Corridors of Power

36: Something out of Character

The light on Big Ben was shining like a golden bead in the January evening; the House had reassembled. It was a season of parties. Three times that week my wife and I went out before dinner, to Diana’s house on South Street, to a private Member’s flat, to a Government reception. The faces revolved about one like a stage army. Confident faces, responding to other confident faces, as though this parade was preserved forever, like a moment in time. Ministers and their wives linked themselves with other Ministers and their wives, drawn by the magnetism of office: groups of four, groups of six, sturdy, confident, confidential backs presented themselves not impolitely, but because it was a treat to be together, to the room. Roger and Caro were there, looking as impregnable as the rest.

There was an hallucination about high places which acted like alcohol, not only on Roger under threat, but on whole circles. They couldn’t believe they had lost the power till it had gone. Even when it had gone, they didn’t always believe it.

That week and the next, mornings in the office were like war time. Roger was sitting in his room, never looking bored, sending out for papers, asking for memoranda, intimate with no one, so far as I knew, certainly not with me. Ripples of admiration and faith were flowing down the corridors. They reached middle-grade civil servants who, as a rule, wanted only to get home and listen to long-playing records. As for the scientists, they were triumphing already. Walter Luke, who had believed in Roger from the beginning, stopped me in a gloomy, lavatory-like passage in the Treasury where his uninhibited voice reverberated round: ‘By God, the old bleeder’s going to get away with it! It just shows, if you go on talking sense for long enough, you wear ’em down in time.’

When I mentioned Walter’s opinion to Hector Rose, he said, with a frigid but not unfriendly smile: ‘Sancta simplicitas.’

Even Rose was not immune from the excitement. Yet he found it necessary to tell me that he had been in touch with Monteith. The piece of false information, which I had protested about, had been checked. Rose had satisfied himself that it was an honest mistake. He told me this, as though the first imperative for both of us was that the official procedures should be proved correct. Then he felt free to pass on to Roger’s chances.

During those days I talked once or twice to Douglas, but only to try to comfort him about his wife. The prognosis had been confirmed: she would become paralysed, she would die within five years. At his desk he sat stoically writing upon official paper. When I went in, he talked of nothing but her.

February had come, it was warm for the time of year, Whitehall was basking in the smoky sunlight.

By the end of the month, Roger was due to make his speech on the White Paper. We were all lulling ourselves with work. All of a sudden the lull broke. It broke in a fashion that no one had expected. It was a surprise to the optimistic: but it was even more of a surprise to the experienced, it didn’t look much, in the office. Just a note on a piece of paper. Harmless looking, the words.

The Opposition had put down a motion to reduce the Navy vote by ten pounds.

It would have sounded archaic, or plain silly, to those who didn’t know Parliament. Even to some who did, it sounded merely technical. It was technical, but most of us knew it meant much more. Who was behind it? Was it a piece of political chess? We did not believe it. Roger did not pretend to believe it.

Our maximum hope had been that, when the House ‘took notice’ of the White Paper, the Opposition would not make much of the debate, or force a division. This hadn’t seemed unrealistic. Some of them believed that Roger was as good — as near their line — as anyone they could expect. If he lost, they would get something worse. They had tried to damp down their own ‘wild men’. But now the switch was sudden and absolute. They were going for him, attacking him before his White Paper speech. They were ready to give up two of their supply days for the job. They must have known something about Roger’s side. They must have known more than that.

Roger had scarcely seen me, since the night at his house with Rubin. Now he sent for me.

He gave a smile as I entered his room, but it wasn’t a comradely one. He had kept his command intact, and his self-control: but, so it seemed, at the price of denying that we knew each other well. We were talking like business partners, with years of risk behind us, with a special risk present now: no closer than that: his face was hard, impatient, over-clear.

What did I know about it? No more than he did, probably less, I said.

‘I doubt if you can know less,’ he said. He broke out: ‘What does it mean?’

‘How in God’s name should I know?’

‘You must have an idea.’

I stared at him without speaking. Yes, I had an idea. I suspected we were fearing the same thing.

‘We’re grown men,’ he said. ‘Tell me.’

I did so. I said it looked to me like a classical case of fraternization behind the lines. That is, some of his enemies, on his own back benches, had been making a bargain with their Opposition counterparts. The Opposition backbenchers had pressed their leaders to bring the vote. They would get support — how much support? — from the Government side. It was more decent that way. If Roger made a compromising speech, his colleagues and party would stay with him. But if he were too unorthodox — well if a Minister were too unorthodox to be convenient, there were other methods of dislodging him: this was one which gave least pain to his own party.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think you’re quite likely right. That may be it.’

He had spoken neutrally. He went on, in an impatient, active tone: ‘Well, there’s nothing for it. We’ve got to know.’

He meant, we had to know, not only whether we were right, but if so, who the enemy were. One or two dissidents in his own party he could write off: but thirty or forty — and the more so if they were respected members — would mean the end.

Unless he behaved as Collingwood and his colleagues would have done, and denied that he meant to do anything at all. For an instant the temptation flickered again. Then he shut it away. He was set.

He was estimating the odds, and also our sources of information. He would be talking to the Whips himself that day and to friends in the party. The trouble was, he said, still talking cold sense, this didn’t sound like a respectable revolt. He hadn’t received a letter of regret, and no one had spoken to him face to face. We should have to go in for subterranean talking ourselves. Some of my Opposition friends might know something. So might the Press.

‘You’d better find out,’ said Roger, as briskly as though he were himself only remotely concerned, but was advising me for my own good.

From two sources I learned much the same story. An Opposition front-bencher whom I had known at Cambridge told it to me: a journalist took me along to El Vino’s to meet a couple of lobby correspondents. Next day, I had some news — not hard news, but more solid than a rumour — for Roger.

Yes, the correspondents had confirmed, our guess had something in it. There had been chaffering (one journalist claimed to know the place of the meeting) between a group of Opposition members and a few conservatives. The Opposition members were mostly on the extreme right wing of the Labour Party, though there were one or two pacifists and disarmers. I kept asking who the conservatives were, and how many. There, just at the point of fact — the rumour got wrapped in wool. Very few, one of my informants thought — maybe only two or three. No one who counted. One was, they were sure, the young man who had asked the Parliamentary Question about Brodzinski’s speech. ‘Oddballs’, my acquaintance kept repeating in the noisy pub, as the drinks went round, as though he found the phrase satisfactory.

It wasn’t bad news, so far as it existed. Considering our expectations, we might have been consoled. But Roger did not take it so. We were grown men, he had said. But it was one thing to face the thought of a betrayal, even a little one: another to hear that the thoughts were true. He was angry with me for bringing the news. He was bitter with himself. ‘I’ve never spent enough time drinking with fools,’ he cried. ‘I’ve never made them feel they’re important. It’s the one thing they can’t forgive.’

That evening, he did something out of character. Accompanied by Tom Wyndham, he spent hours in the smoking room at the House, trying to be matey. I heard the story from Wyndham next day, who said in a puzzled fashion: ‘It’s the first time I’ve known the old boy lose his grip.’ The great figure, clumsy as a bear, standing in the middle of the room, catching acquaintances’ eyes, downing tankards of beer, performing the only one of the personal arts at which he was downright bad. In a male crowd, he was at a loss. There he stood inept, grateful for the company of a colleague who was no use to him, until Tom Wyndham led him away.

He had lost his head. Within twenty-four hours he had regained it. He was outfacing me, daring me to suggest that he had been upset. This time, smoothly in charge, he was doing what ought to be done. One of his supporters had summoned a meeting of the Private Members’ defence committee. No one at that meeting would have guessed that he had, even for a single evening, not been able to trust his nerve. No one would have guessed that he could stand inept, lost, among a crowd of acquaintances.

Reports came flicking through the lobbies that Roger was ‘holding them’, that he was ‘in form’, ‘back again’. I saw one of my journalist informants talking, as though casually, with a smart, beaming-faced member fresh from the meeting.

Once, to most of us, it had merely been a matter of gossipy interest, to identify the leaks, the sources of news. Now we weren’t so detached. This, as it happened, was good news.

I took the journalist back to El Vino’s. He was so eupeptic, so willing to cheer me up, that I was ready to stand him many drinks. Yes, Roger had carried them with him. ‘That chap won’t be finished till he’s dead,’ said my acquaintance, with professional admiration. After another drink, he was speculating about Roger’s enemies. Four or five, he said: anyway, you could count them on one hand. Men of straw. The phrase ‘oddballs’ had a tendency to recur, giving him a sense of definition, illumination, perfection, denied to me.

37: The Use of Money

On the Sunday afternoon, my taxi drove through the empty, comfortable Cambridge streets, across the bridge by Queen’s, along the Backs towards my brother’s house. There he and Francis Getliffe were waiting for me. I hadn’t come just to make conversation, but for a while we sat round the fire in the drawing-room: the bronze doors were not closed, and through the far window the great elm stood up against the cyclorama of sunset sky.

‘I must say,’ I said, ‘it all looks remarkably placid.’

Martin’s controlled features broke into a grin.

‘I must say,’ he jeered at me.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Do you realize that’s exactly what used to infuriate you when big bosses came down from London and met you in the college, and told you what a peaceful place it was?’

His eyes were bright with fraternal malice. He told me one or two of the latest stories about the new Master’s reign. Some of the college officers were finding it appropriate to write him letters rather than expose themselves to conversation. Martin gave a bleak smile. ‘You live in a sheltered world, you know,’ he said.

I wished that he had been with us in the Whitehall struggles. He was a harder man than Francis, tougher and more apt for politics than most of us. Curiously, he was one of the few scientists who had got out of atomic energy and made a sacrifice for conscience’ sake. He had chosen a dimmish career as a college functionary: it seemed likely that that was where he would stay. And yet, in his middle forties, his face set in the shape it would remain until he was old, eyes watchful, he gave out an air not only of detachment but content.

His wife, Irene, brought in the tea-tray. Once she had been a wild young woman, and had made him live with jealousy. But now time had played on her one of its picnic practical jokes. She had become mountainous, the flesh had blown up as though she were a Michelin advertisement. She must have weighed fifty or sixty pounds more than when I first met her, before the war. Her yelp of a laugh was still youthful and flirtatious. Her spirits had stayed high, he had long ago won the battle of wills in their marriage, she had come totally to love him, and also was content.

‘Plotting?’ she said to me. She behaved to me, she had done for years, much as she did to Martin, as though knowing one brother she knew the other: as though neither of us was as sedate as he seemed.

‘Not yet,’ I said.

As we drank our tea I asked Francis, just to delay my mission, whether he had heard from Penelope.

‘As a matter of fact,’ he replied, ‘I had a letter a couple of days ago.’

‘What’s she doing?’

He looked puzzled: ‘That’s what I should like to know.’

‘What does she say?’ Irene burst in.

‘I’m not quite sure,’ said Francis.

He looked round at the three of us, hesitated, and then went on: ‘Look here, what do you make of this?’ He pulled an envelope out of his pocket, put on his long-sighted glasses, and began to read. He read, I couldn’t help thinking, as though the letter were written in a language like Etruscan, in which most of the words were still unknown.

‘Dearest Daddy,

‘Please do not flap. I am perfectly alright, and perfectly happy, working like a beaver, and all is fine with Art and me, and we haven’t any special plans, but he may come back with me in the summer — he isn’t sure. There’s no need for you to worry about us, were just having a lot of fun, and nobody’s bothering about marriage or anything like that, so do stop questioning. I think that you and Mummy must be sex-maniacs.

‘I have met a nice boy called Brewster (first name), he dances as badly as I do so that suits us both. His father owns three night clubs in Reno but I don’t tell Art that!!! Anyway it is not at all serious and is only a bit of fun. I may go to Art’s people for the weekend if I can raise the dollars. I don’t always want him to pay for me.

‘No more now. Brew is fuming (much I care) because he’s double-parked and says he’ll get a ticket if I don’t hurry. Must go.

‘Lots and lots of love,

‘Penny.’

‘Well,’ said Francis, taking off his glasses. He broke out irritably, as though it were Penny’s major crime: ‘I wish she could spell “all right”.’

The rest of us did not find it prudent to meet one another’s eyes.

‘What do you do?’ said Francis. ‘What sanctions has one got?’

‘You could cut off supplies,’ said Martin, who was a practical man.

‘Yes,’ said Francis indecisively. After a long pause he went on: ‘I don’t think I should like to do that.’

‘You’re worrying too much,’ cried Irene, with a high, delighted laugh.

‘Am I?’

‘Of course you are.’

‘Why?’ He was turning to her for reassurance.

‘When I was her age, I could have written a letter just like that.’

‘Could you?’ Francis gazed at her. She was good-natured, she wanted him to be happy. But he did not find the reassurance quite so overwhelming as she had expected; her youth wasn’t perhaps the first model he would have chosen for his daughter.

When she left us, I got down at last to business. It was simple.

For Quaife to survive was going to be a close-run thing. Any bit of help was worth the effort. Could they whip up some scientific support for him — not from the usual quarters, not from the Pugwash group who had dismissed Brodzinski, but from uncommitted men? A speech or two in the House of Lords: a letter to The Times with some ‘respectable’ signatures? Any demonstration might swing a vote or two.

I was still making my case at the moment that Irene returned, apologizing, smelling a secret. There was someone on the telephone for me, a long-distance call. With a curse I went off into the lobby under the stairs: a voice came down the line that I didn’t recognize, giving a name that I didn’t know. We had met at Finch’s, the voice was saying. That meant nothing. The pub on the Fulham Road, came the explanation, brisk, impatient. They had traced me to my home, and so to Cambridge. They thought I should know what to do. Old Ronald Porson had been arrested the night before. What for? Importuning in a lavatory.

I felt — first — sheer blind irritation at being distracted. Then a touch of pity, the black pity of the past. Then, most of all, the tiredness of the ties one couldn’t escape, the accretion of the duties, the years, the acquaintanceships. I muttered something, but the brisk active male voice pressed on. They didn’t know the ropes as well as I did.

I collected myself. I gave the name of a solicitor. If they hadn’t got one already, they must make Porson listen to this man and do what he was told. Yes: this young friend of Porson’s sounded efficient, they were all trying to look after him. The ‘old man’ hadn’t a penny, the voice said. Was I prepared to contribute? Of course, I said, anxious to be away: they must tell the solicitor that I would meet the bill. I felt tired, relieved, as I put the receiver down, trying to put the message out of mind.

As I went back to the hearth, Martin looked at me.

‘Anything wrong?’ he said.

‘Someone in trouble,’ I replied. No, not anyone close. No one he knew.

I said impatiently, ‘Let’s get on.’ I had made a proposal, we had been interrupted, there was not much time.

For a long time, as we sat round the fire, Martin did most of the talking. I knew, without our having spoken together, what he thought. He did not believe that we stood more than an outside chance. He did not believe that any government could bring off more than a poor compromise. He believed that any government would have to repudiate a man who tried to do more. But he did not tell me so. He had been close enough to decisions to know the times when it was better not to be told. Instead, he was ready to help: and yet, as he said, he wasn’t eminent enough as a scientist to carry weight. Somehow, he remarked, the high scientific community had lost either its nerve or its will. There were plenty of people like himself, he went on, ready to be active. But the major scientists had retired into their profession — ‘There’s no one of your standing,’ he said to Francis, ‘who’s ready to take the risks you took twenty years ago.’ It wasn’t that a new generation of scientists hadn’t as much conscience or more: or as much good will: or even as much courage. Somehow the climate had changed, they were not impelled. Had the world got too big for them? Had events become too big for men?

