Corridors of Power

11: Introduction of an Outsider

Once or twice during the next few months, I found myself wondering whether Roger and his associates would qualify for a footnote in history. If so, what would the professionals make of them? I did not envy the historians the job. Of course there would be documents. There would be only too many documents. A good many of them I wrote myself. There were memoranda, minutes of meetings, official files, ‘appreciations’, notes of verbal discussions. None of these was faked.

And yet they gave no idea, in many respects were actually misleading, of what had really been done, and, even more, of what had really been intended. That was true of any documentary record of events that I had seen. I supposed that a few historians might make a strong guess as to what Roger was like. But how was a historian going to reach the motives of people who were just names on the file, Douglas Osbaldiston, Hector Rose, the scientists, the back-bench MPs? There would be no evidence left. But those were the men who were taking part in the decisions and we had to be aware of their motives every day of our lives.

There was, however, another insight which we didn’t possess, and which might come easily to people looking back on us. In personal terms we knew, at least partially, what we were up to. Did we know in social terms? What kind of social forces were pushing together men as different as Roger, Francis Getliffe, Walter Luke, and the rest of us? What kind of social forces could a politician like Roger draw upon? In our particular society, were there any? Those were questions we might ask, and occasionally did: but it was in the nature of things that we shouldn’t have any way of judging the answers, while to a future observer they would stand out, plain as platitudes.

One peaceful summer afternoon, soon after he had taken office, Roger had called some of the scientists into his room. Once, when he was off guard, I had heard him say at Pratt’s that he had only to open his door to find four knights wanting something from him. There they all were, but there were more than four, and this time he wanted something from them. He was setting up a committee for his own guidance, he said. He was just asking them for a forecast about nuclear armaments to cover the next ten years. He wanted conclusions as brutal as they could manage to make them. They could work as invisibly as they liked. If they wanted Lewis Eliot as rapporteur at any time, they could have him. But above all, they had got to take the gloves off. He was asking them for naked opinions, and he was asking for them by October.

Deliberately — it was part of his touch with men like these — he had let the blarney dissolve away. He had spoken as harshly as any of them. He looked round the table, where the faces stood out, moulded in the diffused sunlight. On his right, Walter Luke, who had just become the chief scientist of Roger’s department, tough, cube-headed, prematurely grey. Then Francis Getliffe: then Sir Laurence Astill, smooth-faced, contented with himself: then Eric Pearson, scientific adviser to my own department, youthful and cocky, like a bright American undergraduate: three more, drawn in from universities, like Getliffe and Astill, and so back to me.

Walter Luke grinned. He said: ‘Well, as HMG pays me my keep, I’ve got to play, haven’t I? There’s no need to ask me. It’s what these chaps say that counts.’ He pointed a stiff, strong arm at Astill and the others. As his reputation for scientific judgement grew, his manners had become more off-hand.

‘Sir Francis,’ said Roger, ‘you’ll come in?’

Francis hesitated. He said: ‘Minister, of course it’s an honour to be asked—’

‘It’s not an honour,’ said Roger, ‘it’s an intolerable job. But you can bring more to it than most men.’

‘I should really rather like to be excused—’

‘I don’t think I can let you. You’ve had more experience than any of us.’

‘Minister, believe me, everyone here knows all that I know—’

‘I can’t accept that,’ said Roger.

Francis hesitated again; courteously, but with a frown, he said: ‘There doesn’t seem any way out, Minister. I’ll try to do what I can.’

It sounded like the familiar minuet, as though no one would have been more disappointed than Francis if he had been taken at his word. But that was the opposite of the truth. Other men, wanting flattery or a job, talked about their consciences. Francis was one of the few whom conscience drove. He was a radical through conscience, not through rebellion. He had always had to force himself into personal struggles. He would have liked to think that for him they were all over.

Just over a year before, he had puzzled his friends at our old college. They assumed that he would be a candidate for the Mastership, and they believed that they could get him elected. At the last moment, he had refused to stand. The reason he gave was that he wanted all his time for his research, that he was having the best ideas of his life. I believed that was part of the truth, but not all. His skin was wearing even thinner as he grew older. I fancied that he could not face being talked about, the gossip and the malice.

Incidentally, instead of electing my old friend Arthur Brown, the college had managed to choose a man called G S Clark, and was becoming more factious than anyone could remember.

All Francis wanted for himself was to live in Cambridge, to spend long days in his laboratory, to watch, with worried, disapproving love, how his second and favourite daughter was getting on with an American research student. He wanted no more struggles. That afternoon, as he said yes, he felt nothing but trapped.

Sir Laurence Astill was speaking firmly: ‘If in your judgement, Minister, you feel that I have a contribution to make, then I shall consider myself obliged to accept.’

‘That’s very good of you,’ said Roger.

‘Though how you expect us to fit in these various kinds of service and look after our departments at the same time—’ Sir Laurence had not finished. ‘Some time I’d like a word with you, on the position of the senior university scientist in general.’

‘Any time,’ said Roger.

Sir Laurence nodded his head with satisfaction. He liked being in the company of Ministers: talk with Ministers was big stuff. Just as Francis was sated with the high political world, Astill was insatiable.

The others, without fuss, agreed to serve. Then Roger came to what, in his mind and mine, was the point of the meeting. What he was going to suggest, we had agreed between ourselves. I was as much behind it as he was; later on, I had to remind myself of that. ‘Now that we’ve got a committee together, and a quite exceptionally strong one,’ said Roger, blandishment coming into his tone for the first time that afternoon, ‘I should like to know what you’d all feel if I added another member.’

‘Minister?’ said Astill acquiescently.

‘I’m bringing it up to you, because the man I’m thinking of does present some problems. That is, I know he doesn’t see eye to eye with most of us. He might easily make you waste a certain amount of time. But I have a strongish feeling that it might be worth it.’

He paused and went on: ‘I was thinking of Michael Brodzinski.’

Faces were impassive, the shut faces of committee men. After an interval, Astill took the lead. ‘I think I can probably speak for our colleagues, Minister. Certainly I should have no objection to working with Dr Brodzinski.’

Astill liked agreeing with a Minister. This wasn’t time-serving, it wasn’t even self-seeking: it was just that Astill believed that Ministers were likely to be right. ‘I dare say we shall have our points of difference. But no one has ever doubted that he is a man of great scientific quality. He will have his own contribution to make.’

Someone said, in a low voice — was it Pearson? — ‘If you can’t beat them, join them. But this is the other way round.’ The other academics said that they could get on with Brodzinski. Francis was looking at his watch, as though anxious to be back in Cambridge. He said: ‘Minister, I agree with the rest. I’m inclined to think that he’d be more dangerous outside than in.’

‘I’m afraid that doesn’t quite represent my attitude,’ said Astill.

‘Still,’ Roger said, ‘you’re quite happy about it, Astill?’

‘I’m not. I think you’re all wrong,’ Walter Luke burst out. ‘As bloody wrong as you can be. I thought so when I first heard this idea, and I think so now.’

Everyone looked at him. I said quietly, ‘I’ve told you, you can watch him—’

‘Look here,’ said Walter, ‘you’re all used to reasonable ways of doing business, aren’t you?’

No one replied.

‘You’re all used to taking people along with you, aren’t you?’

Again, silence.

‘So am I, God help me. Sometimes it works, I grant you that. But do you think it’s going to work in anything as critical as this?’

Someone said we had to try it.

‘You’re wiser old bastards than I am,’ said Walter, ‘but I can’t see any good coming out of it.’

The whole table was stirring with impatience. Walter’s outburst had evoked the group-sense of a meeting. Getliffe, Astill, everyone there, wanted him to stop. Technical insight they all gave him credit for; but not psychological insight. He gave himself no credit for it, either. Battered looking he might be, but he still often thought of himself as younger than he was. That strain of juvenility, of deliberate juvenility — for he was proud of this, and in his heart despised the ‘wise old bastards’ — took away the authority with which he might have spoken that afternoon.

Roger was regarding him with hard eyes.

‘Would you take the responsibility, if I gave you your head and left Brodzinski outside?’

‘I suppose so,’ Walter said.

Roger said: ‘You needn’t worry. I’m going to over-rule you.’

A week later, at the same place, at the same time, Michael Brodzinski was making his first appearance on the committee. The others were standing round, before the meeting, when a secretary came to tell me that Brodzinski had arrived. I went out to welcome him, and, before we had shaken hands, just from the joyful recognition on his face, I was certain that he had received some account of the first discussion, that he knew I was partly responsible for getting him there, and so gave me his trust.

I led him into Roger’s room. Approaching the knot of scientists, who were still standing, Brodzinski looked very powerful physically. He was much the most heavily muscled, more so than Walter, who was a strong man.

Once more I was certain that he had heard precisely how he had been discussed. ‘Good afternoon, Sir Laurence,’ he said to Astill, with great politeness and qualified trust. To Francis Getliffe the politeness was still great, the trust more qualified. To Walter the politeness became extreme, the politeness of an enemy.

Roger called out a greeting. It was a hearty, banal bit of cordiality, something like how grateful Roger was to have his help. At once Brodzinski left Walter, and listened as though he were receiving a citation. With his splendid, passionate, luminous eyes, he was looking at Roger as more than a supporter, as something like a saviour.

12: An Even Bet

Twice that month, I was invited out by Caro’s brother. It seemed a little taxing, but on the second occasion, when my wife was staying with her sister, I said yes. It seemed more taxing still, face to face with Sammikins — a name I found increasingly unsuitable for this loud-voiced, untameable man — in one of the military clubs.

He had given me dinner, and a good one. Then, sitting in the library, under the oil-paintings of generals of the Crimean war, the Mutiny, fierce-looking generals of the late-Victorian peace, we had gone on to the port. I was lying back relaxed in my chair. Opposite me, Sammikins sat straight up, wild and active as a hare. He was trying to persuade me to bet.

It might have been because he couldn’t resist it. Earlier that evening he had been inviting me to a race-meeting. Like his sister, he owned race-horses, and he thought it was unnatural, he thought I was holding something back, when I professed boredom in the presence of those romantic animals. But if I wouldn’t bet on horses, surely I would on something else? He kept making suggestions, with cheerful, manic, loud-voiced glee. It might have been just the addiction. Or it might have been that he was provoked by anyone like me. Here was I, fifteen years older, my manner restrained by the side of his, (which didn’t differentiate me too sharply from most of the human race). Did he want to prove that we weren’t all that unlike?

I took him on. I said that, if we were going to bet, he had one advantage; he was, at any rate potentially, richer than I was. I also had an advantage: I understood the nature of odds, and I doubted if he did. If I were ready to bet, it was going to be on something which gave us each precisely an even chance.

‘Done,’ he said.

Finally we settled that Sammikins should order more glasses of port, and afterwards not touch the bell again. Then, for the period of the next half-hour, we would mark down the number of times the waiter’s bell was rung. He would bet on an odd number, I on even. How much? he said.

‘Ten pounds,’ I replied.

Sammikins put his watch on the table between us. We agreed on the starting and finishing time, and watched the second hand go round. As it came up to the figure twelve, Sammikins cried: ‘They’re off!’

On a sheet of club writing-paper, I kept the score. There were only half a dozen men in the library, one of whom kept sniffing in an irritated fashion at Sammikins’ barks of laughter. The only likely orders appeared to be a party of three senior officers. Immediately after the start, they rang for the waiter, and I heard them asking for large whiskys all round. With decent luck, I was reckoning, they ought to manage another.

Watching them with bold, excited eyes, Sammikins, who knew two of them, discussed their characters. I was embarrassed in case his voice should carry. Like his sister’s, his judgements were simple and direct. He had much more insight than staider men. He told stories about those two in the last war. He liked talking about the military life. Why hadn’t he stayed in the army? I asked him. Yes, he had loved it, he said. With his fierce, restless look, he added that he couldn’t have stood being a peace-time officer. It occurred to me that, in different times, he might have been happy as a soldier of fortune.

No, he couldn’t have stood being a peace-time officer, he said: any more than he could stand the thought of keeping up the estate when his father died.

‘I suppose,’ said Sammikins, with a laugh loud even for him, ‘that I shall have to dodder about in the Lords. How would you like that? Eh?’

He meant, that he would detest it. He was speaking, as usual, the naked truth. Though it didn’t seem to fit him, he had all his family’s passion, which Caro shared, for politics. No one could possibly have less of a political temperament than Sammikins had: yet he loved it all. He loved the House of Commons, it didn’t matter how many enemies he made there. He was talking about his party’s leaders, with the same devastating simplicity with which he had talked about the generals, but with his eyes popping with excitement. He didn’t think any better of the politicians, but they entranced him more.

One of the generals pressed the button by the fireplace, and the waiter came in. Sixteen minutes had passed. They ordered another round. I make a stroke on the writing paper and smiled.

‘Soaking,’ said Sammikins, who was not a specially abstemious man, with disapproval.

No movement from anyone else in the room. The man whom Sammikins’ laugh made wretched was reading a leather-bound volume, another was writing a letter, another gazing critically at a glossy magazine.

‘They want stirring up,’ said Sammikins, in a reproving tone. But he was surveying the room with a gambler’s euphoria. He began speaking of the last appointment of a junior minister — who was Roger’s Parliamentary Under-secretary, occupying the job which Roger had filled under Gilbey.

‘He’s no good,’ said Sammikins. The man’s name was Leverett-Smith. He was spoken of as a safe appointment, which to Sammikins meant that there was no merit in it.

‘He’s rich,’ I said.

‘No, he’s pretty well-off, that’s all.’

It occurred to me that Sammikins did not have an indifference which, in my provincial youth, we should have expected of him. Romantically, we used to talk about the aristocratic contempt for money. Sammikins was rough on ordinary bourgeois affluence: but he had no contempt at all for money, when, as with Diana Skidmore, there was enough of it.

‘He’s no good,’ cried Sammikins. ‘He’s just a boring little lawyer on the make. He doesn’t want to do anything, blast him, he doesn’t even want the power, he’s just pushing on, simply to puff himself up.’

I suspected that Leverett-Smith had been put in as a counterweight to Roger, who scarcely knew him and had not been consulted. I said that such men, who didn’t threaten anyone and who were in politics for the sake of the charade, (for I believed Sammikins was right there) often went a long way.

‘So do clothes-moths,’ said Sammikins, ‘that’s what he is — a damned industrious clothes-moth. We’ve got too many of them, and they’ll do us in.’

