Corridors of Power (7 page)

We went across the hall, over to the guest-list. The order of precedence had an eloquence of its own. Mr Reginald Collingwood got the star suite: Collingwood was a senior Cabinet Minister. The Viscount and Viscountess Bridgewater got the next best. That designation marked the transformation of an old acquaintance of mine, Horace Timberlake, not a great territorial magnate but an industrial boss, who had since become one of the worthies of the Tory party. We came third, presumably because we had been there a good many times. Then Mr Roger Quaife and Lady Caroline Quaife. Then Mr Montagu Cave. He had become a junior Minister at the same time as Roger. We noticed that, as had happened before, he was alone, without his wife. There were rumours that she was enjoying herself with other men. Then Mrs Henneker. I made a displeased noise and Margaret grinned. Finally Mr Robinson, by himself and unexplained.

Diana’s brisk, commanding voice rang out from a passageway. She came into the hall, kissed us, led us into one of her sitting-rooms, brilliant, hung with Sisleys and Pissarros. She remembered what we drank, gave orders to the butler without asking us, said, ‘Is that right?’ – knowing that it was right – and looked at us with bold, sharp, appraising eyes.

She was a woman in her early fifties, but she had worn well. She was slender, but wiry, not delicate. She had never been beautiful, so I had heard, perhaps not even pretty, and it was possible that her looks, which in middle-age suggested that she had once been lovely, were now at their best. She had a dashing, faintly monkey-like attractiveness, the air of a woman who had always known that she was attractive to men. As she herself was fond of saying, ‘Once a beauty, always a beauty’, by which she didn’t mean that the flesh was permanent, but that the confidence which underlay it was. Her great charm, in fact, was the charm of confidence. She was not conceited, though she liked showing off. She knew, she was too wordly not to know, that some men were frightened away. But for many she had an appeal, and she had not doubted it since she was a child.

She was wearing a sunblaze of diamonds on her left shoulder. I looked a little apologetically at my wife, who had put on my latest present, a peridot brooch. Margaret’s taste did not run to ostentation, but face to face with Diana, she would not have minded a little more.

The curious thing was that the two of them came from the same sort of family. Diana’s father was a barrister, and her relatives, like Margaret’s, were academics, doctors, the upper stratum of professional people. Some of them even penetrated into the high Bloomsbury into which Margaret had been born. Nevertheless, despite her family, Diana had taken it for granted, from her childhood, that she belonged to the smartest of smart worlds. Taking it for granted, she duly got there, with remarkable speed. Before she was twenty-one, she had married Chauncey Skidmore, and one of the bigger American fortunes. Seeing her in middle-age, one couldn’t help thinking that it was she, not the Skidmores, not her friends in the international circuit, who had been made for just that world.

It seemed like the triumph of an adventuress: but it didn’t seem so to her, and it didn’t seem so when one was close to her. She was self-willed and strong-willed; she was unusually shrewd: but she had the brilliance and yes, the sweetness, of one who had enjoyed everything that happened to her. When she married Chauncey Skidmore, she loved him utterly. She had been widowed for over a year, and she still mourned him.

At dinner that night, there were – although the Quaifes were not arriving till the next day – eighteen at table. Diana had a habit of commanding extra guests from people to whom she let houses on the estate, or from masters at Winchester close by. I looked up at the ceiling, painted by some eighteenth-century Venetian now forgotten. The chatter had gone up several decibels, so that one could hear only in lulls the rain slashing against the windows at one’s back. Confidentially, the butler filled my glass: the four footmen were going round soft-footed. For an instant it seemed to me bizarre that all this was still going on. It was, however, fair to say that it did not seem bizarre to others present. A spirited conversation was proceeding about what, when Diana’s son inherited the house, would need doing to the structure: or whether she ought to start on it, bit by bit. In her ringing voice, Diana turned to Collingwood on her right: ‘Reggie, what do you think I ought to do?’ Collingwood did not usually utter unless spoken to. He replied: ‘I should leave it for him to worry about.’ That seemed to show the elements of realism. It occurred to me that, a quarter of a century before, I had sat in rich houses, listening to my friends, the heirs, assuming that before we were middle-aged, such houses would exist no more. Well, that hadn’t happened. Now Diana’s friends were talking as though it never would happen. Perhaps they had some excuse.