Neither Martin nor I was willing to admit it. After sitting silent, Francis said, at any rate one had to go on acting as though it were not true.

Yes, he said, shrugging himself free, suddenly speaking as though he were a younger man, in command again, he thought my idea was worth trying. Yes, he agreed, it was no use Martin approaching the most senior scientists. He, Francis, would have to take on another job: he would do it himself. We were not to hope for much. He had used his influence too many times, and there was not much of it left.

As we went on talking, I was only half-thinking of the scientists. I could not get rid, completely or for long, of the thought of Porson. There was something I had heard in the voice over the telephone: something that the voice, confident as it sounded, hadn’t uttered. They would have liked to ask me to come back, so that I could help him myself.

Years before, that was what I should have done. By now this kind of compulsion had grown dim. I was the worse for it. For most of us, the quixotic impulses might stay alive, but in time the actions didn’t follow. I had used money to buy off my fellow-feeling, to save trouble, to save myself the expense of spirit that I was no longer impelled to spend.

38: ‘A Small Room and a Gas-ring’

Lord Lufkin summoned Margaret and me to a dinner-party at twenty-four hours’ notice, just as he summoned many guests. He had done the same for thirty years, long before his great success had come: he had done it during the years when he was hated: and still his guests had obeyed.

That February night — it was in the week after my visit to Cambridge — we trooped dutifully into Lufkin’s drawing room in St James’s Court. No one could have called it a cheerful room. Lufkin had had it panelled in dark pine, and there was not a picture on the walls except a portrait of himself. No one went to Lufkin’s expecting a cheerful party. His gifts as a host were negative. Yet in that room there were standing a couple of Ministers, a Treasury boss, the President of the Royal Society, a fellow tycoon.

Lufkin stood in the middle, not making any small talk, nor any other size of talk; not shy so much as not feeling it worthwhile. He took it for granted that he was holding court. The interesting thing was, so did everyone round him. In the past, I had sometimes wondered why. The short answer was, the magnetic pull of power. Not simply, though that added, because he had become one of the top industrialists in England. Much more, because he had complete aptitude for power, had assumed it all his life, and now could back it with everything he had won.

He announced to his guests at large, that he had taken over the suite adjoining this one. He ordered a door to be thrown open to show a perspective of tenebrous rooms.

‘I decided we needed it,’ he said.

Lufkin’s tastes were austere. He spent little on himself: his income must have been enormous, but he was pernicketily honest, he didn’t use any half-legitimate devices for sliding away from taxes, and he had not made an impressive fortune. On the other hand, as though in revenge, he insisted on his firm giving him all the luxuries he had no liking for. This suite was already too big for him, but he had made them double it. He made them pay for his court-like dinner parties. He made them provide not one car, but half a dozen.

Even so, Lufkin had a supreme talent for getting it both ways. ‘I don’t regard this flat as my own, of course,’ he was saying, with his usual moral certainty.

People near him, hypnotized into agreeing, were sagely nodding their heads.

‘I regard it as the company’s flat, not mine. I’ve told my staff that time and time again. This flat is for the use of the whole company.’

If I had been alone with Lufkin, whom I had known much longer than had his other guests, I couldn’t have resisted analysing that arcane remark. What would have happened, if some member of his staff had taken him at his word, and booked the flat for the weekend?

‘As for myself,’ he said, ‘my needs are very simple. All I want is a small room and a gas-ring.’

The maddening thing was, it was quite true.

Though Lufkin might have preferred a round of toast, we moved into a dinner which was far from simple. The dining room, through another inexplicable decree, was excessively bright, the only bright room in the flat. The chandeliers flashed heavily down above our heads. The table was over-flowered. The hierarchy of glasses glittered and shone.

Lufkin, himself content with a whisky and soda for the meal, looked on with approbation as the glasses filled with sherry, hock, claret, champagne. He sat in the middle of his table, his skull-face still young, hair neat and dark in his sixties, with the air of a spectator at what he regarded as a well-conducted dinner. He did not trouble to speak much, though occasionally he talked in a manner off-hand but surreptitious, to Margaret. He enjoyed the presence of women. Though he spent most of his time in male company, with his usual cross-grainedness he never liked it much. It was half-way through the meal when he addressed the table. His fellow-tycoon had begun talking of Roger Quaife and the White Paper. The Ministers were listening, attentive, deadpan, and so was I. Suddenly Lufkin, who had been sitting back, as though utterly detached, his knife and fork aligned, three-quarters of his pheasant left uneaten, intervened.

In his hard, clear voice he said: ‘What’s that you were saying?’

‘I said the City’s getting bearish about some of the long-term consequences.’

‘What do they know?’ said Lufkin, with inspissated contempt.

‘There’s a feeling that Quaife’s going to run the aircraft industry into the ground.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Lufkin, at his bleakest. He had caught my eye. Even Lufkin was not usually as rude as this without a purpose. I had suspected that this dinner wasn’t such an accidental gathering as it seemed.

‘There’s nothing in that.’ He spoke as one who does not propose to say any more. Then he condescended to explain himself.

‘Whatever happens, Quaife or no Quaife, or whether they throw you out at the next election—’ he gave a sardonic smile at the Ministers — ‘and the other chaps come in, there’s only room in this country for a couple of aircraft firms, at most. More likely than not, two is one too many.’

‘I suppose you mean,’ said the other industrialist with a show of spirit, ‘that you ought to be the only firm left in?’

Lufkin was the last man in existence to be worried about being parti-pris: or to have qualms because he was safe with a major contract: or to question whether his own interests and the national interests must necessarily coincide.

‘An efficient firm,’ he said, ‘ought to be ready to take its chance. Mine is.’

That sounded like the cue. Again Lufkin, looking at no one in particular, caught my eye.

He said: ‘I might as well tell you. I’m a hundred per cent pro Quaife. I hope you’ll see—’ he was speaking to the Ministers — ‘that these people’ (by which Lufkin meant anyone he disapproved of) ‘don’t make the job impossible for him. No one’s ever done it properly, of course. With your set-up there isn’t a proper job to do. But Quaife’s the only chap who hasn’t been a hopeless failure. You might as well remember that.’

Having given what, for him, was lavish praise, Lufkin had finished. Dinner proceeded.

The women left us, Margaret casting at me, over her shoulder, a look of one who is doomed. I had known Lufkin, in that room, keep the men talking over the port for two hours while the women waited. ‘You wouldn’t suggest that I was conversationally inept, would you?’ Margaret had said to me after one of these occasions. ‘But several times tonight I dried. We talked about the children, and then about the servant problem, and then about the cleaning of jewellery. I found it hard to be chatty about that. You’d better buy me a tiara, so I can join in next time.’ That night, however, Lufkin passed the decanter round twice and then remarked, as though it were self-evident, ‘I don’t believe in segregating the sexes. Anachronistic.’

As the Ministers, the tycoon, the Second Secretary, the PRS, were moving into the drawing-room, Lufkin called out sharply: ‘Wait a minute, Lewis. I want a word with you.’

I sat down opposite to him. He pushed a bowl of flowers aside so that he could stare at me.

There were no preliminaries. He remarked: ‘You heard what I said about Quaife?’

‘I’m grateful,’ I replied.

‘It isn’t a matter for gratitude. It’s a matter for sense.’

It wasn’t getting easier to be on terms with Lufkin.

‘I’d like to tell him,’ I said. ‘He can do with some moral support.’

‘You’re intended to tell him.’

‘Good.’

‘I don’t say something about a man in one place, and something else in another.’

Like a good many of his claims for himself, this also was true.

His eyes, sunk deep in his neat, handsome head, swivelled round to me. ‘That’s not the point,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘That’s not why I sent them away.’

For an instant there was a silence, a negotiator’s silence. Like one tired of stating the obvious, he let out: ‘Quaife’s been a damned fool.’

I didn’t reply. I sat, not showing excessive interest, gazing at him. He gave a sharp recognitory smile.

‘I ought to tell you, I know about this woman of his,’ he said. ‘He’s been a damned fool. I don’t care what you think about his morals. A man doesn’t want to get mixed up with a woman when he’s trying something big.’

Lufkin seldom missed an opportunity to apportion moral blame. But his tone had become less aloof. I still did not reply, nor change my expression.

Once more, Lufkin smiled. ‘My information is,’ he said, ‘that the man Hood is going to blow the news wide open to Quaife’s wife. And to Smith’s connections. Any day now. This being, of course, the most helpful occasion.’

This time, I was astounded. I showed it. All my practice at coping with Lufkin had failed me. I knew he sat at the centre of a kind of intelligence service; business and curiosity got mixed up; his underlings fed him with gossip as well as fact. But this seemed like divination. I must have looked like one of my aunts, confronted with a demonstration of spiritualist phenomena. Lufkin gave a grin of triumph.

Later on, I thought it was not so mysterious. After all, Hood was employed by a firm closely similar to Lufkin’s. Between the two, there was contact, something like espionage, and personal intimacies at every level. There was nothing improbable in Hood’s having a drinking companion, or even a confidential friend, on Lufkin’s staff.

‘It’s likely to be true,’ said Lufkin.

‘It may be,’ I said.

‘This man,’ said Lufkin, ‘needs all his energy for the job in hand. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know, how his wife will take it. But it isn’t the kind of trouble any of us would want hanging over us when we’re fighting for our skins.’

He was a tough ally. For his own sake, he wanted Roger to survive. But he was speaking with unusual sympathy, with something like comradely feeling. Once or twice in my own life, I had known him come out of his carapace and show something which was not affection, but might have been concern. It had happened only when one was in trouble with wife or children. No one knew much about his own marriage. His wife lived in the country and there was a rumour that she was afflicted. He could have had mistresses, but if so they had been concealed with his consummate executive skill. None of this we were likely to know for sure until after he was dead.

My instructions were clear. I was to warn Roger, and then look after him. That being understood, the conference was over, and Lufkin got up to join his guests. As he did so, I asked about Hood. Was he being used by others? Were there people behind him?

‘I don’t believe in chance,’ said Lufkin.

As for the man himself, was he obsessed?

‘I’m not interested in his psychology,’ said Lufkin. ‘I’m not interested in his motives. All I’m interested in, is seeing him on the bread-line.’

We did not speak again on our way to the drawing-room. There the party, in Lufkin’s absence, had begun to sound a little gayer. He damped it down by establishing us in groups of three with no chance of transfer. For myself, I was preoccupied, and I noticed Margaret glancing at me, a line between her eyes, knowing that something was wrong. In my trio, I heard, as though she were a long way off, the wife of one of the Ministers explaining analytically why her son had not got into Pop, a subject which, at the best of times, I should have found of limited interest.

One might have thought that Lufkin’s dinner-parties broke up early. But they didn’t, unless Lufkin broke them up himself. That night it was half-past eleven before, among the first uprising of departures, I managed to get in a word with Margaret. I told her that Lufkin had been warning me, and about what.

Looking at me, she did not need to ask much. ‘Ought you to go and see Roger?’ she said.

I half-wanted to leave it till next day. She knew that I was tired. She knew that I should be more tired if I didn’t act till next morning. She said, ‘You’d better go to him now, hadn’t you?’

While Margaret waited with Lufkin, I telephoned Lord North Street. I heard Roger’s voice, and began: ‘Lufkin’s been talking to me. There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I come round?’

‘You can’t come here. We’ll have to meet somewhere else.’

Clubs would be closed by this time: we couldn’t remember a restaurant near by: at last I said, anxious to put down the telephone, that I would see him outside Victoria Station and was leaving straight away.

When I told Lufkin that I was going to Roger, he nodded with approval, as for any course of behaviour recommended by himself. ‘I can lay on transport,’ he said. ‘Also for your charming wife.’

Two cars, two drivers, were waiting for us in the street. As mine drew up under the Victoria clock, I did not go into the empty hall, booking-offices closed as in a ghost station, but stayed outside on the pavement, alone except for some porters going home.

A taxi slithered from the direction of Victoria Street, through the rain-glossed yard.

As Roger came heavily towards me, I said: ‘There’s nowhere to go here.’ For an instant I was reminded of Hector Rose greeting me outside the darkened Athenaeum, months before.

I said there was a low-down coffee bar not far away. We were both standing stock-still.

Roger said, quite gently, ‘I don’t think there is anything you can tell me. I think I know it all.’

‘My God,’ I said, in bitterness, ‘we might have been spared this.’

I was angry, not with Hood, but with him. My temper had broken loose because of the risks we had run, of what we had tried to do, of the use he had made of me. He gave a grimace, of something like acquiescence.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘to have got everyone into a mess.’

Those were the kind of words I had heard before in a crisis: apathetic, inadequate, flat. But they made me more angry. He looked at me.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It’s not lost yet.’

As we stood there in front of the station, it was not I who was giving support and sympathy. It was the other way round.

In silence we walked across the station yard, through the dripping rain. By the time we were sitting in the coffee bar, under the livid lights, I had recovered myself.

We sipped tea so weak that it tasted like metal against the teeth. Roger had just said, ‘It’s been very bad,’ when we were interrupted.

A man sat down at a table, and remarked ‘Excuse me’, in a voice that was nearly cultivated, not quite. His hands were trembling. He had a long, fine-drawn face, like the romantic stereotype of a scientist. His manner was confident. He told us a hard-luck story of considerable complexity. He was a lorry-driver, so he said. By a series of chances and conspiracies, his employers had decided to sack him. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was short of money. Could we see him through the night?

I didn’t like him much, I didn’t believe a word of it, above all I was maddened by his breaking in. Yet, as I shook my head, I was embarrassed, as though it were I who was doing the begging. As for him, he was not embarrassed in the least. ‘Never mind, old chap,’ he said.

Roger looked at him and, without a word, took out his wallet and gave him a ten-shilling note. The intruder took it civilly, but without any demonstration. ‘Always glad of a little encouragement,’ he said. He made polite goodbyes.

Roger did not watch or notice. He had given him money not out of fellow-feeling, or pity, or even to be rid of him. It had been the kind of compulsion that affects men who lead risky lives. Roger had been trying to buy a bit of luck.

Suddenly he told me straight out that Caro would ‘put a face on things’, until the struggle was over. She would laugh off the rumours which would soon, if Lufkin’s intelligence were correct, once more be sparking round all J C Smith’s connections. Caro was ready to deny them to Collingwood himself.

But there was some other damage. Many people, including most of the guests at Lord North Street, and Diana Skidmore’s friends, would have expected Caro — and Roger also — not to make much of the whole affair. Yes, Ellen had behaved badly, a wife ought to stick to her sick husband. Roger wasn’t faultless either. Still, there were worse things. After all, Caro had lived in the world all her life. Her friends and family were not models of the puritan virtues. Caro herself had had lovers before her marriage. Like the rest of her circle, she prided herself on her rationality and tolerance. They all smoothed over scandals, were compassionate about sins of the flesh, by the side of which a man having a mistress, even in the circumstances of Roger and Ellen — was nothing but a display of respectability.

That day, since Caro first read the unsigned letter, none of that had counted, nor had ever seemed to exist. There was no enlightenment or reason in the air, just violence. They hadn’t been quarrelling about his public life, nor the morality of taking a colleague’s wife: nor about love: nor sex: but about something fiercer. He was hers. They were married. She would not let him go.

He too felt the same violence. He felt tied and abject. He had come away, not knowing where to turn or what to do.

So far as I could tell, there had been no decision. Or rather, there seemed to have been two decisions which contradicted each other. As soon as the crisis was over, win or lose — Caro gave her ultimatum — he had to choose. She would not endure it more than a matter of weeks, months at the most. Then he had to look after his own career. It must be ‘this woman’ or her. At the same time, she had said more than once that she would not give him a divorce.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. His face was blank and open. He did not look like a man a few days away from his major test.

