Corridors of Power

1: A London Dinner Party

I stopped the taxi at the corner of Lord North Street. My wife and I had the habit of being obsessively punctual, and that night we had, as usual, overdone it. There was a quarter of an hour to kill, so we dawdled down to the river. It was a pleasant evening, I said, conciliating the moment. The air was warm against the cheek, the trees in the Embankment garden stood bulky, leaves filling out although it was only March, against the incandescent skyline. The light above Big Ben shone beneath the cloud-cap: the House was sitting. We walked a few yards further, in the direction of Whitehall. Across Parliament Square, in the Treasury building, another light was shining. A room lit up on the third storey, someone working late.

There was nothing special about the evening, either for my wife or me. We had dined with the Quaifes several times before. Roger Quaife was a youngish Conservative member who was beginning to be talked about. I had met him through one of my official jobs, and thought him an interesting man.

It was the kind of friendly acquaintanceship, no more than that, which we all picked up, officials, politicians of both parties: not meeting often, but enough to make us feel at home in what they sometimes called ‘this part of London’.

Prompt to the last stroke of eight, we were back in Lord North Street. A maid took us upstairs to the drawing-room, bright with chandeliers, drink-trays, the dinner-shirts of the two men already standing there, the necklace of Caro Quaife glittering as she took our hands.

‘I expect you know everyone, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Of course you do!’

She was tall and pretty, in her middle thirties, just beginning, though she was still elegant, to thicken a little through the waist. Her voice was warm, full, and often disconcertingly loud. She gave out a sense of natural and exuberant happiness — as though it were within the power of everyone around her to be as happy as she was.

Other people had followed us up. They all knew one another, establishing Caro’s principle of mutual intimacy: Christian names flew about, so that, when the principle broke down, I didn’t know whom I was being introduced to. There was, in fact, only one man whom Margaret and I had met as often as the Quaifes. That was Monty Cave, who, according to the political talent spotters, was another coming star. He had a plump face, lemur-like eyes, a quiet, subtle, modulated voice.

As for the others, there appeared to be three couples, all the men Tory back-benchers, none of them older than forty, with wives to match, young, strapping matrons such as one saw in the Kensington streets at four in the afternoon, collecting their children from fashionable pre-preparatory schools. There was also an elderly woman called Mrs Henneker.

As we sat down and drank, Roger Quaife not yet present, they were all talking politics, but politics which any outsider — even one as near to it as I was — needed a glossary to follow. This was House of Commons gossip, as esoteric as theatre-gossip, as continuously enthralling to them as theatre-gossip was to actors. Who was in favour, who wasn’t. Who was going to finish up the debate next week. How Archie pulled a fast one with that question.

There was going to be an election soon, we all knew: this was the spring of 1955. They were swapping promises to speak for one another: one was bragging how two senior Ministers were ‘in the bag’ to speak for him. Roger was safe, someone said, he’d give a hand. What had the PM got in mind for Roger ‘when we come back?’ Monty Cave asked Caro. She shook her head, but she was pleased, and I thought she was touching wood.

The other men spoke of Roger as though he were the only one of them whose success was coming soon, or as though he were different from themselves. The gossip went on. The euphoria grew. Then the maid came in and announced, ‘Lady Caroline, Dr Rubin is here.’

It was not that Roger Quaife had a title — but his wife was the daughter of an earl, one of a rich aristocratic family who in the nineteenth century had been Whig grandees.

I looked round, as Caro stood up with cries of welcome. I was taken aback. Yes, it was the David Rubin I knew very well, the American physicist. He came in, very quiet and guarded, pearl cuff-links in his sleeves, his dinner jacket newer and more exquisite than any man’s there. He was, so my scientific friends said, one of the most distinguished of scientists: but unlike the rest of them, he was also something of a dandy.

Caro Quaife took him to my wife’s side. By this time the drawing-room was filling up, and Caro threw a cushion on the floor and sat by me. ‘You must be used to women sitting at your feet, mustn’t you?’ she said. She couldn’t understand, she went on, why Roger, the old devil, was so late. She spoke of him with the cheerfulness, the lack of anxiety, of a happy marriage. When she spoke to me directly, it was in a manner at once high-spirited, deferential and aggressive, eager to be impressed, used to speaking out and not thinking twice.

‘Hungry,’ said Mrs Henneker, in a trumpeting tone.

She had a fleshy, bulbous nose and eyes which stared out, a fine bright blue, with a disconcerting fixity.

‘Sorry. Have another drink,’ said Caro, without any sign of caring. In fact, it was not yet half-past eight, but it seemed late for a dinner-party in the ’fifties.

The conversation had switched. One of the members’ wives had started talking about a friend of theirs who was having ‘woman trouble’. Just for once, they had got away from the House of Commons. This friend was a banker: he had ‘got it badly’: his wife was worried.

‘What’s the woman like?’ Caro gave a loud, crowing chuckle.

I observed David Rubin’s sad face show signs of animation. He preferred this topic to the previous one.

‘Oh, madly glamorous.’

‘In that case,’ cried Caro, ‘I don’t believe Elsa’ (the wife) ‘has much to worry about. It isn’t the glamorous ones you ought to watch out for when the old man’s showing signs of absent-mindedness. It’s that little quiet grey mouse in the corner, who nobody’s ever noticed. If she’s got her claws into him, then the best thing is to call it a day and wonder how you’re going to explain it to the children.’

The other wives were laughing with her. She was not a beauty, I thought, she was too hearty for that. Just then her eyes lit up, and she scrambled off her cushion.

‘Here he is!’ she said. ‘And about time too!’

As Roger walked through the room from an inner door, he looked clumsy, a little comic, quite unselfconscious. He was a big man, heavy and strong; but neither his face nor his body seemed all of a piece. His head was smallish, for a man of his bulk, and well-shaped, his eyes grey and bright, pulled down a little at the outer corners. His nose was flattened at the bridge, his lower lip receded. It was not a handsome face, but it was pleasant. His colleagues in the room, except for Cave, were neat, organized, officer-like; by their side he was shambling and uncoordinated. When I first met him, he had brought back my impression of Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace. Yet his manner, quite unlike Pierre’s, was briskly competent.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said to his wife, ‘someone caught me on the phone—’

It was, it appeared, one of his constituents. He said it simply, as if it were a matter of tactics that she would understand.

He had considerable physical presence, though it was the opposite of an actor’s presence. He shook hands with Rubin and me. All he did and said was easy and direct.

For a moment he and his fellow members had edged away, and on the periphery of the group Mrs Henneker laid a substantial, ringed hand on my arm.

‘Office,’ she said.

I found her conversation hard to cope with.

‘What?’ I replied.

‘That young man is going to get office.’ By which she meant that he would be made a Minister if his party were returned again.

‘Will he?’ I said.

She asked, ‘Are you an idiot?’

She asked it with a dense, confident twinkle, as though I should love her for being rude.

‘I shouldn’t have thought so,’ I said.

‘I meant it in the Greek sense, Sir Leonard,’ she said, and then from a heavy aside, discovered from Caro that my name was Lewis Eliot. ‘Yes, I meant it in the Greek sense,’ she said, quite unabashed. ‘Not interested in politics, y’know.’

She was so proud of her scrap of learning. I wondered how often she had trotted it out, knowing as much Greek as she did Eskimo. There was something childlike about her self-satisfaction. She was sure that she was a privileged soul. She was sure that no one could think otherwise.

‘I am rather interested in politics,’ I said.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Mrs Henneker triumphantly.

I tried to hush her, for I wanted to listen to Roger. His tone was different from that of his friends. I could not place his accent. But it was nothing like that of Eton and the Brigade; any of the others would have known, and Mrs Henneker might have said, that he did not come ‘out of the top drawer’. In fact, his father had been a design engineer, solid provincial middle-class. He wasn’t young, despite Mrs Henneker’s adjective. He was only five years younger than I was, which made him forty-five.

He had interested me from the beginning, though I couldn’t have said why. Listening to him that evening, as we sat round the dinner-table downstairs, I was disappointed. Yes, his mind was crisper than the others’, he was a good deal heavier-weight. But he too, just like the others, was talking about the chessboard of Parliament, the moves of their private game, as though nothing else existed under Heaven. I thought that, with David Rubin present, they were all being impolite. I became impatient. These people’s politics were not my politics. They didn’t know the world they were living in, much less the world that was going to come. I looked at Margaret, who had the eager, specially attentive look she always wore when she was bored, and wished that the evening were over.

All of a sudden, I wasn’t impatient any longer. The women had just gone back upstairs, and we were standing in the candlelight. ‘Come and sit by me,’ Roger said to Rubin, and snapped his fingers, not obtrusively, as if giving himself a signal of some kind. He put me on his other side. As he was pouring brandy into Rubin’s glass, he said, ‘I’m afraid we’ve been boring you stiff. You see, this election is rather on our minds.’ He looked up and broke into a wide, sarcastic grin. ‘But then, if you’ve been attending carefully, you may have gathered that.’

For the first time that evening, David Rubin began to take a part. ‘Mr Quaife, I’d like to ask you something,’ he said. ‘What, according to present thinking, is the result of this election going to be? Or is that asking you to stick your neck out?’

‘It’s fair enough,’ said Roger. ‘I’ll give you the limits. On one side, the worst that can happen to us’ (he meant the Conservative Party) ‘is a stalemate. It can’t be worse than that. At the other end, if we’re lucky we might have a minor landslide.’

Rubin nodded. One of the members said: ‘I’m betting on a hundred majority.’

‘I’d judge a good deal less,’ said Roger.

He was speaking like a real professional, I thought. But it was just afterwards that my attention sharpened. My neighbour’s cigar smoke was spiralling round the candle-flame: it might have been any well-to-do London party, the men alone for another quarter of an hour. Then Roger, relaxed and solid in his chair, turned half-right to David Rubin and said: ‘Now I’d like to ask you something, if I may.’

‘Surely,’ said Rubin.

‘If there are things you mustn’t say, then I hope you won’t feel embarrassed. First, I’d like to ask you — how much does what we’re doing about nuclear weapons make sense?’

Rubin’s face was more sombre, worn, and sensitive than those round him. He was no older than some of the other men, but among the fresh ruddy English skins his stood out dry, pallid, already lined, with great sepia pouches, like bruises, under his eyes. He seemed a finer-nerved, more delicate species of animal.

‘I don’t know that I’m following you,’ he said. ‘Do you mean what the UK is doing about your weapons? Or what we’re doing? Or do you mean the whole world?’

‘They all enter, don’t they?’ Everyone was looking at Roger as he asked the matter-of-fact question. ‘Anyway, would you start on the local position, that is, ours? We have a certain uncomfortable interest in it, you know. Would you tell us whether what this country’s doing makes sense?’

Rubin did not, in any case, find it easy to be as direct as Roger. He was an adviser to his own government; further, and more inhibiting, he was hyper-cautious about giving pain. So he did a lot of fencing. Was Roger talking about the bombs themselves, or the methods of delivery? He invoked me to help him out — as an official, I had heard these topics argued between the Americans and ourselves for years.

There were other considerations besides the scientific ones, beside military ones, said Rubin, back on his last line of defence, why the UK might want their own weapon.

‘It’s our job to worry about that, isn’t it?’ said Roger gently. ‘Tell us — look, you know this as well as anyone in the world — how significant, just in the crudest practical terms, are our weapons going to be?’

‘Well, if you must have it,’ Rubin answered, shrugging his shoulders, ‘anything you can do doesn’t count two per cent.’

‘I say, Professor Rubin,’ came a bass voice, ‘you’re kicking us downstairs pretty fast, aren’t you?’

Rubin said: ‘I wish I could tell you something different.’ His interlocutor was Mrs Henneker’s son-in-law, a man called Tom Wyndham. He confronted Rubin with a cheerful stare, full of the assurance of someone brought up in a ruling class, an assurance which did not exactly ignore changes in power, but shrugged them off. Rubin gave an apologetic smile. He was the most polite of men. He had been born in Brooklyn, his parents still spoke English as a foreign language. But he had his own kind of assurance: it did not surprise him to be told that he was the favourite for that year’s Nobel physics prize.

‘No,’ said Monty Cave, ‘Roger asked you to tell us.’ He gave a sharp grin. ‘He usually gets what he asks for.’

Roger smiled, as though they were friends as well as allies. For five years, since they entered the House, they had been leading their group of back-benchers.

‘Now David, if I may call you so,’ he said, ‘do you mind if I go one step further. About the United States — does your policy about the weapons make sense?’

‘I hope so.’

‘Doesn’t it depend upon the assumption that you’re going to have technical superiority for ever? Don’t some of our scientists think you’re under-estimating the Russians? Is that so, Lewis?’

I was thinking to myself, Roger had been well-briefed; for Francis Getliffe, Walter Luke and their colleagues had been pressing just that view.

‘We don’t know,’ said Rubin.

He was not at his most detached. And yet, I saw that he had respect for Roger as an intelligent man. He was a good judge of intelligence and, courteous though he was, respect did not come easily to him.

‘Well then,’ said Roger, ‘let us assume, as I should have thought for safety’s sake we ought to, that the West — which means you — and the Soviet Union may get into a nuclear arms race on something like equal terms. Then how long have we got to do anything reasonable?’

‘Not as long as I should like.’

‘How many years?’

‘Perhaps ten.’

There was a pause. The others, who had been listening soberly, did not want to argue. Roger said: ‘Does that suggest an idea to anyone?’

He said it with a sarcastic twist, dismissively. He was pushing his chair back, signalling that we were going back to the drawing-room.

Just as he was holding open the door, bells began to ring in the passage, up the stairs, in the room we were leaving. It was something like being on board ship, with the bells ringing for lifeboat-drill. Immediately Roger, who a minute before had seemed dignified — more than that, formidable — took on a sheepish smile. ‘Division bell,’ he explained to David Rubin, still wearing the smile, ashamed, curiously boyish, and at the same time gratified, which comes on men when they are taking part in a collective private ritual. ‘We shan’t be long!’ The members ran out of the house, like schoolboys frightened of being late, while David and I went upstairs alone.

‘They’ve gone off, have they? Time something broke you up.’ Caro greeted us robustly. ‘Whose reputations have you been doing in? Men ought to have—’ With lively hand, she exemplified cats’ whiskers sprouting.

I shook my head, and said that we had been talking about David’s expert subject, and the future. Margaret looked at me. But the division bell had quite smashed the mood. I no longer felt any eschatological sense, or even any responsibility. Instead, in the bright drawing-room, all seemed serene, anti-climactic, and slightly comic.

