Corridors of Power Page 2

  All of a sudden, I wasn’t impatient any longer. The women had just gone back upstairs, and we were standing in the candlelight. ‘Come and sit by me,’ Roger said to Rubin, and snapped his fingers, not obtrusively, as if giving himself a signal of some kind. He put me on his other side. As he was pouring brandy into Rubin’s glass, he said, ‘I’m afraid we’ve been boring you stiff. You see, this election is rather on our minds.’ He looked up and broke into a wide, sarcastic grin. ‘But then, if you’ve been attending carefully, you may have gathered that.’

  For the first time that evening, David Rubin began to take a part. ‘Mr Quaife, I’d like to ask you something,’ he said. ‘What, according to present thinking, is the result of this election going to be? Or is that asking you to stick your neck out?’

  ‘It’s fair enough,’ said Roger. ‘I’ll give you the limits. On one side, the worst that can happen to us’ (he meant the Conservative Party) ‘is a stalemate. It can’t be worse than that. At the other end, if we’re lucky we might have a minor landslide.’

  Rubin nodded. One of the members said: ‘I’m betting on a hundred majority.’

  ‘I’d judge a good deal less,’ said Roger.

  He was speaking like a real professional, I thought. But it was just afterwards that my attention sharpened. My neighbour’s cigar smoke was spiralling round the candle-flame: it might have been any well-to-do London party, the men alone for another quarter of an hour. Then Roger, relaxed and solid in his chair, turned half-right to David Rubin and said: ‘Now I’d like to ask you something, if I may.’

  ‘Surely,’ said Rubin.

  ‘If there are things you mustn’t say, then I hope you won’t feel embarrassed. First, I’d like to ask you – how much does what we’re doing about nuclear weapons make sense?’

  Rubin’s face was more sombre, worn, and sensitive than those round him. He was no older than some of the other men, but among the fresh ruddy English skins his stood out dry, pallid, already lined, with great sepia pouches, like bruises, under his eyes. He seemed a finer-nerved, more delicate species of animal.

  ‘I don’t know that I’m following you,’ he said. ‘Do you mean what the UK is doing about your weapons? Or what we’re doing? Or do you mean the whole world?’

  ‘They all enter, don’t they?’ Everyone was looking at Roger as he asked the matter-of-fact question. ‘Anyway, would you start on the local position, that is, ours? We have a certain uncomfortable interest in it, you know. Would you tell us whether what this country’s doing makes sense?’

  Rubin did not, in any case, find it easy to be as direct as Roger. He was an adviser to his own government; further, and more inhibiting, he was hyper-cautious about giving pain. So he did a lot of fencing. Was Roger talking about the bombs themselves, or the methods of delivery? He invoked me to help him out – as an official, I had heard these topics argued between the Americans and ourselves for years.

  There were other considerations besides the scientific ones, beside military ones, said Rubin, back on his last line of defence, why the UK might want their own weapon.

  ‘It’s our job to worry about that, isn’t it?’ said Roger gently. ‘Tell us – look, you know this as well as anyone in the world – how significant, just in the crudest practical terms, are our weapons going to be?’

  ‘Well, if you must have it,’ Rubin answered, shrugging his shoulders, ‘anything you can do doesn’t count two per cent.’

  ‘I say, Professor Rubin,’ came a bass voice, ‘you’re kicking us downstairs pretty fast, aren’t you?’

  Rubin said: ‘I wish I could tell you something different.’ His interlocutor was Mrs Henneker’s son-in-law, a man called Tom Wyndham. He confronted Rubin with a cheerful stare, full of the assurance of someone brought up in a ruling class, an assurance which did not exactly ignore changes in power, but shrugged them off. Rubin gave an apologetic smile. He was the most polite of men. He had been born in Brooklyn, his parents still spoke English as a foreign language. But he had his own kind of assurance: it did not surprise him to be told that he was the favourite for that year’s Nobel physics prize.