Sammikins, who had a store of bizarre information, most of which turned out to be accurate, had two addenda on Leverett-Smith. A, that he and his wife were only keeping together for social reasons, B, that she had been a protégée of Lord—, who happened to be a voyeur. Then, with an insistence that I didn’t understand, he returned to talking of government appointments, as though he had appointments on the brain. At that moment, when twenty-seven minutes had gone, I saw with surprise and chagrin one of the generals get up with long, creaking movements of the legs, and go to the bell.

‘Put down one more, Lewis,’ cried Sammikins, with a cracking laugh, ‘three! That’s an odd number, you know.’

The waiter was very quick. The general called for three pints of bitter, in tankards.

‘That’s a very good idea.’ Sammikins gave another violent laugh. He looked at the watch. Twenty-nine minutes had passed, the second hand was going round.

‘Well,’ he said, staring at me, bold and triumphant.

I heard a sniff from close by. With a glance of hate towards Sammikins, the man who had been registering protest about his noisiness, soberly put a marker into his book, closed it, and went towards the bell.

‘Twenty seconds to spare,’ I said. ‘My game, I think.’

Sammikins swore. Like any gambler I had ever known, he expected to make money out of it. It didn’t seem an addiction so much as a process of interior logic. Both he and Caro lost hundreds a year on their horses, but they always thought of them as a business which would pull round. However, he had to write me out a cheque, while his enemy and bane, in a gravelly voice, still with a hostile glare at Sammikins, ordered a glass of tonic water.

Without any preamble, his cheque passed over to me, Sammikins said: ‘The trouble with Roger is, he can’t make up his mind.’

For an instant I was at a loss, as though I had suddenly got mixed up in a different conversation.

‘That’s why I’ve been chasing you,’ he said, so directly, so arrogantly, so innocently, that it didn’t seem either flattering or unflattering: it just sounded like, and was, the bare truth.

‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’

By now I was ready for anything, but not for what he actually said. Noisily he asked me: ‘Roger hasn’t picked his PPS yet, has he?’

It was a question to which I had not given thought. I assumed that Roger would choose one of a dozen young back-benchers, glad to get their first touch of recognition.

‘Or has he, and we haven’t heard?’ Sammikins insisted.

I said I had not heard the matter so much as mentioned.

‘I want the job,’ said Sammikins.

I found myself curiously embarrassed. I didn’t want to meet his eyes, as though I had done something shady. Didn’t he realize that he was a public figure? Didn’t he realize that he would be a political liability? A good many people admired his devil-may-care, but not the party bosses or other solid men. No politician in his senses would want him as an ally, much less as a colleague, least of all Roger, who had to avoid all rows except the big ones.

I thought that I had better try to speak openly myself.

‘He’s taken one big risk for you already,’ I said.

I was reminding him of the time Roger had defended him in Collingwood’s face.

Yes, he knew all about that. ‘He’s a good chap,’ said Sammikins. ‘He’s a damned clever chap, but I tell you, I wish he could make up his mind.’

‘Has Caro told you anything?’

‘What the hell can she tell me? I expect she’s doing her best.’ He took it for granted that she was persuading Roger on his behalf, working for him as she had done all their lives. I wondered whether she was. She must know that she would be doing her husband harm.

‘She knows what I want. Of course she’s doing her best,’ he said with trust, with dismissive trust. It was a younger brother’s feeling — with all the responsibility and most of the love on the sister’s side.

‘I want the job,’ said Sammikins, speaking like a man who is saying his last word.

It was not his last word, however. In his restless fashion, he arranged for us to go round to Lord North Street for a night-cap, shamelessly hoping that his presence would act like blackmail. As he drove me in his Jaguar — it was getting late, Piccadilly was dark and empty under the trees, even after a vinous night he was a beautiful driver — he repeated his last word. Yes, he wanted the job. Listening to him as he went on talking, I was puzzled that he wanted it so much. True, he might be tired of doing nothing. True, his entire family assumed that political jobs were theirs by right, without any nonsense about qualifications. They were not intellectuals, he had scarcely heard intellectual conversation in his life, but since he was a child he had breathed day by day politics in the air, he had heard the familiar, authoritative gossip about who’s in, who’s out, who’s going to get this or that. But it still seemed strange: here was the humblest of ambitions, and all his energies were fixed on it.

In Caro’s drawing-room, he did not get a yes or no, or even an acknowledgement of suspense. Caro knew why he was there; she was protective, but gave nothing away. Roger also knew why he was there. He was friendly and paternal, himself having a soft spot for Sammikins. Roger was skilled in keeping off the point, and even Sammikins was over-awed enough not to force it. Watching the three of them — Caro looked flushed and pretty, but subdued, and was drinking more than usual — I thought I could guess what had happened. I believed she had, in fact, mentioned Sammikins’ hopes to Roger, full of the sneaking shame with which one tries to pull off something for a child one loves, and knows to be unsuited. I did not think that she had pressed Roger: and I didn’t think that he had told her that the idea was mad.

All the time, Roger was certain of what he was going to do. He did it within a week of Sammikins’ — blackmail? appeal? It looked prosaic. Roger appointed Mrs Henneker’s son-in-law, Tom Wyndham, who at the dinner-party, when Roger was interrogating David Rubin had protested about the American scientists ‘kicking us downstairs’. It was a commonplace choice: it was also a cool one.

Roger knew, as bleakly as anyone, that Tom Wyndham was a stupid man. That didn’t matter. Roger was securing his base. He had calculated the forces against him — the Air Staff, the aircraft industry, the extreme right of his own party, some of the forces which had helped him into power, as Douglas Osbaldiston, another cool analyst, had pointed out in his own ‘front room’.

Roger was making sure of his own forces, and one of them was the Admiralty. It was good tactics, he had decided, to get ‘channels’, private ‘channels’, to them from the start. That was where Wyndham came in. He had been a naval officer himself, his mother-in-law would have her uses. It was worth while making sure of your potential friends, said Roger. As a rule you couldn’t win over your enemies, but you could lose your friends.

The more I saw of him, the sharper-edged he seemed. Now that he was making his first decisions, in private he threw off some of the tricks and covers of his personality, as though they had been an overcoat. When I saw him so, I thought we had a chance.

One morning, though, he did not seem sharp-edged at all. He was wearing a morning-coat, grey waistcoat, striped trousers. He was absent-mindedly nervous. I had watched him when he was anxious, but in nothing like this state. I asked him what was the matter. When I heard the answer, I thought he was joking. He was going to the Palace that morning — to have an audience with the Queen, and to be sworn into the Privy Council.

I had seen dignitaries, industrialists, academics, waiting in the queue at a Palace investiture, with their hands shaking, as though, when they entered into the Presence, they expected some sinister courtier to put out a foot and trip them up. It seemed absurd that Roger should feel as frightened in the shadow of mana. It was easy to feel with him as a detached modern soul — while in fact he concealed a romantic, or better, a superstitious, yearning for an older world. It was not for show, nor for propriety’s sake, that he was a church-goer. When I asked him why he was Conservative, he had given me a rationalization, and a good one; but he had left an obstinate part of his nature out of it. It was not an accident, perhaps, that he married into a family with an historic name: or at least, when he first met Caro, that her name had its own magic for him.

He was fond of laughing off those who were in politics simply for the sake of the charm of government, of the charm of being in the inner circle. Sammikins’ ‘charade’, the charmed circle — people who were lured by it, said Roger, were useless, and he was right. But, for him, there may have been another charm, deeper, subtler, less rational than that.

I felt relieved when he came back from the Palace, looking jaunty again, and produced brisk plans about how we might seduce Lord Lufkin away from the rest of the aircraft industry.

13: In Honour of Lord Lufkin

That summer, Roger judged that we were doing a little better than we had calculated. As carefully as a competent Intelligence officer, he was keeping track of his enemies. Not that they were enemies yet, in any personal sense: so far he had fewer of them than most politicians. The ‘enemies’ he watched were those who just because of what they wanted, or because of the forces behind them, could not help trying to stop him.

About those, he was as realistic as a man could be. Yet, like most realistic men, he detested having the hard truth brought to him by another. I had to tell him, early in the scientists’ series of meetings, that Brodzinski was not budging by an inch. It was news we had both feared, but for an afternoon Roger regarded me as though I were an enemy myself.

Soon he was in action again. Before the House rose in July, he had talked to the Party’s defence committee, which meant fifty back-bench Members, some of whom he knew were already disquieted. Right from the beginning, he had made his calculation. He could live with disquiet on the extreme right, in the long run it would boil over: but if he lost the solid centre of his own party, then he was finished. So he talked — in what language I didn’t know, though I could guess — to the respectable county members, the ‘Knights of the Shire’. According to Wyndham, who was moved to unusual lyricism, the meeting went ‘like a dream’.

During August, Roger asked Osbaldiston to convene a group of top civil servants, to get some administrative machinery ready in time for the scientists’ report. Since this was an inter-departmental group, and Rose was the senior member, it met in his room. A vase of chrysanthemums on the desk, as usual, the window open on to the Park, as usual, and as usual Rose welcoming us with a courtesy so exaggerated that it sounded faintly jeering.

‘My dear Douglas, how extremely good of you to spare the time! My dear Lewis, how very good of you to come!’ Since my office was ten yards away, and since the summons was official, it was not in fact a benevolent exertion on my part.

As we sat round the table, Rose’s opposite numbers in the Service departments, Douglas, a Second Secretary from the Treasury, and me, Rose was just perceptibly tart. He didn’t mean this to be a long meeting. He was irritated at having to hold it at all. He did not indulge his mood. He merely said: ‘I take it that we’ve all seen Lewis Eliot’s memorandum on the scientists’ first few meetings, haven’t we? I believe they’ve been instructed to report to your Minister by October, Douglas, or have I got that wrong?’

‘Quite right,’ said Douglas.

‘In that case, I’m obliged to confess that in the meantime, even this distinguished gathering can only hope to produce a marginal result,’ said Rose. ‘We don’t know what they’re going to say. Nor, unless I seriously misjudge our scientific colleagues, do they. All that we can be reasonably certain about, is that they can be relied upon to say several different and probably contradictory, things.’

There were grins. Rose was not alone in that room in having a generalized dislike of scientists.

‘No, Hector, we can go a bit further than that,’ said Douglas, neither piqued nor over-borne. ‘My master isn’t asking you to do anything quite useless.’

‘My dear Douglas, I should be the last person to suggest that your admirable department, or your admirable Minister, could ever ask anyone such a thing.’

Rose found it hard to forget that Douglas had once been a junior civil servant, working under him.

Right,’ said Douglas. I agree we shan’t actually receive the report until October, but—’

‘By the way,’ Rose broke in, getting down to business. ‘I take it there are remote chances we shall get the report by then?’

‘We ought to,’ I said.

‘But before that comes along, we’ve got a pretty shrewd idea what it’s going to say, in general terms? This paper—’ Douglas tapped it — ‘gives us enough. Some of the scientists are producing arguments at one extreme, and some at the other. There’s this chap Brodzinski, and you ought to know that he’s got some backers, who’s trying to push us into investing a very sizeable fraction of our defence budget, and an even higher fraction of our total scientific manpower, on this pet scheme of his. I ought to say, and Lewis will correct me if I’m wrong, that none of the scientists, even those who think he’s a national danger, have ever suggested this scheme is airy-fairy.’

They had studied the first estimates of the cost. Several would have liked to believe in the scheme. They had, though, to shake their heads. The Air Ministry man said his department wished for an opportunity of ‘another look at it’, and Rose said: ‘Of course, my dear Edgar, of course. But I’m afraid we should all be mildly surprised if your ingenious friend can really persuade us that we can afford the unaffordable.’

‘That’s our view,’ said Douglas. ‘It’s just not on.’

Someone, who was taking note of the meeting, wrote a few words. Nothing more formal was said, and there was no formal decision. From that moment, however, it would have been innocent to think that Brodzinski’s scheme stood a good chance.

Douglas said, ‘The other extreme view — and this isn’t such an easy one — is that the country hasn’t got the resources, and won’t have within foreseeable time, to have any genuine kind of independent weapon at all. That is we shan’t be able to make do without borrowing from the Americans: and the scientists think the balance of advantage is for us to be honest and say so, and slide out of the nuclear weapons business as soon as we conveniently can. As I said, this is the other extreme. But I ought to say that it seems to be held by chaps who are usually level-headed, like Francis Getliffe and our scientific adviser, Walter Luke.’

‘No,’ said Rose, ‘this isn’t such an easy one. They know as well as we do that this isn’t just a scientific decision. It’s an economic decision, and, I should have thought, even more a political one.’

Rose was speaking carefully. He knew precisely what Douglas was aiming at. Rose had not yet declared himself, but he was inclined to think that Douglas was right. Not that he liked him. Douglas was tipped to have the final professional success denied to himself, and he was envious. But liking mattered less than one might have thought, in these alliances.

Douglas, tilting back his chair like an undergraduate, speaking with his casual, lethal relevance, was arguing that the Luke — Getliffe view also, wasn’t really ‘on’. Furthermore, it might be attractive to the public, and we ought to be prepared to ‘damp it down’. It might be a practicable policy ten or fifteen years ahead, but it wasn’t a practicable policy now. The scientists thought it was easy to find absolute solutions; there weren’t any. None of the great world pundits, no one in the world — for once Douglas showed a trace of irritation — knew the right way, or whether there was a way at all.

Rose began to speak, massive, precise, qualified. I was thinking that until Brodzinski had been disposed of, Douglas had spoken like a correct departmental chief, representing his Minister’s view. But what he had just said was nowhere near his Minister’s view, and Douglas must have known it. I was sure that he did not feel either irregular or conspiratorial. This wasn’t intrigue, it was almost the reverse. It was part of a process, not entirely conscious, often mysterious to those taking part in it and sometimes to them above all, which had no name, but which might be labelled the formation, or crystallization, of ‘official’ opinion. This official opinion was expected to filter back to the politicians, so that out of the to-ing and fro-ing a decision would emerge. Who had the power? It was the question that had struck me, moving between Basset and Clapham Common. Perhaps it was a question without meaning — either way, the slick answers were all wrong.

I wanted to play for time. The longer it took for official opinion to crystallize, the better. But I was in an awkward position. Officially, I was junior to these Heads of departments; further, I had to take care that I didn’t speak as though I knew Roger’s mind.

