‘He’s in Wales at present?’
‘Yes, I had promised to go down myself tomorrow. This survey job is in its last stages.’
‘The police will find out all that Dawson has to tell.’
‘Where does Hamilton live?’ I asked, partly to gain time.
‘We should find him at his flat in the Temple. He might even see you tonight. I did him a favour a couple of years ago and I don’t think he’d refuse.’
I picked up the book he had put down when I came in, stared at it, trying to decide. ‘Do you read Greek for pleasure?’
‘I’ve never had time since I left school. And I was pretty bad at it there.’
‘So you’re making up time now.’
‘Something like that.’
I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry but it doesn’t make sense.’
‘To improve my Greek? Why, because I’m dying? We all are. Mine is only an accelerated rate.’
‘I hope not too accelerated.’
A thrush was still chattering in the garden.
‘There are days when I feel much better,’ he said. ‘Have you decided, Mike?’
‘Give me until after supper.’
Footsteps again, and Stella put her head in. ‘Sorry to be an age.
Things are nearly done. If Mike will give me a hand upstairs with them …’
‘No,’ said John. ‘Have it downstairs. I’d rather come down.’
‘But only a few hours ago the doctor said—’
‘I’ll take the risk. I have a phone call to make this evening.’
While she was fixing things below I helped him to get up, to put on an old fisherman’s jersey, a pair of trousers and a coat.
He was a queer sight, taller than I was, athletic of build but his vigour in ruins. He was more like someone in the prime of life, injured and having lost blood in a car crash.
When he was dressed he sat on the bed and got his breath back before having a shot at the stairs.
He said rather carefully: ‘ You know in all this there’s one symbol that puzzles me more than it should, because it’s the one I’m most familiar with. It’s the letter S – which shouldn’t be an unknown quantity to me at all.’
I reached for his slippers under the bed, found one, and then took more time than I needed to find the other.
Hoping my voice sounded right, I said: ‘We’ve agreed she’s not really in it at all.’
‘Oh, she is in one sense, whether we like it or not.’
‘Are these slippers the right way round? – there doesn’t seem any difference.’
‘There isn’t … Are you in love with Stella, Mike?’
I would have given a year then to have been still in search of the slipper. But I wasn’t. He only had to put his foot into it, and there was nothing I could do but straighten up.
I straightened up. I looked at him. He had his finger inside the heel of the slipper, fixing it.
‘Yes, John. I think I am.’ There wasn’t any lie I could tell him at all. Not any.
‘Only think you are?’
‘No … I’m sure.’
‘And does Stella love you?’ As he spoke he lifted his own head, his face a little less colourless from bending, his eyes full of a sort of incredulous inquiry.
‘You ought to know she doesn’t.’
Slowly he buttoned his coat, the strong fingers fumbling but not only from weakness.
He said: ‘ One isn’t responsible for one’s emotions, only for one’s actions … Perhaps I should feel gratified that we have an admiration in common—’
‘I’ve only known it for the last four or five days. Believe me, I’d no idea …’
‘One doesn’t necessarily have, until the last minute.’
‘I thought I felt the same as ever about Lynn. It must strike you as queer, phoney—’
‘Not as much as it might. Because something rather like it happened to me.’
There was a whistle from downstairs. He mastered his own lips and whistled back.
‘When I met Stella my first wife had only been dead two months. I’d been married to her for sixteen years, and marriages aren’t much better than ours had been. When she died I thought everything was finished for ever. If I hadn’t by accident met Stella it might have been. But you would have thought chance would have given me a year or so to grieve decently. When I found myself in love with Stella – and deeply and truly in love: not merely wanting her and finding marriage the only way of getting her – when I found myself in love, the feeling for a long time came up against a sense of outraged decency; it seemed to put in question my own sincerity towards both women and my honesty with myself … Did you feel anything like that?’
‘Very much … Only I hadn’t reasoned it right out. But in my case there’s – an extra difficulty.’
‘You mean that Stella isn’t free,’ he said gently. ‘ But S becomes part of the equation.’
‘I still don’t see it. Except that anything I may feel for her – any wish to keep her from getting her feet muddied – may have a bearing on what I do, she still isn’t anywhere but on the extreme outside edge of this mess; and that I hope is where she’s going to stay.’
He said: ‘Consider the significance of a point which travels round the circumference of an ellipse at a uniform rate …’ He got up and steadied himself against the bed. ‘ I wonder if in this problem there is no centripetal force … Shall we go down?’
John Curtis rang his lawyer friend while Stella was upstairs making his bed. For some reason I couldn’t explain to myself, I didn’t want to be the one to tell Stella about Lynn – I felt I couldn’t get the words out which would break that bit of news. It was like confession to a crime, merely to admit what I had to admit, and that as a result she had been in the same house with Lynn that afternoon. If John told her in his own time, at least there would be no risk of my having to see the look in her eyes when she knew.
