Homecomings (14 page)

Nevertheless, although he made Bevill uncomfortable, as he did most people, he was not uncomfortable himself. He had come for a purpose and he was moving into it.

He said: ‘There is one other point, Minister.’

‘My dear chap?’

‘You don’t bring us into your projects soon enough.’

‘You’re preaching to the converted, you know. I’ve sown seeds in that direction ever since the war started – and I’ve still got hope that one or two of them may come home to roost.’

The old man’s quiff of hair was standing up, cockatoo-like; Lufkin gazed at him, and said: ‘I’m glad to hear you say that, Minister.’ He went on, and suddenly he had brought all his weight and will into the words: ‘I’m not supposed to know what you’re doing at Barford. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know until it’s time for me to do so. But I do know this – if you’re going to get any results in time for this war, you ought to bring us in the instant you believe you can produce anything. Your people can’t do big-scale chemical engineering. We can. We should have gone out of business if we couldn’t.’

‘Well,
that’s
a prospect that’s never cost any of us an hour’s sleep,’ said Bevill, gaining time to think, smiling with open blue eyes. In fact, the old man was worried, almost shocked. For Lufkin was speaking as though he knew more than he should. Barford was the name of the establishment where the first experiments on atomic fission had been started, nine months before; apart from the scientists on the spot, only a handful of people were supposed to have a glimmer of the secret, a few Ministers, Civil Servants, academic scientists, less than fifty in all. To Bevill, the most discreet of men, it was horrifying that even the rumour of a rumour should have reached Lufkin. Bevill never quite understood the kind of informal intelligence service that radiated from an industrialist of Lufkin’s power; and he did not begin to understand that it was one of Lufkin’s gifts, perhaps his most valuable one, to pick up hints that were floating through the technical air. For recognizing others’ feelings Lufkin had no antennae; but he had an extra set, more highly sensitized than those of anyone round him, for catching the first wave of a new idea.

That morning Bevill was determined to play for time, hiding behind his smoke-screen of platitudes like an amiable old man already a bit ga-ga. Even if the Barford project came off, even if they had to invoke the big firms, he was not sure whether he would include Lufkin. For the present he was not prepared to trust him, or anyone outside the secret, with so much as a speculation about Barford.

‘My dear chap,’ he said, more innocent than a child, ‘I’m not feeling so inclined to count my chickens yet awhile, and believe me, if we don’t mention any of these little games to our colleagues in industry,
or want anyone else to breathe a word about them
’ (that was Bevill’s way of telling a tycoon to keep his mouth shut) ‘it’s because it is all Lombard Street to a china orange that they’ll turn out to be nothing but hot air.’

‘I suggest that it’s a mistake,’ said Lufkin, ‘to act on the basis that you’re going to fail.’

‘No, but we think too much of you to waste your time–’

‘Don’t you think we’re capable of judging that?’

‘Your great company,’ said the Minister, ‘is doing so much for us already.’

‘That isn’t a reason,’ replied Lufkin, deliberately losing his temper, ‘why you should leave us out of what may be the most important business you’ll ever be responsible for.’

The tempers of men of action, even the hard contrived temper of Lufkin, had no effect on Bevill, except to make him seem slightly more woolly. But he was now realizing – it was my only reassurance that morning – that Lufkin was a formidable man, and that he would not be able to stonewall forever. Expert in judging just how much protests were going to matter, Bevill knew that, if he consulted other firms before Lufkin’s, there was certain to be trouble, and probably trouble of a kind that no politician of sense would walk into.

He knew that Lufkin was set in his purpose. It was not simply that, if the Barford project turned into hardware, there would be, not in a year, not during the war, but perhaps in twenty years, millions of pounds in it for firms like Lufkin’s. It was not simply that – though Lufkin calculated it and wanted more than his share. It was also that, with complete confidence, he believed he was the man to carry it out. His self-interest did not make him hesitate, nothing would have seemed to him more palsied. On the contrary his self-interest and his sense of his own powers fused, and gave him a kind of opaque moral authority.

