Corridors of Power

21: Breakfast

It was the morning after Roger had talked to me in the Park, and Margaret and I were sitting at breakfast. From the table, I could look down at the slips of garden running behind the Tyburn chapel. I glanced across at my wife, young-looking in her dressing-gown, fresh, not made up. Sometimes I laughed at her for looking so fresh in the morning: for in fact it was I who woke up easily, while she was slumbrous, not at her best, until she had sat beside the window and drunk her first cups of tea.

That morning she was not too slumbrous to read my expression. She knew that I was worrying, and asked me why. At once I told her Roger’s story. I didn’t think twice about telling her; we had no secrets, I wanted to confide. She wasn’t intimate with Roger as I was, nor with Caro either, and I didn’t expect her to be specially concerned. To my surprise, her colour rose. Her cheeks flushed, making her eyes look bluer still. She muttered: ‘Damn him.’

‘He’ll be all right—’ I was consoling her; but she broke out:

‘Never mind about him. I was thinking of Caro.’

She said: ‘You haven’t given her a thought, have you?’

‘There are two other people as well — ‘He’s behaved atrociously, and she’s the one who’s going to face it.’

As a rule, she was no more given to this kind of moral indignation than I was myself. Already her temper was high and mine was rising. I tried to quieten us both, and said, in the shorthand we were used to, that Roger wasn’t the first person in the world to cut loose: others had done the same.

‘If you mean that I damaged someone else to come to you,’ she flared up, ‘that’s true.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

I had spoken without thinking.

‘I know you didn’t.’ Her temper broke, she smiled. ‘You know, I’d behave the same way again. But I haven’t much to be proud of in that respect.’

‘Nor have I.’

‘You didn’t betray your own marriage. That’s why I can’t brush off Roger betraying his.’

‘You say I’m not giving Caro a thought?’ Once more we were arguing, once more we were near to quarrelling. ‘But how much are you giving him?’

‘You said yourself, he’ll be all right, he’ll come through,’ she said scornfully. Just then she had no feeling for him at all. ‘Do you know what it’s going to be like for her — if they break up?’ She went on with passion. ‘Shock. Humiliation. Loss.’

I was forced to think, Caro had been happy, she had paraded her happiness. She had done much for him — perhaps too much? Had he never accepted it, or the way her family looked at him?

All that I had to admit. And yet, I said, trying to sound reasonable, let’s not make it over-tragic. If it came to losing him, wouldn’t she recover? She was still young, she was pretty, she wasn’t a delicate flower, she was rich. How long would it take her to get another husband?

‘You’re making it too easy for yourselves,’ said Margaret.

‘Who am I making it too easy for?’

‘For him. And for yourself.’ Her eyes were snapping. ‘Losing him,’ she said, ‘that might be the least of it. It will be bad enough. But the humiliation will be worse.’

She added: ‘You’ve always said, Caro doesn’t give a damn. Any more than her brother does. But it’s people who don’t give a damn who can’t bear being humiliated. They can’t live with it, when they have to know what it means.’

I was thinking, Margaret was speaking of what she knew. She too, by nature, by training, made her own rules: they were more refined rules than Caro’s, but they were just as independent. Her family and all her Bloomsbury connections cared no more what others thought than Caro’s did, in some ways less. She knew just how vulnerable that kind of independence was.

She knew something deeper. When she and I first married she had sometimes been frightened: should we come apart? I might think that I had come home. In her heart, knowing mine, she had not been as sure. She had told herself what she must be ready to feel and what it would cost.

Hearing of Roger and Caro, she felt those fears, long since buried, flood back. Suddenly I realized why the argument had mounted into a quarrel. I stopped my next retort, I stopped defending Roger. Instead, I said, looking into her eyes: ‘It’s a bad thing to be proud, isn’t it?’

The words meant nothing to anyone in the world except ourselves. To her, they were saying that I had been at fault and so had she. At once there was nothing between us. The quarrel died down, the tinge of rancour died from the air, and across the table Margaret gave an open smile.

22: ‘The Knives Are Sharpening’

One evening in the week that Roger made his confidence, Hector Rose sent his compliments to my office and asked if I could find it convenient to call upon him. After I had traversed the ten yards along the corridor, I was, as usual, greeted with gratitude for this athletic feat. ‘My dear Lewis, how very, very good of you to come!’

He installed me in the chair by his desk, from which I could look out over the sun-speckled trees, as though this were my first visit to his room. He sat in his own chair, behind the chrysanthemums, and gave me a smile of dazzling meaninglessness. Then, within a second, he had got down to business.

‘There’s to be a Cabinet committee,’ he said, ‘by which our masters mean, with their customary happy use of words, something to which the phrase is not appropriate. However, there it is.’

The committee was to ‘have an oversight’ of some of Roger’s problems, in particular the White Paper. It consisted of Collingwood in the chair, Roger himself, Cave, and our own Minister. According to present habits, there would be a floating and varying population, Ministers, civil servants, scientists, attending on and off, which was why Rose had produced his jibe. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘you and I will no doubt have the inestimable privilege of attending some of the performances ourselves.’

For an instant, Rose’s tidy mind was preoccupied with the shapelessness of new-style administration; but I broke in:‘What does this mean?’

‘By itself’ — he came back to business with a bite — ‘it doesn’t mean anything. Or at least, anything significant, should you say? The membership seems to be designed to strengthen Mr Quaife’s hand. I seem to have heard, from sensible sources, that the Lord President’ (Collingwood) ‘is a moderately strong backer of Quaife. So, on the face of it, there ought to be certain advantages for policies which Mr Quaife and others appear to have at heart.’

He was baiting me, but not in his customary machine-like manner. He seemed uncomfortable. He folded his arms. His head did not move, but his light eyes fixed themselves on mine. ‘You asked me an implied question,’ he said curtly. ‘I can’t be certain, but I have a suspicion the answer is yes.’ He added: ‘I fancy you do, too. I may be wrong, but I think I ought to warn you that the knives are sharpening.’

‘What evidence have you got?’

‘Not much. Nothing very considerable.’ He hesitated. ‘No, I shouldn’t feel at liberty to worry you with that.’

Again he had spoken with discomfort, as though — I could neither understand, nor believe it — he was protecting me.

‘Do you mean that I’m personally involved?’

‘I don’t feel at liberty to speak. I’m not going to worry you unnecessarily.’

Nothing would budge him. At last he said: ‘But I do feel at liberty to say just one thing. I think you might reasonably communicate to your friends that a certain amount of speed about their decisions might not come amiss. In my judgement, the Opposition is going to increase the more chance it gets to form. I shouldn’t have thought that this was a time for going slow.’ As deliberately as another man might light a cigarette, he smelled a flower. ‘I confess, I should rather like to know exactly what our friend Douglas Osbaldiston expects to happen. He has always had a remarkably shrewd nose for the way the wind is blowing. It’s a valuable gift. Of course, he’s a great friend of both of us, but I think it’s fair comment to say that this particular gift hasn’t exactly been a handicap to him in his career.’

I had never known Hector Rose behave like this. First, he had told me, not quite ‘in terms’ (as he would have said himself) but still definitely, that he was supporting Roger’s policy. That was surprising. I had assumed that he started, like Douglas and his colleagues, suspicious of it. He might have become convinced by reason: with Rose, more than most men, that could conceivably happen: or else the events of Suez were still working changes in him. Still, it was a surprise. But, far more of a surprise, was his outburst about Douglas.

I had known Hector Rose for nearly twenty years. In all that time, I had not heard him pass a judgement on any of his equals. Not that he did not make them — but keeping them quiet was part of the disciplined life. I had known for years that he probably disliked, and certainly envied, Douglas. He knew that I knew. Yet I was astonished, and perhaps he was too, that he should let it out.

Just then the telephone rang. It was for me: Francis Getliffe had called at my office. When I told Rose he said: ‘I think, if he wouldn’t mind, I should rather like him to spare me five minutes.’

After I had given the message, Rose regarded me as though, for the second time that evening, he could not decide whether to speak or not. He said: ‘You’ll have a chance to talk to him later, will you?’

‘I should think so,’ I said.

‘In that case, I should be grateful if you passed on the substance of what I’ve been telling you.’

‘You mean, there’s going to be trouble?’

‘There are certain advantages in being prepared, shouldn’t you say?’

‘Including personal trouble?’

‘That’s going further than I was prepared to go.’

Yet he wanted Francis Getliffe to know about it, and he also wanted to avoid telling him.

When Francis came into the room, however, Rose was so polite that he seemed to be caricaturing himself. ‘My dear Sir Francis, it really is extraordinarily good of you! I didn’t expect to have this pleasure—’ All the time he was brandishing Francis’ title; while Francis, who was not undisposed to formality himself, insisted on calling him ‘Secretary’. They sounded, I thought impatiently, used to it as I was, like two nineteenth century Spaniards: but that wasn’t fair. They really sounded like two official mid-twentieth century Englishmen. In fact, they respected each other. Rose liked Francis much more than he did me.

Rose did not keep us long. He asked Francis if he were happy about the work of the scientific committee. Yes, said Francis. Was he, if it came to a public controversy — ‘and I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you, but there may be mild repercussions’ — willing to put the weight of his authority behind it?

‘Yes,’ said Francis, and added, what else could he do?

There were thanks, courtesies, goodbyes, more thanks and courtesies. Soon Francis and I were walking across the Park to the Duke of York’s Steps. ‘What was that in aid of?’ Francis asked.

‘He was telling you that there’s going to be a God-almighty row.’

‘I suppose we had to expect it, didn’t we?’

‘More than we bargained on, I fancy.’ I repeated what Rose had said to me. I went on: ‘He can be so oblique that it drives you mad, but he was suggesting that I’m going to be shot at.’

On the grass, couples were lying in the sunshine. Francis walked on, edgy, preoccupied. He said that he didn’t see how that could happen. It was more likely to happen to himself.

I said: ‘Look, no one wants to bring bad news. But I’ve got a feeling, though Rose didn’t say a positive word, that he thinks that too.’

Francis said, ‘I’m tired of all this.’

We went a few yards in silence. He added: ‘If we get this business through, then I shall want to drop out. I don’t think I can take it any more.’ He began to talk about the international situation: what did I think? Intellectually, he still stuck to his analysis. The technical and military arguments all pointed the same way: peace was becoming much more likely than war. Intellectually he still believed that. Did I? Yet when Quaife and the scientists tried to take one tiny step, not dramatic, quite realistic, then all Hell was ready to break loose.

‘Sometimes I can’t help thinking that people won’t see sense in time. I don’t mean that people are wicked. I don’t even mean they’re stupid. But we’re all in a mad bus, and the only thing we’re all agreed on is to prevent anyone getting to the wheel.’

We were climbing up the steps. He said sharply: ‘Lewis, I could do with some advice.’

For a second, I was afraid he was thinking of resigning. Instead he went on: ‘I just don’t know what to do about Penelope and that young man.’

His tone had become even more worried and sombre. On the way across the Park he, who knew more about it than most men, had been gloomy over the military future. Now he spoke as though his daughter had really been the problem on his mind. He spoke exactly as a Victorian parent might have spoken, as though all the future were predictable and secure except for his daughter’s marriage, and the well-being of his grandchildren.

He was on his way, he said, to meet her in the Ladies’ Annexe of the club (the Athenaeum). Would I come too? It might help him out. He hadn’t the slightest idea of what had been happening, or what she planned. He did not know whether she and Arthur were secretly engaged, or had even thought of getting married. Arthur had, that summer, returned home to America. Francis did not know whether they had quarrelled.

He did not know — but this he didn’t say, for she was his daughter, and both of us were talking more prudishly than if she had been another girl — whether she had been sleeping with Arthur. For myself, in private, I thought it highly probable.

As we sat in the drawing-room of the Annexe, waiting for her, Francis looked more baffled than I had known him. Both he and his wife were lost. Penelope was more obstinate than either of them, and she wasn’t given to explaining herself. She had never been an academic girl: she had taken some sort of secretarial course, and she showed about as much interest in Francis’ scientific friends as she would have done in so many Amazonian Indians. At present, however, she was prepared to recognize their existence. It had occurred to her that some of them lived in the United States; no doubt one could be persuaded to give her a job.

‘I’ve got to stop it,’ said Francis, as we went on waiting. ‘I can’t have her going over.’ He spoke resolutely, like King Lear in the storm, and about as convincingly. He had already ordered a bottle of champagne, with the air of a man trying to keep an exigent girl-friend in a good temper.

At last she came in, with her flouncing walk, flushed, handsome, frowning. ‘I thought it was number twelve,’ she said. She gazed at us firmly giving us the blame for her own mistake.

‘As you see,’ I replied, ‘you thought wrong.’