The talk went on. Someone had just said, ‘We mustn’t try to run before we can walk.’ Douglas cocked an eyebrow at me, as he heard that well-judged remark — as though indicating that, though we might be on opposite sides, our literary comradeship was not impaired.

I thought this was my best time.

‘I wonder if I could say something, Hector?’ I put in, ‘Just as a private person?’

Hector Rose was irritated. We had never got on, our natures gritted on each other: but he had known me a long time, in this kind of situation he knew me very well, and he could guess that I was going to break the harmony. He wanted me to be quiet. He said: ‘My dear Lewis. Anything you have to tell us, in any of your various capacities, we shall all be delighted to hear. Please instruct us, my dear Lewis.’

‘I just wanted to raise a question, that’s all.’ I was as used to his techniques as he to mine.

‘I’m sure that would be equally illuminating,’ said Rose.

I asked my question: but I asked it in several different ways. Wasn’t Douglas pre-judging the issue when he talked about Getliffe’s view as the ‘other extreme’? Wasn’t this view, in fact, deliberately conceived as a means of taking one first step? Did they assume that no first step could ever be taken? Were they all accepting that the entire process had got out of conscious control?

Osbaldiston spoke first. ‘I don’t think it’s possible, you know, to look too far ahead.’

‘We’re all grateful to you, Lewis,’ said Rose, ‘for a most interesting piece of exegesis. We’re very, very grateful. But I suggest, with great respect, that we’ve got to deal with immediate situations. The problem really is, isn’t it, what our masters can actually perform in the course of the present Parliament? The point at issue is how much, in that time, they could alter their present defence policy, or whether they can alter it at all. We do appreciate, believe me, your taking the trouble to give us — what shall I call it? — a more uninhibited point of view. Thank you very, very, very much.’

I didn’t mind. I had taken none of them with me, but I didn’t expect to. I had done what I intended, that is, warn them that others were thinking flat contrary to them, that official opinion might not be altogether homogeneous. They knew now, since they were far from fools, that those other opinions must have reached Roger, and that I had intended most of all.

Other people were trying to nobble the civil servants, I thought, a night or two later, when Margaret and I were sitting in the stalls at Covent Garden. I looked at the lower right-hand box and there saw, in white tie, white waistcoat, Hector Rose. That was surprising, for Rose was tone-deaf and hated music. I didn’t care for it myself, but had gone to please Margaret: and, as she had pointed out to me, opera at least had the benefit of words. It was even more surprising to see him as a guest of honour, with one of the most forceful of aircraft manufacturers on his right, the aircraft manufacturer’s wife on his left, and two pretty daughters behind him.

It was absurd to suppose that Rose could be bought by dinner and a ticket to the opera. It was absurd to suppose that Rose could be bought by any money under Heaven: it would be like trying to slip Robespierre a five-pound note. And yet, though he could not have wanted to, he had accepted this invitation. I remembered the instructions he used to give me during the war: that a civil servant ought not to be too finicky about accepting hospitality, but should take it if he felt it natural to do so, and if not, not. I wondered how natural Hector Rose felt in the box at Covent Garden..

It was equally absurd to suppose that, when Roger made a counter-move, Lord Lufkin could be bought by a dinner, even by a lavish dinner in his honour. Lord Lufkin was financially capable of paying for his own dinners, even lavish ones. Yet he too, who disliked being entertained, accepted the invitation. He was one of the hardest and most austere of men, as I had known for years, having worked for him long before. He would be about as easy to bribe as Rose himself. I had never heard a bribe, in the crude sense, so much as hinted at, anywhere near these people, much less offered. In my own life, I had been offered exactly one bribe, flat, across the table — but that had happened when I was a don at Cambridge. Nothing of the sort was thinkable with the Roses and the Lufkins, although enormous contracts flowed from Rose and Osbaldiston towards Lufkin, and enormous influence flowed back. If Roger got his policy through, one enormous contract would cease to flow to Lufkin. That was a reason why Roger invented a pretext for fêting him — and the pretext was, rather improbably, the occasion of his sixty-first birthday.

The point was, Lufkin came. A crowd was waiting for him in the penthouse of the Dorchester. In the hot flowery room, door opened to the corridor so that men could watch for Lufkin himself, stood Hector Rose, Douglas, Walter Luke, Laurence Astill, Monty Cave, Leverett-Smith (the new Parliamentary Secretary), Tom Wyndham, MPs, civil servants, scientists, the whole of Roger’s entourage, businessmen, even some of Lufkin’s competitors. At last he was seen, sighted like the first sail of the Armada, turning out of the main passage, walking along the soundless corridor, flanked by two of his own staff and two hotel servants, like so many security men.

He had got lost on the penthouse floor, he said, as Roger greeted him. Lufkin spoke as though his getting lost was much to his credit, but even more to everyone else’s discredit. He stood there, drinking tomato-juice, surrounded by people absorbing the radiations of power. There was one man whom I had seen absorbing such radiations before; he loved them for their own sake, he was an executive, something like a sales manager, of a rival organization. Bald, rosy-cheeked, faintly Pickwickian, he stayed happy in the presence of the great man, smiling when the great man spoke. I remembered that his name was Hood.

When we moved into the dining-room, Lufkin sat on Roger’s right, neat-headed, skull-faced, appearing younger than most of the company, although he was the oldest man present. He was also the most successful man present, in the terms of that world. He was a nonconformist minister’s son who had made a big fortune. But it wasn’t his money which made him so important to Roger: it was partly the concentration of industrial power he had in his hands, partly because he was the most unusual of tycoons. He had taken a peerage from a Labour government, but he was so powerful, so indifferent, that his fellow tycoons had by now to forgive him even that. Able, technically far-sighted, bleak, he sat by Roger’s side, like one who is above the necessity to talk. If I knew him, there would be only one subject on which he would discover the necessity to talk: he would not be above probing the Minister’s intention about the contract. When he knew, which would not be tonight, that the contract might be cancelled, he would then discover the necessity to talk about which alternative contract the Minister was proposing to give him in exchange. I was certain that Roger was prepared for these bargains months ahead. With Lufkin placated, the other tycoons in the industry would have lost their hardest voice. This was one of the oldest tactics of all.

Lufkin’s birthday party, the great table, the flowers, the glass, the miscellaneous crowd — looked a singular festivity. Lufkin himself, who was spare and ascetic, ate almost nothing — the caviare passed him, the pâté passed him. He allowed himself two strong whiskys, which he drank along with his fish, and let the rest of the meal go by. Meanwhile, as I heard, sitting opposite them, Roger was getting to work with flattery.

To an outsider, it would have sounded gross, the flattery squeezed out like toothpaste. My own fear was, not that Roger was overdoing it, but that he was not doing it enough. Lufkin was one of the ablest men, and certainly one of the most effective, that I had known. He was tough, shrewd, curiously imaginative, and for his own purposes a first-rate judge of men. But none of that, none of it at all, conflicted with a vanity so overwhelming that no one quite believed it. In days past, when he had paid me as a legal consultant, I used to hear his own staff chanting his praises like so many cherubim; yet even they, he felt, missed important points in his character and achievements. I remembered hearing spinster-aunts of mine telling me in my childhood that great men never cared for flattery. Well, Lufkin would have been a shock to my aunts. It would have been even more of a shock for them to discover that among my most gifted acquaintances, he liked flattery more than the others — but not all that much more.

Lufkin showed no pleasure as he listened to the eulogies. Occasionally he corrected Roger on points of fact — such as when Roger suggested, in stretching his interests from the chemical industry to aircraft, that he had taken a risk. Lufkin commented: ‘It wasn’t a risk if you knew what you were doing.’

‘It must have taken nerve as well as judgement,’ said Roger.

‘That’s as maybe,’ Lufkin replied. Perhaps from the set of his small, handsome head, one might have told that he was not displeased.

Once or twice they were exchanging serious questions. ‘Don’t touch it. You’ll be throwing good money after bad,’ said Lufkin, as though he couldn’t be wrong. Roger knew, as I did, that he was not often wrong.

I could not guess how they were feeling about each other. I hoped that Lufkin, whose vanity did not fog his cold eye for ability, could scarcely miss Roger’s. I was encouraged when, after Roger had proposed the guest of honour’s health, Lufkin got up to reply. He began to tell the story of his life. I had heard it a good many times, and it was always a sign of favour.

He was a very bad speaker, following a very good one. He had no sense of an audience, while Roger’s tone had been just right. None of that worried Lufkin. He stood, erect and bony as a young man, as confident of his oratory as Winston Churchill in one of his less diffident moods. He began by a few bleak words about governments in general, and ministers in particular. He would have been a richer man, he informed us, if he had never listened to any Minister. Then, with his characteristic gift of getting the moral edge both ways, he added that money had never mattered to him. He just wanted to do his duty, and he was glad Roger Quaife had understood him.

There was nothing oblique or hypocritical about Lufkin. Like a supreme man of action, he believed in what he said and the obvious goodness of his intention. He proceeded to illustrate this by his own story. It was always the same. It bore a curious family resemblance to Mein Kampf. It consisted of about six highly abstract anecdotes, most of which had happened, so far as they had a historical origin at all, before he was twenty. One consisted of the young Lufkin being taken by the family doctor — it was not clear why — to see a factory working at half-strength. ‘I decided there and then that when I had factories of my own, they were going to be full. Or they weren’t going to be open at all. Period.’ Another, which I specially liked, told of a slightly older Lufkin being warned by some anonymous wiseacre — ‘Lufkin, you’ll fail, because you won’t remember that the best is the enemy of the good.’ Lufkin’s skull-face looked impassive, and he added ominously: ‘Well, I had to make that chap an allowance in his old age.’ The story of Lufkin’s life always ended in his early twenties. It did so now, which meant that he had reached a date when many of the dinner-party were scarcely born. That did not concern him. Abruptly he sat down, with a grim smile of satisfaction, and folded his arms on his chest.

There was great sycophantic applause, Hood clapping his hands higher than the hands of the rest, his face radiant, as if he had been swept away by the performance of a world-famous soprano, and thought a standing ovation would be in order. Roger patted Lufkin on the back. Yet, I was becoming pretty sure, neither of them underrated the other. Roger had seen too much of powerful men to be put off by the grotesque aspect of Lufkin. It looked as though they might reach a working agreement, and if so, Roger had scored his first tactical success.

14: Humiliation Among Friends

A week after Lufkin’s birthday, I was standing in a crowded drawing-room at the American Ambassador’s house, deafened by the party’s surge and swell. Margaret and I had been exchanging a word or two with the wife of J C Smith, Collingwood’s nephew. I had not met her before. She was a short, slender woman, dark, attractive in a muted way, not very talkative. I wondered incuriously why I hadn’t seen her husband’s name in Hansard for so long. She passed away from us. Someone else called out to Margaret, and in the huddle I found myself against David Rubin.

Soon I was shaking my fingers to restore the circulation while he looked at me with sombre-eyed Schadenfreude. I had asked for whisky with plenty of ice, and had got it: the glass was so thin that my hand had become numbed with cold. Just then, one of the embassy counsellors came towards Rubin, looking for him, not drifting in the party’s stream. Although he knew me well, his manner was constrained. After a few cordialities, he apologized and took Rubin aside.

For an instant I was left alone in the ruck of the party. Over the heads of the people nearby I could see the flaxen hair of Arthur Plimpton, the young American who was going round with Francis Getliffe’s daughter. I caught his eye and beckoned him: but before he could make his way through the crowd, Rubin and the diplomat were back.

‘Lewis had better hear this,’ said Rubin.

‘It’ll be all over town in an hour or so, anyway,’ said the diplomat.

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know whether you’re in the picture already,’ he replied, ‘but your people and the French are going into Su-ez.’

He pronounced the name in the American manner, with time accent on the second syllable.

I was not occupied with phonetic niceties. I cursed. Both of them were used to me as a man with an equable public face. Suddenly they had seen me lose my temper and were uncomfortable.

‘Didn’t you expect it?’

From the summer onwards I had heard forecasts and thought they were irresponsible. ‘Good God Almighty,’ I said, ‘don’t you think I believed that we had the faintest residue of sense? Do you think any sane man would have taken it seriously?’

‘I’m afraid you’ve got to now,’ said the diplomat.

Just then Arthur Plimpton joined us. He greeted the other two, then looked at me and asked straight out: ‘Is there anything wrong, sir?’

‘Yes, Arthur, there is. We’ve gone off our blasted heads.’ He was a great favourite of mine. He was a craggily handsome young man of twenty-three. When he got older, the cheekbones would protrude and the bright blue eyes sink in: he already looked harder than an Englishman of the same age. He was capable, arrogant, and had a pleasant touch of cheek. He was also considerate, though at that moment the most he could think of doing was reach me another drink.

Within half an hour, he and David Rubin had drawn my wife and me away from the party and had established us in a pub in St John’s Wood. They were surprised, I realized as I became cooler, that we were so much outraged. But they were both kind and tactful men. They wanted to see us happier. For a time they kept off the evening’s news, but finding that made us more preoccupied, Arthur, the younger and more direct, plunged in. He asked what was worrying us most.

Margaret burst out, ‘What isn’t?’

Just for a second, Arthur smiled.

Her eyes were bright, she had flushed down her neck. Then he realized that she was more violent, more intransigent, than I was.

‘They’ve learned nothing and they’re no good,’ she said. ‘I’ve never liked playing along behind them, and I wish we never had!’

‘All I hope,’ said David Rubin, with a sad, sardonic smile, ‘is that if you must do something immoral, you manage to make it work.’

‘How can we bring it off?’ I cried. ‘What century do you think we’re living in? Do you think we can hold the Middle East with a couple of brigade groups?’

‘I don’t know how this’ll go over in our country,’ said Arthur.

‘How will it?’ I said angrily.

Rubin shrugged his shoulders.

I said: ‘Countries, when their power is slipping away, are always liable to do idiotic things. So are social classes. You may find yourselves in the same position some day.’

‘Not yet,’ said Arthur, with confidence.

‘No, not yet,’ said David Rubin.

