Corridors of Power (45 page)

I scarcely noticed. I was thinking, was this the time that he might choose to break loose? Once or twice he had threatened to cut the tangle of these arguments, and to try to touch something deeper. Would it help him? We were all children of our time and class, conditioned to think of these decisions (Were they decisions? Were we just driven?) in forms we couldn’t break. Could anyone break them? Were there forces which Roger or anyone in that house, or any of the rest of us, could release?

If he had thought of trying, he put the idea behind him. He was talking only to the House. And yet, within ten minutes, I knew that he wasn’t withdrawing, that he had forgotten temptations, ambiguities and tricks. He was saying what he had often concealed, but all along believed. Now that he had to speak, he gave an account, lucid and sharp, of the kind of thinking Getliffe and his colleagues had made their own. He gave it with more force than they could have done. He gave it with the authority of one who would grip the power. But it was only right at the end that he said something which dropped, quietly, unofficially, into the late night air. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘The problems we’re trying to handle are very difficult. So difficult that most people in this country – people who are by and large at least as intelligent as we are – can’t begin to understand them. Simply because they haven’t had the information, and hadn’t been taught to come to terms with them. I’m not sure how many of us can comprehend what our world is like, now that we’re living with the bomb. Perhaps very few, or none. But I’m certain that the overwhelming majority of people who are, I repeat, at least as intelligent as we are, don’t have any idea. We are trying to speak for them. We have taken a great deal upon ourselves. We never ought to forget it.’

I was feeling admiration, anxiety, the exhilaration of anxiety. Now it had come to it, did I wish that he had compromised? His colleagues could get rid of him now: the bargains and balances of the White Paper didn’t allow for this. The chance, the only chance, was that he might take the House with him.

‘It has been said in this house, these last two nights, that I want to take risks. Let me tell you this. All choices involve risks. In our world, all the serious choices involve grave ones. But there are two kinds of risk. One is to go on mindlessly, as though our world were the old world. I believe, as completely as I believe anything, that if this country and all countries go on making these bombs, testing these bombs – just as though they were so many battleships – then before too long a time, the worst will happen. Perhaps through no one’s fault – just because we’re all men, liable to make mistakes, go mad, or have bad luck. If that happens, our descendants, if we have any, will curse us. And every curse will be justified.

‘This country can’t be a super-power any longer. I should be happier if it could. Though it is possible that being a super-power is in itself an illusion, now that science has caught up with us. Anyway, we can’t be one. But I am certain that we can help – by example, by good judgement, by talking sense, and acting sense – we can help swing the balance between a good future and a bad future, or between a good future and none at all. We can’t contract out. The future is firmly poised. Our influence upon it is finite, but it exists.

‘That is why I want to take one kind of risk. It is, in fact, a small risk, which may do good, as opposed to a great risk which would certainly do harm. That is still the choice. That is all.’

Roger sat down, heavy-faced, hands in his pockets. For an instant, a long instant, there was silence. Then applause behind him. How solid was it? Was it uncomfortable? There were one or two cheers from the back benches on the other side. Ritual took over. The lobby bells rang. I noticed Sammikins stand up, head high and wild, in the middle of his friends, going out defiantly to vote against them. Half a dozen members sat obstinately on the Government benches, most of them with arms crossed, parading their determination to abstain. That told us nothing. There might be others, not so forthright, who would go out and not pass through the lobby.

The members returned. Some were talking, but the noise level was low. There was a crowd, excited, tense, at the sides of the Speaker’s Chair. Before the tellers had passed the dispatch box, a hush had fallen. It was a hush but not a high-spirited one. The voice came: ‘Ayes on the right, 186.’ (There had been more Labour abstentions than Rose had allowed for.)

The voice came again.

‘Noes on the left, 271.’

Rose looked at me with cold sympathy. He said, precisely: ‘I consider this unfortunate.’

In the chamber, it took longer for the result to sink in. The Chairman repeated the numbers in a sonorous bass, and announced that the Noes had it.

Seconds later, half a minute later, a chant opened up from the Opposition. ‘Resign! Resign!’

