Corridors of Power

29: Memorial Service

The bells of St Margaret’s, Westminster, tolled under the low cloud-lid, into the dark noon. It was three days after Christmas, the House was in recess, but the Prime Minister and Collingwood, top-hatted, in morning suits, walked under the awning into the porch. So did three other Ministers, a group of elderly peers, then Roger and Monty Cave. People on the pavement were not paying much attention; top-hats, a handful of bigwigs, some sort of service.

I sat in the middle of the church, where, by some optical illusion, the light seemed brighter than out of doors: over the altar, the stained glass gleamed and glowed, like the glass in the front door at home, when I was a child, or in the door at the Osbaldiston’s. The vigorous, shining faces round me were composed into gravity, but there was no grief. It was part of the ceremonial, ceremonial which they enjoyed, part of the charm of their lives. Collingwood spent some time on his knees. The other Ministers and Members sat in the two front rows, doing what was expected of them, doing what their successors would do for them, when their own memorial services came round.

In fact, the one they were commemorating that morning would not have considered that enough was being done. He had been a modest old man, but he had had the sharpest sense of the fitness of things. The church was only half-full. Not much of a turn out, he would have said. Much worse, he would have been baffled that the service wasn’t being held in the Abbey. ‘Giving me a consolation prize’, he would have said.

This was the memorial service to old Thomas Bevill, who had died before Christmas at the age of eighty-eight. When he was a Minister at the beginning of the war, I had been one of his personal staff. That had been my introduction to the official life, and I knew him better than most of the other mourners did. No one, least of all himself, could have called him a great man; and yet I had learned much from him. In a limited sense of the word, he was a politician, a born politician. He knew which levers to pull and how to pull them, more exactly than anyone I had met in Government, with a skill one meets more often in people working in a smaller world, such as Arthur Brown in my old college.

Bevill was an aristocrat, and it was part of his manner to appear like a bumbling amateur. He was as much an amateur as one of the Irish manipulators of the American Democratic machine. Bevill had a passion for politics. Like most devoted politicians, he was realistic about everything in them — except his own chances. He had been sacked, politely but firmly, in 1943, at the age of seventy-four. Everyone but himself knew it was the end. But he delayed taking his peerage, still hoping that another Conservative government would call him back. New Conservative governments came, but the telephone did not ring. At last, at eighty-four, he accepted his Viscounty, even then hating it, even then going round asking his friends whether, when the PM went, there mightn’t be the chance of one more job. When he was told no, his blue eyes ceased to look mild, and became hot and furious. But he surrendered. For the last four years, Thomas Bevill had entered another avatar, under the style of Lord Grampound.

This was the end. He would get mentioned, as a very minor figure, in some of the official histories. He wouldn’t rate a biography of his own. I looked at the order of the service — Thomas Bevill, first Viscount Grampound — and felt curiously sad. The dignitaries round me were mumbling the responses. Beside the Prime Minister and Collingwood stood Roger, assured among the assured, his fine voice audible.

I felt, yes, alienated as well as sad. Why, I should have been hard put to it to say. This was the kind of leave-taking any ruling society gave to one of their own. As for Thomas Bevill, I should not have said that I loved him much. He had been an ally of mine in days past, but that had been in the way of business. He had been kind to me, as he always was to his colleagues, out of instinctive policy, unless there were overmastering reasons for not being kind. That was about the size of it. He was a tough old Tory politician, patriotic to the core — and also, the nearer one got to the core, snobbish and callous. Yet I was not really thinking of him like that. Standing among the sound of confident official voices, I was out of it — just as he was out of it, because he was, like any one of us when our time comes, being so easily dismissed.

The service ended, and the congregation trooped out, euphoric, healthy-looking, duty done. I did not hear a word spoken about the old man. The Prime Minister, Collingwood and Roger, got into the same car. As the car drove away, Monty Cave was watching it. He remarked to Sammikins, whom I had not noticed at the service: ‘We’re going on again after lunch.’

He meant, the Cabinet committee had been meeting that morning, and had not finished. This was, we already knew, intended to be their final meeting, and so none of their advisers, none of the scientists or civil servants, except Douglas, was present. Monty, with his clever, imbedded eyes, watched the car turn out of Parliament Square.

‘Well-timed, don’t you think?’ he said to Sammikins.

Abruptly, as though he resented the invitation while he was giving it, he asked us whether we were doing anything for lunch. As we drove round to Cave’s house in Smith Square, which I had not visited before, Sammikins was talking away in undiscouraged form, although both Cave and I were silent. Had he asked us just because he was lonely, I was thinking, or because there was something he intended, or felt obliged, to say?

The tall, narrow house sounded empty as we went in. In the dining-room I looked out of the window through the tawny winter air at the ruined church. It might have been part of a Gothick fancy. Yet the room itself was bright and elegant; on one wall was a fine Sisley, of poplars and sunny water, on another a still life by Nicholas de Staël, pastel fruit in a white dish.

I asked him about another picture. He was vague: he didn’t know the painter. He was better-read than most men, but he seemed not to have any visual sense. He was living in a museum of his wife’s taste.

The maid brought in avocado pears, cold chicken, tongue, cheese. Cave ate greedily: Sammikins did not eat so much, or with such relish, but he appropriated the bottle of hock. Cave and I had adopted the habit, common among the younger administrators, of not drinking before the evening.

‘This is the nicest sort of meal,’ Sammikins burst out, ‘why do we waste our time sitting down to bloody great set luncheons?’

Monty Cave smiled at him: yes, with affection: yes, perhaps with an envy for the dash, the abandon, he himself had never had. He said, as though casually, with his mouth full, ‘Well, we’ve had a not uneventful morning.’

He said it more to me than to Sammikins. I knew that he was devious, subtle, cleverer than any of us. I suspected that he was not being casual. Certainly I wasn’t. I asked: ‘How did it go, then?’

‘Oh, you know how these things usually go.’

It wasn’t exactly a snub, but it was maddening. It was deviousness carried to the point of perversity. I looked at him, the bones of his chin sunk into the flesh, his eyebrows like quarter moons, his eyes watchful, malicious and, in that slack face and body, disconcertingly bold. He said: ‘Old Roger’s taken to making jokes in meetings, nowadays. In Cabinets, as well as in this one. Rather good jokes, I must say, but I don’t think Reggie sees them.’

Sammikins gave his brazen laugh, but Cave had one sly eye on me, and went on: ‘I sometimes wonder a little whether it’s wise for politicians to make too many jokes. What do you think? I mean, it sometimes looks as though they’re getting worried and are trying to put a bit too much of a face on it. Do you think that’s possible?’

‘Do you think Roger’s getting worried?’ I asked.

‘I shouldn’t have thought so. I can’t for the life of me imagine why, can you?’

At that, even Sammikins, not listening so intently as I was, looked baffled.

We all knew that Roger was in his private crisis of politics. Cave knew it as well as any man alive. Suddenly I wondered whether, with extravagant indirectness, he was hinting at something which was not political at all. Was he really suggesting that Roger had another concern, different in kind? He was an observant and suspicious man, and he might have had his suspicions sharpened by unhappiness. Had he guessed that another marriage was in danger?

‘No,’ I said to Cave, ‘I can’t imagine why. Unless things went worse this morning than you’ve told us. And you’re wondering if he’s got to back down. And of course you too.’

‘Oh, no, no, no,’ Cave said rapidly. His whole face was transformed by a smile which seemed to come from within, evanescent, amused, youthful. ‘I assure you, it’s all gone easier than I expected. Of course, the White Paper hasn’t really got all that many teeth, has it? Unless someone is going to read it in a way Reggie Collingwood wouldn’t approve.’

He added: ‘Roger was exceptionally good. It was one of the times when he does look the biggest man among us — you know what I mean. It’s true, he did just drop one hint, not very loudly and he threw it away — that, in certain circumstances, he conceivably might want to say a word or two in public. It was nothing like as vulgar as threatening to resign, you understand.’ Cave smiled again. ‘I may be wrong, of course, but I rather got the impression that some of our colleagues took the point.’

With a glint in his eye, Cave said to me, in a very quiet tone: ‘So far as I remember that last party of Caro’s, Roger might have learned that trick from you, mightn’t he?’

It was just on two. The meeting was to start again in half an hour, and soon he would have to be going. We walked upstairs to the drawing-room, also bright, also hung with paintings. But what struck the eye was a large photograph of his wife. It made her look handsomer than she really was: clear-featured, vivid, strong. Not right for him, not conceivably right for him, as anyone studying that face would have guessed. But there it stood. He must have seen it every night when he came in alone. One had a feeling, both of pity and discomfort, that he was living, not only with, but on his sorrow.

With a directness that I could not have matched, nor most of us, Sammikins marched up to the photograph and said: ‘Have you heard from her?’

‘Only through her solicitors.’

‘What about?’

‘What do you think?’ said Cave.

Sammikins turned on him and said, in a hard, astringent tone, ‘Look here, the sooner you say good-riddance, the better it’ll be for you. I don’t suppose you care about that. But the better it will be for her, too, and you do care about that, worse luck. And the better it’ll be for everyone around you.’

He might have been a regimental officer dealing with marital trouble in the ranks. Somehow it didn’t sound like a wild young roisterer talking to an eminent man. It was not embarrassing to listen to.

‘Never mind,’ said Cave gently, with a touch of gratitude, speaking quite genuinely, as Sammikins had spoken. Soon he was saying goodbye, on his way to Great George Street. I thought he was genuine again when, in sympathy and reassurance, he said to me: ‘Don’t worry about this afternoon. It’s all going according to plan.’

But he could not resist one last twist, dig, or mystification: ‘The only question is, whose plan?’

30: A Sense of Insult

On Sunday afternoon, a couple of days after the Memorial Service, Margaret and I were sitting at home. The children had gone out to Christmas parties and we were peaceful. Then the telephone rang. As she answered it, I saw her look surprised. Yes, he is in, she was saying. Apparently the other person was trying to make a date with me: Margaret, protective, suggested that we should be alone, so wouldn’t it be better to come in for a drink? There was a long explanation. At last, she left the receiver off and came to me with a commiserating curse. ‘Hector Rose,’ she said.

Over the telephone, his voice sounded more than ever glacial. ‘I am most extremely sorry to disturb you, my dear Lewis, I wouldn’t have done so if I hadn’t a rather urgent reason. Do make my apologies to your wife. I really am very, very sorry.’

When the polite wind-up had finished, it came out that he needed to see me that same afternoon. He would give me tea at the Athenaeum at half-past four. I didn’t want to go, but he pressed me, all flah-flah dropped, clear and firm. Then, arrangements made, the apologies and thanks started over again.

Seeing our afternoon broken, Margaret and I were cross. I told her that I could not remember him doing this on a Sunday, not even in the busiest time of the war: he must be coming in specially himself, from right beyond Highgate: it occurred to me that I had never been inside his house. Margaret, not placated, was scolding me for not saying no.

She took it for granted, as I did, that the summons had something to do with Roger’s White Paper. Yet we had heard, on the Friday night, that Cave’s prediction had been correct, and that the Cabinet Committee had agreed. Margaret said: ‘Whatever it is, it could wait till tomorrow morning.’

Leaving the comfortable room, leaving my wife, going out into the drizzling cold, I felt she was right.

It was not perceptibly more encouraging when my taxi drew up in front of the club. The building was in darkness: there, on the pavement, in the slush and the half-light, stood Hector Rose. He began apologizing before I had paid my driver. ‘My dear Lewis, this is more than usually incompetent of me. I am most terribly sorry. I’d got it into my head that this was one of the weekends we are open. I must say, I’m capable of most kinds of mistakes, but I shouldn’t have thought I was capable of this.’ The courtesies grew more elaborate, at the same time more sarcastic, as though beneath them all he was really blaming me.