They had just started on what was becoming more and more a sacramental subject in such a drawing-room — schools for the children, or more exactly, how to get them in. One young wife, proud both of maternity and her educational acumen, with a son born three months before, announced that within an hour of his birth he had been ‘put down’ not only for Eton, but for his first boarding school — ‘And we’d have put him down for Balliol too,’ she went on, ‘only they won’t let you do that, nowadays.’

What had Caro arranged for her children? What was Margaret doing for ours? Across the room I watched David Rubin listening, with his beautiful, careful, considerate courtesy, to plans for buying places thirteen years ahead for children he had never seen, in a system which in his heart he thought fantastic. He just let it slip once that, though he was only forty-one, his eldest son was a sophomore at Harvard. Otherwise he listened, grave and attentive, and I felt a desire to give some instruction to Mrs Henneker, who was sitting beside me. I told her that American manners were the best in the world.

‘What’s that?’ she cried.

‘Russian manners are very good,’ I added, as an afterthought. ‘Ours are some of the worst.’

It was pleasing to have startled Mrs Henneker. It was true, I said, getting immersed in comparative sociology, that English lower-class manners were rather good, appreciably better than American; but once you approached and passed the mid-point of society, theirs got steadily better and ours got steadily worse. American professional or upper-class manners were out of comparison better. I proceeded to speculate as to why this should be.

I had a feeling that Mrs Henneker did not find this speculation profitable.

The men came pelting up the stairs, Roger in the rear. The division was over, the majority up to par. From then on, the party did not get going again and it was not later than half-past eleven when Margaret and I took David Rubin away. The taxi throbbed along the Embankment towards Chelsea, where he was staying. He and Margaret were talking about the evening, but as I gazed out of the window I did not join in much. I let myself drift into a kind of daydream.

When we had said good night to David, Margaret took my hand.

‘What are you thinking about?’ she said.

I couldn’t tell her. I was just staring out at the comfortable, familiar town. The Chelsea back-streets, which I used to know, the lights of Fulham Road: Kensington squares: the stretch of Queen’s Gate up towards the Park. All higgledy-piggledy, leafy, not pretty, nearer the ground than the other capital cities. I was not exactly remembering, although much had happened to me there; but I had a sense, not sharp, of joys hidden about the place, of love, of marriage, of miseries and elations, of coming out into the night air. The talk after dinner had not come back to my mind; it was one of many; we were used to them. And yet, I felt vulnerable, as if soft with tenderness towards the town itself, although in cold blood I should not have said that I liked it overmuch.

The dark road across the Park, the sheen of the Serpentine, the livid lamps of Bayswater Road — I was full of the kind of emotion which one cannot hide from oneself, and yet which is so unrespectable that one wants to deny it, as when a foreigner says a few words in praise of one’s country, and, after a lifetime’s training in detachment, one finds oneself on the edge of tears.

2: The Old Hero

The election went according to plan, or rather, according to the plan of Roger’s friends. Their party came back with a majority of sixty; as prophesied by Mrs Henneker at that dinner-party in Lord North Street, Roger duly got office.

As soon as the appointment was announced, my civil service acquaintances started speculating. The rumour went around Whitehall that he was an ambitious man. It was not a malicious rumour; it was curiously impersonal, curiously certain, carried by people who had never met him, building up his official personality for good and all.

One summer afternoon, not long after the election, as I sat in his office with my chief, Sir Hector Rose — St James’s Park lay green beneath his windows and the sunlight edged across the desk — I was being politely cross-questioned. I had worked under him for sixteen years. We trusted each other as colleagues, and yet we were not much easier in each other’s company than we had been at the beginning. No, I did not know Roger Quaife well, I said — which, at the time, was true. I had a feeling, without much to support it, that he wasn’t a simple character.

Rose was not impressed by psychological guesses. He was occupied with something more businesslike. He assumed that Quaife was, as they said, ambitious. Rose did not find that matter for condemnation. But this job which Quaife had taken had been the end of other ambitious men. That was a genuine point. If he had had any choice, there must be something wrong with his judgement.

‘Which, of course, my dear Lewis,’ said Hector Rose, ‘suggests rather strongly that he wasn’t given any choice. In which case, some of our masters may conceivably not wish him all the good in the world. Fortunately, it’s not for us to inquire into these remarkable and no doubt well-intentioned calculations. He’s said to be a good chap. Which will be at least a temporary relief, so far as this department is concerned.’

The appointment had more than a conversational interest for Hector Rose. Since the war, what in our jargon we called ‘the coordination of defence’ had been split up. The greater part had gone to a new Ministry. It was this Ministry of which Roger had just been appointed Parliamentary Secretary. In the process, Rose had lost a slice of his responsibilities and powers. Very unfairly, I could not help admitting. When I first met him, he had been the youngest Permanent Secretary in the service. Now he was only three years from retirement, having been in the same rank, and at the same job, longer than any of his colleagues. They had given him the Grand Cross of the Bath, the sort of decoration he and his friends prized, but which no one else noticed. He still worked with the precision of a computer. Sometimes his politeness, so elaborate, which used to be as tireless as his competence, showed thin at the edges now. He continued to look strong, heavy-shouldered, thick; but his youthfulness, which had lasted into middle age, had vanished quite. His hair had whitened, there was a heavy line across his forehead. How deeply was he disappointed? To me, at least, he did not give so much as a hint. In his relations with the new super-department, of which he might reasonably have expected to be the permanent head, he did his duty, and a good deal more than his duty.

The new department was the civil servants’ despair. It was true what Rose had said: it had become a good place to send an enemy to. Not that the civil servants had any quarrel with the Government about general policy. Rose and his colleagues were conservatives almost to a man, and they had been as pleased about the election results as the Quaifes’ circle themselves.

The point was, the new department, like anything connected with modern war, spent money, but did not, in administrative terms, have anything to show for it. Rose and the other administrators had a feeling, the most disagreeable they could imagine, that things were slipping out of their control. No Minister had been any good. The present incumbent, Roger’s boss, Lord Gilbey, was the worst of any. Civil servants were used to Ministers who had to be persuaded or bullied into decisions. But they were at a loss when they came against one who, with extreme cordiality, would neither make a decision nor leave it to them.

I had seen something of this imbroglio at first hand. At some points, the business of our department interweaved with theirs, and often Rose needed an emissary. It had to be an emissary of some authority, and he cast me for the job. There were bits of the work that, because I had been doing them so long, I knew better than anyone else. I also had a faint moral advantage. I had made it clear that I wanted to get out of Whitehall and, perversely, this increased my usefulness. Or if not my usefulness, at least the attention they paid to me, rather like the superstitious veneration with which healthy people listen to someone known to be not long for this earth.

Thus I was frequently in and out of their offices, which were only a few hundred yards away from ours, at the corner of the Park. Like everyone else, I had become attached to Lord Gilbey. I was no better than anyone else, and in some ways worse, at getting him to make up his mind. A few days after that talk with Rose, I was making another attempt, in conjunction with Gilbey’s own Permanent Secretary, to do just that.

The Permanent Secretary was an old colleague of mine, Douglas Osbaldiston, who was being talked of now just as Rose had been, nearly twenty years before. He was the newest bright star, the man who, as they used to say about Rose, would be Head of the Civil Service before he finished.

On the surface, he was very different from Rose, simple, unpretentious, straightforward where Rose was oblique, humbly born while Rose was the son of an Archdeacon, and yet as cultivated as an old-fashioned civil servant, and exuding the old-fashioned amateur air. He was no more an amateur than Rose, and at least as clever. Once, when he had been working under Rose, I had thought he would not be tough enough for the top jobs. I could not have been more wrong.

He had studied Rose’s career with forethought, and was determined not to duplicate it. He wanted to get out of his present job as soon as he had cleaned it up a little — ‘This is a hiding to nothing,’ he said simply — and back to the Treasury.

He was long, thin, fresh-faced, still with the relics of an undergraduate air. He was quick-witted, unpompous, the easiest man to do business with. He was also affectionate, and he and I became friends as I could never have been with Hector Rose.

That morning, as we waited to go in to Gilbey, it did not take us five minutes to settle our tactics. First — we were both over-simplifying — there was a putative missile on which millions had been spent, and which had to be stopped: we had to persuade ‘the Old Hero’, as the civil servants called Lord Gilbey, to sign a Cabinet paper. Second, a new kind of delivery system for warheads was just being talked about. Osbaldiston, who trusted my nose for danger, agreed that, if we didn’t ‘look at it’ now, we should be under pressure. ‘If we can get the OH,’ said Osbaldiston, ‘to let the new boy take it over—’ By the new boy he meant Roger Quaife.

I asked Osbaldiston what he thought of him. Osbaldiston said that he was shaping better than anyone they had had there; which, because with Gilbey in the Lords Quaife would have to handle the department’s business in the Commons, was a consolation.

We set off down the corridor, empty except for a messenger, high and dark with the waste of space, the lavish clamminess, of nineteenth-century Whitehall. Two doors along, a rubric stood out from the tenebrous gloom: Parliamentary Secretary, Mr Roger Quaife. Osbaldiston jabbed his finger at it, harking back to our conversation about Roger, and remarked: ‘One piece of luck, he doesn’t get here too early in the morning.’

At the end of the corridor, the windows of Lord Gilbey’s room, like those of Hector Rose’s at the other corner of the building, gave on to the Park. In the murky light, the white-panelled walls gleamed spectrally, and Lord Gilbey stood between his desk and the window, surveying with equable disapproval the slashing rain, the lowering clouds, the seething summer trees.

‘It’s a brute,’ he said, as though at last reaching a considered judgement on the weather. ‘It’s a brute.’

His face was pleasant, small-featured, open with that particular openness which doesn’t tell one much. His figure was beautifully trim for a man in his sixties. He was affable and had no side. And yet our proposal, which had seemed modest enough in Osbaldiston’s room, began to take on an aura of mysterious difficulty.

‘Minister,’ said Osbaldiston, ‘I really think it’s time we got a Cabinet decision on the A—.’ He gave the codename of the missile.

‘On the A—?’ Gilbey repeated thoughtfully, in the manner of one hearing a new, original and probably unsound idea.

‘We’ve got as much agreement as we shall ever get.’

‘We oughtn’t to rush things, you know,’ Gilbey said reprovingly. ‘Do you think we ought to rush things?’

‘We got to a conclusion on paper eighteen months ago.’

‘Paper, my dear chap? I’m a great believer in taking people with you, on this kind of thing.’

‘Minister,’ said Osbaldiston, ‘that is precisely what we’ve been trying to do.’

‘Do you think we ought to weary in well-doing? Do you really, Sir Douglas?’

The ‘Sir Douglas’ was a sign of gentle reproof. Normally Gilbey would have called Osbaldiston by his Christian name alone. I caught a side-glance from my colleague, as from one who was being beaten over the head with very soft pillows. Once more he was discovering that the Old Hero was not only affable, but obstinate and vain. Osbaldiston knew only too well that immediately he was away from the office, Gilbey was likely to be ‘got at’ by business tycoons like Lord Lufkin, to whom the stopping of this project meant the loss of millions, or old service friends, who believed that any weapon was better than none.

That was true; the latter being an argument to Osbaldiston for not having a soldier in this job at all. It was not even that Gilbey had been a soldier so eminent that his juniors could not nobble him now. When they called him the Old Hero, it was not a jibe; he had been an abnormally brave fighting officer in both wars, and had commanded a division in the second. That had been his ceiling. If he had been even reasonably capable, the military in the clubs used to say, he couldn’t have helped but go right to the top, since it was hard for a man to be better connected. His peerage had come by birth, not as a military reward. So far as there were aristocrats in England, he was one.

‘Minister,’ said Osbaldiston, ‘if you think it’s wise to prove just how much agreement there is, we could easily run together an inter-departmental meeting, at your level. Or at mine. Or Ministers and officials together.’

‘Do you know,’ Gilbey said, ‘I’m not a great believer in meetings or committees. They don’t seem to result in action, don’t you know.’

For once, Douglas Osbaldiston was at a loss. Then he said, ‘There’s another method. You and the three service ministers could go and talk it over with the Prime Minister. We could brief you very quickly.’

(And I had no doubt Osbaldiston was thinking, we could also see to it that the Prime Minister was briefed.)

‘No, I think that would be worrying him too much. These people have a lot on their plate, you know. No, I don’t think I should like to do that.’

Gilbey gave a sweet, kind, obscurely triumphant smile and said: ‘I tell you what I will do.’

‘Minister?’

‘I’ll have another good look at the papers! You let me have them over the week-end, there’s a good chap. And you might let me have a précis on one sheet of paper.’

Then he broke off, with an air of innocent satisfaction.

‘What do you think of this suit I’m wearing?’

It was an extraordinary question. No one, whatever accusation he was bringing against me or Douglas Osbaldiston, could possibly think of us as dressy men: which, in a gentlemanly way, Lord Gilbey was. He sounded innocent, but though he might not be capable of making decisions, he was entirely capable of pushing them out of sight.

It looked very nice, I said, with a total lack of interest.

‘You’ll never guess where I had it made.’

No, we found that beyond us.

‘As a matter of fact, I had it made at—.’ Gilbey gave the name, not of a fashionable tailor, but of a large London departmental store. ‘It doesn’t sound very smart, but it’s all right.’

Inconsiderately, we had to bring him back to the point. This was my turn. I didn’t know whether any news had reached him, but there was a kite being flown for a new delivery system: from what we knew of Brodzinski, he wasn’t going to stop flying that kite just through lack of encouragement. Wouldn’t it be prudent — Rose and Osbaldiston both agreed with this — to deal with the problem before it got talked about, to bring in Getliffe, Luke and the Barford scientists straight away? It probably wasn’t pressing enough for the Minister himself, I said, but it might save trouble if Quaife, say, could start some informal talks.

‘I think that’s a very good idea,’ said Osbaldiston, who did not miss a cue.

‘Quaife? You mean my new Parliamentary Secretary?’ Lord Gilbey replied, with a bright, open look. ‘He’s going to be a great help to me. This job is altogether too much for one man, you’ve both seen enough of it to know that. Of course, my colleagues are politicians, so is Quaife, and I’m a simple soldier, and perhaps some of them would find the job easier than I do, don’t you know. Quaife is going to be a great help. There’s just one fly in the ointment about your suggestion, Lewis. Is it fair on the chap to ask him to take this on before he’s got his nose inside the office? I’m a great believer in working a man in gently—’

Amiably, Lord Gilbey went in for some passive resistance. He might find his job too much for one man, but nevertheless he liked it. He might be a simple soldier, but he had considerable talent for survival; quite as well as the next man, he could imagine the prospect of bright young men knocking at the door. On this point, however, we had a card to play. My department would be quite willing to take over these first discussions, I said. If Luke and the other scientists took the view we expected, then the business need never come into Gilbey’s office at all.

