out blue. He had a long neck and champagne-bottle shoulders; it was a kind of physique that often went with unusual muscular strength, and also with virility. Somehow at first sight he would have struck most people as bleak, independent, masculine, even though his voice was high-pitched and uninflected. As he spoke to me, he seemed awkward, but not shy.
“I believe you know that chap Luke, don’t you?” he said.
He meant Walter Luke, the head of the Barford atomic energy establishment, knighted that January at the age of forty, one of the most gifted scientists of the day. Yes, I said, Luke was an old friend of mine.
“He must be an extraordinary sort of chap?” said Howard.
“Just why?”
“Well, he’s got a finger in this bomb nonsense, hasn’t he? And I don’t know how a scientist can bring himself to do it.”
I was annoyed, more annoyed than I was used to showing. I was fond of Walter Luke: and also I had seen how he and his colleagues had tried to settle it with their consciences about the bomb, Luke choosing one way, my brother Martin the other.
“He happens to think it’s his duty,” I said.
“It’s a curious sort of duty, it seems to me,” replied Howard.
Meanwhile Margaret and Laura had been talking. Glancing at them, vexed at having this man inflicted on me, I noticed how young and slight Margaret looked beside the other woman. Against Laura’s, Margaret’s skin, still youthful over her fine bones, seemed as though it would be delicate to the touch. Actually it was Margaret who was ten years the elder, who had had children; but she seemed like a student beside the other, dark, handsome, earnest.
I could not hear what they were saying. As we sat round the table in the dining-room, Howard mentioned one or two more acquaintances he and Margaret and I had in common. Listening to him, I had already picked up something that no one had told me. He was farouche and a roughneck, and some of his manners might — to anyone without an English ear — have seemed working-class. Actually he was no more working-class than Margaret, who had been born among the academic aristocracy. His parents and hers could easily have gone to the same schools, though his probably came from Service families, not from those of clerics or dons. It was his wife who had gone up in the world, Howard not at all.
Margaret, who was watching Laura’s face, did not let the chit-chat dribble on.
“You’ve come to tell Lewis something, haven’t you?” she said before we had finished the soup. She was kind: and she did not like being oblique. “Wouldn’t you rather do it straight away?”
Laura smiled with relief. She looked across at her husband: “Who’s going to begin?”
“I don’t mind,” he said, without any grace.
“We’re not going to ask you very much,” said Laura to me, her brows furrowed. “They’re still shilly-shallying about opening the case again, and we want you to use your influence on them, that’s all.”
Suddenly she said, in a formal, dinner-party manner, addressing Margaret in full style: “I’m afraid this is boring for you. How much have you heard about this difficulty of ours?”
“I think about as much as Lewis has, by now,” said Margaret.
“Well, then, you can understand why we’re absolutely sickened by the whole crowd of them,” cried Laura. Her total force — and she was a passionate woman, one could not help but know — was concentrated on Margaret. But Margaret was the last person to be overwhelmed. She looked fine-nerved, but she was passionate herself, she was tough, and her will was at least as strong as Laura’s.
She was not going to be bulldozed into a conviction she did not feel, or even into more sympathy than she had started with.
“I think I can understand the kind of time you’ve had,” she said, gently but without yielding.
“Perhaps I ought to say,” I broke in, “that I know a good deal more about this business now—”
“How do you know?” Laura cried.
“I heard a certain amount in college.”
“I hope you were pleased with everything you heard,” she said.
There had been a time when I should have found this kind of emotion harder to resist than my wife found it. Though it was difficult for people to realise, though Laura exerted her first effort on Margaret because she seemed the softer option, I was more suggestible than she was. I had had to train and discipline myself out of it. But actually I had no temptation to acquiesce too much that night. Laura had not got me on her side; I felt antipathy for Howard; I was ready to speak plainly.
“That’s neither here nor there,” I said. I waited until the next course was in front of us, and then spoke to Laura again: “You talked about people in the college shilly-shallying about opening your case again. That’s nothing like the situation.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that, so far as I heard, and I think I should have heard if it was being talked about, no one there has the slightest intention of opening the case again.”
“Do you believe that?” said Laura to her husband.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said.
She stared at me steadily, with angry eyes. She came straight out: “If you were there, would you be content with that?”
For an instant I caught Margaret’s eye, and then looked at Howard on her right. His head was lowered, as it were sullenly, and he did not show any sign of recognition at all. I turned back to his wife and said: “I am afraid I haven’t yet heard anything which would make me take any steps.”
I felt, rather than heard, that Howard had given something like a grin or snigger. Laura flushed to the temples and cried: “What right have you got to say that?”
“Do you really want me to go on?”
“What else can you do?”
“Well, then,” I said, trying to sound impersonal, “I couldn’t take any other view, in the light of what the scientists report about the evidence. Remember, I’m totally unqualified to analyse the evidence myself, and so are most of the people in the college. That’s one of the difficulties of the whole proceedings. If I were there, I should just have to believe what Francis Getliffe and the other scientists told me.”