For a while we sat, drinking more cups of the metallic tea, not saying much. Then he remarked:‘I told her’ (he meant Ellen) ‘earlier in the day. I promised I’d ring her up before I went to bed. She’ll be waiting.’

Blundering, as though his limbs were heavy, he went off to look for a telephone behind the bar. When he came back he said flatly: ‘She wants me to go and see her. She asked me to bring you too.’

For an instant, I thought this was not meant seriously.

‘She asked me,’ he repeated. Then I thought perhaps I understood. She was as proud as Caro: in some ways, she was prouder. She was intending to behave on her own terms.

The rain had stopped, and we went on foot to Ebury Street. It was well past one. At her door, Ellen greeted us with the severeness which I had long ago forgotten, but which took me back to the first time I saw her there. Once we were inside the smart little sitting-room, she gave Roger a kiss, but as a greeting, no more. It wasn’t the hearty, conjugal kiss I had seen before, the kiss of happy lovers used to each other, pleased with each other, sure of pleasure to come.

She offered us drinks. Roger took a whisky, so did I. I pressed her to join us. As a rule, she enjoyed her drink. But she was one of those who, in distress, refuse to accept any relief.

‘This is atrocious,’ she said.

Roger repeated to her what he had told me. She listened with an expression impatient, strained and intent. She was hearing little new, most of it had been said already over the telephone. When he repeated that his wife would ‘see him through’ the crisis, she burst out in scorn: ‘What else could she do?’

Roger looked hurt, as well as angry. She was sitting opposite to him across the small table. She gave a laugh which wasn’t a laugh, which reminded me of my mother when an expectation came to nothing or one of her pretensions was deflated, when she had, by laughing, to deny the moment in which we stood.

‘I mean, you have to win. She couldn’t spoil that!’

He said nothing. For a moment he looked desperately tired, fretted, drained, as if he had lost interest in everything but the desire to be alone, to switch off the light, turn his face into the pillow and sleep.

Shortly afterwards she cried: ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘I haven’t the right to stop you.’

‘It was disloyal.’

She meant, disloyal to him, not to Caro: and yet her emotions towards Caro were not simple. All three of them were passionate people. Under the high-spirited surface, she was as violent as Caro. If those two had met that night, I thought more than once, the confrontation might have gone any way at all.

She sat back and said; ‘I’ve been dreading this.’

‘Don’t you think I know?’ Roger replied.

There was a long silence. At last Ellen turned to me and said in a sharp, steady tone: ‘I’m willing to give him up.’

‘It’s too late for that,’ said Roger.

‘Why is it?’ She looked straight at him. ‘You trust me, don’t you? I’ve got that left, haven’t I?’

‘I trust you.’

‘Well, then, I meant what I said.’

‘It’s too late. There were times when I might have taken that offer. Not now.’

They were each speaking with stark honesty. On his side, with the cruelty of a love-relation which is nothing but a love-relation: where they were just naked with each other, with neither children, nor friends, nor the to-and-fro of society to console them, to keep them safe. On her side, she was speaking from loneliness, from the rapacity with which she wanted him, and, yes, from her own code of honour.

Their eyes met again, and fell away. Between them, at that instant, was not love: not desire: not even affection: but knowledge.

As though everything else was irrelevant, she said in a brisk, businesslike manner: ‘Well, you’d better settle how you’re going to handle it next Thursday morning.’

She meant, the Cabinet, at which Roger’s debate would, though possibly only perfunctorily, come up. Once she had been envious of Caro for knowing the political life as she did not. Now she had learned. Whom could he trust? Could he sound his colleagues before the meeting? Could I find out anything in Whitehall? Whom could he trust? More important, whom couldn’t he trust?

We talked on for a couple of hours. The names went round. Collingwood, Monty Cave, the PM, Minister after Minister, his own Parliamentary Secretary, Leverett-Smith. It was like sitting in Cambridge rooms twenty years before, counting heads, before a college election. It was like that. The chief difference was that this time the stakes were a little higher, and the penalties (it seemed to me that night) more severe.

39: Political Arithmetic

During those days before the debate, Roger, whenever he went into the House or the Treasury Building or Downing Street, was under inspection: inspection often neither friendly nor unfriendly, but excited by the smell of human drama: the kind of inspection that I remembered my mother being subjected to, in the provincial back streets, when we were going bankrupt — but it was also just as much a predilection of the old Norse heroes, who, on hearing that your house had been burned down, with you inside, were interested, not in your fate, but in how you had comported yourself.

As they watched him, Roger behaved well. He was a brave man, physically and morally, people were saying. It was true. Nevertheless, on those mornings he could not bring himself to read the political correspondents’ gossip-columns. He listened to accounts of what they said, but could not read them. Though he walked through the lobbies, bulky and composed, cordial to men whom he suspected, he could not manage to invite the opinions of his own nearest supporters. He sat at his desk in the office, staring distantly at me, as though his articulateness and self-knowledge had both gone.

I had to guess what request he was making: yes, he would like to know where his Parliamentary Secretary, Leverett-Smith, stood, and Tom Wyndham too.

This was one of the jobs I fancied least. I had no detachments left. I also did not want to hear bad news. I did not want to convey it. It was easy to understand how leaders in danger got poor information.

In fact, I picked up nothing of much interest, certainly nothing that added to disquiet. Tom Wyndham was, as usual, euphoric and faithful. He had been one of Roger’s best selections. He continued to carry some influence with the smart young ex-officers on the back benches. They might distrust Roger, but no one could distrust Tom Wyndham. He was positive all would turn out well. He did not even seem to understand what the fuss was about. As he stood me drinks at the bar of White’s, I felt, for a short time, reassured and very fond of him. It was only when I got out into the February evening that it came to me, with displeasing clarity, that, though he had a good heart, he was also remarkably obtuse. He couldn’t even see the chessboard, let alone two moves ahead.

With Leverett-Smith next morning — it was now five days before the Opposition motion — the interview was more prickly. It took place in his office, and to begin with, he showed mystification as to why I was there at all. Not unreasonably, he was put out. If the Minister (as he always called Roger) wished for a discussion, here was he, sitting four doors down the corridor, from 9.30 in the morning until he left for the House. His point was reasonable: that didn’t make it more gratifying. He looked at me with his lawyer’s gaze, and addressed me formally, like a Junior Minister putting high civil servants in their place.

‘With great respect—’ he kept saying.

We should never have got on, not in any circumstances, least of all in these. We had hardly a thought or even an assumption in common.

I repeated that for Roger next week was the major crisis. This wasn’t an occasion for protocol. We were obliged to give him the best advice we could.

‘With great respect,’ replied Leverett-Smith, ‘I am confident that neither of us needs to be reminded of his official duty.’

Then he began something like a formal speech. It was a stiff, platitudinous and unyielding speech. He didn’t like me any better as he made it. Yet he was revealing more sense than I gave him credit for. It was ‘common ground’ that the Minister was about to undergo a supreme test. If he (Leverett-Smith) had been asked to give his counsel, he would have suggested festina lente. Indeed, he had so suggested, on occasions that I might conceivably remember. What might provoke opposition if done prematurely, would be accepted with enthusiasm when the time was ripe. Nevertheless, in the Minister’s mind the die was cast, and we all had to put away our misgivings and work towards a happy issue.

We should certainly have six abstentions, Leverett-Smith went on, suddenly getting down to the political arithmetic. Six we could survive. Twenty meant Roger was in peril unless he had reassured the centre of the party. Thirty-five, and he would, without any conceivable doubt, have to go.

‘And you?’ I asked quietly, and without hostility.

‘I consider,’ said Leverett-Smith, formally but also without hostility, ‘that that question should not have been put. Except by the Minister himself. If he weren’t overwrought, he would know that, if I had been going to disagree with my Minister, I should have done so in public before this and I should naturally resign. So it oughtn’t to need saying that now, if the worst comes to the worst, and the Minister has to go — which I still have good hopes is not going to happen — then as a matter of principle I shall go with him.’

Spoken like a stick, I thought. But also like an upright man. The comparison with Roger, in the same position three years before, flickered like a smile on the wrong side of the face.

I was able to report to Roger that afternoon without needing to comfort him. He listened as though brooding: but when he heard of Leverett-Smith’s stuffy speech; he shouted out loud. He sounded amused, but he wasn’t really amused. He was in one of those states of suspicion when any piece of simple human virtue, or even decency, seems more than one can expect or bear.

He was wrapped up in his suspicions, in his plans for the counter-attacks, like a doctor confronted with the x-ray pictures of his own lungs. He did not even tell me, I did not know until I got home to Margaret, that Caro had invited me to their house the following night.

She had not telephoned, she had dropped in at our flat without notice.

‘She obviously had to talk to somebody,’ Margaret said, looking upset, ‘and I suppose she didn’t want to do it with her own friends, so she thought it had better be me.’

I did not ask her what Caro had said, but Margaret wanted to tell me about it.

Caro had begun: ‘I suppose you know?’ — then had launched into a kind of strident abuse, half-real, half-histrionic, punctuated by the routine obscenities she would have heard round the stables at Newmarket. It was not so much abuse of Ellen, though there was some of that too, but of life itself. As the violence began to wear itself out, she had begun to look frightened, then terrified. She had said, her eyes wild, but with no tears in them, ‘I don’t know how I shall bear being alone. I don’t know how I am to bear it.’

Margaret said, ‘She does love him. She says she can’t imagine not hearing his key in the lock, not having the last drink with him at night. It’s true: I don’t know how she is going to bear it.’

40: An Evening of Triumph

It was well after ten when we got out of the taxi in Lord North Street. We had been invited, not to dinner, but for an after-debate supper. The door shone open for another guest, light streaming across the lances of rain.

I felt Margaret’s hand tighten in mine. When we had first entered this house, it had seemed enviable. Now it was threatened. Some of us, going up the stairs that night, knew, as well as Roger and Caro themselves, of both the threats.

She greeted us in the drawing-room, eyes flashing, jewels flashing, shoulders splendid under the lights. Her voice wasn’t constricted; she hugged Margaret, perhaps a little more closely than usual, she brushed my cheek. I knew, as we kissed, that this was a performance, gallant as it was. She had never liked me much, but now, if it weren’t for her obligation, she would have put me out of sight for good. She had either found out, or had decided for herself, that I had been in Roger’s confidence. She might be generous and reckless, but she would not forget her wrongs. This one was not to be forgiven.

The clock was striking the half-hour. There were already three or four people in the drawing-room, including Diana Skidmore.

‘They’ve not got back yet,’ said Caro, in her loud, casual tone, as though this were any other parliamentary night, ‘they’ being the politicians.

‘They’ve had quite a day, bless their hearts. I haven’t seen Roger since he went to the Cabinet this morning. Have you seen any of them, Diana?’

‘Not to speak of, you know,’ Diana replied, with a smile as bright, and as communicative, as her emeralds.

‘Isn’t Monty Cave making a great speech tonight?’ Caro went on.

‘I suppose he would have to say something, wouldn’t he?’ said Diana.

Caro told Diana that Monty would be along soon, in a tone which implied that Diana knew already. Diana responded with a question:

‘Is the PM coming?’

Caro replied boldly: ‘I couldn’t get him.’ She added, as though she wouldn’t be outfaced: ‘Reggie Collingwood promised to look in. If they’re not too late.’

It seemed clear — had the news reached Diana yet? — that Caro was trying to do her last service for Roger. She was not just seeing him through, she was doing more than that. She was calling up all her influence, until the debate. She was helping him to win, as thoroughly as if they had been happy.

And yet, though it was chivalrous, though she would truly have done it if she were losing him next week, did she expect, completely expect, to lose him? As I listened, she didn’t seem as if she had quite let go. Did she still hope that if he won, if his career were once more assured, he would have to stay with her? On her own terms? Given a future as brilliant as it had looked the year before, how much of it would he risk or sacrifice?

It would be astonishing if at times, brilliant with certainty, she did not hope like that. For myself, I was at a loss to know whether she was right or wrong.

I wondered also what chances she believed he had of winning. She was radiant with fighting energy. She would go on beyond the last minute. But, though she wasn’t subtle, she was shrewd and had seen much. She had been trying to get signals of encouragement from Diana and had received none. That must have been as patent to Caro as it was to Margaret and me. Not that Diana had finally given Roger up. She knew he was in extreme trouble, that was all. She was playing safe. Maybe she did not want to embarrass her closest political friends, like Collingwood; maybe she had heard from him the first whisper of a scandal: but, deeper than that, she was acting out of instinct.

The beau monde wasn’t kind, Caro had once said to me on a carefree night. If it were kind, it would soon cease to be beau. It was tolerably good-natured, until you were really in trouble. Then you were on your own.

I wondered how many worlds were any better. If you were in trouble in the public eye, who was going to guard you? All the worlds I knew, not only the beau, but the civil servants, the academics, the industrialists, the scientists, huddled together to protect themselves. If you became exposed, they couldn’t do much. It was the odd acquaintance, sometimes the wild, sometimes the sober, who had concealed the fact that he was afraid of nothing and no one, who came out and took the risks and stood by one’s side.

Car in the Street below. Heavy footsteps on the stairs. Roger came in, came in alone.

I had an instant’s anxiety, as though Caro’s guests had let her down, as though her gesture had gone for nothing, and we were left with a useless supper-party, like so many Baltic Deputies.

Then, with a disproportionate relief, so that I gave a broad and apparently unprovoked grin in Diana’s direction, I saw Cave at the door, with Collingwood’s hand on his shoulder.

‘Give Monty a drink,’ cried Roger, in his broadest, heartiest voice. ‘He’s made the speech of a lifetime!’

‘He’ll make better speeches some day,’ said Collingwood, with an air of the highest congratulation, rather like Demosthenes commenting on a hitherto tongue-tied pupil.

‘Give him a drink!’ cried Roger. He was standing by his wife. Their faces were open, robust, smiling. They might have been a serene couple, rejoicing, because they were so successful, in a great friend’s success. Looking round, I should have liked to know how many of the others saw them so, and how much they knew.

As we sat down at the dinner-table downstairs, I was on edge and guessing. So were others. Some of the decisions — one could feel the crackle in the air — were not only not revealed, they were not yet taken. If Collingwood had heard the news about his nephew’s wife, he showed no sign of it. His phlegm was absolute. Diana’s self-control, Caro’s flaming courage — they were tightened, because people round the table knew that nothing was settled; were waiting to see in what might pass as a convivial evening, where others would — the old phrase returned to me — ‘come down’.

Cave held up a glass to the candlelight, viewed it with his round sombre, acute eyes, and sat forward, the rolls of chin sinking into his chest. He kept receiving compliments, Collingwood’s magisterial and not specially articulate, Roger’s hearty but increasingly forced. Cave’s glance darted towards them, his eyes sharply on guard, in the podgy, clown-like face. Diana was flattering him, with a brisk, hortatory rasp, as though irritated that he didn’t know how good he was.

About his triumph in the House that evening, there was no ambiguity at all. It had no connection with Roger’s policy or what was to come. Cave had, in a routine debate, wound up for the Government. To anyone outside the Commons, what he said would either be unnoticed or forgotten within days: but on the parliamentary stock exchange, the quotation in Cave had rushed up many points. On a normal evening, there would have been no more to it than that. Roger might have been expected to feel that particular blend of emotions appropriate to an occasion, when a colleague, friend, rival and ally had just had a resplendent professional success.