Margaret and I were humiliated, and the others went on trying to cheer us up. When I had glimmers of detachment, which was not often that night, I thought that their attitudes were diametrically opposite to what one might expect. David Rubin was a man of deep and complex sophistication. His grandparents had been born in Poland, he had no English genes in him at all. Yet it was he who loved England more uncritically, which was strange, for he was one of the most critical of men. He did not like being patronized by English pundits, but he still had a love-affair with England, just a little like that of Brodzinski, who was a scientific enemy of his. He loved the pretty, picture-book England — far more than Margaret and I could have loved it. And at first sight surprisingly, far more so than Arthur Plimpton, who was as Anglo-Saxon as we were, who had the run of Basset and Diana Skidmore’s smart friends, who knew the privileged in our country as well as his own, and who had no special respect for any of them.

If Arthur had been an English boy, I should, when I first met him a couple of years before, have been able to place him within five minutes. As it was, it was apparent that he was well-off. But it had taken Diana to enlighten me that that was putting it mildly. Diana did not show enthusiasm for the idea that he might marry Penelope Getliffe. Diana considered that marriage with the daughter of a scientist, however eminent, would be a come-down. She was laying plans for something more suitable.

Despite, or perhaps because of, all this, Arthur was not over-impressed by England. On that night of Suez, he was full of idealism, genuine idealism, damning the British Government. I distinctly recalled that when he spoke of capitalist enterprises, particularly of methods of adding to his own fortune, he showed an anti-idealism which would have made Commodore Vanderbilt look unduly fastidious. Yet that night, he talked with great hope and purity.

It heartened Margaret, whose nature was purer than mine. Myself, I was discouraged. I was remembering the outbursts of idealism that I had listened to, from young men as good as this one, back in my own group, in a provincial town, when our hopes had been more revolutionary than Arthur could have believed, but still as pure as his. I fell silent, half-hearing the argument, Arthur and Margaret on one side, David Rubin on the other, Rubin becoming more and more elaborate and Byzantine. I was signalling to Margaret to come away. If I stayed there, I should just become more despondent, and more drunk.

There was one glint of original sin, as Arthur saw Margaret and me getting ready to go. He might have been talking with extreme purity; but he was not above using his charm on Margaret, persuading her to invite Penelope to stay at our flat, and, as it were coincidentally, him too. I supposed he was trying to get her out of the atmosphere of the Cambridge house. But I was feeling corrupt that night, and it occurred to me that, like most of the very rich people I had known, he was trying to save money.

15: Self-defence

On the Sunday afternoon, Margaret and I walked down, under the smoky, blue-hazed autumn sky, to Trafalgar Square. We could not get nearer than the bottom of the Haymarket. Margaret was taken back, high-coloured, to the ‘demos’ of her teens. For her, more than for me, the past might be regained; she could not help hoping to recapture the spirit of it, just as she hoped that places we had visited together in the past might always hold a spark of their old magic. She was not as possessed by time lost as I was, yet I believed she could more easily possess herself of it. The speeches of protest boomed out. We were part of a crowd, we were all together. It was a long time since I had been part of a crowd, and, that day, I felt as Margaret did.

During the next few days, wherever I went, in the offices, clubs and dinner-parties, tempers were more bitter than they had been in this part of the London world since Munich. As at the time of Munich, one began to refuse invitations to houses where the quarrel would spring up. This time, however, the divide took a different line. Hector Rose and his colleagues, the top administrators, had most of them been devoted Municheers. Now, conservative as they were, disposed by temperament and training to be at one with Government, they couldn’t take it. Rose astonished me when he talked.

‘I don’t like committing my own future actions, my dear Lewis, which in any case will shortly be of interest to no one but myself — but I confess that I don’t see how I’m going to hypnotize myself into voting Conservative again.’

He was irked because for once he had known less than usual about the final decision: but also, he was shocked. ‘I don’t mind these people—’ he meant the politicians, and for once did not use the obsequious ‘our masters’ — ‘failing to achieve an adequate level of intelligence. After all, I’ve been trying to make them understand the difference between a precise and an imprecise statement for nearly forty years. But I do mind, perhaps I mind rather excessively, when they fail to show the judgement of so many cockatoos.’ Bitterly, Rose considered the parallel, and appeared to find it close enough.

He was sitting in his room behind the bowl of flowers. He said: ‘Tell me, Lewis, you are rather close to Roger Quaife‚ is that true? Closer, that is, than one might expect a civil servant, even a somewhat irregular civil servant, to be to a politician, even a somewhat irregular politician?’

‘That’s more or less true.’

‘He must have been in it, you know. Or did you hear?’

‘Nothing at all,’ I said.

‘The rumour is that he put up some sort of opposition in Cabinet. I should be mildly curious to know. I have seen a good many Ministers who were remarkably bold outside, but who somehow were not quite so intransigent when they got round the Cabinet table.’

There was a new rasp in Rose’s tone. He went on: ‘It might conceivably do a trivial amount of good, if you dropped the word to Quaife that a number of comparatively sensible and responsible persons have the feeling that they suddenly find themselves doing their sensible and responsible work in a lunatic asylum. It can’t do any harm, if you communicate that impression. I should be very, very grateful to you.’

Even for Rose, it took an effort of discipline that afternoon to return to his duties, to his ‘sensible and responsible work’.

Meanwhile, Tom Wyndham and his friends of the back benches were happy. ‘I feel I can hold my head up at last,’ said one of them. I did not see Diana Skidmore during those days, but I heard about her: the whole of the Basset circle was solid for Suez. Just as the officials seemed slumped in their chairs, the politicians became brilliant with euphoria. Sammikins, for once not odd man out, exuded more euphoria than any of them. In his case, there was a special reason. He happened, alone among his right wing group, to be pro-Zionist. Whether this was just a whim, I did not know, but he had applied for a commission in the Israeli Army, and he was riotously happy at the prospect of getting in one more bout of fighting before he grew too old.

In the clubs, the journalists and political commentators carried the rumours along. We were all at the pitch of credulity or suspiciousness — because in crisis these states are the same, just as they are in extreme jealousy — when anything seemed as probable as anything else. Some supporters of the Government were restive, we heard. I had a conversation myself with Cave and a couple of his friends, who were speaking the same bitter language as the officials, the professional men. ‘This is the last charge of Eton and the Brigade of Guards,’ said one young Conservative. How could we stop it? How many members of the Cabinet had been against it? Was — going to resign? Above all, what had Roger done?

One morning, during a respite from Cabinet meetings, Roger sent for me to give some instructions about the scientists’ committee. He did not volunteer a word about Suez. I thought that, just then, it would do no good to press it. Soon a secretary came in: Mr Cave had called. Would the Minister see him?

On the instant, as soon as the name was mentioned, Roger’s equable manner broke. ‘Am I never going to get a minute’s peace? Good God alive, why don’t some of you protect me a bit?’

He relapsed into sullenness, saying he was too busy, too pestered, she must make some excuse. The girl waited. She knew, as well as Roger did, that Cave was the most talented of Roger’s party supporters. She knew he ought not to be turned away. At last Roger, with a maximum of ill-grace, said he supposed she had better send him in.

I made to go out, but Roger, frowning, shook his head. When Cave entered, his head was thrown back from his slack, heavy body, eyes flickering under the thick arches of brow. Roger had made himself seem matey again. It was Cave who came to the point.

‘We can’t grumble about things being dull, can we?’

There were a few remarks, affable, half-malicious, to which Roger did not need to reply. All of a sudden, Cave ceased being devious.

‘Is there really any bit of sanity in this affair?’ he said.

‘What am I expected to say to that?’

‘I’m speaking for some of your friends, you know,’ said Cave. ‘Is there anything which you know and we don’t, that would alter our opinion?’

‘I shouldn’t think so, should you?’

‘No, Roger,’ said Cave, who, having thrown away side-digs or any kind of malice, was speaking with authority. ‘I was asking you seriously. Is there anything we don’t know?’

Roger replied, for a second friendly and easy: ‘Nothing that would make you change your minds.’

‘Well, then; you must know what we think. This is stupid. It’s wrong. On the lowest level, it won’t work.’

‘This isn’t exactly an original opinion, is it?’

Neither Cave nor I knew then, though I was able to check the date later, that on the night before the Cabinet had heard of the veto from Washington.

‘I’m quite sure it’s your own. But how much have you been able to put it across?’

‘You don’t expect me to tell you what’s happened in the Cabinet, do you?’

‘You have been known to drop a hint, you know.’ Cave, his chin sunk down, had spoken with a touch of edge.

At that remark, Roger’s temper, which I had not seen him lose before, except as a tactic, broke loose. His face went white: his voice became both thick and strangulated. He cried: ‘I’ll tell you one thing. I’ve not lost my senses. I don’t believe this is the greatest stroke of English policy since 1688. How in hell can you imagine that I don’t see what you see?’ His anger was ugly and harsh. He did not relish the voice of conscience, perhaps most of all, when it came from a man as clever, as much a rival, as Monty Cave: but that wasn’t all. That was only the trigger.

‘I’ll tell you another thing,’ Roger shouted. ‘You’re wondering what I said in Cabinet. I’ll tell you. I said absolutely nothing.’

Cave stared at him, not put off by violence, for he was not an emotional coward, but astonished. In a moment he said, steadily: ‘I think you should have done.’

‘Do you? Then it’s time you learned something about the world you’re living in.’ He rounded on me. ‘You pretend to know what politics is like! It’s time you learned something, too. I tell you, I said absolutely nothing. I’m sick and tired of having to explain myself every step of the way. This is the politics you all talk about. Nothing I could have said would make the slightest difference. Once these people had got the bit between their teeth, there was no doubt what was going to happen. Yes, I let it go on round me. Yes, I acquiesced in something much more indefensible than you’ve begun to guess. And you expect me to explain, do you? Nothing I could have said would have made the faintest difference. No, it would have made one difference. It would have meant that one newcomer would have lost whatever bit of credit he possessed. I’ve taken risks. You’ve both seen me take an unjustified risk.’

He was referring to his defence of Sammikins. He was speaking with extreme rancour, as though denouncing the folly, and worse, of somebody else. ‘If I were any good at what I’m trying to do, I never ought to allow myself to take risks for the sake of feeling handsome. I only ought to take one risk. I’ve got a fifty per cent chance of doing what I set out to do.’

He snapped his fingers, less unobtrusively than usual. ‘If I can’t do what we believe in, then I reckon no one is going to do it. For that, I’ll make a great many sacrifices you two would be too genteel to make. I’ll sacrifice all the useless protests. I’ll let you think I’m a trimmer and a time-server. I’ll do anything. But I’m not prepared for you two to come and teach me when I’ve got to be noble. It doesn’t matter whether I look noble or contemptible, so long as I bring this off. I’m fighting on one front. That’s going to be hard enough. Nothing that any of you say is going to make me start fighting on two fronts, or any number of fronts, or whatever you think I ought to fight on.’ There was a pause.

‘I don’t find it as easy as you do,’ said Monty Cave. ‘Isn’t it slightly too easy to find reasons for doing nothing, when it turns out to be advantageous to oneself?’

Roger’s temper had subsided as suddenly as it had blown up.

‘If I were going to fall over backwards to get into trouble, whenever there are decent reasons for keeping out of harm’s way, then I shouldn’t be any use to you, or in this job.’

For a man of action — which he was, as much so as Lord Lufkin — Roger was unusually in touch with his own experience. But as he made that reply, I thought he was speaking like other men of action, other politicians that I had known. They had the gift, common to college politicians like my old friend Arthur Brown, or national performers like Roger, of switching off self-distrust, of knowing when not to be too nice about themselves. It was not a romantic gift: but it was one, as more delicate souls like Francis Getliffe found to their disadvantage, the lack of which not only added to the pain of life, but cost one half the game.

16: Pretext for a Conversation

The days of Suez were over. Monty Cave, with two other junior Ministers, had resigned from the Government. There were still dinner-parties from which it was advisable to excuse ourselves. But I could not excuse myself from Gilbey’s speech in the House of Lords.

It was not an occasion made for drama. There were perhaps forty men lolling on the red benches, under the elaboration of stained glass, the brass and scarlet of the galleries, the chamber more flashy than the Commons, the colours hotter. If Roger had not asked me, I should not have thought of listening. The Government spokesman was uttering generalities, at the tranquillizing length which Douglas Osbaldiston judged suitable, about the defence programme after Suez. The Opposition was expressing concern. One very old peer muttered mysteriously about the use of the camel. A young peer talked about bases. Then Gilbey rose, from the back of the Government benches. He was looking ill, iller than he really was, I thought. It occurred to me that he was doing his best to emulate the elder Pitt. But I hadn’t realized what he was capable of. Speaking to an official brief, he was fumbling, incompetent, and had embarrassed us for years. On his own, he was eloquent, and as uninhibited as an actor of his own generation playing Sydney Carton.

‘I should have liked to speak before your lordships in the uniform which has been the greatest pride and privilege of my life,’ he told them in his light, resonant, reedy tenor. ‘But a man should not wear uniform who is not well enough to fight.’ Slowly he put his hand on his heart. ‘In recent days, my lords, I have wished devoutly that I was well enough to fight. When the Prime Minister, God bless him, decided with a justice and righteousness that are as unchallengeable as any in our history, that we had to intervene by force of arms to keep the peace, and our own inalienable rights in Suez, I looked the world in the face as I have not been able to do these last ten years. For a few days, true Englishmen were able to look the whole world in the face. Is this the last time that true Englishmen will have that privilege, my lords?’

As usual with Lord Gilbey, it was ham. As usual with his kind of ham, it was perfectly sincere.

But Gilbey, despite his sincerity, was not so simple as he seemed. This speech was a threnody for his own England: but it turned into an opportunity for revenge on those who had kicked him out. He was not clever, but he had some cunning. He had worked out that the enemies of Suez within the Government had been his own enemies. As the rumours that Roger was anti-Suez went round the clubs, Gilbey had decided that these were the forces, this man the intriguer, who had supplanted him. Like other vain and robust men, Gilbey had no capacity for forgiveness whatsoever. He did not propose to forgive this time. Speaking as an elder statesman, without mentioning Roger by name, he expressed his doubts about the nation’s defences, about ‘intellectual gamblers’ who would let us all go soft. ‘This is a knife in the back,’ an acquaintance in the gallery wrote on an envelope and passed to me.

