Corridors of Power Page 7

  We were each working out the chances. Personality for personality, Gilbey’s backers were powerful, and had the social pull: but in the long run, big business, with the military and the scientists, usually won.

  ‘Unless he did himself in irretrievably with your very smart friends,’ said Douglas with an amiable jeer, ‘I bet Quaife is in the job within twelve months.’

  He passed the decanter round again. Then he asked: ‘Tell me, Lewis, if he does get there, have you any idea what he’s going to try to do?’

  I hesitated. He suspected, or had guessed, that I was in Roger’s confidence. In return, I had guessed that he was not. I knew for sure that some of the forces propelling Roger into power were just the forces that, once there, he would have to fight. Douglas had said earlier that the best way to arrive was to arrive with no one to thank for it. Had he now a shrewd idea that Roger might be more cluttered up than that?

  Mary Osbaldiston had taken out a piece of needlework, a tray-cloth, or something of the kind: she was working daisies round the edge of it, with finical care. Margaret, who could not sew a stitch, remarked on it, and asked her something about the pattern: but she was not missing a word of the conversation, and her gaze flickered up in my direction.

  ‘Look, there are some peculiar features about the situation,’ Douglas pressed on. ‘It isn’t only Brodzinski and the wild men who are clamouring for Quaife, you know. There’s your old chum, Francis Getliffe and his friends. Now whatever sleight of hand Quaife goes in for, and I fancy he’s pretty good at that, He’s not going to please both gangs. Tell me, do you know what he’s really going to do?’

  I nearly came out into the open. I had one clear and conscious reason for not doing so. I knew that Douglas, like nearly all his colleagues, was deeply conservative. He was too clever not to see the arguments for Roger’s policy, but he would not like them. Yet that was not the reason which kept me quiet. There was another, so worn into me that I did not notice it was there. I had lived too long in affairs; I had been in too many situations like this, where discretion was probably the right, and certainly the easiest, course. Sometimes in the past I had got into trouble, and that had happened when I followed my impulse and blasted discretion away.

  So that night it was second nature to say something noncommittal. Douglas gazed at me, his face for an instant more youthful. Then he smiled, and passed the decanter over.

  We made something of a night of it. In the taxi going home, Margaret, holding my hand against her cheek, said: ‘You made a mistake, you know.’ She went on to say that he was a man one could trust completely. She did not say, but she meant, that we all four liked each other, and that it was a mistake to deny affection. I was angry with her. I had a sharp sense of injustice, the sense of injustice which is specially sharp when one knows one is in the wrong.

  8: Knight on a Tombstone

  In March, three weeks after the Basset and Clapham combination, there was more news, which none of us could have allowed for. One morning at the office, Douglas Osbaldiston rang me up: Gilbey had been taken ill during the night, and they were not certain that he would live. The story ran round Whitehall all that morning, and reached the clubs at lunch-time. It was announced in the evening papers. Everyone that I met assumed from the start, just as I did myself, that Gilbey was going to die. A friend of mine was busy adding a hundred words about Gilbey’s political achievements to an account of his career; the chief of the obituary department of a morning paper had appealed in distress, saying that he was in ‘an impossible situation’ with his editor, having been ‘caught short about a man like Gilbey’.

  As usual, at the prospect of a death, everyone else was a little more alive. There was a tang of excitement in the air. As usual, also, the professional conversations were already beginning: Douglas was invited to have a drink with a cabinet Minister, Rose spent the afternoon with our own Minister, talking about a scheme for redistributing the work between the two departments. I had seen the same in a smaller world twenty years before, when I was living in a college. How many deaths mattered, really mattered, mattered like an illness of one’s own, to any individual man? We pretended they did, out of a kind of biological team spirit; in some ways, it was a valuable hypocrisy. But the real number was smaller than we dared admit.

  As I heard men talking about Gilbey during the next day or two, I could not help remembering what Thomas Bevill, that cunning, simple old man, used to tell me was the first rule of politics: Always be on the spot. Never go away. Never be too proud to be present. Perhaps, after all that was only the second rule, and the first was: Keep alive.