  ‘No,’ said Monty Cave, ‘Roger asked you to tell us.’ He gave a sharp grin. ‘He usually gets what he asks for.’

  Roger smiled, as though they were friends as well as allies. For five years, since they entered the House, they had been leading their group of back-benchers.

  ‘Now David, if I may call you so,’ he said, ‘do you mind if I go one step further. About the United States – does your policy about the weapons make sense?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Doesn’t it depend upon the assumption that you’re going to have technical superiority for ever? Don’t some of our scientists think you’re under-estimating the Russians? Is that so, Lewis?’

  I was thinking to myself, Roger had been well-briefed; for Francis Getliffe, Walter Luke and their colleagues had been pressing just that view.

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Rubin.

  He was not at his most detached. And yet, I saw that he had respect for Roger as an intelligent man. He was a good judge of intelligence and, courteous though he was, respect did not come easily to him.

  ‘Well then,’ said Roger, ‘let us assume, as I should have thought for safety’s sake we ought to, that the West – which means you – and the Soviet Union may get into a nuclear arms race on something like equal terms. Then how long have we got to do anything reasonable?’

  ‘Not as long as I should like.’

  ‘How many years?’

  ‘Perhaps ten.’

  There was a pause. The others, who had been listening soberly, did not want to argue. Roger said: ‘Does that suggest an idea to anyone?’

  He said it with a sarcastic twist, dismissively. He was pushing his chair back, signalling that we were going back to the drawing-room.

  Just as he was holding open the door, bells began to ring in the passage, up the stairs, in the room we were leaving. It was something like being on board ship, with the bells ringing for lifeboat-drill. Immediately Roger, who a minute before had seemed dignified – more than that, formidable – took on a sheepish smile. ‘Division bell,’ he explained to David Rubin, still wearing the smile, ashamed, curiously boyish, and at the same time gratified, which comes on men when they are taking part in a collective private ritual. ‘We shan’t be long!’ The members ran out of the house, like schoolboys frightened of being late, while David and I went upstairs alone.

  ‘They’ve gone off, have they? Time something broke you up.’ Caro greeted us robustly. ‘Whose reputations have you been doing in? Men ought to have–’ With lively hand, she exemplified cats’ whiskers sprouting.

  I shook my head, and said that we had been talking about David’s expert subject, and the future. Margaret looked at me. But the division bell had quite smashed the mood. I no longer felt any eschatological sense, or even any responsibility. Instead, in the bright drawing-room, all seemed serene, anti-climactic, and slightly comic.

  They had just started on what was becoming more and more a sacramental subject in such a drawing-room – schools for the children, or more exactly, how to get them in. One young wife, proud both of maternity and her educational acumen, with a son born three months before, announced that within an hour of his birth he had been ‘put down’ not only for Eton, but for his first boarding school – ‘And we’d have put him down for Balliol too,’ she went on, ‘only they won’t let you do that, nowadays.’

  What had Caro arranged for her children? What was Margaret doing for ours? Across the room I watched David Rubin listening, with his beautiful, careful, considerate courtesy, to plans for buying places thirteen years ahead for children he had never seen, in a system which in his heart he thought fantastic. He just let it slip once that, though he was only forty-one, his eldest son was a sophomore at Harvard. Otherwise he listened, grave and attentive, and I felt a desire to give some instruction to Mrs Henneker, who was sitting beside me. I told her that
American manners were the best in the world.

  ‘What’s that?’ she cried.

  ‘Russian manners are very good,’ I added, as an afterthought. ‘Ours are some of the worst.’

  It was pleasing to have startled Mrs Henneker. It was true, I said, getting immersed in comparative sociology, that English lower-class manners were rather good, appreciably better than American; but once you approached and passed the mid-point of society, theirs got steadily better and ours got steadily worse. American professional or upper-class manners were out of comparison better. I proceeded to speculate as to why this should be.

  I had a feeling that Mrs Henneker did not find this speculation profitable.

