Corridors of Power (24 page)

In the library, Diana, revived, her face less drawn, went through the minuet of grumbles, while she had the satisfaction of seeing three boxes being opened on three pairs of knickerbockered knees.

‘I’d better put dinner off till nine?’ she said.

‘I’m afraid it looks like it,’ replied Collingwood. His tone was grave and ill-used: yet he couldn’t, any more than Diana, conceal a kind of pleasure, the pleasure, secretive but shining, that they got from being at the centre of things.

Diana had the drill laid on. Dinner to be late, drinks to be sent up at once to the Minister’s rooms. Soon Collingwood was lumbering up the wide staircase, with the step of a man who has to bear too much. The other two followed. I wasn’t wanted, and it was some time before I went up to my room. There, as I dressed, Margaret was baiting me through the door, hilarious at the stately ritual downstairs. Did all men in power behave like this? Why? Because otherwise, I replied, they wouldn’t reach power, enjoy it, or keep it.

Just then, there was a knock on the door. It was one of the menservants, bearing an envelope, addressed to me in Collingwood’s bold Edwardian hand. Inside was a sheet of Basset writing-paper, covered by more of Collingwood’s elephantine writing. It said: ‘I should be grateful if you could spare us a few minutes of your time. It would be a convenience if you could come without delay.’

I took in the note to Margaret without a word, and left her laughing.

Inside Collingwood’s bedroom, which was the biggest in the house, the boxes gaped open on a table, and the great four-poster bed was strewn with papers. All three men were still wearing their outdoor suits, though Collingwood had taken off his jacket. He was sitting on the bed, and the other two had drawn up chairs nearby, each holding a glass in his hand.

‘Oh, there you are,’ said Collingwood. ‘We want to get something fixed up.’

Roger explained that they had received a Cabinet paper. He said to Collingwood: ‘I assume Eliot can see it? He’ll get it in his own office on Monday.’

Collingwood nodded.

I ran through it. It was only a couple of pages, typed in triple spacing on one of the large-letter machines, as though specially designed for longsighted elderly men. It came from the Minister of Labour. It said that if a change in weapons policy was at any time contemplated, the Minister wished the labour position to be established from the beginning. That is, a sudden stop, even in a single isolated project, such as—’ would mean unemployment for seven thousand men, of whom three thousand were specialists, and difficult to assimilate. This would be embarrassing for the Minister. Any more fundamental change in weapons policy would produce large pockets of unemployment. Unless the changes were spread over several years, they would be unacceptable.

It sounded official, cautious, reasonable. But everyone in the room knew that it meant more. It was a sighting-shot: and it was a sighting-shot, as it were, by proxy. It was not really this Minister who was testing Roger’s intentions. It was a set of other interests, who were still keeping quiet. Service groups? Big firms? None of us knew, but all of us were guessing.

‘They’ve been getting at him,’ said Collingwood.

‘It’s very easy, as I said before,’ Roger leaned back, ‘for them to overplay their hands.’

He looked confident, full of weight, springy with resource. Collingwood turned his handsome head and watched him in silence. So far as I could feel it in the air, there had been no argument.

‘Well, then, Quaife, I’m with you. I agree, the Committee’ (he meant the Cabinet committee on defence policy, about which Rose had given me the first news) ‘ought to meet tomorrow or Tuesday. That’s where we want you to help us–’ He spoke to me. He gave, as usual, the impression that he was ill at ease and that he didn’t care whether he was at ease or not. Everyone at Basset called him Reggie, but he still found it an effort not to speak to those two Cabinet colleagues of his as Mr Quaife and Mr Cave. He just managed to use their surnames. As for me, though I had met him a dozen times in the house, he could not become as familiar as that.

He assumed that I was at his disposal for a modest task.

They wanted the Committee convened over the weekend. As Douglas Osbaldiston was the Secretary, that was his job. Would I telephone him and get that in motion before dinner?

It was barely polite. It was certainly not adroit. Yet, within the next ten minutes, I saw, or thought I saw, how he kept his power. Before I arrived, they had been talking about three big firms: how much influence could they pull out? By this time, Roger and Cave spoke of ‘pressure groups’, or ‘lobbies’, as though they were Americans.