Gilbey was finishing. ‘My lords, I wish for nothing more than that I could assure you that the country’s safety is in the best possible hands. It is a long time since I lay awake at night. I have found myself lying awake, these last bitter nights, wondering whether we can become strong again. That is our only safety. Whatever it costs, whether we have to live like paupers, this country must be able to defend itself. Most of us here, my lords, are coming to the end of our lives. That matters nothing to me, nothing to any of us, if only, at the hour of our death, we can know that the country is safe.’

Again, slowly, Gilbey put his hand on his heart. As he sat down, he took from his waistcoat pocket a small pill-box. There were ‘Hear hears’, and one or two cheers from the benches round him. Gilbey took a capsule, and closed his eyes. He sat there with eyes closed, hand on heart, for some minutes. Then, bowing to the Woolsack, leaning on the arm of a younger man, he left the Chamber.

When I had to report this performance to Roger, he took it better than other bad news. ‘If it comes to playing dirty,’ he said, ‘aristocrats have got everyone else beaten, any day of the week. You should see my wife’s relatives when they get to work. It’s a great disadvantage to be held back by middle-class morality.’

He spoke with equanimity. We both knew that the enemies, both as people and as groups, would become visible from now on. The extreme right, he was saying, was bound to be ten times more powerful in any society like ours, or the American society, than the extreme left. He had been watching them before this. It was not only Gilbey who would be talking, he said.

No, it was not only Gilbey who would be talking, as Caro proved to me a few days later, when she came to have a drink at our flat. She herself, like all her family, had been pro-Suez. At the dinner-table in Lord North Street, she had been outspoken for it, while Roger had not said much. Had they arranged this between themselves, or did they know the moves so well that they did not need to? It was good tactics for Roger to have a wife, and a Seymour, who was talking the party line. Good tactics or not, pre-arranged or not, Caro believed what she said. Once again, people were not clever enough to dissimulate. When Caro talked to me with a bold, dashing, innocent stare, I was furious with her, but I did not doubt that she was honest. She was as much pro-Suez as Lord Gilbey, and for the same reason. What was more, she insisted that Roger’s constituents were pro-Suez too, including many of the poor.

She pressed me to visit them, wanted so urgently to take me, that I suspected she might have another motive. She wore me down. One afternoon in November, she drove me down to what she called her ‘office’. We had not far to go, for Roger held one of the safe Kensington seats. Caro drove through the remnants of gentility in Queen’s Gate, the private hotels, the flats, the rooming-houses, the students’ hostels, past the end of Cromwell Road and Earl’s Court — crowded with the small-part actresses, the African students, the artists, all displaying themselves in the autumn sun, and (I remarked to Caro) as remote from Lord Gilbey’s concerns as if he were a Japanese daimyo. Caro just said: ‘Most of them don’t vote anyway.’

Her ‘office’ turned out to be in one of the back streets close by Olympia, a back-street of terrace houses, like those I used to walk past in my childhood on the way home. Each Monday afternoon, Caro used, so I gathered, to sit from two to six in the ‘front room’ of one of her constituency ‘chums’, a big woman with a glottal Cockney accent, who made us a pot of tea, was on hearty, patting, egalitarian terms with Caro, and cherished her delight at calling a woman of title by her Christian name.

That room, that street, seemed unbusinesslike for Caro. It was the wrong end of the constituency. The seat was safe, the Kensington end would go on returning Roger, if he turned into a gorilla. But down here she was surrounded by the working-class. Among the knockabout poor, the lumpen proletariat, she might pick up a vote or two; but the rest, with similar English impartiality and phlegm, would go on voting for another gorilla, provided he was Roger’s opponent.

There Caro sat, in the tiny, close-smelling front room, ready to talk to any caller for hours to come. Through the window, the houses opposite stood near and plain, so near that one could see the wood-pocks on the doors. The first of Caro’s visitors — perhaps clients was a better word — were Conservative supporters, elderly people living on small private means or pensions, who had made the trip from Courtfield Gardens or Nevern Square, from single rooms in the high nineteenth-century houses, who had come out here — for what? Mostly to have someone to talk to, I thought.

A good many of them were lonely, pointlessly lonely, cooking for themselves, going out to the public library for books. Some wanted to speak of their young days, of gentilities past and gone. They were irremediably lonely in the teeming town, lonely, and also frightened. They worried about the bombs: and though some of them would have said they had nothing to live for, that made them less willing to die. ‘Dying is a messy business anyway,’ said an old lady who had thirty years before taught at a smart girls’ school, putting a stoical face on it. I couldn’t have comforted her: dying was a messy business, but this was a hard way to die, frightened, neglected and alone. I couldn’t have comforted her, but Caro could, not through insight, not even through sympathy, for Caro was as brave as her brother — but through a kind of comradeship, unexacting, earthy, almost callous as though saying: We’re all dirty flesh, we’re all in the same boat.

Those genteel clients, some eccentric and seedy, some keeping up appearances, were pro-Suez all right. That wasn’t a surprise. It was more of a surprise when I listened to the later ones. They came from the streets round about, working people finished for the day; they were the sort of mixture you could pick up anywhere, just beyond the prosperous core of the great, muddled, grumbling town; they worked on the Underground and in small factories, they filled in their pools coupons and bet with a street bookmaker. They were members of trade unions and voted Labour. Their reasons for coming along were matter-of-fact — mostly to do with housing, sometimes with schools.

In her turn, Caro was brisk and matter-of-fact: yes, that could be taken up, no, that wasn’t on.

She gave one or two a tip for a race next day — not de haut en bas, but because she was, if possible, slightly more obsessed with horse-racing than they were themselves. She was playing fair, but once or twice she mentioned Suez, sometimes the others did. It was true what she had stated: there were several who would never have voted for ‘her people’, they would have said they were against the bosses — but just then, in a baffled, resentful fashion, they were on her side and Lord Gilbey’s, not on mine.

When she had said her goodbyes, and we went outside into the sharp night, the stars were bright for London. Behind the curtains, lights shone pallid in the basement rooms. At the corner, the pub stood festooned with bulbs, red, yellow and blue. The whole street was squat, peaceful, prosaic, cheerful. Caro was insisting that I should go back to Lord North Street for a drink. I knew that Roger was in the country making a speech. I knew she was not so fond of my company as all that. She still had something on her mind.

She was driving fast, the eastward traffic was slight on the way home to Westminster.

‘You see,’ she said. She meant that she had been right.

I wasn’t pleased. I began arguing with her; this was a tiny sample which showed nothing, not the real midland or northern working-class. But I wasn’t sure. Some politicians brought back from their constituencies the same report as hers.

‘I hope they’re all pleased with the result,’ I said. ‘I hope you are, too.’

‘We ought to have gone through with it,’ said Caro.

‘You’re all clinging with your fingernails on to the past,’ I said. ‘Where in God’s name do you think that is going to take us?’

‘We ought to have gone through with it.’

Out of patience with each other, tempers already edged, we sat in her drawing-room. She had been talking all the afternoon. I was tired with having just sat by: but she was restless and active. She mentioned the two boys, both at preparatory schools. Neither of them was ‘bright’, she said, with an air of faint satisfaction. ‘My family was never much good at brains.’

I fancied that when I left she would go on drinking by herself. She was looking older that night, the skin reddened and roughened round her cheek-bones. But it made no difference to her prettiness, and she walked about the room, not with grace, but with the spring, the confidence in her muscles, of someone who loved the physical life.

She went back to the sofa, curled her legs under her, and gazed straight at me.

‘I want to talk,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘You knew, did you?’ She was staring at me as boldly as her brother had done in his club. She went on: ‘You know that Roger has had his own line on this?’ (She meant Suez.) ‘You know it, I know you know it, and it’s dead opposite to the way I feel. Well, that’s all down the drain now. It doesn’t matter a hoot what any of us thought. We’ve just got to cut our losses and start again.’

Suddenly she asked me: ‘You see Roger quite a lot nowadays, don’t you?’ I nodded.

‘I suppose you realize that no one has any influence on him?’

She gave her loud, unconstricted laugh.

‘I don’t mean he’s a monster. He lets me do anything I want round the house, and he’s good with the children. But when it comes to things outside, it’s a different kettle of fish. When it comes to where he’s going and how he’s going to get there, then no one has a scrap of influence on him.’

She said it with submission. Gossips at Basset, and places like it, often said confidently that she ran him. Partly because she was splendid to look at, partly because, as in the incident of Sammikins, Roger behaved to her with deference and chivalry. She’s the master in that set-up, the gossips said in knowledgeable whispers, particularly in Caro’s smart, rich world.

Caro had just told me who the master was. She said it as though with surprise at her own submission. Also, as she spoke, there was a jab of triumph at my expense, for she was insisting that I was a subordinate also. She liked insisting on it — because Caro, who seemed as dashing and as much a gambler as her brother, whom other women grumbled had had all the luck, was jealous of her husband’s friends.

‘No one’s going to push him where he doesn’t want to go,’ she said, ‘it’s just as well to get that straight.’

‘I’ve done a certain amount of business with him, you know,’ I said.

‘I know about the business you’ve been doing. What do you take me for?’ she cried, ‘that’s why I’ve got to talk to you. What is it all going to add up to?’

‘I should guess,’ I said, ‘that he’s a better judge of that than I am.’

‘I’ve not said so to him’ — Caro’s eyes were fierce — ‘because one never ought to say these things or even think them, once he’s made up his mind, if one’s going to be any help — but I doubt if he’s going to get away with it.’

‘It’s a risk,’ I replied. ‘But he’s gone into it with his eyes open.’

‘Has he?’

‘What do you mean? Don’t you believe in what he’s doing?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got to believe in it.’

‘Well?’

‘I can’t argue with you. I don’t know enough,’ she said. ‘But I’d follow my instincts, and I don’t think he’s got an even chance of getting away with it. So I want to ask you something.’ She was speaking, not in a friendly tone, but with passion.

‘What is it?’

‘He’ll do what he wants in the long run. I’ve given you fair warning. But you and your friends can make it more difficult for him. Don’t. That’s what I’m asking you. I want you to give him room to manoeuvre. He may have to slide gracefully out of this whole business. That doesn’t matter, if he does it in time. But if he gets in it up to the neck, then he might ruin himself. I tell you, you and your friends mustn’t make it too difficult for him.’

She was no more intellectual than Sammikins. She rarely read anything, except fashionable memoirs. But she knew this game of high politics better than I did, perhaps better than Roger did himself. She knew it as a game, in which one won or lost. It did not count whether Roger had to abandon a policy. What did count, was whether his chances of a high office were going up or down. To that, she was utterly committed, utterly loyal, with every cell of her flesh.

Previously, I had been getting colder to her. But suddenly the passion of her loyalty moved me.

I said, the whole campaign was in his hands. He was too good a politician not to smell the dangers.

‘You’ve got to make it easy for him.’

‘I don’t think you need worry—’

‘How do you expect me not to? What’s going to happen to him if this goes wrong?’

‘I should have thought’ — I was now speaking gently — ‘that he was a very tough man. He’d come back, I’m sure he would.’

‘I’ve seen too many future PMs,’ she said, the edge having left her voice also, ‘who’ve made a mess of something, or somehow or other taken the wrong turn. They’re pretty pathetic afterwards. It must be awful to have a brilliant future behind you. I don’t know whether he could bear it.’

‘If he had to bear it,’ I said, ‘then of course he would.’

‘He’d never be satisfied with second prizes. He’d eat his heart out. Don’t you admit it? He’s made for the top, and nothing else will do.’

As she gazed at me with great open guiltless eyes, she was immersed in him. Then, all of a sudden, the intimacy and tension broke. She threw her head back in a hearty, hooting laugh, and exclaimed: ‘Just imagine him giving up the unequal struggle and settling down as Governor-General of New Zealand!’ She had cheered up, and had poured herself another drink.

I was amused by Caro’s picture of ultimate failure and degradation.

Soon I said that it was time I went home. She tried, insistently, naggingly, to keep me there for another quarter of an hour. Although we were on better terms by now, she was not fond of me. It was simply that, with husband away, children away, she was bored. Like Diana, and other rich and pretty women, she was not good at being bored, and the person nearest to her had to pay for it. When I refused to stay she sulked, but began thinking that she would enjoy gambling her time away. As I left the house, she was ringing round her friends, trying to arrange for a night’s poker.

17: The Switch of Suspicion

I had said to Caro that Roger was too good a politician not to smell the dangers. In fact, a nose for danger was the most useful single gift in the political in-fighting: unless it stopped one acting altogether, in which case it was the least. That winter, while others were still vertiginous about Suez, Roger was looking out for opponents, critics, enemies, a year ahead. His policy would be coming into the open then. It was better tactics to let powers like Lufkin get the first taste of it from Roger direct. Patiently he set himself to dine out with them, telling them a little, occasionally letting out a burst of calculated candour.

Moving round Whitehall and the clubs, I got some of the backwash of all this. I even heard a compliment from Lord Lufkin, who said: ‘Well, considering that he’s a politician, you can’t say that he’s altogether a fool.’ This evaluation, which in both form and content reminded me of the New Criticism, was the highest praise I remembered Lufkin bestowing on anyone, with the solitary exception of himself.

Towards the end of December, Roger passed one of these forestalling operations on to me. The scientists had fallen behind with their report, but we knew it was going to be delivered early in the New Year; we knew also what it was going to contain. There would be differences in detail between Laurence Astill and Francis Getliffe, but by and large they would all be saying the same thing, except for Brodzinski. He had retained an implacable confidence throughout, absolutely assured both that he was right and that he must prevail. It was clear that he would insist on writing a minority report.

My job, said Roger, was to give him a hint of the future, to pacify him, but to warn him that for the present he couldn’t bank on much support, that Government couldn’t do much for him.

My own nose for danger twitched. I still reproached myself for not having been open with Douglas Osbaldiston from the start, when he had invited me to do so. I thought it was right to be open with Brodzinski now. But I felt sure that Roger ought to do it.

Roger was vexed and overtired. When I said that I shouldn’t have any success, Roger replied that I had been doing these things all my life. When I said that Brodzinski was a dangerous man, Roger shrugged. No one was dangerous, he replied, unless he represented something. He, Roger, was taking care of the industry and the military. Brodzinski was just a man out on his own. ‘Are you afraid of a bit of temperament? We’re going to run into worse than that, you know. Are you going to leave everything to me?’

It was as near a quarrel as we had had. After I left him, I wrote him a letter saying that he was making a mistake, and that I wouldn’t talk to Brodzinski. Feeling superstitious, I went over to the window and then returned to my desk and tore the letter up.