He went on explaining, with the same elaboration, that perhaps the consequences of his ‘fatuity’ were not irretrievably grave: since ‘the club’ was closed, the Senior would by agreement be open, and we could perhaps, without too much inconvenience, have our tea there. I was as familiar with these facts as he was. Fifty yards from us, just across the Place, the lights of what he called the ‘Senior’ (the United Services Club) streamed through the first flutter of sleet. All I wanted to do was cut the formalities short and get into the warm.

We got into the warm. We sat in a corner of the club drawing-room and ordered tea and muffins. Rose was dressed in his weekend costume, sports jacket, grey flannel trousers. Still the formalities were not cut short. This was so unlike him that I was at a loss. As a rule, after the ceremonies had in his view been properly performed, he got down to business like a man turning on a switch. His manner was so artificial, so sharply split from the personality beneath, that it was always difficult to pick up his mood. And yet, as he went on describing great labyrinthine curves of politeness, I had a sense, a distressing sense, that he was under strain.

We drank the tea, we ate the muffins. Rose was expressing a mannerly interest in the book reviews in the Sunday papers. He had noticed something on a subject that was bound to interest my wife, to whom again, his regrets for intruding that day –

Usually I was patient: but I could wait no longer. I said: ‘What’s all this about?’

He gazed at me with an expression I could not read.

‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘that something has happened about Roger Quaife. Is that it?’

‘Not directly,’ said Rose, in his brisk, businesslike tone. So at last he was engaged. He went on:‘No, so far as I know, that’s all right. Our masters appear to be about to sanction what I must say is an unusually sensible White Paper. It’s going to the Cabinet next week. It’s a compromise, of course, but it has got some good points. Whether our masters stick to those when they get under shot and shell — that’s quite another matter. Will our friend Quaife stick to it when they really get at him? I confess I find it an interesting speculation.’ He was speaking from his active, working self: but he was still watching me.

‘Well, then?’ I said.

‘I do think that’s reasonably all right,’ he said, glad to be talking at a distance, like an Olympian god who hadn’t yet decided on his favourite. ‘I don’t believe you need have that on your mind.’

‘Then what do I need to have on my mind?’ Again I could not read his expression. His face was set, authoritative, and when he wasn’t forcing smiles, without pretence.

‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I’ve been having to spend some time with the Security people.’ He added sharply: ‘Far too much time, I may say.’

Suddenly, comfortably, I thought I had it. Tuesday was New Year’s Day. Each year, Rose sat in the group which gave out Honours. Was it conceivable that something had leaked, from our office? I asked: ‘Have some of the names slipped out?’

Rose looked at me, irritated. ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you.’

‘I meant, have some of the names in next week’s list got out?’

‘No, my dear chap, nothing like that. Nothing like that at all.’ It was rare for him to let his impatience show through. He had to make an effort to control it, before he spoke calmly, precisely, choosing his words: ‘I didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily. But I think I remember telling you, some months ago, about representations from various quarters, which I said then that I was doing my best to resist. When would that be?’

We both had good memories, trained memories. He knew, without my telling him, that it had been back in September, when he warned me that ‘the knives were sharpening’. We could both have written a précis of that conversation.

‘Well, I’m sorry to have to tell you, but I haven’t been able to resist indefinitely. These people — what do they call them, in their abominable jargon? “pressure groups”? — have been prepared to go over our heads. There’s no remedy for it. Some of our scientists, I mean our most eminent scientists advising on defence policy — and that, I need hardly tell you, is our friend Quaife’s policy — are going to be put through a new security investigation. I fancy the name for this procedure, though it is not specially elegant, is “double checking”.’

Rose was speaking with bitter distaste, distaste apparently as much for me as for the pressure groups, as he went on with his exposition, magisterial, orderly, and lucid. Some of this influence had been set in motion by Brodzinski, working on the members whom he knew. Some might have got going independently. Some had been wafted over via Washington — prompted, perhaps, by Brodzinski’s speeches, or his friends there, or possibly by a re-echo of the Question in the House.

‘We could have resisted any of these piecemeal,’ said Rose. ‘Though, as you may have noticed, our masters are not at — shall I say, their most Cromwellian — when faced with a “suggestion” from our major allies. But we could not resist them all combined. You must try to give us the benefit of the doubt.’

Our eyes met, each of us blank-faced. No one apologized more profusely than Rose, when apologies were not needed: no one hated apologizing more, when the occasion was real.

‘The upshot is,’ he went on, ‘that some of our more distinguished scientists, who have done good service to the State, are going to have to submit to a distinctly humiliating experience. Or alternatively, be cut off from any connection with the real stuff.’

‘Who are they?’

‘There are one or two who don’t matter much to us. Then there’s Sir Laurence Astill.’

I could not help smiling. Rose gave a wintry grin.

‘I must say,’ I said, ‘I think that’s rather funny. I wish I could be there when it happens.’

‘I have an idea,’ said Rose, ‘that he was thrown in to make things look more decent.’

‘The others?’

‘One is Walter Luke. Between ourselves, since he’s a chief Government scientist, I take that distinctly ill.’

I swore.

‘But still,’ I said, ‘Walter’s a very tough man. I don’t think he’ll mind.’

‘I hope not.’ He paused. ‘Another is a very old friend of yours. Francis Getliffe.’

I sat silent. At last I said: ‘This is a scandal.’

‘I’ve tried to indicate that I don’t regard it with enthusiasm myself.’

‘It’s not only a scandal, but it’s likely to be serious,’ I went on.

‘That was one of my reasons for dragging you here this afternoon.’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I know Francis very well. I’ve known him since we were very young men. He’s as proud as a man can be. I doubt, I really do doubt, whether he’ll take this.’

‘You must tell him he’s got to.’

‘Why should he?’

‘Duty,’ said Rose.

‘He’s only been lending a hand at all because of duty. If he’s going to be insulted into the bargain—’

‘My dear Lewis,’ said Rose, with a flash of icy temper, ‘a number of us, no doubt less eminent than Getliffe, but still reasonably adequate in our profession, are insulted in one way or another towards the end of our careers. But that doesn’t permit us to abdicate.’

It was almost the only personal complaint I had heard him make, and then half-veiled. I said:‘All Francis wants is to get on with his research and live in peace.’

Rose replied: ‘If I may borrow your own debating technique, may I suggest that, if he does so, there is slightly less chance that either he or any of the rest of us will live in peace?’

He continued sharply: ‘Let’s drop the nonsense. We all know that Getliffe is the scientific mind behind Quaife’s policy. For military things, I think we’re all agreed that he’s the best scientific mind we’ve got. That being so, he’s just got to swallow his pride. You’ve got to tell him so. I repeat, that was one of my reasons for giving you this news today. We’ll probably hear of this unpleasantness tomorrow afternoon. You’ve got to soften the blow before he hears, and persuade him. If you believe in this policy so much — and I thought, forgive me, that there were certain indications that you did — you can’t do any less.’

I waited for a moment, then said, as quietly as I could: ‘What I’ve only just realized — is that you believe in this policy so much.’

Rose did not smile or blink, or show any sign of acquiescence.

‘I am a civil servant,’ he said. ‘I play according to the rules.’ Briskly he asked me: ‘Tell me, how embarrassing is this going to be for Francis Getliffe?’

‘How sensibly do you think they’ll handle him?’

‘They will be told — they may just possibly even know — that he’s an important man.’ He went on, the sarcasm left behind: ‘He has the reputation of being far to the Left. You know that?’

‘Of course I know that,’ I replied. ‘He was a radical in the Thirties. In some ways he still thinks of himself as a radical. That may be true intellectually. But in his heart, it isn’t.’

Rose did not answer for some instants. Then he pointed with his foot over to my right. I turned and looked. It was an oil-painting, like a great many in the drawing-room, of a Victorian officer, side-whiskered, high-coloured, pop-eyed, period that of the Zulu Wars.

‘The trouble with our major allies,’ he said, ‘is that they methodically read every speech Francis Getliffe has ever made, and can’t believe that any of us know anything about him. One of the few advantages of living in England, is that we do know just a little about one another, don’t you agree? We know, for instance, the not entirely irrelevant fact that Francis Getliffe is as likely to betray his country as’ — Rose read the name under the painting without emphasis, but with his bitterest edge — ‘Lieutenant-General Sir James Brudenell, Bart., CB.’

He was still speaking under strain. It had not got less, but greater, after he had broken the news about Francis. There was a jagged pause before he said: ‘There’s something else you’ll have to warn Getliffe about. I confess I find it offensive. But modern thought on this kind of procedure apparently requires what they like to call “research” into the subject’s sexual life.’

Taken unawares, I grinned. ‘They won’t get much for their trouble,’ I said. ‘Francis married young, and they’ve lived happily ever after.’

I added: ‘But what are they going to ask?’

‘I’ve already suggested to them that it wouldn’t be tactful to bring up the subject to Sir Francis Getliffe himself. But they’ll feel obliged to scurry round his acquaintances and see if he’s liable to any kind of blackmail. That is, I take it, to find out whether he has mistresses, or other attachments. As you know, there is a curious tendency to assume that any homosexual attachment means that a man is probably a traitor. I must say, I should like them to sell that to — and—’

For once, Rose, the most discreet of men, was not at all discreet. He had given the names of a particularly tough Minister and of a high public servant.

‘I must say,’ I echoed him, ‘I should like someone to tell Francis that it was being seriously investigated whether he had homosexual attachments or not.’

The thought was not without humour.

But then I said: ‘Look here, I don’t think he’s going to endure this.’

‘He’s got to,’ said Rose, unyielding. ‘It’s intolerable, but it’s the way we live. I must ask you to ring him up tonight. You must talk to him before he hears from anyone else.’

There was a silence.

‘I’ll do my best,’ I said.

‘I’m grateful,’ said Rose. ‘I’ve told you before, this was one reason why I had to talk to you today.’

‘What’s the other reason?’ I had been dense, but suddenly I knew.

‘The other reason, I’m afraid, is that the same procedure is to be applied to you.’

I exclaimed. My temper boiled up. I was outraged.

‘I’m sorry, Eliot,’ said Rose.

For years he had called me by my Christian name. Now, telling me this news, he felt as much estranged as when we first met. He had never really liked me. Over the years, we had established colleague-like relations, some sort of respect, some sort of trust. I had given him a little trouble, because, in an irregular position, I had taken liberties which a career civil servant could not, or would not, think of taking. Things I had said and written hadn’t been easy for him. He had ‘picked up the pieces’, not good-humouredly, but according to his obligation. Now, at last he hadn’t been able to protect me, as, by his sense of fitness, he should have protected a colleague. He felt something like dishonoured, leaving me exposed. As a consequence, he liked me less than he had ever done.

‘It doesn’t make it any more agreeable,’ he said stiffly, ‘but this has nothing to do with suggestions from our allies. They have asked questions about Getliffe, but nothing about you. No, you seem to have some enemies at home. I take it that isn’t exactly a surprise to you?’

‘Do you expect me to stand for it?’

‘I’ve got to say to you what I said about Getliffe.’

After a while, during which we sat mute opposite each other, he said, strained, cold, hostile: ‘I think I ought to make it as smooth for you as I can. If you don’t care to submit to this business, then I will make an excuse, which shouldn’t be beyond human ingenuity, and someone they’re less interested in can take over the defence work. Not of course’ — with an effort, punctilio returned — ‘that anyone else could be so valuable to us, my dear Lewis.’

‘Do you seriously think I could take that offer?’

‘I made it in good faith.’

‘You knew I couldn’t possibly accept?’

Rose had become as angry as I was. ‘Do you really believe that I haven’t resisted this business for weeks?’

‘But it has still happened.’