As we listened that night, this wasn’t all. There was no mystery about the triumph in the evening: but there was considerable mystery about the Cabinet a few hours before. Not that Collingwood or the others would in company have talked about Cabinet proceedings. Nevertheless, Caro and Diana, neither of them over-theoretical or over-delicate, were used to picking up the signs. Of course, they assumed, Roger’s debate next week had been talked about that morning. Of course the Cabinet had taken steps. Caro asked Collingwood a question about the vote next Tuesday, with as much fuss as she would have asked about the prospects of a horse.

‘We’ve been thinking about that, naturally,’ he said. He added gnomically: ‘Not that we’re not always busy. We can’t spend too much time on one thing, you understand.’

He volunteered a piece of information. The proper operations had been set going. A three-line Whip had gone out. Three or four dissidents were being worked on.

There was no side-talk round the table. Everyone was attending. Everyone knew the language. This meant that, in formal terms, the Government was not backing down. This was the maximum show of pressure on its party. It could do no more.

But also, I was thinking, as I listened to Collingwood’s grating, confident voice, it could do no less. They had gone too far not to bring out the standard procedure now. We were no nearer to knowing what had happened that morning.

Conceivably, Collingwood and the other Ministers could not have told us, even if they had wanted to. Not because of secrecy; not because some had their own different designs: but simply because of the way Cabinet business was done.

Word had come out from the Cabinet room that Lenton was, when he wanted to be, an efficient chairman. More than most recent Prime Ministers, he often let Ministers introduce topics, he encouraged an orderly discussion round the table, and even took a straw-vote at the end. But this didn’t always happen.

Lenton was efficient and managerial. He was more self-effacing than most Prime Ministers. He was also a ruthless politician, and he knew a Prime Minister’s power. This power had increased out of all proportion since Collingwood entered politics. The Prime Minister, they used to say piously, was the first among equals. It might be so, but in that case, the first was a good deal more equal than the others.

It wasn’t a matter of charisma. It wasn’t even a matter of personality. The awe existed, but it was practical awe. The Prime Minister had the jobs in his hand. He could sack anyone, and appoint anyone. Even a modest man like Lenton did just that. Any of us, on the secretariat of committees, who had seen any Prime Minister with his colleagues, noticed that they were frightened of him, whoever he might be.

If he didn’t want a decision in Cabinet, it took a bold man to get one. In office, men tended not to be bold. Lenton, who could be so businesslike, had become a master at talking round a subject, and then leaving it in the air. It looked sloppy: little he cared: it was a useful technique for getting his own way.

Perhaps that, or something like it, had happened that day. None of us except Collingwood knew what the Prime Minister thought of Roger or his policy. My guess, for some time past, had been that he thought it was rational but that it couldn’t be pressed too far. If Roger could placate, or squeeze by, the solid centre of the party, then it would be good for the Government. They might win the next election on it. But if Roger had stirred up too much opposition, if he went beyond his brief and campaigned only for the Getliffe portions of the White Paper, he needn’t be rescued. Roger was expendable. In fact, it was possible that the Prime Minister would not be heartbroken if Roger had to be expended. For that pleasantly modest man had some of the disadvantages of modesty. He might not be over-fond of seeing, at the Cabinet, a colleague much more brilliant than himself, and some years younger.

I fancied that little had been said, either in Cabinet or in meetings tête-à-tête. Maybe the Prime Minister had spoken intimately to Collingwood, but I doubted even that. This kind of politics, which could be the roughest of all, went on without words.

That night, Collingwood, bolt upright on Caro’s right hand, showed no sign of embarrassment, or even of the disfavour one can’t totally suppress towards someone to whom one is doing a bad turn. His quartz eyes might have been blind. So far as he was capable of cordiality, he was giving it, like a moderate-sized tip, to Monty Cave. Cave was the hero of the evening, Cave looked on the short list for promotion. But Collingwood bestowed a smaller, but judicious, cordiality upon Roger. It was hard to believe that he bore him rancour. This was the behaviour, straightforward, not forthcoming, of someone who thought Roger might still survive, and who would within limits be content if he did so.

He was just as straightforward when Caro pressed him about who would speak in the debate. Roger would have the last word, said Collingwood. The First Lord would have to open. ‘That ought to do,’ said Collingwood. To Caro, to me — did Diana know already? — this was the first sharp warning of the night. The First Lord was a light-weight; it sounded as if Roger was not being given a senior Minister to help him out.

‘Are you going to speak, Reggie?’ said Caro, as unabashed as she had ever been in Roger’s cause.

‘Not much in my line,’ said Collingwood, as though inadequacy in speech were a major virtue. He rarely spoke in the House, and then mumbled through a script so execrably that he seemed unable not only to speak, but to read. Yet he managed to communicate to the back-bench committees. Perhaps that was what he meant when he looked up the table at Roger and said, with self-satisfaction, ‘I’ve done something. I’ve done something for you already, you know.’

Roger nodded. But suddenly I noticed, so did others, that his eyes were fixed on Monty Cave. The pretence of heartiness, the poise, the goodwill, had all drained away from Roger’s expression. He was gazing at Cave with intense anxiety, not with liking, not with anything as final as enmity, but with naked concern.

We followed his glance. Cave gave no sign of recognition. The rest of us had finished eating, but Cave had cut himself another slice of cheese. His lips, fat man’s lips, glutton’s lips, child’s lips, were protruding. He looked up, eyes hard in the soft face.

Just for an instant even Caro’s nerve failed. There was a silence. Then her voice rang out, full, unquailing; ‘Are you going to speak, Monty?’

‘The Prime Minister hasn’t asked me to,’ said Cave.

This meant that he couldn’t speak, even if he wanted to. But there was a note in his voice, quiet, harmonious, that rasped the nerves.

Caro could not help asking him: ‘Isn’t there anything else you can do for Roger?’

‘I can’t think of anything. Can you?’

‘How should we handle it then?’ she cried.

Suddenly I was sure that this question had been asked before. At the morning’s Cabinet? It was easy to imagine the table, Lenton droning away with deliberate amiability, not letting the issue emerge, as though there weren’t an issue, as though no policy and no career depended upon it. It was easy to imagine Cave sitting silent. He knew as well as any man alive that Roger needed, not just his acquiescence, but his support. There was he, the bright hope of the party avant-garde, its best debater, maybe a leader. They were waiting for him. He knew what depended on it.

‘How should we handle it, Monty?’

‘I’m afraid it all depends on Roger. He’s got to settle it for himself,’ he said in a soft, modulated, considered tone, along the table to Caro.

It was out now. For years Cave’s attitude to Roger had been veiled. He had disagreed with some of Roger’s policy in detail: but yet, he should have been on the same side. He knew why he was making pretexts for minor disagreements. Much more than most politicians, Cave knew himself. He hadn’t forgiven Roger for holding back over Suez. Far more than that, Roger was a rival, a rival, in ten years’ time, for the first place. By keeping quiet, Cave might be able to see that rival done for.

For once, though, it was possible that the career did not come first. Cave might have concealed from others, but not from himself, that he profoundly envied Roger. In the midst of all else, he was letting the envy rip. Envy, most of all, of Roger’s careless masculine potence: envy, because Roger did not have women leave him: envy of what, with a certain irony, he thought of as Roger’s sturdy, happy marriage. From the sadness of his diffident, frustrated sexual life, he regarded Roger. The contrast made him cruel. As he gave his answer to Caro, his voice was soft with cruelty.

She did not think it worth while pressing further. Soon afterwards the party broke up, although it was only half-past twelve. Yet, even then, as they said goodbye, Roger kept hold of himself. He might suspect, he was capable of suspecting anything by now, that Cave had in secret stimulated the attack upon him. But reproach, anger, scorn — he could afford none of them. Cave would keep his hostility quiet. In public, he would behave like a colleague. Once more, Roger congratulated him on the evening’s feat. As Roger did so, Collingwood patted him on the shoulder.

Below, the cars were driving away. In the drawing-room, Margaret and I were getting up to go. Now that we were alone, Roger looked at his wife and said, with a curious harsh trustfulness: ‘Well, it couldn’t be much worse, could it?’

‘It might be better,’ said Caro, bitter and honest.

The moment after, up the stairs came a rapid, stumbling tread. Sammikins marched into the room and gave a brassy hail. He was wearing a dinner-jacket, unlike anyone at the supper-party: a carnation shone in his lapel. He had been drinking, hard enough for his eyes to stare with fierce, wild, arrogant happiness. ‘It’s too late,’ said Caro.

‘I shan’t stay long,’ he shouted. ‘I want a drink.’

‘You’ve had enough.’

‘You don’t know what I’ve had.’ He spoke with the glee of one who had come, not only from drinking, but from bed. He laughed at her, and went on in a confident cry: ‘I want to talk to your husband.’

‘I’m here.’ Roger sat forward on the sofa.

‘By God, so you are!’ Sammikins again asked for a drink. This time Caro poured him a whisky, and told him to sit down.

‘I’m not going to. Why should I?’ He gulped his drink and stared down at Roger.

He announced at the top of his voice: ‘It won’t do!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I can’t go along with you next week. It sticks in my throat.’

For an instant I had thought, so had Margaret, that he was denouncing Roger for breaking up the marriage. But he couldn’t have known yet about that. If he had known, his sister had protected him too much — his side of their relation was too defiant — for him to care.

Caro had stood up. She took his arm and said passionately: ‘No, no, you musn’t go back on him now.’

Sammikins shrugged her off. He shouted down at Roger: ‘I shan’t abstain. That’s a boring thing to do. I shall vote against you.’

Roger did not look up. He snapped his fingers against his thigh.

After a pause, he said in a steady, tired, reflective tone: ‘I shouldn’t have thought this was the best possible time to betray me.’

Sammikins’ face lost its fierce joy. More quietly and considerately than he had so far spoken, he replied: ‘I’m sorry about the timing.’ Then his eyes flared, and he broke out: ‘I don’t like the word “betray”.’

‘Don’t you?’ asked Roger, expressionless.

‘Two can play at that game. Who are you betraying?’

‘Will you tell me?’

‘I’ll give you credit that you don’t mean to. But how are you going to leave this blasted country? You’ve got your reasons, of course, everyone’s got their reasons. We can’t play with the big boys, I grant you that. But we’ve got to be able to blow up someone. Ourselves, if that’s the only way out. Otherwise the others will blackmail us whenever they feel inclined. We shall be sunk for good.’

Slowly Roger raised his head, but did not speak.

Sammikins went shouting on. ‘You’re wrong, I tell you! You’re wrong. It’s simple. War’s always been simple. You’re too clever by half. You’ve just got to think of one simple thing, just to see that we’re not sunk for good. It’s a pity you didn’t have a chap like me, I’m not too clever by half — somewhere on top — just to say “Oi, oi”. You’re being too clever, your job is to see we’re not getting sunk for good.’

‘I suppose you’re the only patriot we’ve got?’ Roger’s voice had turned thick and dangerous. At the end of that day, which he had endured without a lapse, he was suddenly moved, shaken, enraged. It was not that Sammikins’ defection, in practical terms, counted much. He was a ‘wild man’, he had been written off long before as irresponsible, a political playboy. If he went into the lobby against his brother-in-law, all that meant would be a paragraph in the gossip columns. It was not the defection which stabbed Roger — but the personal betrayal, for he had an affection, almost a paternal affection, for the younger man. The personal betrayal, and yes, the reason for it, the half-baked, drunken words. All through, Roger had been nagged at by the regrets, even the guilt, of someone living among choices where the simple certainties weren’t enough. For Roger in particular, with his nostalgia for past grandeur, it was tempting to think of a time when you could choose without folly, to make the country both powerful and safe. He had thought in terms as old-fashioned as that. He had often wished that he had been born in a different time, when reason did not take one into decisions which denied the nostalgic heart.

‘You’ve only got to keep your eye on the ball and remember the simple things,’ Sammikins shouted.

Roger had risen to his feet, a massive bulk in the room.

‘No one else tries to remember the simple things?’

‘They decide what will happen to us,’ said Sammikins.

‘Do you think no one else cares what will happen to us?’

‘I hope they do.’

Sammikins had not spoken in his loud, confident voice. This time it was Roger who shouted: ‘Get out!’

After all his disciplined performances, the fury boiling up and over was astonishing — no, less astonishing than unnerving, to hear. The thick, driven cry filled the room. Roger began to move, hunched, on to the other man.

I was standing up too, wondering how to stop the fight. Sammikins was athletic, but Roger was four or five stones heavier, and far stronger. With a bear-like heave, he threw Sammikins against the wall. Sammikins slid very slowly down it, like a coat collapsing from a peg, till he was on the floor. For a moment he sat there, head hanging, as if he had forgotten where he was, or who any of us were. Then, with an athlete’s lightness, he sprang up — from crossed ankles — and stood erect with hardly a stagger, eyes staring. Caro got between him and Roger. She clung to her brother’s hand.

‘For God’s sake, go,’ she said.

‘Do you want me to?’ he said, with a curious, injured dignity.

‘You must go.’

Head back, he moved to the door. From the far end of the room he said to Caro, ‘I expect I’ll want to see you—’

‘This is my house,’ shouted Roger, ‘get out of it!’

Caro did not reply to Sammikins. She went to Roger’s side, and, like a united front of husband and wife, they listened to the footsteps lurching down.

41: Quarrel in the Corridor

Next day, when I called in Roger’s office, he sat calm and stoical, like a man without passions, as though any story about an outbreak of his was one’s own invention and couldn’t be referred to. Yet once more his tic returned: in a distant, cold, almost inimical manner, he asked me to report what the papers were rumouring that morning. ‘There’s not much,’ I said.

‘Good.’ His face, his voice, became smooth. He was for the moment over-easily reassured, like a man jealous in love, snatching at the bits of news which comfort him.

There was a report in one paper about a meeting of a few back-benchers and some scientists, which seemed to have ended in the scientists quarrelling — that was about all, I said.

Immediately, again like a jealous man, he started on the detective work of anxiety: who could they be? Where? This was the ultra-Conservative paper, they were enemies, we knew which member slipped them the gossip. Yet this man, who was venal but abnormally amiable, had already written to Roger pledging his support. Was he reneging at the last minute? I shook my head. I was positive that he was all right. Not that he minded collecting his retainer from the paper.

‘One of these days,’ said Roger, relieved and savage, ‘we’ll get men like him expelled from the House.’

What about the scientists? I said. Who were they, anyway? He wasn’t interested. Nothing could interest him except the lobbies now. As I left him, he was working out, repetitiously, unable to shake off the obsession, who these members were, and whether he could count on their votes.

Back in my own room, I wasn’t much better. The debate was to begin on Monday afternoon. They would vote the night after that. Four days and a half before it would be over. I pulled down a file from my in-tray. There was a minute written in the most beautiful handwriting, in the most lucid prose. I did not feel like reading it.

I sat there day-dreaming, not pleasantly. Once I rang up Margaret, asking if there were any news, though what I expected I hadn’t an idea.

A knock sounded on my door, not the door leading to my assistants, through which visitors should come, but the corridor door, usually inviolable. Hector Rose came in, perhaps for the second time since we had been colleagues, paying me a visit unannounced.

‘Forgive me, my dear Lewis, I do apologize many, many times for interrupting you like this—’

‘There isn’t much to interrupt,’ I said.

‘You’re so much occupied that there’s always something to interrupt.’ He gazed at the empty desk, at the in-tray with its stack of files. He gave a faint, arctic smile. ‘In any case, my dear Lewis, forgive me for disturbing some of your valuable meditations.’