After the next meeting of the scientists, a few days before Christmas, I took my chance to get Brodzinski alone. Walter Luke had walked away with Francis Getliffe and Astill; Pearson was going off, as he did phlegmatically each fortnight, to catch the evening plane to Washington. So I could ask Brodzinski to come across with me to the Athenaeum, and we walked along the edge of the pond in the shivery winter dark. A steam of mist hung over the black water. Just after I heard the scurry, glug and pop of a bird diving, I said: ‘How do you think it is going?’

‘What is going?’ In his deep, chest-throbbing voice, Brodzinski as usual addressed me in style.

‘How do you think the committee is going?’

‘Let me ask you one question. Why did those three’ (he meant Luke, Getliffe, Astill) ‘go away together?’

He was almost whispering in the empty park. His face was turned to mimic, his great eyes luminous with suspicion. ‘They went away,’ he answered himself, ‘to continue drafting without me being there to intervene.’ It was more than likely. If it had not been likely, he would still have imagined it.

‘Do you think that I am happy about the committee—?’ Once more, the bass, unyielding courtesy.

We walked in silence. It was not a good start. In the club, I took him upstairs to the big drawing-room. There, on the reading desk, was the Candidates’ Book. I thought it might mollify him to pass by. His name was entered: we had all signed our names in support, Francis, Luke, Astill, Osbaldiston, Hector Rose, the whole lot of us. Somehow everyone knew that he craved to be a member, that he was passionately set on it. We were doing our best. Not merely to soften him, to keep him quiet: but in part, I thought, for an entirely different reason. Despite his force of character, despite his paranoia, there was something pathetic about him.

No, not despite his paranoia, but because of it. Paranoia had a hypnotic effect, even on tough and experienced men. I had come across a first intimation of this earlier in my life, in the temperament of my earliest benefactor, George Passant. It was not entirely, or even mainly, his generosity, his great balloon-like dreams, that drew the young: it was not the scale of his character or his formidable passions. It was that, in his fits of suspicion, of feeling done down and persecuted, he was naked to the world. He called for, and got, sympathy in the way most of us could never do. We might behave better: we might need help out of proportion more: we might even be genuinely pathetic. And yet, by the side of the George Passants, we could never suggest to those round us that revelation, that insight into pathos, which came from seeming innocent, uncorrupt, and without defence.

It was like that with Brodzinski. I had told Roger that Brodzinski was a dangerous man: that was a workaday comment, the sort of warning I could keep in the front of my mind. Sitting by him at the end of the Athenaeum drawing-room, watching his eyes stray to the Candidates’ Book, I wasn’t thinking about warnings: I could feel how once more he was exposed to the brilliance of suspicion, this naked sense of a group of privileged persons, whom he wanted above all to belong to, conspiring together to push him out. One’s impulse, even mine, was to make it easier. He ought to be shown that there were no plots against him; one ought to lend a hand. I found myself hoping that the Committee would elect him out of turn.

When I offered him a drink, he asked for half a glass of sherry and sipped at it, looking doubtfully at me while I put down a whisky. For a man so massive and virile, he was curiously old-maidish in some of his habits — or perhaps it was that he expected to find in all Anglo-Saxons the signs of incipient alcoholism. I said: ‘The Minister is extremely grateful for all you’ve done on his committee. You know how grateful he is, don’t you?’

‘He is a fine man,’ said Brodzinski, with deep feeling.

‘I am sure,’ I went on, ‘that before long the Government will want to give you some recognition.’

I knew that it was being arranged for him to get a CBE in the June Honours List. I had settled with Roger that I should hint at this.

Brodzinski stared at me with lambent eyes. He understood some of Whitehall politics much better than most Englishmen: but on these matters of honorific etiquette, he was mystified. He could not have guessed where Roger or Douglas Osbaldiston, or anyone else, came in. On the other hand, he gave a very English reply.

‘It doesn’t matter whether I get recognized. All that matters is that we do the right thing.’

‘The Minister is extremely grateful for the advice you have given. I know he’ll want to tell you so himself.’

Brodzinski sat back in the leather-covered chair, his great chest protruding like a singer’s. His face, wide and shield-shaped, was hard with thought, the flap of dusty hair fell to his eyebrows. He was still preoccupied, I guessed, with the thought of drafting going on without him. Yet he was happy. Roger he had spoken of as a trusted, powerful friend. He was sitting with me as though I were another friend, lesser, but still powerful.

‘It will soon be time,’ he said, ‘for the Minister to assert himself.’

I was having to feel my way.

‘Of course,’ I said, ‘what any Minister can do on his own is pretty limited.’

‘I am afraid I do not understand you.’

‘I mean,’ I said, ‘you mustn’t expect miracles. He’s a very able man, as I’m sure you realized a long time ago, and he’s prepared to do things that most Ministers wouldn’t. But, you know, he can’t do much without the support of his colleagues at all levels. He can only do what a great many people think ought to be done — not just himself.’

There was a rim of white all round his irises. His gaze was fixed on me, and stayed so. He said:‘I still do not understand you—’ Once more he addressed me in full. ‘Or, at least I hope I do not understand you.’

‘I am saying that the area of freedom of action for a Minister is smaller, a great deal smaller, than most people can ever understand.’

‘I can see that could be so.’ He seemed exaggeratedly reasonable, and once more he was optimistic. ‘But let us come to practical examples. There are questions — we have been trying to discuss them this afternoon — where there is not unanimity of opinion. There cannot be unanimity of opinion. There will be differences, with some scientists taking Getliffe’s view, and some scientists taking mine. Am I correct?’

‘There hasn’t been unanimity so far, has there?’ I was trying the effect of sarcasm, but he went on, set-faced, as though we were already agreed:

‘Well then, in such circumstances, the Minister can use his authority on one side or the other: am I correct again?’

‘In some circumstances,’ I replied ‘he could.’

‘In these circumstances, then?’ He was throwing in all the weight of his nature, bearing me down. Yet his expression looked as though all was simple, as though difficulties did not exist, and his friends, including me, would give him what he longed for: as though disappointment did not exist on this earth.

I was searching for the words. At last I said: ‘I don’t think you must count on it.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’ve been trying to explain, the Minister is bound to listen to his advisers. You’ve been giving him one kind of advice. But — you know this don’t you? — the overwhelming majority of opinion is dead against you. The Minister can’t say that the pros and cons are about equal, and then just decide.’

‘I think I understand. I think I understand clearly.’ His heavy hands on his thighs, Brodzinski stared at me. His face had not altered, but his eyes had flared up. The transition was complete, as if the switch of suspicion had, between one instant and the next, been turned on in his mind. A second before, beautiful, expectant clarity: now, the sight of an enemy.

‘What do you understand?’

‘It is very easy. The Minister is not to be allowed to make up his own mind. These scientists have been carefully picked by other officials. Of course they have. They advise one thing, I advise another. Then other officials surround the Minister. They pick and choose, they are not willing to let the matter be discussed. Of course they are not. I see what I am expected to understand.’

‘You mustn’t look for sinister explanations.’

‘I do not look for them. I am obliged to see them.’

‘I am not prepared,’ I said, my voice getting harder, ‘to listen to suggestions that you have not been treated fairly. Do you really believe that my colleagues have been trying to do you down?’

‘I am not speaking about your colleagues.’

‘You mean me?’

‘I believe there is a saying — If the cap fits, wear it.’

I had become the spider in the web, the origin of persecution. No one likes being hated: most of us are afraid of it: it jars to the bone when we meet hatred face to face. But it was better that I should be the enemy, not Roger.

I had to sound as if I didn’t mind being insulted, as though I had no temper of my own. I wanted to lash out and do it better than he did. Temperaments like his clashed right at the roots with mine: even if he were not being offensive, he would have tempted me to say something hard. But I was doing a job, and I couldn’t afford luxuries, certainly not the luxury of being myself. I said, sounding like a middle-aged public man: ‘I repeat, the Minister is very grateful for all the effort you’ve put into this work. I think I ought to say that he has an exceptionally high opinion of you.’

‘I hope you are right.’

‘He has made it perfectly clear—’

‘I hope you are right.’ Suddenly his face was full of illumination, as though he were looking over my shoulder. ‘Then I shall go straight to him in the future.’

‘That may not be possible, when he’s occupied—’

‘That,’ said Brodzinski, ‘is for the Minister to say.’

With ritual courtesy, he inquired what I should be doing for Christmas. With dignity he thanked me for entertaining him. When I took him to the top of the stairs, he gripped my hand in his immense one. I returned to the drawing-room, and stood preoccupied, not noticing acquaintances about the room, with my back to the fire. I was thinking angrily of Roger. He should have broken the news himself.

A cheerful little old man patted my arm. ‘I saw you caballing down there—’ he pointed to the end of the room — ‘with that scientist chap.’

‘Oh yes?’ I said.

‘Talking a bit of shop?’

‘Talking a bit of shop,’ I said.

I was wondering just how I could have done it better. One thing was clear: I could hardly have done it worse. I was wondering what Brodzinski would do next.

I was letting myself get worn down by one man. It seemed foolish, right out of proportion, as I stood there by the fire, in the drawing-room of the Athenaeum.

It seemed even more foolish, half an hour later, in the drawing-room of my own flat. Francis Getliffe was there before me, having come for dinner before he got the late train back to Cambridge. He was talking to Margaret, who liked him best of my old friends, who shone at him as if, in different circumstances, he might have been her choice. This was not so, and he knew it was not. She was fond of him, both because she recognized his reciprocal affection, and because she admired what his life had been. Like hers, it had been signally without equivocation. They knew how to talk to each other simply, without parentheses.

The room was bright, the pictures were lively on the walls, it was a home such as in my young manhood I thought I should never have. I mentioned that I had had a scene with Brodzinski. Margaret was smiling, because of the place where it had happened. Francis was impatient. The sooner he delivered the report to Roger, the better: as for this man, he could not see that he mattered. Nor could I, drinking before dinner in my own home.

Francis had quite a different concern. Soon after I arrived, a young man and a girl came into the room, both of them flushed. The young man was Arthur Plimpton, who immediately took charge of the drinks. He made Margaret lie back, and went round with a tinkling tray, refilling our glasses, calling Francis and me ‘Sir’, with his mixture of respect and impudence. The girl was Penelope, Francis’ younger daughter.

She was nineteen, but looked older. She was taller than her father, Junoesque and, in a rosy flowering fashion, beautiful. She did not much resemble either of her parents. Where that particular style of beauty came from, no one could explain; if I had not known, it would not have occurred to me that her mother was Jewish.

Arthur had managed to get his way. It had been easy to coax Margaret into inviting them to stay with us for a week. It had not been so easy for Penelope to accept. Francis, who usually rejoiced in his children’s love-affairs and marriages, did not seem to rejoice in this. The fact was, that someone had let him know, after Arthur had got inside the family, how rich the young man was. Francis did not like it: or rather, he would have liked them to get married, but could not let anyone see it, even his oldest friends. He would not, even by an ordinary invitation, appear to be encouraging his daughter to marry a fortune. His sense of punctilio was getting stiffer as he grew older: he had all the hard pride of the English professional classes, plus something added of his own.

It amused me, having known Francis since we were both young. I had seen him, less orthodox than now, marrying for love, but also marrying into a rich family. I had seen him defying taboos, a Gentile carrying off a Jewish girl. I had seen him less respectable than now. Other people, meeting him in his middle fifties, regarded him as he and I regarded the dignitaries of our own youth — Sir Francis Getliffe, high principled, decent, full of gravitas, a little formal and, yes, a little priggish. I could not regard him so. Even when he was behaving stiffly, I could still hear, as none of us can help hearing with the friends of our youth, the chimes of another time: the ‘chimes of midnight’, in the empty, lonely streets we had once walked together.

That did not prevent Margaret and me from twitting him, saying that he was showing ridiculous decorum, and ourselves opening our house to Arthur. I was fond of Penelope, who happened to be my goddaughter, but of the pair it was Arthur who was the more fun.

That night at dinner, he had two objectives. One was to absorb the conversation. He could not get over his discovery that Sir Francis, so eminent, so strait-laced about domestic behaviour, was, when he talked about the world, by American standards wildly radical. Arthur could not have enough of it. It shocked him, and gave him a thrill of guilt. Not, I thought, that anything Francis, Margaret or I said would affect him by as much as one per cent. But I thought also, with a certain grim satisfaction, that it would do him no harm to hear us talk about communists as though they were human beings.

Arthur’s second objective was less intellectual. It was to get Penelope to himself. Towards the end of the meal, Francis was looking at his watch. He would soon have to leave for Liverpool Street. If Arthur waited half an hour, he and Penelope could slip out without a word. But Arthur was a young man of spirit.

‘Sir Francis,’ he said, ‘we will have to be going ourselves. I must say, it’s been a very fine evening.’

‘Where are you going?’ said Margaret, since Francis did not reply.

‘Penny and I are going to dance some place.’

They were both waiting. Penelope, who was not talkative, had an inward-turning smile.

They might be late, Arthur went on, and asked Margaret if they could have a key.

‘I’ll get her back safe and sound,’ Arthur said to Francis.

Francis nodded.

‘And I’ll send her back to Cambridge in time for Christmas,’ Arthur went on, a little lordly, and knowing it.

I joined in, to stop Arthur teasing Francis any more. I said we would all travel to Cambridge together. We were taking our children, as we did each year, to spend Christmas with my brother Martin.

Francis, back in authority again, asked us all to come to his house on Boxing Day. There was to be a great party of Francis’ children, a couple of grandchildren, Martin’s family and ours.

Just for an instant, Arthur looked appealing. He wanted to be invited. Francis knew it, and glanced at him from under high, quixotic eyebrows. Arthur might be obstinate, but he had met another obstinate man. This time Francis held the initiative. He did not budge. He gave no invitation. He said politely that in five minutes he must be off.

Resilient, Arthur was on his feet.

‘We have to go too. Come on, Penny. It’s been a very fine evening, Sir Francis.’

They told Margaret they wouldn’t want breakfast, and would see her later in the morning. Arthur said good night to Francis, and Penelope kissed him. Then they went out, a handsome couple, cherishing their secrets, disclosing nothing except happiness, full of the pride of life, full of joy.