‘It used to be number twelve.’

‘Never.’

‘I remember going to number twelve.’ She spoke with an extreme display of mumpsimus, persisting confidently in error.

‘In that case, either you remember wrong, or you went to the wrong place before.’

She stopped lowering, and gave me an open, happy grin. I could imagine what Arthur and others saw in her.

With a healthy thirst, she put down two glasses of champagne.

Francis’ manner to her was courteous but uneasy, very much as when he was talking to Hector Rose. He told her that — from Oxford was dining with them. ‘How old is he?’ Penelope sat up.

‘Forty-seven or eight.’

Penelope sank back.

‘Now if you’d ever seen him,’ I remarked, ‘you’d certainly have put on a new dress.’

‘Of course I shouldn’t.’ Then a thought struck her. ‘Does he know people in America?’

‘Why America?’ I said, trying to help Francis out.

‘Oh, I’m going there this fall or next spring.’

Francis cleared his throat. Screwing himself up, he said: ‘I’m sorry, Penny, but I wish you’d get that out of your mind.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m afraid it can’t happen.’

‘We’ll see.’

Francis took the plunge.

‘I don’t mean that we couldn’t find a way for you to earn your keep. I expect we could—’

‘Then let’s get going!’ said Penelope, with enthusiasm.

‘That isn’t the point. Don’t you see it isn’t?’

Francis paused: then rushed on: ‘Don’t you see, we can’t let you deposit yourself on young Plimpton’s doorstep?’

‘Why not?’

Penelope stretched herself luxuriously, with the poised expression of one who has said her last word for the evening.

Francis continued a one-sided conversation, without answers. Didn’t she see that they couldn’t let her? Didn’t she realize that they had to behave like responsible persons?

Suddenly his tone became gentler, and even more embarrassed. He said: ‘All that’s bad enough, but there’s something worse.’

This time she responded: ‘What’s that?’

‘My dear girl, I’m not going to ask you what your feelings are for young — Arthur, or what his are for you. I don’t think any of us is entitled to ask that.’

She gazed at him with splendid grey eyes, her face quite unreadable.

‘But suppose you do care for him, and something went wrong? You’re both very young, and the chances are that something will go wrong. Well, if you’ve gone over to be with him, and then you’re left alone — that’s a risk I just can’t think of your taking.’

Penelope gave a gnomic smile and said: ‘When I go to America I may not see Arthur at all.’

23: Visit to a Small Sitting-room

It was still September. In the middle of the morning, the telephone rang on my desk. My personal assistant was speaking: someone called Ellen Smith was on the line, asking to talk to me urgently. The name meant nothing: what did she want? No, said the PA, she had refused to say. I hesitated. This was one of the occupational risks. Then I said, ‘All right, put her through.’

‘My name is Ellen Smith.’ The voice was brisk and cultivated. ‘I’ve met you once before.’

I said ‘Yes?’ But I did not remember.

‘I think Roger — Roger Quaife — has told you, hasn’t he?’

Now I understood.

‘He’s given me permission,’ she went on, ‘to talk to you myself. Do you mind?’

Would I call at her flat one evening, when she had got back from her job? That would be better than saying anything on the telephone, didn’t I agree? She didn’t want to impose on me, but she was worried. She hoped I could bear it.

She sounded precise, nervous, active. I had no impression of her at all. On the way to her flat in Ebury Street, I thought to myself that it was well-placed for Westminster — chance or not? But about her, I did not know whether she was single or married, nor anything else.

When she opened the door to me, the first thing I felt was the obvious, the banal irony. She seemed familiar, yet I could not place her. She shook hands with an expression both diffident and severe. She was small and slender, but not at all frail, dark-haired, wearing a white jersey over a black skirt. She was no younger than Caro. By the side of Caro, the confident, the splendid, she would have looked insignificant. One memory, though not about herself, came back with the relevance of someone telling one the time, and I remembered Caro, gay in the drawing-room at Lord North Street, roaring with laughter and saying the woman a wife needs to fear isn’t the raving beauty, but that little grey mouse in the corner. It seemed the most cut and dried of ironies to remember that, and then to follow Ellen Smith into her chic, small sitting-room. I still could not recall meeting her, anything about her.

She poured me a drink. She drew her legs on to the sofa, the tumblers on the table between us.

‘It’s kind of you to come,’ she said.

‘Nonsense,’ I replied, a little over-heartily.

‘Is it nonsense?’ She looked at me. For an instant I had Caro’s eyes in mind, bold, full, innocent. These eyes were not bold, but deeper-set, lit up with attention, lit up with insight. Then the contrast faded out. I was studying her face, not beautiful, not pretty, but fine and delicate. The delicacy, the acuteness of her expression, struck one more when one looked up from her strong shoulders. She smiled, diffidently and honestly. ‘This is damned awkward,’ she said.

Suddenly a memory flashed back — was it because my fingers were cold against the glass? The Ambassadorial house in Regent’s Park, the night of Suez, the wife of J C Smith.

So this was she. Yes, it was awkward, though that was not what she meant. Smith, Collingwood’s nephew, fanatical, dedicated, so people said about him: I had read some of his speeches and articles: they had a curious gritty violence. They were shot through with a conspiratorial feeling of history and politics: and yet I had met young Conservative members who worshipped him. The wife of J C Smith. Yes, it was awkward. I said something muted, such as, the less she fretted the better.

This time her smile was brilliant.

‘That’s easier said than done, you know.’

I tried to take the edge off both of us. I asked what she had been doing that day. She told me that she had been out as usual at her job. She seemed to be working in a reference library. We mentioned the names of acquaintances, among them Lord Lufkin. I said that I had once worked for him. ‘I’m sure that was good for you,’ she said with a faint flash of mischief. Strained as she was, her spirits did not take much to revive them. She did not forget about my comfort, either. The glass was refilled, the cigarette-box was open. She broke out: ‘I am not fretting about him and me. You do believe that, don’t you?’

She went on: ‘I’m happy about us. I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life. And I think he’s happy too. It sounds too conceited to live, but I think he’s happy too.’

She had no conceit at all, I was thinking, far too little for her own good.

She had spoken so directly that I could do the same. I asked, where was her husband, what had happened to her marriage? She shook her head.

‘I’ve got to tell you,’ she said. ‘It sounds ugly. If I heard it about someone else, I should write her off. I know I should.’ She said that, beside Roger, only her husband’s parents knew the truth about him. It was to be kept a dead secret. Then she said, flat and hard: ‘He’s in a mental home.’ It wasn’t certain that he would get better, she said. His constituency had been told that he was ill and might not contest his seat at the next election.

‘It’s been coming on for years. Yes, and that hasn’t stopped me. I saw the chance to be happy, and I took it.’ She looked at me with an expression honest, guilty and stern. ‘I’m not going to make excuses. But you might believe this. It sounds disloyal, but if he hadn’t been getting unbalanced I should have left him long ago. I tried to look after him. If it hadn’t been for that, I should have left him long before Roger came along.’ She gave a sharp-eyed smile, not merciful to herself. ‘There’s something wrong with a woman who falls for a man she can’t endure and then for one she can’t marry, isn’t there?’

‘It could be bad luck.’

‘It’s not all bad luck.’ Then she said, without pretence: ‘But, do you know, just now I can’t feel that there’s much wrong with me. You can understand that, can’t you?’

She laughed out loud. One couldn’t doubt her warmth, her ardour, her capacity for happiness. And yet I felt that this was not a life for which she was made. Plenty of women I knew in London made the best of this sort of bachelor life in flats like this — though hers was brighter, more expensive, than most of theirs. Plenty of women came back from offices as she did, looked after their little nests, waited for their men. Some of them could take it: light come, light go. Some even felt their blood run hotter because they had to keep a secret, because the curtains were drawn and they were listening — alone — for the snap of the lift-door. Looking at Ellen, I was sure that, though she would bear it in secrecy if she couldn’t get him any other way, she was paying a price, maybe higher than she knew.

I asked how long had their affair been going on.

‘Three years,’ she said.

That set me back. Three years. All the time I had known him well. For an instant I was piqued, at having noticed nothing.

There was a silence. Her eyes, dark blue, painfully honest, were studying me. She said: ‘I want to ask you something. Very seriously.’

‘Yes?’ I replied.

‘Ought I to get out of it?’

I hesitated.

‘Is that a fair question?’ I asked.

‘Isn’t it?’

I said: ‘But could you get out of it?’

Her eyes stayed steady. She did not reply. After a moment she said: ‘I couldn’t do him harm. We’ve been good for each other. You’d expect him to be good for me, of course, but somehow it isn’t all one-sided. I don’t know why, but sometimes I think I’ve been good for him.’ She was speaking simply, tentatively: then she broke out: ‘Anyway, it would be the end for me if I let him go.’

Her voice had risen; tears had come. With a rough, schoolgirlish gesture, she brushed her cheeks with the back of her fingers. Then she sniffled, and made herself go on in a braver tone. ‘But I couldn’t do him harm, you know that, don’t you?’

‘I think I do.’

‘I believe in what he’s doing. You believe in it, isn’t that true?’ She said she wasn’t ‘political’, but she was shrewd. She knew where his position was weak.

She gave a sharp smile: ‘I’m not fooling you, am I? I’m not the sort of person to make gestures. Naturally I couldn’t do him harm. I couldn’t bear to damage his career, just because it’s him. But I couldn’t bear to damage him — because I’m pretty selfish. If he suffered any sort of public harm because of him and me, he’d never really forgive me. Do you think he would?’

I noticed, not for the first time, her curious trick of throwing questions at me, questions about herself which I could not have enough knowledge to answer. In another woman, it would have seemed like an appeal for attention — ‘Look at me! — an opening gambit to intimacy, to flirtation. But she was not thinking of me at all as a man, only as someone who might help her. This was her method, not precisely of confiding, so much as of briefing me, so that if the chance came I could be some use.

I said something non-committal.

‘No,’ she said, ‘it would be the end.’

In an even, realistic, almost sarcastic tone, she added: ‘So I get the rough end of the stick however I play it.’

I wanted to comfort her. I told her the only use I could be was practical. What was happening now? Had she been to a lawyer? What else had she done?

Up till then, she had been too apprehensive to get to the facts. And yet, was that really so? She was apprehensive, all right, but she had spirit and courage. In theory, she had asked me there to talk about the facts. After the years of silence, though, it was a release to have a confidant. Even for her, who had so little opinion of herself — perhaps most of all for her — it was a luxury to boast a little.

The facts did not tell me much. Yes, she had been to a lawyer. He had got her telephone calls intercepted: once or twice the voice had broken through. Always from call boxes, nothing to identify it. The same voice? Yes. What sort? Not quite out of the top drawer, said Ellen, just as Mrs Henneker would have said it, as only an Englishwoman would have said it. Rough? Oh, no. Like someone fairly refined, from the outer suburbs. Obscene? Not in the least. Just saying that her liaison with Roger was known, telling her the evenings when he visited her, and asking her to warn Roger to be careful.

Since the check on telephone calls, she had received a couple of anonymous letters. That was why, she said when it was nearly time for me to leave, she had begged me to call that night. Yes, she had shown them to the lawyer. Now she spread them out on the table, beside the tumblers.

I had a phobia about anonymous letters. I had been exposed to them myself. I could not prevent my nerve-ends tingling, from the packed, paranoid handwriting, the psychic smell, the sense of madness whirling in a vacuum, of malice one could never meet in the flesh, of hatred pulsating in lonely rooms. But these letters were not of the usual kind. They were written in a bold and normal script on clean quarto paper. They were polite and business-like. They said that Roger had been known to visit her between five and seven in the evening, on the dates set down. (‘Correct?’ I asked. ‘Quite correct,’ said Ellen.) The writer had documentary proof of their relations (‘Possible?’ ‘I’m afraid we’ve written letters.’) If Roger continued in the public eye, this information would, with regret, have to be made known. Just that, and no more.

‘Who is it?’ she cried. ‘Is it some madman?’

‘Do you think,’ I said slowly, ‘it sounds like that?’

‘Is it just someone who hates us? Or one of us?’

‘I almost wish it were.’

‘You mean—?’

‘It looks to me,’ I said, ‘more rational than that.’

‘It’s something to do with Roger’s politics?’ She added, her face flushed with fighting anger, ‘I was afraid of that. By God, this is becoming a dirty game!’

I was glad that she was angry, not just beaten down. I said I wanted to take the letters away. I had acquaintances in Security, I explained. Their discretion was absolute. They were good at this kind of operation. If anyone could find out who this man was, or who was behind him, they could.