Gilbey didn’t like the idea of delegating a piece of work within his own department: but he liked the idea of the work totally escaping his department even less. Finally, in a sweet, good-natured fashion, he gave us a hedging consent. He said: ‘Yes, perhaps that’s what we should do.’ Without a blink, Osbaldiston took a note and said that he would minute it to the Parliamentary Secretary.

‘We mustn’t overburden the poor chap,’ said Gilbey, still hankering after a retreat. But he knew when he was beaten, and in a crisp tone, suggesting an efficiency expert addressing the woolly-minded, he said:

‘Well, that’s as far as we can go. I call it a good morning’s work.’

As we knew, he had a Cabinet at twelve. One might have thought that he would have shied from the approach of Cabinet meetings, feeling them above his weight. Not a bit of it. He loved them. As he was preparing himself for the occasion, he took on a special look, a special manner. As a rule, leaving Osbaldiston or me, or the secretaries in the room outside, he would say: ‘So long,’ sounding, as he often did, as though transported back before the first war when he was a smart young officer in the Household Cavalry. But, leaving to go to a Cabinet meeting, he would not have thought of saying, ‘So long.’ He inclined his head very gravely, without a word. He walked to the door, slow and erect, face solemn and pious, exactly as though he were going up the aisle in church.

3: A Speech in the Commons

After we had by-passed Lord Gilbey, I began to see Roger at work. He was ready to listen to any of us. He did not show much of his own mind. There were things about him, one above all, which I needed to know: not just for curiosity’s sake, though that was sharpening, but for the sake of my own actions.

In the middle of July, Roger was making his first ministerial speech. I did not need reminding, having drafted enough of them, how much speeches mattered — to parliamentary bosses, to any kind of tycoon. Draft after draft: the search for the supreme, the impossible, the more than Flaubertian perfection: the scrutiny for any phrase that said more than it ought to say, so that each speech at the end was bound, by the law of official inexplicitness, to be more porridge-like than when it started out in its first draft. I had always hated writing drafts for other people, and nowadays got out of it. To Hector Rose, to Douglas Osbaldiston, it was part of the job, which they took with their usual patience, their usual lack of egotism: when a minister crossed out their sharp, clear English and went in for literary composition of his own, they gave a wintry smile and let it stand.

Osbaldiston told me that, on the present occasion, Roger was doing most of his own writing. Further, it was Roger who was taking over the final draft of Gilbey’s speech. They were each to make statements for the department on the same day, Gilbey in the Lords, Roger in the Commons.

When the day came, I went to listen to Roger. I met Osbaldiston in Palace Yard: half-an-hour before he had gone through the experience, in the line of duty, of hearing Lord Gilbey. ‘If anyone can make head or tail of that,’ he reported, with professional irritation, ‘he damned well ought to be an authority on l’explication du texte.’

As we were on our way to our customary listening-point, his phlegm, usually impregnable as that of any of his colleagues, was wearing thin.

In the central lobby, I smelled scent near by me, and, glancing round, saw Caro Quaife. Her eyes were full and bright: she did not pretend to hide her nervousness. ‘I’d better sit somewhere out of the way,’ she said. ‘Otherwise I’m going to fidget you.’

I said that he would be all right. Instead of going to the civil servants’ Box, we walked up with her to the Strangers’ Gallery. ‘This sort of speech is hell,’ said Caro. ‘I mean, when there’s nothing to say.’

I could not argue with that. She knew the position as well as I did, and the House of Commons much better.

We sat in the front row of the gallery, deserted except for a party of Indians. We looked down on the Chamber, half full of members, on the sea-green, comfortable benches, the green carpet hazy in the submarine light filtering through from the summer evening.

‘I’ve got the needle,’ said Caro. ‘This is a bit too raw.’

Within two or three minutes of his getting to his feet, she must have been reassured. Down there, speaking from the dispatch box, he looked a great hulk of a man. From a distance, his heavy shoulders seemed even more massive than they were. I had not heard him speak before, and I realized that he was effective quite out of the ordinary. Effective very much in a style of our time, I was thinking. He didn’t go in for anything that used to be called oratory. Nearly everyone in that chamber, and men like Osbaldiston and me, felt more comfortable with him because he didn’t. His manner was conversational; he had a typescript in front of him, but he did not glance at it. No metaphors, except in sarcasm. As Caro had realized, he had ‘nothing to say’ — but he didn’t make the mistake of pretending he had. There was no policy settled: the decisions were complex: there weren’t any easy solutions. He sounded competent, master of the details of the job. He also sounded quite uncomplacent, and listening to him, I believed it was that tone which went straight home.

So far as I could judge Commons receptions, his was a warm one, not only on his own side. Certainly Caro was in no doubt. Gazing down with an expression that was loving, gratified and knowledgeable, she said,

‘Now I call that a bit of all right.’

On my other side, Osbaldiston, still preoccupied with professional values, was reflecting: ‘I must say, it does make us look a bit more respectable, anyway.’

In the lobby, where we went to meet him, he was being congratulated. Members whom he scarcely knew, hounds of success, were trying to catch his eye. Shining with sweat and well-being, he nevertheless wanted our opinion too. ‘Satisfactory?’ he asked Osbaldiston and me, with a vigilant look. It was not until he had had enough praise that he switched to another topic. Now he was ready to think about some of the scientists’ troubles, he said. He and Caro were going out to dinner. Could we come round to Lord North Street after eleven, and start straight away?

Later that night, I sat in the Quaifes’ drawing-room, waiting for them. I was sitting there alone, since Osbaldiston, who lived out in the suburbs, had left me to it. They were not late home: they ran up the stairs brimming with excitement: but it was a long time before Roger and I got down to business.

They were excited because they had been dining with the editor of The Times, and had been given a glimpse of next day’s (Friday morning’s) paper.

I was amused. This was real privilege, I said. In London at that time, one could not buy the earliest editions until the small hours. The other notices they would not see before the morning. Still, Roger was prepared to concede, The Times was the most important. They couldn’t have done him better. His had been the statement they examined, while Lord Gilbey, his boss, received a few indifferent lines.

He saw me watching him. I asked, what did Gilbey’s speech look like on paper? Roger shrugged his shoulders, said he had been too close to it. He didn’t know how it would read in the House of Lords Hansard.

Caro, radiant, gave us more drink, and took a stiff one herself. She was as excited as he was, but much more confident. She could trust her judgement about success much more easily than he could. He was still thinking of next morning’s papers. That evening in the House, he had sounded grown-up, unusually speculative, responsible. It was arguable, unless one believed that we were wholly at the mercy of blind and faceless fortune, that his decisions might turn out to be important. More than most men, that was the feeling he gave one. Yet, in the bright drawing room in Lord North Street, all he was thinking of, without any deviation or let-up, was what the Telegraph, the Guardian, the popular press, would say next day. Caro sat stroking the side of her glass, proud, loving, full of certainties. She could have written the headlines herself.

Of the people I knew, I often thought, it was only the politicians and the artists who lived nakedly in public. The great administrative bosses, the Roses and Osbaldistons, scarcely ever heard a public word about themselves, certainly not a hostile one. As for the industrial tycoons like Paul Lufkin, as soon as they got near the top, they would have felt the virtues outraged if they had heard so much as a whisper of personal criticism. Those lives were out of comparison more shielded. It was the politicians and artists who had to get used to being talked about in public, rather as though they were patients in a hospital visited daily by troops of medical students, who didn’t hate them, but who saw no reason to lower their voices. Of course, the politicians and artists had asked for it, or rather, some part of their temperament had. Yet, though they might have asked for it, they didn’t like it. Their skins did not thicken, even if they became world figures. I was sure that Roger’s never would.

I wished that I were as sure of what, in his job, he intended to do. That night, at last, we were talking business. He was as familiar with ‘the papers’, (which meant a drawer-full of files, memoranda marked ‘Top Secret’, and even one or two books) as I was. He had mastered both the proposals of the Brodzinski group, and what Getliffe and the others argued in reply. All Roger said was intelligent and precise — but he would not give me an opinion of his own.

I did not get any further that night. We went on in the same fashion, sniffing at each other like dogs, in the weeks before the summer recess. He must have guessed where I stood, I thought — even though guardedness was catching, and soon one didn’t put out one’s feelers as far.

Intermittently, during the summer, on holiday with the family, I wondered about him. It was possible that he was testing me. It was possible that he had not yet made up his mind.

As a rule I would have waited. This time I had to know. It was often naïf to be too suspicious, much more naïf than to believe too easily. It often led to crasser action. But there were occasions — and this was one — where you needed to trust.

In September, arriving back in London, I thought it would do no harm if I tried to spend an evening with him alone. Then, my first morning in Whitehall, I felt the sensation of having put one’s shoulder hard against a door already on the latch. A telephone call came through before I had glanced at my in-tray. I heard a familiar, rich, off-beat voice. Roger was asking me whether I had any time free in the next few days, and whether we might spend a bachelor evening at his club.

4: Something in the Open

At the Carlton, Roger and I had our dinner at a corner table. Although he waved now and then to passers-by, he was concentrating on his meal. He was enjoying himself, we were sharing a bottle of wine and he ordered another. When I had been with him before, he had not cared what he ate or drank, or whether he did so at all. Now he was behaving like a gold-miner coming into town. It struck me that he had the irregular habits, the mixture of rapacity and self-denial, which I had seen before in people who set themselves big tasks.

Through the dinner, I was stonewalling. He wanted something out of me: I wanted to find out something about him. But I could afford to let it ride. So we talked about books, where he uttered strong opinions, and about common acquaintances, where he was more interested and would not utter any opinion whatever. Rose, Osbaldiston, Luke, Getliffe, a couple of top Ministers: we discussed them all. He produced detail after detail, but would not admit that he liked one more than another. I taunted him by saying that this neutrality didn’t suit his style. He was putting on the neutrality of men of action who, except under extreme provocation, never admitted that one man was preferable to another.

Roger gave a boisterous laugh, a laugh so unrestrained that I saw other people glancing towards our table.

It was a point to me. Without any introduction, preparation or lead in, Roger leaned across the table and suddenly said: ‘Lewis, I want your help.’

I was taken by surprise, and went back to stonewalling again. I looked, not at him, but at the people round about us, at an old man with a crimson face who was chewing with exaggerated slowness, at a serious youth impressed by his first glimpse of a London club.

I said:‘What for?’

‘I thought you had just been blaming me for being neutral.’

‘What am I being neutral about?’ I asked.

‘I can play that game as long as you can. Is it going to get us anywhere?’

Roger had seized the initiative and held it. He was speaking easily, with inexplicable intimacy, with something like anger.

A few drops of wine had spilled upon the table. He flicked them together with his forefinger, then made a cross with them, as if to emphasize an end to something.

‘You’ve got some insight, haven’t you? You’re supposed to be a man of good will, aren’t you? I believe you want some of the things I do. The trouble with you, you like to sit above the battle. I don’t know that I’ve got much use for that. You’re prepared to get your hands a bit dirty, but not very dirty. I’m not sure that that’s as creditable as you would like to think. I must say, I sometimes lose my respect for people who know as much as you do, and still don’t come and fight it out.’

He gave a comradely, savage grin, then broke out: ‘Anyway, just to begin with, don’t you think you might treat me as a moral equal?’

This was my second surprise — so sharp, it seemed I hadn’t heard right and simultaneously knew that I had. We looked at each other, and then away, as one does when words have burrowed to a new level, when they have started to mean something. There was a pause, but I was not premeditating. I said: ‘What do you want? What do you really want?’

Roger laughed, not loudly this time. ‘You must have learned a little from your observations, mustn’t you?’

His body was heaved back in his chair, relaxed, but his eyes were bright, half with malice, half with empathy, making me take part.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I want everything that politics can give me. Somehow you never seem to have wanted that. If you’d been slightly different, I’ve sometimes thought you could have done. But I don’t think you were humble enough.’

He went on: ‘Look, a politician lives in the present, you know. If he’s got any sense, he can’t think of leaving any memorial behind him. So you oughtn’t to begrudge him the rewards he wants. One of them is — just possessing the power, that’s the first thing. Being able to say yes or no. The power usually isn’t very much, as power goes, but of course one wants it. And one waits a long time before one gets a smell of it. I was thinking about politics, I was working at politics, I was dreaming of a career nowhere else, from the time I was twenty. I was forty before I even got into the House. Do you wonder that some politicians are content when they manage to get a bit of power?’

He said: ‘I’m not, you know.’

Once more angry, intimate and simple, he said he thought he could have done other things. He believed he could have had a success at the Bar, or made money in business. He said in passing that money didn’t matter much, since Caro was so rich. He went on: ‘If I were content, it would all be nice and easy. I happen to be pretty comfortably placed. It isn’t a matter of being liked. I doubt if they like me all that much. Being liked doesn’t count so much in politics as outsiders think. Being taken for granted, becoming part of the furniture, counts for a great deal more. I’ve only got to sit on my backside, and I should become part of the furniture. If I played the game according to the rules, nothing could stop me getting a decent, safe Ministry in five years or so.’ He gave a smile at once sarcastic, matey, calm. ‘The trouble is, that isn’t good enough.’

He said, as though it were straightforward: ‘The first thing is to get the power. The next — is to do something with it.’

There was a silence. Then, heaving himself up, he suggested that we might have a change of scene. We went into the drawing room, where he ordered brandy. For a moment or so he sat in silence, as though uncertain. Then he snapped his fingers and looked at me, with a glimmer of amusement. ‘Why do you imagine I’m in this present job at all? I suppose you thought I wasn’t given any choice?’

I said that I had heard speculations.

‘Oh no,’ he replied. ‘I asked for it.’

He had been warned against it, he said, by all who believed in him: encouraged into it by some who didn’t. It was of course a risk, he added, that a politician at his stage ought not to take. He looked at me, and said, without emphasis: ‘I believe I can do something. I don’t guarantee it, but there is a chance. For a few years the situation is comparatively fluid. After that, I confess I don’t see much hope.’

It was quiet in the drawing room, only four other people there beside ourselves, and they were far away across the room. It was, as usual, rather dark or gave the impression of darkness. There was no sense of time there, of the hurrying clock, or the inevitability of morning.

For some time we went over arguments which we both knew well. They were the arguments over which for months we had been fencing, not declaring ourselves. Yet, as he had known and I had suspected, we disagreed little. They were the arguments which had been implicit in his interrogation of David Rubin, that evening in the spring: when, so it seemed now, Roger was already preparing himself.