Even now, after all those years, even in stress, I didn’t know the response to his singular brand of courtesy. The bright young Treasury officials, certain by this time that he would soon be retiring, and that they would never, as they once imagined, have to answer to him, had invented a quip, the sort of quip which, like a premature obituary, gets circulated when a formidable man is passing out: ‘With old Hector Rose, you’ve got to take the smooth with the smooth.’

Little they knew.

After some more apologies he sat down. He looked at me with bleached eyes and said: ‘I thought you ought to know that I had the curious experience of meeting your friend Dr Brodzinski last night.’

‘Where?’

‘Oddly enough, with some of our political acquaintances.’ Suddenly, the item in the newspaper flashed back, and I guessed: ‘So you were there!’

‘How have you heard?’

I mentioned the paper.

Rose gave a polite smile and said: ‘I don’t find it necessary to read that particular journal.’

‘But you were there?’

‘I was trying to make that clear, my dear Lewis.’

‘How did you get invited?’

Again he smiled politely: ‘I made it my business to be.’

He cut out the flourishes, and with sarcastic relevance told me the story. Brodzinski, in a last attempt to whip up opposition to Roger’s policy, had made an appeal to some of his Tory contacts. Instead of again attacking Roger directly, he had done it through an attack on Walter Luke. He had told some of the extreme right, the pro-Suez relics, that it was Luke’s advice which had led Roger into bad judgement. So Brodzinski had been asked to dine with a small splinter group. So, by a piece of upright pig-headed good manners, had Walter Luke. So, through his own initiative, had Hector Rose.

‘I wasn’t prepared to have the excellent Luke thrown to the wolves,’ he said. ‘Also, I thought I might as well listen to what was going on. I have a certain influence with Lord A—’ (the leader of the splinter-group, and the man responsible for the pig-headed good manners. It sounded improbable that he should be a friend of Hector Rose’s, but in fact — in the minuteness of the English official world — they had been at school together.)

Between Brodzinski and Luke, there had been a violent row. Lord North Street was not the only place, the night before, where eminent persons came to physical violence. ‘How these scientists love one another,’ said Rose. He added: ‘Brodzinski could certainly be sued for defamation, if Luke cared to go to law.’ With crisp detachment he gave a few examples.

‘Is anyone going to believe that?’

‘My dear Lewis, don’t you agree that if anyone is accused of anything, literally anything, most of our friends believe it?’

He went on: ‘While I am about it, you might drop a word to our potentially supreme colleague. Douglas Osbaldiston. There appears to be no doubt that Brodzinski has been trying to spill this particular poison into his ear,’

Once before — just once, in that disciplined life where personal relations were left unstated — Rose had let fall his feelings about Douglas. He did not let himself be so direct again, not even when I said that Douglas, whatever Rose thought of him, was honest and fair.

‘I am perfectly certain,’ said Rose, half-bowing as he spoke, ‘that our colleague has been utterly correct. In fact, I gathered that he had refused to grant Brodzinski an interview at the present juncture. No one could be more correct, could he? Our colleague has every qualification for the perfect public servant. But still, I do suggest you drop a word. He is just a shade inclined to believe in reconciliation for its own sake. When all this is settled, he might find it was wiser and safer to have Brodzinski in rather than out. I should regard that as reconciliation carried to a somewhat excessive extent. Our colleague has a slightly greater veneration than I have for the general good sense of everybody in this part of London.’

Our eyes met. For this occasion, we were allies. He said: ‘By the way, one fact seems to be generally known.’

‘Yes?’

‘That he’s not a hundred per cent happy about his master’s policy, or shall I say his master’s ultimate intentions about policy?’ Rose was not given to underlining. That morning he was thinking of Tuesday’s voting, not with Roger’s concentration, for that was total, but with something as channelled as mine. Name by name, he gave his prognosis about last night’s party. There had been twelve members present. All but one were on the extreme right, and so possible enemies of Roger. Of these, three would vote for him, including Lord A — (Rose was, as he might have said himself, most correct. He did not give a vestigial hint that he, a functionary, could possibly have used any persuasion.) Of the others, a maximum of nine would certainly abstain. ‘It’s beginning to look uncomfortable,’ said Hector Rose. He broke off, and went on about the vote. There were bound to be more abstentions. I told him, not the full story of Sammikins, but that he would vote against.

Rose clicked his tongue. He looked at me as though he were going to give a verdict. Then he shook his head, and in a cool tone remarked: ‘I take it you will let your friend Quaife know at once. That is, about the information I was able to collect. I needn’t tell you, you’ll have to do it discreetly, and I’m afraid you mustn’t reveal your source. But he ought to know about these abstentions. You can tell him these people by name, I think.’

‘What good can that do him?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you believe that, if he saw them now, he could possibly persuade them back?’

‘No,’ said Rose.

‘Well, then, all he can do is make his speech. He’ll make a better speech the more hope he’s got left.’

‘My dear Lewis, with great diffidence, I think he ought to be able to reckon up his opponents—’

‘I repeat,’ I said with force, ‘what good can that do?’

‘You’re taking a responsibility on yourself.’ Rose stared at me, surprised, disapproving. ‘If I were he,’ he said, ‘I should want to be able to reckon up every scrap of news, however bad it was, until the end.’

I stared back. ‘I believe you would,’ I said.

It wasn’t necessarily the toughest and hardest-nerved who lived in public. Yet sometimes I wondered whether a man as tough and hard-nerved as Rose could imagine what the public life was like, or how much it would have tested him.

He got up. ‘Well, that’s all the bad news for the present.’ He made the grim, Greek messenger joke, said this seemed as far as we could go, and began his paraphernalia of thanks and apologies.

As soon as he had gone, I looked at the clock. It was nearly twenty to twelve. This time I didn’t brood or wait. I went out, through my private office, into the corridor, past the doors of my own department, round three sides of the Treasury quadrangle, on my way to Osbaldiston. I didn’t notice, as I had done times enough, the bizarre architecture, the nineteenth-century waste of space, the gigantic unfilled hole in the centre of the building, like a Henry Moore sculpture pretending to be functional. I didn’t even notice the high jaundiced walls, the dark stretch of corridor up to the next bend, the compartments where the messengers sat on stools reading the racing editions, the labels on the doors just visible in the half light, Sir W— H—, GBE, Sir W— D—, KCB. It was just dark, domesticated, familiar: a topological journey: the doors passing me by like the stations seen from an underground train.

Before I got into the last straight, which led to Douglas’ office, I saw him coming round the corner, head forward, a docket of papers in his hand. ‘I was looking for you,’ I said.

‘I’ve got a meeting,’ Douglas answered. He wasn’t evading me. There was not time to return to his room. We stood there in the corridor, talking in low voices. Occasionally, in the next few minutes, doors opened, young men walked briskly past us, throwing a glance in the direction of their boss. Some would know that he and I were close friends. They might have thought that we were settling a bit of business before the meeting, or alternatively, in the way of the top stratum, at once the casual and machine-like, saving time and an interdepartmental minute.

It wasn’t going quite like that. As we kept our voices down, I was watching his face with a mixture of affection, pity and blind anger. It had changed since his wife’s illness; we had seen it change under our eyes. Now it had the special pathos of a face which, still in essence anachronistically youthful, was nevertheless beginning to look old. Once he had been untouched as Dorian Gray, a character whom he resembled in no other particular, but now all that was gone.

Three times a week, Margaret went to sit with his wife in hospital. By this time, when she wanted to smoke, Mary had to be fed her cigarette. ‘How paralysed can you get?’ she said, with a euphoria and courage that made it worse to watch.

Douglas had come to stay with us some nights, when he couldn’t stand any more either the lonely house or the club. Once he had told us, with bitter, unguarded candour, that there were not two hours together in any day when he didn’t think of her lying there, not to move again, while he was free.

All that was out of my mind. I was saying: ‘How much do you know of the latest attack on Quaife?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Do you realize that they’re going for anyone who has the slightest connection with him? Now it’s Walter Luke—’

‘You can’t have a war,’ said Douglas, ‘without someone getting hurt.’

‘I suppose you’re aware,’ I said angrily, ‘that you’ve been giving aid and comfort to these people?’

‘What are you saying now?’ All of a sudden, his face had become stony. He was as enraged as I was: the more so, because we had in private so often been open with each other.

‘I’m saying, it’s well known that you don’t agree with Quaife.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘Can you tell me that?’

‘I do tell you that, and I expect you to believe it,’ said Douglas.

‘What do you expect me to believe?’

‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘You’ve felt yourself entitled to your private view. Not so private, if I may say so. So have I. I’ve made no secret of it. I haven’t left my Minister in any doubt. I think he’s wrong, and he knows that as well as I do. But no one else knows it, except you, and one or two people I can trust.’

‘So do others.’

‘Do you really think I’m responsible for that?’

‘It depends what you mean by responsible.’

His face had darkened up to the cheekbones.

‘We’d better try to be rational,’ he said. ‘If my Minister wins, then I shall do my best for him. Of course, I shall be carrying out a policy in which I don’t believe. Well, I’ve done that before and I can do it again. I shall try to make the thing work. Without false modesty, I shall do it as well as anyone round here.’

All that he said was absolutely true.

‘You think he can’t win?’ I said.

‘And what do you think?’

His gaze was sharp, appraising. For a second we might have been in a negotiation, listening for a point at which the other would give way.

‘You’ve done a certain amount to make it harder,’ I let fly again.

‘I’ve done exactly what I’ve told you. No more, and no less.’

‘You’re better at singing in unison than some of us, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You realize that the line you’re taking is the line that a good many powerful persons want you to take? Most of them don’t really want Roger Quaife to get away with it, do they?’

With a curious detachment he replied: ‘That is possibly so.’

‘If he doesn’t win, you’ll be sitting pretty, won’t you? You will have scored a nice new piece of credit for yourself? You’ll have everything waiting for you?’

He looked at me without expression. He said, in a quite friendly voice: ‘One thing. You know I’ve had my own view all along about this business. Don’t you believe it was an honest view?’

I had to say, Yes, of course I did.

I burst out, without remembering that I had once heard Cave make the same accusation to Roger: ‘But all you’ve done or not done — you must have realized that it wouldn’t exactly impede your progress, mustn’t you?’

In my fury, I was astonished to see him give a smile — not an intimate smile, but still genuine.

‘If I’ve worried about that sort of consideration, Lewis, we should never do anything, should we?’

After glancing at his watch he said, in a businesslike tone: ‘You’ve made me a bit late.’

He went off towards his meeting quickly but not in a rush, head thrust forward, papers in hand, along the corridor.

42: View from the Box

In the middle of the afternoon, my PA came in with a letter marked ‘Urgent’. It must have been delivered by hand, she said. The handwriting on the envelope looked like a woman’s, but I did not recognize it. Then I found that the note was signed ‘Ellen’. I read:

I expect you will be at the debate Monday and Tuesday. I have got to stay away, of course. I can’t even communicate with him until it’s all over. Will you please — I have to ask you this — let me know how things are going? I trust you to tell me the bare truth, whatever it is. I shall be in the flat alone, on both evenings. Please ring up, whatever you have to tell me.

I thought of her that evening, as Margaret and I went out to the theatre, just as an anaesthetic against the suspense. Roger was at home working at his speech, Caro with him. Ellen was the loneliest of all. I talked of her to Margaret. There she was, hearing nothing of him. Once she had feared that, if his career was broken, she would lose him. Now the blackmail had come out, now Caro had confronted him, Ellen must have the contradictory fear. Yet I was sure that she prayed for his success. Margaret said: ‘She’s not as good as you think she is.’

I said: ‘She tries to be.’

Margaret had met Ellen only socially, and then in the past, with her husband. It was Caro whom Margaret knew and loved, as I did not, Caro whom she had tried to comfort. Now, as we stood in the foyer of the Haymarket, avoiding the sight of acquaintances because we wanted to be together, she asked if the position was clear-cut — was Ellen facing that dilemma, either getting him, or seeing him prevail? I said, I didn’t believe that either of them knew. There could be something in it? I didn’t answer her.

‘If there’s the slightest bit in it,’ said Margaret, ‘I’m grateful was never tested that way about you.’

Monday came and dragged, like a day in my youth when I was waiting for the result of an examination. Hector Rose sent his compliments, and informed me that he expected to be in the Box for the last hours of the debate the following night. Otherwise I had no messages of any kind all that morning.

I hesitated about ringing Roger up. I detested being wished good luck myself (at root I was as superstitious as my mother); and I decided that he, also, would like to be left alone. I did not want to go to a club for lunch, in case I met Douglas or anyone else involved. I was tired of pretending to write or read. Instead, while the others were at lunch, I did what I should have done as a young man, and walked blankly round St James’s Park in the sunshine, catching, and being tantalized by, the first scent of spring; then through the streets, calling in at bookshops, nibbling away at time.

In the afternoon, the office clock swept out the minutes with its second hand. There was no point in leaving until half-past four: I did not wish to sit through question time. I rang my private secretary, and went with obsessive detail into next week’s work. After that, I had a session with my PA, making sure that she knew where I would be each hour of that day and the next. At last it was four twenty-five. Not quite the starting-time, but I could permit myself to go.

Then, as I was hurrying down the corridor, I heard a voice behind me. It was my PA, eager, comely, spectacled. My own devices had gone back on me: she knew the time too well. A lady was on the telephone, said Hilda: she said she had to speak to me immediately, it was desperately important, she couldn’t wait a minute. Thwarted, anxious, not knowing what to be anxious about, I rushed back. Was Caro going to break some news? Or was it Ellen, or from home?

It was none of them. It was Mrs Henneker.

‘I should never have believed it possible.’ Her voice came strongly over the phone. What was it? I asked.

‘What do you think?’

I did not feel inclined for guessing-games. It turned out that she had had a letter by the afternoon post, five minutes before, from a publisher. They had actually told her they didn’t consider her biography of her husband would be of sufficient interest to the general public. ‘What do you think of that?’

She sounded almost triumphant in her incredulity.

Oh well, I said, there were other publishers — trying to put her off, maddened because I was not out of the room.

‘That’s not good enough!’ Her voice rang out like a challenge.

I would talk to her sometime in the nearish future.

‘No.’ Her reply was intransigeant. ‘I think I must ask you to come round straight away.’

I said I had important business.

‘What do you call this, if it isn’t important?’

It was utterly and absolutely impossible, I said. I was occupied all the evening, all the next day, all the week.

‘I’m afraid,’ she said sternly, ‘I consider this entirely unsatisfactory.’

I said, incensed, that I was sorry.

‘Entirely unsatisfactory. Can’t I make you understand what has happened? They actually say — I’d better read you the whole letter.’

I said I hadn’t time.

‘I believe in putting first things first.’

I said goodbye.

Just as I got to the end of the corridor, I heard my telephone ringing again. I was quite sure it was Mrs Henneker. I walked on.

Down in Great George Street, the evening light bland and calm, I still felt menaced by that monomaniac voice, as though that was the cause of my worry, and not what I was going to listen to in the House. Looking up, I could see the informatory light shining above Big Ben, with a clear violet sky beyond. Though I had seen it so often, it stirred a memory, or at least a disquiet, the reason for which seemed mixed with the monomaniac voice. I was tugging at the roots of memory, but they would not be pulled out. Was it the night my wife and I went to dine at Lord North Street and, arriving too early, had walked round by St Margaret’s? The light had been shining that evening, too; yet there had been no disquiet, we had been at leisure, and content.