  The men came pelting up the stairs, Roger in the rear. The division was over, the majority up to par. From then on, the party did not get going again and it was not later than half-past eleven when Margaret and I took David Rubin away. The taxi throbbed along the Embankment towards Chelsea, where he was staying. He and Margaret were talking about the evening, but as I gazed out of the window I did not join in much. I let myself drift into a kind of daydream.

  When we had said good night to David, Margaret took my hand.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ she said.

  I couldn’t tell her. I was just staring out at the comfortable, familiar town. The Chelsea back-streets, which I used to know, the lights of Fulham Road: Kensington squares: the stretch of Queen’s Gate up towards the Park. All higgledy-piggledy, leafy, not pretty, nearer the ground than the other capital cities. I was not exactly remembering, although much had happened to me there; but I had a sense, not sharp, of joys hidden about the place, of love, of marriage, of miseries and elations, of coming out into the night air. The talk after dinner had not come back to my mind; it was one of many; we were used to them. And yet, I felt vulnerable, as if soft with tenderness towards the town itself, although in cold blood I should not have said that I liked it overmuch.

  The dark road across the Park, the sheen of the Serpentine, the livid lamps of Bayswater Road – I was full of the kind of emotion which one cannot hide from oneself, and yet which is so unrespectable that one wants to deny it, as when a foreigner says a few words in praise of one’s country, and, after a lifetime’s training in detachment, one finds oneself on the edge of tears.

  2: The Old Hero

  The election went according to plan, or rather, according to the plan of Roger’s friends. Their party came back with a majority of sixty; as prophesied by Mrs Henneker at that dinner-party in Lord North Street, Roger duly got office.

  As soon as the appointment was announced, my civil service acquaintances started speculating. The rumour went around Whitehall that he was an ambitious man. It was not a malicious rumour; it was curiously impersonal, curiously certain, carried by people who had never met him, building up his official personality for good and all.

  One summer afternoon, not long after the election, as I sat in his office with my chief, Sir Hector Rose – St James’s Park lay green beneath his windows and the sunlight edged across the desk – I was being politely cross-questioned. I had worked under him for sixteen years. We trusted each other as colleagues, and yet we were not much easier in each other’s company than we had been at the beginning. No, I did not know Roger Quaife well, I said – which, at the time, was true. I had a feeling, without much to support it, that he wasn’t a simple character.

  Rose was not impressed by psychological guesses. He was occupied with something more businesslike. He assumed that Quaife was, as they said, ambitious. Rose did not find that matter for condemnation. But this job which Quaife had taken had been the end of other ambitious men. That was a genuine point. If he had had any choice, there must be something wrong with his judgement.

  ‘Which, of course, my dear Lewis,’ said Hector Rose, ‘suggests rather strongly that he wasn’t given any choice. In which case, some of our masters may conceivably not wish him all the good in the world. Fortunately, it’s not for us to inquire into these remarkable and no doubt well-intentioned calculations. He’s said to be a good chap. Which will be at least a temporary relief, so far as this department is concerned.’

  The appointment had more than a conversational interest for Hector Rose. Since the war, what in our jargon we called ‘the coordination of defence’ had been split up. The greater part had gone to a new Ministry. It was this Ministry of which Roger had just been appointed Parliamentary Secretary. In the process, Rose had lost a slice of his responsibilities and powers. Very unfairly, I could not help admitting. When I first met him, he had been the youngest Permanent Secretary in the service. Now he was only three years from retirement, having been in the same rank, and at the same job, longer than any of his colleagues. They had given him the Grand Cross of the Bath, the sort of decoration he and his friends prized, but which no one else noticed. He still worked with the precision of a computer. Sometimes his politeness, so elaborate, which used to be as tireless as his competence, showed thin at the edges now. He continued to look strong, heavy-shouldered, thick; but his youthfulness, which had lasted into middle age, had vanished quite. His hair had whitened, there was a heavy line across his forehead. How deeply was he disappointed? To me, at least, he did not give so much as a hint. In his relations with the new super-department, of which he might reasonably have expected to be the permanent head, he did his duty, and a good deal more than his duty.

