Corridors of Power (23 page)

I wanted to comfort her. I told her the only use I could be was practical. What was happening now? Had she been to a lawyer? What else had she done?

Up till then, she had been too apprehensive to get to the facts. And yet, was that really so? She was apprehensive, all right, but she had spirit and courage. In theory, she had asked me there to talk about the facts. After the years of silence, though, it was a release to have a confidant. Even for her, who had so little opinion of herself – perhaps most of all for her – it was a luxury to boast a little.

The facts did not tell me much. Yes, she had been to a lawyer. He had got her telephone calls intercepted: once or twice the voice had broken through. Always from call boxes, nothing to identify it. The same voice? Yes. What sort? Not quite out of the top drawer, said Ellen, just as Mrs Henneker would have said it, as only an Englishwoman would have said it. Rough? Oh, no. Like someone fairly refined, from the outer suburbs. Obscene? Not in the least. Just saying that her liaison with Roger was known, telling her the evenings when he visited her, and asking her to warn Roger to be careful.

Since the check on telephone calls, she had received a couple of anonymous letters. That was why, she said when it was nearly time for me to leave, she had begged me to call that night. Yes, she had shown them to the lawyer. Now she spread them out on the table, beside the tumblers.

I had a phobia about anonymous letters. I had been exposed to them myself. I could not prevent my nerve-ends tingling, from the packed, paranoid handwriting, the psychic smell, the sense of madness whirling in a vacuum, of malice one could never meet in the flesh, of hatred pulsating in lonely rooms. But these letters were not of the usual kind. They were written in a bold and normal script on clean quarto paper. They were polite and business-like. They said that Roger had been known to visit her between five and seven in the evening, on the dates set down. (‘Correct?’ I asked. ‘Quite correct,’ said Ellen.) The writer had documentary proof of their relations (‘Possible?’ ‘I’m afraid we’ve written letters.’) If Roger continued in the public eye, this information would, with regret, have to be made known. Just that, and no more.

‘Who is it?’ she cried. ‘Is it some madman?’

‘Do you think,’ I said slowly, ‘it sounds like that?’

‘Is it just someone who hates us? Or one of us?’

‘I almost wish it were.’

‘You mean–?’

‘It looks to me,’ I said, ‘more rational than that.’

‘It’s something to do with Roger’s politics?’ She added, her face flushed with fighting anger, ‘I was afraid of that. By God, this is becoming a dirty game!’

I was glad that she was angry, not just beaten down. I said I wanted to take the letters away. I had acquaintances in Security, I explained. Their discretion was absolute. They were good at this kind of operation. If anyone could find out who this man was, or who was behind him, they could.

Ellen, an active woman, was soothed by the prospect of action. Bright-eyed, she made me have another drink before I left. She was talking almost happily, more happily than she had done all the evening, when she said out of the blue, a frown clouding her face: ‘I suppose you know her?’

All of a sudden she got up from the sofa, turned her back on me, rearranged some flowers – as though she wanted to talk about Caro but wasn’t able to accept the pain.

‘Yes, I know her.’

She gazed at me: ‘I was going to ask you what she was like.’ She paused. ‘Never mind.’

At the lift-door, when we said goodbye, she looked at me, so I thought, with trust. But her expression had gone back to that which had greeted me, diffident, severe.

Basset in October, a week before the new session: the leaves falling on the drive, the smoke from the lodge chimney unmoving in the still air, the burnished sunset, the lights streaming from the house, the drinks waiting in the flower-packed hall. It might have been something out of an eclogue, specially designed to illustrate how lucky these lives were, or as an advertisement composed in order to increase the rate of political recruitment.

Even to an insider, it all looked so safe.

It all looked so safe at dinner. Collingwood, silent and marmoreal, sat on Diana’s right: Roger, promoted to her left hand, looked as composed as Collingwood, as much a fixture. Caro, in high and handsome spirits, was flashing signals to him and Diana across the table. Caro’s neighbour, a member of the Opposition shadow cabinet, teased her as though he fitted as comfortably as anyone there, which in fact he did. He was a smooth, handsome man called Burnett, a neighbour of Diana’s whom she had called in for dinner. Young Arthur Plimpton was sitting between my wife and a very pretty girl, Hermione Fox, a relative of Caro’s. It didn’t take much skill to deduce that this was one of Diana’s counter-measures against Penelope Getliffe. Arthur, looking both bold and shifty, was in England for a week, intent upon not drawing too much of my attention and Margaret’s.