Neither of us needed to make a coherent case. Knowing the details of the debate so intimately, we used a kind of shorthand, which at that time would have been understood by a good many of our acquaintances, in particular by Getliffe and most of the scientists. To put it at its simplest, we believed that most people in power, certainly in our own country, certainly in the West, had misjudged the meaning of nuclear arms. Yet we had got on to an escalator, and it would take abnormal daring to get off. There were two points of action, Roger and I both knew. One was in our own, English, hands. It was not realistic for us to try indefinitely to possess our own weapons. Could we slide out and manage to prevent the spread? The second point, about which I myself felt much more strongly, was not in our control. We might have an influence. If the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union went on too long — how long was too long? none of us could guess — then I could see only one end.

‘It mustn’t happen,’ said Roger. Neither of us smiled. It was an occasion when only a platitude gave one support. Roger went on speaking with energy, calculation and warmth. It had to be solved. There were enough forces to be used, by determined and skilful men. He sounded impersonal, immersed. He wasn’t thinking about me; both his psychological attention and his vanity had dropped away. He was utterly sure that he could be of some use.

After a time, when the concentration had slackened, I said: ‘All this is fine, but isn’t it curious, coming from your side?’

He knew as well as I did that I was no conservative.

‘It’s got to come from my side. It’s the only chance. Look, we both agree that we haven’t much time. In our kind of society — and I mean America too — the only things that can possibly get done are going to be done by people like me. I don’t care what you call me. Liberal conservative. Bourgeois capitalist. We’re the only people who can get a political decision through. And the only decisions we can get through will come from people like me.

‘Remember,’ said Roger, ‘these are going to be real decisions. There won’t be many of them, they’re only too real. People like you, sitting outside, can influence them a bit, but you can’t make them. Your scientists can’t make them. Civil servants can’t make them. So far as that goes, as a Junior Minister, I can’t make them. To make the real decisions, one’s got to have the real power.’

‘Are you going to get it?’ I asked.

‘If I don’t,’ said Roger, ‘this discussion has been remarkably academic.’

In the last moment before we got ready to go, he was preoccupied, but not with decisions to come. He was thinking how soon he could manage to sit in Gilbey’s chair. He mentioned the name, but he was being careful not to involve me. He was sensitive, perhaps in this case over-sensitive, to what he could ask his supporters. It sometimes made him seem, as now, more cagey, evasive, tricky than he was at heart.

He was, however, happy with the evening’s talk. He foresaw that, when he had the power, he would be plunged in a network of what he called ‘closed’ politics, the politics of the civil servants, the scientists, the industrialists, before he got any scrap of his policy through. He thought I could be useful to him there. After this evening, he believed that he could rely on me.

When we had said good night in St James’s Street, and I made my way up that moderate incline (with a vestigial memory of how, when I was younger and had spent nights at Pratt’s, it had sometimes seemed uncomfortably steep) I was thinking that he did not find his own personality easy to handle. It was not neat or sharp, any more than his face was. Like a lot of subtle men, he must often have been too clever by half, and taken in no one but himself. Nevertheless, when he spoke about what he wanted to do, he had not been clever at all. He knew, and took it for granted that I knew, that in their deep concerns men aren’t clever enough to dissimulate. Neither of us had been dissimulating that night.

5: The Scientists

Within two days of that dinner at the Carlton, Roger asked me to make some arrangements. He wanted us to have lunch with Francis Getliffe and Walter Luke — ‘in a private room’, he specified. After lunch, we would all pay a visit to Brodzinski. As I stood with Getliffe and Luke in the room at the Hyde Park Hotel, looking down at the Row and the bronzing trees, I was puzzled and the others more so. There was nothing specially mysterious about the private room, if we were to discuss secret projects: but Roger met them both regularly on one of the defence committees. Why should he make an occasion of it now? Neither of them had any inclination to spend time with Brodzinski, nor saw any value in it.

As we waited for Roger, Francis was vexed. He was getting more irritable, more occupied with punctilio, as he grew older. He and I had been friends since our early twenties. At this time he was fifty-two, and already an elder statesman of science. He had thought more effectively about military-scientific strategy than anyone had, and it was his views which had influenced us most. But now he had to force himself to produce them. He had found a new field of research, and was working as obsessively as when he was a young man. It was a physical strain to be torn away from it, to be dragged up from Cambridge for that lunch. He stood by the window, his face sculptured, hidalgo-like, his fingers nervous, as he spun the stem of a glass.

By his side, Walter Luke looked seamed, confident, grizzled, low-slung, more prosaic. Yet the scientists said that he had been unlucky: he had a scientific imagination as powerful as Francis’, or more so: in a peaceful world, he might have done work of genius. As it was, he had been busy on what he called ‘hardware’ since 1939: he was still not forty-four, but he had been head of the Atomic Energy establishment for years. He was not as vexed as Francis, but was swearing like the dockyard hand his father used to be. When Roger arrived, he was friendly, business-like, but did not exert his personal arts on either of them. As we ate, he was asking them questions about Brodzinski’s project — as though refreshing his memory, or making certain they had not changed their minds, for in fact he had heard their opinions times before and knew them off by heart.

‘I go on saying,’ said Walter Luke, ‘I believe technically it might be on. At least, there’s a fifty-fifty chance it might be on. Brod’s no fool, he’s got a touch of the real stuff. And if we had these bloody things, we could call ourselves independent in nuclear weapons, which we’re not now except for guff, and which we’re probably never going to be. The whole point is, we kept coming back to it — what price are you willing to pay for that?’

‘What price are you?’

‘Not this.’

Luke bristled with energy. From his manner, no one would have guessed that he hadn’t enjoyed coming down on this side. He had a simple, integral patriotism. He had shared the scientists’ moral concern, but if his country could have kept the highest military power, he would have made any sacrifice. His tough mind, though, told him it was impossible, and he put the regret behind him. ‘We just can’t play in this league. If we spent everything we’ve got, that is, everything we now spend on defence, and I mean everything, we might bring this off — and what the bloody hell have we bought at the end of it? The priceless thought that we could take out Moscow and New York simultaneously. The only thing that scares me is that too many people never grow up.’

Roger turned to Francis Getliffe.

‘You know what I think, Parliamentary Secretary,’ said Francis with stiff courtesy. ‘This business of Brodzinski’s is a nonsense. And so are the views of more important people.’

Francis, who did not often go in for public controversy, had not long before screwed himself up to write a pamphlet. In it he had said that there was no military rationale behind the nuclear policy. This analysis had got him into trouble, mostly in America, but also in England. In some Right-thinking circles, it had seemed not only preposterous, but also heretical, and something like wicked.

As we drove through the autumnal streets to the Imperial College, I was still not sure why Roger was playing it this way. What was he aiming at? Was he reckoning that Brodzinski, that lover of English flummery, would be softened by the attentions, the paraphernalia?

If so, sitting in Brodzinski’s room, gazing out at the lonely-looking Colcutt tower, the pale green dome making the aesthetic protest in the solitude of sky, I thought that Roger had reckoned wrong. It was true that Brodzinski loved English flummery, with a passion that made Roger’s more conservative friends look like austere revolutionaries. He had been a refugee from Poland in the late ’thirties. During the war he had made a name, working in one of the Admiralty scientific departments. Afterwards he had spent some years at Barford, had quarrelled with Luke and others, and recently taken a professorship. It was true that he had immersed himself, with fanatical devotion, in what he thought of as English life. He knew all the English snobberies, and loved them so much that they seemed to him morally right. He had dedicated himself to the politics of the English ultra-right. He addressed Francis Getliffe and Walter Luke, with extreme relish, as Sir Francis, and Sir Walter. Despite all that, or perhaps because of it, he was unyielding about his idea, and, instead of listening to Quaife’s persuasions, he was determined to make Quaife listen to him.

He was a tallish man, very thick in the chest and thighs, and his muscles filled his clothes. His voice boomed against the walls of his office. He had beautiful pure transparent eyes, in a flat Slavic face; his fair hair, now mingled with grey, was the colour of dust. He was always on the lookout for enemies, and yet he was vulnerable to help, appealing for it, certain that anyone, not already an enemy, given intelligence and willingness, would be convinced that he was right.

He explained the project over again. ‘I must inform you, Parliamentary Secretary,’ (he was as familiar with English official etiquette as any of us) ‘that there is nothing technically novel here! There is nothing that we do not know. Sir Walter will tell you that I am not over-stating my case.’

‘With reservations,’ said Luke.

‘With what reservations?’ Brodzinski burst out, brilliant with suspicion. ‘What reservations, Sir Walter? Tell me that, now?’

‘Come off it, Brod,’ Luke was beginning, ready to settle down to a good harsh scientific argument. But Roger would not let it start. He was treating Brodzinski with a mixture of deference and flattery — or perhaps not pure flattery, but an extreme empathy. Just as Brodzinski felt a brilliance of suspicion when Walter Luke spoke, so with Roger he felt a brilliance of reassurance. Here was someone who knew what he had to fight against, who knew his urgencies.

‘But, Parliamentary Secretary, when do we get something done?’ he cried. ‘Even if we start now, tonight, it will take us to 1962 or ’63 before we have the weapons—’

‘And they won’t have any strategic meaning,’ said Francis Getliffe, irritated at the way the conversation was going.

‘Sir Francis, Sir Francis, I believe there is meaning in having weapons in your hands, if the country is going to survive. I suppose you mean, I hope you mean, that America will have their own armaments, much greater than ours, and I hope they will. The more the better, and good luck to them. But I shall not sleep happy until we can stand beside them—’

‘I mean something more serious—’ Francis interrupted. But once more Roger stopped the argument.

Brodzinski burst out: ‘Parliamentary Secretary, when can we get some action?’

After a pause, Roger replied, carefully, considerately: ‘You know, I mustn’t raise false hopes—’

Brodzinski raised his head. ‘I know what you’re going to say. And I agree with it. You are going to say that this will cost a thousand million pounds. Some say we cannot afford to do it. I say, we cannot afford not to do it.’

Roger smiled at him. ‘Yes, I was going to raise that point. But also I was going to say that there are many people to convince. I am only a junior Minister, Professor. Let me say something to you in confidence that I really oughtn’t to. Within these four walls, I think it will be necessary to convince my own Minister. Without him behind it, no government could even begin to listen—’

Brodzinski was nodding. He did not need explanations about the English political machine. He was nodding, passionately thoughtful. As for Luke and Getliffe, they were looking stupefied. They knew, or thought they knew, what Roger wanted as a policy. They had just heard him, not exactly state the opposite, but leave Brodzinski thinking that he had.

Soon Roger was saying goodbye, inviting Brodzinski to visit him in Whitehall, repeating that they would keep in touch. Brodzinski clung to his hand, looking at him with beautiful candid eyes, the colour of sea-water. Brodzinski’s goodbyes to Walter and Francis were cold, and when they were back in the car they themselves spoke coldly to Roger. They were, in their different fashions, straightforward and honourable men, and they were shocked.

Roger, apparently at ease, invited them to tea before the car had moved a hundred yards. Utterly aware of the chill, utterly ignoring it as he spoke, he said that, when he was a young man, he used to go to a café‚ not far away: was it still there? Stiffly, Francis said that he ought to get back to Cambridge. No, said Roger, come and have tea. Again they refused. ‘I want to talk to you,’ said Roger — not with official authority, but his own. In a sullen silence, we sat at a table in the café‚ window, the December mists thick in the street outside. It was one of those anonymous places, neither a rackety one for the young nor a tearoom for the elderly: the atmosphere was something between that of a respectable pull-up for carmen and a coffee-room for white collar workers.

Roger said: ‘You disapproved of what I’ve just done.’

‘I’m afraid I did,’ Francis replied.

‘I think you’re wrong,’ said Roger.

Francis said curtly that he had given Brodzinski too much encouragement. Walter Luke, more violent, asked if he didn’t realize that the man was a mad Pole, whose only uncertainty was whether he hated Russians as Russians more than Russians as Communists, and who would cheerfully die himself along with the entire population of the United States and Great Britain, so long as there wasn’t a Russian left alive. If that was the sort of lunacy we were going to get mixed up in, he, Luke, for one, hadn’t bargained on it.

Roger said that he knew all that. But Walter was wrong on just one point. Brodzinski was not mad. He had a touch of paranoia. But a touch of paranoia was a very useful part of one’s equipment. On far more people than not, it had a hypnotic effect.

‘I wish I had it,’ Roger added, with a grim smile. ‘If I had, I shouldn’t have to spend time telling you I am not deserting. No, your colleague Brodzinski is a man of power. Don’t deceive yourselves about that. My bet is that his power is likely to influence quite a number of people before we’re through. He’s going to require very careful handling. You see, he’s got one great advantage. What he wants, what he’s saying, is very simple and it’s what a lot of people want to hear. What you want — and what I want quite as much as you do, if I may say so — is very difficult and not in the least what a lot of people want to hear. That’s why we’re going to need all the luck in the world if we’re going to get away with it. If you think it’s going to be easy and painless, then my advice to you is to cut all your connections with Government as fast as you possibly can. It’s going to be hell, and we may easily lose. As for me, I’m committed. But I’m taking bigger risks than any of you, and you’ve got to let me do it in my own way.’

Yes, I thought then, and in cooler blood afterwards, he was taking risks. Just as he had done, talking to me at the Carlton Club. He was taking risks in speaking in that tone to Getliffe and Luke. And yet, he knew they were both, in spite of Luke’s raucous tongue, men trained to discretion. He also knew, what was more significant, that they were ‘committed’ in the sense he had used the word. For years before Hiroshima, they had foreseen the technological dangers. They could be relied upon as allies.

Luke was still grumbling. Why had Roger taken them there? What did he think he had achieved?

Roger explained that he wanted to shower Brodzinski with attentions: he wouldn’t be satisfied, but it might for the time being keep him quiet.

That reply satisfied Walter Luke. It would not have satisfied me.

It was part of Roger’s technique to seem more spontaneous than he was. Or rather, it was part of his nature which he had developed into a technique. His spontaneity was genuine, it gave him some of his bite: but he could govern it. He had not given Luke and Getliffe the slightest indication of what, I was now certain, was his strongest reason for buttering up Brodzinski.

The reason was simple. Roger was set on easing Lord Gilbey out and getting the job himself. He wanted Brodzinski to do the opposite of keeping quiet, to shout his discontent. I had seen too many examples of this process not to recognize it now.

Roger was less hypocritical than most men. He would have made the same moves without excuse. Yet, I was coming to believe that, as he had just said, he was committed. Old Thomas Bevill used to lecture me, in his Polonius-like fashion, on the forces driving the great politicians he had known. He rolled out his Victorian phrases: one force, Bevill used to say, was a consciousness of powers. Another, and a rarer one, was a consciousness of purpose. For men seeking excuses for themselves, that was the best of all.