Rose spoke with deliberate fairness, with deliberate reasonableness: ‘I repeat, I’m sorry. As a matter of historical fact, I have been arguing your case and Getliffe’s most of the autumn. But yesterday they gave me no option. I also repeat, I want to do anything in the department’s power to make it smooth for you. If I were you, I think I should feel very much as you do. Please forget about telephoning Getliffe. It was inconsiderate of me to ask you that, when I had to talk about something which was even more unpleasant for you. And, incidentally, for me. There’s no need to decide anything tonight. Let me know tomorrow what you would like done.’

He had spoken with fairness. But I was a reproach, sitting there. All he wanted was for me to get out of his sight. As for me, I could not manage even the grace of his fairness.

‘No, there’s no choice,’ I said roughly. ‘You may as well tell these people to go ahead.’

31: Recommendation by a Prudent Man

That night I did my duty, and rang up Francis in Cambridge. I was angry with him, just as Rose had been with me, because I had to persuade him. I was angry because he was so stiff-necked and hard to persuade. I was angry with Margaret, because of love and her own high-principled temper she was saying what I wanted to say: that Francis and I should each of us resign and leave them to it.

But I felt something else, which I had not felt before, or not since I was a very young man — the intense, mescalin-vivid sense of being watched. When I picked up the receiver and asked for the Cambridge number, I was listening (was the line tapped?) to sounds on the aural threshold. The clicks and tinkles seemed to me as though they had been picked up by an amplifier.

It was the same for days to come. I remembered a refugee, years before, telling me one of the prices of exile. One had to think about actions which, before one left home, were as unconscious as dreaming. Now I knew what that meant. I found myself looking round before I took a taxi. Though the light was dim, the trees of the Park appeared to be preternaturally sharp; I felt I could have counted each twig. The top-light of another taxi shone like a beacon.

Early in the week, Ellen telephoned: she had that morning received another anonymous letter: she and Roger wanted to talk to me together. Once more the world outside seemed over-brilliant. As we talked of where to meet, we sounded reasonable, to each other and to ourselves, but we weren’t quite. We had lost our sense of fact, just as people do when they are hypnotized by secrets: just as my brother and I had once done, when, in the war, worried by what we knew, we had gone into the middle of Hyde Park so as not to be overheard.

In the end — it was like being young and poor again, with nowhere to take one’s young woman — we dropped in, one by one, into a pub on the Embankment. When I arrived, the lounge was empty and I sat at a table in the corner. Soon Roger joined me. I noticed that, despite all the photographs, no one behind the bar recognized him. Ellen came in: I went and greeted her, and brought her to the table.

She gave Roger her severe introductory smile, but her skin was glowing and the whites of her eyes as clear as a child’s. She looked as though strain and suspicion were good for her, as though energy was pumping through her. Of the three of us, it was Roger who seemed physically subdued. Yet, as I read the new letter Ellen had brought out of her bag, he was watching me with eyes as alert as hers.

The letter was in the same handwriting, but the words had run close together. The tone was threatening (‘you haven’t much longer to make him change his mind’) and, for the first time, obscene. It was a curious kind of obscenity — as though the writer, setting out for a hard-baked business purpose — had gone off the track, had become as obsessed as someone scrawling in a public lavatory. The obsession slithered on, insinuating, sadistic, glassy-eyed.

I didn’t want to go on reading, and pushed the letter away over the glass table-top.

‘Well?’ cried Ellen.

Roger sank back in his chair. Like me, he was shocked, and at the same time didn’t like being shocked. In a deliberately off-hand tone he said: ‘One thing is fairly clear. He doesn’t like us very much.’

‘I’m not going to stand it,’ she said.

‘What else can we do?’ Roger asked her, in a placating voice.

‘I’m going to do something.’ She appealed to me — no, announced to me: ‘Don’t you agree, this is the time to do something?’

In the past minute, I had realized that for the first time they were split. That was why I had been asked there that night. She wanted me on her side: and Roger, as he sat back in his chair, giving sensible, cautious reasons why they had to go on enduring this in silence, believed that I had to be on his.

He had spoken with caution, but without much authority. The words came slowly. As for this man, there was no sign that the threats would come to anything. Let it alone. Pretend they were unmoved. It was a nuisance they could live with.

‘That’s easy for you,’ said Ellen.

He stared at her. It was nearly always wrong, he said quietly, to take steps when you couldn’t see the end.

‘This man can be stopped,’ she insisted.

‘You can’t be sure.’

‘We can go to the police,’ she said sharply. ‘They’ll protect you. Do you know that he could get six months for this?’

‘I dare say so.’ Roger looked at her with a touch of exasperation, as if she were a child being obtuse about her sums. ‘But I am not in a position to appear in a witness-box as Mr X. One has to be singularly anonymous for that particular activity. You must see that. I can’t be Mr X.’

She was silent for a minute. ‘No. Of course you can’t.’

He put his hand on hers for a second.

Then she flared up again. ‘But that isn’t the only way. As soon as I knew who he was, I knew he could be stopped. He’ll crumple up. This is my business, and I’m going to do it.’ Her eyes were wide open with passion. She fixed her glance on me.

‘What do you think, Lewis?’

After a pause I replied, turning to Roger: ‘It’s a slight risk. But I fancy it’s probably time to take the offensive.’

I said it with every appearance of reason, of deliberate consideration, and perhaps as persuasively as I ever said anything.

Roger had been talking sense. Ellen was as gifted with sense as he was: but she was made for action, her judgement was always likely to leave her if she couldn’t act. I ought to have known that. Maybe, with half my mind, I did know. But my own judgement had gone, for reasons more complex than hers, and much more culpable. As I grew older, I had learned patience. The influence I had on people like Roger was partly because they thought me a tough and enduring man; but this wasn’t as natural as it seemed, nor so much all of a piece. I had been born spontaneous, excessively so, emotional, malleable. The stoical public face had become real enough, but the earlier nature went on underneath, and when the patience and control snapped, was still, in my middle-age, capable of breaking through. This was dangerous for me, and for those round me, since fits of temper, or spontaneous affection, or sheer whims, filtered through the public screen, and sounded as disciplined, as reliable, as some part of my character had now become, and as I should have liked the rest of it to be. It didn’t happen often, because I was on my guard: but occasionally it happened still, as on that evening. No one but Margaret knew it, but for days, since the dialogue with Rose, my temper had been smouldering. Like Ellen, I had gone into the pub craving for action. Unlike her, though, I didn’t sound as though I needed it. The craving came out through layers of patience, mixed with all the qualifications and devices of discipline, as though it were the reasonable, considered recommendation of a wise and prudent man.

Yes, I said, we were all being shot at. There were great advantages in absorbing the attacks, in showing passive strength. Made enemies worried about what one had in reserve. But one mustn’t stay passive forever. If so, they ceased to worry, and treated one like a punchball. The whole art was, to stay silent, to select one’s time, and then pick them off. Perhaps the time had come, or was coming. This attack on Ellen — there the man was wide-open. If he had any connection with others, which we were no nearer knowing, it would interest them to hear that he had been coped with; anyway, this was the thing to do. Roger gave up, with only a token struggle. Except in little things, as Caro had once told me, he was the hardest of men to influence. In all our connection, I had scarcely once persuaded him: certainly not over-persuaded him. Sitting there, round the little table, it did not occur to me that I was over-persuading him. I felt as reasonable as I sounded. Almost at once, the three of us were talking, not of whether anything should be done, but of what.

Later on, when it was all over, I wondered what responsibility I had to accept. Perhaps I was being easy on myself — but had it made much difference, what I said that night? Surely it had been Ellen’s will, or more precisely, her desire, which had been decisive? For once, Roger had wanted to slump into acquiescence and let her have her way. He gave the impression, utterly unlike him, of being absent — not from strain so much as from a kind of comfort. He did not even speak much. When he did speak, he said, as though it were one of his most pointed reflections, ‘I must say, it will make things smoother, when we don’t hear from him again.’

Ellen hissed at him like a cat.

‘By God, that’s helpful!’ she cried. She broke into a grin, a lop-sided grin, furious and loving. As for him, he would be absent until he could take her in his arms.

The truth was, I now accepted, that the love was not one-sided. He loved her in return. It wasn’t a passing fancy, such as a man of Roger’s age and egotism might often have. He admired her, just as he admired Caro, and oddly enough for some of the same reasons: for these women were not so unlike as they seemed. Ellen was as upright as Caro, and as honourable: in her way, she was as worldly, though she had more grievances about the world. Perhaps she was deeper, nearer to the nerve of life. I believed Roger thought they were both better people than he was. And, of course, between him and Ellen there was a link of the senses, so strong that sitting with them was like being in a field of force. Why it was so strong, I should probably never know. It was better that I shouldn’t. If one reads the love-letters that give the details of a grand passion, they make one forget that the passion can still be grand.

There was one other thing. Just as Ellen’s judgement and mine had been distorted, so was his. He loved her. But in a fashion strange to him, he felt he had no right to love her. Not only, perhaps not mainly, because of his wife. People thought of him as a hard professional politician. There was truth in that. How complete the truth was, I still didn’t know. I still wasn’t sure which choices he would make. And yet I was sure that he had a hope of virtue. He wanted perhaps more strongly than he himself could tell, to do something good. Somehow, as though he was dragged back to the priests and prophets, he would have felt more certain of virtue, more fit to do something good, if like the greatest politicians, he could pay a price. It sounded atavistic and superstitious, as I looked at the two of them, the sharp, self-abnegating woman, the untransparent hulk of a man: yet, somewhere in my mind, was nagging the myth of Samson’s hair.

Ellen and I, with Roger mostly silent, were arguing what was to be done. Private detectives? No, no point. Then I had an idea. This man was employed by one of Lord Lufkin’s competitors. If Lufkin would talk to the other chairman — ‘Have you ever seen that done?’ said Roger, suddenly alive.

Yes, I said, I had once seen it done.

It would mean telling Lufkin everything, Roger was saying.

‘It would mean telling him a good deal.’

‘I’m against it,’ said Ellen.

Roger listened to her, but went on: ‘How far do you trust him?’

‘If you gave him a confidence, he’d respect it,’ I said.

‘That’s not enough, is it?’

I said that Lufkin, cold fish as he was, had been a good friend to me. I said that he was, in his own interest, without qualification on Roger’s side. I left them talking it over, as I went to the bar to get more drinks. As I stood there, the landlady spoke to me by name. I had used that pub for years, since the time during the war when I lived in Pimlico. There was nothing ominous in her addressing me, but her tone was hushed.

‘There’s someone I want to show you,’ she said.

For an instant I was alarmed. I looked round the room, the sense of being watched acute again. There weren’t many people there, no one I knew or could suspect.

‘Do you know who that is?’ she whispered reverentially, pointing to the far end of the bar. There, sitting on a stool, eating a slice of veal and ham pie, with a glass of stout beside the plate, was a commonplace-looking man in a blue suit.

‘No,’ I said.

‘That,’ said the landlady, her whisper more sacramental, ‘is Grobbelaar’ s brother-in-law!’

It might have sounded like gibberish, or alternatively, as if Grobbelaar were a distinguished public figure. Not a bit of it. Distinguished public figures were not in the landlady’s line. In that pub, Roger stayed anonymous and, if she had been told his name, she would have had no conception who he was. On the other hand, she had a clear conception who Grobbelaar was, and so had I. Grobbelaar had been, in fact, an entirely respectable South African, but an unfortunate one. About five years before, living, so far as I could remember, in Hammersmith, he had been murdered for the sake of a very small sum, about a hundred pounds. There had been nothing spectacular about the murder itself, but the consequences were somewhat gothic. For Grobbelaar had been in an amateurish fashion dissected, and the portions made into brown paper parcels, weighted down with bricks, and dropped, at various points between Blackfriars and Putney, into the river. It was the kind of bizarre crime which, unbeknown to the landlady, foreigners thought typical of her native town, the fate which waited for many of us, as we groped our way through endless streets, in a never-ending fog. It was the kind of crime, true enough, which brought the landlady and me together. As she gave me this special treat, as she invited me to gaze, she knew that she was showing me an object touched by mana. It was true enough that this brother-in-law was another entirely respectable man, who had not had the slightest connection with the gothic occurrences. Did he, as an object of reverence, seem a little remote? Had the mana worn just a shade thin? The landlady’s whisper was in a tone which meant that mana never wore thin.

