Corridors of Power Page 15

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He leaned forward. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘if I said what the position seemed like tonight – I should have to say that I’ve got it in the palm of my hand.’

  He sounded realistic, sober, baffled. He sounded as though he didn’t want us to see, didn’t want himself to see, that he was happy.

  ‘Isn’t that good news?’ said Margaret.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ said Roger.

  ‘You can, you know,’ said Caro gently.

  ‘You’ve all got to remember’ – Roger was speaking with care – ‘that things change very fast at the top. I’m in favour now. It may not last twelve months. Things may begin to go the other way. Remember your uncle and what happened to him. You ought to know what to expect,’ he said to Caro. ‘So ought Lewis and Margaret. They’ve seen enough. For all we know, I’m at the top of the hill tonight. I may start moving downwards tomorrow. Or perhaps I’ve already started. We’ve all got to remember that.’

  It was the sort of solemn warning that a sanguine man gives to others, because he feels he ought to give it to himself. Roger sounded so cautious, statesmanlike and wise; he was trying to be all those things; but in his heart he didn’t believe a word of it. Behind his puzzled, twisted expression, he was lit up with hope – or almost with hope realized. There were times that evening when he felt that what he wanted to do was already done. There were also times when he was thinking of his next office, and of his next office but one.

  Yet, all through the evening, he spoke with self-knowledge, as though he were putting pretensions on one side, almost as though he had been deflated. It was a curious result of success, or the foretaste of success.

  We stayed for a long time drinking before dinner. Yes, he had had a reception the night before that he hadn’t dared imagine. The PM had been cordial; of course the PM was professionally cordial, so it didn’t mean much. What did mean something was that he had assured Roger of support. As for Collingwood, he had gone out of his way to be friendly; which, from him, who never troubled to be friendly, or couldn’t be, had been something no one could have expected.

  ‘The extraordinary thing is,’ said Roger, his face puzzled and simple, ‘he seems to like me.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Margaret.

  ‘Why should he?’ said Roger.

  He went on: ‘You know, it’s the first time anyone at the top has crooked his finger at me and said in effect – “My boy, your place is up here.” Up to now they’ve let me crawl up and fight every inch of the way. I’m not the sort of man people feel inclined to help, you know.’

  He had spoken with a trace of passion. To others, I was thinking, even to me, that complaint rang strangely. He was too formidable a man for one to think of him as being ‘promising’, as needing patronage or protection. To most men, to the Collingwoods and their kind, he must have seemed mature and dominant, even before he was forty, long before he had in any sense ‘arrived’. Yet Roger did not see himself like that. Perhaps no one saw himself as beyond question, formidable, mature, dominant. Roger knew that, when other men had been helped up, he had been left alone. He spoke as though this had been a wound: as though, years before, it had made him harden his will.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Caro, ‘they like you, they’re telling you you’re in.’

  Roger said, ‘They’ve left it pretty late.’

  As we sat at dinner, he was amiable but absent-minded, until Caro, looking prettier than I had seen her, had been talking about her brother. He broke into a conversation. Across the table, he said to his wife: ‘It doesn’t matter much being liked, for this kind of life.’

  We might have been back in the drawing-room, still discussing the Prime Minister and Collingwood. We hadn’t realized, while we talked, that he was daydreaming contentedly away.

  For a second, Caro didn’t take the reference. Then she misjudged him. She said: ‘But they do like you.’

  She went on telling him that Collingwood was sincere. She seemed to be reassuring Roger that he got liked as easily as most men. But that wasn’t a reassurance he needed. With a grin, part shame-faced, part sarcastic, he said: ‘No, that’s neither here nor there. I meant it doesn’t matter much being liked. For serious purposes, it doesn’t really count. Nothing like so much as your relatives have always thought.’

