Corridors of Power (6 page)

Roger turned to Francis Getliffe.

‘You know what I think, Parliamentary Secretary,’ said Francis with stiff courtesy. ‘This business of Brodzinski’s is a nonsense. And so are the views of more important people.’

Francis, who did not often go in for public controversy, had not long before screwed himself up to write a pamphlet. In it he had said that there was no military rationale behind the nuclear policy. This analysis had got him into trouble, mostly in America, but also in England. In some Right-thinking circles, it had seemed not only preposterous, but also heretical, and something like wicked.

As we drove through the autumnal streets to the Imperial College, I was still not sure why Roger was playing it this way. What was he aiming at? Was he reckoning that Brodzinski, that lover of English flummery, would be softened by the attentions, the paraphernalia?

If so, sitting in Brodzinski’s room, gazing out at the lonely-looking Colcutt tower, the pale green dome making the aesthetic protest in the solitude of sky, I thought that Roger had reckoned wrong. It was true that Brodzinski loved English flummery, with a passion that made Roger’s more conservative friends look like austere revolutionaries. He had been a refugee from Poland in the late ’thirties. During the war he had made a name, working in one of the Admiralty scientific departments. Afterwards he had spent some years at Barford, had quarrelled with Luke and others, and recently taken a professorship. It was true that he had immersed himself, with fanatical devotion, in what he thought of as English life. He knew all the English snobberies, and loved them so much that they seemed to him morally right. He had dedicated himself to the politics of the English ultra-right. He addressed Francis Getliffe and Walter Luke, with extreme relish, as Sir Francis, and Sir Walter. Despite all that, or perhaps because of it, he was unyielding about his idea, and, instead of listening to Quaife’s persuasions, he was determined to make Quaife listen to him.

He was a tallish man, very thick in the chest and thighs, and his muscles filled his clothes. His voice boomed against the walls of his office. He had beautiful pure transparent eyes, in a flat Slavic face; his fair hair, now mingled with grey, was the colour of dust. He was always on the lookout for enemies, and yet he was vulnerable to help, appealing for it, certain that anyone, not already an enemy, given intelligence and willingness, would be convinced that he was right.

He explained the project over again. ‘I must inform you, Parliamentary Secretary,’ (he was as familiar with English official etiquette as any of us) ‘that there is nothing technically novel here! There is nothing that we do not know. Sir Walter will tell you that I am not over-stating my case.’

‘With reservations,’ said Luke.

‘With what reservations?’ Brodzinski burst out, brilliant with suspicion. ‘What reservations, Sir Walter? Tell me that, now?’

‘Come off it, Brod,’ Luke was beginning, ready to settle down to a good harsh scientific argument. But Roger would not let it start. He was treating Brodzinski with a mixture of deference and flattery – or perhaps not pure flattery, but an extreme empathy. Just as Brodzinski felt a brilliance of suspicion when Walter Luke spoke, so with Roger he felt a brilliance of reassurance. Here was someone who knew what he had to fight against, who knew his urgencies.

‘But, Parliamentary Secretary, when do we get something done?’ he cried. ‘Even if we start now,
tonight
, it will take us to 1962 or ’63 before we have the weapons–’

‘And they won’t have any strategic meaning,’ said Francis Getliffe, irritated at the way the conversation was going.

‘Sir Francis, Sir Francis, I believe there is meaning in having weapons in your hands, if the country is going to survive. I suppose you mean, I hope you mean, that America will have their own armaments, much greater than ours, and I hope they will. The more the better, and good luck to them. But I shall not sleep happy until we can stand beside them–’

‘I mean something more serious–’ Francis interrupted. But once more Roger stopped the argument.

Brodzinski burst out: ‘Parliamentary Secretary, when can we get some action?’

After a pause, Roger replied, carefully, considerately: ‘You know, I mustn’t raise false hopes–’

Brodzinski raised his head. ‘I know what you’re going to say. And I agree with it. You are going to say that this will cost a thousand million pounds. Some say we cannot afford to do it.
I
say, we cannot afford not to do it.’