‘That,’ she repeated, ‘is Grobbelaar’s brother-in-law.’

I went back to our table with a grin. Ellen had noticed me conferring with the landlady, she looked at me with apprehensive eyes. I shook my head and said, ‘No, nothing.’

They had decided against Lufkin. The straightforward method was to write a couple of lines to the man himself, saying without explanation that she wished to receive no further communications from him, and that any further letters would be returned. Nothing but that. It implicated no one but herself, and it told him that she knew.

At that we left it, and sat in the cheerful pub, now filling up, with the landlady busy, but her gaze still drawn by the magnet in the blue suit at the end of the bar.

32: Symptoms

The White Paper was published at last; the House had not reassembled. This concatenation was not just an amiable coincidence. We wanted official opinion to form, the more of it the better. There was our best chance. As soon as the Paper, Command 8964, came out, Roger’s supporters were trying to read the signs.

The newspapers didn’t tell us much. One paper cried: ‘Our Deterrent To Go?’ To our surprise, the slogan did not immediately catch on. Most of the comments of the defence correspondents were predictable: we could have written them ourselves. In fact, to an extent, we had written them ourselves, for two or three of the most influential correspondents were friends and disciples of Francis Getliffe. They knew the arguments as well as he or Walter Luke. They understood the White Paper, though it deserved fairly high marks for deliberate obscurity. They accepted that, sooner or later, there was only one answer.

The danger was that we were listening to ourselves. It was the occupational danger of this kind of politics: you cut yourselves off from your enemies, you basked in the echo of your own voice. That was one of the reasons why the real bosses stayed more optimistic than the rest of us. Even Roger, more realistic than other bosses, knowing that this was the moment, knowing that he had to be certain what the back-benchers were saying, had to force himself to visit the Carlton or White’s.

The Cabinet had, as a compromise, accepted the White Paper. But Roger knew — inarticulate men like Collingwood could sometimes make themselves very clear — that they meant the compromise to be kept. If he tilted the balance, if he put his weight on the side of his own policy, he was in danger. The Prime Minister and his friends were not simple men, but they were used to listening to men simpler than themselves. If the backbenchers became suspicious of Roger, then simple men sometimes had grounds for their suspicions. It was by his own party that he would be judged.

As for me, I liked hearing bad news no more than Roger did. But for the next fortnight, I called on acquaintances and used my clubs as I had not done since I married Margaret. I did not pick up many signs. With those I did pick up, I was not sure which way they pointed. Walking along Pall Mall, one wild windy January night, I was thinking that on the whole it was going a shade worse, but not decisively worse, than I reckoned on. Then I went up the steps of a club, where I was not a member, but was meeting a Whitehall colleague. He was the head of a service department, and after a few minutes with him I was encouraged. As he talked, one eye to his watch, needing to catch a train back to East Horsley for dinner, the odds seemed perceptibly shorter. I caught sight of Douglas Osbaldiston walking through the colonnades. My host said goodbye, and I stayed for a word, what I thought would be a casual word, with Douglas. As he came out into the light, I saw his face, and I was shocked. He looked ravaged.

Before I could ask him, he broke out: ‘Lewis, I’m nearly off my head with worry.’ He sat beside me. I said, ‘What is it?’

In reply, he said one word. ‘Mary.’ The name of his wife. Then he added, that she might be very ill.

As though released, he told me of her signs and symptoms, hyper-attentively, almost with fervour, just as a sick person tells one about his own. About two weeks before — no, Douglas corrected himself with obsessive accuracy — eleven days before, she had complained of double vision. Holding her cigarette at arm’s length, she had seen a replica alongside it. They had laughed. They were happy together. She had always been healthy. A week later, she said that she had lost feeling in her left arm. Suddenly they had looked at each other in distress. ‘We’ve always known, ever since we were married, when either of us was afraid.’ She had gone to her doctor. He couldn’t reassure her. Forty-eight hours before, she had got up from a chair and been unable to control her legs. ‘She’s been walking like a spastic,’ he cried. That morning she had been taken to hospital. He couldn’t get any comfort. It would be a couple of days before they gave him any sort of answer.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I’ve got the best neurologists in the place. I’ve been talking to them most of the day.’ It had been a consolation to use influence and power, to find out the names of the specialists, to have them brought in government cars to his office. That day, Douglas had given up being unassuming.

‘I suppose you know what we’re afraid of?’ he asked in a quiet tone.

‘No.’ I failed him. All through his description I had been at a loss.

Even when he brought out the name of the disease, it was his manner that harrowed me most. ‘Disseminated sclerosis,’ he said. He added, ‘You must remember reading about Barbellion’s disease.’

Then, quite suddenly, he was full of an inexplicable hope.

‘It may not be anything of the sort,’ he said robustly, almost as though it were for him to cheer me up. ‘They don’t know. They can’t know yet awhile. Don’t forget, there are several possibilities which are more or less benign.’

He had a surge of happiness, of confidence in the future. I did not know how soon his mood would change. Not liking to leave him in the club, I offered to take him home to my wife, or to go with him to his own house, deserted now. He gave an intimate smile, some of the freshness returning to his face. No, he wouldn’t hear of it. He was perfectly all right, nothing could happen that night. He was staying at the club, he would go to bed with a good book. I ought to know he wasn’t the man to take to the bottle by himself.

All he said in that patch of euphoria was, for him, curiously indirect, but when I said goodbye, he gripped my hand.

During the next few days, at meetings, in the office, speculations about Roger got sharper. Parliament would be sitting again in a week. Before Easter, there would, Rose and the others agreed, have to be a full-dress debate on the White Paper. But they did not agree either on the strength of Roger’s position nor on his intentions. Rose, very distant from me at this time, merely gave a polite smile.

On the fourth morning after I had met Douglas at his club, his secretary rang up mine. Would I please go along at once?

As soon as I entered his room, I had no doubt. He was standing by the window. He gave me some sort of greeting. He said: ‘You were worried about her too, weren’t you?’ Then he burst out: ‘The news is bad.’

What had they said?

He replied, no, it wasn’t exactly what they had expected. It wasn’t disseminated sclerosis. But that wasn’t much improvement, he said, with a quiet and bitter sarcasm. The prognosis of what she had got was as bad or worse. It was another disease of the central nervous system, a rarer one. They could not predict its course with accuracy. The likelihood was, she would be dead within five years. Long before that, she would be completely paralysed. He said, his expression naked and passionate: ‘Can you imagine how horrible it is to know that? About someone you’ve loved in the flesh?’ He added: ‘About someone you still love in the flesh?’

For minutes I stayed silent, and he broke out in disjointed, violent spasms.

‘I shall have to tell her soon.’

‘She’s been kind all her life. Kind to everyone. Why should this happen to her?

‘If I believed in God, I should throw him back his ticket.’

‘She’s good.’

‘She’s got to die like this.’

At last, when he fell silent, I asked whether there was anything I could do.

‘There’s nothing,’ he said, ‘that anyone can do.’ Then he said, in a level tone, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Lewis. She’ll need her friends. She’ll have a lot of time to see her friends. She’ll want you and Margaret, of course she will.’

There was a pause. He said: ‘Well, that’s all.’

I could feel the effort of his will. His voice tightened and he added: ‘Now I should like to talk some business.’

He held up his copy of the White Paper, which had been lying on the blotter.

‘I want your impression. How is this going down?’

‘How do you think?’

‘I’ve been occupied with other things. Come on, what is your impression?’

I replied: ‘Did anyone expect absolutely universal enthusiasm?’

‘It hasn’t got it, you mean?’

‘There are some malcontents.’

‘From what I’ve been able to pick up,’ said Douglas, ‘that may be putting it mildly.’

As he sat there unrelaxed, the nerve of professional expertness showed through. It was not the White Paper which worried him. It was the interpretation which he knew, as well as I did, Roger wished to make and to act upon. He had never liked Roger’s policy: his instincts were too conservative for that. It was only because Roger was a strong Minister that he had got his way so far: or perhaps because Douglas wasn’t unaffected by Roger’s skills. But now Douglas neither liked the policy nor wanted to gamble on its chances. Just as he hadn’t wished to be linked with a scandal when the Parliamentary Question came up, so he didn’t wish to be linked with a failure.

As he shut out his suffering, his tormented thoughts of his wife, this other concern leaped out.

‘It could be,’ I said. He was much too astute a man to be bluffed.

‘It’s no use deceiving ourselves,’ said Douglas. ‘Anyway, you wouldn’t. There is a finite possibility that my Minister’s present policy may be a dead duck.’

‘How finite?’

We stared at each other. I couldn’t get him to commit himself. I pressed him. An even chance? That would, before this conversation, have been my secret guess. Douglas said: ‘I–I hope he’s sensible enough to cut his losses now. And start on another line. The important thing is, we’ve got to have another line in reserve.’

‘You mean—?’

‘I mean, we have to start working out some alternative.’

‘If that became known,’ I said, ‘it would do great harm.’

‘It won’t get known,’ he replied, ‘and it will have to be done at once. We shan’t have long. It’s a question of thinking out several eventualities and making up our minds which is going to be right.’

‘In this business,’ I said, ‘I’ve never had much doubt what’s right.’

‘Then you’re lucky.’

For the moment, he was back in his off-hand form. Then he went on driving himself, clear, concentrated. He had said ‘which is going to be right’ without any fuss, meaning which policies would, according to the climate of opinion, be both sensible and practicable. He proposed that afternoon to begin writing the draft of a new plan, ‘just to see how it looks.’ Then, if trouble came, the department would have something ‘up its sleeve’.

In everything he said or intended, he was entirely straightforward. His code of behaviour was as rigid as that of Rose. He would inform Roger that afternoon of precisely what he intended to do.

In one respect, however, he differed from Rose. He did not indulge in any hypocrisy of formality or protocol. It never occurred to him to pretend — as Rose had always pretended, and sometimes managed to believe — that he had no influence on events. It never occurred to him to chant that he was simply there to carry out the policy of his ‘masters’. On the contrary, Douglas often found it both necessary and pleasant to produce his own.

As I went down the corridors back to my own office, I was thinking of his interview with Roger that afternoon.

33: A Man Called Monteith

It was late that same afternoon when I received a note from Hector Rose — not a minute, but a note in his beautiful italic handwriting, beginning ‘My dear Lewis’ and ending, ‘Yours ever’. The substance was less emollient. Rose, who did not lack moral courage, and who was sitting three doors down the corridor, had shied away from telling it in person.

Could you possibly make it convenient to come to my room at ten a.m. tomorrow? I know that this is both unpleasantly early and at intolerably short notice: but our friends in — [a branch of Security] are apt to be somewhat pressing. They wish to have a personal interview with you, which is, I believe, the last stage in their proceedings. They have asked for a similar arrangement with Sir F Getliffe in the afternoon. I take it you would not prefer to approach F G yourself, and we are acting on that assumption. I cannot tell you how sorry I am that the notice should be so short, and I have already had a word to say about this.

That night, as I let myself go to Margaret, taking comfort from her fury, I didn’t find Rose’s preoccupation with timing funny. I felt it was another dig, another jab of the needle. When I entered his room, at precisely five minutes to ten the next morning, he had something else to brood about and was as brusque as I was.

‘Have you seen this?’ he said, without any of his greetings.

‘This’ was an editorial in one of the popular papers. It was an attack on the White Paper, under the heading: ARE THEY THROWING AWAY OUR INDEPENDENCE?

The paper went on asking: Do they intend to sell us out? Do they intend to stop us being a great power?

