Corridors of Power Page 16

  ‘Anyway, he’s right. Statistically, he must be right.’

  ‘Horses are better than cards, any day of the week. Damn it all, Professor, I’ve proved it!’

  David Rubin was getting noise-drunk. Sammikins, in a more conciliatory tone, went on: ‘I grant you this, Professor, I don’t know about roulette. I’ve known men who made an income at roulette.’

  The scientific truth was too strong for Rubin.

  ‘No. If you played roulette for infinite time, however you played, you’d be bound to lose.’ He took Sammikins by the arm. We had the pleasant spectacle of Rubin, Nobel Laureate, most elegant of conceptual thinkers, not quite sober, trying to explain to Sammikins, positive that he had found the secret of prosperity, distinctly drunk, about the theory of probability.

  Diana said, in her clear, military rasp, that racing was a mug’s game. On the other hand, she was sharp with happiness. She wanted to have dinner with the architect. It was only out of duty, as we were all ready to go, that she mentioned the Government.

  ‘They seem to be getting on a bit better,’ she said.

  There were murmurs of agreement all round her.

  ‘Roger’s doing all right,’ she said to me. She was not asking my opinion, she was telling me.

  She went on: ‘Reggie Collingwood thinks well of him.’ We were getting near the door. Diana said: ‘Yes. Reggie says he’s a good listener.’

  Diana had passed on the good news, and I went away happy. Objectively, Collingwood’s statement was true; but, from a man who could hardly utter about one of the most eloquent men in London, it seemed an odd compliment.

  20: Evening in the Park

  In September, with the House in recess, Roger kept coming to his office. It was what the civil servants called, the ‘leave season’. Douglas was away and so, in my department, was Hector Rose. Nevertheless, Roger’s secretaries were arranging a set of meetings to which I had to go. As I arrived in his room for one of them, Roger asked in a matter-of-fact tone if I minded staying behind after it was over. He had something he wanted to talk to me about, so he said.

  He seemed a little preoccupied as he took the meeting. When he spoke, he was fumbling for the words, as a man does when he is tired and strained. I did not take much notice. The meeting was purring efficiently on. There were some unfamiliar faces, deputy secretaries, under-secretaries, appearing instead of their bosses. The competent voices carried on, the business was getting done.

  The cups of tea were brought in, the weak and milky tea, the plates of biscuits. The meeting was doing all that Roger wanted. He might be tired, but he was showing good judgement. He did not hurry them, he let the decisions form. It was past six o’clock when the papers were being packed in the brief cases. Practised and polite, Roger said his good evenings and his thanks, and we were left alone.

  ‘That went rather well,’ I said.

  There was a pause, as though he had to remember what I was speaking about, before he replied: ‘Yes, it did, didn’t it?’

  I was standing up, stretching myself. He had stayed in his chair. He looked up without expression, and asked: ‘Do you mind if we go for a stroll in the Park?’

  We went down the corridors, down the stone stairs, out through the main entrance. We crossed over the Park by the lake; one of the pelicans was spreading its wings. The trees were creaking in a blustery wind; on the grass, the first leaves had fallen. It was a dark evening, with clouds, low and grey, driving across from the west. Roger had not spoken since we left the office. For an instant, I was not thinking of him. The smell of the water, of the autumn night, had filled me with a sense, vague but overmastering, of sadness and joy, as though I were played on by a memory which I could not in truth recall, of a place not far away, of a time many years before, when my first love, long since dead, had told me without kindness that she would come to me.

  We walked slowly along the path. Girls, going home late from the offices, were scurrying in front of us. It was so windy that most of the seats by the lakeside were empty. Suddenly Roger said: ‘Shall we sit down?’

  Miniature waves were flecking the water. As we sat and watched them, Roger, without turning to me, said in a curt, flat and even tone: ‘There may possibly be trouble. I don’t think it’s likely, but it’s possible.’

  I was shocked out of my reverie. My first thought was to ask if any of his supporters, high or low, Collingwood or the back-benchers, had turned against him.

  ‘No. Nothing like that. Nothing like that at all.’

