Corridors of Power (27 page)

There were mutters of irritation from the Tory benches. The young man had gone too far.

This time, Leverett-Smith did not take so long to meditate. Solidly he announced to the middle distance: ‘This supplementary question is covered by my last answer. The question is also an unworthy reflection on gentlemen, who, often at great sacrifices to themselves, are doing invaluable service to the country.’

Vigorous hear-hears. Definite hear-hears, putting an end to supplementaries. Another question was called. Leverett-Smith sat broad-backed, basking in a job well done.

I was waiting for another question, further down the list, addressed to my own Minister. Douglas, who had been sitting beside me, left with a satisfied grin.

Sometime later, a debate was beginning. It was not yet time for me to leave for Ebury Street. Then I saw Roger coming into the Chamber. He must have picked up gossip outside, for on his way to his seat on the front bench he stopped by Leverett-Smith and slapped him on the shoulder. Leverett-Smith, turning to him, gave a serious contented smile.

Roger lolled in his seat, reading his own papers, like a man working in a railway carriage. At some quip from the Opposition benches that raised a laugh, he gave a preoccupied, good-natured smile.

As another speech began, he looked up from his scripts, turned to the box, and caught my eye. With his thumb, he beckoned me to meet him outside. I saw him get up, whisper to another Minister and stroll out.

In the central lobby, full of visitors, of little groups chatting earnestly, of solitary persons waiting with passive resignation, much like Grand Central Station on a winter night, he came up to me.

‘I hear Leverett was pretty good,’ he said.

‘Better than you’d have been.’

Roger drew down his lip in a grim chuckle. He was just going to speak, when I caught sight of Ellen walking past us. She must have come from the Strangers’ Gallery, I thought, as she gave me the slight smile of a distant acquaintance. To Roger she made no sign of recognition, nor he to her. I watched her move away from us, through the lobby doors.

Roger said: ‘She’ll be going straight home. We can follow in a few minutes. I think I’ll come along with you.’

In Palace Yard, the lamps, the taxi-lights, shone smearily through the fog. As we got near to the taxis, Roger muttered that it was better if I gave the address.

The click of the lift-door opening, the ring of the bell.

As Ellen opened the door, she was ready for me, but seeing Roger, gave an astonished, delighted sigh. The door closed behind us, and she was in his arms. It was a hug of relief, of knowledge, the hug of lovers who know all the pleasure they can give each other. For her, perhaps, it was a little more. Meeting him only in this room, pressed in by this claustrophobia of secrecy, she was glad, this once, to throw her arms round him and have someone there to watch. They would have liked to go straight to bed. Nevertheless, it was a joy to her, as well as a frustration, to have me there.

At last they sat on the sofa, I in an armchair. ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’ she asked, inquiring about the incident in the House, but her tone so happy that she might have been asking another question. His eyes were as bright as hers. He answered, in the same sort of double-talk: ‘Not bad.’ Then he got down to business.

‘Everyone seems to think that it passed off rather well.’

I said I was sure it had.

She wanted us to tell her: would the question do any damage now? Difficult to say: possibly not, unless something bigger happened. She was frowning. She was shrewd, but she had not been brought up to politics and found the corridors hard to see her way through.

‘Well, anyway,’ she said, ‘it must be the end of Brodzinski. That’s something.’

No, we said, that wasn’t certain. Never underestimate the paranoid. I was mimicking Roger and also scoring off him, going back to his handling of Brodzinski. Often they stayed dangerous, while saner men went under. Never underestimate them, I said. Never try to placate them. It is a waste of time. They take and never give. The only way to deal with paranoids is to kick them in the teeth. If a chap has persecution mania, the only practical course is to give him something to feel persecuted about.

I was being off-hand, putting on a tough act to cheer her up. But she wasn’t putting on a tough act when she said: ‘I want him done in. I wish to God I could manage it myself.’ He had done, or was trying to do, Roger harm. That was enough.

‘Can’t you set some of the scientists on to him?’ she asked me passionately.

‘They’re none too pleased,’ I replied.

‘Hell, what good is that.’