Digby Hamilton was in Paris, his wife said, but she was expecting him back in the morning. John covered the phone and asked me if he should ring someone else, but I said, no, I’d rather see the man he knew; so it was agreed I should ring him at ten in the morning from the hotel. John said he would ring also, to be sure that Hamilton got the right impression as to the urgency of the thing.
I stayed at the cottage until ten. Stella walked to the gate with me when I left. She said: ‘It’s been a queer evening Mike. Everyone – walled up, on their best behaviour, safe subjects only. Have we all got secrets from each other?’
‘Yes … Stella, he knows that I love you.’
‘Why? How?’
‘He asked me. When it came to the point I found I couldn’t lie to him about it. In fact I think he knew.’
‘It wouldn’t be hard to guess, would it? You – don’t seem able to hide it.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He asked me if you loved me too.’
She put her fingers on the gate. ‘Well?’
‘I said he ought to know that you didn’t. I think he believed what I said. But the ice is thin.’
‘Do you know why I really came to Hockbridge this afternoon?’
‘No, I—’
‘It was to say I didn’t think I could go on without telling him.’
After a while I said: ‘Don’t you sometimes hurt a man more by telling him the truth than by lying to him?’
‘But when someone has absolute trust in you …’ She moved angrily, defensively. ‘ If I don’t play straight in this it makes a sham of everything I do for him. The faithful loving ministering wife …’
I thought it out, trying to be absolutely honest with myself, trying not to let other considerations crowd us.
‘But it isn’t a sham; because if s true. You are the faithful loving ministering wife. If he’s got to know about us, then I’m willing to face it; but I don’t think we should insist on telling him because of some discomfort in ourselves. We’re not entitled to make h
im sleep worse at nights so that we can sleep better. The thing’s our burden, not his. If we unload it, we’re not nobler, we’re squaring our consciences at his expense.’
She said: ‘ If I cared for him less I should care for myself a lot more.’
We were going to separate then, but I made a slight movement towards her. ‘No, Mike,’ she whispered. ‘Everything will become impossible if you—’
‘I know,’ I said, not able to explain the conflict even to her. ‘ I wasn’t going to … But a lot of things may happen before we meet again.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Ask John tomorrow.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Darling, I can’t tell you … Let me say good night to you now.’
So I kissed the inside of her hand and left her. Even that respectful gesture made my heart thump and wasn’t gone through without feeling that I was blundering over the boundaries of the peculiar thing that had built up between the three of us. But perhaps love and betrayal are always nearer to each other than we realise.
Chapter Twenty-One
WHEN I got back to the Old Bull I went straight to bed but couldn’t sleep, dozing a dozen times and starting awake again as if sleep were an enemy. My thoughts were on the edge of a precipice; to let go would be to fall into the pit. But in the end I couldn’t last out any longer and I suppose about four I gave in. Then, oddly, there was no nightmare about the expected things: it was about the scintillometer and the trials at Llanveryan. I thought the man Holborn from Canada had come to the conference and was shooting the whole of our work and theories to pieces. The thing about it was that he seemed in the dream to use arguments that a misguided but knowledgeable man might have used in real life if he’d wanted to sink the whole idea. I had to answer him. That was obvious. I had to answer him; and in the madly silly way that dreams have I got to my feet and then couldn’t remember any of the figures we’d worked out. I’d begin: ‘But in a case of that sort the rate-meter output shows a characteristic pattern. Where u is the effective gamma-ray absorption of air, you can express it as F (t) = I oe – u over …’ and then I wouldn’t be able to remember what it was over and knew in any case that I’d left something out. So it went on. Each time I’d try to justify what we’d done, and each time I was pushed into a corner. When the phone went to tell me it was eight o’clock I was in a sweat and knew that the whole of our work was going to be thrown over for an enormous gadget that he had made and which I was absolutely certain would let them down as soon as they got out in the desert.
Before getting up I lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, watching the smoke as it drifted across the room. Then I had a bath and breakfasted quietly in the over-timbered drawing-room among the pewter and the willow-pattern. There was a paper on the next table and I saw a heading which said: ‘State of Emergency in Southern Sudan. Eighty Killed.’ I thought, of course Thurston will keep his end up and can probably hold his own with them all on the theoretical side; but it’s on the practical side that he’ll be outpointed. But anyway, how important is our equipment? Can it do something in these peculiar circumstances that no other equipment can? If I believe it can, then it’s important it should be approved, for much larger reasons than petty personal ones, and important it should be used irrespective of what happens to the man who made it, or to his factory. What was it Porter from the Foreign Office had said in his rather florid way – ‘necessary to England’? At half-past nine I phoned Bouverie 6775.
A woman answered and I gave my name and stated my business.
‘Oh, is that Mr Granville,’ she said. ‘This is Mrs Hamilton. Dr Curtis rang about you last evening, didn’t he? I’m very sorry but my husband has been delayed in Paris. He rang me late last night and hopes now to be home on the last plane tonight.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘From what Dr Curtis said, your business is rather urgent, isn’t it? I don’t know if you have anyone else in mind whom you would like to approach instead.’
‘No. No, I haven’t.’
‘My husband’s office would be able to recommend someone … Or if you can wait that long, ring tomorrow any time after nine.’