  Another person seemed to have a similar thought that week. That other person was Lord Gilbey. Four days after the first news, I received a telephone call from his private secretary. The rumours of the illness, came a chanting Etonian voice, were very much exaggerated. It was utter nonsense to suggest that he was dying. All that had happened was a ‘minor cardiac incident’. Lord Gilbey was extremely bored, and would welcome visitors: he very much hoped that I would call upon him at the London Clinic some afternoon the following week.

  A similar message, I discovered, had been sent to politicians, senior officers, Douglas Osbaldiston and Hector Rose. Rose commented: ‘Well, we may have to agree that the noble Lord is not precisely a nonpareil as a departmental minister, but we can’t reasonably refuse him marks for spirit, can we?’

  When I visited him at the Clinic, no one could have refused him marks, though it was a spirit we were not used to. He was lying flat, absolutely immobile – the sight recalled another invalid I used to visit – like the effigy of a knight on a tomb, a knight who had not gone on crusade, for his legs were thrust straight out. The bed was so high that, as I sat by its side, my face was on a level with his, and he could have whispered. He did not whisper: he enunciated, quietly, but in something like his usual modulated and faintly histrionic tone.

  ‘This is very civil of you,’ he said. ‘When I’m safely out of here, we must meet somewhere pleasanter. You must let me give you dinner at the In and Out.’ I said I should like it.

  ‘I ought to be out of here in about a month. It will be another two months, though–’ he added in a minatory manner, as though I had been indulging in over-optimism – ‘before I’m back in the saddle again.’ I replied with something banal, that that wouldn’t be very long.

  ‘I never thought I was going to die.’ He did not move at all: his cheeks were beautifully shaven, his hair was beautifully trimmed. Looking at the ceiling as he asked a question, he permitted himself one change of expression: his eyes opened into incredulous circles, as he said: ‘Do you know, people have sat in this very room and asked me if I was afraid of death?’

  There was the slightest emphasis on the pronoun. He went on: ‘I’ve been close to death too often to be frightened of it now.’

  It sounded ham. It was ham. He began talking about his life. He had lost most of his closest friends, his brother officers, ‘on the battle-field’, in the first war. Every year he had been given since, he had counted as a bonus, he said. He had seen more of the battle-field in the second war than most men of his own age. Several times he thought his hour had come. Had he enjoyed the war? I asked. Yes, of course he had enjoyed it. More than anything in life.

  I asked him, after all this, what virtues did he really admire?

  ‘That’s very simple. There’s only one virtue for me, when it comes down to the last things.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘Physical courage. I can forgive anything in a man who has it. I can never respect a man without it.’

  This seemed to me at the time, and even more later, the oddest conversation I had ever had with a brave man. I had met others who took their courage as a matter of course, and who were consoling to anyone who did not come up to their standard. Not so Lord Gilbey. He was the only soldier I knew who could refer, with poetic enthusiasm, to the battle-field.

  It occurred to me that all his life Lord Gilbey h
ad been in search of glory. Glory in the old pre-Christian sense, glory such as the Myceneans and Norsemen fought for. Put him in with a shipload of Vikings, and he would have endured what they did, and boasted as much. True, he was Catholic-born: he did his religious duties, and that morning, so he had told me, he had been visited by his ‘confessor’. But it was not salvation that he prayed for, it was glory.

  Looking at him prostrate, so handsome, so unlined, I wondered if that was why this attack had knocked him out. It must have been – one didn’t need to be a doctor to see it – graver than we had officially been told. Was it the kind of attack that comes to men who have been taught to suppress their own anxieties? No one could be less introspective; but even he must have known that he had made a mess of his political job, which needed, by a curious irony, a variety of courage that he did not begin to possess. He must certainly have known that he was being criticized, conspired against, threatened with being kicked upstairs. He had shown no sign of it. He had sat among the colleagues who thought least of him, and remained charming, vain, armoured. Probably he didn’t let himself think what their opinion of him was, or what they intended. Was this the price he paid?

