Corridors of Power Page 20

  We had neither of us brought overcoats or hats, and so got straight out before the others, into the night air.

  ‘By God!’ cried Sammikins.

  He had drunk a good deal, but he was not drunk. Yet it would have been an error to think that he was tractable. He was inflamed with his grievance, his vicarious grievance of the interruption.

  ‘By God, he’s’ (he was talking of Roger) ‘a better man than they are. I know men in his regiment. I tell you, he’s as brave as a man can reasonably be.’

  I said that no one doubted it.

  ‘Who the hell was that bloody man?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ I asked.

  ‘I expect he was a colonel in the Pay Corps. I’d like to ram the words down his fat throat. What in God’s name do you mean, “Does it matter?”’

  I said, being accused of something one knows oneself to be ridiculous, and which everyone else knows to be ridiculous, never hurt one. As I said it, I was thinking: Is that true? It pacified Sammikins for the time being, while I was brooding. No, I had sometimes been hurt by an accusation entirely false: more so than by some which were dead accurate.

  In silence we walked to a corner and paused there for a moment, looking across the road at the bulk of the Monument, black against the moonlight blue of the sky. It was not cold; a south-west wind was blowing. We turned down Arthur Street and into Upper Thames Street, keeping parallel with the wharves. Beyond the ragged bomb-sites, where the willow herb was growing still, since the air raids nearly twenty years before, we saw the glitter of the river, the density of warehouses, the skeletal cranes.

  ‘He’s a great man, isn’t he?’ said Sammikins.

  ‘What is a great man?’

  ‘By God, are you turning on him now?’

  I had spoken carelessly, but his temper was still on the trigger.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ve thrown everything I could behind him. And I’m taking more risks than most of his friends.’

  ‘I know that, I know that. Yes, damn it, he’s a great man.’

  He gave me a friendly smile. As we walked along what used to be a narrow street, now wide open to the moonlight, he said: ‘My sister did well for herself when she married him. I suppose she was bound to make a happy marriage and have a brood of children. But, you know, I always thought she’d marry one of us. She was lucky that she didn’t.’

  When Sammikins said that he thought she would marry ‘one of us’, he spoke as unselfconsciously as his great-grandfather might have done, saying he thought that his sister might have married a ‘gentleman’. Despite his hero-worship of Roger, that was exactly what Sammikins meant. As he spoke, however, there was something which took my attention more. Caro was more concerned about him, loved him more, than he loved her. Nevertheless, he was fond of her; and yet he saw her marriage in terms of happiness, exactly as the world saw it. Diana, seeing them walking in the grounds at Basset, or as allies at a Government dinner-table, might have seen it so. This despite the fact that both Diana, and even more Sammikins, had lived all their lives in a raffish society, where the surface was calm and the events not so orderly. Listening to Sammikins talking of his sister’s marriage, I thought of Ellen, alone in her flat in the same town.

  ‘Yes, she’s got her children.’ He was going on about Caro. ‘And I am a barren stock.’

  It was the only self-pity I had known him indulge in, and incidentally, the only literary flourish I had ever heard him make.

  There was plenty of gossip as to why he had not married. He was in his thirties, as handsome as Caro in his own fashion. He was chronically in debt, partly because of his gambling, partly because his money, until his father died, was tied up in trusts he was always trying to break. But sooner or later, as well as inheriting the earldom, he would become a very rich man. He was one of the most eligible of bachelors. Diana commented briskly, with the mercilessness of the twentieth century, that there must be ‘something wrong with him’. It was said that he liked young men.

  All that might easily be true. I suspected that he was one of those – and there were plenty, often young men of his spectacular courage– who didn’t find the sexual life straightforward, but who, if left to themselves, came to terms with it as well as simpler men. Half-sophistication, I was convinced as I grew older, was worse than no sophistication: half-knowledge was worse than no knowledge. Label someone a homosexual too quickly, and he will believe you. Tell him he is predestined to keep out of the main stream, and you will help push him out. The only service you can do him – it was a very hard truth – was to keep quiet. So the last thing I wanted that night was to force a confidence. I did not even want to receive it. I was glad (though faintly cheated, my inquisitiveness unsatisfied) when, after a few more laments at large, he gave a strident laugh and said: ‘Oh, to hell with it.’