Neither Getliffe nor Luke realized what Roger was up to. Yet, if they had, they would not have minded much. It seemed strange, but they would have minded less than I did. For I had an affection for Lord Gilbey. Sometimes my affections ran away with me. They had done so years before, I now believed, in a struggle on a pettier scale when I had been voting for a Master of my college. They had made me forget function, or justice, or even the end to be served. Now I was getting older, I could realize those mistakes in the past, mistakes which a man like Francis, high-principled as he was, would never have made. For him, this issue would be simple. Lord Gilbey never ought to have been in this job in the first place: the sooner he was removed the better. Roger had to be rough. Gilbey would cling like a mollusc, in distinguished incompetence. If Roger was not prepared to be rough, then he was no good to us.

Getliffe and Luke would be right. Yet they might not know that Roger was a more deeply forested character than they were. I believed in his purpose, but it would have comforted me to know why he had it. Perhaps, I thought once or twice that autumn, it would have comforted him too.

6: A Weekend in the Country

During the winter, the gossip began to swirl out from the clubs and the Whitehall corridors that Lord Gilbey was ‘getting past it’. At the same time, Roger’s name crept into the political columns in the Sunday papers, as the first junior Minister in the new government to be talked about for promotion. It looked as though he were handling the press, or rather, the political link-men who added to their incomes through leaking secret information to the press, with skill and nerve. About whether these link-men really existed, administrators like Hector Rose went on speculating, as though they were some species still in doubt, like the yeti, or the plesiosaur in Loch Ness. Rose, with his rigid propriety, could not easily believe in them. My guess was that Roger not only believed in them, but knew them. If so, he got himself liked, but never let out that he had a policy already formed, much less what it was. In fact, the political commentators, while agreeing that he was coming to the front, gave diametrically different reasons why he should do so.

Early in February, Roger told me that he was spending the weekend at Basset, Diana Skidmore’s house in Hampshire. It was not a coincidence that Margaret and I had just received the same invitation. Diana had an intelligence network of her own, and this meant that the connection between Roger and me was already spotted. So far as Roger went, it meant more. Diana was a good judge of how people’s stock was standing, whatever their profession was: upon stock prices within the government, her judgement was something like infallible. Since Diana had a marked preference for those on the rise, the frequency of a man’s invitation to Basset bore a high correlation to his political progress.

People said that about her, and it was true. But, hearing it before one met her, one felt one had been misled. Driving down the Southampton road, the wiper skirling on the windscreen, the wind battering behind us, Margaret and I were saying that we should be glad to see her. The road was dark, the rain was pelting, we lost our way.

‘I like her really,’ said Margaret, ‘she’s so relaxing.’

I questioned this.

‘One hasn’t got to compete, because one can’t. You wouldn’t know. But I should never buy a special frock to go to Basset in.’

I said it would be nice to get there, in any garments whatsoever. When at last we saw the lights of the Basset lodge, we felt as travellers might have done in a lonelier and less domesticated age, getting a glimpse of light over the empty fields.

It was a feeling that seemed a little fatuous once we had driven up from the lodge through the dark and tossing parkland and stood in the great hall of Basset itself. The façade of the house was eighteenth century, but this enormous hall was as warm as a New York apartment, smelling of flowers, flowers spread out in banks, flowers dominating the great warm space as though this were a wedding-breakfast. It was a welcome, not only of luxury, but of extreme comfort.

We went across the hall, over to the guest-list. The order of precedence had an eloquence of its own. Mr Reginald Collingwood got the star suite: Collingwood was a senior Cabinet Minister. The Viscount and Viscountess Bridgewater got the next best. That designation marked the transformation of an old acquaintance of mine, Horace Timberlake, not a great territorial magnate but an industrial boss, who had since become one of the worthies of the Tory party. We came third, presumably because we had been there a good many times. Then Mr Roger Quaife and Lady Caroline Quaife. Then Mr Montagu Cave. He had become a junior Minister at the same time as Roger. We noticed that, as had happened before, he was alone, without his wife. There were rumours that she was enjoying herself with other men. Then Mrs Henneker. I made a displeased noise and Margaret grinned. Finally Mr Robinson, by himself and unexplained.

Diana’s brisk, commanding voice rang out from a passageway. She came into the hall, kissed us, led us into one of her sitting-rooms, brilliant, hung with Sisleys and Pissarros. She remembered what we drank, gave orders to the butler without asking us, said, ‘Is that right?’ — knowing that it was right — and looked at us with bold, sharp, appraising eyes.

She was a woman in her early fifties, but she had worn well. She was slender, but wiry, not delicate. She had never been beautiful, so I had heard, perhaps not even pretty, and it was possible that her looks, which in middle-age suggested that she had once been lovely, were now at their best. She had a dashing, faintly monkey-like attractiveness, the air of a woman who had always known that she was attractive to men. As she herself was fond of saying, ‘Once a beauty, always a beauty’, by which she didn’t mean that the flesh was permanent, but that the confidence which underlay it was. Her great charm, in fact, was the charm of confidence. She was not conceited, though she liked showing off. She knew, she was too wordly not to know, that some men were frightened away. But for many she had an appeal, and she had not doubted it since she was a child.

She was wearing a sunblaze of diamonds on her left shoulder. I looked a little apologetically at my wife, who had put on my latest present, a peridot brooch. Margaret’s taste did not run to ostentation, but face to face with Diana, she would not have minded a little more.

The curious thing was that the two of them came from the same sort of family. Diana’s father was a barrister, and her relatives, like Margaret’s, were academics, doctors, the upper stratum of professional people. Some of them even penetrated into the high Bloomsbury into which Margaret had been born. Nevertheless, despite her family, Diana had taken it for granted, from her childhood, that she belonged to the smartest of smart worlds. Taking it for granted, she duly got there, with remarkable speed. Before she was twenty-one, she had married Chauncey Skidmore, and one of the bigger American fortunes. Seeing her in middle-age, one couldn’t help thinking that it was she, not the Skidmores, not her friends in the international circuit, who had been made for just that world.

It seemed like the triumph of an adventuress: but it didn’t seem so to her, and it didn’t seem so when one was close to her. She was self-willed and strong-willed; she was unusually shrewd: but she had the brilliance and yes, the sweetness, of one who had enjoyed everything that happened to her. When she married Chauncey Skidmore, she loved him utterly. She had been widowed for over a year, and she still mourned him.

At dinner that night, there were — although the Quaifes were not arriving till the next day — eighteen at table. Diana had a habit of commanding extra guests from people to whom she let houses on the estate, or from masters at Winchester close by. I looked up at the ceiling, painted by some eighteenth-century Venetian now forgotten. The chatter had gone up several decibels, so that one could hear only in lulls the rain slashing against the windows at one’s back. Confidentially, the butler filled my glass: the four footmen were going round soft-footed. For an instant it seemed to me bizarre that all this was still going on. It was, however, fair to say that it did not seem bizarre to others present. A spirited conversation was proceeding about what, when Diana’s son inherited the house, would need doing to the structure: or whether she ought to start on it, bit by bit. In her ringing voice, Diana turned to Collingwood on her right: ‘Reggie, what do you think I ought to do?’ Collingwood did not usually utter unless spoken to. He replied: ‘I should leave it for him to worry about.’ That seemed to show the elements of realism. It occurred to me that, a quarter of a century before, I had sat in rich houses, listening to my friends, the heirs, assuming that before we were middle-aged, such houses would exist no more. Well, that hadn’t happened. Now Diana’s friends were talking as though it never would happen. Perhaps they had some excuse.

I was watching Collingwood. I had met him before, but only in a group. He struck me as the most puzzling of political figures — puzzling, because politics seemed the last career for him to choose.

He was a handsome man, lucky both in his bone-structure and his colouring. His skin tone was fresh and glowing, and he had eyes like blue quartz, as full of colour, as opaque. For his chosen career, however, he had what one might have thought a handicap; for he found speech, either in public or private, abnormally difficult. As a public speaker he was not only diffident and dull, but he gave the impression that, just because he disliked doing it so much, he was going to persevere. In private he was not in the least diffident, but still the words would not come. He could not, or did not care to, make any kind of conversation. It seemed a singular piece of negative equipment for a politician.

And yet, he had deliberately made the choice. He was a well-to-do country gentleman who had gone into merchant banking and made a success of it. But he had broken off that career; it was politics that he could not resist; if it meant making speeches, well then, it meant making speeches.

He carried weight inside the Cabinet, and even more inside his party, far more than colleagues of his who seemed to have ten times his natural gifts. That was why, that night at dinner, I was anxious when I heard, or thought I heard, a reply of his to Diana, which sounded like dubiety about the Quaifes. I could not be sure; at such a table, listening to one’s partner, who in my case turned out, with an absence of surprise on my part, to be Mrs Henneker, one needed a kind of directional hearing-sense to pick up the gossip flowing by. If Roger had Collingwood against him, it was serious for us all — but I was captured again by Mrs Henneker, who was thinking of writing a life of her dead husband, who had been a Rear-Admiral, monstrously treated, so she explained to me, by the Board of Admiralty.

Across the table, Cave, who was a gourmet, was eating without pleasure; but, since for him quantity could be made to turn into quality, he was also eating like a glutton, or a hungry child.

Once more, maddeningly, a whiff of disapproval from the top of the table. A person whose name I could not catch was in trouble. I caught a remark from Lord Bridgewater, plethoric, pineapple-headed: ‘He’s letting us down, you know what I mean.’ To which Collingwood replied, ‘It won’t do.’ And a little later, mixed with a clarification about the Rear-Admiral, I heard Collingwood again: ‘He’s got to be stopped.’ I had no idea who the man was. I had no idea, either, what kind of trouble he was in — except that I should have been prepared to bet that it wasn’t sexual. If it had been, Diana would have been flashing signals of amusement, and the others would not have been so condemnatory and grave. Whatever they said in public, in private they were as sexually tolerant as people could be. They could not forgive public scandals, and sometimes they made special rules. In private, though, and within their own circle, or any circle which touched theirs, no one cared what anyone ‘did’. Divorces — there had been several round this table, including Margaret’s. A nephew of Diana’s had been run in while picking up a guardsman in the Park: ‘That chap had hard luck,’ I had heard them say.

Nevertheless, there was constraint in the air. Margaret and I, when we were alone, told each other that we were puzzled.

Next morning, in mackintosh and Wellingtons, I went for a walk in the rain with Monty Cave. Until we turned back to the house, he was preoccupied — preoccupied, so it seemed, with sadness. I wished I knew him well enough to ask. Suddenly he burst out, in darts of flashing, malicious high spirits: wasn’t Diana showing strange signs of taste in modern music? wasn’t Mr Robinson a connoisseur? wasn’t she capable of assimilating any man’s tastes? And then: why did people have absurd pet-names? Sammikins — Bobbity — how would I like to be Lewikins? ‘Or perhaps,’ said Cave, with a fat man’s sparkle, ‘that’s what your friends do call you.’

He wasn’t restful; his mood changed too fast for that, until we talked politics. Then he was lucid, imaginative, unexpectedly humane. For the first time, I could understand how he was making his reputation.

Back in the house, I felt the constraint tightened again, as soon as the Quaifes arrived. I caught Margaret’s eye: in the midst of the party we couldn’t talk. Yet soon I realized that, whatever the reason, it was not that which had worried me most: for just before lunch, I found Caro and Diana drinking whisky, and agreeing that Gilbey must be got rid of.

‘You’re in on this, Lewis!’ cried Diana. ‘Old Bushey’ (Gilbey) ‘has never been the slightest bit of good to us, has he?’

I sat down. ‘I don’t think this is his line,’ I said.

‘Don’t be pie-faced,’ said Diana. ‘He’s a nice, smart cavalry officer, and he’d have married an actress if they’d let him, but that’s his ceiling and you know it.’

‘He’d never have married an actress, he’s the biggest snob of the lot of them,’ said Caro.

‘Do you think the priests would have got to work?’ said Diana. Gilbey’s family was Catholic, and to these two he seemed to have lived in the backwoods. There was much hooting hilarity, which did not disguise the truth that Diana and Caro understood each other and meant business.

‘The point is,’ said Diana, ‘he’s no good. And we can’t afford him.’

She glanced at Caro with appraising eyes, at a pretty woman twenty years younger than herself, at a pretty woman as tough as herself, at an ally.

‘I can tell you this,’ Diana added sharply, ‘Reggie Collingwood is certain that we can’t afford him.’

It ought to have been good news. After an instant, Caro frowned.

‘I’m afraid I’ve got no special use for Reggie,’ she said.

‘Listen,’ said Diana, ‘you have got to be careful. And Roger, of course. But you have got to be very careful.’

If I had not been there, she would have said more. A few minutes later we went in to lunch.

As for me, until after dinner on the Sunday night, I remained half-mystified. The hours seeped away, punctuated by meals; I might have been on an ocean crossing, wondering why I hadn’t taken an aircraft. The rain beat down, the windows streamed, the horizon was a couple of fields away; it was, in fact, singularly like being on a ship in gloomy, but not rough, weather.

I did not get a word with Roger alone. Even with Margaret, I managed to speak only in our own rooms. She was having more than her share of the philosophy of Lord Bridgewater, while in the great drawing-room of Basset, in various subsidiary drawing-rooms, in the library, I found myself occupied with Mrs Henneker.

She was nothing like so brassy as I had previously known her. When she discovered me alone in the library on Saturday afternoon, she still looked dense, but her confidence had oozed away. The curious thing was, she was outfaced. Through the misted window, we watched Diana and Caro stepping it out along the drive in mackintoshes and hoods, taking their exercise in the drenching rain.

‘The rich think they can buy anything,’ said Mrs Henneker heavily. The mana of Diana’s wealth was too much for her, just as it might have been for my relatives or my old friends or others really poor. There was a certain irony, I thought. Mrs Henneker herself must have been worth a hundred thousand pounds or so.

Mrs Henneker did not listen to any repartee of mine. But she had a use for me. Perhaps under the provocation of the Basset opulence, her purpose had crystallized. She was going to write that biography of her husband, and I could be of minor assistance.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I’ve never done any writing, I’ve never had the time. But my friends always tell me that I write the most amusing letters. Of course, I should want a bit of help with the technique. I think the best thing would be for me to send you the first chapters when I’ve finished them. Then we can really get down to work.’

She had obsessive energy, and she was methodical. On the Sunday morning, while most of the house-party, Roger among them, went to church, cars squelching on the muddy gravel, she brought me a synopsis of her husband’s life. After the drawn-out luncheon, Diana’s neighbours staying until after tea, Mrs Henneker got hold of me again, and told me with triumph that she had already written the first two paragraphs, which she would like me to read.

When at last I got up to my dressing-room, light was streaming in from our bedroom and Margaret called out. I’d better hurry, she said. I replied that I had been with Mrs Henneker: she found my experience funnier than I did. As I pulled off my coat, she called out again: ‘Caro’s brother seems to have stirred up the dovecotes.’