Ellen, an active woman, was soothed by the prospect of action. Bright-eyed, she made me have another drink before I left. She was talking almost happily, more happily than she had done all the evening, when she said out of the blue, a frown clouding her face: ‘I suppose you know her?’

All of a sudden she got up from the sofa, turned her back on me, rearranged some flowers — as though she wanted to talk about Caro but wasn’t able to accept the pain.

‘Yes, I know her.’

She gazed at me: ‘I was going to ask you what she was like.’ She paused. ‘Never mind.’

At the lift-door, when we said goodbye, she looked at me, so I thought, with trust. But her expression had gone back to that which had greeted me, diffident, severe.

24: Dispatch Boxes in the Bedroom

Basset in October, a week before the new session: the leaves falling on the drive, the smoke from the lodge chimney unmoving in the still air, the burnished sunset, the lights streaming from the house, the drinks waiting in the flower-packed hall. It might have been something out of an eclogue, specially designed to illustrate how lucky these lives were, or as an advertisement composed in order to increase the rate of political recruitment.

Even to an insider, it all looked so safe.

It all looked so safe at dinner. Collingwood, silent and marmoreal, sat on Diana’s right: Roger, promoted to her left hand, looked as composed as Collingwood, as much a fixture. Caro, in high and handsome spirits, was flashing signals to him and Diana across the table. Caro’s neighbour, a member of the Opposition shadow cabinet, teased her as though he fitted as comfortably as anyone there, which in fact he did. He was a smooth, handsome man called Burnett, a neighbour of Diana’s whom she had called in for dinner. Young Arthur Plimpton was sitting between my wife and a very pretty girl, Hermione Fox, a relative of Caro’s. It didn’t take much skill to deduce that this was one of Diana’s counter-measures against Penelope Getliffe. Arthur, looking both bold and shifty, was in England for a week, intent upon not drawing too much of my attention and Margaret’s.

But there was at least one person who was putting on a public face. Monty Cave’s wife had at last left him for good; to anyone but himself it seemed a release, but not to him. The morning he received the final note, he had gone to his department and done his work. That was three days ago. And now he was sitting at the dinner table, his clever, fat, subtle face giving away nothing except interest, polite, receptive — as though it were absurd to think that a man so disciplined could suffer much, could ever have wished for death.

He was a man of abnormal control, on the outside. Mrs Henneker did not know what had happened to him.

When Margaret and I came into the house out of the Virgilian evening, Mrs Henneker had been lurking in the hall. I was just getting comfortable, we were having our first chat with Diana, when Mrs Henneker installed herself at my side. She was waiting for the other two to start talking. The instant they did so, she said, with her sparkling, dense, confident look: ‘I’ve got something to show you!’

Yes, it was my retribution. She had finished a draft of her ‘Life,’ as she kept calling it, the biography of her husband. There was no escape. I had to explain to Margaret, who gave a snort of laughter, then, composing her face, told me sternly how fortunate I was to be in on the beginning of a masterpiece. I had to follow Mrs Henneker into the library. Would I prefer her to read the manuscript aloud to me? I thought not. She looked disappointed. She took a chair very close to mine, watching my face with inflexible attention as I turned over the pages. To my consternation, it was a good deal better than I had expected. When she wrote, she didn’t fuss, she just wrote. That I might have reckoned on: what I hadn’t, was that she and her husband had adored each other. She did not find this in the least surprising, and as she wrote, some of it came through.

This was a real love-story, I tried to tell her. The valuable things in the book were there. So she ought to play down the injustices she believed him to have suffered, her own estimate of what ought to have happened to him. I didn’t say, but I thought I might have to, that she wasn’t being over-wise in telling us that as a fighting commander he was in the class of Nelson, as a naval thinker not far behind Mahan, as a moral influence comparable with Einstein — if she wanted us to believe that as a husband, he was as good as Robert Browning.

I had spoken gently, or at least, I had intended to. Mrs Henneker brooded. She stared at me. It was near dinner time, I said, and we had left ourselves only a quarter of an hour to dress. In a stately fashion, Mrs Henneker inclined her head. She had not thanked me for my suggestions, much less commented upon them.

At the dinner table, she was still brooding. She was too much preoccupied to speak to me. When Arthur, accomplished with elderly matrons, took time off to be polite to her, he did not get much further. At last, after the fish, she burst out, not to either of us, but to the table at large: ‘I suppose I must be old-fashioned!’

She had spoken so loudly, so furiously, that everyone attended.

In her briskest tone, Diana said: ‘What is it, Kate?’

‘I believe in happy marriages. I was happy with my husband and I don’t mind anyone knowing it. But my neighbour—’ she meant me, she was speaking with unconcealed distaste — ‘tells me that I mustn’t say so.’

For an instant I was put out. This was what came of giving literary advice. I should never persuade her, nor presumably anyone else, that I had said the exact opposite.

She was put out too. She was indifferent to anyone round her. She said, ‘Doesn’t anyone nowadays like being married, except me?’

The table was quiet. Roger knew about Monty’s state: so did Caro. So did Margaret. I could not prevent my glance deviating towards him. Nor, in that quiet and undisciplined instant, could others. He was sitting with his eyes open and meaningless, his mouth also open: he looked more childlike than clever, foolish, a bit of a clown.

It was Caro who cracked the silence. Her colour had risen. She called out, just like someone offering a bet: ‘Damn it, most of us do our best, don’t we?’ She was teasing Margaret and me, each of whom had been married twice. She laughed at Arthur and Hermione Fox. They had plenty of time ahead, she said, they probably wouldn’t do any better than we had all done.

Arthur gave a creaking laugh. If Caro had been his own age, she would have known exactly how much he fought shy of getting married; she would have had it out of him. He wouldn’t have cared. For some, the flash of sympathy between them was a relief.

Except that, for some moments yet, Monty Cave sat with his clown’s face. Then his expression, and those of the rest of us, became disciplined again.

With one exception, that Margaret and I speculated about. At the head of her own table, Diana was crying. Even when she gave us orders about how long to stay over the port, the tears returned. When we were alone in our bedroom, Margaret and I talked about it. Yes, she had behaved much as usual after dinner; she still sounded like a curious mixture of Becky Sharp and a good regimental officer keeping us all on our toes. We both knew that her marriage to Skidmore was supposed to have been an abnormally happy one. Was that why she had cried?

Next morning, meeting me in the hall, she told me that she was too tired to go out with the guns. It was the first time I had known her energies flag. She was still enough herself to give me instructions. I didn’t shoot, I might be bored, but I was to keep Monty Cave company in her place. ‘He’s not to be left by himself just now,’ she said. It sounded matter-of-fact and kind. Actually it was kind, but not entirely matter-of-fact. Diana was providing against the remotest chance of a suicide.

Soon the shooting parties were setting out, with me among them. Reggie Collingwood, Caro and Roger, walked along together through the golden fields. So far as Collingwood had any casual pleasures, shooting was the favourite one. He approved of Roger for sharing it: while Roger, who had taken on the pastimes of Caro’s family when he married her, lolloped tweedily along between them, looking as natural as an Edwardian statesman.

Monty and I veered to the left. When I spoke to him, he answered me, quite sweet-temperedly, but that was all. By the side of the other party, we were funereal. Then quick steps came padding up behind us. I looked round. It was Arthur Plimpton, dressed no more fittingly than I was, but carrying a gun. I did not understand why he had sacrificed a day with a comely young woman, but I was glad to see him. It was possible that he had come out of good nature. He was no fool, and he couldn’t have been in Basset for twenty-four hours without picking up the story of Monty’s wife.

‘Do you like hunting, sir?’ he said cheerfully to Monty.

‘No, I never hunt,’ said Monty, who had just brought down two birds with a right and left.

‘If I may say so, sir, you’re doing pretty well for a beginner.’ Arthur knew as well as I did that the English did not refer to this form of avicide as ‘hunting’. He had used the word out of mischief. He turned out to be a competent shot, about as good as Collingwood or Roger. Of the four of them, Monty was far and away the best. He might be a clever, sad, fat man, whom women were not drawn to: but his eyes and limbs worked like a machine.

At about one o’clock, we all gathered on a mound, eating out of the picnic-baskets. The morning mist had cleared, the light was mellow, clear as Constable’s. Caro stretched herself on the turf with the sensuous virtue of one who has taken exercise; she took a swig from a brandy flask and passed it to Roger. The party looked like a tableau out of someone’s attempt to present a simpler age.

Collingwood gazed at the shining countryside. ‘It’s a nice day,’ he said.

When, in the dying afternoon, we were sitting in the library up at the house, having just got back for tea, Collingwood felt the phrase could not be much improved. He and Roger and Cave sat in their tweeds round Diana, who was pouring out. ‘It’s been a nice day,’ said Collingwood.

Though it would have taken a great expert in Collingwoodian dialogue to detect this, he was not so patriarchally content as he had been at mid-day in the sunshine. During the afternoon, the difference between the bags had mounted. By the time we walked home, Collingwood and Roger had had the worst of the day. Collingwood was inclined to blame it on to Roger.

‘You seem to have been in good form, Cave,’ said Collingwood in the library, with manly frankness, with oblique reproach.

Monty Cave muttered politely, but without interest.

Arthur joined in: ‘He was good all day,’ and began talking to Cave himself. Arthur was suggesting a two-handed shoot, just the two of them, first thing the next morning.

Collingwood was surveying them. He approved of attempts to ‘take his mind off it’. He approved of young men making efforts with their elders. Most of all, he approved of able, rich young men. Drinking whisky instead of tea, he stretched out stockinged legs and gave a well-disposed sigh. Turning to his hostess, he remarked: ‘Diana, I must say, it’s been a nice day.’

When the dispatch-boxes arrived, both Diana and he made their routine grumbles, just as they had been doing since the twenties, when he got his first office, and she was starting to run a political house. As Margaret and I were strolling in the courtyard, in the bluish twilight, a government car drove up. A secretary descended, carrying one of the boxes, red and oblong, which we were all used to. We followed him in: this one was for Monty Cave. Within minutes, two other secretaries, carrying two identical boxes, walked through the great hall of Basset, on their way to Collingwood and Roger Quaife.

In the library, Diana, revived, her face less drawn, went through the minuet of grumbles, while she had the satisfaction of seeing three boxes being opened on three pairs of knickerbockered knees.

‘I’d better put dinner off till nine?’ she said.

‘I’m afraid it looks like it,’ replied Collingwood. His tone was grave and ill-used: yet he couldn’t, any more than Diana, conceal a kind of pleasure, the pleasure, secretive but shining, that they got from being at the centre of things.

Diana had the drill laid on. Dinner to be late, drinks to be sent up at once to the Minister’s rooms. Soon Collingwood was lumbering up the wide staircase, with the step of a man who has to bear too much. The other two followed. I wasn’t wanted, and it was some time before I went up to my room. There, as I dressed, Margaret was baiting me through the door, hilarious at the stately ritual downstairs. Did all men in power behave like this? Why? Because otherwise, I replied, they wouldn’t reach power, enjoy it, or keep it.

Just then, there was a knock on the door. It was one of the menservants, bearing an envelope, addressed to me in Collingwood’s bold Edwardian hand. Inside was a sheet of Basset writing-paper, covered by more of Collingwood’s elephantine writing. It said: ‘I should be grateful if you could spare us a few minutes of your time. It would be a convenience if you could come without delay.’

I took in the note to Margaret without a word, and left her laughing.

Inside Collingwood’s bedroom, which was the biggest in the house, the boxes gaped open on a table, and the great four-poster bed was strewn with papers. All three men were still wearing their outdoor suits, though Collingwood had taken off his jacket. He was sitting on the bed, and the other two had drawn up chairs nearby, each holding a glass in his hand.

‘Oh, there you are,’ said Collingwood. ‘We want to get something fixed up.’

Roger explained that they had received a Cabinet paper. He said to Collingwood: ‘I assume Eliot can see it? He’ll get it in his own office on Monday.’

Collingwood nodded.

I ran through it. It was only a couple of pages, typed in triple spacing on one of the large-letter machines, as though specially designed for longsighted elderly men. It came from the Minister of Labour. It said that if a change in weapons policy was at any time contemplated, the Minister wished the labour position to be established from the beginning. That is, a sudden stop, even in a single isolated project, such as—’ would mean unemployment for seven thousand men, of whom three thousand were specialists, and difficult to assimilate. This would be embarrassing for the Minister. Any more fundamental change in weapons policy would produce large pockets of unemployment. Unless the changes were spread over several years, they would be unacceptable.

It sounded official, cautious, reasonable. But everyone in the room knew that it meant more. It was a sighting-shot: and it was a sighting-shot, as it were, by proxy. It was not really this Minister who was testing Roger’s intentions. It was a set of other interests, who were still keeping quiet. Service groups? Big firms? None of us knew, but all of us were guessing.