  Was he trying to break some news affecting me? I had nothing on my mind, I could not think what it might be. I gave him a chance to tell me, but he shook his head.

  Now it had come to the point, the confidence would not flow. He stared at the water. At last he said: ‘I have a young woman.’

  For the instant, I felt nothing but surprise.

  ‘We’ve kept it absolutely quiet. Now she’s been threatened. Someone’s found out.’

  ‘Who has?’

  ‘Just a voice she didn’t know, over the telephone,’ he said.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘How do we know?’

  ‘What are you frightened of?’

  There was a pause before he said: ‘If it came out it might do some harm.’

  I was still surprised. I had thought his marriage happy enough. A man of action’s marriage, not all-excluding; but strong, a comfort, an alliance. Some of his worry was infecting me. I felt an irritation, an impatience, that I could not keep quiet. What more did he want? I was asking myself, as simply, as uncharitably as my mother might have done. A good-looking wife, children, a rich home: what was he taking risks for? Risks, he seemed to think, which might damage his plans and mine. I was condemning him as simply as that, not in the least like one who had seen people in trouble, not like one who had done harm himself.

  At the same time I could not help feeling a kind of warmth, not affection so much as a visceral warmth. In the midst of his anxiety, he had been half-pleased to confess. Not with just the pleasure displayed by men higher-minded than he was, as they modestly admit a conquest – no, with a pleasure deeper than that, something more like joy. Looking at him as he sat, still gazing at the lake, not meeting my eyes, I should have guessed that he had not had much to do with women. But his emotions were powerful and, perhaps, so could his passions be. As he sat there, his face heavy, thinking of the dangers, he seemed comforted by what had happened to him – like a man for whom the promise of life is still there. I set myself to ask a practical question. What were the chances of it coming out?

  ‘She’s worried. I’ve never known her lose her nerve before.’

  I said, probably she had never had to cope with a scandal. But the technique was all worked out. Go to a good tough lawyer. Tell everything.

  ‘You’ve no reason to think that any rumours have gone round already, have you? I certainly haven’t.’

  Roger shook his head.

  ‘Then it ought to be fairly easy to stop the hole.’

  He did not respond, or look at me. He stared into the distance. In a moment, knowing that I was giving him no comfort, I broke off.

  I said: ‘I’m sure this can be handled. You ought to tell her that. But even if it couldn’t be, and the worst came to the worst – is it the end of the world?’ I meant, as I went on to say, that the people he lived amongst were used to scandals out of comparison more disreputable than this.

  ‘You’re fooling yourself,’ he said harshly. ‘It isn’t so easy.’ I wondered, was he holding something back? Was she very young? ‘Is there something special about it?’ I said. ‘Who is she?’

  It seemed that he could not reply. He sat without speaking, and then in a burst of words put me off.

  ‘It isn’t important what’s done. It is important who does it. There are plenty of people – you know as well as I do – who want an excuse to knife me. Don’t you accept that this would be a reasonable excuse?’

  ‘You haven’t told me how.�
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  ‘There’s an old maxim in the Anglican church. You can get away with unorthodox behaviour. Or you can get away with unorthodox doctrine. But you can’t get away with both of them at the same time.’

  For an instant, his spirits had flashed up. In the same sharp, realistic, almost amused tone, he added: ‘Remember, I’ve never been one of the family. Perhaps, if I had been, I could get away with more.’

  What was ‘the family’?

  The inner circle of privilege, the Caves, Wyndhams, Collingwoods, Diana’s friends, the Bridgewaters, the people who, though they might like one another less than they liked Roger, took one another for granted, as they did not take him.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘you’ve never been one of them. But Caro is.’ I brought in her name deliberately. There was a silence. Then he answered the question I had not asked. ‘If this thing breaks, Caro will stand by me.’

  ‘She doesn’t know?’

  He shook his head, and then broke out with violence: ‘I won’t have Caro hurt.’ It sounded more angry than anything he had said. Had he been talking about one worry, about the practical risk that still seemed to me unreal, in order to conceal another from himself? What kind of guilt did he feel, how much was he tied? All of a sudden, I thought I understood at last his outburst on Sammikins’ behalf at Basset. It had seemed uncomfortable, untypical, not only to the rest of us but to himself. Yes, it had been chivalrous, it had been done for Caro’s sake. But it had been altogether too chivalrous. It had the strain, the extravagant self-abnegation, of a man who gives his wife too many sacrifices, just to atone for not giving her his love.