Throughout that interview with the Minister, despite the old man’s wiliness, flattery and distrust, it was Lufkin who held the moral initiative.

ON the ceiling, the wash of firelight brightened; a shadow quivered and bent among the benign and rosy light; there was the noise of a piece of coal falling, the ceiling flickered, faded, and then glowed. It might have been a holiday long forgotten or an illness in childhood, as I lay there in a content so absolute that it was itself a joy, not just a successor of joy, gazing up at the ceiling. In the crook of my arm Margaret’s neck was resting; she too was gazing up.

Despite the blaze the air in the room was cold, for Margaret had to eke out her ration of coal, and the fire had not been lighted until we arrived. Under the bedclothes our skins touched each other. It was nine o’clock, and we had come to her room two hours before, as we had done often on those winter evenings. The room was on the ground floor of a street just off Lancaster Gate, and in the distance, through the cold wartime night, came the sough of traffic, washing and falling like the tide over a pebbly beach.

She was speaking, in spasms of talk that trailed luxuriously away, of her family, and how blissful and intimate they had been. Her hair on my shoulder, her hip against mine, that other bliss was close too; she had slipped into talking of it, once I had given her a cue. For I had mentioned, grumbling lazily in bed, that soon I should have some quite unnecessary exertion, since the Chelsea house I used to live in had been damaged in a raid the year before and its effective owner had begun pestering me with another list of suggestions.

‘That’s Sheila’s father?’ Margaret had said.

I said yes, for an instant disturbed because I had let the name creep in. Without any constraint, she asked: ‘How did they get on?’

‘Not well.’

‘No, I shouldn’t have thought they would,’ she said.

Running through my mind were letters from the rectory, business-like, ingenious, self-pitying, assuming that my time was at Mr Knight’s disposal. Reflectively, Margaret was saying: ‘It was different with me.’ She had always loved her father – and her sister also. She spoke of them, both delicately and naturally; she was not inhibited by the comparison with Sheila; she had brought it to the front herself.

Yet she too had rebelled, I knew by now – rebelled against her father’s disbeliefs. It was not as easy as it sounded, when she told me their family life used to be intense and happy, and that anyone who had not known it so could not imagine what they had missed.

It was nine o’clock, and there was another hour before I need go out into the cold. By half past ten I had to be back in my own flat in case the Minister, who was attending a cabinet committee after dinner, wanted me. I had another hour’s grace in which I could hide in this voluptuous safety, untraceable, unknown. Though it was not only to be safe and secret that we came to her room rather than mine, but also because she took pleasure in it, because she seized the chance, for two or three hours among the subterranean airless working days, of looking after me.

I gazed at her face, her cheekbones sharp in the uneven light; she was relaxed because I was happy, just as I had seen her abandoned because she was giving me pleasure. Used as I was to search another’s face for signs of sadness, I had often searched hers, unable to break from the habit, the obsession, sensitive beyond control that she might be miserable.

One night, not long before, this obsession had provoked a quarrel, our first. All that evening she had been subdued, although she smiled to reassure me; as we whispered in each other’s arms, her replies came from a distance. At last she got up to dress, and I lay in bed watching her. Sitting naked in front of the looking-glass, with her back to me, her body fuller and less girlish than it appeared in clothes, she was brushing her hair. As she sat there, I could feel, with the twist of tenderness, how her carelessness about dress was a fraud. She made up little, but that was her special vanity; she had that curious kind of showing-off which wraps itself in the unadorned, even the shabby, but still gleams through. It was a kind of showing-off that to me contained within it some of the allure and mystery of sensual life.

In the looking-glass I saw the reflection of her face. Her smile had left her, the sweet and pleasure-giving smile was wiped away, and she was brooding, a line tightened between her eyebrows. I cried out: ‘What’s the matter?’

She muttered an endearment, tried to smooth her forehead, and said: ‘Nothing.’

‘What have I done?’

I expected her moods to be more even than mine. I was not ready for the temper which broke through her.

She turned on me, the blood pouring up into her throat and cheeks, her eyes snapping.