‘They’ve been getting at him,’ said Collingwood.

‘It’s very easy, as I said before,’ Roger leaned back, ‘for them to overplay their hands.’

He looked confident, full of weight, springy with resource. Collingwood turned his handsome head and watched him in silence. So far as I could feel it in the air, there had been no argument.

‘Well, then, Quaife, I’m with you. I agree, the Committee’ (he meant the Cabinet committee on defence policy, about which Rose had given me the first news) ‘ought to meet tomorrow or Tuesday. That’s where we want you to help us—’ He spoke to me. He gave, as usual, the impression that he was ill at ease and that he didn’t care whether he was at ease or not. Everyone at Basset called him Reggie, but he still found it an effort not to speak to those two Cabinet colleagues of his as Mr Quaife and Mr Cave. He just managed to use their surnames. As for me, though I had met him a dozen times in the house, he could not become as familiar as that.

He assumed that I was at his disposal for a modest task.

They wanted the Committee convened over the weekend. As Douglas Osbaldiston was the Secretary, that was his job. Would I telephone him and get that in motion before dinner?

It was barely polite. It was certainly not adroit. Yet, within the next ten minutes, I saw, or thought I saw, how he kept his power. Before I arrived, they had been talking about three big firms: how much influence could they pull out? By this time, Roger and Cave spoke of ‘pressure groups’, or ‘lobbies’, as though they were Americans.

‘If they were solid together, they might be more of a menace,’ said Roger. ‘But they’re not, we haven’t given them a chance to be. There are always going to be some Government contracts. For some of our friends, that prospect carries its own simple logic.’

By the side of Roger, braced for the struggle, his voice taking on its taunting edge, Cave looked slack and gone to seed. But he was more at home than he had been all the weekend. He didn’t see, he said, any lobby being effective by itself. ‘But I should make two qualifications. First, Government must know its own mind. Second, and this isn’t quite a platitude, lobbies may be important if they happen to touch opinion deeper than their own. That is, if they touch opinion which hasn’t their own axe to grind.’

‘Fair comment,’ said Roger.

Collingwood stirred, and put one arm round the bedpost. ‘I see.’ He was speaking to neither of them in particular, making pauses like one reading from a script: but the authority was there. ‘If I understand you both right, there isn’t much between us. I take it Cave means that we’ve got to feel our way. I agree to that. We’ve got to watch whether any of these forces are having any effect on the Party. We can’t push the Party further than it’s prepared to go. I’m not presuming to give Quaife any advice. I never give anyone any advice.’ He said this as though it were the most exalted claim a man could make. ‘But, if I were Quaife, I should wrap up some of his intentions. I shouldn’t let them get down to particular consequences until we’ve carried most of them with us. Carried them further than they thought. But not further than some of us are ready to go. I shouldn’t let the White Paper give them much idea which weapons were being struck off straight away. I should wrap it up.’ He was still addressing the wall. ‘If I were Quaife, I should remember one other thing. I’ve got a feeling that the Party needs a lead. And by the Party, I mean the country as well. They need to feel that they’re doing something new. I’ve got a feeling that, if anyone gives them a lead, they’ll forgive him a lot. They may not like everything he’s doing, but they’ll be ready to forgive him.’

It was a curious speech, I thought, as I listened, and even more so later. A good deal of it was common form, not specially ominous, but carefully uncommitted. The last part was not such common form. He seemed to be inviting Roger to take a risk. As he did so, I had felt for the first time that he was, in his own right, a formidable man. Was he inducing Roger to take one risk too many? He had sounded, in a stony way, sincere. What did he wish for Roger? He had done him good turns. Did he like him? Men like Collingwood did not like or dislike freely. I was still uncertain about his feelings for Roger, or whether he had any feelings for him at all.

Next day, Margaret and I had to leave the house after tea. The weather had not changed. Just as when we arrived, it was an evening so tranquil that the chimney smoke seemed painted on the sky, and in the air there was a smell of burning leaves. Diana stood by herself in the courtyard, waving us off.

It had been a weekend in the country, with unhappiness in the house, and foreboding. As we settled down in the car, though, I felt, not relief to get away, but disquiet. For some of the disquiet I could find reason; but it was still there, swelling, nagging, changing, as though I were back in my childhood after a holiday, returning home, not knowing what I should find nor what I feared.

25: A Speech to the Fishmongers

The committee room looked inwards to the Treasury yard: the rain sloshed down. Past Collingwood’s head, on the two sides of the window, quivered the turning plane-leaves. In the chair, Collingwood behaved as he had done before, sitting on the bed at Basset. He was formal with the Ministers: Douglas Osbaldiston he treated like a servant, which Douglas showed no sign of noticing, much less of minding. But Collingwood got what he wanted. Arguments did not continue, except on lines which he approved, and there were not many. He had come to inspect the skeleton of the White Paper. In his view, it ought to be what he called ‘a set of balances’.

This suited Roger. It was not the way in which, that summer, before the opposition began to crystallize, we had been making drafts. This way left him some tactical freedom. It sounded as though he and Collingwood, after the bedroom conference, had made a deal. Yet I knew for certain that, since half-past eight on the Saturday night, two and a half days before, they had not exchanged a word in private. Enough had been said. They each understood what would follow, and so did Monty Cave and I. This was the way business got done, very rarely with intrigue, not as a rule with cut and dried agreements; quite different from the imaginative picture of the cynical and unworldly.

Osbaldiston, who was neither cynical nor unworldly, would have understood it without even a comment, if he had been present on Saturday night. As it was, he was momentarily surprised. He had expected something more dramatic from his Minister, and had been uneasy. Douglas did not approve of anything dramatic, on paper. Now he realized that the White Paper was going to be filled with detail. He was more comfortable with it so.

While Hector Rose, sick with migraine when I reported to him that afternoon, smelled compromise in the air.

‘I think I remember, my dear Lewis, mentioning to you that the knives were sharpening. Has it ever crossed your mind that our masters are somewhat easily frightened off?’ He looked at me with sarcastic satisfaction in his own judgement. I told him more about the meeting, which he would have attended himself if he had been well. I said that the Air Minister had reserved his position at much too great length. Rose nodded. It would be a month or two before the White Paper could be finished, they had agreed. By that time, Roger had told them casually, just before the end of the meeting, he would have his ‘winding-up’ ready for them to see. ‘That went down?’ Rose raised his eyebrows. ‘It sounds like a very neat job of papering-over-the-cracks, shouldn’t you say?’

But Rose and a good many others were puzzled when, within a fortnight, Roger next spoke in public. Long before the Basset weekend, Lufkin had made him commit himself to the actual engagement. Whether he had changed his mind about what to say, after Collingwood’s allocution, I did not know. Whether he had decided to use this occasion, instead of going on to the television screen, I did not know also. It may have been the chance conjunction of Collingwood and Lufkin that led him to give what became known, a little bizarrely, as the Fishmongers’ Hall Speech.

Lord Lufkin was a Fishmonger. Not that he had ever sold a fish: not even in the Hamletian sense. Lufkin had a singular gift for getting it both ways. He disapproved of the hereditary peerage, and had become a hereditary peer. In just the same way, he had nothing but scorn for the old livery companies. It was grotesque, said Lufkin, with acid scorn, for businessmen to take on the names of honest trades they had not a vestige of connection with: and to stand themselves good dinners out of money earned by better men. It was medieval juju, said Lufkin. It was ‘atavistic’, he said mysteriously, with the spirit that John Knox might have shown when he was less well disposed than usual to Mary Queen of Scots. None of that prevented him taking all the honours in his own livery, which, by some fluke, was the Fishmongers. That year, he had risen to be the Prime Warden of the Fishmongers. Most of his colleagues enjoyed each honorific job as it came, and would have enjoyed this. Lufkin showed no sign of pleasure: except, I sometimes fancied, at the thought of doing someone else out of it.

He went through his duties. That was why he had invited Roger to the Michaelmas dinner and had arranged for him to speak. That was why Lufkin stood in a great drawing-room at the hall, that November night, dressed in a russet Tudor gown tipped with fur, surrounded by other officials of the livery, dressed in less grand gowns tipped with less grand fur. Above the fancy dress protruded Lufkin’s small, neat, handsome twentieth-century head, as he shook hand after hand with an impersonation of cordiality.

With maces carried before him, he led the procession into the hall for dinner. It was a hall not unlike, though larger than, a college hall: and the dinner was not unlike, though larger than, a college feast. Roger sat at the high table, on Lufkin’s right hand. I was somewhere down the hall, placed between a banker, cultivated and reactionary, and a Labour MP, less cultivated, but not much less reactionary. I did not know many men there, though across the room I caught sight of Sammikins, leaning back with a glass in his hand. The food and drink were good, but not good enough to go out for. I knew that Roger was going to use the occasion to ‘fly a kite’. I had not seen the script, and did not expect much. I was not at all keyed-up. I got the banker off the subject of South Africa, on which he sounded like an unusually illiberal Afrikaaner, on to German translations of Dostoievsky, where I knew nothing, and he a great deal.

Speeches. A long, and very bad one, by the chairman of an insurance company. I drank another glass of port. A short and very bad one by Lufkin, who sat down among dutiful plaudits as though he both expected them and was impervious.

Then the toastmaster cried: ‘Pray silence for your guest, the Right Honourable Roger Quaife, one of her Majesty’s Privy Councillors, holder of the Distinguished Service Order, Member of Parliament for—’

In the candlelight, looking at the table before me, I saw the sheen of glass, of gold and silver plate. I turned as Roger rose. He looked enormous, after the image left by Lufkin. He began the incantation: ‘My Lord and Prime Warden, your Grace, my Lords, Members of the Honourable Livery Company of the Fishmongers, gentlemen—’

He stopped short, and stood there in silence. He went on in a quiet tone: ‘We have, all of us here, a good deal to be thankful for. This is an autumn night, and there is no war. An autumn night, and no war. For ten years out of the lives of almost every man here, we could not have said as much. We are lucky now, tonight. We have to make sure that that luck lasts. Some of us have fought in two wars. Most of us have fought in one. I don’t need to tell anyone who has fought, that war is hell. We have seen better men than ourselves killed beside us. We have seen the way they died. We have seen our dead. But that is not the worst of it. In the wars we fought, there were times when we could still admire our friends: one was terrified oneself, but others were brave. War was stink, and rot, and burning, but human beings were often fine. Individual men still counted. It is hard to imagine how, in any major war which we can now foresee, they can count much again.’

At that point, Roger had to break off into official language and point out how the armed services were still all-important. But soon he was talking in his own voice again. That was the knack — it was more than a knack, it was a quality which had drawn some of us to him — which held his audience. The hall was quiet. He went on: ‘We all think, from time to time, of thermo-nuclear war. Of course we do. We should be foolish, as well as wicked, if we didn’t. We can dimly imagine what such a war would be like. By its side, any horrors that men have so far contrived to inflict upon other men, would look like a tea-party. So we know that this must never happen. Yet, though we know that, we do not know the way to stop it. I have met men of good will, who don’t easily give up hope, thinking to themselves that we are all — all mankind — caught in a hideous trap. I don’t believe that, I believe that with courage and intelligence and a little luck, we shall find a way out. I don’t pretend it will be easy. I doubt whether there is any total solution. Perhaps we’ve got to hack away here and there, trying to do comparatively small things, which may make war that much less likely. That is why I am taking the opportunity tonight to ask a few questions. No one in the world, I think, knows the answers to all of them, perhaps not to many. That is a reason why we should at least ask them. Most of all, in this country. Ours is a country which has been as stable as any in the world for the longest time. We are an experienced people. We have been through many dangers. It happens, through no fault of our own, that this new danger, this change in the nature of war, this thermo-nuclear breakthrough, threatens us more vitally and completely than any major power. Simply because, by world standards, we are no bigger than a pocket-handkerchief, and live so close together. This degree of danger, of course, ought not to affect our judgement. I know there are some — most of all, old people living alone, and some of the young, who feel this predicament as unfair — who quite naturally, in their own hearts, occasionally feel frightened.’

There had been no noise, almost no coughing, in the hall. I had been aware of the faces round me, some naked with interest, the banker’s reflective and morose. Just then, a voice down the end of the opposite table shouted, thick with drink: ‘Speak for yourself!’

Sammikins was on his feet, berserk, calling to the interrupter.

‘Shut up, you blasted swine!’

‘Speak for yourself!’ came a drunken voice.

Sammikin’s neighbours were pulling him down, as he cried, ‘Where have you fought? This man has, you pig!’