Roger said that she needn’t worry too much about Brodzinski. He would still have some nuisance value, but so far as having any practical influence, he might have shot his bolt. It wasn’t a good idea, making attacks in America. It might create some enemies for us there, but they would have been enemies anyhow. As for this country, it would damage his credit, even with people who would have liked to use him.

‘There’ll be plenty more trouble,’ he said, ‘but as for Brodzinski, I fancy he’ll stew in his own juice.’

‘You’re not going to do anything to him?’

‘Not if leaving him alone produces the right answer.’ He smiled at her.

‘I want him done in,’ she cried again.

His arm was round her, and he tightened his hold. He told her that, in practical affairs, revenge was a luxury one couldn’t afford. There was no point in it. She laughed out loud. ‘You speak for yourself. There would be some point in it for
me
.’

I had been trying to cheer her up, but it was not easy. She was worried for Roger, more worried than either he or I were that night: yet she was full of spirit. Not just because she was with us. She was behaving as though a wound were healed.

At last I grasped it. This attack had nothing to do with her. She was suspicious that, behind the telephone calls, might be someone Roger had known. For a time, she had been ready to blame Brodzinski. The inquiries I had set moving had already told us that this was unlikely. Now she could believe it. It set her free to hate Brodzinski more. She was blazing with relief. She could not bear the danger to come through her. She would, I thought, have lost an eye, an arm, her looks, if she could have lessened the danger for Roger: and yet, that kind of unselfish love had its own egotism: she would have chosen that the danger were increased, rather than it should have come from her.

I told her that the intelligence people hadn’t got anything positive. They now had all her telephone calls intercepted.

‘All that’s done,’ she said, ‘is to be maddening when he–’ she looked at Roger – ‘is trying to get through.’

‘They’ve got their own techniques. You’ll have to be patient, won’t you?’

‘Am I good at being patient?’

Roger said, ‘You’re having the worst of this. You’ve got to put up with it.’ He said it sharply, with absolute confidence.

She asked me, was there anything else she could do? Had she just got to sit tight?

‘It’s pretty hard, you know,’ she said.

Roger said: ‘Yes, I know it is.’

Soon afterwards, he looked at his watch and said he would have to leave in another half-hour. On my way home, I thought of them a little, free together, by themselves.

It needed no one to instruct Roger about gossip. He picked it up in the air: or more exactly, for there was nothing supernatural about it, he read it in the expressions of acquaintances, without a word spoken, as he walked about the House, his clubs, the offices, Downing Street. We all knew, in those November days, that it was boiling up: some of it sheer random gossip – malicious, mischievous, warm with human relish – some politically pointed.

I had not yet heard a whisper about Ellen, or any other woman. The PQ seemed to have fallen dead. One reason why he was being talked about was that he was getting precisely the support he could least afford. The Fishmongers’ Hall speech, or bits of it, or glosses upon it, was passing round. It had made news. It was drawing the kind of publicity which, because no one understood it, the theatre people called ‘word of mouth’. Roger had, within two or three weeks, become a favourite, or at any rate a hope, of liberal opinion. Liberal opinion? To some on the outside, certainly to the Marxists, it didn’t mean much. It might use different language from the
Telegraph
, Lord Lufkin’s colleagues, or the Conservative back-benchers, but if ever there was a fighting-point, it would come down on the same side. Maybe. But this, inconveniently for Roger, was not how it appeared to the
Telegraph
, Lord Lufkin’s colleagues, or the Conservative back-benchers. To them, the
New Statesman
and the
Observer
looked like Lenin’s paper,
Iskra
, in one of its more revolutionary phases. If Roger got praise in such quarters, he was a man to be watched.

There was praise from other quarters, more dangerous still. Irregulars on the opposition benches had begun to quote him: not the official spokesmen, who had their own troubles and who wanted to quieten the argument down, but the disarmers, the pacifists, the idealists. They were not an organized group; in numbers they might be less than thirty, but they were articulate and unconstrained. When I read one of their speeches, in which Roger got an approving word, I thought with acrimony, save us from our friends.