‘You’ve done nothing,’ she said.

‘I asked you what was the matter.’

‘It’s nothing to do with us. But it soon will be if you assume that you are to blame every time I’m worried. That’s the way you can ruin it all, and I won’t have it.’

Shaken by her temper, I nevertheless pressed her to tell me what was on her mind. She would not be forced. Her wiry will stood against mine. At last, however, seeing that I was still anxious, with resentment she told me; it was ludicrously hard for me to believe. The next day, she was due to go to a committee as the representative of her branch, and she was nervous. Not that she had ambition in her job, but she felt humiliated if she could not perform creditably. She detested ‘not being equal to things’. She was, as the Civil Servants said, ‘good on paper’, but when it came to speaking in committee, which men like me had forgotten could ever be a strain, she was so apprehensive that she spent sleepless hours the night before.

It occurred to me, thinking her so utterly unlike Sheila as to be a diametrical opposite, that I had for once caught her behaving precisely as Sheila would have done.

After she had confided, she was still angry: angry that I was so nervous about causing her unhappiness. It was not a show of temper just for a bit of byplay; it had an edge and foreboding that seemed to me, feeling ill-used, altogether out of proportion.

This night, as we lay together watching the luminescence on the ceiling, the quarrel was buried. When I looked at her face, the habit of anxiety became only a tic, for in her eyes and on her mouth I saw my own serenity. She was lazier than usual; as a rule when I had to make my way back to my telephone at Dolphin Square, she accompanied me so as to make the evening longer, though it might mean walking miles in the cold and dark; that night, stretching herself with self-indulgence, she stayed in bed. As I said good night I pulled the blankets round her, and, looking down at her with peace, saw the hollow of her collar-bone shadowed in the firelight.

IT was not until a Saturday afternoon in May that Margaret could arrange for me to meet her elder sister. At first we were going for a walk in the country, but a despatch-box came in, and I had to visit the Permanent Secretary’s office after lunch. As I sat there answering Hector Rose’s questions, I could see the tops of the trees in St James’s Park, where I knew the young women were waiting for me. It was one of the first warm days of the year and the windows were flung open, so that, after the winter silence in that office, one seemed to hear the sounds of spring.

Before Rose could write his minute to the Minister, he had to ring up another department. There was a delay, and as we sat listening for the telephone Rose recognized the beauty of the afternoon.

‘I’m sorry to bring you back here, my dear chap,’ he said. ‘We ought to be out in the fresh air.’ Disciplined, powerful, polite, he did not really mind; but he was too efficient a man to stay there working for the sake of it, or to keep me. He worked fourteen hours a day in wartime, but there was nothing obsessive about it; he just did it because it was his job and the decisions must be made. The only thing obsessive about him was his superlative politeness. That afternoon, with Margaret and her sister outside in the park, Rose many times expressed his sorrow and desolation at taking up my time.

He was forty-five that year, one of the youngest of heads of departments, and looked even younger. His eyes were heavy-lidded and bleached blue, his fair hair was smoothed back. He was one of the best-thought-of Civil Servants of his day. I had much respect for him, and he some for me, but our private relation was not comfortable, and while we were waiting for the telephone call we had nothing spontaneous to say to each other.

‘I really am most exceedingly sorry,’ he was saying.

The words sounded effusive and silly: in fact he was the least effusive and silly of men, and, of those I knew, he was with Lufkin the one with most aptitude for power. Since the war began he had been totally immersed in it, carrying responsibility without a blink. It was a lesson to me, I sometimes thought, about how wrong one can be. For, in the great political divide before the war, it was not only Lufkin’s business associates who were on the opposite side to me. Bevill, the old aristocratic handyman of a politician, had been a Municheer: so had Rose and other up-and-coming Civil Servants. I had not known Rose then: if I had done, I should have distrusted him when it came to a crisis. I should have been dead wrong. Actually, when war came, Bevill and Rose were as whole-hearted as men could be. Compared with my friends on the irregular left, their nerves were stronger.