  Next afternoon, I went to see Roger in the House. I sat in the civil servants’ Box, within touching distance of the government benches, while he answered a question. It was a question put down by one of the members whom Lufkin used for these purposes, to embarrass Gilbey. ‘Was the Minister aware that no decision had yet been announced on–’ There followed a list of aircraft projects. Roger would, in any case, have had to answer in the Commons, but with Gilbey ill, he was in acting charge of the department. The questioner pointedly, and I suspected, under instructions, demonstrated that he was not making difficulties for Roger himself. When Roger gave a dead-pan, stonewalling reply, neither the member nor any of the aircraft spokesmen followed with a subsidiary. There were one or two half-smiles of understanding. After questions, Roger took me along to his room. It struck me that, although I often called on him now, he almost never took me to the tea-room or the bar. I had heard it mentioned that he spent too little time in casual mateyness among crowds of members, that he was either too arrogant, or too shy. It seemed strange, when he was so easy with anyone in private.

  The room was cramped, unlike his stately office in the Ministry across Whitehall. Beyond the window, mock gothic, the afternoon sky was sulphurous.

  I asked him if he had visited Gilbey yet. Yes, of course, he said, twice.

  ‘What do you think?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t you think he’s probably lucky to be alive?’

  I said yes. Then I told him what I had thought in the Clinic the day before, that it might be a psychosomatic illness. Or was I psychologizing too much?

  ‘You mean, if I hadn’t put on the pressure, and we’d all said he was wonderful, he might still be on his feet? You may very well be right.’

  ‘I meant a bit more than that,’ I said. ‘Presuming the old man gets better and comes back to the job: then what?’

  I did not need to go further. I meant, a man in Gilbey’s condition oughtn’t to have to live among the in-fighting. If he did, there was a finite danger that he wouldn’t live at all.

  Roger had missed nothing. His eyes met mine in recognition. He was smoking a cigarette, and he did not answer for a time.

  ‘No,’ he said at last, ‘I’m not going to take any more responsibility than I’m bound to. This isn’t very real.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘He’s out,’ said Roger, ‘whatever I do now. He’ll never come back.’

  ‘Is that settled?’

  ‘I’m sure it is,’ he said. He broke off.

  ‘Do you want an answer to the question you’re really asking?’

  I said, ‘Leave it.’

  ‘I’m prepared to answer,’ he said. ‘I should go on regardless.’

  He had been speaking without smoothness, as though he were dredging up the words. Then he said, in a brisk tone: ‘But this isn’t real. He’s out.’

  He went on, with a sarcastic smile, ‘I’m sure he’s out. I’m not so sure I’m in.’

  ‘What are the chances?’

  Roger answered, with matter-of-fact precision: ‘Slightly better than evens. Perhaps 6–4 on.’

  ‘Did you do yourself harm,’ I put in, ‘at Basset? That last night?’

  ‘I may have done.’ He went on, with a baffled frown, like a short-sighted child screwing up his eyes: ‘The trouble was, I couldn’t do anything else.’

  A couple of days later, I arrived at the London Clinic immediately after lunch. Gilbey might not have moved a millimetre in seventy-two hours. Eyes staring at the ceiling, hair shining, face unblemished. He spoke of Roger, who had visited him that morning. Affably, with friendly condescension, Gilbey told me, what I knew myself, that Roger had had a distinguished record in the last war.

  ‘You wouldn’t think it to look at him,’ said Gilbey, harking back to our previous conversation. ‘But he’s all right. He’s quite all right.’

  Gilbey proceeded to talk, enjoying himself, about his own campaigns. Within a few minutes however, he received a reminder of mortality. His secretary busily entered the quiet, the marmoreally-composed sickroom, Gilbey static except for his lips, me unmoving beside him, the trees motionless in the garden outside.

  ‘Sir,’ said the secretary. He was an elegant young man with a Brigade tie.