In the central lobby, busy with cavernous activity, members were meeting constituents, acquaintances, taking them off to tea. When I got into the officials’ box, I could have counted less than a hundred members in the chamber. There seemed as yet no special excitement in the air. The Opposition opener was speaking, like a man who is settling down to a steady lecture. He was prosy but confident, saying nothing new. It was a standard speech, gaining nothing, losing nothing. For a while I felt the needle pass away.

On the front bench, Roger was leaning back, fingers entwined, hands under his chin: Tom Wyndham sat dutifully behind him. There were three other Ministers on the front bench, Collingwood among them. A few members entered, others left. Figures were dotted here and there on the empty benches, some not listening. It might have been a borough council, assembled out of duty, for a discussion of something not specially earth-shaking, such as a proposal for a subsidy to the civic theatre.

In the box, Douglas and two other Whitehall acquaintances were already sitting. Douglas, who was writing a note on the small desk flap, gave me a friendly smile. They were all professionals, they had been here before. The climax was a long way off. This was just the start, as perfunctory as the first hour of a county cricket match, or the exposition of a drawing-room comedy.

During the opening speech I went along to the Speaker’s Gallery. There Caro and Margaret were sitting together. ‘He’s not doing any harm,’ whispered Caro. They were going back to Lord North Street for a sandwich some time. They knew I shouldn’t eat till the sitting was over. ‘Come along then, and pick up Margaret,’ said Caro, in another whisper. Now that at last we were all in it, all immersed, she could put hostilities aside until another day. Her eyes looked at me, bold and full, just as her brother’s did when he gambled. No one could expect her to be happy. Yet she wasn’t in the true sense anxious, and in her excitement there was a glint, not only of recklessness, but of pleasure.

Back in my place at Douglas’ side, I listened to the First Lord making the first reply. He too was competent, more so than I had been told. He was using much the same language as the Opposition spokesman. In fact, I found myself thinking, as the words rolled out like the balloons from characters in comic strips, an observer from Outer Mongolia would have been puzzled to detect the difference between them. ‘Deterrence’ was a word they both used often. The First Lord was preoccupied with ‘potential scaling-down’, not scaling-down in the here and now, but ‘potential scaling-down if we can have the assurance that this will influence others’. He also talked of ‘shield and sword’, ‘striking power’, ‘capability’. It was a curious abstract language, of which the main feature was the taking of meaning out of words.

As I listened to their speeches and those which followed, I wasn’t interested in speculation, or even the arguments as such. We had heard them all, for years. So I was listening, with concentrated and often obsessed attention, not to the arguments, but simply to what they meant in terms of votes next night. That was all. For all those hours, it was enough. The House grew fuller during the early evening, then thinned at dinner-time. Until nine o’clock there were no surprises. A Labour Party back-bencher expressed views close to Francis Getliffe’s or mine. When it came to the vote there would, we already knew, be plenty of abstentions on the Labour side — how many we were not certain, but too many for comfort. Though these abstentions meant support for Roger’s policy, it was once again the support he could not afford. A Labour Party front-bencher expressed views that a member of Lord A—’s splinter group, or an American admiral, might have found reactionary. Lord A— himself made a Delphic speech, in which he stated his suspicions of the Government’s intentions and his determination to vote for them. Another ultra-Conservative, whom we had counted as lost, followed suit.

To the surprise of everyone round me, the first hours of the debate didn’t produce much animus. It was a full-dress parliamentary occasion. Everyone had heard the passions over the issue and the personality seething for weeks. They were waiting for violence, and it hadn’t come.

Then, precisely at nine, the member for a county division was called. When I saw him rise, I settled back without any apprehensions at all. His name was Trafford, and I knew him slightly. He wasn’t well-off, he lived on a small family business. He wasn’t on the extreme right, he wasn’t smart. He didn’t speak often, he asked pertinacious questions: he was never likely to be invited to Basset. I had met him because, in his constituency, there were people who had known me in my youth. I thought he was dull, determined, over-anxious to do all the listening.

He got up, heavy-shouldered, raw-skinned. Within a minute, he was ripping into an attack. It was an attack which, from the first sounding note, was virulent. He was a loyal supporter of the Government, he said: he hoped to be so in the future: but he couldn’t support this particular policy and this particular Minister. The policy was the policy of an adventurer. What else was this man? What had he done? What was his record of achievement? All he did was play the field, look out for the main chance, find the soft option. This was the kind of adventurer’s progress he was leading the country into. Why? What were his credentials? What reason had he given us for trusting him? Trust him? Trafford’s tone got more violent. Some of us compared him with a man we could truly trust, the Honourable Member for Brighton South. We wished that the Honourable Member for Brighton South were in his place tonight, bringing us back to our principles. We believed that he had been a victim to his own high standards.

As the constituency of Brighton South was shouted out, I could not recall the member’s name. I whispered a question to Douglas.

‘J C Smith,’ he said.

So it had got so far. The abuse went on, but the accusation became no more direct. It couldn’t have been understood, except by those who knew already; yet the hate was palpable. Was this man Trafford one of Smith’s disciples? It might be so. How far were they in touch with Hood, how far was he their weapon?

My own suspicion had crystallized. I did not believe that he was just a man unbalanced, on his own. Or rather, he might be unbalanced, or have become so, as he carried the persecution on. But I believed that there were cool minds behind it. There was evidence that he had a fanatical devotion to his own aircraft firm, the kind of devotion, passionate and pathetic, of one who didn’t get the rewards himself, but hero-worshipped those who did. There could have been people shrewd enough to use him, shrewd enough to know that he got excitement from the sexual life of others.

I thought that there were cool minds behind him. But it seemed to me that these were business minds. They might have their links with Smith’s disciples; but it didn’t sound like the work of those disciples, not even the work of this man himself, snarling in the chamber.

Adventurers were dangerous, he was saying. They might be ingratiating, they might have attractions for all those round them, they might be clever, but they were the ruin of any government and any nation. It was time this Government went back to the solid virtues, and then Trafford and his friends and the whole country would support them once more.

It wasn’t a long speech. Twice he was shouted into silence, but even Roger’s partisans were embarrassed and for a time hypnotized by his venom. Roger sat through it, eyes hard, face expressionless.

I hadn’t heard such an outburst in the House before. What harm had it done? For a few, for Collingwood, the reference to Smith wouldn’t be missed. The attack came from a quarter we should least have chosen, the respectable middle-of-the road of the Tory members. Had it been too violent for man to take? That seemed the best hope. When two of Hector Rose’s dinner companions got up to say they couldn’t support the Government, they were noticeably civil and restrained, and one paid a compliment to Roger’s character.

When the House rose, I couldn’t trust my judgement. A policeman was shouting ‘Who goes home?’ as I telephoned Ellen, not knowing what to say. I heard her quick, breath catching ‘Yes’, and told her all had gone as we expected, except — again a ‘Yes?’ — except, I said, for one bit of malice. I couldn’t tell what the effect would be. It had been meant to kill. It might result in nothing worse than a single unexpected abstention. ‘You’re not holding back?’ she said. I had to tell her there had been a hint about her husband: not many would have grasped it. Down the telephone came a harsh sigh: What difference would it make? Was it going to tip the balance? Her voice had risen. I said, in flat honesty, that no one could tell: I believed, for better or worse, it wouldn’t count. I added, meaninglessly, Try to sleep.

Through the sparkling, frosty night, I hurried round to Lord North Street. On the stairs I heard laughter from the drawing-room. As I got inside, I saw with astonishment, with the desire to touch wood, that Caro, Margaret and Roger were all looking cheerful. A plate of sandwiches was waiting for me, since I had not eaten all day.

‘What have you been doing to Trafford?’ Roger asked, as though to put me at my ease.

‘Do you understand it?’ I cried.

‘Whatever does he hope for?’ Caro spoke with genuine, full-throated scorn, not pretending. She must have heard each overtone of the insinuation, but she laughed like one saying — ‘If that is the worst they can do!’

‘Have you had any repercussions?’ I asked.

‘Not one.’ Roger spoke with studious interest, with the euphoria which sometimes breaks through in the middle of a crisis, ‘Do you know, I can’t begin to imagine why he did it. Can you?’

I couldn’t answer.

‘If no one can supply any motive — Why, I shall soon be forced to think that he meant what he said.’ His tone was unforced, free from rancour. He gave a laugh, like a man easy among his friends. He had drunk little, he was keyed up for action next day. He was hoping more simply than he had hoped for weeks.

43: The Meaning of Numbers

Next morning I woke early and lay listening to the papers as they thudded on to the hall floor. They didn’t settle either what I feared, or what I hoped. The Times was playing down the whole debate: on the middle page, Trafford only got a couple of lines. The Telegraph gave bolder headlines and more space: if one knew the language, one knew that they were anti-Roger. But they also muffled Trafford’s attack. The Express was angry with the chief Labour speaker. I dressed and went up Albion Gate to buy the other morning papers. I came back to breakfast, neither Margaret nor myself out of our misery, either for good or bad. In the morning light, she was ashamed of herself for having been so elated the night before.

I wondered whether Roger, too, had hated the morning. I wondered whether Caro had tried to give him comfort, as Margaret did to me. She knew, better than I did, that time and the hour ran through the roughest day.

Nothing happened — that didn’t make the day smoother — until, once more at tea-time, I was within a few minutes of leaving for the House. Then a telephone call came through; this time, not from Mrs Henneker. Instead, a friend of Sammikins had a piece of news. He had just come away from the Lords. He wanted to tell me that old Gilbey had, ten minutes before, taken a hand.

By this time, Lord Gilbey was very ill. He hadn’t been able to make a public appearance for twelve months, and his doctors were surprised that he had lived at all. Yet that afternoon, he had been impelled to make a public appearance, even if it were his last. He had arrived in the Lords. The subject for his intervention could not have seemed promising, for some peer, ennobled for scientific eminence, was moving for papers on the state of the country’s technological education. This hadn’t deterred Gilbey. Standing up, frail, white as bleached bread, he had supported the motion with passion. He didn’t understand technology, but he wanted it, if that was the price of keeping us strong. He was for anything, whether it was technology or black magic, if competent persons like the Noble Lord proved that it was necessary to keep us strong and make us stronger. He would assert this to his dying day, which wouldn’t be far off.

He had spoken for five minutes, an old soldier’s attack on adventurers, men who were too clever for their good or ours. Adventurers in high places, careerists in high places. He begged the Noble Lords to beware of them. He wanted to make this plea, even if it were for the last time.

It was pure revenge. He might die before the summer, but hatred for Roger would live as long as he did. It didn’t sound like a hero’s end: and then I thought that it might be just his willingness to end like this which had made him a hero.

I was relieved to be back in the box, relieved to sit beside Hector Rose instead of Douglas. On this night it was better to have the company of an ally who wasn’t a friend than the other way round. Arms folded across his chest, Rose watched with trained, cold eyes. As, at intervals of half an hour, three members whom he had designated by name got up with hostile speeches, he permitted himself to say: ‘According to plan.’ Yet, even to him, fresh as he was, the debate was not giving any answer. The tone had become more bitter on both sides. The benches were full now, members were squatting in the aisles. There were echoes of Trafford; words like ‘gambler’, ‘adventurer’, ‘risk’, ‘surrender’, snapped into the Chamber, but all from men we had already written off. Several speakers sat down, leaving it vague how they intended to vote. When a Labour ex-Minister began a preamble on strategy, Rose said quietly: ‘I give him forty minutes. Time for us to eat.’

I didn’t want to leave.

‘No, you must.’

Douglas had made the same estimate about the speaker’s staying-power. As we reached the Hall together, Rose gave him lavish and courteous greetings, but pointedly did not invite him to come along with us.

We hurried through the yard, across to a Whitehall pub. There Rose, who normally had delicate tastes in food, put down a large hunk of cheese and a scotch egg, and inspected me with satisfaction as I did the same. ‘That will keep us going,’ he said dutifully.

We hadn’t spoken about the debate. I said the one word: ‘Well?’

‘I don’t know, my dear Lewis, I don’t know.’

‘Any chance?’

‘He’ll have to pull something out of the bag himself, shouldn’t you have thought?’

He meant, in the final speech.

I wanted to scratch over the evidence, to reckon the odds, but Rose wouldn’t have it.

‘It doesn’t seem profitable,’ he said. Instead, he had his own recourse. He drew out a stiff, plain pocket-book, such as I had often seen him use in meetings, and began to write down numbers. Maximum possible number of members on the Government side, 315. He jotted down the figure, without an inquiry or a doubt, like a computing machine. Unavoidable absences, illness, and so on — the Whips appeared to expect eight. Available votes, 307. Rose did not hesitate: Cabinet dubious, Minister not sticking to the rules, he couldn’t afford defections. 290 votes, and he might be safe: 17 abstentions. (From the debate, we now knew there would be at least nine, and one vote, Sammikins’, against.)

Anything under 280, and he was in great danger.

Anything under 270, and it was all over.

Rose went on with his own kind of nepenthe. He didn’t think the Opposition vote was relevant, but in his clear, beautiful script he continued to write figures. Maximum: 230. Absences: 12. Abstentions: perhaps 25.

The majority would not be significant. Roger could survive provided he received the 290 votes from his own side, plus or minus 10. That would be the figure which all informed persons would regard as decisive that night.

Rose looked up with the pleasure of one who has performed a neat operation. It struck me, even in the suspense, that the figures would be hard to explain to anyone not steeped in this kind of parliamentary process. The figures looked blank, the margins negligible. They would decide at least one career, maybe others, conceivably a good deal else.

When we returned to our places, the ex-Minister had only just finished. More speeches, the House becoming packed. The shouts of laughter were louder, so were the protests, but most of the time there was a dense silence. It was a dense, impatient silence. Men looked at Roger, sitting heavily on the front bench, chin in hand. The last perfunctory ‘hear-hears’ after the last Opposition speech damped down. Again the silence. Voice from the Chair — ‘Mr Quaife.’

At last. Roger stood up, heavy, moving untidily but without strain. He was much the biggest man on either front bench. Once again, as when I first met him in his clumsy, powerful, formidable presence, he gave me a reminder of Pierre Bezukhov. There was loyal applause behind him.

He looked relaxed, abnormally so, troublingly so, for a man in his chief trial. He began with taunts. He had been accused of so many things, he said. Some of them were contradictory, they could not all be valid. Of course, wise persons remarked that, if you wanted to hear the truth about yourself, you listened to what your enemies said. Splendid. But that principle didn’t apply only to him. It applied to everyone. Even, believe it or not, to other Honourable Members, in some cases Honourable and Gallant Members, who had so reluctantly volunteered their character — sketches of himself. He listed four of the ultra-Conservatives. He did not refer, even by an intonation, to Trafford. It might be a good idea if each of us accepted just what his enemies said; it might make us better, and the world too. It would certainly rub into us that we were all miserable sinners.

It was good-natured. The House was laughing. Once or twice a barb darted out. Suddenly one heard him, not so Pierre-like, but clear, hard, piercing. Though his friends cheered, I was not easy. It might be too light a beginning. In a sense, it seemed too much above the battle. I looked at Hector Rose. Almost imperceptibly, he gave a shake of the head. In the House, in the galleries, people were saying that this was the speech of the debate. As he got down to the arguments, he was using the idiom of a late-twentieth-century man. He had thrown away the old style of parliamentary rhetoric altogether. Compared with the other speeches from both the front benches, this might have come from a man a generation younger. It was the speech of one used to broadcasting studios, television cameras, the exposure of the machine. He didn’t declaim: he spoke about war, weapons, the meaning of a peaceful future, in his own voice. This was how, observers said later, parliamentarians would be speaking in ten years’ time.