‘Good God alive,’ cried Rose, ‘what kind of world are they living in? Do you think that if there were a single way in heaven or earth which could keep this damned country a great power, some of us wouldn’t have killed ourselves to find it?’

Savagely, he went on swearing. I could scarcely remember hearing an oath from him, much less a piece of rhetoric. ‘Do these silly louts imagine,’ he burst out, ‘that it’s specially easy to accept the facts?’

He looked at me, his eyes bleak.

‘Ah, well,’ he said, ‘our masters will have a good deal on their plate. Now, before Monteith arrives, there is something I wanted to explain to you.’ Once more, smooth as a machine, he was on the track of protocol. ‘Monteith is going to conduct this business himself. We thought that was only fitting, both for you and Getliffe. But there was some difference of opinion about the venue. They thought it was perhaps hardly suitable to talk to you in your own room, as being your home ground, so to speak. Well, I was not prepared to let them invite you to their establishment, so we reached a compromise that Monteith should meet you here. I hope that is as much to your liking as anything can be, my dear Lewis, in these somewhat egregious circumstances.’

He allowed himself that one flick. It was as near a token of support as he could manage. I nodded, and we gazed at each other. He announced, as though it were an interesting piece of social gossip, that he would soon vacate the room for the entire day.

Shortly afterwards, the private secretary brought in Monteith. This time Rose’s greetings were back at their most profuse. Turning to me, he said: ‘Of course, you two must have met?’

In fact we hadn’t, though we had been present together at a Treasury meeting. ‘Oh, in that case,’ said Rose, ‘do let me introduce you.’

Monteith and I shook hands. He was a brisk, strong-boned man, with something like an actor’s handsomeness, dark haired, with drifts of white above the ears. His manner was quite unhistrionic, subdued and respectful. He was much the youngest of the three of us, probably ten years younger than I was. As we made some meaningless chat, he behaved like a junior colleague, modest but assured.

After Rose had conducted the ceremony of chit-chat for five minutes, he said: ‘Perhaps you won’t mind if I leave you two together?’

When the door closed, Monteith and I were left looking at each other.

‘I think we might sit down, don’t you?’ he said. Politely he showed me to an armchair, while he himself took Rose’s. There was a bowl of blue hyacinths in front of him, fresh that morning, witness to Rose’s passion for flowers. The smell of hyacinths was, for me, too sickly, too heavy, to stir up memories, as it might have done, of business-like talks with Rose going back nearly twenty years. All the smell did was to give me a discomfort of the senses, as I sat there, staring into Monteith’s face.

I did not know precisely what his function was. Was he the boss? Or a grey eminence, working behind another boss? Or just a deputy? I thought I knew: Rose certainly did. But, with a passion for mystification, including self-mystification, none of us discussed those agencies or their chains of command.

‘You have had a most distinguished career—’ Firmly, gracefully, Monteith addressed me in full style. ‘You will understand that I have to ask you some questions on certain parts of it.’

He had not laid out a single note on the desk, much less produce a file. Throughout the next three hours, he worked from nothing but memory. In his own office, there must have been a dossier a good many inches high. I already knew that he had interviewed, not only scientists and civil servants who had been colleagues of mine during the war and after, not only old acquaintances at Cambridge, such as the former Master and Arthur Brown, but also figures from my remote past, a retired solicitor whom I had not seen for twenty-five years, even the father of my first wife. All this material he had stored in his head, and deployed with precision. It was an administrator’s trick, which Rose or Douglas or I could have done ourselves. Still, it was impressive. It would have been so if I had watched him dealing with another’s life. Since it was my own life, I found it at times deranging. There were facts about myself, sometimes facts near to the bone, which he knew more accurately than I did.

My earliest youth, my father’s bankruptcy, poverty, my time as a clerk, reading for the Bar examinations — he had the dates at command, the names of people. It all sounded smooth and easy, not really like one’s past at all. Then he asked: ‘When you were a young man in—’ (the provincial town), ‘you were active politically?’ Speeches at local meetings, the ILP, schoolrooms, the nights in pubs: he ticked them off.

‘You were then far out on the left?’

I had set myself to tell the absolute truth. Yet it was difficult. We had a few terms in common. I wasn’t in complete control of my temper. Carefully, but in a sharpened tone, I said: ‘I believed in socialism. I had all the hopes of my time. But I wasn’t a politician as real politicians understand the word. At that age, I wasn’t dedicated enough for that. I was too ambitious in other ways.’

At this, Monteith’s fine eyes lit up. He gave me a smile, not humorous, but comradely. I was dissatisfied with my answer. I had not been interrogated before. Now I was beginning to understand, and detest, the pressures and the temptations. What I had said was quite true: and yet it was too conciliatory.

‘Of course,’ said Monteith, ‘it’s natural for young men to be interested in politics. I was myself, at the University.’

‘Were you?’

‘Like you, but on the other side. I was on the committee of the Conservative Club.’ He said this with an air of innocent gratification, as though that revelation would astonish me, as though he was confessing to having been chairman of a Nihilist cell.

Once more he was efficient, concentrated, ready to call me a liar.

The Thirties, my start at the bar, marriage, the first days of Hitler, the Spanish Civil War.

‘You were strongly on the anti-Nationalist side?’

‘In those days,’ I said, ‘we called it something different.’

‘That is, you were opposed to General Franco?’

‘Of course,’ I replied.

‘But you were very strongly and actively opposed?’

‘I did what little came easy. I’ve often wished I’d done more.’

He went over some Committees I had sat on. All correct, I said.

‘In the course of these activities, you mixed with persons of extreme political views?’

‘Yes.’

He addressed me formally again, and then — ‘You were very intimate with some of these persons?’

‘I think I must ask you to be more specific.’

‘It is not suggested that you were, or have been at any time, a member of the Communist Party—’

‘If it were suggested,’ I said, ‘it would not be true.’

‘Granted. But you have been intimate with some who have?’

‘I should like the names.’

He gave four — those of Arthur Mounteney, the physicist, two other scientists, R— and T—, Mrs Charles March.

I was never a close friend of Mounteney, I said. (It was irksome to find oneself going back on the defensive.)

‘In any case, he left the party in 1939,’ said Monteith, with brisk expertness.

‘Nor of T—.’ Then I said: ‘I was certainly a friend of R—. I saw a good deal of him during the war.’

‘You saw him last October?’

‘I was going to say that I don’t see him often nowadays. But I am very fond of him. He is one of the best men I have ever known.’

‘Mrs March?’

‘Her husband and I were intimate friends when we were young men, and we still are. I met Ann at his father’s house twenty odd years ago and I have known her ever since. I suppose they dine with us three or four times a year.’

‘You don’t deny that you have remained in close touch with Mrs March?’

‘Does it sound as though I were denying it?’ I cried, furious at seeming to be at a moral disadvantage.

He gave a courteous, non-committal smile.

I made myself calm, trying to capture the initiative.

I said: ‘Perhaps it’s time that I got one or two things clear.’

‘Please do.’

‘First of all, though this isn’t really the point, I am not inclined to give up my friends. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to do so — either because they were communists or anything else. Ann March and R — happen to be people of the highest character, but it wouldn’t matter if they weren’t. If you extend your researches, you’ll find that I have other friends, respectable politically, but otherwise disreputable by almost any standards.’

‘Yes, I was interested to find how remarkable your circle was,’ he said, not in the least outfaced.

‘But that isn’t the point, is it?’

He bowed his fine head.

‘You want to know my political views, don’t you? Why haven’t you asked me? — Though I can’t answer in one word. First of all, I haven’t altered much as I’ve got older. I’ve learned a bit more, that’s all. I’ll have another word about that a little later. As I told you, I’ve never been dedicated to politics as a real politician is. But I’ve always been interested. I think I know something about power. I’ve watched it in various manifestations, almost all my working life. And you can’t know something about power without being suspicious of it. That’s one of the reasons why I couldn’t go along with Ann March and R—. It seemed to me obvious in the Thirties, that the concentration of power which had developed under Stalin was too dangerous by half. I don’t think I was being emotional about it. I just distrusted it. As a matter of fact, I’m not emotional about the operations of politics. That is why I oughtn’t to give you any anxiety. I believe that, in the official life, we have to fall back on codes of honour and behaviour. We can’t trust ourselves to do anything else.’

He was gazing straight at me, but did not speak.

‘But I want to be open with you,’ I said. ‘In terms of honour and behaviour, I think you and I would speak the language. In terms of ultimate politics, we almost certainly don’t. I said that I’m not emotional about the operations of politics. But about the hopes behind them, I’m deeply so. I thought it was obvious that the Revolution in Russia was going to run into some major horrors of power. I wasn’t popular with Ann March and R — and some of my other friends for telling them so. But that isn’t all. I always believed that the power was working two ways. They were doing good things with it, as well as bad. When once they got some insight into the horrors, then they might create a wonderful society. I now believe that, more confidently than I ever did. How it will compare with the American society, I don’t know. But so long as they both survive, I should have thought that many of the best human hopes stand an excellent chance.’

Monteith was still expressionless. Despite his job, or perhaps because of it, he did not think about politics except as something he had to give a secret answer to. He was not in the least a speculative man. He coughed, and said: ‘A few more questions on the same subject, sir. Your first wife, just before the war, made a large donation to a certain communist?’

‘Who was it?’

He mentioned a name which meant nothing to me.

‘Are you sure?’ I asked.

‘Quite sure.’

I knew absolutely nothing of him.

‘If you’re right,’ I said, ‘it wasn’t for ideological reasons.’

Just for an instant, he had stripped away the years. I was a youngish man, distraught, with a wife I had to look after: still capable of jealousy, but schooled to watching her in search of anyone who might alleviate the inner cold: still appalled because I did not know where she was or whom she was with, at the mercy of anyone who dropped news of her: still listening for her name.

There was a silence. With a stiff sensitivity he said: ‘I have informed myself about your tragedy. I need not ask you anything more about her.’

He broke out sharply: ‘But you yourself. You attended meetings of—?’ He gave the title of what, not at the time but later, we had come to call a ‘Front’ organization.

‘No.’

‘Please think again.’

‘I tell you no,’ I said.

‘This is very curious.’ His manner throughout had been professional. He had kept hostility out: but now there was an edge. ‘I have evidence from someone who remembers sitting next to you. He remembers exactly how you looked. You pushed your chair back from the table and made a speech.’

‘I tell you, there is not a word of truth in it.’

‘My evidence is from someone reliable.’

‘Who is it?’

Monteith answered, ‘You ought to know that I can’t reveal my sources.’

‘It is utterly and absolutely untrue.’ I was speaking harshly and angrily. ‘I take it you’ve got it from one of your ex-communists? I take it that most of your information comes that way?’

‘You’ve no right to ask those questions.’

I was suffused with outrage, with a disproportionate bitterness. After a moment I said: ‘Look here, you ought to be careful about these channels of yours. This isn’t specially important. So far as I know, this Front you’re speaking of was quite innocuous. I had plenty of acquaintances far more committed than that. I’ve told you so, and I’m prepared to go on telling you so. But, as it happens, I never went anywhere near that particular group. I repeat, I never went to a meeting of theirs, or had any communication with them. That is flat. It has got to be accepted. Your man has invented this whole story. I also repeat, you ought to be careful of his stories about other people. This one doesn’t matter much to me. But there may be others which could do more harm — to people who are more helpless.’

For the first time, I had shaken him. Not, I later thought, by anger: he must have been used to that. More likely, because his technical expertness was being challenged. He had had a good deal of experience. He knew that I, or any competent man, would not have denied a point so specific without being dead sure.

‘I will look into it,’ he said.

‘I suppose you’ll give a report of this interview to Hector Rose?’ I said.

‘That is so.’

‘When you do, I should like you to mention this matter. And say that you are doing so at my request.’

‘I should have done that in any case.’

Just then he was talking, not like an interrogator, but as though we were all officials together, getting to work on ‘a difficult one’. ‘It’s very curious.’ He was puzzled and distracted. When he went on with his questions, the snap had left him, like a man who is absent-minded because of trouble at home.