She had been hearing about it after tea. At last I understood one of Cave’s obliquities the morning before. For Caro’s brother was called, not only by his family but by acquaintances, ‘Sammikins’. He was also Lord Houghton, a Tory MP, young and heterodox. Recently, Margaret and I recalled, he had published a short book on Anglo-Indian relations. Neither of us had read it, but the newspapers had splashed it about. From the reviews, it seemed to be anti-Churchill, pro-Nehru, and passionately proGandhi. It sounded a curious book for a Tory MP to write. That was part of his offence. ‘He’s not exactly their favourite character, should you say?’ said Margaret. She was frowning at herself, and her dress, in the glass. She was not quite so uncompetitive, these days, as she would have had me think.

I could guess what Diana had said to Caro. At dinner the topic was not mentioned, and I began to hope that we were, for the time being, safely through. The conversation had the half-intimacy, the fatigue, the diminuendo, of the close of a long weekend. Since there was no host, the men did not stay long round the dining-table, and in the drawing-room afterwards, we sat round in a semi-circle, Diana, impresario-like, placing herself between Collingwood and Roger, encouraging them to talk across her.

Suddenly Lord Bridgewater, open-faced, open-eyed, cleared his throat. We knew what was coming. He hadn’t been born in this society, but he had taken its colour. At home he was an amiable man, but he had a liking for unpleasant jobs. He spoke across the width of the room to Caro. ‘I hope we shan’t hear any more of Sammikins, you know what I mean.’ For once, almost for the first time, I saw Caro put out. She flushed. She had to control herself: she hated doing so. It was in her nature not only not to give a damn, but to say that she didn’t. After a pause, she replied, a little feebly: ‘Horace, I’m sorry, but I’m not my brother’s keeper.’ Sammikins was a couple of years younger than she was, and listening, I was sure that she loved him.

‘Some people,’ said Collingwood, ‘would say that he could do with one.’

‘They’d better say that to him,’ said Caro, ‘that’s all.’

‘He’s not doing any good to the Party,’ said Lord Bridgewater, ‘he’s not doing any good at all.’

Collingwood looked at Caro. His eyes brightened in women’s company, but his manner did not change and he said straight at her: ‘It’s got to be stopped.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, that if Sammikins won’t stop it himself, we shall have to stop him.’

In Collingwood’s difficult, senatorial tone, the nickname sounded more than ever ridiculous. Caro was still just keeping her temper.

‘I don’t think,’ she replied, ‘that any of you have the slightest idea what he’s like.’

‘That doesn’t enter,’ said Collingwood. ‘I mean, that if he writes anything like this again, or makes any more speeches on the same lines, we can’t have anything more to do with him.’

On the other side of Diana, I saw Roger’s frowning face. He was gazing at his wife. She, dark with shame, was shaking her head as though telling him to keep quiet. Up to now, she knew — better than anyone there — that he had not made a false move, or one not calculated, since he entered the Government. This wasn’t the time to let go.

Caro gave Collingwood a social smile.

‘You mean,’ she said, ‘you’re ready to take the whip away?’

‘Certainly.’

‘That wouldn’t matter much, for him.’

I believed that, for an instant, she was talking professional politics in the sense Collingwood would understand. Her brother, as heir to his father’s title, could not reckon on a serious political career.

‘That’s not all,’ said Collingwood. ‘No one likes — being right out of things.’

There was a pause. Caro thought successively of things to say, discarded them all.

‘I utterly disagree with nearly everything you’ve said.’ It was Roger’s voice, not quietened, addressed to the room as well as to Collingwood. He must have been enraged by the choice he had to make: now he had made it, he sounded spontaneous and free.

Like Caro, I had been afraid of this. Now that it had happened, I felt excited, upset, and at the same time relieved.

‘I don’t know how you can.’ Collingwood looked lofty and cold.

‘I assure you that I do. I have the advantage, of course, of knowing the man very well. I don’t think many of you have that advantage, have you?’ Roger asked the question with a flick, his glance moving towards his wife. ‘I can tell you, if a few of us had his spirit and his idealism, then we should be doing a lot better than we are.’

Caro had flushed right up to her hair-line. She was anxious for Roger, she knew he was being unwise: but she was proud of him, proud because he had put her first. She had not known what to expect, had tried to persuade herself that she hoped for his silence. But he had not been silent: and she was filled with joy. I saw Margaret flash her an exhilarated glance, then flash me a worried one.

‘Aren’t you forgetting judgement, Quaife?’ asked Lord Bridgewater.

Roger swept on. ‘No, I’m not forgetting judgement. But we’re too inclined to talk about judgement when we mean the ability to agree with everyone. That’s death. Let’s have a look at what this man has really done. He’s stated a case — pretty roughly, that I’ll grant you: he hasn’t taken the meaning out of everything he said, which is another gift we tend to over-value. In one or two places he’s overstated his case. That I accept, and it’s a fault you’re always going to find in sincere and passionate men. But still, the major points in his book are substantially true. What is more, everyone in this room, and almost everyone competent to express an opinion, knows they are substantially true.’

‘I can’t agree,’ said Collingwood.

‘You know it. You may disagree with the attitudes, but you know the points are true. That’s why you’re all so angry. These things are true. The sin this man has committed is to say them. It’s quite all right for people like us to know these things. But it’s quite wrong for anyone to say them — outside our charmed circle. Aren’t we all coming to take that for granted more and more? Isn’t it becoming much more desirable to observe the etiquette rather than tell the truth? I don’t know whether it frightens you, but it certainly frightens me. Politics is too serious a business to be played like a private game at a private party. In the next ten years, it’s going to be more serious than anything we’ve ever imagined. That’s why we need every man who’s got the spine enough to say what he really thinks. That’s why we need this man you’re all so bitter about. That’s why—’ he finished, in a conversational tone, speaking to Collingwood — ‘if there is any question of his being pushed out, I shouldn’t be able to sit quietly by.’

‘I’m sure you wouldn’t,’ Collingwood replied, in his own awkward kind of conversational tone. He was quite composed. There was no sign of what effect Roger had made on him, or whether he had made any effect at all. ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t.’

7: Another Home

The next night, Monday, Margaret and I were due to dine at the Osbaldistons’. As our taxi drew up, we could not help reflecting that it was something of a change from Basset; for the Osbaldistons lived in a house, detached, but only just detached, on the west side of Clapham Common. It might have been one of the houses I had visited as a boy, feeling that I was going up in the world, in the provincial town where I was born, the houses of minor professional men, schoolmasters, accountants, solicitors’ clerks.

We went up the path between two rows of privets; the front door had a panel of coloured glass, leaded, in an acanthus design, and the passage light shone pinkly through.

Inside the house, I was thinking that there was no need for Douglas Osbaldiston to live like that. The decoration and furnishing had not been changed from the fashion of the early twenties: beige wallpaper with a satin stripe and a discreet floral dado: some indifferent romantic landscapes, water-colours, in wooden frames, gate-legged tables, a sideboard of fumed oak with green handles. At the top of the Civil Service, he could have done much better for himself. But, just as some men of Douglas’ origins or mine set themselves up as country gentlemen, Douglas did the reverse. It was done out of deliberate unpretentiousness, but, as with the bogus country gentlemen, it was becoming a little of an act. When, over dinner, we told him that we had been at Basset for the week-end, he whistled cheerfully, in excellent imitation of a clerk reading the gossip columns and dreaming of social altitudes inaccessible to him. Yet Douglas knew — for he was the most clear-headed of operators — that just as he suspected that places like Basset still had too much effect on government decisions, so Diana Skidmore and her friends had an identical, and perhaps a stronger, suspicion about his colleagues and himself. Neither side was sure where the real power rested. In the great rich house, among the Christian names of the eminent, there were glances backwards, from the knowledgeable, in the direction of suburban villas such as this.

In the tiny dining-room, we were having an excellent dinner, cooked by Mary Osbaldiston: clear soup, a steak and kidney pie, lemon soufflé. It was much better than anything to be found at Basset. When I praised the meal, she flushed with gratification. She was a fine-featured woman, intelligent and undecorated as Douglas himself; she had no style and much sweetness. Margaret and I were fond of her, Margaret especially so, both of us knowing that they had a deprivation we had been spared. They had longed for children, and had had none.

Douglas had the pertinacity and precision of a boss administrator; he wanted to know exactly why and how I had come to know Diana Skidmore. He was not in the least envious of my extra-official life; he was not asking entirely through inquisitiveness, through needing another piece of information about how the world ticks.

He listened, with the direct concentration of a detective. Anything about business, anything that might affect ministers, was a concern of his. In particular, when I told him about Roger’s outburst, he regarded that as very much a concern of his.

‘I must say,’ said Douglas, ‘I thought he was a cooler customer.’

His face had ceased to look like a scholar’s.

‘Why in God’s name did he choose this time of all times to blow his top? Lord love me, we don’t have much luck in our masters—’

I was saying that I thought we had been lucky in Roger, but Douglas went on: ‘I suppose he did it out of chivalry. Chivalry can be an expensive luxury. Not only for him, but for the rest of us.’ His wife said that we didn’t know the relations of Caro Quaife and her brother. Perhaps that was the secret.

‘No,’ said Douglas. ‘I don’t see how that could be much excuse. It was an irresponsible thing to do. I can’t imagine indulging in that sort of chivalry if anything hung on it—’ He grinned at his wife. It sounded bleak, but it was said with trust. Douglas knew precisely what he wanted; he was tough and, in his fashion, ruthless; he was going to the top of his own tree, and his dégagé air wasn’t enough disguise; but his affections were strong, and he was a passionate man, not a cold one.

‘Mind you, Lewis,’ said Douglas, ‘if this man Quaife gets away with this performance, he’s in a very strong position. The best way to arrive is to arrive with no one to thank for it. He must know that as well as we do.’

Douglas had his full share of a man of action’s optimism. The optimism which makes a gulf between men of action and purely reflective men, which makes a man insensitive to defeat until it has really happened. He was telling us that he himself had some news on the brighter side: he would cheer us up with it, and after we had all moved together into the ‘front room’.

As soon as I heard that phrase, I was amused. To talk about the ‘front room’ as his mother or mine might have done, was going a bit too far in the direction of modesty, even for Douglas. This house, though small, was not as small as that, and the so-called ‘front room’ was in fact a study. On the desk lay a black official brief case. Round the walls, in bookshelves which ran up to the ceiling, was packed one of the most curious collections of nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels that I had seen. Douglas allowed himself something between a luxury and an affectation. He liked to read novels in much the state in which they had first been read. So in the shelves one could find most of the classical English, Russian, American and French novels in editions and bindings not more than a few years away from their original publication.

We sat within sight and smell of those volumes, while Douglas told us the hopeful news. He was not exaggerating. The news was as promising as he had said, and more unexpected. It was — that several influences, apparently independently, were lobbying against Gilbey and for Roger. They were influences which ‘had the ear’ of senior Ministers, who would be bound at least to listen. The first was the aircraft industry, or that part of it represented by my old boss, Lord Lufkin, who had extended his empire since the war. The second was a group of vociferous Air Marshals. The third, more heterogeneous, consisted of scientists. Lufkin had been to see the Chancellor: a couple of Air Marshals had lunched with the Prime Minister, the scientists had been talking ‘at Ministerial level’.

‘It’s one of the slickest campaigns I’ve ever seen,’ said Douglas.

‘Who sparked it off?’

‘You won’t believe it, but some of the lines seem to go back to a chap of no consequence at all.’

‘Who?’

‘The man Brodzinski.’

Douglas added, ‘Of course, if it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else.’ Like most high-class administrators, Douglas did not believe much in personal flukes. ‘But I must say, he seems to have a pretty good eye for the people who cut ice in our part of London.’

We were each working out the chances. Personality for personality, Gilbey’s backers were powerful, and had the social pull: but in the long run, big business, with the military and the scientists, usually won.

‘Unless he did himself in irretrievably with your very smart friends,’ said Douglas with an amiable jeer, ‘I bet Quaife is in the job within twelve months.’

He passed the decanter round again. Then he asked: ‘Tell me, Lewis, if he does get there, have you any idea what he’s going to try to do?’

I hesitated. He suspected, or had guessed, that I was in Roger’s confidence. In return, I had guessed that he was not. I knew for sure that some of the forces propelling Roger into power were just the forces that, once there, he would have to fight. Douglas had said earlier that the best way to arrive was to arrive with no one to thank for it. Had he now a shrewd idea that Roger might be more cluttered up than that?

Mary Osbaldiston had taken out a piece of needlework, a tray-cloth, or something of the kind: she was working daisies round the edge of it, with finical care. Margaret, who could not sew a stitch, remarked on it, and asked her something about the pattern: but she was not missing a word of the conversation, and her gaze flickered up in my direction.

‘Look, there are some peculiar features about the situation,’ Douglas pressed on. ‘It isn’t only Brodzinski and the wild men who are clamouring for Quaife, you know. There’s your old chum, Francis Getliffe and his friends. Now whatever sleight of hand Quaife goes in for, and I fancy he’s pretty good at that, He’s not going to please both gangs. Tell me, do you know what he’s really going to do?’

I nearly came out into the open. I had one clear and conscious reason for not doing so. I knew that Douglas, like nearly all his colleagues, was deeply conservative. He was too clever not to see the arguments for Roger’s policy, but he would not like them. Yet that was not the reason which kept me quiet. There was another, so worn into me that I did not notice it was there. I had lived too long in affairs; I had been in too many situations like this, where discretion was probably the right, and certainly the easiest, course. Sometimes in the past I had got into trouble, and that had happened when I followed my impulse and blasted discretion away.

So that night it was second nature to say something noncommittal. Douglas gazed at me, his face for an instant more youthful. Then he smiled, and passed the decanter over.

We made something of a night of it. In the taxi going home, Margaret, holding my hand against her cheek, said: ‘You made a mistake, you know.’ She went on to say that he was a man one could trust completely. She did not say, but she meant, that we all four liked each other, and that it was a mistake to deny affection. I was angry with her. I had a sharp sense of injustice, the sense of injustice which is specially sharp when one knows one is in the wrong.

8: Knight on a Tombstone

In March, three weeks after the Basset and Clapham combination, there was more news, which none of us could have allowed for. One morning at the office, Douglas Osbaldiston rang me up: Gilbey had been taken ill during the night, and they were not certain that he would live. The story ran round Whitehall all that morning, and reached the clubs at lunch-time. It was announced in the evening papers. Everyone that I met assumed from the start, just as I did myself, that Gilbey was going to die. A friend of mine was busy adding a hundred words about Gilbey’s political achievements to an account of his career; the chief of the obituary department of a morning paper had appealed in distress, saying that he was in ‘an impossible situation’ with his editor, having been ‘caught short about a man like Gilbey’.

