Corridors of Power (21 page)

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.

Privacy

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.

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 an 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.’

I had never known Hector Rose behave like this. First, he had told me, not quite ‘in terms’ (as he would have said himself) but still definitely, that he was supporting Roger’s policy. That was surprising. I had assumed that he started, like Douglas and his colleagues, suspicious of it. He might have become convinced by reason: with Rose, more than most men, that could conceivably happen: or else the events of Suez were still working changes in him. Still, it was a surprise. But, far more of a surprise, was his outburst about Douglas.

I had known Hector Rose for nearly twenty years. In all that time, I had not heard him pass a judgement on any of his equals. Not that he did not make them – but keeping them quiet was part of the disciplined life. I had known for years that he probably disliked, and certainly envied, Douglas. He knew that I knew. Yet I was astonished, and perhaps he was too, that he should let it out.

Just then the telephone rang. It was for me: Francis Getliffe had called at my office. When I told Rose he said: ‘I think, if he wouldn’t mind, I should rather like him to spare me five minutes.’

After I had given the message, Rose regarded me as though, for the second time that evening, he could not decide whether to speak or not. He said: ‘You’ll have a chance to talk to him later, will you?’

‘I should think so,’ I said.

‘In that case, I should be grateful if you passed on the substance of what I’ve been telling you.’

‘You mean, there’s going to be trouble?’

‘There are certain advantages in being prepared, shouldn’t you say?’

‘Including personal trouble?’

‘That’s going further than I was prepared to go.’

Yet he wanted Francis Getliffe to know about it, and he also wanted to avoid telling him.

When Francis came into the room, however, Rose was so polite that he seemed to be caricaturing himself. ‘My dear Sir Francis, it really is extraordinarily good of you! I didn’t expect to have this pleasure–’ All the time he was brandishing Francis’ title; while Francis, who was not undisposed to formality himself, insisted on calling him ‘Secretary’. They sounded, I thought impatiently, used to it as I was, like two nineteenth century Spaniards: but that wasn’t fair. They really sounded like two official mid-twentieth century Englishmen. In fact, they respected each other. Rose liked Francis much more than he did me.

Rose did not keep us long. He asked Francis if he were happy about the work of the scientific committee. Yes, said Francis. Was he, if it came to a public controversy – ‘and I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you, but there may be mild repercussions’ – willing to put the weight of his authority behind it?

‘Yes,’ said Francis, and added, what else could he do?

There were thanks, courtesies, goodbyes, more thanks and courtesies. Soon Francis and I were walking across the Park to the Duke of York’s Steps. ‘What was that in aid of?’ Francis asked.

‘He was telling you that there’s going to be a God-almighty row.’

‘I suppose we had to expect it, didn’t we?’

‘More than we bargained on, I fancy.’ I repeated what Rose had said to me. I went on: ‘He can be so oblique that it drives you mad, but he was suggesting that I’m going to be shot at.’

On the grass, couples were lying in the sunshine. Francis walked on, edgy, preoccupied. He said that he didn’t see how that could happen. It was more likely to happen to himself.

I said: ‘Look, no one wants to bring bad news. But I’ve got a feeling, though Rose didn’t say a positive word, that he thinks that too.’

Francis said, ‘I’m tired of all this.’

We went a few yards in silence. He added: ‘If we get this business through, then I shall want to drop out. I don’t think I can take it any more.’ He began to talk about the international situation: what did I think? Intellectually, he still stuck to his analysis. The technical and military arguments all pointed the same way: peace was becoming much more likely than war. Intellectually he still believed that. Did I? Yet when Quaife and the scientists tried to take one tiny step, not dramatic, quite realistic, then all Hell was ready to break loose.