Roger held up his hand. He stood, impassive, immobile, without a flicker. He said: ‘I’m prepared for anyone to accuse me of being cowardly. That doesn’t matter. It’s hard, I sometimes think, for a man with young children not to be. But I’m not prepared for anyone to accuse the people of this country of being cowardly. They’ve proved the opposite quite enough for any reasonable man. Anything we decide, now or in the future, about our military position, will be done because it seems to us moral and sensible, not because we’re frightened, or because, on the other hand, we have to prove that we’re not.’ He drew the first rumble of ‘hear, hears’. He let them run, then held up his hand again.

‘Now, after this bit of pleasantry, I’m going to ask the questions. As I say, no one knows the answers. But if all of us think about them, we may some day be able to say something that decent people, people of good will all over the world, are waiting to hear. First, if there is no agreement or control, how many countries are going to possess thermo-nuclear weapons by, say, 1967? My guess, and this is a political guess, and yours is as good as mine, is that four or five will actually have them. Unless it is not beyond the wit of man to stop them. Second, does this spread of weapons make thermo-nuclear war more or less likely? Again, your guess is as good as mine. But mine is sombre. Third, why are countries going to possess themselves of these weapons? Is it for national security, or for less rational reasons? Fourth, can this catastrophe — no, that is going further than I feel inclined, I ought to say, this extreme increase of danger — can it be stopped? Is it possible that any of us, any country or group of countries, can give a message or indication that will, in fact make military and human sense?’

Roger had been speaking for ten minutes, and he continued for as long again. In the whole of the second half of his speech, he went off again into official language, the cryptic, encyclical language of a Minister of the Crown. The effect was odd, but I was sure that it was calculated. He had tried them deep enough: now was the time to reassure them. They would be glad of platitudes, and he was ready to oblige them.

He did not make much of a peroration, and sat down to steady, though not excessive, applause. There was an amiable and inept vote of thanks, and the Prime Warden’s procession, maces in front, Roger alongside Lufkin, left the hall.

When I recalled the evening, I thought that few of the people round me realized that they had been listening to what would become a well-known speech. I was not certain that I realized it myself. There was a sense of curiosity, in some sense of malaise, in some of let-down. I heard various speculations on my way out. Most of them were respectful but puzzled.

In the press of men jostling towards the cloakroom, I saw Sammikins, his eyes flaring, his face wild as a hawk’s. He was not far from me, but he shouted: ‘I’m sick of this mob! Come for a walk.’

I had a feeling that the invitation was not specially calculated to please his neighbours, who stood stolid and heavy while he pushed through them, lean, elegant, decorations on his lapel.

We had neither of us brought overcoats or hats, and so got straight out before the others, into the night air.

‘By God!’ cried Sammikins.

He had drunk a good deal, but he was not drunk. Yet it would have been an error to think that he was tractable. He was inflamed with his grievance, his vicarious grievance of the interruption.

‘By God, he’s’ (he was talking of Roger) ‘a better man than they are. I know men in his regiment. I tell you, he’s as brave as a man can reasonably be.’

I said that no one doubted it.

‘Who the hell was that bloody man?’

‘Does it matter?’ I asked.

‘I expect he was a colonel in the Pay Corps. I’d like to ram the words down his fat throat. What in God’s name do you mean, “Does it matter?”’

I said, being accused of something one knows oneself to be ridiculous, and which everyone else knows to be ridiculous, never hurt one. As I said it, I was thinking: Is that true? It pacified Sammikins for the time being, while I was brooding. No, I had sometimes been hurt by an accusation entirely false: more so than by some which were dead accurate.

In silence we walked to a corner and paused there for a moment, looking across the road at the bulk of the Monument, black against the moonlight blue of the sky. It was not cold; a south-west wind was blowing. We turned down Arthur Street and into Upper Thames Street, keeping parallel with the wharves. Beyond the ragged bomb-sites, where the willow herb was growing still, since the air raids nearly twenty years before, we saw the glitter of the river, the density of warehouses, the skeletal cranes.

‘He’s a great man, isn’t he?’ said Sammikins.

‘What is a great man?’

‘By God, are you turning on him now?’

I had spoken carelessly, but his temper was still on the trigger.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ve thrown everything I could behind him. And I’m taking more risks than most of his friends.’

‘I know that, I know that. Yes, damn it, he’s a great man.’

He gave me a friendly smile. As we walked along what used to be a narrow street, now wide open to the moonlight, he said: ‘My sister did well for herself when she married him. I suppose she was bound to make a happy marriage and have a brood of children. But, you know, I always thought she’d marry one of us. She was lucky that she didn’t.’

When Sammikins said that he thought she would marry ‘one of us’, he spoke as unselfconsciously as his great-grandfather might have done, saying he thought that his sister might have married a ‘gentleman’. Despite his hero-worship of Roger, that was exactly what Sammikins meant. As he spoke, however, there was something which took my attention more. Caro was more concerned about him, loved him more, than he loved her. Nevertheless, he was fond of her; and yet he saw her marriage in terms of happiness, exactly as the world saw it. Diana, seeing them walking in the grounds at Basset, or as allies at a Government dinner-table, might have seen it so. This despite the fact that both Diana, and even more Sammikins, had lived all their lives in a raffish society, where the surface was calm and the events not so orderly. Listening to Sammikins talking of his sister’s marriage, I thought of Ellen, alone in her flat in the same town.

‘Yes, she’s got her children.’ He was going on about Caro. ‘And I am a barren stock.’

It was the only self-pity I had known him indulge in, and incidentally, the only literary flourish I had ever heard him make.

There was plenty of gossip as to why he had not married. He was in his thirties, as handsome as Caro in his own fashion. He was chronically in debt, partly because of his gambling, partly because his money, until his father died, was tied up in trusts he was always trying to break. But sooner or later, as well as inheriting the earldom, he would become a very rich man. He was one of the most eligible of bachelors. Diana commented briskly, with the mercilessness of the twentieth century, that there must be ‘something wrong with him’. It was said that he liked young men.

All that might easily be true. I suspected that he was one of those — and there were plenty, often young men of his spectacular courage— who didn’t find the sexual life straightforward, but who, if left to themselves, came to terms with it as well as simpler men. Half-sophistication, I was convinced as I grew older, was worse than no sophistication: half-knowledge was worse than no knowledge. Label someone a homosexual too quickly, and he will believe you. Tell him he is predestined to keep out of the main stream, and you will help push him out. The only service you can do him — it was a very hard truth — was to keep quiet. So the last thing I wanted that night was to force a confidence. I did not even want to receive it. I was glad (though faintly cheated, my inquisitiveness unsatisfied) when, after a few more laments at large, he gave a strident laugh and said: ‘Oh, to hell with it.’

Immediately he wanted me to accompany him to—’s (a gambling club). When I refused, he pressed me at least to come to Pratt’s and make a night of it. No, I said, I must be getting home. Then let’s walk a bit, he said. He said it scornfully, as though despising my bourgeois habit of going to bed. He did not want to be left alone.

We walked through the streets of the old City. From the bottom of Ducks Foot Lane, we caught sight of the dome of St Paul’s and, as if adjacent to it, the pinnacles of Dick Whittington’s church, white as sugar icing in the moonlight. The City of London, in its technical sense, as opposed to the great incomprehensible town, meant little either to him or to me. It evoked no memories, I had never worked there, all it brought back were taxi-rides on the way to Liverpool Street Station. Yet something played on us — the sight of the vast cathedral? The bomb sites? The absolute loneliness, not another person in the streets? The false-romantic memory of the past, the history which is not one’s own but lives in the imagination? Something played on us, not only on him but on me, who was more sober and less adrift.

We had passed Great Trinity Lane and had turned right: St Paul’s sprang now into open view before us, soot and whitewash.

Sammikins said: ‘I suppose Roger is right. If there is another war, it’ll be the end of us, won’t it?’

I said yes.

He turned to me: ‘How much does it matter?’

He was speaking in earnest. I couldn’t make a sarcastic reply. I answered: ‘What else matters?’

‘No. I’m asking you. How much do any of us believe in human life? When it comes to the point?’

‘If we don’t, then there’s no hope for us.’

‘Perhaps there isn’t,’ he said. ‘I tell you, aren’t we becoming hypocritical? How much do any of us care, really care, for human life?’

I was silent. And in a clear tone, neither fierce nor wild, he went on: ‘How much do you care? Except for the people round you? Come on. What is the truth?’

I could not answer straight away. At last I said: ‘I think I do. At any rate, I want to.’

He said: ‘I doubt if I do. I’ve taken life before now, and I could do it again. Of course I care for a few lives. But as for the rest, I don’t believe — when you strip away the trappings — that I give a rap. And that’s truer of more people than any of us would like to think.’

26: Parliamentary Question

The headlines, on the morning after the dinner in Fishmongers’ Hall, had a simple but pleasing eloquence. ARMED SERVICES ALL–IMPORTANT: then, in smaller letters, ‘No Substitute for Fighting Men. Minister’s Strong Speech,’ said the Daily Telegraph (Conservative). SECURITY COMES FIRST, ‘Mr R. Quaife on World Dangers,’ said The Times (moderate Conservative). SPREAD OF ATOMIC WEAPONS, ‘How Many Countries Will Possess the Bomb?’ said the Manchester Guardian (centre). CHANCE FOR THE COMMONWEALTH, ‘Our Lead in Atomic Bomb,’ said the Daily Express (irregular Conservative). TAGGING BEHIND THE US, said the Daily Worker (Communist).

The comments were more friendly than I had expected. It looked as though the speech would soon be forgotten. When I went over the press with Roger, we were both relieved. I thought he felt, as much as I did, a sense of anti-climax.

In the same week, I noticed a tiny news item, as obscure as a fait divers, in the ‘Telegrams in Brief’ column of The Times.

‘Los Angeles. Dr Brodzinski, British physicist, in a speech here tonight, attacked “New Look” in British defence policy as defeatist and calculated to play into hands of Moscow.’

I was angry, much more angry than apprehensive. I was sufficiently on guard — or sufficiently trained to be careful — to put through a call to David Rubin in Washington. No, he said, no reports of Brodzinski’s speech had reached the New York or Washington papers. They would carry it now. He thought we could forget about Brodzinski. If he, Rubin, were Roger, he’d play it rather cool. He would be over to talk to us in the New Year.

That sounded undisquieting. No one else seemed to have noticed the news item. It did not arrive in the departmental press-cuttings. I decided not to worry Roger with it, and put it out of mind myself.

A fortnight later, in the middle of a brilliant, eggshell blue November morning, I was sitting in Osbaldiston’s office. We had been working on the new draft of the White Paper, Collingwood having contorted Douglas’ first. Douglas was good-humoured. As usual, he took no more pride in authorship than most of us took in the collective enterprise of travelling on a bus.

His personal assistant came in with an armful of files, and put them in the in-tray. Out of habit his eye, like mine, had caught sight of a green tab on one of them. ‘Thank you, Eunice,’ he said equably, looking not much older than the athletic girl. ‘A bit of trouble?’

‘The PQ is on top, Sir Douglas,’ she said.

It was part of the drill he had been used to for twenty-five years. A parliamentary question worked like a Pavlovian bell, demanding priority. Whenever he saw one, Douglas, who was the least vexable of men, became a little vexed.

He opened the file and spread it on his desk. I could see the printed question, upside down: under it, very short notes in holograph. It looked like one of these questions which were rushed, like a chain of buckets at a village fire, straight up to the Permanent Secretary.

With a frown, a single line across his forehead, he read the question. He turned over the page and in silence studied another document. In a hard, offended tone, he burst out, ‘I don’t like this.’ He skimmed the file across the desk. The question stood in the name of the Member for a south coast holiday town, a young man who was becoming notorious as an extreme reactionary. It read: ‘To ask the Minister of—’ (Roger’s department) ‘If he is satisfied with security arrangements in his department, especially among senior officials?’

That looked innocuous enough: but Douglas’ juniors, thorough as detectives, had noticed that this same member had been making a speech in his own constituency, a speech in which he had quoted from Brodzinski’s at Los Angeles. Here were the press cuttings, the local English paper, the Los Angeles Times, pasted on to the file’s second page.

With a curious sense of déjà vu, mixed up with incredulity and a feeling that all this had happened time out of mind, I began reading them. Brodzinski’s lecture at UCLA: SCIENCE AND THE COMMUNIST THREAT: Danger, danger, danger: Infiltration: Softening, Conscious, Unconscious: as bad or worse in his own country (UK) as in the US: People in high positions, scientific and non-scientific, betraying defence; best defence ideas sabotaged; security risks, security risks, security risks.

‘This isn’t very pleasant,’ said Douglas, interrupting me.

‘It’s insane.’

‘Insane people can do harm, as you have reason to know.’ He said it with tartness and yet with sympathy. He knew of my first marriage, and it was easy for us to speak intimately.

