‘Was it a matter of will?’ I said, feeling more tender to her.
‘No,’ said Irene, ‘I’ve got the will, but I can’t trust my nerves.’
Then I asked why she had married Martin. She began not by answering the question, but by saying: ‘You shouldn’t worry too much about Martin.’
‘Why not?’
‘I fancy he’s a harder man than you are.’
She said it as though she were praising him. Reverting to her businesslike manner, she went on about her reasons for the marriage. She had found some of her friends competing for him, she said; and that provoked her. But most of all she wanted safety.
‘I was getting notorious,’ she said. ‘When people heard my name, they were beginning to say “Oh, her”.’
Curiously, by this time she and I were on easy terms. Nevertheless, I did not know how much to believe. She was anxious not to give herself the benefit of the doubt, she was putting herself in the coldest light. Nearly always, I thought, there was something men or women were protecting, when deliberately, and with pride, almost with conceit, they showed you their most callous side.
All of a sudden she looked at me with her eyes narrowed and frightened.
‘Why did you ask me — about marrying him?’
I tried to put her off.
‘Do you want him to leave me?’
‘That’s not my business,’ I said.
‘Are you trying to take him away?’ Her tone had been brittle, the tears had been near again, and she sighed.
Then she threw her head back, and put on her matey, hard-baked smile. ‘You can try anything you like,’ she said. ‘Nothing will have any effect on him, you ought to know that by now.’
Within ten minutes we were walking along the footpath to the laboratories, Irene’s face groomed as though nothing were more impossible than tears or anger, both of us talking as though there had been no scene between us. Just once, she referred back to it, when she commented out of the blue: ‘Mornings before the office.’
It was her phrase for any kind of morning drama: it was a phrase that only had meaning if your working life was disciplined, as all of ours had by this time become. Whatever was left behind at home, the files were waiting. As we walked along the country footpath, I was myself sorting out my official thoughts, collecting what I could safely say to Drawbell.
Before I called on Drawbell, I said goodbye to Martin. He was standing in his laboratory, looking at one of the counters: tiny neon lamps, the size of buttons, flickered in and out, the noise tapped on, on the indicator the figures moved like a taxi register.
‘Any progress?’ I asked.
‘Nothing new,’ said Martin patiently. He and others had already explained to me that what was true of pure scientific research was truer still of this: that the days of crisis were few: that it was only after long periods of preparation, measured in months, not days, that they came to a ‘result’ — one day of excitement, and afterwards another period of building, routine, long-drawn-out suspense.
In the office where Drawbell’s secretaries worked, I was kept waiting among the typing stools and dictaphones before I could see him. I suspected that he was doing it on purpose, as I went on chatting to Hanna Puchwein and her assistant, Mary Pearson, the wife of one of the chief engineers, a young woman who at that first impression seemed just spectacled and flushing. At last the bell trilled on Hanna’s desk, and she took me in.
Drawbell’s office had in the past been the main drawing-room of the Barford house. On the high walls, where the white paint was chipping from the panels, were pinned charts, tables of organization, graphs, diagrams. The room was so long that there was time to notice my footsteps on the parquet as I went towards Drawbell’s desk. He sat, steadily regarding me, watching me come towards him without changing his expression or making a sound.
All this was put on. I had met him several times, in that office as well as in London. He was not an academic, and Luke and the others said, with their usual boisterous lack of respect, that he was not a scientist at all. In peacetime he had been head of another government station. Though I knew that he was not unformidable, I knew also that he was a bit of a humbug and a bit of a clown.
He remained silent. I sat down in an armchair by his desk, He went on gazing at me, with an unwinking inflexible stare from his right eye: the other had little vision and turned blandly off at forty-five degrees. He was bald: square-jowled: podgy-nosed: wide-mouthed, with upturning melon-lips. I studied him, also without speaking.
‘Eliot,’ he said at last, ‘I’m not satisfied with the support that we’re receiving.’
I said that this was what I had come to talk about.
‘Now you’ve had an opportunity to see what we’re doing.’
I said yes.
‘I hope you’ve made the most of it. I hope you are beginning to realize that this place maybe — I don’t say that it is, I say may be — the most important institution in the entire world. And I’m going to ask you straight out: what help am I to expect from headquarters?’
I hesitated.
‘Naturally, I expect some positive results from you,’ said Drawbell.
I was the wrong man for this opening, but I had to be patient. I had two problems on my mind. What was going to happen? I had not much doubt of the answer — but how frankly should I tell it to Drawbell?
I knew in cold blood what was bound to happen. Even if Rudd’s scheme worked (perhaps Martin was underestimating its chances), it would take years. All the scientists they wanted were working elsewhere, most of them on RDF, on work that would pay dividends in one year or two, not in the remote future: no one in authority could take the risk of moving them; even if the Barford result was certain, instead of uncertain, no one at that stage of the war could do much more.
If I were to be any use as an administrator to Barford, I had to get them to trust me: so I decided to be open with Drawbell. I said that no one could spend any time with his scientists without becoming infected with their faith. He nodded his head. I should report that to Hector Rose and the Minister, for what it was worth: but Drawbell must not expect too much.
‘Why not?’
I told him what I had been thinking to myself. He was up against the facts of war. Whatever I reported to the Minister, or the Minister represented to his committees, or the committees recommended on their own, would make little difference. Barford would get buildings and equipment without any serious trouble, but could only hope for a few extra scientists. However much faith anyone had, the men just did not exist.
‘Strip the country,’ said Drawbell,
I told him any set of responsible persons would have to say no. We couldn’t weaken ourselves in 1943 or 1944 for the sake of a gigantic gamble.
‘I won’t tolerate the word gamble,’ said Drawbell, in a loud monotonous voice, speaking like a man trying to hold back his anger.
I had expected him to be reasonable; I had misjudged him.
He would not listen to my case. He shouted me down. He tried cajoling me, saying that I was the only man in the Minister’s entourage with any imagination. He tried threatening me, asking how I should feel when the Germans dropped the first uranium bomb on London.
I was used, like any official who has had to carry bad news, to being blamed for it, but it was an effort to keep my temper.
‘Quite frankly,’ said Drawbell, meaning by that phrase that something unpleasant was coming, ‘I hoped that you were going to be less obstructive.’
He went on: ‘Of course, I shan’t be able to hide it from your superiors that we’ve been disappointed by your visit.’
I said that was up to him.
‘If your superiors take the same hopeless attitude as you do, Eliot, it will be a black day for this country.’