But there was at least one person who was putting on a public face. Monty Cave’s wife had at last left him for good; to anyone but himself it seemed a release, but not to him. The morning he received the final note, he had gone to his department and done his work. That was three days ago. And now he was sitting at the dinner table, his clever, fat, subtle face giving away nothing except interest, polite, receptive – as though it were absurd to think that a man so disciplined could suffer much, could ever have wished for death.

He was a man of abnormal control, on the outside. Mrs Henneker did not know what had happened to him.

When Margaret and I came into the house out of the Virgilian evening, Mrs Henneker had been lurking in the hall. I was just getting comfortable, we were having our first chat with Diana, when Mrs Henneker installed herself at my side. She was waiting for the other two to start talking. The instant they did so, she said, with her sparkling, dense, confident look: ‘I’ve got something to show you!’

Yes, it was my retribution. She had finished a draft of her ‘Life,’ as she kept calling it, the biography of her husband. There was no escape. I had to explain to Margaret, who gave a snort of laughter, then, composing her face, told me sternly how fortunate I was to be in on the beginning of a masterpiece. I had to follow Mrs Henneker into the library. Would I prefer her to read the manuscript aloud to me? I thought not. She looked disappointed. She took a chair very close to mine, watching my face with inflexible attention as I turned over the pages. To my consternation, it was a good deal better than I had expected. When she wrote, she didn’t fuss, she just wrote. That I might have reckoned on: what I hadn’t, was that she and her husband had adored each other. She did not find this in the least surprising, and as she wrote, some of it came through.

This was a real love-story, I tried to tell her. The valuable things in the book were there. So she ought to play down the injustices she believed him to have suffered, her own estimate of what ought to have happened to him. I didn’t say, but I thought I might have to, that she wasn’t being over-wise in telling us that as a fighting commander he was in the class of Nelson, as a naval thinker not far behind Mahan, as a moral influence comparable with Einstein – if she wanted us to believe that as a husband, he was as good as Robert Browning.

I had spoken gently, or at least, I had intended to. Mrs Henneker brooded. She stared at me. It was near dinner time, I said, and we had left ourselves only a quarter of an hour to dress. In a stately fashion, Mrs Henneker inclined her head. She had not thanked me for my suggestions, much less commented upon them.

At the dinner table, she was still brooding. She was too much preoccupied to speak to me. When Arthur, accomplished with elderly matrons, took time off to be polite to her, he did not get much further. At last, after the fish, she burst out, not to either of us, but to the table at large: ‘I suppose I must be old-fashioned!’

She had spoken so loudly, so furiously, that everyone attended.

In her briskest tone, Diana said: ‘What is it, Kate?’

‘I believe in happy marriages. I was happy with my husband and I don’t mind anyone knowing it. But my neighbour–’ she meant me, she was speaking with unconcealed distaste – ‘tells me that I mustn’t say so.’

For an instant I was put out. This was what came of giving literary advice. I should never persuade her, nor presumably anyone else, that I had said the exact opposite.

She was put out too. She was indifferent to anyone round her. She said, ‘Doesn’t anyone nowadays like being married, except me?’

The table was quiet. Roger knew about Monty’s state: so did Caro. So did Margaret. I could not prevent my glance deviating towards him. Nor, in that quiet and undisciplined instant, could others. He was sitting with his eyes open and meaningless, his mouth also open: he looked more childlike than clever, foolish, a bit of a clown.

It was Caro who cracked the silence. Her colour had risen. She called out, just like someone offering a bet: ‘Damn it, most of us do our best, don’t we?’ She was teasing Margaret and me, each of whom had been married twice. She laughed at Arthur and Hermione Fox. They had plenty of time ahead, she said, they probably wouldn’t do any better than we had all done.

Arthur gave a creaking laugh. If Caro had been his own age, she would have known exactly how much he fought shy of getting married; she would have had it out of him. He wouldn’t have cared. For some, the flash of sympathy between them was a relief.

Except that, for some moments yet, Monty Cave sat with his clown’s face. Then his expression, and those of the rest of us, became disciplined again.