  Immediately he wanted me to accompany him to—’s (a gambling club). When I refused, he pressed me at least to come to Pratt’s and make a night of it. No, I said, I must be getting home. Then let’s walk a bit, he said. He said it scornfully, as though despising my bourgeois habit of going to bed. He did not want to be left alone.

  We walked through the streets of the old City. From the bottom of Ducks Foot Lane, we caught sight of the dome of St Paul’s and, as if adjacent to it, the pinnacles of Dick Whittington’s church, white as sugar icing in the moonlight. The City of London, in its technical sense, as opposed to the great incomprehensible town, meant little either to him or to me. It evoked no memories, I had never worked there, all it brought back were taxi-rides on the way to Liverpool Street Station. Yet something played on us – the sight of the vast cathedral? The bomb sites? The absolute loneliness, not another person in the streets? The false-romantic memory of the past, the history which is not one’s own but lives in the imagination? Something played on us, not only on him but on me, who was more sober and less adrift.

  We had passed Great Trinity Lane and had turned right: St Paul’s sprang now into open view before us, soot and whitewash.

  Sammikins said: ‘I suppose Roger is right. If there is another war, it’ll be the end of us, won’t it?’

  I said yes.

  He turned to me: ‘How much does it matter?’

  He was speaking in earnest. I couldn’t make a sarcastic reply. I answered: ‘What else matters?’

  ‘No. I’m asking you. How much do any of us believe in human life? When it comes to the point?’

  ‘If we don’t, then there’s no hope for us.’

  ‘Perhaps there isn’t,’ he said. ‘I tell you, aren’t we becoming hypocritical? How much do any of us care, really care, for human life?’

  I was silent. And in a clear tone, neither fierce nor wild, he went on: ‘How much do you care? Except for the people round you? Come on. What is the truth?’

  I could not answer straight away. At last I said: ‘I think I do. At any rate, I want to.’

  He said: ‘I doubt if I do. I’ve taken life before now, and I could do it again. Of course I care for a few lives. But as for the rest, I don’t believe – when you strip away the trappings – that I give a rap. And that’s truer of more people than any of us would like to think.’

  26: Parliamentary Question

  The headlines, on the morning after the dinner in Fishmongers’ Hall, had a simple but pleasing eloquence. ARMED SERVICES ALL-IMPORTANT: then, in smaller letters, ‘No Substitute for Fighting Men. Minister’s Strong Speech,’ said the Daily Telegraph (Conservative). SECURITY COMES FIRST, ‘Mr R. Quaife on World Dangers,’ said The Times (moderate Conservative). SPREAD OF ATOMIC WEAPONS, ‘How Many Countries Will Possess the Bomb?’ said the Manchester Guardian (centre). CHANCE FOR THE COMMONWEALTH, ‘Our Lead in Atomic Bomb,’ said the Daily Express (irregular Conservative). TAGGING BEHIND THE US, said the Daily Worker (Communist).

  The comments were more friendly than I had expected. It looked as though the speech would soon be forgotten. When I went over the press with Roger, we were both relieved. I thought he felt
, as much as I did, a sense of anti-climax.

  In the same week, I noticed a tiny news item, as obscure as a fait divers, in the ‘Telegrams in Brief’ column of The Times.

  ‘Los Angeles. Dr Brodzinski, British physicist, in a speech here tonight, attacked “New Look” in British defence policy as defeatist and calculated to play into hands of Moscow.’

  I was angry, much more angry than apprehensive. I was sufficiently on guard – or sufficiently trained to be careful – to put through a call to David Rubin in Washington. No, he said, no reports of Brodzinski’s speech had reached the New York or Washington papers. They would carry it now. He thought we could forget about Brodzinski. If he, Rubin, were Roger, he’d play it rather cool. He would be over to talk to us in the New Year.

  That sounded undisquieting. No one else seemed to have noticed the news item. It did not arrive in the departmental press-cuttings. I decided not to worry Roger with it, and put it out of mind myself.