  She hesitated. His tone had not escaped her. He had spoken of ‘your’ relatives as though he had not accepted them, would never accept them, as being his. Yet that was reversing the truth. It had not been easy for him, I had been told, at the time of his marriage. She had loved him to the highest pitch of obstinacy and they had had to put up with her decision. He was not wholly unacceptable, it wasn’t as though she had been a wild young girl and he something like a dance-band leader: he was presentable, he would ‘do’. But he was not ‘one of them’. They would have made him into ‘one of them,’ if will had been the only element involved; but they could not do it. Years later, there were times when they still couldn’t help behaving as though he were the local doctor, or the parson, whom Caro happened to have invited to a meal.

  ‘That’s how most of them got on,’ said Caro.

  ‘Not in the real stuff,’ Roger replied. ‘What you want is someone who believes what you do. It’s preferable if he doesn’t want to cut your throat.’

  He was speaking as he had once done, when we were dining at the Carlton Club. It was a theme his mind kept digging into. Personal relations, so Roger went on saying, didn’t decide anything in the real ‘stuff’. Being one of a group, as with the Whig aristocrats from whom Caro’s family descended, decided much more. But in the long run, his job didn’t depend on that. In the real issues he wasn’t going to get support, just because Reggie Collingwood enjoyed splitting a bottle with him. These things weren’t as easy: they weren’t as romantic. ‘If they like me, and it seems that they may do, they’ll take a little longer to kick me out. They might even kick me upstairs. But that’s all the benefit I should get out of being liked. While as for support – that’s a different cup of tea. They’re going to support me for a bit – because it fits in with what they want to do. Because they believe we’re on the same side. Up to a point. They’re watching me, you know. I tell you, real politics isn’t as personal as people think.’

  Margaret said: ‘Doesn’t that make it worse?’

  Roger replied: ‘Don’t you think it’s probably better?’ His tone was not bantering. It wasn’t even specially wise. It was eager. Suddenly I felt in him – what was often hidden, because of his will, his tricks, even the power of his nature – something quite simple. He knew the temptations, the charm of politics, the romantic trappings – but there were times when he wanted to throw them right away. There were times when he could tell himself, and be full of faith, that there was something he wanted to do. Then he could feel that there was a justification for his life. He wanted that grace more than most men: the lumber dropped away from him, he seemed to himself light, undivided, at one.

  In the drawing-room, drinking after dinner, tired, content, Roger went on talking about politics. One story had come up the night before, which Collingwood had said he ought to know. A rumour was running round about Cave’s appointment. It had reached the clubs; they could expect it in the political columns next Sunday, said Collingwood, who didn’t appear to know that in Whitehall we had heard it already. It was that this appointment had been the pay-off for Roger and his associates. Roger had struck a bargain with Charles Lenton when the Prime Ministership fell vacant. He and his friends would support Lenton for the place, but they had fixed the price, and the price was a Ministry for Cave.

  ‘What do you think of that?’ asked Roger. He, like Collingwood, seemed to have been surprised by the rumour. Collingwood was an unsociable widower, but I thought there was less excuse for Roger.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s not the most terrible accusation I’ve ever heard.’ I was laughing at him. He had been enjoying himself, talking without humbug. All night his mood
had been realistic, modest, almost chastened: that was the way he faced the promise of success. And yet, at this mild bit of slander, he felt indignant and ill-used.

  ‘But it’s not true!’ Roger raised his voice.

  ‘They’ll say worse things than that, which won’t be true either,’ I said.

  Roger said: ‘No, the point is: politics are not like that. God knows, I’ve played it rougher than that before now. If necessary I shall play it rough again. But not like that.’ He was speaking with complete reasonableness. ‘Of course politics can be corrupt. But not corrupt in that fashion. No one makes that kind of bargain. It’s not that we’re specially admirable. But we’ve got to make things work, and they couldn’t work like that, and they don’t. I’ve never seen anyone make a deal of that kind in my life. It’s only people who don’t know how the world ticks who think it ticks like that.’

  I was thinking, I had once, twenty years before, seen someone propose such a deal. It had happened in my college. The college politicians had turned it down at sight, outraged, just as Roger was, by a man who didn’t know ‘how the world ticks’, by a man who made the world look worse than it was because he had all the cynicism of the unworldly.