Roger smiled at him. ‘Yes, I was going to raise that point. But also I was going to say that there are many people to convince. I am only a junior Minister, Professor. Let me say something to you in confidence that I really oughtn’t to. Within these four walls, I think it will be necessary to convince my own Minister. Without him behind it, no government could even begin to listen–’

Brodzinski was nodding. He did not need explanations about the English political machine. He was nodding, passionately thoughtful. As for Luke and Getliffe, they were looking stupefied. They knew, or thought they knew, what Roger wanted as a policy. They had just heard him, not exactly state the opposite, but leave Brodzinski thinking that he had.

Soon Roger was saying goodbye, inviting Brodzinski to visit him in Whitehall, repeating that they would keep in touch. Brodzinski clung to his hand, looking at him with beautiful candid eyes, the colour of sea-water. Brodzinski’s goodbyes to Walter and Francis were cold, and when they were back in the car they themselves spoke coldly to Roger. They were, in their different fashions, straightforward and honourable men, and they were shocked.

Roger, apparently at ease, invited them to tea before the car had moved a hundred yards. Utterly aware of the chill, utterly ignoring it as he spoke, he said that, when he was a young man, he used to go to a café‚ not far away: was it still there? Stiffly, Francis said that he ought to get back to Cambridge. No, said Roger, come and have tea. Again they refused. ‘I want to talk to you,’ said Roger – not with official authority, but his own. In a sullen silence, we sat at a table in the café‚ window, the December mists thick in the street outside. It was one of those anonymous places, neither a rackety one for the young nor a tearoom for the elderly: the atmosphere was something between that of a respectable pull-up for carmen and a coffee-room for white collar workers.

Roger said: ‘You disapproved of what I’ve just done.’

‘I’m afraid I did,’ Francis replied.

‘I think you’re wrong,’ said Roger.

Francis said curtly that he had given Brodzinski too much encouragement. Walter Luke, more violent, asked if he didn’t realize that the man was a mad Pole, whose only uncertainty was whether he hated Russians as Russians more than Russians as Communists, and who would cheerfully die himself along with the entire population of the United States and Great Britain, so long as there wasn’t a Russian left alive. If that was the sort of lunacy we were going to get mixed up in, he, Luke, for one, hadn’t bargained on it.

Roger said that he knew all that. But Walter was wrong on just one point. Brodzinski was not mad. He had a touch of paranoia. But a touch of paranoia was a very useful part of one’s equipment. On far more people than not, it had a hypnotic effect.

‘I wish I had it,’ Roger added, with a grim smile. ‘If I had, I shouldn’t have to spend time telling you I am not deserting. No, your colleague Brodzinski is a man of power. Don’t deceive yourselves about that. My bet is that his power is likely to influence quite a number of people before we’re through. He’s going to require very careful handling. You see, he’s got one great advantage. What he wants, what he’s saying, is very simple and it’s what a lot of people want to hear. What
you
want – and what I want quite as much as you do, if I may say so – is very difficult and not in the least what a lot of people want to hear. That’s why we’re going to need all the luck in the world if we’re going to get away with it. If you think it’s going to be easy and painless, then my advice to you is to cut all your connections with Government as fast as you possibly can. It’s going to be hell, and we may easily lose. As for me, I’m committed. But I’m taking bigger risks than any of you, and you’ve got to let me do it in my own way.’

Yes, I thought then, and in cooler blood afterwards, he was taking risks. Just as he had done, talking to me at the Carlton Club. He was taking risks in speaking in that tone to Getliffe and Luke. And yet, he knew they were both, in spite of Luke’s raucous tongue, men trained to discretion. He also knew, what was more significant, that they were ‘committed’ in the sense he had used the word. For years before Hiroshima, they had foreseen the technological dangers. They could be relied upon as allies.

Luke was still grumbling. Why had Roger taken them there? What did he think he had achieved?

Roger explained that he wanted to shower Brodzinski with attentions: he wouldn’t be satisfied, but it might for the time being keep him quiet.

That reply satisfied Walter Luke. It would not have satisfied me.

It was part of Roger’s technique to seem more spontaneous than he was. Or rather, it was part of his nature which he had developed into a technique. His spontaneity was genuine, it gave him some of his bite: but he could govern it. He had not given Luke and Getliffe the slightest indication of what, I was now certain, was his strongest reason for buttering up Brodzinski.