My record over the atomic bomb. Yes, I had known about it from the start. Yes, I had been close to the scientists all along. Yes, I had known Sawbridge, who gave away some secrets. Yes, he and my brother had been to school together. But Monteith was doing it mechanically: he knew that in the end it was my brother who had broken Sawbridge down.

Monteith was watchful again, as he talked of what I had done and thought about the dropping of the first bomb.

‘I’ve made it public. You’ve only got to read, you know,’ I said. ‘And you’ll find a certain amount more on the files.’

‘That has been done,’ replied Monteith. ‘But still, I should like to ask you.’

Hadn’t I, like many of the scientists, been actively opposed to the use of the bomb? Certainly, I said. Hadn’t I met the scientists, just before Hiroshima, to see how they could stop it? Certainly, I said. Wasn’t that going further than a civil servant should feel entitled to? ‘Civil servants have done more effective things than that,’ I said. ‘Often wish I had.’

Then I explained. While there was a chance of stopping the bomb being dropped, we had used every handle we could pull: this wasn’t improper unless (I couldn’t resist saying) it was improper to oppose in secret the use of any kind of bomb at any time.

When the thing had happened, we had two alternatives. Either to resign and make a row, or else stay inside and do our best. Most of us had stayed inside, as I had done. For what motives? Duty, discipline, even conformity? Perhaps we had been wrong. But, I thought, if I had to make the choice again, I should have done the same.

After that, the interrogation petered out. My second marriage. Hadn’t my father-in-law, before the war, before I knew either of them, belonged to various Fronts? asked Monteith, preoccupied once more. I didn’t know. He might have done. He was an old-fashioned intellectual liberal. Official life — nothing there, though he was curious about when I first knew Roger. It was past one o’clock. Suddenly he slapped both palms on the desk.

‘That is as far as I want to go.’ He leaped up, agile and quick, and gave me a lustrous glance. He said in a tone less formal, less respectful than when he began: ‘I believe what you have told me.’ He shook my hand and went out rapidly through the outer office, leaving me standing there.

It had all been very civil. He was an able, probably a likeable, man doing his job. Yet, back in my office through the January afternoon, I felt black. Not that I was worrying about the result. It was something more organic than that, almost like being told that one’s heart is not perfect, and that one has got to live carefully in order to survive. I did not touch a paper and did no work.

Much of the afternoon I looked out of the window, as though thinking, but not really thinking. I rang up Margaret. She alone knew that I should not shrug it off. She knew that in middle age I was still vain, that I did not find it tolerable to account for my actions except to myself. Over the telephone I told her that this ought to be nothing. A few hours of questions by a decent and responsible man. In the world we were living in, it was nothing. If you’re living in the middle of a religious war, you ought to expect to get shot at, unless you go away and hide. But it was no use sounding robust to Margaret. She knew me.

I should bring Francis back to dinner, I said, after they had finished with him. This she had not expected, and she was troubled. She had already invited young Arthur Plimpton, once more in London: partly out of fun, partly out of matchmaking.

‘I’d put him off,’ she said, ‘but I haven’t the slightest idea where he’s staying. Shall try to get him through the Embassy?’

‘Don’t bother,’ I told her. ‘At best, he may lighten the atmosphere.’

‘And there might be something of an atmosphere,’ she replied.

No, it was no use sounding robust to Margaret — but it was to Francis. As we drove home, under the lights of the Mall, he did not refer to my interrogation, although he knew of it. He believed me to be more worldly, less quixotic, than he was: which was quite true. He assumed that I took what came to me as all in the day’s work.

As for himself, he said: ‘I’m sorry that I let them do it.’

He was very quiet. When we got into the flat, Arthur was waiting in the drawing-room, greeting us politely. He went on: ‘Sir Francis, you look as though you could use a drink.’ He took charge, installed us in the armchairs, poured out the whisky. He was more adept than Francis’ own son, I was thinking. Which didn’t make him more endearing to Francis. But just then, Francis was blaming him, not only for his charm, but for his country. As Francis sat there, silent, courteous, hidalgo-like, he was searching for culprits on whom to blame that afternoon.

With Arthur present, I couldn’t talk directly to Francis: nor, when Margaret came in, could she. She saw him, usually the most temperate of men, taking another drink, very stiff: she hated minuets, she longed to plunge in. As it was, she had to talk about Cambridge, the college, the family. Penelope was still in the United States — how was she? Quite well, when they last heard, said Francis, for once sounding not over-interested in his favourite daughter.

‘I heard from her on Sunday, Sir Francis,’ said Arthur, dead-pan, like a man scoring an unobtrusive point.

‘Did you,’ Francis replied, not as a question.

‘Yes, she put in a transatlantic call.’

Margaret could not resist it. ‘What did she say?’

‘She wanted to know which was the best restaurant in Baltimore.’

Arthur had spoken politely, impassively, and without a glint in his eye. Margaret’s colour rose, but she went on. What was he going to do himself? Was he going back to the United States? Yes, said Arthur, he had settled on his career. He had arranged to enter the electronic industry. He talked about his firm-to-be with dismaying confidence. He knew more about business than Francis and Margaret and I all rolled together.

‘So you’ll be home again soon?’ asked Margaret.

‘It’ll be fine,’ said Arthur. Suddenly, with an owlish look, he said: ‘Of course, I don’t know Penny’s plans.’

‘You don’t,’ said Margaret.

‘I suppose she won’t be back on this side?’

For once Margaret looked baffled. In Arthur’s craggy face, the blue eyes shone dazzlingly sincere: but under the flesh there was a lurking grin.

When he left us — out of good manners, because, listening, he had picked up what was unspoken in the air — I felt saddened. I looked at Francis, and saw, not the friend I had grown up with, but an ageing man, stern, not serene, not at all at peace. I had first met him when he was Arthur’s age. It had been pleasant — or so it seemed that night — to be arrogant and young.

‘Francis,’ said Margaret, ‘you’re being rather stupid about that boy.’

Francis gave an unprofessorial curse.

There was a silence.

‘I think,’ he spoke to her with trust and affection, as though it were a relief, ‘I’ve just about ceased to be useful. I think I’ve come to the limit.’

She said, that couldn’t be true.

‘I think it is,’ said Francis. He turned on me. ‘Lewis oughtn’t to have persuaded me. I ought to have got out of it straight away. I shouldn’t have been exposed to this.’

We began to quarrel. There was rancour in our voices. He blamed me, we both blamed Roger. Politicians never take care of their tools, said Francis, with increasing anger. You’re useful so long as you’re useful. Then you’re expendable. No doubt, said Francis bitterly, if things went wrong, Roger would play safe. In a gentlemanly fashion, he would go back to the fold: and in an equally gentlemanly fashion, his advisers would be disgraced.

‘You can’t be disgraced,’ said Margaret.

Francis began to talk to her in a more realistic tone. They would not keep him out just yet, he said. At least, he didn’t think so. They wouldn’t dare to say that he was a risk. And yet, when all this was over, win or lose, somehow it would be convenient for them not to involve him. The suggestion would go round that he didn’t quite fit in. It would be better to have safer men. As our kind of world went on, the men had to get safer and safer. You couldn’t afford to be different. No one could afford to have you, if you showed a trace of difference. The most valuable single gift was the ability to sing in unison. And so they would shut him out.

We went on quarrelling.

‘You’re too thin-skinned,’ I said, at my sharpest.

Margaret looked from him to me. She knew what in secret I had felt that day. She was wondering when, after Francis had gone, she could make a remark about the thinness of other skins.

34: The Purity of Being Persecuted

The next evening, Margaret and I got out of the taxi on the Embankment and walked up into the Temple gardens. All day news had come prodding in, and I was jaded. The chief Government Whip had called on Roger. Some backbenchers, carrying weight inside the party, had to be reassured. Roger would have to meet them. Two Opposition leaders had been making speeches in the country the night before. No one could interpret the public opinion polls.

Yes, we were somewhere near a crisis, I thought with a kind of puzzlement, as I looked over the river at the lurid city sky. How far did it reach? Maybe in a few months’ time, some of the offices in this part of London would carry different names. Was that all? Maybe other lives stood to lose, lives stretched out under the lit-up sky. Roger and the others thought so: one had to think it, or it was harder to go on.

Those other lives did not respond much. A few did, not many. Perhaps they sent their messages to the corridors very rarely, when the dangers were on top of them: otherwise, perhaps the messages came not at all.

Back towards the Strand, the hall of my old Inn blazed out like a church on a Sunday night. We were on our way to a Bar concert. In the Inn buildings, lighted windows were shining here and there, oblongs of brilliance in a bulk of darkness. We passed the set of chambers where I had worked as a young man. Some of the names were still there, as they had been in my time. Mr H Getliffe: Mr W Allen. On the next staircase, I noticed the name of a contemporary: Sir H Salisbury. That was out of date: he had just been appointed Lord Justice of Appeal. Margaret, feeling that I was distracted, pressed my arm. This was a part of my life she hadn’t known; she was apt to be jealous of it, and, as we walked past the building in the sharp air, she believed that I was homesick. She was wrong. I had felt something more like irritation. The Bar had never really suited me, I had not once thought of going back. And yet, if I could have been content with it, I should have had a smoother time. Like Salisbury. I shouldn’t be in the middle of this present crisis.

The Hall was draughty. Chairs, white programmes gleaming on them as at a Church wedding, had been set in lines and then pushed into disorder, as people leaned over to talk. The event, though it didn’t sound it, was an occasion of privilege. Several Members from both front benches were there: Lord Lufkin and his entourage were there; so was Diana Skidmore, who had come with Monty Cave. As they shouted to one another, white-tied, bedecked, no one would have thought they were in a crisis. Much less that any of them resented, as I did, the moment in which we stood. They were behaving as though this was the kind of trouble politicians got into. They made jokes. They behaved as if these places were going to stay their own: while as for the rest — well, one could be reminded of them by the russet light of the City sky.

They weren’t preoccupied with the coming debate, except to make some digs at Roger. What they were really interested in at this moment — or at least, what Diana and her friends were really interested in — was a job. The job, somewhat bewilderingly, was a Regius Professorship of History. Diana had recovered some of her spirits. There was a rumour that she had determined to make Monty Cave divorce his wife. Having become high-spirited once again, Diana had also, once again, become importunate. Her friends had to do what she told them: and what she told them was to twist the Prime Minister’s arm. The PM had to hear her candidate’s name from all possible angles. This name was Thomas Orbell.

It was not that Diana was a specially good judge of academic excellence. She would have been just as likely to have a candidate for a bishopric. She treated academic persons with reverence, as though they were sacred cows: but, though they might be sacred cows, they did not seem to her quite serious. That didn’t stop her getting excited about the claims of Dr Orbell, and didn’t stop her friends getting excited for him or against. Not that they were wrapped up in the academic life. It was nice to toss the jobs around, it was nice to spot winners. This was one of the pleasures of the charmed circle. Margaret, who had been brought up among scholars, was uneasy. She knew Orbell and did not want to spoil his chances. She was certain that he wasn’t good enough.

‘He’s brilliant,’ said Diana, herself resplendent in white, like the fairy on a Christmas tree.

In fact, Diana’s enthusiasm, the cheerful, cherubim-chanting of a couple of her ministerial friends, Margaret’s qualms, were likely all to be beside the point. True, the Prime Minister would listen; true, he would listen with porcine competence. Orbell’s supporters might get words of encouragement. At exactly the same moment, a lantern-jawed young man in the private office, trained by Osbaldiston, would be collecting opinions with marmoreal calm. My private guess was that Tom Orbell stood about as much chance for this Chair as he did for the Headship of the Society of Jesus.

In the library after the performance, where we had herded for sandwiches and wine, I noticed Diana, her diamonds flashing, talk for a moment to Caro alone. Just before we left, Caro spoke to me and passed a message on.