  We had not drawn the curtains, and through the open windows a breeze was blowing in. For an instant I leaned out. There was a smell of petrol from the Bayswater Road, mixed with the smell of spring. It was a clear night for London, and above the neon haze, over the trees in the park, I could make out some stars.

  I turned back to the room. Roger was stretched out, quiet, and happy again, on the sofa. Margaret had asked him a question I did not catch. He was replying without fuss that the decisions had to be taken soon. He might soon cease to be useful. He would be lucky if he had ten years.

  19: Sudden Cessation of a Nuisance

  It puzzled me, not that Brodzinski kept pressing for a private talk with Roger, but that all of a sudden he left off doing so. Once he had given me up, letters came into Roger’s office. Brodzinski begged for an interview on a matter of grave public concern. He wished to explain his disagreement with his scientific colleagues. He had been alarmed by the attitude of the secretary of the committee.

  It was a nuisance, but Ministers’ offices were used to nuisances. Roger asked Osbaldiston to see Brodzinski. Douglas, more guarded and official than I had been, gave a reply as though to a parliamentary question: no, the Minister had not reached a conclusion: he was studying both the majority report and Brodzinski’s minority report. For a few days, this seemed to reassure Brodzinski. Then the letters began again. Once more I told Roger not to underestimate him.

  Roger asked, what could he do? Write to The Times? Talk to the Opposition military spokesmen? There we were safeguarded. We had, through Francis Getliffe and others, our own contacts. Francis and I had, for years, been closer to them than to Roger’s colleagues. What could the man do? I had to agree. After the talk in the Athenaeum, I had come away apprehensive. Now the anxiety had lost its edge. As out of habit, I repeated that Roger ought to have a word with him.

  On the Thursday which followed his dinner with the Prime Minister, Roger had been invited to a conversazione of the Royal Society. The day after, he mentioned that he had spent a quarter of an hour with Brodzinski alone.

  It looked as though Roger had spread himself. The next letters from Brodzinski said, he had always known that the Minister understood. If they could continue the conversation undisturbed, he, Brodzinski, was certain that all the obstacles would be removed. In a few days Roger replied politely. Another letter arrived by return. Then telephone calls. Would the Minister’s Private Secretary arrange a meeting? Could the Minister be told that Brodzinski was on the line? Could he be put straight through?

  Suddenly it all stopped. No more telephone calls. No more letters. It was bewildering. I took what precautions I could. We knew his points of influence in the Air Ministry, in the House. Was he pressing them, instead? But no: he seemed not to have been near them. There was no disquiet anywhere, there were not even any rumours hissing round.

  The patient young men in Roger’s private office allowed themselves a shrug of relief. He had got tired of it at last, they said. Four months of commotion: then absolute silence. From their records, they could date when silence fell. It was the third week in May.

  In that same week, I happened to have been inquiring whether certain invitations to accept Honours had been sent out. My question had nothing to do with Brodzinski, though I thought mechanically that his invitation must have gone out too. It did not occur to me, not remotely, to connect the two dates.

  As the summer began, all of us round Roger were more confident than we had yet been. First drafts of the White Paper were being composed. Francis Getliffe came from Cambridge twice a week to confer with Douglas and Walter Luke. Papers passed between Douglas’ office and Rose’s. Roger had issued an instruction that the office draft must be ready for him by August. Then he would publish when he guessed the time was right. In private, he was preparing for the month after Christmas, the beginning of 1958.

  While we were drafting, Diana Skidmore was going through her standard summer round. On the last day of Ascot Week, she invited some of us to a party in South Street. She had heard – as though she had a ticker-tape service about American visitors – that David Rubin was in England. She had not met him: ‘He’s brilliant, isn’t he?’ she asked. Yes, I assured her, he was certainly brilliant. ‘Bring him along,’ she ordered. There had been a time when the Basset circle was supposed to be anti-Semitic. That, at least, had changed.