‘How much effect will this really have—’

‘You’re taking it too easily,’ he said, hard and sharp.

It must have been years since anyone made me that particular reproach. Then I realized that Douglas had taken charge. He was speaking with complete authority. Because he was so unpretentious, so fresh, lean and juvenile in appearance, one fell into the trap of thinking him light-weight. He was no more light-weight than Lufkin or Hector Rose.

It was he who was going to handle this matter, not Roger. From the moment he read the question, he showed his concern. Why it should be so acute, I could not make out. At a first glance, Brodzinski was getting at Francis Getliffe, perhaps me, perhaps Walter Luke, or even Roger himself. It would be a nuisance for me if I were involved: but, in realistic terms, I thought, not much more. Douglas was a close friend: but his present gravity would have been disproportionate, if it had just been on my account.

No. Was he, as a high bureaucrat, troubled when open politics, in particular extremist open politics, looked like breaking out? He was both far-sighted and ambitious. He knew, as well as anyone in Whitehall, that in any dog-fight, all the dogs lose: you could be an innocent victim, or even a looker-on: but some of the mud stuck. If there were any sort of political convulsion, his Treasury friends and bosses would be watching him. His name would get a tag on it. It would be unjust, but he would be the last man to complain of injustice. It was his job to see that the fuss didn’t happen. If it did, he might find himself cut off from the topmost jobs for life, a second Hector Rose.

There was another reason why he was disturbed. Though he was ambitious, he had high standards of behaviour. He could no more have made Brodzinski’s speech than he could have knifed an old woman behind her counter. Although he was himself Conservative, more so even than his colleagues, he felt that the PQ could only have been asked — and he would have used simple, moral terms — by a fool and a cad. In a heart which was sterner than anyone imagined, Douglas did not make special allowances for fools, cads, or paranoids like Brodzinski. For him, they were moral outlaws.

‘The Minister mustn’t answer the questions himself,’ he announced.

‘Won’t it be worse if he doesn’t?’

But Douglas was not consulting me. Roger was himself ‘under fire a bit’. He had to be guarded. We didn’t want too many whispers about whether he was ‘sound.’ It was at just this point in politics where he was most vulnerable. No, the man to answer the question was the Parliamentary Secretary, Leverett-Smith.

What Douglas meant was that Leverett-Smith hadn’t an idea in his head, was remarkably pompous, and trusted by his party both in the House and at conferences. He would, in due course, make, Monty Cave had said with his fat man’s malice, a quintessential Law Officer of the Crown.

Within a few minutes, Douglas had been inside Roger’s office and had returned.

‘He agrees,’ he said. Since Douglas must have spoken with the wrappings off, just as he had spoken to me, it would have been difficult for Roger not to agree. ‘Come on. You may have to speak for some of the scientists.’

In Roger’s room, Douglas had already written on the file the terms of a reply. When we called on Leverett-Smith, two doors down the passage, the pace of business became more stately.

‘Parliamentary Secretary, we’ve got a job for you,’ Douglas had begun. But it took longer. Leverett-Smith, bulky, glossy-haired, spectacled, owlish, stood up to welcome us. Very slowly, he read the civil servants’ comments as the question had made its way up. Douglas’ draft, the newspaper clipping. Again very slowly, in his reverberating voice, he began to ask questions. What was the definition of ‘bad security risk’ in British terms? What were the exact levels of security clearance? Had all members of the scientific committee been cleared for Top Secret, and for the information none of us mentioned?

Leverett-Smith went inexorably on. The method of slow talk, I thought, as Keynes used to say. Had all the civil servants been cleared? What were the dates of these clearances?

Like his colleagues, Douglas kept his relations with the Security organs obscure. He did not refer to documents, but answered out of his head — as accurately as a computer, but more impatiently. This was not the kind of examination a Permanent Secretary expected from a junior Minister — or, so far as that went, from a senior Minister either. The truth was, Leverett-Smith was not only cumbrous and self-important: he disliked Roger: he had no use for rough and ready scientists like Walter Luke, while men like Francis Getliffe or me made him uncomfortable. He did not like his job, except that it might be a jumping-off board. This mixture of technology, politics, ideology, moral conscience, military foresight, he felt odious and not quite respectable, full of company he did not choose to live his life among.

Actually, he lived his life in one of the odder English enclaves. He wasn’t in the least an aristocrat, as Sammikins and his sister were: he wasn’t a country gentleman, like Collingwood: to Diana’s smart friends, he was stodgy middle-class. But the kind of middle-class in which he seemed never to have heard an unorthodox opinion — from his small boys’ school in Kensington, to his preparatory school, to his house at Winchester, to the Conservative Club at Oxford, he had moved with a bizarre absence of dissent.

‘I don’t completely understand, Secretary, why the Minister wishes me to take this question?’

After an hour’s steady interrogation, he made this inquiry. Douglas, who did not often permit himself an expression of God-give-me-patience, almost did so now.

‘He doesn’t want to make an issue of it,’ he said. Then, with his sweet and youthful smile, he added: ‘He thinks you would carry confidence with everybody. And that would kill this bit of nonsense stone-dead.’

Leverett-Smith tilted his massive, cubical head. For the first time, he was slightly placated. He was interested to know if that was the Minister’s considered judgement. He would, of course, have to consult him to make sure.

Douglas, still smiling sweetly, as though determined to prove that pique did not exist in public business, reminded him that they had only a few hours to play with.

‘If the Minister really wishes me to undertake this duty, then naturally I should be unable to refuse,’ said Leverett-Smith, with something of the air of a peeress pressed to open a church bazaar. He had a parting shot.

‘If I do undertake this duty, Secretary, I think I can accept your draft in principle. But I shall have to ask you to call on me after lunch, so that we can go over it together.’

As Douglas left the room with me, he was silent. Pique might not exist in public business; but, I was thinking, if Leverett-Smith remained in political office at the time when Douglas became Head of the Treasury, he might conceivably remember this interview.

Yet although time might have been spent in Leverett-Smith’s ceremonies, there had been no compromise. It was Douglas who had got his own way.

The question was down for Thursday. That morning, Roger asked me to go to the House, to see how Leverett-Smith performed. He also asked me, as though it were an absent-minded thought, to drop in afterwards at Ellen’s flat for half an hour.

It was a raw afternoon, fog in the streets, ghostly residues of fog in the Chamber. About fifty members were settled on the benches, like an ill-attended matinee. As soon as prayers were finished, I had gone to the box behind the Speaker’s chair. There were several questions before ours, a lot of backchat about the reprieve of a murderer whom a Welsh Member kept referring to, with an air of passionate affection, as ‘Ernie’ Wilson.

Then, from the back bench on the Government side, on my right hand, rose the man we were waiting for — young, smart, blond, avid. He announced that he begged to ask Question 22, in a manner self-assured and minatory, his head back, his chin raised, as if he were trying to get the maximum bark from the microphones.

Leverett-Smith got up deliberately, as though his muscles were heavy and slow. He did not turn to the back-bencher in his rear: he stood gazing at a point far down on the opposite side below the gangway.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said, as though announcing satisfaction, not only with security arrangements but with the universe.

The avid young man was on his feet.

‘Has the Minister seen the statement made by Professor Brodzinski on November 3rd, which has been widely published in the United States?’

Leverett-Smith’s uninflected, confident voice came rolling out: ‘My Right Honourable friend has seen this statement, which is erroneous in all respects. Her Majesty’s Government has a defence policy which is the responsibility of Her Majesty’s Government, and which is constantly being debated in this House. My Right Honourable friend acknowledges with gratitude the services of his advisers on the scientific committees and elsewhere. It does not need to be said that these men are one and all of the highest integrity and devoted to the national interest. As a matter of standard procedure, all persons including Her Majesty’s Ministers having access to secret information, are subjected to rigorous security procedure. And this is the case with each person consulted, on any matter connected with Defence whatsoever, by my Right Honourable friend.’

Subdued, respectful hear-hears. The blond young man was on his feet.

‘I should like to ask whether all scientific advisers have gone through security vetting during this past year.’

Leverett-Smith, standing once more, looked for an instant like an elephantine beast being baited. I was afraid that he would ask for notice of the question.

He stood there letting the seconds tick by. Then his voice resounded, once more impregnable.

‘My Right Honourable friend regards the publication of the details of security procedures as not being in the public interest.’

Good, I thought. That was all we wanted.

Again, hear-hears. Again, the pestering, angry voice.

‘Will the Minister produce the dates on which certain members of this scientific committee, the names of whom I am willing to supply, were last submitted to security vetting? Some of us are not prepared to ignore Dr Brodzinski—’

There were mutters of irritation from the Tory benches. The young man had gone too far.

This time, Leverett-Smith did not take so long to meditate. Solidly he announced to the middle distance: ‘This supplementary question is covered by my last answer. The question is also an unworthy reflection on gentlemen, who, often at great sacrifices to themselves, are doing invaluable service to the country.’

Vigorous hear-hears. Definite hear-hears, putting an end to supplementaries. Another question was called. Leverett-Smith sat broad-backed, basking in a job well done.

I was waiting for another question, further down the list, addressed to my own Minister. Douglas, who had been sitting beside me, left with a satisfied grin.

Sometime later, a debate was beginning. It was not yet time for me to leave for Ebury Street. Then I saw Roger coming into the Chamber. He must have picked up gossip outside, for on his way to his seat on the front bench he stopped by Leverett-Smith and slapped him on the shoulder. Leverett-Smith, turning to him, gave a serious contented smile.

Roger lolled in his seat, reading his own papers, like a man working in a railway carriage. At some quip from the Opposition benches that raised a laugh, he gave a preoccupied, good-natured smile.

As another speech began, he looked up from his scripts, turned to the box, and caught my eye. With his thumb, he beckoned me to meet him outside. I saw him get up, whisper to another Minister and stroll out.

In the central lobby, full of visitors, of little groups chatting earnestly, of solitary persons waiting with passive resignation, much like Grand Central Station on a winter night, he came up to me.

‘I hear Leverett was pretty good,’ he said.

‘Better than you’d have been.’

Roger drew down his lip in a grim chuckle. He was just going to speak, when I caught sight of Ellen walking past us. She must have come from the Strangers’ Gallery, I thought, as she gave me the slight smile of a distant acquaintance. To Roger she made no sign of recognition, nor he to her. I watched her move away from us, through the lobby doors.

Roger said: ‘She’ll be going straight home. We can follow in a few minutes. I think I’ll come along with you.’

In Palace Yard, the lamps, the taxi-lights, shone smearily through the fog. As we got near to the taxis, Roger muttered that it was better if I gave the address.

The click of the lift-door opening, the ring of the bell.

As Ellen opened the door, she was ready for me, but seeing Roger, gave an astonished, delighted sigh. The door closed behind us, and she was in his arms. It was a hug of relief, of knowledge, the hug of lovers who know all the pleasure they can give each other. For her, perhaps, it was a little more. Meeting him only in this room, pressed in by this claustrophobia of secrecy, she was glad, this once, to throw her arms round him and have someone there to watch. They would have liked to go straight to bed. Nevertheless, it was a joy to her, as well as a frustration, to have me there.

At last they sat on the sofa, I in an armchair. ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’ she asked, inquiring about the incident in the House, but her tone so happy that she might have been asking another question. His eyes were as bright as hers. He answered, in the same sort of double-talk: ‘Not bad.’ Then he got down to business.

‘Everyone seems to think that it passed off rather well.’

I said I was sure it had.

She wanted us to tell her: would the question do any damage now? Difficult to say: possibly not, unless something bigger happened. She was frowning. She was shrewd, but she had not been brought up to politics and found the corridors hard to see her way through.

‘Well, anyway,’ she said, ‘it must be the end of Brodzinski. That’s something.’

No, we said, that wasn’t certain. Never underestimate the paranoid. I was mimicking Roger and also scoring off him, going back to his handling of Brodzinski. Often they stayed dangerous, while saner men went under. Never underestimate them, I said. Never try to placate them. It is a waste of time. They take and never give. The only way to deal with paranoids is to kick them in the teeth. If a chap has persecution mania, the only practical course is to give him something to feel persecuted about.

I was being off-hand, putting on a tough act to cheer her up. But she wasn’t putting on a tough act when she said: ‘I want him done in. I wish to God I could manage it myself.’ He had done, or was trying to do, Roger harm. That was enough.

‘Can’t you set some of the scientists on to him?’ she asked me passionately.

‘They’re none too pleased,’ I replied.

‘Hell, what good is that.’