The reason was simple. Roger was set on easing Lord Gilbey out and getting the job himself. He wanted Brodzinski to do the opposite of keeping quiet, to shout his discontent. I had seen too many examples of this process not to recognize it now.

Roger was less hypocritical than most men. He would have made the same moves without excuse. Yet, I was coming to believe that, as he had just said, he was committed. Old Thomas Bevill used to lecture me, in his Polonius-like fashion, on the forces driving the great politicians he had known. He rolled out his Victorian phrases: one force, Bevill used to say, was a consciousness of powers. Another, and a rarer one, was a consciousness of purpose. For men seeking excuses for themselves, that was the best of all.

Neither Getliffe nor Luke realized what Roger was up to. Yet, if they had, they would not have minded much. It seemed strange, but they would have minded less than I did. For I had an affection for Lord Gilbey. Sometimes my affections ran away with me. They had done so years before, I now believed, in a struggle on a pettier scale when I had been voting for a Master of my college. They had made me forget function, or justice, or even the end to be served. Now I was getting older, I could realize those mistakes in the past, mistakes which a man like Francis, high-principled as he was, would never have made. For him, this issue would be simple. Lord Gilbey never ought to have been in this job in the first place: the sooner he was removed the better. Roger had to be rough. Gilbey would cling like a mollusc, in distinguished incompetence. If Roger was not prepared to be rough, then he was no good to us.

Getliffe and Luke would be right. Yet they might not know that Roger was a more deeply forested character than they were. I believed in his purpose, but it would have comforted me to know why he had it. Perhaps, I thought once or twice that autumn, it would have comforted him too.

During the winter, the gossip began to swirl out from the clubs and the Whitehall corridors that Lord Gilbey was ‘getting past it’. At the same time, Roger’s name crept into the political columns in the Sunday papers, as the first junior Minister in the new government to be talked about for promotion. It looked as though he were handling the press, or rather, the political link-men who added to their incomes through leaking secret information to the press, with skill and nerve. About whether these link-men really existed, administrators like Hector Rose went on speculating, as though they were some species still in doubt, like the yeti, or the plesiosaur in Loch Ness. Rose, with his rigid propriety, could not easily believe in them. My guess was that Roger not only believed in them, but knew them. If so, he got himself liked, but never let out that he had a policy already formed, much less what it was. In fact, the political commentators, while agreeing that he was coming to the front, gave diametrically different reasons why he should do so.

Early in February, Roger told me that he was spending the weekend at Basset, Diana Skidmore’s house in Hampshire. It was not a coincidence that Margaret and I had just received the same invitation. Diana had an intelligence network of her own, and this meant that the connection between Roger and me was already spotted. So far as Roger went, it meant more. Diana was a good judge of how people’s stock was standing, whatever their profession was: upon stock prices within the government, her judgement was something like infallible. Since Diana had a marked preference for those on the rise, the frequency of a man’s invitation to Basset bore a high correlation to his political progress.

People said that about her, and it was true. But, hearing it before one met her, one felt one had been misled. Driving down the Southampton road, the wiper skirling on the windscreen, the wind battering behind us, Margaret and I were saying that we should be glad to see her. The road was dark, the rain was pelting, we lost our way.

‘I like her really,’ said Margaret, ‘she’s so relaxing.’

I questioned this.

‘One hasn’t got to compete, because one can’t.
You
wouldn’t know. But I should never buy a special frock to go to Basset in.’

I said it would be nice to get there, in any garments whatsoever. When at last we saw the lights of the Basset lodge, we felt as travellers might have done in a lonelier and less domesticated age, getting a glimpse of light over the empty fields.

It was a feeling that seemed a little fatuous once we had driven up from the lodge through the dark and tossing parkland and stood in the great hall of Basset itself. The façade of the house was eighteenth century, but this enormous hall was as warm as a New York apartment, smelling of flowers, flowers spread out in banks, flowers dominating the great warm space as though this were a wedding-breakfast. It was a welcome, not only of luxury, but of extreme comfort.