  When Margaret, David Rubin and I stood at the edge of Diana’s drawing-room, about seven o’clock on the wet June evening, not much else seemed to have changed. The voices were as hearty as ever: the champagne went around as fast: the women stood in their Ascot frocks, the men in their Ascot uniforms. There were a dozen Ministers there, several of the Opposition front bench, many Conservative members, and a few from the other side.

  There was a crowd of Diana’s rich friends. She welcomed us with vigour. Yes, she knew that David Rubin was talking to the English nuclear scientists.

  ‘People over here being sensible?’ she said to him. ‘Come and tell me about them. I’ll arrange something next week.’ She was peremptory as usual, and yet, because she took it for granted that it was for her to behave like a prince, to open England up to him, he took it for granted too.

  How was it, I had sometimes wondered, that, despite her use of her riches, she didn’t attract more resentment? Even when she put a hand, with complete confidence, into any kind of politics? She had been drawn back into the swirling, meaty, noisy gaggle: there she was, listening deferentially to a handsome architect. Even in her devoted marriage, she had had a hankering for one guru after another. Just as she took it for granted that she could talk to Ministers, so she loved being a pupil. If it seemed a contradiction to others, it seemed natural to her, and that was all she cared about.

  Margaret had been taken away by Monty Cave. I noticed Rubin being shouted at hilariously by Sammikins. I walked round the party, and then, half an hour after we came in, found myself by Rubin’s side again. He was watching the crowd with his air of resignation, of sad intelligence.

  ‘They’re in better shape, aren’t they?’ He meant that these people, or some of them, had lost their collective confidence over Suez. Now they were behaving as though they had found it again. Rubin knew, as well as I did, that political sorrows did not last long. Political memory lasted about a fortnight. It did not count beside a new love-affair, a new job, even, for many of these men, the active glow after making a good speech.

  ‘No country’s got a ruling class like this.’ David Rubin opened his hands towards the room. ‘I don’t know what they hope for, and they don’t know either. But they still feel they’re the lords of this world.’

  I was fond of Rubin and respected him, but his reflections on England were irking me. I said he mustn’t judge the country by this group. Being born in my
provincial town wasn’t much different from being born in Brooklyn. He ought to know the boys I grew up among. Rubin interrupted, with a sharp smile: ‘No. You’re a far-sighted man, I know it, Lewis. But you’re just as confident in yourself as these characters are.’ Once more he shrugged at the room. ‘You don’t believe a single thing that they believe, but you’ve borrowed more from them than you know.’

  People were going out to dinner, and the party thinned. Gradually those who were left came to the middle of the room. There stood Diana and her architect, Sammikins and two decorative women, Margaret and Lord Bridgewater, and a few more. I joined the group just as David Rubin came up from the other side with Cave’s wife, who was for once out with her husband. She was ash-blonde, with a hard, strained, beautiful face. Rubin had begun to enjoy himself. He might have a darker world view than anyone there, but he gained certain consolations.

  No one could talk much, in that inner residue of the party, but Sammikins. He was trumpeting away with a euphoria startling even by his own standards. Just as Diana had lost money at Ascot, he had won. With the irrationality of the rich, Diana had been put out. With the irrationality of the harassed, which he would remain until his father died, Sammikins was elated. He wanted to entertain us all. He spoke with the luminosity of one who saw that his financial problems had been settled for ever. ‘All the time I was at school,’ he cried, ‘m’tutor gave me one piece of advice. He said, “Houghton, never go in for horse-racing. They suck you in.”’ Sammikins caught sight of David Rubin, and raised his voice once more. ‘What do you think of that, Professor? What do you think of that for a piece of advice? Not à point, eh?’

  David Rubin did not much like being called Professor. Also, he found Sammikins’ allusions somewhat esoteric. But he grappled. He replied: ‘I’m afraid I have to agree with your friend.’

  ‘M’tutor.’