‘If they were solid together, they might be more of a menace,’ said Roger. ‘But they’re not, we haven’t given them a chance to be. There are always going to be some Government contracts. For some of our friends, that prospect carries its own simple logic.’

By the side of Roger, braced for the struggle, his voice taking on its taunting edge, Cave looked slack and gone to seed. But he was more at home than he had been all the weekend. He didn’t see, he said, any lobby being effective by itself. ‘But I should make two qualifications. First, Government must know its own mind. Second, and this isn’t quite a platitude, lobbies may be important if they happen to touch opinion deeper than their own. That is, if they touch opinion which hasn’t their own axe to grind.’

‘Fair comment,’ said Roger.

Collingwood stirred, and put one arm round the bedpost. ‘I see.’ He was speaking to neither of them in particular, making pauses like one reading from a script: but the authority was there. ‘If I understand you both right, there isn’t much between us. I take it Cave means that we’ve got to feel our way. I agree to that. We’ve got to watch whether any of these forces are having any effect on the Party. We can’t push the Party further than it’s prepared to go. I’m not presuming to give Quaife any advice. I never give anyone any advice.’ He said this as though it were the most exalted claim a man could make. ‘But, if I were Quaife, I should wrap up some of his intentions. I shouldn’t let them get down to particular consequences until we’ve carried most of them with us. Carried them further than they thought. But not further than some of us are ready to go. I shouldn’t let the White Paper give them much idea which weapons were being struck off straight away. I should wrap it up.’ He was still addressing the wall. ‘If I were Quaife, I should remember one other thing. I’ve got a feeling that the Party needs a lead. And by the Party, I mean the country as well. They need to feel that they’re doing something new. I’ve got a feeling that, if anyone gives them a lead, they’ll forgive him a lot. They may not like everything he’s doing, but they’ll be ready to forgive him.’

It was a curious speech, I thought, as I listened, and even more so later. A good deal of it was common form, not specially ominous, but carefully uncommitted. The last part was not such common form. He seemed to be inviting Roger to take a risk. As he did so, I had felt for the first time that he was, in his own right, a formidable man. Was he inducing Roger to take one risk too many? He had sounded, in a stony way, sincere. What did he wish for Roger? He had done him good turns. Did he like him? Men like Collingwood did not like or dislike freely. I was still uncertain about his feelings for Roger, or whether he had any feelings for him at all.

Next day, Margaret and I had to leave the house after tea. The weather had not changed. Just as when we arrived, it was an evening so tranquil that the chimney smoke seemed painted on the sky, and in the air there was a smell of burning leaves. Diana stood by herself in the courtyard, waving us off.

It had been a weekend in the country, with unhappiness in the house, and foreboding. As we settled down in the car, though, I felt, not relief to get away, but disquiet. For some of the disquiet I could find reason; but it was still there, swelling, nagging, changing, as though I were back in my childhood after a holiday, returning home, not knowing what I should find nor what I feared.

The committee room looked inwards to the Treasury yard: the rain sloshed down. Past Collingwood’s head, on the two sides of the window, quivered the turning plane-leaves. In the chair, Collingwood behaved as he had done before, sitting on the bed at Basset. He was formal with the Ministers: Douglas Osbaldiston he treated like a servant, which Douglas showed no sign of noticing, much less of minding. But Collingwood got what he wanted. Arguments did not continue, except on lines which he approved, and there were not many. He had come to inspect the skeleton of the White Paper. In his view, it ought to be what he called ‘a set of balances’.

This suited Roger. It was not the way in which, that summer, before the opposition began to crystallize, we had been making drafts. This way left him some tactical freedom. It sounded as though he and Collingwood, after the bedroom conference, had made a deal. Yet I knew for certain that, since half-past eight on the Saturday night, two and a half days before, they had not exchanged a word in private. Enough had been said. They each understood what would follow, and so did Monty Cave and I. This was the way business got done, very rarely with intrigue, not as a rule with cut and dried agreements; quite different from the imaginative picture of the cynical and unworldly.

Osbaldiston, who was neither cynical nor unworldly, would have understood it without even a comment, if he had been present on Saturday night. As it was, he was momentarily surprised. He had expected something more dramatic from his Minister, and had been uneasy. Douglas did not approve of anything dramatic, on paper. Now he realized that the White Paper was going to be filled with detail. He was more comfortable with it so.