As usual, at the prospect of a death, everyone else was a little more alive. There was a tang of excitement in the air. As usual, also, the professional conversations were already beginning: Douglas was invited to have a drink with a cabinet Minister, Rose spent the afternoon with our own Minister, talking about a scheme for redistributing the work between the two departments. I had seen the same in a smaller world twenty years before, when I was living in a college. How many deaths mattered, really mattered, mattered like an illness of one’s own, to any individual man? We pretended they did, out of a kind of biological team spirit; in some ways, it was a valuable hypocrisy. But the real number was smaller than we dared admit.

As I heard men talking about Gilbey during the next day or two, I could not help remembering what Thomas Bevill, that cunning, simple old man, used to tell me was the first rule of politics: Always be on the spot. Never go away. Never be too proud to be present. Perhaps, after all that was only the second rule, and the first was: Keep alive.

Another person seemed to have a similar thought that week. That other person was Lord Gilbey. Four days after the first news, I received a telephone call from his private secretary. The rumours of the illness, came a chanting Etonian voice, were very much exaggerated. It was utter nonsense to suggest that he was dying. All that had happened was a ‘minor cardiac incident’. Lord Gilbey was extremely bored, and would welcome visitors: he very much hoped that I would call upon him at the London Clinic some afternoon the following week.

A similar message, I discovered, had been sent to politicians, senior officers, Douglas Osbaldiston and Hector Rose. Rose commented: ‘Well, we may have to agree that the noble Lord is not precisely a nonpareil as a departmental minister, but we can’t reasonably refuse him marks for spirit, can we?’

When I visited him at the Clinic, no one could have refused him marks, though it was a spirit we were not used to. He was lying flat, absolutely immobile — the sight recalled another invalid I used to visit — like the effigy of a knight on a tomb, a knight who had not gone on crusade, for his legs were thrust straight out. The bed was so high that, as I sat by its side, my face was on a level with his, and he could have whispered. He did not whisper: he enunciated, quietly, but in something like his usual modulated and faintly histrionic tone.

‘This is very civil of you,’ he said. ‘When I’m safely out of here, we must meet somewhere pleasanter. You must let me give you dinner at the In and Out.’ I said I should like it.

‘I ought to be out of here in about a month. It will be another two months, though—’ he added in a minatory manner, as though I had been indulging in over-optimism — ‘before I’m back in the saddle again.’ I replied with something banal, that that wouldn’t be very long.

‘I never thought I was going to die.’ He did not move at all: his cheeks were beautifully shaven, his hair was beautifully trimmed. Looking at the ceiling as he asked a question, he permitted himself one change of expression: his eyes opened into incredulous circles, as he said: ‘Do you know, people have sat in this very room and asked me if I was afraid of death?’

There was the slightest emphasis on the pronoun. He went on: ‘I’ve been close to death too often to be frightened of it now.’

It sounded ham. It was ham. He began talking about his life. He had lost most of his closest friends, his brother officers, ‘on the battle-field’, in the first war. Every year he had been given since, he had counted as a bonus, he said. He had seen more of the battle-field in the second war than most men of his own age. Several times he thought his hour had come. Had he enjoyed the war? I asked. Yes, of course he had enjoyed it. More than anything in life.

I asked him, after all this, what virtues did he really admire?

‘That’s very simple. There’s only one virtue for me, when it comes down to the last things.’

‘What is it, then?’

‘Physical courage. I can forgive anything in a man who has it. I can never respect a man without it.’

This seemed to me at the time, and even more later, the oddest conversation I had ever had with a brave man. I had met others who took their courage as a matter of course, and who were consoling to anyone who did not come up to their standard. Not so Lord Gilbey. He was the only soldier I knew who could refer, with poetic enthusiasm, to the battle-field.

It occurred to me that all his life Lord Gilbey had been in search of glory. Glory in the old pre-Christian sense, glory such as the Myceneans and Norsemen fought for. Put him in with a shipload of Vikings, and he would have endured what they did, and boasted as much. True, he was Catholic-born: he did his religious duties, and that morning, so he had told me, he had been visited by his ‘confessor’. But it was not salvation that he prayed for, it was glory.

Looking at him prostrate, so handsome, so unlined, I wondered if that was why this attack had knocked him out. It must have been — one didn’t need to be a doctor to see it — graver than we had officially been told. Was it the kind of attack that comes to men who have been taught to suppress their own anxieties? No one could be less introspective; but even he must have known that he had made a mess of his political job, which needed, by a curious irony, a variety of courage that he did not begin to possess. He must certainly have known that he was being criticized, conspired against, threatened with being kicked upstairs. He had shown no sign of it. He had sat among the colleagues who thought least of him, and remained charming, vain, armoured. Probably he didn’t let himself think what their opinion of him was, or what they intended. Was this the price he paid?

Next afternoon, I went to see Roger in the House. I sat in the civil servants’ Box, within touching distance of the government benches, while he answered a question. It was a question put down by one of the members whom Lufkin used for these purposes, to embarrass Gilbey. ‘Was the Minister aware that no decision had yet been announced on—’ There followed a list of aircraft projects. Roger would, in any case, have had to answer in the Commons, but with Gilbey ill, he was in acting charge of the department. The questioner pointedly, and I suspected, under instructions, demonstrated that he was not making difficulties for Roger himself. When Roger gave a dead-pan, stonewalling reply, neither the member nor any of the aircraft spokesmen followed with a subsidiary. There were one or two half-smiles of understanding. After questions, Roger took me along to his room. It struck me that, although I often called on him now, he almost never took me to the tea-room or the bar. I had heard it mentioned that he spent too little time in casual mateyness among crowds of members, that he was either too arrogant, or too shy. It seemed strange, when he was so easy with anyone in private.

The room was cramped, unlike his stately office in the Ministry across Whitehall. Beyond the window, mock gothic, the afternoon sky was sulphurous.

I asked him if he had visited Gilbey yet. Yes, of course, he said, twice.

‘What do you think?’ I said.

‘Don’t you think he’s probably lucky to be alive?’

I said yes. Then I told him what I had thought in the Clinic the day before, that it might be a psychosomatic illness. Or was I psychologizing too much?

‘You mean, if I hadn’t put on the pressure, and we’d all said he was wonderful, he might still be on his feet? You may very well be right.’

‘I meant a bit more than that,’ I said. ‘Presuming the old man gets better and comes back to the job: then what?’

I did not need to go further. I meant, a man in Gilbey’s condition oughtn’t to have to live among the in-fighting. If he did, there was a finite danger that he wouldn’t live at all.

Roger had missed nothing. His eyes met mine in recognition. He was smoking a cigarette, and he did not answer for a time.

‘No,’ he said at last, ‘I’m not going to take any more responsibility than I’m bound to. This isn’t very real.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘He’s out,’ said Roger, ‘whatever I do now. He’ll never come back.’

‘Is that settled?’

‘I’m sure it is,’ he said. He broke off.

‘Do you want an answer to the question you’re really asking?’

I said, ‘Leave it.’

‘I’m prepared to answer,’ he said. ‘I should go on regardless.’

He had been speaking without smoothness, as though he were dredging up the words. Then he said, in a brisk tone: ‘But this isn’t real. He’s out.’

He went on, with a sarcastic smile, ‘I’m sure he’s out. I’m not so sure I’m in.’

‘What are the chances?’

Roger answered, with matter-of-fact precision: ‘Slightly better than evens. Perhaps 6–4 on.’

‘Did you do yourself harm,’ I put in, ‘at Basset? That last night?’

‘I may have done.’ He went on, with a baffled frown, like a short-sighted child screwing up his eyes: ‘The trouble was, I couldn’t do anything else.’

A couple of days later, I arrived at the London Clinic immediately after lunch. Gilbey might not have moved a millimetre in seventy-two hours. Eyes staring at the ceiling, hair shining, face unblemished. He spoke of Roger, who had visited him that morning. Affably, with friendly condescension, Gilbey told me, what I knew myself, that Roger had had a distinguished record in the last war.

‘You wouldn’t think it to look at him,’ said Gilbey, harking back to our previous conversation. ‘But he’s all right. He’s quite all right.’

Gilbey proceeded to talk, enjoying himself, about his own campaigns. Within a few minutes however, he received a reminder of mortality. His secretary busily entered the quiet, the marmoreally-composed sickroom, Gilbey static except for his lips, me unmoving beside him, the trees motionless in the garden outside.

‘Sir,’ said the secretary. He was an elegant young man with a Brigade tie.

‘Green?’

‘I have a telegram for you, sir.’

‘Read it, my dear chap, read it.’

Since Gilbey’s eyes did not alter their upward gaze, he did not know that the telegram was still unopened. We heard the rip of paper.

‘Read it, my dear chap.’

Green coughed. ‘It comes from an address in SW10 — I think that’s Fulham, sir.’ He gave the signatory’s name. ‘Someone called Porson.’

‘Please read it.’

Momentarily, I caught a glance from Green’s eyes, pale, strained, hare-like. He read: ‘All the trumpets will sound for you on the other side.’

Just for a second, Gilbey’s mouth pursed, then tightened. Very soon, the modulated voice said to the ceiling: ‘How nice!’

In a voice even more careful, unemphatic, clipped and trim, he added: ‘How very nice!’

9: Two Kinds of Alienation

As soon as I could, after the telegram had been read, I said goodbye to Gilbey. I indicated to Green that I wanted a word with him outside. Nurses were passing by, the corridor was busy, it was not until we reached the waiting room that I could let my temper go.

In the panelled room, with its copies of the Tatler, the Field, Punch on the console table, I said: ‘Give me that telegram.’

As I glanced at it — the words shining out as though innocent of trouble — I said: ‘You bloody fool!’

‘What?’ said Green.

‘Why in God’s name don’t you read telegrams before you bring them in? Why hadn’t you got the wit to invent something, when you saw what you’d got in front of you?’

I looked at the telegram again. Porson. It might be. In this lunacy, anything was possible. An old acquaintance of mine. For the sake of action, for the sake of doing anything, I rushed out of the room, out of the Clinic, shouted for a taxi, gave the address, just off the Fulham Road.

The taxi chugged through the afternoon traffic, south-west across London. I was so angry that I did not know why I was going there. I had lost touch with my own feelings. Guilt, concern, personal fates, public ends — I hadn’t the patience to think of any of them. Nothing except pushing the taxi on.

At last, after the driver had made false shots, trying squares, places, mews, we drove up a street all of tall terraced houses, shabby, unpainted. In front of one, I looked at the slips of cardboard by the bells. The other names were handwritten, but against the top floor bell was a soiled visiting card: Mr R Porson, Barrister-at-Law.

Empty milk bottles stood on the steps. Inside the door, which was on the latch, letters and newspapers lay in the unlit hall. I climbed upstairs. On the second landing the door of a bathroom opened, the only one, it seemed, in the house. I went up to the top floor and knocked. A thick, strident voice answered, and I entered. Yes, it was the man I used to know — twenty years older, more than half drunk. He greeted me noisily, but I cut him short by giving him the telegram.

‘Did you send this?’

He nodded.

‘Why?’

‘I wanted to cheer him up.’

In the attic flat, which had a skylight and a high window, Porson peered at me, ‘What’s the matter, old boy? You look a bit white. I insist on prescribing for you. What you need is a good stiff drink.’

‘Why did you send this?’

‘The poor chap hasn’t got long to go. It’s been all over the papers,’ said Porson. ‘I’ve got a great respect for him. We don’t breed men like him nowadays. He’s a bit different from all these young pansies. So I wanted him to know that some of us were thinking about him. I wasn’t prepared to let him go out alone.’

Fiercely he cried out: ‘Well, is there anything the matter with that?’

He lurched back into his chair. He said: ‘I don’t mind telling you, I don’t run to telegrams unless I have to. Four bob. But I thought it was the least I could do.’

‘What in Heaven’s name,’ I shouted, ‘do you imagine it was like for him—’

He was too drunk to understand. I was shouting for my own benefit alone. In time I gave it up. There was nothing to do. I accepted his drink.

‘Well,’ he said, examining me with a critical, patronizing air, ‘from all I hear, you haven’t done so badly, young man. I’ve always insisted you’d have done better, though, if you had listened to me more in the old days.’

‘What about you?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got a great many talents. You know that as well as anybody. Somehow they haven’t done as much for me as they should. There’s still plenty of time to pull something off. Do you realize,’ he said in a threatening tone, ‘that I’m only sixty-two?’

He had gone many steps down hill since I last saw him before the war. This tiny room, furnished with a divan bed, a table, one easy chair and one hard one, showed still the almost pernickety, aunt-like tidiness that I remembered, but it must have been the cheapest he could find. Even then, the rent must have come out of his bit of capital. So far as I knew, he had done no work for years. On the mantelpiece he kept a picture of Ann March, his symbol of unrequited love, his princesse lointaine. There were also photographs of two young men. In himself he looked broken down, his face puce, flecked with broken veins. The tic down his left cheek convulsed it more than ever. Yet at some moments he appeared — in his expression, not only in his spirit — much younger than he was, instead of older: as though unhappiness, discontent, frustration, failure, drink, had been a preservative during which time stood still, as it could not for luckier and stabler men. All his old hatreds came boiling out, just as fresh as they had always been — the Jews, the Reds, the Pansies. He was particularly violent about the pansies, much more so than in the past. I couldn’t pretend that Lord Gilbey was any of those things, could I? ‘He’s a man after my own heart, I insist on that,’ he cried belligerently. ‘Do you understand why I had to send a personal message? Because if you don’t now, my boy, you never will.’

The outburst died down. He seemed glad to have me there; he took it without surprise, as though I had seen him the day before and had just called in again. In a tone both gentle and defiant he said: ‘You may not believe it, but I’m very comfortable here.’

He went on: ‘There are a lot of young people round this neighbourhood. I like the young. I don’t care what anyone says against them, I like the young. And it’s very good for them to have an older man with plenty of experience to come to for advice.’

He was impatient for me to meet them. But we had to wait until the pub opened, he said. He was restless, he stumped over to the whisky bottle several times, he kept looking at his watch. As the afternoon light edged through the high window, he got to his feet and gazed out.

‘Anyway,’ he said loudly, ‘you can’t deny that I’ve got a nice view.’

Porson’s acquaintances came to the pub at the corner of his street, where he installed us both at the crack of opening time. They were mostly young, not many over thirty. Some of them were living on very little; one or two might have some money from home. There were painters there, there were one or two writers and schoolteachers. They were friendly, and gave Porson what he wanted. They made him a bit of a figure. They treated me amiably, as though I were someone of their age, and I liked them. It might have been a sentimentality, the consequence of my abortive anger and this resurrection of the past in Porson, an old acquaintance become not more respectable, but considerably less so. It might have been a sentimentality, but I was speculating whether there was a higher proportion of kind faces there than in the places I nowadays spent my time. It might have been a sentimentality, and probably was. But theirs was a life which, if one has ever lived it or been close to it, never quite relinquishes its last finger-hold upon one. I could think of contemporaries of mine, middle-aged persons with a public face, who dreamed a little more often than one would think likely of escaping back to places such as this.