  The new department was the civil servants’ despair. It was true what Rose had said: it had become a good place to send an enemy to. Not that the civil servants had any quarrel with the Government about general policy. Rose and his colleagues were conservatives almost to a man, and they had been as pleased about the election results as the Quaifes’ circle themselves.

  The point was, the new department, like anything connected with modern war, spent money, but did not, in administrative terms, have anything to show for it. Rose and the other administrators had a feeling, the most disagreeable they could imagine, that things were slipping out of their control. No Minister had been any good. The present incumbent, Roger’s boss, Lord Gilbey, was the worst of any. Civil servants were used to Ministers who had to be persuaded or bullied into decisions. But they were at a loss when they came against one who, with extreme cordiality, would neither make a decision nor leave it to them.

  I had seen something of this imbroglio at first hand. At some points, the business of our department interweaved with theirs, and often Rose needed an emissary. It had to be an emissary of some authority, and he cast me for the job. There were bits of the work that, because I had been doing them so long, I knew better than anyone else. I also had a faint moral advantage. I had made it clear that I wanted to get out of Whitehall and, perversely, this increased my usefulness. Or if not my usefulness, at least the attention they paid to me, rather like the superstitious veneration with which healthy people listen to someone known to be not long for this earth.

  Thus I was frequently in and out of their offices, which were only a few hundred yards away from ours, at the corner of the Park. Like everyone else, I had become attached to Lord Gilbey. I was no better than anyone else, and in some ways worse, at getting him to make up his mind. A few days after that talk with Rose, I was making another attempt, in conjunction with Gilbey’s own Permanent Secretary, to do just that.

  The Permanent Secretary was an old colleague of mine, Douglas Osbaldiston, who was being talked of now just as Rose had been, nearly twenty years before. He was the newest bright star, the man who, as they used to say about Rose, would be Head of the Civil Service before he finished.

  On the surface, he was very different from Rose, simple, unpretentious, straightforward where Rose was oblique, humbly born while Rose was the son of an Archdeacon, and yet as cultivated as an old-fashioned civil servant, and exuding the old-fashioned amateur air. He was no more an amateur than Rose, and at least as clever. Once, when he had been working under Rose, I had thought he would not be tough enough for the top jobs. I co
uld not have been more wrong.

  He had studied Rose’s career with forethought, and was determined not to duplicate it. He wanted to get out of his present job as soon as he had cleaned it up a little – ‘This is a hiding to nothing,’ he said simply – and back to the Treasury.

  He was long, thin, fresh-faced, still with the relics of an undergraduate air. He was quick-witted, unpompous, the easiest man to do business with. He was also affectionate, and he and I became friends as I could never have been with Hector Rose.

  That morning, as we waited to go in to Gilbey, it did not take us five minutes to settle our tactics. First – we were both over-simplifying – there was a putative missile on which millions had been spent, and which had to be stopped: we had to persuade ‘the Old Hero’, as the civil servants called Lord Gilbey, to sign a Cabinet paper. Second, a new kind of delivery system for warheads was just being talked about. Osbaldiston, who trusted my nose for danger, agreed that, if we didn’t ‘look at it’ now, we should be under pressure. ‘If we can get the OH,’ said Osbaldiston, ‘to let the new boy take it over–’ By the new boy he meant Roger Quaife.

  I asked Osbaldiston what he thought of him. Osbaldiston said that he was shaping better than anyone they had had there; which, because with Gilbey in the Lords Quaife would have to handle the department’s business in the Commons, was a consolation.

  We set off down the corridor, empty except for a messenger, high and dark with the waste of space, the lavish clamminess, of nineteenth-century Whitehall. Two doors along, a rubric stood out from the tenebrous gloom: Parliamentary Secretary, Mr Roger Quaife. Osbaldiston jabbed his finger at it, harking back to our conversation about Roger, and remarked: ‘One piece of luck, he doesn’t get here too early in the morning.’