While Hector Rose, sick with migraine when I reported to him that afternoon, smelled compromise in the air.

‘I think I remember, my dear Lewis, mentioning to you that the knives were sharpening. Has it ever crossed your mind that our masters are somewhat easily frightened off?’ He looked at me with sarcastic satisfaction in his own judgement. I told him more about the meeting, which he would have attended himself if he had been well. I said that the Air Minister had reserved his position at much too great length. Rose nodded. It would be a month or two before the White Paper could be finished, they had agreed. By that time, Roger had told them casually, just before the end of the meeting, he would have his ‘winding-up’ ready for them to see. ‘That went down?’ Rose raised his eyebrows. ‘It sounds like a very neat job of papering-over-the-cracks, shouldn’t you say?’

But Rose and a good many others were puzzled when, within a fortnight, Roger next spoke in public. Long before the Basset weekend, Lufkin had made him commit himself to the actual engagement. Whether he had changed his mind about what to say, after Collingwood’s allocution, I did not know. Whether he had decided to use this occasion, instead of going on to the television screen, I did not know also. It may have been the chance conjunction of Collingwood and Lufkin that led him to give what became known, a little bizarrely, as the Fishmongers’ Hall Speech.

Lord Lufkin was a Fishmonger. Not that he had ever sold a fish: not even in the Hamletian sense. Lufkin had a singular gift for getting it both ways. He disapproved of the hereditary peerage, and had become a hereditary peer. In just the same way, he had nothing but scorn for the old livery companies. It was grotesque, said Lufkin, with acid scorn, for businessmen to take on the names of honest trades they had not a vestige of connection with: and to stand themselves good dinners out of money earned by better men. It was medieval juju, said Lufkin. It was ‘atavistic’, he said mysteriously, with the spirit that John Knox might have shown when he was less well disposed than usual to Mary Queen of Scots. None of that prevented him taking all the honours in his own livery, which, by some fluke, was the Fishmongers. That year, he had risen to be the Prime Warden of the Fishmongers. Most of his colleagues enjoyed each honorific job as it came, and would have enjoyed this. Lufkin showed no sign of pleasure: except, I sometimes fancied, at the thought of doing someone else out of it.

He went through his duties. That was why he had invited Roger to the Michaelmas dinner and had arranged for him to speak. That was why Lufkin stood in a great drawing-room at the hall, that November night, dressed in a russet Tudor gown tipped with fur, surrounded by other officials of the livery, dressed in less grand gowns tipped with less grand fur. Above the fancy dress protruded Lufkin’s small, neat, handsome twentieth-century head, as he shook hand after hand with an impersonation of cordiality.

With maces carried before him, he led the procession into the hall for dinner. It was a hall not unlike, though larger than, a college hall: and the dinner was not unlike, though larger than, a college feast. Roger sat at the high table, on Lufkin’s right hand. I was somewhere down the hall, placed between a banker, cultivated and reactionary, and a Labour MP, less cultivated, but not much less reactionary. I did not know many men there, though across the room I caught sight of Sammikins, leaning back with a glass in his hand. The food and drink were good, but not good enough to go out for. I knew that Roger was going to use the occasion to ‘fly a kite’. I had not seen the script, and did not expect much. I was not at all keyed-up. I got the banker off the subject of South Africa, on which he sounded like an unusually illiberal Afrikaaner, on to German translations of Dostoievsky, where I knew nothing, and he a great deal.

Speeches. A long, and very bad one, by the chairman of an insurance company. I drank another glass of port. A short and very bad one by Lufkin, who sat down among dutiful plaudits as though he both expected them and was impervious.

Then the toastmaster cried: ‘Pray silence for your guest, the Right Honourable Roger Quaife, one of her Majesty’s Privy Councillors, holder of the Distinguished Service Order, Member of Parliament for—’

In the candlelight, looking at the table before me, I saw the sheen of glass, of gold and silver plate. I turned as Roger rose. He looked enormous, after the image left by Lufkin. He began the incantation: ‘My Lord and Prime Warden, your Grace, my Lords, Members of the Honourable Livery Company of the Fishmongers, gentlemen–’