Roger said that she needn’t worry too much about Brodzinski. He would still have some nuisance value, but so far as having any practical influence, he might have shot his bolt. It wasn’t a good idea, making attacks in America. It might create some enemies for us there, but they would have been enemies anyhow. As for this country, it would damage his credit, even with people who would have liked to use him.

‘There’ll be plenty more trouble,’ he said, ‘but as for Brodzinski, I fancy he’ll stew in his own juice.’

‘You’re not going to do anything to him?’

‘Not if leaving him alone produces the right answer.’ He smiled at her.

‘I want him done in,’ she cried again.

His arm was round her, and he tightened his hold. He told her that, in practical affairs, revenge was a luxury one couldn’t afford. There was no point in it. She laughed out loud. ‘You speak for yourself. There would be some point in it for me.’

I had been trying to cheer her up, but it was not easy. She was worried for Roger, more worried than either he or I were that night: yet she was full of spirit. Not just because she was with us. She was behaving as though a wound were healed.

At last I grasped it. This attack had nothing to do with her. She was suspicious that, behind the telephone calls, might be someone Roger had known. For a time, she had been ready to blame Brodzinski. The inquiries I had set moving had already told us that this was unlikely. Now she could believe it. It set her free to hate Brodzinski more. She was blazing with relief. She could not bear the danger to come through her. She would, I thought, have lost an eye, an arm, her looks, if she could have lessened the danger for Roger: and yet, that kind of unselfish love had its own egotism: she would have chosen that the danger were increased, rather than it should have come from her.

I told her that the intelligence people hadn’t got anything positive. They now had all her telephone calls intercepted.

‘All that’s done,’ she said, ‘is to be maddening when he—’ she looked at Roger — ‘is trying to get through.’

‘They’ve got their own techniques. You’ll have to be patient, won’t you?’

‘Am I good at being patient?’

Roger said, ‘You’re having the worst of this. You’ve got to put up with it.’ He said it sharply, with absolute confidence.

She asked me, was there anything else she could do? Had she just got to sit tight?

‘It’s pretty hard, you know,’ she said.

Roger said: ‘Yes, I know it is.’

Soon afterwards, he looked at his watch and said he would have to leave in another half-hour. On my way home, I thought of them a little, free together, by themselves.

27: Promenade beneath the Chandeliers

It needed no one to instruct Roger about gossip. He picked it up in the air: or more exactly, for there was nothing supernatural about it, he read it in the expressions of acquaintances, without a word spoken, as he walked about the House, his clubs, the offices, Downing Street. We all knew, in those November days, that it was boiling up: some of it sheer random gossip — malicious, mischievous, warm with human relish — some politically pointed.

I had not yet heard a whisper about Ellen, or any other woman. The PQ seemed to have fallen dead. One reason why he was being talked about was that he was getting precisely the support he could least afford. The Fishmongers’ Hall speech, or bits of it, or glosses upon it, was passing round. It had made news. It was drawing the kind of publicity which, because no one understood it, the theatre people called ‘word of mouth’. Roger had, within two or three weeks, become a favourite, or at any rate a hope, of liberal opinion. Liberal opinion? To some on the outside, certainly to the Marxists, it didn’t mean much. It might use different language from the Telegraph, Lord Lufkin’s colleagues, or the Conservative back-benchers, but if ever there was a fighting-point, it would come down on the same side. Maybe. But this, inconveniently for Roger, was not how it appeared to the Telegraph, Lord Lufkin’s colleagues, or the Conservative back-benchers. To them, the New Statesman and the Observer looked like Lenin’s paper, Iskra, in one of its more revolutionary phases. If Roger got praise in such quarters, he was a man to be watched.

There was praise from other quarters, more dangerous still. Irregulars on the opposition benches had begun to quote him: not the official spokesmen, who had their own troubles and who wanted to quieten the argument down, but the disarmers, the pacifists, the idealists. They were not an organized group; in numbers they might be less than thirty, but they were articulate and unconstrained. When I read one of their speeches, in which Roger got an approving word, I thought with acrimony, save us from our friends.

Roger knew all this. He did not speak of it to me; he held back any confidence about what he feared, or hoped, or planned to do. Once he talked of Ellen; and another time, in the bar of a club, he brought me a tankard of beer and suddenly said: ‘You’re not religious, are you?’

He knew the answer. No, I said, I was an unbeliever.

‘Curious,’ he said. His face looked puzzled, uncalculating, simple. ‘I should have thought you would have been.’

He gulped at his own tankard. ‘You know, I can’t imagine getting on without it.’

‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘there are plenty of people who like the Church, even though they don’t really believe. I think I should still like the Church, if I didn’t believe. But I do.’

I asked: just what did he believe?

‘I think,’ he said, ‘almost everything I learned as a child. I believe in God In Heaven, I believe in an after-life. It’s no use telling me that Heaven isn’t the place I used to think it was. I know that as well as they do. But I can’t help believing.’

He went on talking about faith. His tone was gentle, like a man blundering on. He would have liked me to say, Yes, that’s how I feel. He was utterly sincere: no one could confide like that and lie. And yet, half suspiciously, at the back of my mind I was thinking, it is possible for a man to confide, quite genuinely, one thing, because he wants to conceal another.

At the back of my mind I was thinking, this wasn’t a device, it came to him by nature. Yet it would be just as effective in keeping me away from his next moves.

Up to now, I had shut up the doubt which Hector Rose had not spoken, but had, with acerbity, implied. I knew Roger and Rose didn’t, and wouldn’t have wanted to. Rose would have been totally uninterested in his purpose, his aspirations, in his faith. Rose judged men as functional creatures, and there he was often, more often than I cared to remember, dead right. He was asking one question about Roger, and one alone: What — when it came to the point — would he do?

Roger told me nothing. In the next week, I received only one message from him. And that was an invitation to a ‘bachelor supper’ in Lord North Street, the night after the Lancaster House reception.

At Lancaster House, Roger was present, walking for a few minutes arm-in-arm with the Prime Minister, up and down the carpet, affable under the chandeliers. That did not distinguish him from other Ministers, or even from Osbaldiston or Rose. The Prime Minister had time for all, and was ready to walk arm-in-arm with anyone, affable, under chandeliers. It was the kind of reception, I thought as I stood on the stairs, that might have happened in much the same form and with much the same faces, a hundred years before, except that then, it would probably have been held in the Prime Minister’s own house, and that nowadays, so far as I remembered accounts of Victorian political parties, there was a good deal more to drink.

The occasion was the visit of some western Foreign Minister. The politicians and their wives were there, the Civil Servants and their wives. The politicians’ wives were more expensively dressed than the Civil Servants’, and in general more spectacular. On the other hand, the Civil Servants themselves were more spectacular than the politicians, so that a stranger might have thought them a more splendiferous race. With their white ties, they were wearing their crosses, medals and sashes, and the figure of Hector Rose, usually subfusc, shone and sparkled, more ornamented, more be-sashed, than that of anyone in the room.

The room itself was filling up, so was the staircase. Margaret was talking to the Osbaldistons. On my way to join them, I was stopped by Diana Skidmore. I admired her dress, her jewellery; star-sapphires. Underneath it all, she looked strained and pale. But she could assume high spirits; or else, they were as much part of her as the bones of her monkey face. She kept giving glances, smiling, recognizing acquaintances as they passed.

She gazed at the Prime Minister, now walking up and down with Monty Cave. ‘He’s doing it very nicely, isn’t he?’ she said. She spoke of the Prime Minister rather like a headmaster discussing the performance of the best thirteen-year-old in a gymnastic display. Then she asked me: ‘Where’s Margaret?’ I pointed her out, and began to take Diana towards her. Though Diana knew far more people at the reception than I did, she had not met the Osbaldistons.

She said she would like to, vivacious and party-bright. Before we had gone three steps, she stopped: ‘No. I don’t want to meet anyone else. I’ve met quite enough.’

For an instant, I wondered if I had heard right. It wasn’t like her breakdown at her own dinner-table. Her eyes were bright with will, not tears.

We were in the middle of the party. Yes, since that night at Basset, her backbone had stiffened again. She was miserable when we talked of marriage. She wasn’t used to being miserable without doing something about it. She couldn’t go on living alone in that great house. She wanted someone to talk to her. The pupillages she went through, the times when, like an adoring girl, she changed the colour of her thoughts — they weren’t enough. Love-affairs wouldn’t be enough. She wanted someone all the time.

‘You’re no good,’ she said, practical and open. ‘You’ve got a wife.’

In the great drawing-room, most of the faces looked happy. Happier than in most gatherings, I thought. Then I saw Caro walking out on Roger’s arm, an impressive smiling couple, unselfconscious, used to catching the public eye. Were there others there with this kind of secret? There were bound to be some: if one knew these lives, there would be some surprises. But not, perhaps, so many as one might think. In this drawing-room the men and women were vigorous and hearty. ‘Peach-fed’ I had heard them called, though not by themselves. There were some love-affairs floating around. But most of them didn’t chafe against the limits of the sexual existence. Often they got more out of it than those who did. But they didn’t live, or talk, or excite themselves, as though there were, there must be, a sexual heaven round the corner. Perhaps, I sometimes thought, that was a pre-condition for the active life.

Anyway, most of them were happy. That night, they seemed to be getting a special happiness out of one another’s reflected glory: even the Prime Minister, though the glory reflected was his own. It was one of their rewards. What others were there?

In the hall, after Margaret and I had made our goodbyes, we waited while car after car, government car, firm’s car, were shouted for by name. Lord Bridgewater: Mr Leverett-Smith: the Belgian Ambassador: Sir Hector Rose. Margaret asked me why I was smiling. I had just remembered that I had once asked Lord Lufkin what rewards he thought he got, for a life which many people would have judged arduous beyond compare. Power, of course, I said. We took that for granted. The only other thing, I had suggested, was transport. He had not used a public vehicle in London for a generation: transport was always laid on. In the midst of his dog’s life, he travelled as though on a magic carpet. Lord Lufkin had not been amused.

When I saw the other men, brought together for dinner in Lord North Street the following night, I thought Roger had made a tactical mistake. Monty Cave was there, Leverett-Smith, Tom Wyndham: both Rose and Osbaldiston, and also Francis Getliffe. It was easy to see the rationale. Cave was Roger’s closest political ally, Leverett-Smith and Wyndham had had to know what was going on. The rest of us had all through been close to Roger’s policy. But everyone there, except Francis, had attended the reception the night before. If I had been Roger, I should have waited for the afterglow from the charmed circle to fade; then they might not mind so much the risk of being out of it.

As I sat at the dinner-table, Islamic except for Caro at the far end, I began to wonder what Roger’s intentions were. He wasn’t likely to speak openly, in front of Hector Rose or Douglas, or several of the others. He and Caro, who was working like an ally who has been rehearsed, seemed to be casting round for opinions: just how were the reactions coming in? They weren’t asking specific questions. They were sitting back, waiting for any information that was collecting in the air.

Just as when Roger talked to me about religion, I could not rely on my judgement of him, or even be sure, because it was flickering, what my judgement was. Was this the way he would start, if he were looking for an opportunity to withdraw? Perhaps he was not making a tactical mistake after all.

Certainly — and this was clear and explicit — he was giving everyone present the chance to come out with his doubts. He was not only giving them the chance, he was pressing them to do so.

After dinner, Caro did not leave. She was one of the junta, she sat over the port like the rest of us. Before the port was put on the table, something happened that I did not remember having seen in that house or anywhere else. The maids took off the tablecloth, then laid the wine-glasses on the bare and polished rosewood. It was, so she said, an old nineteenth-century custom which had been kept up in her father’s house. The glasses, the silver, the decanters, the rounded pinkness from a bowl of roses, were reflected in the table-top: perhaps that was what her ancestors had enjoyed, perhaps that was how she imagined them sitting, forming Victoria’s governments, handing out the jobs.

Sliding a decanter to Getliffe on his left, Roger said casually that everyone there knew pretty well who was for them and who against. For any sort of decision, one had to know that. Then he added, in the most detached of tones, rather like a research student at the Harvard School of Government: ‘I sometimes wonder how much freedom any of us have to make decisions? Politicians I mean. I wonder if the area of freedom isn’t smaller than one’s inclined to think.’

Hector Rose must have been sure of what he had expected all along, that Roger was preparing a loophole of escape. But Rose took up the argument, as though he were being either judicious or perverse.

‘With respect, Minister, I think it’s even smaller than that. The older I grow the more public decisions I have assisted at — in the French sense, I need hardly say — the more I believe that old Count Tolstoy was in the right of it.’

Tom Wyndham looked stupefied but obstinate, as though Hector’s opinions — obviously Russian-influenced — might well be subversive.