  A fortnight later, in the middle of a brilliant, eggshell blue November morning, I was sitting in Osbaldiston’s office. We had been working on the new draft of the White Paper, Collingwood having contorted Douglas’ first. Douglas was good-humoured. As usual, he took no more pride in authorship than most of us took in the collective enterprise of travelling on a bus.

  His personal assistant came in with an armful of files, and put them in the in-tray. Out of habit his eye, like mine, had caught sight of a green tab on one of them. ‘Thank you, Eunice,’ he said equably, looking not much older than the athletic girl. ‘A bit of trouble?’

  ‘The PQ is on top, Sir Douglas,’ she said.

  It was part of the drill he had been used to for twenty-five years. A parliamentary question worked like a Pavlovian bell, demanding priority. Whenever he saw one, Douglas, who was the least vexable of men, became a little vexed.

  He opened the file and spread it on his desk. I could see the printed question, upside down: under it, very short notes in holograph. It looked like one of these questions which were rushed, like a chain of buckets at a village fire, straight up to the Permanent Secretary.

  With a frown, a single line across his forehead, he read the question. He turned over the page and in silence studied another document. In a hard, offended tone, he burst out, ‘I don’t like this.’ He skimmed the file across the desk. The question stood in the name of the Member for a south coast holiday town, a young man who was becoming notorious as an extreme reactionary. It read: ‘To ask the Minister of—’ (Roger’s department) ‘If he is satisfied with security arrangements in his department, especially among senior officials?’

  That looked innocuous enough: but Douglas’ juniors, thorough as detectives, had noticed that this same member had been making a speech in his own constituency, a speech in which he had quoted from Brodzinski’s at Los Angeles. Here were the press cuttings, the local English paper, the Los Angeles Times, pasted on to the file’s second page.

  With a curious sense of déjà vu, mixed up with incredulity and a feeling that all this had happened time out of mind, I began reading them. Brodzinski’s lecture at UCLA: SCIENCE AND THE COMMUNIST THREAT: Danger, danger, danger: Infiltration: Softening, Conscious, Unconscious: as bad or worse in his own country (UK) as in the US: People in high positions, scientific and non-scientific, betraying defence; best defence ideas sabotaged; security risks, security risks, security risks.

  ‘This isn’t very pleasant,’ said Douglas, interrupting me.

  ‘It’s insane.’

  ‘Insane people can do harm, as you have reason to know.’ He said it with tartness and yet with sympathy. He knew of my first marriage, and it was easy for us to speak intimately.

  ‘How much effect will this really have–’

  ‘You’re taking it too easily,’ he said, hard and sharp.

  It must have been years since anyone made me that particular reproach. Then I realized that Douglas had taken charge. He was speaking with complete authority. Because he was so unpretentious, so fresh, lean and juvenile in appearance, one fell into the trap of thinking him light-weight. He was no more light-weight than Lufkin or Hector Rose.

  It was he who was going to handle this matter, not Roger. From the moment he read the question, he showed his concern. Why it should be so acute, I could not make out. At a first glance, Brodzinski was getting at Francis Getliffe, perhaps me, perhaps Walter Luke, or even Roger himself. It would be a nuisance for me if I were involved: but, in realistic terms, I thought, not much more. Douglas was a close friend: but his present gravity would have been disproportionate, if it had just been on my account.

  No. Was he, as a high bureaucrat, troubled when open politics, in particular extremist open politics, looked like breaking out? He was both far-sighted and ambitious. He knew, as well as anyone in Whitehall, that in any dog-fight, all the dogs lose: you could be an innocent victim, or even a looker-on: but some of the mud stuck. If there were any sort of political convulsion, his Treasury friends and bosses would be watching him. His name would get a tag on it. It would be unjust, but he would be the last man to complain of injustice. It was his job to see that the fuss didn’t happen. If it did, he might find himself cut off from the topmost jobs for life, a second Hector Rose.