With one exception, that Margaret and I speculated about. At the head of her own table, Diana was crying. Even when she gave us orders about how long to stay over the port, the tears returned. When we were alone in our bedroom, Margaret and I talked about it. Yes, she had behaved much as usual after dinner; she still sounded like a curious mixture of Becky Sharp and a good regimental officer keeping us all on our toes. We both knew that her marriage to Skidmore was supposed to have been an abnormally happy one. Was that why she had cried?

Next morning, meeting me in the hall, she told me that she was too tired to go out with the guns. It was the first time I had known her energies flag. She was still enough herself to give me instructions. I didn’t shoot, I might be bored, but I was to keep Monty Cave company in her place. ‘He’s not to be left by himself just now,’ she said. It sounded matter-of-fact and kind. Actually it was kind, but not entirely matter-of-fact. Diana was providing against the remotest chance of a suicide.

Soon the shooting parties were setting out, with me among them. Reggie Collingwood, Caro and Roger, walked along together through the golden fields. So far as Collingwood had any casual pleasures, shooting was the favourite one. He approved of Roger for sharing it: while Roger, who had taken on the pastimes of Caro’s family when he married her, lolloped tweedily along between them, looking as natural as an Edwardian statesman.

Monty and I veered to the left. When I spoke to him, he answered me, quite sweet-temperedly, but that was all. By the side of the other party, we were funereal. Then quick steps came padding up behind us. I looked round. It was Arthur Plimpton, dressed no more fittingly than I was, but carrying a gun. I did not understand why he had sacrificed a day with a comely young woman, but I was glad to see him. It was possible that he had come out of good nature. He was no fool, and he couldn’t have been in Basset for twenty-four hours without picking up the story of Monty’s wife.

‘Do you like hunting, sir?’ he said cheerfully to Monty.

‘No, I never hunt,’ said Monty, who had just brought down two birds with a right and left.

‘If I may say so, sir, you’re doing pretty well for a beginner.’ Arthur knew as well as I did that the English did not refer to this form of avicide as ‘hunting’. He had used the word out of mischief. He turned out to be a competent shot, about as good as Collingwood or Roger. Of the four of them, Monty was far and away the best. He might be a clever, sad, fat man, whom women were not drawn to: but his eyes and limbs worked like a machine.

At about one o’clock, we all gathered on a mound, eating out of the picnic-baskets. The morning mist had cleared, the light was mellow, clear as Constable’s. Caro stretched herself on the turf with the sensuous virtue of one who has taken exercise; she took a swig from a brandy flask and passed it to Roger. The party looked like a tableau out of someone’s attempt to present a simpler age.

Collingwood gazed at the shining countryside. ‘It’s a nice day,’ he said.

When, in the dying afternoon, we were sitting in the library up at the house, having just got back for tea, Collingwood felt the phrase could not be much improved. He and Roger and Cave sat in their tweeds round Diana, who was pouring out. ‘It’s been a nice day,’ said Collingwood.

Though it would have taken a great expert in Collingwoodian dialogue to detect this, he was not so patriarchally content as he had been at mid-day in the sunshine. During the afternoon, the difference between the bags had mounted. By the time we walked home, Collingwood and Roger had had the worst of the day. Collingwood was inclined to blame it on to Roger.

‘You seem to have been in good form, Cave,’ said Collingwood in the library, with manly frankness, with oblique reproach.

Monty Cave muttered politely, but without interest.

Arthur joined in: ‘He was good all day,’ and began talking to Cave himself. Arthur was suggesting a two-handed shoot, just the two of them, first thing the next morning.

Collingwood was surveying them. He approved of attempts to ‘take his mind off it’. He approved of young men making efforts with their elders. Most of all, he approved of able, rich young men. Drinking whisky instead of tea, he stretched out stockinged legs and gave a well-disposed sigh. Turning to his hostess, he remarked: ‘Diana, I must say, it’s been a nice day.’

When the dispatch-boxes arrived, both Diana and he made their routine grumbles, just as they had been doing since the twenties, when he got his first office, and she was starting to run a political house. As Margaret and I were strolling in the courtyard, in the bluish twilight, a government car drove up. A secretary descended, carrying one of the boxes, red and oblong, which we were all used to. We followed him in: this one was for Monty Cave. Within minutes, two other secretaries, carrying two identical boxes, walked through the great hall of Basset, on their way to Collingwood and Roger Quaife.