I scarcely noticed. I was thinking, was this the time that he might choose to break loose? Once or twice he had threatened to cut the tangle of these arguments, and to try to touch something deeper. Would it help him? We were all children of our time and class, conditioned to think of these decisions (Were they decisions? Were we just driven?) in forms we couldn’t break. Could anyone break them? Were there forces which Roger or anyone in that house, or any of the rest of us, could release?

If he had thought of trying, he put the idea behind him. He was talking only to the House. And yet, within ten minutes, I knew that he wasn’t withdrawing, that he had forgotten temptations, ambiguities and tricks. He was saying what he had often concealed, but all along believed. Now that he had to speak, he gave an account, lucid and sharp, of the kind of thinking Getliffe and his colleagues had made their own. He gave it with more force than they could have done. He gave it with the authority of one who would grip the power. But it was only right at the end that he said something which dropped, quietly, unofficially, into the late night air. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘The problems we’re trying to handle are very difficult. So difficult that most people in this country — people who are by and large at least as intelligent as we are — can’t begin to understand them. Simply because they haven’t had the information, and hadn’t been taught to come to terms with them. I’m not sure how many of us can comprehend what our world is like, now that we’re living with the bomb. Perhaps very few, or none. But I’m certain that the overwhelming majority of people who are, I repeat, at least as intelligent as we are, don’t have any idea. We are trying to speak for them. We have taken a great deal upon ourselves. We never ought to forget it.’

I was feeling admiration, anxiety, the exhilaration of anxiety. Now it had come to it, did I wish that he had compromised? His colleagues could get rid of him now: the bargains and balances of the White Paper didn’t allow for this. The chance, the only chance, was that he might take the House with him.

‘It has been said in this house, these last two nights, that I want to take risks. Let me tell you this. All choices involve risks. In our world, all the serious choices involve grave ones. But there are two kinds of risk. One is to go on mindlessly, as though our world were the old world. I believe, as completely as I believe anything, that if this country and all countries go on making these bombs, testing these bombs — just as though they were so many battleships — then before too long a time, the worst will happen. Perhaps through no one’s fault — just because we’re all men, liable to make mistakes, go mad, or have bad luck. If that happens, our descendants, if we have any, will curse us. And every curse will be justified.

‘This country can’t be a super-power any longer. I should be happier if it could. Though it is possible that being a super-power is in itself an illusion, now that science has caught up with us. Anyway, we can’t be one. But I am certain that we can help — by example, by good judgement, by talking sense, and acting sense — we can help swing the balance between a good future and a bad future, or between a good future and none at all. We can’t contract out. The future is firmly poised. Our influence upon it is finite, but it exists.

‘That is why I want to take one kind of risk. It is, in fact, a small risk, which may do good, as opposed to a great risk which would certainly do harm. That is still the choice. That is all.’

Roger sat down, heavy-faced, hands in his pockets. For an instant, a long instant, there was silence. Then applause behind him. How solid was it? Was it uncomfortable? There were one or two cheers from the back benches on the other side. Ritual took over. The lobby bells rang. I noticed Sammikins stand up, head high and wild, in the middle of his friends, going out defiantly to vote against them. Half a dozen members sat obstinately on the Government benches, most of them with arms crossed, parading their determination to abstain. That told us nothing. There might be others, not so forthright, who would go out and not pass through the lobby.

The members returned. Some were talking, but the noise level was low. There was a crowd, excited, tense, at the sides of the Speaker’s Chair. Before the tellers had passed the dispatch box, a hush had fallen. It was a hush but not a high-spirited one. The voice came: ‘Ayes on the right, 186.’ (There had been more Labour abstentions than Rose had allowed for.)

The voice came again.

‘Noes on the left, 271.’

Rose looked at me with cold sympathy. He said, precisely: ‘I consider this unfortunate.’

In the chamber, it took longer for the result to sink in. The Chairman repeated the numbers in a sonorous bass, and announced that the Noes had it.

Seconds later, half a minute later, a chant opened up from the Opposition. ‘Resign! Resign!’

Without fuss, the Government front bench began to empty. The Prime Minister, Collingwood, Monty Cave, went out of the House together, passing close by us in the box. Cries followed them, but the shouts were focused on Roger. He was sitting back, one arm stretched out behind him, talking, with apparent casualness, to the First Lord and Leverett-Smith.

‘Resign! Resign!’

The yells broke on him. Once, he gave a wave across the gangway, like a Wimbledon player acknowledging the existence of the crowd.

Taking his time, he got up. He didn’t look either at his own back-benchers or at the others. ‘Resign! Resign!’ The shouts grew louder. His great back moved slowly down the aisle, away from us. At the Bar he turned and made his bow to the Chair. Then he walked on. When he was out of sight, the shouts still crashed behind him.

44: ‘You Have Nothing to Do with It’

Next morning, headlines, questions in the papers: rumours in Whitehall. Beyond the windows, the February sky was clear and crystalline. In my office, the scrambled, yellow corded telephone kept ringing. No message from Roger had reached the Prime Minister’s secretary.

Collingwood was reported to have said: ‘This dance will no further go.’ (The only historical reference the old man knew, said a cultivated voice at the other end of the wire.) He was said to be bearing Roger no malice, to be speaking of him with dispassion. He had heard — this I did not know for certain until later — about Roger and his nephew’s wife. He took the news with stony lack of concern. ‘I regard that as irrelevant,’ he said. He turned out to have no feeling whatsoever for his nephew. That had been one of the unrealistic fears.

That morning, there was a strong rumour, which came from several sources, that some of Roger’s supporters were calling on the Prime Minister. They were trying to arrange for the Prime Minister to interview him. He hadn’t resigned yet. Another rumour: he was backing down. He wouldn’t resign. He would announce that he had stressed one part of the White Paper at the expense of the whole. He had been wrong, but now faithfully accepted the compromise. He would go on implementing the compromise policies: or alternatively, he would take a dimmer job.

I heard nothing from him. I imagined that he was like the rest of us when the worst has happened, in moments still tantalized by hopes, almost by fulfilment, as though it had gone the other way: just as, when Sheila had betrayed me when I was a young man, I walked across the park deceived by gleams of happiness, as though I were going to her bed: just as, when an operation has failed, one lies in hospital and, now and then, has reveries of content, as though one were whole again.

He would be living with temptations. He wasn’t different from most of those who have obtained any kind of power, petty or grand. He wanted to cling to it up to the end, beyond the end. If he went out now, untouched, unbudging, that was fine, that was in the style he would like for himself. And yet, he knew politics too well not to know that he might never come back. It would be bitter to behave as if he had been wrong, to be juggled with, put in an inconspicuous Ministry for years: but perhaps that was the way to win. Would they let him? He must be thinking of the talks that day. Others would be counting the odds, with more degrees of freedom than he had. It might be good management to make sure that he was disposed of. Some might be sorry, but that didn’t count. If they gave him a second chance, it wouldn’t be because of sympathy or even admiration. They owed him no support. It would be because he still had some power. They must be weighing up just how much influence he still possessed. Would he be more dangerous eliminated, or allowed to stay?

In the afternoon I attended a departmental meeting, Rose in the chair. He hadn’t spoken to me that morning; he greeted me with overflowing politeness, as though I were a valuable acquaintance whom he had not seen for months. No one round the table could have guessed that we had been sitting side by side, in anxiety, the night before. He got through the business as accurately, as smoothly, as he would have done when I first sat under him, nearly twenty years before. Next year, he would be sixty, taking his last meeting in this room. He would go on like this till the last day. This particular afternoon, it wasn’t even interesting business: it had to be done.

As soon as I returned to my room, my PA came in.

‘There’s a lady waiting for you,’ she said. She looked inquisitive and apologetic. ‘I’m afraid she seems rather upset.’

I asked who it was.

‘She says her name is Mrs Smith.’

When I had told Ellen the result over the telephone, late the previous night, she had gasped. I had heard a gulp of tears before the receiver crashed down.

That afternoon, as she sat down in the chair beside my desk, her eyes were open, bloodshot, piteous and haughty. They reminded me of someone else’s so hauntingly that I couldn’t at first listen to what she was saying. Then, down the years, I had it. They were like my mother’s, after an intolerable wound to her pride, as on the day my father went bankrupt.

She asked: ‘What is he going to do?’

I shook my head. ‘He’s told me nothing.’

‘I haven’t been able to see him.’

She was crying out for sympathy, and yet she would reject it.

I said, as astringently as I could make myself: ‘Yes, it’s bad. It’s part of the situation.’

‘I mustn’t see him till he’s decided, one way or the other. You understand, don’t you?’

‘I think so.’

‘I mustn’t influence him. I mustn’t even try.’

Then she gave a crisp, ironic, almost cheerful laugh, and added: ‘Do you believe I could?’

I had seen her so often under strain. This day was the worst. But — just in that moment — I could feel how she behaved with Roger. Given a chance, she was, more than most of us, high-spirited and gay.

‘Tell me something,’ she said, her eyes searching mine. ‘Which is better for him?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know well enough.’ Impatiently she explained herself. She might have been reading my own speculations earlier that day. Until she met Roger, she was politically innocent. Now she could follow, by instinct, love and knowledge, the moves, the temptations, the choices. Her insight had told her much what mine did: except that she was certain that, if Roger wanted to climb down, they would welcome him.

‘Which is better for him?’

‘If I knew, which I don’t, ought I to tell you?’ I said.

‘You’re supposed to be a friend of his, aren’t you?’ she flared out.

‘Fortunately,’ this time I could let the temperature drop, and smile sarcastically back, ‘I just don’t know which is better.’

‘But you think you do—’

I said: ‘If we forget your side of it, then I think he’d probably, not certainly but probably, be wiser to stay if he can.’

‘Why?’

‘If he’s out of politics, won’t he feel he’s wasting his life?’

‘It means humiliating himself and crawling to them.’ She flushed. She was hating ‘them’ with all the force of her nature.

‘Yes, it means that.’

‘Do you know that underneath he’s a very proud man?’

I looked at her and said, ‘Hasn’t he learned to live with it?’

‘Has anyone? Don’t you believe that I’m proud too?’

She was speaking without constraint, self-effacingness stripped off, codes of behaviour fallen away. Her face had gone naked and wild.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I believe that.’

‘If he does throw it up and comes to me, will he ever forgive me?’

It was a new fear, different from that which she had once confided in her own flat, yet grown from the same root. Then she had been afraid that, once he had failed, he would blame her and be unable to endure her. Now that fear had gone. She believed that, whatever happened, he would need her. Yet the doubt, the cruelty, the heritage, remained.

‘You have nothing to do with it,’ I said. ‘If he had never fallen in love with any woman at all, he would have been in precisely the same position as he is today.’

‘Are you dead sure?’

I said immediately, ‘I am dead sure.’

I was saying what I almost believed. If she had not been sitting beside me, wounded and suspicious, waiting for the slightest qualification, I might have been less positive. Roger had stood much less of a chance of getting his policy through — I became convinced later, looking back — than we imagined when we were living in the middle of it. It was hard to believe that a personal chance, such as their love affair, had had any effect. And yet — their love affair had had an effect on him: without it, would he have acted precisely as he had?

‘I am dead sure,’ I repeated.

‘Will he ever believe it?’

For an instant, I did not answer. ‘Will he ever believe it?’

She was thinking of Roger coming to her, marrying her: the plain life, after Caro’s home, the high hopes gone: the inquest on the past, the blame. She sat there for a moment or so, not speaking. Ellen, so self-effacing in public as to be inconspicuous, was filled with the beauty of violence, and perhaps with the beauty given her by the passion for sheer action, even if it were action destructive to herself, to all her hopes.

‘I’m telling myself,’ she said, ‘that I ought to get out of it, now. Today.’

I said: ‘Could you?’ She stared at me, her eyes once more piteous and haughty. She asked: ‘What is he going to do?’

45: A Good Letter

Some time after I had seen Ellen into a taxi, I was clearing up work in my office. The sky outside the window was already dark, the secretaries had gone home, all was quiet. The private phone buzzed. Would I call in on Roger before I left?

Through the corridors, deserted now, I trod out the long, maze-like walk. One or two doors were open, lights of offices shone out: always the offices of the top echelon, staying late. Douglas was working, but I did not look in to say good night. I went straight into Roger’s room. From the reading-lamp shone out a cone of light which glared off the paper, was sopped up by the blotting-pad. Roger stood up, looming against the window. For the first time since we had been introduced, years before, he gripped my hand.

‘Well?’ he said.

I was taken aback by his vigorous, active manner. This was like a conversation which one had rehearsed in one’s head and which was going wrong. I muttered something lame, about it being a pity.

‘Never mind about that,’ he said. He gazed at me with sharp, unrelenting eyes.

‘Well?’ he said again. He snapped his fingers.

For an instant I thought he wanted me to take the initiative. It might have been the beginning of a business deal. But I was mishearing him. He went on: ‘It’s time I thought it out again from the beginning, isn’t it?’ He gave out a special kind of exhilaration. The exhilaration of failure: the freedom of being bare to the world.

He was certain where he was, because there was nothing else to be certain of. I thought I knew him. Ellen knew him better. But the way we had seen him that day was not the way he saw himself. The hedges, the duplicities of his nature — either they did not exist for him that day, or he saw through them. This was nothing like the night when David Rubin had begged him to back down, and Roger had played with him.

Across the pool of light, he began to talk. To begin with, as though it were obvious and had to be put out of the way, he said that he would have to go. There was no argument. He was out: so was what he had tried to do.

Then he broke out: ‘But not for good. Not for long. Someone’s going to do it. Maybe I still can.’

It was the last thing I expected. He was talking with a curious impersonality about the future, He did not mention his wife or Ellen, as though ruling out his self-bound concerns, the concern of his own guilt. He did say, as an objective fact, as part of the situation, that he would be on his own: without influence, without powerful friends. Even without money. He would have to start again. ‘It will be harder,’ he said. ‘It’ll be harder than if I’d never done anything at all.’

He looked at me with a caustic, open smile.

‘You don’t think I stand a chance, do you?’

Kindnesses, personal relations, had dropped away. I answered: ‘Not much.’

‘Someone’s going to do it. All we want is time, and luck, and something in the air. Someone’s going to do it.’

Just when he had been at the peak of his power, when it seemed that the Prime Minister and Collingwood were befriending him, he talked about the political process with relaxation, with detachment. Could anyone else have done better than he had done? Could he have avoided the mistakes that he had made? What about mine? If we had handled Brodzinski better? How far did personalities count? Nothing like as much as one liked to think. Only in those circumstances when the hinge is oiled, but the door may swing or not. If that isn’t the situation, then no personality is going to make more than an ineffectual noise.

He wasn’t asking for comfort. He wasn’t even asking for my view. He was speaking as though to himself, in the quiet room. He said, If one goes too far, one’s ruined. If one doesn’t go at all, one might as well not be there.

He said, Trying may have value. Even when it has failed. The situation will never be quite time same again. He said (I remembered when he had first said it): The first thing is to get the power. The next thing is to do something with it. He said: Someone is going to do what I tried to do. I don’t know whether it’ll be me.

He spoke with simplicity, almost with purity. It was hard for anyone outside to find within him that pure and simple feeling. He cared, less than many men, what his own feelings were. He had felt most temptations and passions, but not that kind of self-regard. And yet, he wanted something for himself. When he said, he wanted to get power and ‘do something with it’, he meant that he wanted a justification, a belief that he was doing something valuable with his life. He also wanted a justification, in an older and deeper sense. He wanted something like a faith, a faith in action. He had lurched about until he found just that. Despite his compromises and callousnesses — or to an extent because of them — he had believed in what he was doing. Those round him might suspect him, but there, and there alone, he did not suspect himself.