Some of the people in that pub seemed to live in a present which to them was ideal. They could go on, as though the future would always be like this. It was a slap-happy March evening. They kept standing Porson drinks. I was enjoying myself: and yet, at the same time, I was both softened and shadowed. I knew well enough what anyone of political insight would say, whether they were Marxists, or irregulars like Roger Quaife, or hard anti-communists from the Partisan Review. They would agree about the condition, though they fought about the end. They would say that there was no protest in this pub. Not that these people shared Porson’s fits of crazed reaction. They had good will, but except for one or two picked causes, they could not feel it mattered. Nearly everyone there would have joined in a demonstration against hanging. Otherwise, they shrugged their shoulders, lived their lives, and behaved as though they were immortal. Was this their version of the Basset house-party, which also talked as though there would never be a change again?

They would have had no use for Roger Quaife. To them, he would be part of an apparatus with which they had no connection, from which they were alienated, as completely as if it were the governing class of San Domingo. So was he alienated from them. How could he reach them? How could he, or any politician, find a way through?

They were not going to worry about Roger Quaife, or the scientists, or the civil servants, or anybody else who had to take a decision. They did not thank anybody for worrying about them. Yes, there were unhappy people in the pub, now it was filling up. A schoolmaster with an anxiety-ridden face, who lived alone: a girl sitting at the bar, staring with schizoid stillness at a glass of beer. For them, there were friends here prepared to worry. Even for old Porson, drunken, boastful, violent, a little mad.

I should have liked to stay. But somehow, the fact that they were so un-anxious, so island-like, had the reverse effect on me. In the noisy and youthful pub, they were rooting up a half-memory, buried somewhere in my mind. Yes! It was another evening, another part of London, Roger questioning David Rubin, the uninflected replies.

This was not the place for me. I finished my drink, said goodbye to Porson who ‘insisted’ on inviting me there another time. I pushed through the crowd, affable, cordial and happy, and went out into the street, lights from the shops doubled in the moist pavements of the Fulham Road.

10: News in South Street

By the early summer, gossip was bubbling and bursting. Gilbey had left the Clinic and gone home. One political columnist was prophesying that he would soon be back. Elsewhere, rumours appeared that he had already accepted a government post abroad. As for his successor, names were being mentioned, Roger’s usually among them, but not prominently, except in one Sunday paper.

Nearer the point of action, we were mystified. Some of the rumours we knew to be nonsense, but not all. Men like Douglas Osbaldiston and Hector Rose, or even Roger himself, were not sure where they came from. Diana Skidmore and Caro’s relatives, people who made an occupation out of being in the know, could pick up nothing, or at least what they did pick up was useless. It was one of those occasions, commoner than one might think, when the ‘insiders’ were reading their newspapers for enlightenment as inquisitively as anyone else.

Of us all, Roger put on the most impassive front. He did his job in the office without any fuss; he answered questions in the House: he made a couple of speeches. In all this, he was behaving like a competent stand-in. As I watched him, through those weeks, I realized that he had one singular natural advantage, besides his self-control. He had the knack of appearing more relaxed, far less formidable, than he really was. One night, after a debate which Douglas and I were attending, a young member took us all to Pratt’s. In the tiny parlour, round the kitchen fire, there were several hard, able faces, but Roger’s was not among them. He sat there, drinking pints of beer, a heavy, clumsy man, looking amiable, idealistic, clever, simple, rather like an impressive innocent among card-sharpers. Among hard-featured faces, his stood out, full of enjoyment, full of feeling, revealing neither ambition nor strain.

One afternoon in June, I received another summons from Lord Gilbey. This time I was asked to call, so my personal assistant said, at his ‘private residence’. What for? No, the invitation had come, not from Green, but from some humbler person, who was unwilling to say. Had anyone else been asked? My PA missed nothing. She had already rung up Hector Rose’s office, and Douglas’. Each had been summoned also: Rose was busy at a meeting, Douglas was already on his way.

It was a short distance to Gilbey’s, for he had a flat, one of the last in private occupation, in Carlton House Terrace. It was a short distance, but it took some time. Cars were inching, bonnet to tail, along the Mall, cars with crosses on the windscreens, on their way to a Palace Garden Party. It must have been a Thursday.

The flat, when I finally got there, was at the top of the building. A smart young woman came to greet me. I inquired, ‘Mr Green?’

Mr Green was no longer working for Lord Gilbey.

Lady Gilbey was out for tea, but Lord Gilbey would like to see me at once. He and Douglas were standing by the drawing-room window, from which one looked, in the gusty, sparkling sunshine, right across St James’s Park, across the glitter of the lake, to the towers and turrets of our offices, away above the solid summer trees. Below, the roofs of cars, hurrying now the Mall was thinning, flashed their semaphores in the sun. It was a pleasant London vista: but Lord Gilbey was regarding it without enthusiasm. He welcomed me gracefully, but he did not smile.

He moved to a chair. As he walked, and as he sat down, he seemed to be deliberating how each muscle worked. That must have been the result of his illness, automatic now. Otherwise he had forgotten it, he was preoccupied with chagrin and etiquette.

‘Sir Hector Rose isn’t able to join us, I hear,’ he said, with distant courtesy. ‘I should be grateful if you would give him my regrets. I wanted to speak to some of you people who have been giving me advice. I’ve already spoken to some of my colleagues.’ He gazed at us, immaculate, fresh-faced, sad. ‘I’d rather you heard it from me first,’ he went on. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll believe it, but this morning, just before luncheon, I had a letter from the Prime Minister.’

Suddenly he broke out: ‘He ought to have come himself. He ought to have!’

He lifted a hand carefully, as though not exerting himself too jerkily, and pointed out of the window in the direction of Downing Street.

‘It’s not very far,’ he said. ‘It’s not very far.’

Another aspect of etiquette struck him, and he went on: ‘I must say it was a very decent letter. Yes. It was a decent letter, I’ve got to give him that.’

Neither of us knew when to begin condoling. It was some while before Gilbey got to the bare facts. At last he said: ‘The long and the short of it is, they’re getting rid of me.’

He turned his gaze, absently, from Douglas to me: ‘Do you know, I really can’t believe it.’ He was having fugues, as one often does under the impact of bad news, in which the bad news hadn’t happened and in which he was still planning his return to the department. Then the truth broke through again.

‘They haven’t even told me who my successor is going to be. They ought to have asked my advice. They ought to have.’

He looked at us: ‘Who is it going to be?’ Douglas said none of us knew.

‘If I believed what I saw in the papers,’ said Gilbey, outrage too much for him, ‘they’re thinking of replacing a man like me—’ very slowly he raised his right hand just above the height of his shoulder — ‘by a man like Grigson.’ This time his left hand descended carefully, palm outwards, below his knee.

He got on to a more cheerful topic. ‘They,’ (after his first complaint he could not bring himself to refer to the Prime Minister in the singular, or by name) had offered him a ‘step-up’ in the peerage. ‘It’s civil of them, I suppose.’

It was the only step-up the Gilbeys had had since they were ennobled in the eighteenth century, when one of them, a Lancashire squire, had married the daughter of a wealthy slave-trader. ‘Rascals. Awful rascals,’ said Lord Gilbey, with the obscure satisfaction that came over him as he meditated on his origins. When anyone else meditated so, he did not feel the same satisfaction. I had heard him comment on a scholarly work which traced the connection of some English aristocratic families with the African slave trade — ‘I should have thought,’ he had said in pain, ‘that that kind of thing is rather unnecessary.’

Gilbey was dwelling on the consequences of the step-up. Place in ceremonies, change in the coronet. ‘I don’t suppose I shall see another coronation, but you never know. I’m a great believer in being prepared.’

Gilbey was lonely, and we stayed for another half-hour.

When at last we left, he said that he proposed to attend the Lords more regularly, not less. ‘They can do with an eye on them, you know.’ His tone was simple and embittered.

Out in the open, crossing the path beside the Park, Douglas, black hat pulled down, gave a grin of surreptitious kindness. Then he said: ‘That’s that.’

Ministers came, Ministers went. On his side, Douglas wouldn’t have expected his Minister to mourn for him if he were moved to a dim job, or rejoice if he clambered back to the Treasury.

‘Now perhaps,’ he said, ‘we can get down to serious business.’

He did not speculate on who would get Gilbey’s job. He might have been holding off, in case I knew more than I actually did. Whereas in fact, the moment I regained my own office, I rang up Roger and was asked to go round at once. He was in his Whitehall room, not across the way. When I got there, I looked at the clock. It was just after half-past four.

‘Yes,’ said Roger, sitting loose and heavy behind his desk, ‘I know all about it.’

‘Have you heard anything?’

‘Not yet,’ He added evenly: ‘Unless I hear tonight, of course, it’s all gone wrong.’

I did not know whether that was true, or whether he was placating fate by getting ready for the worst.

‘I didn’t go to the House this afternoon. I thought that was asking a bit much.’

He gave a sarcastic grin, but I thought he was playing the same trick.

He would not mention his plans, or the future, or any shape or aspect of politics at all. We talked on, neither of us interested, finding it hard to spin out the time, with the clock ticking. A man from his private office came in with a file. ‘Tomorrow,’ said Roger roughly. As a rule he was polite with his subordinates.

Through the open window came the chimes of Big Ben. Half-past five.

‘This is getting pretty near the bone,’ said Roger.

I asked if he wouldn’t have a drink. He shook his head without speaking.

At nineteen minutes to six — I could not help but watch the clock — the telephone buzzed. ‘You answer it,’ said Roger. For an instant his nerve had frayed.

I heard an excited voice from his own office. The call was from Number 10. Soon I was speaking to the Prime Minister’s principal private secretary, and passed the telephone to Roger.

‘Yes,’ said Roger, ‘I can come along. I’ll be with you at six.’

He looked at me without expression.

‘This looks like it,’ he remarked. ‘I don’t know, there may be a catch in it yet.’

I took a taxi home, with the whole afternoon’s story, except for the dénouement, ready to tell Margaret. But she was dressed ready to go out, and laughing at me because my news was stale. Diana Skidmore had been tracking the day’s events and had rung Margaret up, asking us round for drinks at her house in South Street.

Park Lane was full of party frocks, morning suits, grey top hats, those who had stuck out the royal garden party to an end and were now humbly walking to buses and tubes. One or two top hats and frocks turned, a little less humbly, into South Street, and into Diana’s house.

It was, by the standards of Basset, small, the rooms high but narrow; yet, because it was more crowded with valuable objects, gave an even greater sense of opulence, opulence compressed, each of its elements within arm’s reach. At Basset, one could walk by a bank of flowers between one precious acquisition and the next: space itself gave some effect of simplicity, of plein air. But here in South Street, despite Diana’s efforts, the effect was not unlike that of an auctioneer’s saleroom or a display of wedding-presents.

When Margaret and I arrived, Diana, with an air of concentrated sincerity, was explaining to a guest what an extremely small house it was. She was giving her explanation with a depth of architectural expertness which I didn’t know she possessed: which she hadn’t possessed until a month or two before. It sounded as though she had passed from the influence of her musician under the influence of an architect, and got delight out of showing it off — just as a young girl, first in love, gets delight out of mentioning the man’s name.

It was very foolish, I felt sometimes in the presence of Diana, to imagine that worldly people were cynical. Born worldlings, like herself, were not in the least cynical. They were worldlings just because they weren’t, just because they loved the world.

Seeing Margaret and me, Diana slid her guest on to another group, and became her managing self, all nonsense swept away. Yes, she had found out that Roger was with the Prime Minister. He and Caro had been invited to come when they could, and if they felt like it.

‘No one in politics here,’ said Diana briskly. ‘Is that right?’ She wasn’t going to expose them, if the prize had been snatched away at the end.

We mingled among the party, most of them rich and leisured. Probably the majority had not so much as heard of Roger Quaife. Margaret and I were sharing the same thought, as we caught each other’s eye: he ought to be here by now. I noticed that Diana, who did not easily get worried, had taken an extra drink.

Then they came, Caro on one side of Roger, and on the other her brother Sammikins, all of them tall, Roger inches taller than the other man, and stones heavier. We had only to look at Caro to know the answer. She was glowing with pleasure, with disrespectful pleasure, that she wanted to cast over us all. They each took a glass of champagne on their way towards us.

‘That’s all right,’ Roger said. It sounded unconcerned, in the midst of kisses and handshakes. It sounded ludicrously tight-lipped. A stranger might have thought he looked the same as he had looked a couple of hours before. Yet, beneath a social smile, reserved, almost timid, his eyes were lit up, the lines round his mouth had settled — as though triumph were suffusing him and it was a luxury not to let it out. Beneath the timid smile, he gave an impression both savage and youthful. He was a man, I was thinking, who was not too opaque to suffer his sorrows or relish his victories.

‘The old boy hasn’t done too badly, has he?’ said Caro to Margaret. Sammikins was trumpeting with laughter.

At close quarters he looked like an athlete, light on his feet with animal spirits. He had eyes like Caro’s, large, innocent and daring. He had her air, even more highly developed, of not giving a damn. He showed more open delight at Roger’s appointment than anyone there. Talking to me, he was enumerating in a resounding voice all the persons whom it would most displease.

Joining our group, Diana was avid for action. ‘Look,’ she said to Roger, ‘I want to give you a real party. We can clear the decks here and lay it on for later tonight. Or have it tomorrow. Which would you like?’

Sammikins would have liked either. So would Caro, but she was looking at Roger.

Slowly he shook his head. He smiled diffidently at Diana, thanked her, and then said: ‘I don’t think it’s the right time.’

She returned his smile, as though she had a soft spot for him, not just a political hostess’. With a rasp, she asked: ‘Why isn’t it the right time?’

‘There have been thousands of Cabinet Ministers before me. Most of them didn’t deserve a party.’

‘Oh, rubbish. You’re you. And I want to give a party for you.’

He said: ‘Wait till I’ve done something.’

‘Do you mean that?’ cried Diana.

‘I’d much rather you waited.’

She did not press him any further. Somehow she, and the rest of us, partly understood, or thought we did. What he said might have been priggish. It was not that, so much as superstitious. Just as he had been placating fate in his own office, so, in a different fashion, the job in his hands, he was doing now. It was the superstitiousness of a man in spiritual training, who had set himself a task, who could not afford to let himself be softened, who was going to feel he had wasted his life unless he brought it off.