Corridors of Power Page 11

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

  I thought this was my best time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  14: Humiliation Among Friends

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

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

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

  ‘Lewis had better hear this,’ said Rubin.

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

  ‘What is it?’

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

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

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

  ‘Didn’t you expect it?’

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

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

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

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

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

  Margaret burst out, ‘What isn’t?’

  Just for a second, Arthur smiled.

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘How will it?’ I said angrily.

  Rubin shrugged his shoulders.

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

  ‘Not yet,’ said Arthur, with confidence.

  �
��No, not yet,’ said David Rubin.

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

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

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