Corridors of Power Page 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘We ought to have gone through with it.’

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

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

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

  ‘I want to talk,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’

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

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

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

  She gave her loud, unconstricted laugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
‘Has he?’

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

  ‘I’ve got to believe in it.’

  ‘Well?’

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

  ‘What is it?’

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

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

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

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

  ‘You’ve got to make it easy for him.’

  ‘I don’t think you need worry–’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  17: The Switch of Suspicion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘How do you think the committee is going?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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