Roger knew all this. He did not speak of it to me; he held back any confidence about what he feared, or hoped, or planned to do. Once he talked of Ellen; and another time, in the bar of a club, he brought me a tankard of beer and suddenly said: ‘You’re not religious, are you?’

He knew the answer. No, I said, I was an unbeliever.

‘Curious,’ he said. His face looked puzzled, uncalculating, simple. ‘I should have thought you would have been.’

He gulped at his own tankard. ‘You know, I can’t imagine getting on without it.’

‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘there are plenty of people who like the Church, even though they don’t really believe. I think I should still like the Church, if I didn’t believe. But I do.’

I asked: just what did he believe?

‘I think,’ he said, ‘almost everything I learned as a child. I believe in God In Heaven, I believe in an after-life. It’s no use telling me that Heaven isn’t the place I used to think it was. I know that as well as they do. But I can’t help believing.’

He went on talking about faith. His tone was gentle, like a man blundering on. He would have liked me to say, Yes, that’s how I feel. He was utterly sincere: no one could confide like that and lie. And yet, half suspiciously, at the back of my mind I was thinking, it is possible for a man to confide, quite genuinely, one thing, because he wants to conceal another.

At the back of my mind I was thinking, this wasn’t a device, it came to him by nature. Yet it would be just as effective in keeping me away from his next moves.

Up to now, I had shut up the doubt which Hector Rose had not spoken, but had, with acerbity, implied. I knew Roger and Rose didn’t, and wouldn’t have wanted to. Rose would have been totally uninterested in his purpose, his aspirations, in his faith. Rose judged men as functional creatures, and there he was often, more often than I cared to remember, dead right. He was asking one question about Roger, and one alone: What – when it came to the point – would he do?

Roger told me nothing. In the next week, I received only one message from him. And that was an invitation to a ‘bachelor supper’ in Lord North Street, the night after the Lancaster House reception.

At Lancaster House, Roger was present, walking for a few minutes arm-in-arm with the Prime Minister, up and down the carpet, affable under the chandeliers. That did not distinguish him from other Ministers, or even from Osbaldiston or Rose. The Prime Minister had time for all, and was ready to walk arm-in-arm with anyone, affable, under chandeliers. It was the kind of reception, I thought as I stood on the stairs, that might have happened in much the same form and with much the same faces, a hundred years before, except that then, it would probably have been held in the Prime Minister’s own house, and that nowadays, so far as I remembered accounts of Victorian political parties, there was a good deal more to drink.

The occasion was the visit of some western Foreign Minister. The politicians and their wives were there, the Civil Servants and their wives. The politicians’ wives were more expensively dressed than the Civil Servants’, and in general more spectacular. On the other hand, the Civil Servants themselves were more spectacular than the politicians, so that a stranger might have thought them a more splendiferous race. With their white ties, they were wearing their crosses, medals and sashes, and the figure of Hector Rose, usually subfusc, shone and sparkled, more ornamented, more be-sashed, than that of anyone in the room.

The room itself was filling up, so was the staircase. Margaret was talking to the Osbaldistons. On my way to join them, I was stopped by Diana Skidmore. I admired her dress, her jewellery; star-sapphires. Underneath it all, she looked strained and pale. But she could assume high spirits; or else, they were as much part of her as the bones of her monkey face. She kept giving glances, smiling, recognizing acquaintances as they passed.

She gazed at the Prime Minister, now walking up and down with Monty Cave. ‘He’s doing it very nicely, isn’t he?’ she said. She spoke of the Prime Minister rather like a headmaster discussing the performance of the best thirteen-year-old in a gymnastic display. Then she asked me: ‘Where’s Margaret?’ I pointed her out, and began to take Diana towards her. Though Diana knew far more people at the reception than I did, she had not met the Osbaldistons.

She said she would like to, vivacious and party-bright. Before we had gone three steps, she stopped: ‘No. I don’t want to meet anyone else. I’ve met quite enough.’

For an instant, I wondered if I had heard right. It wasn’t like her breakdown at her own dinner-table. Her eyes were bright with will, not tears.