Diana had been talking to Reggie Collingwood. He had said they would all have to ‘feel their way’. It was conceivable that Roger would have to ‘draw in his horns’ a bit. If so, they could look after him.

It sounded, and was meant to sound, casual and confident. But it was also deliberate. Collingwood wasn’t given to indiscretion. Nor, when it came to confidences, was Diana. This remark was intended to reach Roger: and Caro was making sure that it reached me. As she told me, she took me by the arm, walking towards the door, and gazed at me with bold eyes. This was not a display of affection. She did not like me any better, she was no warmer to Roger’s advisers, as she walked on my arm, her shoulders, because she was a strapping woman, not far below my own. But she was making certain that I wasn’t left out.

The Bar concert had taken place on a Thursday night. On the Saturday morning I was alone in our drawing-room, the children back at school, Margaret off for a day with her father, now both ill and valetudinarian, when the telephone rang. It was David Rubin.

This was not, in itself, a surprise. I had heard the day before that he was over on one of his State Department visits. I expected that he and I would find ourselves at the same meeting on Saturday afternoon. That turned out to be true, and David expressed his courteous gratification. But it was a surprise to hear him insisting that I arrange an interview with Roger. Apparently he had tried Roger’s office the day before and had been rebuffed. It was odd enough for anyone to rebuff him: much odder for him to come back afterwards. ‘This isn’t just an idea of visiting with him. I want to say something to him.’

‘I rather gathered that,’ I said. Over the phone came a reluctant cachinnation.

He was flying out next morning. The interview would have to be fixed for some time that night. I did my best. First of all, Caro would not put me through to Roger. When at last I made her, he greeted me as though I had brought bad news. Did I know that Parliament met next week? Did I by any chance remember that he was preparing for a Debate? He wanted to see no one. I said (our voices were petty with strain) that he could be rude to me, though I didn’t pretend to like it. But it was unwise to be rude to David Rubin.

When I saw Rubin that afternoon, for the first time in a year, he did not look so formidable. He was sitting at a table, between Francis Getliffe and another scientist, in one of the Royal Society’s rooms in Burlington House. The room smelled musty, lined with bound volumes of periodicals, like an unused library. The light was dim. Rubin, lemur-like circles under his eyes, looked fastidious and depressed. When I passed a note along, saying that we were due at Lord North Street after dinner, he gave a nod, as from one who had to endure much before he slept.

He had to endure this meeting. He was by now too much of a Government figure to hope for a great deal. He was more pessimistic than anyone there. It was not an official meeting. Everyone in the room, at least in form, had attended as a private citizen. Nearly all were scientists who had been, or still were, concerned with the nuclear projects. They were trying to find a way of talking directly to their Soviet counterparts. Several men in the room had won world fame — there were the great academic physicists, Mounteney, who was chairman, Rubin himself, an old friend of mine called Constantine. There were also Government scientists, such as Walter Luke, who had demanded to take part.

All three Governments knew what was going on. Several officials, including me, had been invited. I remembered other meetings in these musty-smelling rooms, nearly twenty years before, when scientists told us that the nuclear bomb might work.

David Rubin sat like one who has listened often enough. Then, all of a sudden, he became interested. Scientific good will, legalisms, formulations — they vanished. For the door opened, and to everyone’s astonishment, there came into the room Brodzinski. Soft-footed, for all his bulk, he walked to the table, his barrel chest thrust out. His eyes were stretched wide, as he looked at Arthur Mounteney. In his strong voice, in his off-English, he said, ‘I’m sorry to be late, Mr Chairman.’

Each person round the table knew of his speeches in America and knew that Getliffe and Luke had been damaged. Men like Mounteney detested him and all he stood for. For him to enter, and then make this little apology — it irritated them all, it was a ridiculous anti-climax.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Arthur Mounteney, ‘why you’re here at all.’ His long and cavernous face was set. He couldn’t produce a soft word among his friends, let alone now.

‘I was invited, Mr Chairman. As I suppose my colleagues were, also.’

This I took to be true. Invitations had gone to the scientists on the defence committees as well as to the scientific elder statesmen. Presumably Brodzinski’s name had remained upon the list.

‘That doesn’t mean there was any sense in your coming.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Chairman. Am I to understand that only those of a certain kind of opinion are allowed here?’

Walter Luke broke in, rough-voiced: ‘That’s not the point, Brodzinski, and you know it. You’ve made yourself a blasted nuisance where we can’t get at you. And every bleeding scientist in this game is having the carpet pulled from under him because of you.’

‘I do not consider your attitude is correct, Sir Walter.’

‘Come off it, man, who do you take us for?’

This was unlike the stately protocol of a meeting chaired by Hector Rose.

Francis Getliffe coughed, and with his curious relic of diffidence said to Mounteney: ‘I think perhaps I ought to have a word.’

Mounteney nodded.

‘Dr Brodzinski,’ said Francis, looking down the table, ‘if you hadn’t come here today I was going to ask you to call on me.’

Francis was speaking quietly, without Mounteney’s bleakness or Walter Luke’s roughneck scorn. He had to make an effort, while they could quarrel by the light of nature. Nevertheless, it was Francis whom we all listened to, Brodzinski most of all.

Brodzinski, although nobody had thought, or perhaps wished, to invite him (since the normal courtesies had failed) to sit down, had found himself a chair. He sat in it, squarely, heavy as a mountain and as impervious.

‘It’s time you heard something about your behaviour. It’s got to be made clear to you. I was going to do that. I had better do it now. You must realize there are two things your scientific colleagues hold against you. The first is the way you have behaved to some of us. This is not important in the long run: but it is enough to make us prefer not to have any personal dealings with you. You have made charges about us in public and, as I believe, more charges in private, that we could only meet by legal action. You have taken advantage of the fact that we are not willing to take legal action against a fellow scientist. You have said that we are dishonest. You have said that we have perverted the truth. You have said that we are disloyal to our country.’

‘I have been misrepresented, of course,’ said Brodzinski.

‘Not in the least.’

‘I have always given you credit for good intentions, Sir Francis,’ said Brodzinski. ‘I do not expect the same from you.’

His expression was pure, persecuted, and brave. It was the courage of one who even now, believed in his locked-in self that they would see how right he was. He felt no conflict, no regret nor remorse, just the certainty that he was right. At the same time, he wanted pity because he was being persecuted. He was crying out for pity. The more they saw he was right, the more they would persecute him.

Suddenly a thought came to me. I hadn’t understood why, the previous summer, he had given up attempting to see Roger: as though he had switched from faith to enmity. It must have been the day the offer of his decoration arrived. He had accepted the decoration — but he could have felt, I was sure he could have felt, that it was another oblique piece of persecution, a token that he was not so high as the Getliffes of the world, a sign of dismissal.

‘I had to make some criticisms,’ he said. ‘Because you were dangerous. I gave you the credit for not realizing how dangerous you were, but, of course, I had to make some criticisms. You can see that, Dr Rubin.’

He turned with an open, hopeful face to David Rubin, who was scribbling on a sheet of paper. Rubin raised his head slowly and gazed at Brodzinski with opaque eyes.

‘What you did,’ he said, ‘was not admissible.’

‘I did not expect any more from you, Dr Rubin.’ This answer was so harsh and passionate that it left us mystified. Rubin believed that Brodzinski had remembered that he was a Gentile talking to a Jew.

‘You said we were dangerous,’ Francis Getliffe went on. ‘I’ve finished now with your slanders on us. They only count because they’re involved in the other damage you’ve done. That is the second thing you must hear about. It is the opinion of most of us that you’ve done great damage to decent people everywhere. If we are going to use the word dangerous, you are at present one of the most dangerous men in the world. And you’ve done the damage by distorting science. It is possible to have different views on the nuclear situation. It is not possible, without lying or irresponsibility or something worse, to say the things you have said. You’ve encouraged people to believe that the United States and England can destroy Russia without too much loss. Most of us would regard that suggestion as wicked, even if it were true. But we all know that it is not true, and, for as long as we can foresee, it never will be true.’

‘That is why you are dangerous,’ said Brodzinski. ‘That is why I have to expose myself. You think you are people of good will. You are doing great harm, in everything you do. You are even doing great harm, in little meetings like this. That is why I have come where I am not welcome. You think you can come to terms with the Russians. You never will. The only realistic thing for all of us is to make the weapons as fast as we know how.’

‘You are prepared to think of war?’ said Arthur Mounteney.

‘Of course I am prepared to think of war. So is any realistic man,’ Brodzinski replied. ‘If there has to be a war, then we must win it. We can keep enough people alive. We shall soon pick-up. Human beings are very strong.’

‘And that is what you hope for?’ said Francis, in a dead, cold tone.

‘That is what will happen.’

‘You can tolerate the thought of three hundred million deaths?’

‘I can tolerate anything which will happen.’

Brodzinski went on, his eyes lit up, once more pure: ‘You will not see, there are worse things which might happen.’

‘I have to assume that you are responsible for your actions,’ said Francis. ‘If that is so, I had better tell you straight away I cannot sit in the same room with you.’

Faces, closed to expression, looked down the table at Brodzinski. There was a silence. He sat squarely in his chair and said: ‘I believe I am here by invitation, Mr Chairman.’

‘It would save trouble if you left,’ said Arthur Mounteney.

With exaggerated reasonableness, Brodzinski said: ‘But I can produce my invitation, Mr Chairman.’

‘In that case, I shall adjourn the meeting. And call another to which you are not invited.’

Later, that seemed to Rubin a masterpiece of Anglo-Saxon propriety.

Brodzinski stood up, massive, stiff.

‘Mr Chairman,’ he said, ‘I am sorry that my colleagues have seen fit to treat me in this fashion. But I expected it.’

His dignity was absolute. With the same dignity, he went, soft-footed, strong-muscled, out of the room.

35: A Choice

A few hours later, in David Rubin’s bedroom, he and I were having a snack before we went on to Roger’s house. The room was modest, in a cheap, genteel Kensington hotel: the snack was modest too. Rubin had the entrée to Heads of State, but, despite the Tailor and Cutter elegance of his clothes, he lived more simply than an Embassy clerk. He was a poor man, he had never earned money, apart from his academic salary and his prizes.

He sat without complaint in the cold bedroom, nibbling a stale sandwich, sipping at a weak and un-iced whisky. He talked about his son at Harvard, and his mother who would scarcely have known what Harvard was, who had not spoken English in the home, and who had been ambitious for David — just as rapaciously as my mother for me. He spoke a little sadly. Everything had come off for him, spectacular achievement, happy marriage, the love of children. He was one of the men most venerated in the world. Yet there were times when he seemed to look back to his childhood, shrug his shoulders and think that he had expected more.

We had each been talking without reserve, like passengers at sea. He sat there, in elegant suit, silk shirt, hand-made shoes, shook his head, and looked at me with sad, kind eyes. It occurred to me that he had not given me a clue, not so much as a hint, why he was so insistent on talking to Roger that night.

When we arrived at Lord North Street, it was about half-past nine and Roger and Caro were still sitting in the dining-room. It was the place where Roger, nearly three years before, had interrogated Rubin. As on that evening, Rubin was ceremonious — bowing over Caro’s hand: ‘Lady Caroline’ — greeting Roger. As on that evening, Roger pushed the decanter round.

At Caro’s right hand, Rubin was willing to drink his glass of port, but not to open a conversation. Caro looked down the table at Roger, who was sitting silent and impatient with strain. She had her own kind of stoicism. She was prepared to chat with Rubin, in a loud brassy fashion, about his flight next day, about whether he hated flying as much as she did. She was terrified every time, she said, with the exaggerated protestations of cowardice that her brother Sammikins went in for.

All four of us were waiting for the point to come. At last Roger could wait no longer.

‘Well?’ he said roughly, straight at Rubin.