‘Sunday morning?’
‘Oh, yes, that won’t matter. I mentioned Dr Curtis’s call to Digby, and he said he would certainly see you as soon as he got home.’
I thought it out. ‘ Is your husband likely to be detained again?’
‘He can’t be. There are several things needing attention before Monday.’
‘And I shall be adding to them.’
‘I don’t think he would look on it in that light.’
I considered again. ‘Thank you, Mrs Hamilton, I’ll phone you tomorrow.’
I hung up and rubbed my hand along the sore place at the back of my head. Then I rang Stella. I said: ‘Stella, don’t disturb John. Give him a message, will you? Tell him not to bother ringing Digby Hamilton this morning. Tell him Hamilton isn’t home today but that I’ve arranged to meet him tomorrow. And tell him I’m going to spend today at Llanveryan.’
All the roads were crowded, it being a summer Saturday morning, but I drove as if there was a posse of police cars on my wheels, and got to Llanveryan about ten past two. There I found no trials had taken place in the morning after all because the plane had broken an oil feed and wouldn’t be ready to take off for some hours yet. This at first looked like a stroke of luck.
Holborn was a big sharp-boned fellow of forty-odd with nothing much to say and a cagey expression. When I met him he was talking to Steel, who hailed me as if I were an old golfing friend. But I didn’t believe a word of it this time. I had five minutes alone with Thurston but didn’t get to speak to Frank Dawson at all because, everyone else having arrived, it was decided to have a preliminary meeting right away.
Thurston led off with a highly technical account of the test trials so far. Porter was there, and I wondered what he made of it. Almost certainly nothing at all. Then after we’d discussed them Bennett asked what were Mr Holborn’s impressions so far as they at present went?
Holborn picked up a pencil in his big bony hands, and said that obviously he couldn’t as of here and now say much about the practical operation of the equipment. Running the apparatus in the plane on the ground had given him the impression that it was a little more sensitive to cosmic radiation than his own, and it seemed to him a pity that no cosmic cancellation circuit had been incorporated. He made one or two other minor comments but didn’t mention what most of us had in mind. Steel said:
‘And as to the absence of a radioaltimeter?’
Holborn put the pencil behind his ear. ‘You’re asking me to talk out of turn, Dr Steel. But in principle I should say that’s quite a disadvantage. It increases the likelihood of error — either error in mistaking worthless activity for a valuable ore body or in overlooking the genuine deposit when you come on it.’
Thurston said: The risk of error is always there. Without discussing the merits of this particular instrument, the increase of risk must depend largely on the type of country you’re prospecting.’
‘Oh, yes, surely. Our machine was designed for rugged country. The flatter the terrain, the less your altitude varies as your plane passes over it in level flight. That stands to reason.’
Bennett said: ‘I think we have to take into consideration the circumstances for which this particular instrument is designed. And I think before going any further we should hear from Mr Thurston his reasons for considering this device and then rejecting it.’
Thurston looked at me and said: ‘This is really your territory, Granville.’
I said: ‘ What sort of a plane were you flying, Mr Holborn?’
‘At first we had an Anson V, and then we put it in a Beechcraft Expeditor.’
‘Much bigger planes than the Auster we’re using …’
‘Oh, yes, twice the size. Our apparatus was altogether bigger.’
‘And by how much did the radioaltimeter increase the w
eight?’
‘I suppose by about thirty-five pounds.’
I said: ‘ That was one of our objections. Another is that you need elaborate test gear that has to be carted from place to place. And at the end it didn’t seem to us that one ever has a reliable signal-to-height relationship. It was better, we reasoned, to have no correction than one that couldn’t be trusted.’
‘Also,’ said Thurston, ‘ you need a highly technical personnel on the spot, first for constant checking and second to interpret the results.’
‘Don’t you always need a technical personnel?’ Holborn discovered a second pencil and drew gentle figure eights on the table-top with it. ‘ But don’t get me wrong. I think there’s an area of misunderstanding in our conversation. Are you supposing that we used an altimeter with an automatic electronic compensator?’ He looked round the table inquiringly.
‘That was my impression,’ said Bennett.
‘Well, it’s wrong, sir. It’s used on some of the American machines, but we considered it and discarded it for some of the reasons Mr Granville has put forward. We simply have a radioaltimeter and an aerial camera, both continuously running, and each can then be compared with the record of the counting rate-meter and any significant signals checked against variations in height and terrain.’
No one spoke for a bit. Steel blew his nose noisily.
Flight Lieutenant Rhodes said: ‘But the additional weight will still remain?’
‘Yes, the additional weight I told you still remains.’
Rhodes said to Porter: ‘This unrest in the Sudan, sir. Is it near our piece of country?’
Porter looked over the top of his spectacles. ‘ The territory to be prospected was at one time part of Equatoria where the chief rioting is taking place, and the tribes are still emotionally linked.’
Rhodes said: ‘I can only just get her completely airborne now. If I carry another two and half stone of equipment we’ll have to reduce the fuel carried.’