  ‘Isn’t Caro going to be hurt anyway?’ I said.

  He did not reply.

  ‘This affair isn’t ready to stop, is it?’

  ‘Not for either of us. Not for–’ He hesitated. He still had not told me the woman’s name. Now he wanted to, but at last brought out the pronoun, not the name.

  ‘Can you give her up?’

  ‘No,’ said Roger.

  Beneath the layers of worry, there was something else pressing him. Part joy: part something else again, which I could feel in the air, but to which I could not put a name – as though it were a superstitious sense, a gift of foresight.

  He leaned back, and did not confide any more.

  To the left, above the trees, the light from a window shone out – an office window, perhaps in Roger’s Ministry, though I could not be sure – a square of yellow light high in the dark evening.

  Part Three

  Privacy

  21: Breakfast

  It was the morning after Roger had talked to me in the Park, and Margaret and I were sitting at breakfast. From the table, I could look down at the slips of garden running behind the Tyburn chapel. I glanced across at my wife, young-looking in her dressing-gown, fresh, not made up. Sometimes I laughed at her for looking so fresh in the morning: for in fact it was I who woke up easily, while she was slumbrous, not at her best, until she had sat beside the window and drunk her first cups of tea.

  That morning she was not too slumbrous to read my expression. She knew that I was worrying, and asked me why. At once I told her Roger’s story. I didn’t think twice about telling her; we had no secrets, I wanted to confide. She wasn’t intimate with Roger as I was, nor with Caro either, and I didn’t expect her to be specially concerned. To my surprise, her colour rose. Her cheeks flushed, making her eyes look bluer still. She muttered: ‘Damn him.’

  ‘He’ll be all right–’ I was consoling her; but she broke out:

  ‘Never mind about him. I was thinking of Caro.’

  She said: ‘You haven’t given her a thought, have you?’

  ‘There are two other people as well – ‘He’s behaved atrociously, and she’s the one who’s going to face it.’

  As a rule, she was no more given to this kind of moral indignation than I was myself. Already her temper was high and mine was rising. I tried to quieten us both, and said, in the shorthand we were used to, that Roger wasn’t the first person in the world to cut loose: others had done the same.

  ‘If you mean that I damaged someone else to come to you,’ she flared up, ‘that’s true.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  I had spoken without thinking.

  ‘I know you didn’t.’ Her temper broke, she smiled. ‘You know, I’d behave the same way again. But I haven’t much to be proud of in that respect.’

  ‘Nor have I.’

  ‘You didn’t betray your own marriage. That’s why I can’t brush off Roger betraying his.’

  ‘You say I’m not giving Caro a thought?’ Once more we were arguing, once more we were near to quarrelling. ‘But how much are you giving him?’

  ‘You said yourself, he’ll be all right, he’ll come through,’ she said scornfully. Just then she had no feeling for him at all. ‘Do you know what it’s going to be like for her – if they break up?’ She went on with passion. ‘Shock. Humiliation. Loss.’

  I was forced to think, Caro had been happy, she had paraded her happiness. She had done much for him – perhaps too much? Had he never accepted it, or the way her family looked at him?

  All that I had to admit. And yet, I said, trying to sound reasonable, let’s not make it over-tragic. If it came to losing him, wouldn’t she recover? She was still young, she was pretty, she wasn’t a delicate flower, she was rich. How long would it take her to get another husband?

  ‘You’re making it too easy for yourselves,’ said Margaret.

  ‘Who am I making it too easy for?’

  ‘For him. And for yourself.’ Her eyes were snapping. ‘Losing him,’ she said, ‘that might be the least of it. It will be bad enough. But the humiliation will be worse.’

  She added: ‘You’ve always said, Caro doesn’t give a damn. Any more than her brother does. But it’s people who don’t give a damn who can’t bear being humiliated. They can’t live with it, when they have to know what it means.’