‘It’s slightly instructive to ask oneself’ — It was rare for Rose to go out to dinner, but he seemed, as he aged, suddenly to be enjoying company — ‘exactly what would be the effect on the public decisions, if the whole of your delightful party, Lady Caroline, were eliminated at one fell swoop? Or in fact, which I don’t think is really very likely, if we extended the operation and eliminated the whole of Her Majesty’s Government and the higher Civil Service? With great respect, I strongly suspect that the effect would be precisely nil. Exactly the same decisions would be taken within negligible limits, and they would be taken at almost exactly the same time.’

Douglas joined in. He was not averse to disagreeing with Rose, and yet they shared their service solidarity. They did not want the talk to become too concrete: so Douglas took his cue from Rose. He didn’t believe in predestination quite so much, he said. Perhaps other men could do the same jobs, make the same choices: but one had to act and feel as though that wasn’t so. When one was at the centre of things, said Douglas, one did make the choices. No one believed in predestination when he was making a choice.

He looked round the table. For an instant, his dégagé air had quite gone. ‘And that’s why we wanted to be at the centre of things.’

‘We, my dear Douglas?’ asked Rose.

‘I wasn’t speaking only for myself,’ said Douglas.

Monty Cave, sitting opposite to me half-way down the table, had been watching Roger with quick eyes. His dinner-jacket rumpled, so that his body looked stubbier than it was, Monty caught everyone’s attention. Turning away from Douglas and Rose, he asked Roger, in a quiet and confidential tone: ‘Weren’t you saying — something else?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ said Monty, and suddenly he could not resist the malicious fat grin, ‘weren’t you saying something a little nearer home?’

‘What do you think, Monty?’

‘I thought you were telling us that in politics, what’s going to be dead right ten years hence may be dead wrong now. That is unfortunately true. We all know that.’

‘Well?’ Roger had no expression.

‘I may have misunderstood you, but I thought you were asking us whether there was the faintest chance that mightn’t be the present situation.’

‘Was that the impression I gave you?’

‘In which case,’ said Monty, ‘wouldn’t you be in favour of going into reverse? Wouldn’t you tend to be just a little cautious?’

‘Do you really think he’s been so cautious?’ Caro interrupted, from the end of the table. Her eyes were gleaming, her colour was high. She looked angry and splendid.

‘I wasn’t suggesting it was easy,’ said Monty.

‘But you were suggesting that he was getting cold feet. Doesn’t anyone realize that for months he’s been playing his hand to the limit? It’s possible that he may have been overplaying his hand. The only question is, where does he go from here?’

‘Where does he?’ said Monty.

There was a flash of hostility between them. He was attracted to her, afraid of her. On her part, he was too subtle, not virile enough. Her anger was genuine. She was fighting for Roger, she was ready to let fly; but she knew — as though by instinct — how to let fly in the way that did most good. She was leaving nothing to chance. She had seen plenty of disloyalties round dinner-tables such as this. She wanted to make sure of Leverett-Smith and Tom Wyndham: she was trying to prove to them that Roger was being pushed on by wilder men.

She was high-hearted, and her anger was genuine. How much so was this attack of Cave’s? I didn’t know whether he and Roger had an understanding. It had been convenient for Roger, it had suited his tactics, for the attack to be made.

‘In my judgement—’ Leverett-Smith began, with extreme pomposity.

‘Yes, Horace?’ Caro leaned towards him with two kinds of charm, the aristocratic embrace, the embrace of a pretty woman.

‘In my judgement, we ought to remember that sometimes the more haste, the less speed.’ He produced this thought as though it contained the wisdom of the ages. Caro continued to smile admiringly.

‘Have we been forgetting that?’ she said.

‘Do enlighten us,’ said Monty.

‘I’m inclined to think that we’ve been moving perceptibly faster than opinion round us. It’s right that we should move faster, otherwise we shouldn’t be giving proper leadership. The problem as I see it,’ Leverett-Smith went on, ‘is to judge how much faster it is safe to go.’

‘Quite,’ Monty commented.

His contempt was palpable. I thought he was wrong to dismiss Leverett-Smith as a negligible man. He was as sententious as a man could reasonably be: but he wasn’t budgeable. Thinking of the future, I wished he were more negligible, more budgeable. It might be a misfortune for Roger not to have someone malleable in that job.

Caro went on devoting herself to him and Tom Wyndham. She was good with them. She could sympathize with their doubts, the hesitations deep in their conservative flesh — partly because, though she would not have admitted it to anyone but Roger, and not to him, once he had committed himself, those hesitations were her own.

Tom Wyndham was still wistfully wishing that the battleship were the decisive weapon.

‘I know it isn’t, of course,’ he said.

‘I’m so glad of that,’ said Monty Cave.

Tom persisted, red-faced and puzzled. Since the last war, everyone had gone on changing their minds on what you could fight with. He expected it was all right. But still, he said, ‘It takes the chaps’ (he meant the serving officers, and also his friends in the House) ‘time to get used to things changing like this.’

Francis Getliffe broke in, apologizing to Wyndham and to Leverett-Smith with the aloof formality that was growing on him. But, just as he had become more formal, he had also become more impatient.

‘There isn’t much time,’ he said. ‘The time-scale of politics you know about, it’s your business to. But the time-scale of applied science is something like ten times faster. If you’re going to wait too long before everyone agrees, then the overwhelming probability is that there won’t be anything left to wait for.’

Roger stared at him. Hector Rose gave a grim smile. Then I put in my piece. If we got really stuck (I was deliberately identifying myself with Roger’s policy) we still had one recourse. We had been trying to struggle through by the channels of ‘closed’ politics — the corridors, the committees. If they got blocked, we could take it into the open. The only even quarter-way open statement had been the speech in Fishmongers’ Hall. We all knew why this was so: the problems were, or at least we made them, technical: most of the facts were fogged by security: these were the decisions which in our country, in all countries, we had got used to settling by a handful of men, in secret. For many reasons, this was forced on us. But there might come a time when someone would have to break it. This mightn’t be the time. But even the threat that it was, I said without emphasis, might have an interesting effect.

I didn’t expect these remarks to be popular. They weren’t. To Douglas, who loved me, they were shocking and best forgotten. To Rose, who didn’t, they were the token of why I had never quite fitted in. Even Francis didn’t like them much. As for the politicians, Cave was reflecting: he was the only man there who might have considered whether in fact there did exist — in a rich and comfortable country — the social forces to call upon.

Leverett-Smith said, ‘I can’t associate myself with that suggestion.’

Caro was frowning. There was no debate. Someone changed the subject, and it was a few minutes later that Roger said: ‘None of this is easy, you know.’

Since his exchange with Cave he had not spoken. He had sat at the end of the table, sipping his port, pre-potent, brooding. Now he took charge. He showed his worry, he did not pretend. He knew, and he knew that we knew, that he had to carry everyone round that table with him. Listening, I thought I had never heard him put on a better performance. Performance? That was true and not true. This might not be all he intended, but it was a good deal. There were ambiguities which might be deliberate: there were also some that he didn’t know himself.

As we said goodnight, his influence was still pervasive. He seemed to have gained all he wanted.

On the way home, and in cooler blood next morning, I wondered what each man thought Roger had actually said. What you wanted to hear, you heard, even with people as experienced as these. Ask them to write down their accounts and the answers would have a certain ironic interest. And yet, Roger had said nothing untruthful or even disingenuous.

As for myself, I was further from predicting his actions than I had been since Rose gave his first warning. Of course, Roger was leaving a channel of retreat: he would be crazy not to do so. Of course, he must have faced the thought — and Caro must have brought it into the open — that there was still time to back down, throw the stress of his policy just where solid men would be comfortable, then take another Ministry, and gain considerable credit into the bargain. So much was clear. I was sure of nothing else.

28: A Name without much Meaning

One morning in December, I received a report. It was brought by one of my acquaintances in Security. I was not allowed to see it, but I was used to their abracadabra. He gave me the name I wanted, and took the report away with him.

The name I wanted was that of Ellen’s persecutor. When I heard it, I said: ‘Oh, yes?’ It sounded matter-of-fact, like the name of a new housekeeper. It sounded — as facts tend to sound, whenever you are mixed up in a secret investigation — as probable or improbable as anything else. Yet, when I was left alone, it seemed very odd. Nothing like what I should have expected. Odd, but not melodramatically odd. I hadn’t been told, as in an old-fashioned thriller, the name of Hector Rose or the Prime Minister, or Roger himself. Dully odd. Within five minutes, I rang up Ellen telling her I wanted to see her before one o’clock.

‘What about?’ But she did not need to ask.

Over the telephone, I made her give me a promise. I couldn’t say anything, I told her, unless she did. When she had this information, she must do nothing with it, nothing of any kind, until we had agreed.

‘I suppose so,’ she said, in a strong reluctant voice.

We had to find somewhere where we could safely meet. It was the Christmas holidays, and at my flat the children would be home. Hers? No, she said: for once, I thought, not practical.

Briskly, she fixed a rendezvous, in an art gallery off Burlington Gardens. There I found her, alone, in the middle of the inner room, on the single chair. Round the walls were slabs and flashes of colour on canvases of enormous size. It occurred to me, walking to her in the deserted gallery, that we might have been two solitary devotees of Action painting: or a middle-aged official, a smartly-dressed, youngish woman, at a first assignation. As she saw me, her eyes were open, dark, apprehensive, waiting.

‘Well?’ she said.

I wasted no time.

‘Apparently,’ I replied, ‘it’s Hood.’

For an instant, she couldn’t believe that she had heard right, or that the Hood of whom I spoke was the man we both knew slightly, the little, pleasant-faced dispenser of drinks, cherry-cheeked, Pickwickian, who had a job, not one of the top jobs, but two or three down on the commercial side, with one of Lufkin’s rivals. I told her I had met him last at Lufkin’s birthday party, when he had been exhaling with admiration at each utterance that Lufkin made, and raising his hands high as if to applaud a diva.

‘I’ve seen him in the library,’ she repeated several times. She went on: ‘But he can’t have anything against me! I’ve hardly talked to him alone.’

She was searching for something personal, a snub, a pass she hadn’t noticed or had not responded to, but she couldn’t flatter herself; she couldn’t even gain that tiny bit of consolation.

‘Perhaps seeing me there somehow put him on to us. How did he get on to us? Does anyone know?’

I said it didn’t matter. To her, in that moment, it mattered so much that she could think of nothing else. Then she cried: ‘I’ve got to have it out with him.’

‘No.’

‘I’ve got to.’

‘That’s why I made you promise,’ I said, ‘an hour ago.’

She looked at me with violence, with something like hate. She was craving for action as though it were a drug. To be kept from it was intolerable. It was like a denial of the whole self, body and soul, body as well as soul.

Passionately she argued. It could do no harm, she said. It could do no good, I replied: it might be dangerous. Now that we had identified him, some of the menace was gone. If it was simply a personal grudge, which I said again that I didn’t believe, he didn’t count, except for nuisance value. She could live with that.

But if not a personal grudge, was he acting on his own? If not, for whom? Suddenly Ellen went into a brilliant fugue of paranoia. She saw some central intelligence marshalling enemies: enemies watching them, planning, moving in, studying each aspect of Roger’s life and hers. This was one move, Brodzinski’s was another. Who was directing it all?

I couldn’t pacify her, or persuade her that it wasn’t true. I didn’t myself know what was happening. In that empty room, the reds in the pictures pushing out towards us, I began to feel in a web of persecution myself.

She wanted to shout, cry, fly out, make love to Roger, anything. Her colour was high — but, as though in a moment-by-moment change, just as a child changes when in illness, when I looked again I saw she had turned pale.

She went very quiet. The passion had died away. She was afraid. At last I got her to talk again: ‘If this goes on, I don’t know whether I can stand it.’

The truth was, she did not doubt her own fortitude, but his. ‘I don’t know whether he can stand it.’ That was what the words really meant, deeper than she could express. Also, she could not bring herself to say that she had a new fear about why she might lose him. Some of those fears she could confess, as she had done at our first meeting, when she told me that if he lost his political career because of her, he would not forgive her. This was a new fear, which she could not confess, because it seemed a betrayal. But though she worshipped Roger, she knew him. She believed that these persecutions wouldn’t stiffen him, but would drive him back into safety — back to the company of his colleagues, to the shelter of Lord North Street.

She could not stop herself from telling me: ‘It’s being away from him that matters now.’ She meant, not being with him every hour of every day. ‘When he comes to me he enjoys himself, you know. So do I.’ She said it with her usual realism, her lack of fuss. ‘But it’s not enough now.’

She said: ‘I’d give up everything, I tell you, I could live in the back streets, I could live on nothing — I could do anything you like — if only I could be close to him the whole time. I could give up going to bed with him, if I had to, if I could just be near him, night and day, and day after day.’