The irony was that, if our suspicions had been true, he would have been a more successful politician. He might even, within the limits of those years, have done more good.

It was getting on for eight o’clock. All of a sudden, Roger’s manner changed. He pushed one foot against the desk and said, as though we were at work once more: ‘I want you to read this.’

All this time, a letter had been waiting in front of him. It began, ‘Dear Prime Minister’, in his own bold holograph, and continued in typescript. It was a good letter. There was not a sign of reproach or rancour, either overt or hinted at. It said that Roger had been honoured to be the Prime Minister’s colleague. He was sorry that his policy had evoked so much dissension, and that he had emphasized parts of it to an extent which his colleagues could not share, so that both it and he had now become liabilities to the Government. He continued to believe in his policy. He could not persuade himself that it had been wrong. Since he could not honestly change his mind, there was only one course open to him, which he was sure the Prime Minister would sympathize with and understand. He hoped to be of some use to the Prime Minister and the Government as a private member.

There the typing ended. In Roger’s hand, halfway down the third page, was written, black and firm: ‘Yours ever, Roger Quaife.’

As soon as I lifted my eyes he said: ‘Will that do?’

‘It’s good,’ I said.

‘It will be accepted, you know’ (he meant the resignation).

‘Yes, it’ll be accepted,’ I said.

‘With slightly excessive haste.’ We gazed at each other across the desk.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’d better see it go.’

One of the red dispatch boxes was standing beside the telephones. From his hip-pocket he brought out a bunch of keys and unlocked it. He did it with the ceremonial air of a man who is enjoying a privilege. Not many men had ever revelled more in having the liberty of the dispatch-boxes, of being in possession of such a key. He was enjoying the privilege, the physiognomic charm of office, even then.

Punctiliously he placed the letter in the box, and relocked it. He pressed a button, and his principal private secretary — who this last week could have had no time to call his own — opened the door.

‘Will you see this goes to the Prime Minister?’ said Roger. He spoke in a matter-of-fact tone.

The young man, thirtyish, a high class civil servant on the climb, acknowledged it with similar matter-of-fact politeness. It might have been any of the messages he had transmitted for Roger these last years, or would go on transmitting for years to come, although he must have been wondering now whether this was the end, and who his new master would be.

The door closed. Roger smiled.

‘I might have changed my mind,’ he said. ‘That would have been unfortunate.’

His voice, his whole expression, had gone tired. He had to force himself to speak again, to produce a spurt of vigour.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘to have got some of our friends into trouble.’ He was trying to speak with warmth, with intimacy: but he couldn’t do it any more. He tried again when he said: ‘I’m sorry to have done you harm.’

‘That’s nothing.’

‘I’m sorry.’

After that, he did not want to make another effort. He sat back, waiting to sit in that room alone. As I was leaving he said: ‘I shan’t be available for some time. I’m going away.’

46: Another Choice

My own choice was clear. Margaret and I dismissed it in half an hour and then, friction-free, stood ourselves a drink. It seemed to both of us that we might be on the eve of a holiday, cases packed and labelled, the car ordered for nine in the morning, the ship awaiting us, rest in the sun.

I waited three days. In that time, Roger’s resignation was announced and the name of his successor. It was all assimilated in the papers, Whitehall, the clubs, as though it had happened months before. I waited three days, then asked for an appointment with Hector Rose.

It was a quarter-past ten in the morning. In the Park below, the mist was clearing. On Rose’s desk a bowl of hyacinths breathed out the scent of other interviews, of headaching lunches long ago.

I said, the moment I sat down: ‘It’s time for me to go now.’

The elegant posturing was washed away; his concentration was complete.

‘You mean—?’

‘I mean, I’ve outlived my usefulness here.’

‘I should have thought,’ said Rose, ‘that that was overstating the case.’

‘You know as well as I do, that I’m identified with this debacle.’

‘To an extent,’ Rose replied, arms folded, ‘that is unfortunately true.’

‘It is entirely true.’

‘I don’t think, however, that you need to take it too tragically.’

‘I’m not taking it tragically,’ I said. ‘I’m just commenting, I have to do business for you with people we both know. In their view, I’ve backed the wrong horse. Fairly openly. It wouldn’t have mattered so much doing it openly, if it hadn’t been the wrong horse.’

Rose gave an arctic smile.

‘It’s simple,’ I said. ‘I should be no good with these people any more. It’s time to go.’

There was a long silence. Rose considered, his pale eyes still on me, unblinking, expressionless. At last he began to speak, fluently but with deliberation.

‘You have always had a tendency, if I may say so with respect, to permit yourself a certain degree of over-simplification. I can see that you have occasionally acted in a fashion which would have been, shall I say, unusual, if you had been a career civil servant. That has applied particularly in the matter of the unfortunate Quaife. But I might remind you that there have been other examples, during the course of your valuable activities. I think you should acknowledge that the Service is not so finicky as our critics are fond of telling us. The Service has been prepared to put up with what might be, by some standards, a certain trifling amount of embarrassment. It has been considered that we have gained through your having taken some rather curious liberties. In fact, we have formed the firm opinion that your presence was very much more advantageous than your absence. I dislike stressing the point, but we have expressed our appreciation in the only way open to us.’

He was referring to the Honours Lists.

I said, ‘You’ve treated me generously. I know that.’

He bowed his head. He considered, just as precisely: ‘I can see further that after these recent events, it wouldn’t be in your interests or ours for you to undertake certain commissions for us, including perhaps some which you would have carried through with your usual distinction. I suggest, though, that this is really not serious sub specie aeternitatis. It ought not to be beyond the wit of man to make a slight redistribution of your functions. We shall still retain the benefit of your services, at places where we continue to need them. And where, you will understand, though this isn’t an occasion for flattery, we can’t comfortably afford to dispense with them yet awhile.’

He was speaking with fairness, and perhaps with justice. He was also speaking as he might have done at any time during our twenty years’ connection. Within a few months he would himself be retiring from the Service — the Service which had not given him his full reward, certainly not his desire. If I left a vacant niche, it would soon be no concern of his. Nevertheless, he was still saying ‘we’, taking care of Service needs years ahead. He hadn’t, by so much as a flick, recognized that for a short time, for a few days and hours, we had been, not colleagues, but allies. That was wiped out. He was speaking with absolute fairness, but between us there had come down once more, like a curtain, the utter difference in our natures, the uneasiness, perhaps the dislike.

I thanked him, paused, and said: ‘No. But that doesn’t alter the position. I want to go.’

‘You really want to go?’

I nodded.

‘Why?’

‘There are some things I want to help get done. I thought we might do them this way, on the quiet. Now I don’t think we can. Or at least, there’s nothing more I can do on the quiet. I shall have to be a private citizen again.’

‘Will it be so very private, my dear Lewis?’ Rose was watching me carefully.

He asked: ‘I take it, there is no financial problem?’

I said no. He knew it in advance. He wasn’t above a dash of envy because I had been lucky. Himself, though he had been expensively educated, he had no money. When he retired, he would have to live on his pension.

‘You intend to go?’

‘Yes.’

He gazed at me. When it came to men’s actions, he was a good judge. He shrugged his shoulders.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Well, it remains to us to make it as painless as possible.’

There was another silence, not a long one.

He said, without emphasis: ‘I should like to put one consideration before you. If you resign now, it won’t pass unnoticed. You are fairly conspicuous. There will be those who will be malicious enough to draw certain conclusions. They might even hint that your departure is not unconnected with recent differences of opinion. And it wouldn’t be altogether easy to prove them wrong.’

He went on: ‘That would be somewhat embarrassing for us. No doubt you will make your own view heard in your own good time. But I suggest you have some obligation to give us a decent interval. You’ve been working with us for a long time. It wouldn’t seem proper if you made matters awkward for us by a dramatic resignation.’

I did not reply. Rose went on: ‘I also suggest it wouldn’t be good for you. I expect it affects you very little. You have other things to occupy you. I understand that. But still, you’ve done your service to the state. It would be a pity to spoil it now. Whoever one is, I think it’s wrong to leave a job with hard feelings. It’s bad for the soul to leave under a cloud.’

I could not tell whether he was being considerate. His manner, which had become more than ever frigid, made the words sound scornful or artificial. Yet he was insistent.

I said: ‘How long should I stay?’

‘The end of the year? Is that asking too much?’

I said I would do it. Rose accepted the bargain, businesslike, without thanks. It was only when I went towards the door that he began to thank me profusely, not for meeting his wishes or accepting his advice, but for the somewhat more commonplace feat of walking along the corridor to see him.

47: Night Sky over London

It was a warm summer night, a year and a half after Roger’s resignation, when Margaret and I arrived at South Street for a party at Diana’s. Not that either of us was thinking of the past. This was just an engagement, it wasn’t more significant than others, it was part of the to-ing and fro-ing. The children were at school, we were free, it was pleasant to drive round the Park through the soft indigo evening.

In the drawing-room upstairs, the guests clattered and drank, keeping eyes alert for the latest entrant. There was a simmer of pleasure as they moved around, the pleasure of being inside the circle, like being in a party on ship-board, with the sea pattering below. It was all still going on, I thought. Going on as, for most of them, it had always been: and as, in their expectations, it always would.

I was curious, as at any of Diana’s parties, about who was in favour now. Collingwood stood by the fireplace, sempiternal, satisfied, unvocal. For a while Monty Cave, who had been promoted that spring, was at his side. Cave had now outdistanced his competitors: all Diana’s influence was behind him: he was being talked of as the next Chancellor. People were continuing to speculate whether Diana would marry him, but, in spite of her resolve to break away from loneliness, she, who wasn’t used to dithering, went on doing so. She was hard-baked enough about the power game, but she couldn’t make herself hard-baked about a second marriage. She was still capable of dreams of love. Her will deserted her. She had had a happy marriage and longed for another. She was not ready for one which was not real.

Lenton came in, did not stay long, but found time to talk, modestly, unobtrusively, to his hostess. As Prime Minister he might be busy, but he was teaching some lessons to men who thought him commonplace. One was, never make enemies if you can help it, and above all, never make enemies by neglect. Before he went, he had beamed, porcine and attentive, at each of his supporters. I noticed him whispering to Douglas Osbaldiston, whom I had not seen at Diana’s before, and who, years before, when his wife was well and we were better friends, used to tease Margaret and me for our excursions into the high life.

Diana kept up with the times, I thought. She used not to pay attention to top civil servants, but here was not only Douglas, but one of his co-equals at the Treasury. Douglas had duly returned there, and had one of the top jobs created for him. All that Hector Rose, now retired, had wished for from the Service, Douglas had obtained. Margaret continued to visit his wife in hospital, and, in the months since I left Whitehall, he had frequently dined with us. Yet, between him and me, the breach wasn’t healed. He had tried; the coldness was one-sided, the fault was mine.

From the ruck of the party, Sammikins halloo’ed at me. He was looking for someone to take to Pratt’s, to finish off the evening. He wasn’t having any luck: he had just been turned down for the sixth time, he announced at the top of his voice, his laugh ringing out like a spirited but inappropriate imitation of Roland’s horn at Roncesvalles. Caro went by at that moment, magnificently pretty, looking as though she were carefree. She tapped her brother on the shoulder, threw a cordial word to Margaret, then spun round at the greeting of somebody else and addressed herself to him with vivacity. She did not come near me, or Margaret, again that night.

I felt my arm gripped. It was Lord Lufkin. He said in a meaningful and grinding tone: ‘That man Hood.’ The tone was meaningful, but for an instant I was lost. Quite lost. The party lapped and hooted round me. All this was still going on. I had forgotten. But Lufkin did not forget.

‘I’ve got him,’ he said.

Lufkin was obsessive enough to go in for revenge. No one else in his position would have done the same. It seemed fantastic that a great tycoon should have spent his energy — not just for a day, but for weeks and months — working out plans for getting a middle-rank employee of another firm dismissed from his job. Yet that was precisely what he had done. He did not regard it as revenge, but as natural justice. When he spoke of it, he did not exhibit triumph or even relish. It was something he had to do, and was able to do. It was part of the rightness of things.

In the roundabout of the party, among the groomed and prosperous faces, for the first time that night I thought of Roger. He was not there. He would not have been invited. If he had been invited, it was not likely that he would have come. Margaret had asked him and Ellen often to our house, but they had accepted only once. Face to face, he was as warm and easy-natured as he had ever been: and yet he shied, like one with an active phobia, from the places and people he had known best in his period of power.

He was still in the House. But, now the divorces had gone through and he had married Ellen, his constituency party would not run him at the next election. He had not lost his hope. He and Ellen were living modestly, in an ambience quite unlike the glitter of Lord North Street. His income, such as it was, came from two or three directorships which Lufkin had stiffly but judiciously put in his way. As for the marriage, we had not seen them at close enough quarters to be anything like certain, but Margaret, prejudiced against it, had nevertheless come to believe that it was firm and good.

Ellen she had not quite brought herself to like. This was partly out of feeling for Caro and partly, I thought to myself with a degree of inner amusement, because in some of the qualities of their natures, she and Ellen were not altogether dissimilar. Both were active, both were capable of violent feeling, both were natural partisans, though Ellen had nothing of the easy flow inbred in Margaret. ‘She is a one-man dog, you know,’ Margaret had once said to me with a rueful grin, ‘she hasn’t anything left over for the rest of us. And that I find a little hard to take. Still, it’s not hard for him to take, and I suppose that’s the important thing.’

Parting from Lufkin, I went through the heat and dazzle, out to the balcony in search of her. There she was, in a group with Francis Getliffe and others, and I took her aside. Lufkin’s news filled my mind, absented me from the party. I felt as though I had suddenly recaptured a long dead grief or joy, and I had to tell her.

She listened, looking at me and then into the brilliant room. She knew, more quickly than I did, that I was not really telling her about Lufkin or Hood, but about Roger’s failure and our own. I was really speaking of what we had tried and failed, to do.

‘Yes,’ said Margaret, ‘we need a victory.’

Her spirit was strong. She was looking back into the room. Just as I had done earlier, she was thinking how it all went on. ‘We need a victory,’ she said. She was not giving up, nor letting me.

Francis Getliffe joined us. For an instant Margaret and I stopped talking, awkwardly. We might have been caught gossiping about him, using his name in malice. Francis wasn’t with us any more. He had given up. Not that he had changed his opinions: but he could not endure another struggle. He had retired to his house in Cambridge and to his research. Already, that evening, he had talked about a new idea with as much excitement as when he was young.

Defeat can cut into friendships, I was thinking, as much as being on different sides. Francis and I had been intimate for thirty years. Yet now part of the spontaneity had had to go, almost as much as it had gone with Douglas. It was a tiny price to pay for having gone through the struggle: but still, it was a price.

We talked a little, the three of us, of the college and Cambridge. We went to the end of the balcony. Over the garden, over the rooftops, shone the rusty, vivid night-sky of London, the diffused recognition of all those lives. We talked, more eagerly now, of our children, with the special tenderness of old friends, who have seen each other’s families growing up. The memory of the struggle, even the reason for it, dimmed down. We talked of the children, and were happy. The only puzzle remaining to us that night was Penelope. She and Arthur Plimpton were both in the United States and they had both got married, but not to each other. Francis gave a grim, quixotic smile and thought it was a joke against himself.

Under the town’s resplendent sky we talked of the children and their future. We talked as though the future were easy and secure, and as though their lives would bring us joy.