18: The Euphoria of Touching Wood

On a bright January morning, the telephones kept ringing in my office. Did I know, did anyone know, who was going to be the new Prime Minister? Had anyone been summoned to the Palace? All over Whitehall, all through the maze of the Treasury Building, men were gossiping. To some, in particular to Ministers like Roger, the answer mattered. To one or two, it would be decisive. No one in Roger’s circle knew what it was going to be. They had not been ready for the resignation. Now the Chancellor was being backed: so was the Home Secretary. Moral sentiments were being expressed, and a good deal of damage being done.

After lunch, we heard that Charles Lenton had been sent for. There had not been such a turnover of fortune for over thirty years. By the end of the afternoon, people in high places were discovering virtues in Lenton that had not before been so vividly perceived. He was a middle-ranking Minister who had, for a short time after the war, been in charge of Hector Rose’s department. He was now fifty-five, young to be Prime Minister. He was a lawyer by profession, and people commented that he must be the first Conservative Prime Minister since Disraeli without substantial private means. He was hearty, healthy, unpretentious: he looked amiable and slightly porcine, except that, as a political cartoonist and a smart photographer happily observed, he was born with bags under his eyes. Rose said: ‘At any rate, my dear Lewis, we shan’t be dazzled by coruscations of brilliance.’

Roger said nothing. He was waiting to see where the influence lay. In the London network, messages about the Prime Minister began flashing like the bulbs on a computer. Whom he listened to, where he spent the weekend, whom he had a drink with late at night.

Within three months, Roger and his friends were certain of one thing. The Prime Minister had set himself up with a confidant. This was not in itself surprising: most men in the ‘first place’ (as some liked to call the Prime Ministership) did so. But it was more surprising when they realized who the confidant was. It was Reggie Collingwood.

From the outside, the two of them had nothing in common. Collingwood was arrogant, unsocial, in a subfusc fashion grand — whereas the Prime Minister was matey and deliberately prosaic, as though his ambition was to look natural in a bowler hat, coming in on the Underground from Purley. Yet there it was. At once the gossips were tipping Ministers whom Collingwood appeared to fancy. They all agreed that Roger’s stock was on the way down.

It sounded too near the truth. I had heard from Caro herself that Collingwood had never got on with her family. They were too smart, too much in the high world, for him. Collingwood might have spent a lot of time in the high world, but he did not approve of it. As for Roger, Collingwood had had nothing to do with him. They had not had so much as a drink together. At Basset, during that weekend twelve months before, they had met like remote acquaintances: and then Roger had found himself in, or forced, a quarrel.

Before long, the gossips began to hedge. Monty Cave was brought back into the Government, and promoted to full Ministerial rank. The commentators got busy once more. Was this a gesture towards Roger? Or was the PM playing both ends against the middle? Or, a more ingenious gloss, was he showing the left wing of the party that he had nothing against them, before he eased Roger out?

A few days after Cave’s appointment, I was sitting in the barber’s in Curzon Street when I heard a breathy whisper near my ear. ‘Well, what’s going to happen tomorrow night?’

As soon as I got out of the chair, I heard some more. Apparently Roger had been summoned to one of those private dinners which busybodies like my informant were beginning to know about: dinners with the Prime Minister and Collingwood and a single guest, which took place, because Collingwood didn’t like the Tory clubs, in his own suite at an old-fashioned hotel.

‘Well, what are they going to say to him?’

I didn’t know. I didn’t even know whether the story was true. My informant was a man with a selfless passion for gossip. As I walked down the street in the sunshine, I was thinking bleakly of the old Dostoievskian phrase, that I had heard something ‘on not specially reliable authority.’

But it was true. In forty-eight hours we knew, when Caro telephoned Margaret to ask if they could come to dinner that night, with no one present but the four of us.

They arrived very early. The sun was still high over the Park, blinding Caro as she sat down opposite the window. She screwed up her eyes, hooted, told Margaret that she wanted a drink but that Roger needed one first. Roger had scarcely spoken, and Caro’s voice, as in her own house, took charge. But Margaret liked her more, and got on with her better, than I did.

Soon they were sitting side by side on the sofa, all of us suddenly quiet.

I said to Roger: ‘So you saw them last night, did you?’

‘Why do you think,’ said Caro, ‘that we’ve parked ourselves on you like this?’

From his armchair, Roger was gazing, eyes blank, at the picture over the fireplace.

‘How did it go?’ I asked.

He muttered, as though he were having to force himself to talk.

I was at a loss. He was not inhibited because Margaret was there. He knew that she was as discreet as I was, or more so. Both he and Caro felt safe with her, and trusted her.

Roger brushed both hands over his eyes, forehead and temples, like a man trying to freshen himself.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. He leaned forward. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘if I said what the position seemed like tonight — I should have to say that I’ve got it in the palm of my hand.’

He sounded realistic, sober, baffled. He sounded as though he didn’t want us to see, didn’t want himself to see, that he was happy.

‘Isn’t that good news?’ said Margaret.

‘I can’t believe it,’ said Roger.

‘You can, you know,’ said Caro gently.

‘You’ve all got to remember’ — Roger was speaking with care — ‘that things change very fast at the top. I’m in favour now. It may not last twelve months. Things may begin to go the other way. Remember your uncle and what happened to him. You ought to know what to expect,’ he said to Caro. ‘So ought Lewis and Margaret. They’ve seen enough. For all we know, I’m at the top of the hill tonight. I may start moving downwards tomorrow. Or perhaps I’ve already started. We’ve all got to remember that.’

It was the sort of solemn warning that a sanguine man gives to others, because he feels he ought to give it to himself. Roger sounded so cautious, statesmanlike and wise; he was trying to be all those things; but in his heart he didn’t believe a word of it. Behind his puzzled, twisted expression, he was lit up with hope — or almost with hope realized. There were times that evening when he felt that what he wanted to do was already done. There were also times when he was thinking of his next office, and of his next office but one.

Yet, all through the evening, he spoke with self-knowledge, as though he were putting pretensions on one side, almost as though he had been deflated. It was a curious result of success, or the foretaste of success.

We stayed for a long time drinking before dinner. Yes, he had had a reception the night before that he hadn’t dared imagine. The PM had been cordial; of course the PM was professionally cordial, so it didn’t mean much. What did mean something was that he had assured Roger of support. As for Collingwood, he had gone out of his way to be friendly; which, from him, who never troubled to be friendly, or couldn’t be, had been something no one could have expected.

‘The extraordinary thing is,’ said Roger, his face puzzled and simple, ‘he seems to like me.’

‘Why not?’ said Margaret.

‘Why should he?’ said Roger.

He went on: ‘You know, it’s the first time anyone at the top has crooked his finger at me and said in effect — “My boy, your place is up here.” Up to now they’ve let me crawl up and fight every inch of the way. I’m not the sort of man people feel inclined to help, you know.’

He had spoken with a trace of passion. To others, I was thinking, even to me, that complaint rang strangely. He was too formidable a man for one to think of him as being ‘promising’, as needing patronage or protection. To most men, to the Collingwoods and their kind, he must have seemed mature and dominant, even before he was forty, long before he had in any sense ‘arrived’. Yet Roger did not see himself like that. Perhaps no one saw himself as beyond question, formidable, mature, dominant. Roger knew that, when other men had been helped up, he had been left alone. He spoke as though this had been a wound: as though, years before, it had made him harden his will.

‘Never mind,’ said Caro, ‘they like you, they’re telling you you’re in.’

Roger said, ‘They’ve left it pretty late.’

As we sat at dinner, he was amiable but absent-minded, until Caro, looking prettier than I had seen her, had been talking about her brother. He broke into a conversation. Across the table, he said to his wife: ‘It doesn’t matter much being liked, for this kind of life.’

We might have been back in the drawing-room, still discussing the Prime Minister and Collingwood. We hadn’t realized, while we talked, that he was daydreaming contentedly away.

For a second, Caro didn’t take the reference. Then she misjudged him. She said: ‘But they do like you.’

She went on telling him that Collingwood was sincere. She seemed to be reassuring Roger that he got liked as easily as most men. But that wasn’t a reassurance he needed. With a grin, part shame-faced, part sarcastic, he said: ‘No, that’s neither here nor there. I meant it doesn’t matter much being liked. For serious purposes, it doesn’t really count. Nothing like so much as your relatives have always thought.’

She hesitated. His tone had not escaped her. He had spoken of ‘your’ relatives as though he had not accepted them, would never accept them, as being his. Yet that was reversing the truth. It had not been easy for him, I had been told, at the time of his marriage. She had loved him to the highest pitch of obstinacy and they had had to put up with her decision. He was not wholly unacceptable, it wasn’t as though she had been a wild young girl and he something like a dance-band leader: he was presentable, he would ‘do’. But he was not ‘one of them’. They would have made him into ‘one of them,’ if will had been the only element involved; but they could not do it. Years later, there were times when they still couldn’t help behaving as though he were the local doctor, or the parson, whom Caro happened to have invited to a meal.

‘That’s how most of them got on,’ said Caro.

‘Not in the real stuff,’ Roger replied. ‘What you want is someone who believes what you do. It’s preferable if he doesn’t want to cut your throat.’

He was speaking as he had once done, when we were dining at the Carlton Club. It was a theme his mind kept digging into. Personal relations, so Roger went on saying, didn’t decide anything in the real ‘stuff’. Being one of a group, as with the Whig aristocrats from whom Caro’s family descended, decided much more. But in the long run, his job didn’t depend on that. In the real issues he wasn’t going to get support, just because Reggie Collingwood enjoyed splitting a bottle with him. These things weren’t as easy: they weren’t as romantic. ‘If they like me, and it seems that they may do, they’ll take a little longer to kick me out. They might even kick me upstairs. But that’s all the benefit I should get out of being liked. While as for support — that’s a different cup of tea. They’re going to support me for a bit — because it fits in with what they want to do. Because they believe we’re on the same side. Up to a point. They’re watching me, you know. I tell you, real politics isn’t as personal as people think.’

Margaret said: ‘Doesn’t that make it worse?’

Roger replied: ‘Don’t you think it’s probably better?’ His tone was not bantering. It wasn’t even specially wise. It was eager. Suddenly I felt in him — what was often hidden, because of his will, his tricks, even the power of his nature — something quite simple. He knew the temptations, the charm of politics, the romantic trappings — but there were times when he wanted to throw them right away. There were times when he could tell himself, and be full of faith, that there was something he wanted to do. Then he could feel that there was a justification for his life. He wanted that grace more than most men: the lumber dropped away from him, he seemed to himself light, undivided, at one.

In the drawing-room, drinking after dinner, tired, content, Roger went on talking about politics. One story had come up the night before, which Collingwood had said he ought to know. A rumour was running round about Cave’s appointment. It had reached the clubs; they could expect it in the political columns next Sunday, said Collingwood, who didn’t appear to know that in Whitehall we had heard it already. It was that this appointment had been the pay-off for Roger and his associates. Roger had struck a bargain with Charles Lenton when the Prime Ministership fell vacant. He and his friends would support Lenton for the place, but they had fixed the price, and the price was a Ministry for Cave.

‘What do you think of that?’ asked Roger. He, like Collingwood, seemed to have been surprised by the rumour. Collingwood was an unsociable widower, but I thought there was less excuse for Roger.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s not the most terrible accusation I’ve ever heard.’ I was laughing at him. He had been enjoying himself, talking without humbug. All night his mood had been realistic, modest, almost chastened: that was the way he faced the promise of success. And yet, at this mild bit of slander, he felt indignant and ill-used.

‘But it’s not true!’ Roger raised his voice.

‘They’ll say worse things than that, which won’t be true either,’ I said.

Roger said: ‘No, the point is: politics are not like that. God knows, I’ve played it rougher than that before now. If necessary I shall play it rough again. But not like that.’ He was speaking with complete reasonableness. ‘Of course politics can be corrupt. But not corrupt in that fashion. No one makes that kind of bargain. It’s not that we’re specially admirable. But we’ve got to make things work, and they couldn’t work like that, and they don’t. I’ve never seen anyone make a deal of that kind in my life. It’s only people who don’t know how the world ticks who think it ticks like that.’

I was thinking, I had once, twenty years before, seen someone propose such a deal. It had happened in my college. The college politicians had turned it down at sight, outraged, just as Roger was, by a man who didn’t know ‘how the world ticks’, by a man who made the world look worse than it was because he had all the cynicism of the unworldly.

We had not drawn the curtains, and through the open windows a breeze was blowing in. For an instant I leaned out. There was a smell of petrol from the Bayswater Road, mixed with the smell of spring. It was a clear night for London, and above the neon haze, over the trees in the park, I could make out some stars.

I turned back to the room. Roger was stretched out, quiet, and happy again, on the sofa. Margaret had asked him a question I did not catch. He was replying without fuss that the decisions had to be taken soon. He might soon cease to be useful. He would be lucky if he had ten years.

19: Sudden Cessation of a Nuisance

It puzzled me, not that Brodzinski kept pressing for a private talk with Roger, but that all of a sudden he left off doing so. Once he had given me up, letters came into Roger’s office. Brodzinski begged for an interview on a matter of grave public concern. He wished to explain his disagreement with his scientific colleagues. He had been alarmed by the attitude of the secretary of the committee.

It was a nuisance, but Ministers’ offices were used to nuisances. Roger asked Osbaldiston to see Brodzinski. Douglas, more guarded and official than I had been, gave a reply as though to a parliamentary question: no, the Minister had not reached a conclusion: he was studying both the majority report and Brodzinski’s minority report. For a few days, this seemed to reassure Brodzinski. Then the letters began again. Once more I told Roger not to underestimate him.

Roger asked, what could he do? Write to The Times? Talk to the Opposition military spokesmen? There we were safeguarded. We had, through Francis Getliffe and others, our own contacts. Francis and I had, for years, been closer to them than to Roger’s colleagues. What could the man do? I had to agree. After the talk in the Athenaeum, I had come away apprehensive. Now the anxiety had lost its edge. As out of habit, I repeated that Roger ought to have a word with him.

On the Thursday which followed his dinner with the Prime Minister, Roger had been invited to a conversazione of the Royal Society. The day after, he mentioned that he had spent a quarter of an hour with Brodzinski alone.