Without fuss, the Government front bench began to empty. The Prime Minister, Collingwood, Monty Cave, went out of the House together, passing close by us in the box. Cries followed them, but the shouts were focused on Roger. He was sitting back, one arm stretched out behind him, talking, with apparent casualness, to the First Lord and Leverett-Smith.

‘Resign! Resign!’

The yells broke on him. Once, he gave a wave across the gangway, like a Wimbledon player acknowledging the existence of the crowd.

Taking his time, he got up. He didn’t look either at his own back-benchers or at the others. ‘Resign! Resign!’ The shouts grew louder. His great back moved slowly down the aisle, away from us. At the Bar he turned and made his bow to the Chair. Then he walked on. When he was out of sight, the shouts still crashed behind him.

Next morning, headlines, questions in the papers: rumours in Whitehall. Beyond the windows, the February sky was clear and crystalline. In my office, the scrambled, yellow corded telephone kept ringing. No message from Roger had reached the Prime Minister’s secretary.

Collingwood was reported to have said: ‘This dance will no further go.’ (The only historical reference the old man knew, said a cultivated voice at the other end of the wire.) He was said to be bearing Roger no malice, to be speaking of him with dispassion. He had heard – this I did not know for certain until later – about Roger and his nephew’s wife. He took the news with stony lack of concern. ‘I regard that as irrelevant,’ he said. He turned out to have no feeling whatsoever for his nephew. That had been one of the unrealistic fears.

That morning, there was a strong rumour, which came from several sources, that some of Roger’s supporters were calling on the Prime Minister. They were trying to arrange for the Prime Minister to interview him. He hadn’t resigned yet. Another rumour: he was backing down. He wouldn’t resign. He would announce that he had stressed one part of the White Paper at the expense of the whole. He had been wrong, but now faithfully accepted the compromise. He would go on implementing the compromise policies: or alternatively, he would take a dimmer job.

I heard nothing from him. I imagined that he was like the rest of us when the worst has happened, in moments still tantalized by hopes, almost by fulfilment, as though it had gone the other way: just as, when Sheila had betrayed me when I was a young man, I walked across the park deceived by gleams of happiness, as though I were going to her bed: just as, when an operation has failed, one lies in hospital and, now and then, has reveries of content, as though one were whole again.

He would be living with temptations. He wasn’t different from most of those who have obtained any kind of power, petty or grand. He wanted to cling to it up to the end, beyond the end. If he went out now, untouched, unbudging, that was fine, that was in the style he would like for himself. And yet, he knew politics too well not to know that he might never come back. It would be bitter to behave as if he had been wrong, to be juggled with, put in an inconspicuous Ministry for years: but perhaps that was the way to win. Would they let him? He must be thinking of the talks that day. Others would be counting the odds, with more degrees of freedom than he had. It might be good management to make sure that he was disposed of. Some might be sorry, but that didn’t count. If they gave him a second chance, it wouldn’t be because of sympathy or even admiration. They owed him no support. It would be because he still had some power. They must be weighing up just how much influence he still possessed. Would he be more dangerous eliminated, or allowed to stay?

In the afternoon I attended a departmental meeting, Rose in the chair. He hadn’t spoken to me that morning; he greeted me with overflowing politeness, as though I were a valuable acquaintance whom he had not seen for months. No one round the table could have guessed that we had been sitting side by side, in anxiety, the night before. He got through the business as accurately, as smoothly, as he would have done when I first sat under him, nearly twenty years before. Next year, he would be sixty, taking his last meeting in this room. He would go on like this till the last day. This particular afternoon, it wasn’t even interesting business: it had to be done.

As soon as I returned to my room, my PA came in.

‘There’s a lady waiting for you,’ she said. She looked inquisitive and apologetic. ‘I’m afraid she seems rather upset.’

I asked who it was.

‘She says her name is Mrs Smith.’

When I had told Ellen the result over the telephone, late the previous night, she had gasped. I had heard a gulp of tears before the receiver crashed down.