‘Minister?’ said David Rubin, as though surprised.

‘I thought you had something to tell me.’

‘Do you have time?’ said Rubin mysteriously.

Roger nodded. To everyone’s astonishment, Rubin began a long, dense and complex account of the theory of games as applied to nuclear strategy. Talk of over-simplification — this was over-complication gone mad. It was not long before Roger stopped him.

‘Whatever you’ve come for,’ he said, ‘it isn’t this.’

Rubin looked at him with an expression harsh, affectionately distressed. Suddenly his whole manner changed from the incomprehensibly devious to a brutal-sounding snap.

‘I came to tell you to get out while there’s time. If not, you’ll cut your own throat.’

‘Get out of what?’

‘Out of your present planning, or design, or whatever you like to call it. You don’t stand a chance.’

‘You think so, do you?’ said Roger.

‘Why else should I come?’

Then Rubin’s tone became once more quiet and reasonable: ‘Wait a minute. I couldn’t make up my mind whether to let it go. It’s because we respect you—’

‘We want to hear,’ said Caro. This wasn’t social, it wasn’t to make him comfortable. It was said with absolute attention.

Roger and Rubin sat blank-faced. In the room, each sound was clear. To an extent they liked each other: but that didn’t matter. Between them there was something quite different from liking or disliking, or even trust. It was the sense of actuality, the sense of events.

‘First of all,’ said Rubin, ‘let me make my own position clear. Everything you’ve planned to do is sensible. This is right. Anyone who knows the facts of life, knows that this is right. For the foreseeable future, there can only be two nuclear powers. One is my country, and the other is the Soviet Union. Your country cannot play in that league. As far as the economic and military side go, the sooner you get out the better. This is correct.’

‘You told us so,’ said Roger, ‘in this very room, years ago.’

‘What is more,’ said Rubin, ‘we will want you out. The way our thinking is shaping up, we will decide that these weapons ought to be concentrated in as few hands as possible. Meaning, us and the Soviets. This is right also. Before long, I’m ready to predict that you’ll be under some pressure from us—’

‘You’re saying it in different terms, and for slightly different reasons.’ Roger spoke without either intransigeance or suggestibility. ‘But you’re saying what I’ve been saying, and what I’ve been trying to do.’

‘And what you can’t do.’ Rubin’s voice hardened as he added: ‘And what you must get out of, here and now.’

There was a pause. Then, as though he were being simple, Roger asked: ‘Why?’

Rubin shrugged his shoulders, spread his hands.

‘I’m a scientist. You’re a politician. And you ask me that?’

‘I should still like to hear the answer.’

‘Do I have to tell you that a course of action can be right — and not worth a second’s thought? It’s not of importance that it’s right. What is of importance, is how it’s done, who it’s done by, and most of all, when it’s done.’

‘As you say,’ said Roger, ‘one’s not unfamiliar with those principles. Now I wish you’d tell me what you know.’

Rubin stared down at the table.

‘I mustn’t say that I know,’ he said at last. ‘But I suspect. A foreigner sometimes picks up indications that you wouldn’t give such weight to. I believe you’re swimming against the tide. Your colleagues will not admit it. But if you swim too far, they wouldn’t be able to stay loyal to you, would they?’

Rubin went on: ‘They’re not fools, if you don’t mind me saying so. They’ve been watching you having to struggle for every inch you’ve made. Everything’s turned out ten per cent, twenty per cent, sometimes fifty per cent, more difficult than you figured on. You know that better than any of us. Lewis knows.’ For an instant, under the hooded lids, I caught a glance, glinting with Weltschmerz and fellow-feeling. ‘Everything’s turned out too difficult. It’s my view of almost any human concern, that if it turns out impossibly difficult, if you’ve tried it every way, and it still won’t go, then the time has come to call it a day. This is surely true of intellectual problems. The more I’ve seen of your type of problem the more I believe it’s true of them. Your colleagues are good at keeping a stiff upper lip. But they’re used to dealing with the real world. I suspect that they’ll be compelled to think the same.’

‘Do you know?’ Roger spoke quietly, and with all his force.

Rubin raised his head, then let his eyes fall again. ‘I’ve made my own position clear to everyone I know in Washington. They’ll come round to thinking that you and I were right. But they haven’t got there yet. They don’t know what to think about your weapons. But I have to tell you something. They are worried about your motives for wanting to give them up.’

‘Do you think we ought to care about that?’ cried Caro, with a flash of arrogance.

‘I think you’ll be unwise not to, Lady Caroline,’ said Rubin. ‘I don’t claim they’ve analysed the situation. But as of this moment, they’re not all that interested in what you do — as long as you don’t seem to be sliding out of the Cold War. This is the one thing that they’re scared of. This is the climate. This is the climate in which some of them are anxious about you now.’

‘How much have they listened to Brodzinski?’ I said angrily.

‘He hasn’t helped,’ said Rubin. ‘He’s done you some harm. But it’s deeper than that.’

‘Yes,’ said Roger, ‘it’s deeper than that.’

‘I’m glad you know.’ Rubin turned to Caro. ‘I told you, Lady Caroline, you’ll be unwise not to care about this. Some of our people are in a state of tension about it. At various levels. Including high levels. Some of that tension is liable to be washed across to this side. Maybe some of it has been washed across already.’

‘That wouldn’t be so astounding,’ said Roger.

‘Of course, it’s frustrating to disengage oneself,’ said Rubin. ‘But the facts are very strong. So far as I’ve observed anything on this side, you’ve only to play it cool and put it aside for five, ten years. Then you’ll be right at the top here, unless my information is all wrong. And you’ll be swimming with the tide, not against it. As for Washington, they’ll be begging you to do exactly what you can’t do now.’ Rubin gave a sharp, ironic smile. ‘And you’re the one person in this country who will be able to do it. You’re a valuable man. Not only to Britain, but to all of us. This is why I’m giving you this trouble. We can’t afford to waste you. And I am as certain as I am of anything that if you didn’t take one step backwards now, you would be wasted.’

For an instant, none of us spoke. Roger looked down the table at his wife and said: ‘You hear what he says?’

‘You have heard too, haven’t you?’ said Caro.

All the social clangour had left her voice. It held nothing but devotion. She was speaking as they did when they were alone. They had said very little, but enough. Roger knew what she thought, and what answer she wanted him to give. Their marriage might be breaking on his side, but it still had its shorthand. The message was simple. She was, though Rubin did not know it, his supporter.

Right through Roger’s struggle, she had been utterly loyal. One expected nothing else: and yet, one knew what she was concealing. In her heart she couldn’t give up her chauvinistic pride. Just as she had flared out against David Rubin, when she reminded them that the English power had sunk, so she couldn’t accept that the great days were over. Her instincts were as simple as my mother’s would have been.

But that wasn’t the main force which drove her to Rubin’s side, made her cheeks glow and eyes shine as she answered Roger. For Rubin had just offered Roger a prospect of the future: and that was her prospect too. It would have seemed to her absurd, finicky, hypocritical and above all genteel, not to want the top place for Roger. If he didn’t want that, she would have said, then he ought not to be in politics at all. If she didn’t want that for him, she ought not to be his wife.

‘I agree with almost everything you’ve said.’ Roger spoke directly to Rubin. ‘You’ve made it very clear. I’m extremely grateful to you.’ His tone was subdued, reasonable, a little submissive. At that moment he sounded like one willing to be converted, or perhaps already converted, arguing for the sake of self-respect. ‘You know,’ he said, with an abstracted smile, ‘I’ve thought out some of these things for myself. You’ll give me credit for that?’

Rubin smiled.

‘Of course,’ Roger went on, ‘if you want to get anywhere in politics, you’ve got to be good at pushing on open doors. If you can’t resist pushing on closed ones, then you ought to have chosen another job. That’s what you’re telling me, isn’t it? Of course you’re right. I shouldn’t be surprised if you hadn’t wasted some energy on closed doors in your time. Much more than I ever have. But then, of course, you’re not a politician.’

It might have been a jibe, I couldn’t tell. If so, it was a gentle one. Roger was speaking without strain or edge. He said: ‘My one trouble is, I can’t help thinking the present situation is slightly different. I think, if we don’t bring this one off now, we never shall. Or we shan’t until it’s too late. Isn’t that the only difference between us? Perhaps you can tell me that it isn’t so.’

‘The honest answer is,’ said Rubin slowly, ‘that I don’t know.’

‘You believe everything will drift along, with no one able to stop anywhere?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Most of us understand the situation. Can none of us affect it?’

‘Does any one person matter very much? Can any one person do very much?’

‘You’re a wise man,’ said Roger.

There was a long pause. Roger spoke with complete relaxation, so that it was surprising to hear how strong his voice sounded. He said: ‘You’re saying, we’re all caught. All the world. The position has crystallized on both sides. There’s nothing for any of us to do. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? All we can do is stick to our position, and be humble enough to accept that there’s practically nothing we can do.’

‘In detail there may be a little,’ said Rubin.

‘That’s not much, is it?’ Roger gave a friendly smile. ‘You’re a very wise man,’ He paused again. ‘And yet, you know, it’s pretty hard to take. In that case, one might as well not be here at all. Anyone could just wait until it’s easy. I don’t think I should have lived this life if that were all.’

For a moment his tone had been passionate. Then it became curiously formal and courteous as he added: ‘I’m most grateful for your advice. I very much wish I could accept it. It would make things easier for me.’

He looked up the table and said to Caro, as though they were alone: ‘I wish I could do what you want.’

It seemed to me that had Caro known she was fighting for her marriage, she would not so openly have implied her opposition to Roger that night. He was guilt-ridden enough to welcome the smallest loophole of escape, just to feel to himself that it could not have gone on, anyway. Yet was that really so? He had known her mind, he had always known it. To her, loyalty to Roger would have seemed less if she had gone in for pretences. She had said nothing new that night. But I believed that her repetition, before Rubin, of what had already been said in private, might have given Roger some vestigial sense of relief, of which he was nevertheless ashamed.

He said, ‘I wish I could.’

I wondered when Rubin had realized that Roger was going through with it? At what point, at what word? In intellect Rubin was by far the subtler; in emotion, he was playing with a master.

There was another oddity. In private, Rubin was as high-principled, as morally-fastidious, as Francis Getliffe. And yet — it was a disconcerting truth — there were times, and most important times, when the high-principled were not to be trusted — and perhaps Roger was. For to Roger there were occasions, not common, but not so rare as we all suspected, when morality grew out of action. In private, Rubin lived a better life than most men; and yet he would have been incapable of contemplating walking into obloquy, risking his reputation, gambling his future, as in clear sight Roger was doing now.

I wondered when I myself had realized that Roger was going through with it. In a sense, I had believed it soon after we became intimate, and I had backed my judgement. Yet simultaneously, I had not trusted my judgement very far. In the midst of his obfuscation, I had been no surer than anyone else that he would not desert us. And so, in that sense, I had not realized, or at least had not been certain, that he was going through with it until — until that night.

When did Roger realize it? He would not have known, or been interested to know. Morality sprang out of action, so did choices, certainly a choice as complex as this. Even now, he might not know in what terms he would have to make it nor from what motives it would come.

How much part, it occurred to me again, had his relation with Ellen played?

‘I can’t accept your advice, David,’ said Roger, ‘but I do accept your estimate of my chances. You don’t think I’m going to survive, do you? Nor do I. I’d like you to understand that I agree.’

He added, with a hard and radiant smile: ‘But it isn’t absolutely cut and dried even now. They haven’t quite finished with me yet.’

Until that moment he had been speaking with total realism. Suddenly his mood had switched. He was suffused with hope, the hope of crises, that hope which just before a struggle, warms one with the assurance that it is already won. With the anxious pouches darker under his eyes, Rubin gazed at him in astonishment, and something like dismay.

He felt, we could all feel, that Roger was happy. He was not only happy and hopeful, he was also serene.