It looked as though Roger had spread himself. The next letters from Brodzinski said, he had always known that the Minister understood. If they could continue the conversation undisturbed, he, Brodzinski, was certain that all the obstacles would be removed. In a few days Roger replied politely. Another letter arrived by return. Then telephone calls. Would the Minister’s Private Secretary arrange a meeting? Could the Minister be told that Brodzinski was on the line? Could he be put straight through?

Suddenly it all stopped. No more telephone calls. No more letters. It was bewildering. I took what precautions I could. We knew his points of influence in the Air Ministry, in the House. Was he pressing them, instead? But no: he seemed not to have been near them. There was no disquiet anywhere, there were not even any rumours hissing round.

The patient young men in Roger’s private office allowed themselves a shrug of relief. He had got tired of it at last, they said. Four months of commotion: then absolute silence. From their records, they could date when silence fell. It was the third week in May.

In that same week, I happened to have been inquiring whether certain invitations to accept Honours had been sent out. My question had nothing to do with Brodzinski, though I thought mechanically that his invitation must have gone out too. It did not occur to me, not remotely, to connect the two dates.

As the summer began, all of us round Roger were more confident than we had yet been. First drafts of the White Paper were being composed. Francis Getliffe came from Cambridge twice a week to confer with Douglas and Walter Luke. Papers passed between Douglas’ office and Rose’s. Roger had issued an instruction that the office draft must be ready for him by August. Then he would publish when he guessed the time was right. In private, he was preparing for the month after Christmas, the beginning of 1958.

While we were drafting, Diana Skidmore was going through her standard summer round. On the last day of Ascot Week, she invited some of us to a party in South Street. She had heard — as though she had a ticker-tape service about American visitors — that David Rubin was in England. She had not met him: ‘He’s brilliant, isn’t he?’ she asked. Yes, I assured her, he was certainly brilliant. ‘Bring him along,’ she ordered. There had been a time when the Basset circle was supposed to be anti-Semitic. That, at least, had changed.

When Margaret, David Rubin and I stood at the edge of Diana’s drawing-room, about seven o’clock on the wet June evening, not much else seemed to have changed. The voices were as hearty as ever: the champagne went around as fast: the women stood in their Ascot frocks, the men in their Ascot uniforms. There were a dozen Ministers there, several of the Opposition front bench, many Conservative members, and a few from the other side.

There was a crowd of Diana’s rich friends. She welcomed us with vigour. Yes, she knew that David Rubin was talking to the English nuclear scientists.

‘People over here being sensible?’ she said to him. ‘Come and tell me about them. I’ll arrange something next week.’ She was peremptory as usual, and yet, because she took it for granted that it was for her to behave like a prince, to open England up to him, he took it for granted too.

How was it, I had sometimes wondered, that, despite her use of her riches, she didn’t attract more resentment? Even when she put a hand, with complete confidence, into any kind of politics? She had been drawn back into the swirling, meaty, noisy gaggle: there she was, listening deferentially to a handsome architect. Even in her devoted marriage, she had had a hankering for one guru after another. Just as she took it for granted that she could talk to Ministers, so she loved being a pupil. If it seemed a contradiction to others, it seemed natural to her, and that was all she cared about.

Margaret had been taken away by Monty Cave. I noticed Rubin being shouted at hilariously by Sammikins. I walked round the party, and then, half an hour after we came in, found myself by Rubin’s side again. He was watching the crowd with his air of resignation, of sad intelligence.

‘They’re in better shape, aren’t they?’ He meant that these people, or some of them, had lost their collective confidence over Suez. Now they were behaving as though they had found it again. Rubin knew, as well as I did, that political sorrows did not last long. Political memory lasted about a fortnight. It did not count beside a new love-affair, a new job, even, for many of these men, the active glow after making a good speech.

‘No country’s got a ruling class like this.’ David Rubin opened his hands towards the room. ‘I don’t know what they hope for, and they don’t know either. But they still feel they’re the lords of this world.’

I was fond of Rubin and respected him, but his reflections on England were irking me. I said he mustn’t judge the country by this group. Being born in my provincial town wasn’t much different from being born in Brooklyn. He ought to know the boys I grew up among. Rubin interrupted, with a sharp smile: ‘No. You’re a far-sighted man, I know it, Lewis. But you’re just as confident in yourself as these characters are.’ Once more he shrugged at the room. ‘You don’t believe a single thing that they believe, but you’ve borrowed more from them than you know.’

People were going out to dinner, and the party thinned. Gradually those who were left came to the middle of the room. There stood Diana and her architect, Sammikins and two decorative women, Margaret and Lord Bridgewater, and a few more. I joined the group just as David Rubin came up from the other side with Cave’s wife, who was for once out with her husband. She was ash-blonde, with a hard, strained, beautiful face. Rubin had begun to enjoy himself. He might have a darker world view than anyone there, but he gained certain consolations.

No one could talk much, in that inner residue of the party, but Sammikins. He was trumpeting away with a euphoria startling even by his own standards. Just as Diana had lost money at Ascot, he had won. With the irrationality of the rich, Diana had been put out. With the irrationality of the harassed, which he would remain until his father died, Sammikins was elated. He wanted to entertain us all. He spoke with the luminosity of one who saw that his financial problems had been settled for ever. ‘All the time I was at school,’ he cried, ‘m’tutor gave me one piece of advice. He said, “Houghton, never go in for horse-racing. They suck you in.”’ Sammikins caught sight of David Rubin, and raised his voice once more. ‘What do you think of that, Professor? What do you think of that for a piece of advice? Not à point, eh?’

David Rubin did not much like being called Professor. Also, he found Sammikins’ allusions somewhat esoteric. But he grappled. He replied: ‘I’m afraid I have to agree with your friend.’

‘M’tutor.’

‘Anyway, he’s right. Statistically, he must be right.’

‘Horses are better than cards, any day of the week. Damn it all, Professor, I’ve proved it!’

David Rubin was getting noise-drunk. Sammikins, in a more conciliatory tone, went on: ‘I grant you this, Professor, I don’t know about roulette. I’ve known men who made an income at roulette.’

The scientific truth was too strong for Rubin.

‘No. If you played roulette for infinite time, however you played, you’d be bound to lose.’ He took Sammikins by the arm. We had the pleasant spectacle of Rubin, Nobel Laureate, most elegant of conceptual thinkers, not quite sober, trying to explain to Sammikins, positive that he had found the secret of prosperity, distinctly drunk, about the theory of probability.

Diana said, in her clear, military rasp, that racing was a mug’s game. On the other hand, she was sharp with happiness. She wanted to have dinner with the architect. It was only out of duty, as we were all ready to go, that she mentioned the Government.

‘They seem to be getting on a bit better,’ she said.

There were murmurs of agreement all round her.

‘Roger’s doing all right,’ she said to me. She was not asking my opinion, she was telling me.

She went on: ‘Reggie Collingwood thinks well of him.’ We were getting near the door. Diana said: ‘Yes. Reggie says he’s a good listener.’

Diana had passed on the good news, and I went away happy. Objectively, Collingwood’s statement was true; but, from a man who could hardly utter about one of the most eloquent men in London, it seemed an odd compliment.

20: Evening in the Park

In September, with the House in recess, Roger kept coming to his office. It was what the civil servants called, the ‘leave season’. Douglas was away and so, in my department, was Hector Rose. Nevertheless, Roger’s secretaries were arranging a set of meetings to which I had to go. As I arrived in his room for one of them, Roger asked in a matter-of-fact tone if I minded staying behind after it was over. He had something he wanted to talk to me about, so he said.

He seemed a little preoccupied as he took the meeting. When he spoke, he was fumbling for the words, as a man does when he is tired and strained. I did not take much notice. The meeting was purring efficiently on. There were some unfamiliar faces, deputy secretaries, under-secretaries, appearing instead of their bosses. The competent voices carried on, the business was getting done.

The cups of tea were brought in, the weak and milky tea, the plates of biscuits. The meeting was doing all that Roger wanted. He might be tired, but he was showing good judgement. He did not hurry them, he let the decisions form. It was past six o’clock when the papers were being packed in the brief cases. Practised and polite, Roger said his good evenings and his thanks, and we were left alone.

‘That went rather well,’ I said.

There was a pause, as though he had to remember what I was speaking about, before he replied: ‘Yes, it did, didn’t it?’

I was standing up, stretching myself. He had stayed in his chair. He looked up without expression, and asked: ‘Do you mind if we go for a stroll in the Park?’

We went down the corridors, down the stone stairs, out through the main entrance. We crossed over the Park by the lake; one of the pelicans was spreading its wings. The trees were creaking in a blustery wind; on the grass, the first leaves had fallen. It was a dark evening, with clouds, low and grey, driving across from the west. Roger had not spoken since we left the office. For an instant, I was not thinking of him. The smell of the water, of the autumn night, had filled me with a sense, vague but overmastering, of sadness and joy, as though I were played on by a memory which I could not in truth recall, of a place not far away, of a time many years before, when my first love, long since dead, had told me without kindness that she would come to me.

We walked slowly along the path. Girls, going home late from the offices, were scurrying in front of us. It was so windy that most of the seats by the lakeside were empty. Suddenly Roger said: ‘Shall we sit down?’

Miniature waves were flecking the water. As we sat and watched them, Roger, without turning to me, said in a curt, flat and even tone: ‘There may possibly be trouble. I don’t think it’s likely, but it’s possible.’

I was shocked out of my reverie. My first thought was to ask if any of his supporters, high or low, Collingwood or the back-benchers, had turned against him.

‘No. Nothing like that. Nothing like that at all.’

Was he trying to break some news affecting me? I had nothing on my mind, I could not think what it might be. I gave him a chance to tell me, but he shook his head.

Now it had come to the point, the confidence would not flow. He stared at the water. At last he said: ‘I have a young woman.’

For the instant, I felt nothing but surprise.

‘We’ve kept it absolutely quiet. Now she’s been threatened. Someone’s found out.’

‘Who has?’

‘Just a voice she didn’t know, over the telephone,’ he said.

‘Does it matter?’

‘How do we know?’

‘What are you frightened of?’

There was a pause before he said: ‘If it came out it might do some harm.’

I was still surprised. I had thought his marriage happy enough. A man of action’s marriage, not all-excluding; but strong, a comfort, an alliance. Some of his worry was infecting me. I felt an irritation, an impatience, that I could not keep quiet. What more did he want? I was asking myself, as simply, as uncharitably as my mother might have done. A good-looking wife, children, a rich home: what was he taking risks for? Risks, he seemed to think, which might damage his plans and mine. I was condemning him as simply as that, not in the least like one who had seen people in trouble, not like one who had done harm himself.

At the same time I could not help feeling a kind of warmth, not affection so much as a visceral warmth. In the midst of his anxiety, he had been half-pleased to confess. Not with just the pleasure displayed by men higher-minded than he was, as they modestly admit a conquest — no, with a pleasure deeper than that, something more like joy. Looking at him as he sat, still gazing at the lake, not meeting my eyes, I should have guessed that he had not had much to do with women. But his emotions were powerful and, perhaps, so could his passions be. As he sat there, his face heavy, thinking of the dangers, he seemed comforted by what had happened to him — like a man for whom the promise of life is still there. I set myself to ask a practical question. What were the chances of it coming out?

‘She’s worried. I’ve never known her lose her nerve before.’

I said, probably she had never had to cope with a scandal. But the technique was all worked out. Go to a good tough lawyer. Tell everything.

‘You’ve no reason to think that any rumours have gone round already, have you? I certainly haven’t.’

Roger shook his head.

‘Then it ought to be fairly easy to stop the hole.’

He did not respond, or look at me. He stared into the distance. In a moment, knowing that I was giving him no comfort, I broke off.

I said: ‘I’m sure this can be handled. You ought to tell her that. But even if it couldn’t be, and the worst came to the worst — is it the end of the world?’ I meant, as I went on to say, that the people he lived amongst were used to scandals out of comparison more disreputable than this.

‘You’re fooling yourself,’ he said harshly. ‘It isn’t so easy.’ I wondered, was he holding something back? Was she very young? ‘Is there something special about it?’ I said. ‘Who is she?’

It seemed that he could not reply. He sat without speaking, and then in a burst of words put me off.

‘It isn’t important what’s done. It is important who does it. There are plenty of people — you know as well as I do — who want an excuse to knife me. Don’t you accept that this would be a reasonable excuse?’

‘You haven’t told me how.’

‘There’s an old maxim in the Anglican church. You can get away with unorthodox behaviour. Or you can get away with unorthodox doctrine. But you can’t get away with both of them at the same time.’

For an instant, his spirits had flashed up. In the same sharp, realistic, almost amused tone, he added: ‘Remember, I’ve never been one of the family. Perhaps, if I had been, I could get away with more.’

What was ‘the family’?

The inner circle of privilege, the Caves, Wyndhams, Collingwoods, Diana’s friends, the Bridgewaters, the people who, though they might like one another less than they liked Roger, took one another for granted, as they did not take him.

‘No,’ I said, ‘you’ve never been one of them. But Caro is.’ I brought in her name deliberately. There was a silence. Then he answered the question I had not asked. ‘If this thing breaks, Caro will stand by me.’

‘She doesn’t know?’

He shook his head, and then broke out with violence: ‘I won’t have Caro hurt.’ It sounded more angry than anything he had said. Had he been talking about one worry, about the practical risk that still seemed to me unreal, in order to conceal another from himself? What kind of guilt did he feel, how much was he tied? All of a sudden, I thought I understood at last his outburst on Sammikins’ behalf at Basset. It had seemed uncomfortable, untypical, not only to the rest of us but to himself. Yes, it had been chivalrous, it had been done for Caro’s sake. But it had been altogether too chivalrous. It had the strain, the extravagant self-abnegation, of a man who gives his wife too many sacrifices, just to atone for not giving her his love.

‘Isn’t Caro going to be hurt anyway?’ I said.

He did not reply.

‘This affair isn’t ready to stop, is it?’

‘Not for either of us. Not for—’ He hesitated. He still had not told me the woman’s name. Now he wanted to, but at last brought out the pronoun, not the name.

‘Can you give her up?’

‘No,’ said Roger.

Beneath the layers of worry, there was something else pressing him. Part joy: part something else again, which I could feel in the air, but to which I could not put a name — as though it were a superstitious sense, a gift of foresight.

He leaned back, and did not confide any more.

To the left, above the trees, the light from a window shone out — an office window, perhaps in Roger’s Ministry, though I could not be sure — a square of yellow light high in the dark evening.