That afternoon, as she sat down in the chair beside my desk, her eyes were open, bloodshot, piteous and haughty. They reminded me of someone else’s so hauntingly that I couldn’t at first listen to what she was saying. Then, down the years, I had it. They were like my mother’s, after an intolerable wound to her pride, as on the day my father went bankrupt.

She asked: ‘What is he going to do?’

I shook my head. ‘He’s told me nothing.’

‘I haven’t been able to see him.’

She was crying out for sympathy, and yet she would reject it.

I said, as astringently as I could make myself: ‘Yes, it’s bad. It’s part of the situation.’

‘I mustn’t see him till he’s decided, one way or the other. You understand, don’t you?’

‘I think so.’

‘I mustn’t influence him. I mustn’t even try.’

Then she gave a crisp, ironic, almost cheerful laugh, and added: ‘Do you believe I could?’

I had seen her so often under strain. This day was the worst. But – just in that moment – I could feel how she behaved with Roger. Given a chance, she was, more than most of us, high-spirited and gay.

‘Tell me something,’ she said, her eyes searching mine. ‘Which is better for him?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know well enough.’ Impatiently she explained herself. She might have been reading my own speculations earlier that day. Until she met Roger, she was politically innocent. Now she could follow, by instinct, love and knowledge, the moves, the temptations, the choices. Her insight had told her much what mine did: except that she was certain that, if Roger wanted to climb down, they would welcome him.

‘Which is better for him?’

‘If I knew, which I don’t, ought I to tell you?’ I said.

‘You’re supposed to be a friend of his, aren’t you?’ she flared out.

‘Fortunately,’ this time I could let the temperature drop, and smile sarcastically back, ‘I just don’t know which is better.’

‘But you think you do–’

I said: ‘If we forget your side of it, then I think he’d probably, not certainly but probably, be wiser to stay if he can.’

‘Why?’

‘If he’s out of politics, won’t he feel he’s wasting his life?’

‘It means humiliating himself and crawling to them.’ She flushed. She was hating ‘them’ with all the force of her nature.

‘Yes, it means that.’

‘Do you know that underneath he’s a very proud man?’

I looked at her and said, ‘Hasn’t he learned to live with it?’

‘Has anyone? Don’t you believe that I’m proud too?’

She was speaking without constraint, self-effacingness stripped off, codes of behaviour fallen away. Her face had gone naked and wild.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I believe that.’

‘If he does throw it up and comes to me, will he ever forgive me?’

It was a new fear, different from that which she had once confided in her own flat, yet grown from the same root. Then she had been afraid that, once he had failed, he would blame her and be unable to endure her. Now that fear had gone. She believed that, whatever happened, he would need her. Yet the doubt, the cruelty, the heritage, remained.

‘You have nothing to do with it,’ I said. ‘If he had never fallen in love with any woman at all, he would have been in precisely the same position as he is today.’

‘Are you dead sure?’

I said immediately, ‘I am dead sure.’

I was saying what I almost believed. If she had not been sitting beside me, wounded and suspicious, waiting for the slightest qualification, I might have been less positive. Roger had stood much less of a chance of getting his policy through – I became convinced later, looking back – than we imagined when we were living in the middle of it. It was hard to believe that a personal chance, such as their love affair, had had any effect. And yet – their love affair had had an effect on him: without it, would he have acted precisely as he had?

‘I am dead sure,’ I repeated.

‘Will he ever believe it?’

For an instant, I did not answer. ‘Will he ever believe it?’

She was thinking of Roger coming to her, marrying her: the plain life, after Caro’s home, the high hopes gone: the inquest on the past, the blame. She sat there for a moment or so, not speaking. Ellen, so self-effacing in public as to be inconspicuous, was filled with the beauty of violence, and perhaps with the beauty given her by the passion for sheer action, even if it were action destructive to herself, to all her hopes.

‘I’m telling myself,’ she said, ‘that I ought to get out of it, now. Today.’

I said: ‘Could you?’ She stared at me, her eyes once more piteous and haughty. She asked: ‘What is he going to do?’