  ‘Green?’

  ‘I have a telegram for you, sir.’

  ‘Read it, my dear chap, read it.’

  Since Gilbey’s eyes did not alter their upward gaze, he did not know that the telegram was still unopened. We heard the rip of paper.

  ‘Read it, my dear chap.’

  Green coughed. ‘It comes from an address in SW10 – I think that’s Fulham, sir.’ He gave the signatory’s name. ‘Someone called Porson.’

  ‘Please read it.’

  Momentarily, I caught a glance from Green’s eyes, pale, strained, hare-like. He read: ‘All the trumpets will sound for you on the other side.’

  Just for a second, Gilbey’s mouth pursed, then tightened. Very soon, the modulated voice said to the ceiling: ‘How nice!’

  In a voice even more careful, unemphatic, clipped and trim, he added: ‘How very nice!’

  9: Two Kinds of Alienation

  As soon as I could, after the telegram had been read, I said goodbye to Gilbey. I indicated to Green that I wanted a word with him outside. Nurses were passing by, the corridor was busy, it was not until we reached the waiting room that I could let my temper go.

  In the panelled room, with its copies of the Tatler, the Field, Punch on the console table, I said: ‘Give me that telegram.’

  As I glanced at it – the words shining out as though innocent of trouble – I said: ‘You bloody fool!’

  ‘What?’ said Green.

  ‘Why in God’s name don’t you read telegrams before you bring them in? Why hadn’t you got the wit to invent something, when you saw what you’d got in front of you?’

  I looked at the telegram again. Porson. It might be. In this lunacy, anything was possible. An old acquaintance of mine. For the sake of action, for the sake of doing anything, I rushed out of the room, out of the Clinic, shouted for a taxi, gave the address, just off the Fulham Road.

  The taxi chugged through the afternoon traffic, south-west across London. I was so angry that I did not know why I was going there. I had lost touch with my own feelings. Guilt, concern, personal fates, public ends – I hadn’t the patience to think of any of them. Nothing except pushing the taxi on.

  At last, after the driver had made false shots, trying squares, places, mews, we drove up a street all of tall terraced houses, shabby, unpainted. In front of one, I looked at the slips of cardboard by the bells. The other names were handwritten, but against the top floor bell was a soiled visiting card: Mr R Porson, Barrister-at-Law.

  Empty milk bottles stood on the steps. Inside the door, which was on the
latch, letters and newspapers lay in the unlit hall. I climbed upstairs. On the second landing the door of a bathroom opened, the only one, it seemed, in the house. I went up to the top floor and knocked. A thick, strident voice answered, and I entered. Yes, it was the man I used to know – twenty years older, more than half drunk. He greeted me noisily, but I cut him short by giving him the telegram.

  ‘Did you send this?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I wanted to cheer him up.’

  In the attic flat, which had a skylight and a high window, Porson peered at me, ‘What’s the matter, old boy? You look a bit white. I insist on prescribing for you. What you need is a good stiff drink.’

  ‘Why did you send this?’

  ‘The poor chap hasn’t got long to go. It’s been all over the papers,’ said Porson. ‘I’ve got a great respect for him. We don’t breed men like him nowadays. He’s a bit different from all these young pansies. So I wanted him to know that some of us were thinking about him. I wasn’t prepared to let him go out alone.’

  Fiercely he cried out: ‘Well, is there anything the matter with that?’

  He lurched back into his chair. He said: ‘I don’t mind telling you, I don’t run to telegrams unless I have to. Four bob. But I thought it was the least I could do.’

  ‘What in Heaven’s name,’ I shouted, ‘do you imagine it was like for him–’

  He was too drunk to understand. I was shouting for my own benefit alone. In time I gave it up. There was nothing to do. I accepted his drink.

  ‘Well,’ he said, examining me with a critical, patronizing air, ‘from all I hear, you haven’t done so badly, young man. I’ve always insisted you’d have done better, though, if you had listened to me more in the old days.’