  I was thinking, Margaret was speaking of what she knew. She too, by nature, by training, made her own rules: they were more refined rules than Caro’s, but they were just as independent. Her family and all her Bloomsbury connections cared no more what others thought than Caro’s did, in some ways less. She knew just how vulnerable that kind of independence was.

  She knew something deeper. When she and I first married she had sometimes been frightened: should we come apart? I might think that I had come home. In her heart, knowing mine, she had not been as sure. She had told herself what she must be ready to feel and what it would cost.

  Hearing of Roger and Caro, she felt those fears, long since buried, flood back. Suddenly I realized why the argument had mounted into a quarrel. I stopped my next retort, I stopped defending Roger. Instead, I said, looking into her eyes: ‘It’s a bad thing to be proud, isn’t it?’

  The words meant nothing to anyone in the world except ourselves. To her, they were saying that I had been at fault and so had she. At once there was nothing between us. The quarrel died down, the tinge of rancour died from the air, and across the table Margaret gave an open smile.

  22: ‘The Knives Are Sharpening’

  One evening in the week that Roger made his confidence, Hector Rose sent his compliments to my office and asked if I could find it convenient to call upon him. After I had traversed the ten yards along the corridor, I was, as usual, greeted with gratitude for this athletic feat. ‘My dear Lewis, how very, very good of you to come!’

  He installed me in the chair by his desk, from which I could look out over the sun-speckled trees, as though this were my first visit to his room. He sat in his own chair, behind the chrysanthemums, and gave me a smile of dazzling meaninglessness. Then, within a second, he had got down to business.

  ‘There’s to be a Cabinet committee,’ he said, ‘by which our masters mean, with their customary happy use of words, something to which the phrase is not appropriate. However, there it is.’

  The committee was to ‘have a
n oversight’ of some of Roger’s problems, in particular the White Paper. It consisted of Collingwood in the chair, Roger himself, Cave, and our own Minister. According to present habits, there would be a floating and varying population, Ministers, civil servants, scientists, attending on and off, which was why Rose had produced his jibe. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘you and I will no doubt have the inestimable privilege of attending some of the performances ourselves.’

  For an instant, Rose’s tidy mind was preoccupied with the shapelessness of new-style administration; but I broke in:‘What does this mean?’

  ‘By itself’ – he came back to business with a bite – ‘it doesn’t mean anything. Or at least, anything significant, should you say? The membership seems to be designed to strengthen Mr Quaife’s hand. I seem to have heard, from sensible sources, that the Lord President’ (Collingwood) ‘is a moderately strong backer of Quaife. So, on the face of it, there ought to be certain advantages for policies which Mr Quaife and others appear to have at heart.’

  He was baiting me, but not in his customary machine-like manner. He seemed uncomfortable. He folded his arms. His head did not move, but his light eyes fixed themselves on mine. ‘You asked me an implied question,’ he said curtly. ‘I can’t be certain, but I have a suspicion the answer is yes.’ He added: ‘I fancy you do, too. I may be wrong, but I think I ought to warn you that the knives are sharpening.’

  ‘What evidence have you got?’

  ‘Not much. Nothing very considerable.’ He hesitated. ‘No, I shouldn’t feel at liberty to worry you with that.’

  Again he had spoken with discomfort, as though – I could neither understand, nor believe it – he was protecting me.

  ‘Do you mean that I’m personally involved?’

  ‘I don’t feel at liberty to speak. I’m not going to worry you unnecessarily.’

  Nothing would budge him. At last he said: ‘But I do feel at liberty to say just one thing. I think you might reasonably communicate to your friends that a certain amount of speed about their decisions might not come amiss. In my judgement, the Opposition is going to increase the more chance it gets to form. I shouldn’t have thought that this was a time for going slow.’ As deliberately as another man might light a cigarette, he smelled a flower. ‘I confess, I should rather like to know exactly what our friend Douglas Osbaldiston expects to happen. He has always had a remarkably shrewd nose for the way the wind is blowing. It’s a valuable gift. Of course, he’s a great friend of both of us, but I think it’s fair comment to say that this particular gift hasn’t exactly been a handicap to him in his career.’