  There was another reason why he was disturbed. Though he was ambitious, he had high standards of behaviour. He could no more have made Brodzinski’s speech than he could have knifed an old woman behind her counter. Although he was himself Conservative, more so even than his colleagues, he felt that the PQ could only have been asked – and he would have used simple, moral terms – by a fool and a cad. In a heart which was sterner than anyone imagined, Douglas did not make special allowances for fools, cads, or paranoids like Brodzinski. For him, they were moral outlaws.

  ‘The Minister mustn’t answer the questions himself,’ he announced.

  ‘Won’t it be worse if he doesn’t?’

  But Douglas was not consulting me. Roger was himself ‘under fire a bit’. He had to be guarded. We didn’t want too many whispers about whether he was ‘sound.’ It was at just this point in politics where he was most vulnerable. No, the man to answer the question was the Parliamentary Secretary, Leverett-Smith.

  What Douglas meant was that Leverett-Smith hadn’t an idea in his head, was remarkably pompous, and trusted by his party both in the House and at conferences. He would, in due course, make, Monty Cave had said with his fat man’s malice, a quintessential Law Officer of the Crown.

  Within a few minutes, Douglas had been inside Roger’s office and had returned.

  ‘He agrees,’ he said. Since Douglas must have spoken with the wrappings off, just as he had spoken to me, it would have been difficult for Roger not to agree. ‘Come on. You may have to speak for some of the scientists.’

  In Roger’s room, Douglas had already written on the file the terms of a reply. When we called on Leverett-Smith, two doors down the passage, the pace of business became more stately.

  ‘Parliamentary Secretary, we’ve got a job for you,’ Douglas had begun. But it took longer. Leverett-Smith, bulky, glossy-haired, spectacled, owlish, stood up to welcome us. Very slowly, he read the civil servants’ comments as the question had made its way up. Douglas’ draft, the newspaper clipping. Again very slowly, in his reverberating voice, he began to ask questions. What was the definition of ‘bad security risk’ in British terms? What were the exact levels of security clearance? Had all members of the scientific committee been cleared for Top Secret, and for the information none of us mentioned?

  Leverett-Smith went inexorably on. The method of slow talk, I thought, as Keynes used to say. Had all the civil servants been cleared? What were the dates of these clearances?

  Like his colleagues, Douglas kept his relations with the Security organs obscure. He did not refer to documents, but answered out of his head – as accurately as a computer, but more impatiently. This was not the kind of examination a Permanent Secretary expected from a junior Minister – or, so far as t
hat went, from a senior Minister either. The truth was, Leverett-Smith was not only cumbrous and self-important: he disliked Roger: he had no use for rough and ready scientists like Walter Luke, while men like Francis Getliffe or me made him uncomfortable. He did not like his job, except that it might be a jumping-off board. This mixture of technology, politics, ideology, moral conscience, military foresight, he felt odious and not quite respectable, full of company he did not choose to live his life among.

  Actually, he lived his life in one of the odder English enclaves. He wasn’t in the least an aristocrat, as Sammikins and his sister were: he wasn’t a country gentleman, like Collingwood: to Diana’s smart friends, he was stodgy middle-class. But the kind of middle-class in which he seemed never to have heard an unorthodox opinion – from his small boys’ school in Kensington, to his preparatory school, to his house at Winchester, to the Conservative Club at Oxford, he had moved with a bizarre absence of dissent.

  ‘I don’t completely understand, Secretary, why the Minister wishes me to take this question?’

  After an hour’s steady interrogation, he made this inquiry. Douglas, who did not often permit himself an expression of God-give-me-patience, almost did so now.

  ‘He doesn’t want to make an issue of it,’ he said. Then, with his sweet and youthful smile, he added: ‘He thinks you would carry confidence with everybody. And that would kill this bit of nonsense stone-dead.’

  Leverett-Smith tilted his massive, cubical head. For the first time, he was slightly placated. He was interested to know if that was the Minister’s considered judgement. He would, of course, have to consult him to make sure.

  Douglas, still smiling sweetly, as though determined to prove that pique did not exist in public business, reminded him that they had only a few hours to play with.

  ‘If the Minister really wishes me to undertake this duty, then naturally I should be unable to refuse,’ said Leverett-Smith, with something of the air of a peeress pressed to open a church bazaar. He had a parting shot.