I was watching Collingwood. I had met him before, but only in a group. He struck me as the most puzzling of political figures – puzzling, because politics seemed the last career for him to choose.

He was a handsome man, lucky both in his bone-structure and his colouring. His skin tone was fresh and glowing, and he had eyes like blue quartz, as full of colour, as opaque. For his chosen career, however, he had what one might have thought a handicap; for he found speech, either in public or private, abnormally difficult. As a public speaker he was not only diffident and dull, but he gave the impression that, just because he disliked doing it so much, he was going to persevere. In private he was not in the least diffident, but still the words would not come. He could not, or did not care to, make any kind of conversation. It seemed a singular piece of negative equipment for a politician.

And yet, he had deliberately made the choice. He was a well-to-do country gentleman who had gone into merchant banking and made a success of it. But he had broken off that career; it was politics that he could not resist; if it meant making speeches, well then, it meant making speeches.

He carried weight inside the Cabinet, and even more inside his party, far more than colleagues of his who seemed to have ten times his natural gifts. That was why, that night at dinner, I was anxious when I heard, or thought I heard, a reply of his to Diana, which sounded like dubiety about the Quaifes. I could not be sure; at such a table, listening to one’s partner, who in my case turned out, with an absence of surprise on my part, to be Mrs Henneker, one needed a kind of directional hearing-sense to pick up the gossip flowing by. If Roger had Collingwood against him, it was serious for us all – but I was captured again by Mrs Henneker, who was thinking of writing a life of her dead husband, who had been a Rear-Admiral, monstrously treated, so she explained to me, by the Board of Admiralty.

Across the table, Cave, who was a gourmet, was eating without pleasure; but, since for him quantity could be made to turn into quality, he was also eating like a glutton, or a hungry child.

Once more, maddeningly, a whiff of disapproval from the top of the table. A person whose name I could not catch was in trouble. I caught a remark from Lord Bridgewater, plethoric, pineapple-headed: ‘He’s letting us down, you know what I mean.’ To which Collingwood replied, ‘It won’t do.’ And a little later, mixed with a clarification about the Rear-Admiral, I heard Collingwood again: ‘He’s got to be stopped.’ I had no idea who the man was. I had no idea, either, what kind of trouble he was in – except that I should have been prepared to bet that it wasn’t sexual. If it had been, Diana would have been flashing signals of amusement, and the others would not have been so condemnatory and grave. Whatever they said in public, in private they were as sexually tolerant as people could be. They could not forgive public scandals, and sometimes they made special rules. In private, though, and within their own circle, or any circle which touched theirs, no one cared what anyone ‘did’. Divorces – there had been several round this table, including Margaret’s. A nephew of Diana’s had been run in while picking up a guardsman in the Park: ‘That chap had hard luck,’ I had heard them say.

Nevertheless, there was constraint in the air. Margaret and I, when we were alone, told each other that we were puzzled.

Next morning, in mackintosh and Wellingtons, I went for a walk in the rain with Monty Cave. Until we turned back to the house, he was preoccupied – preoccupied, so it seemed, with sadness. I wished I knew him well enough to ask. Suddenly he burst out, in darts of flashing, malicious high spirits: wasn’t Diana showing strange signs of taste in modern music? wasn’t Mr Robinson a connoisseur? wasn’t she capable of assimilating any man’s tastes? And then: why did people have absurd pet-names? Sammikins – Bobbity – how would I like to be Lewikins? ‘Or perhaps,’ said Cave, with a fat man’s sparkle, ‘that’s what your friends do call you.’

He wasn’t restful; his mood changed too fast for that, until we talked politics. Then he was lucid, imaginative, unexpectedly humane. For the first time, I could understand how he was making his reputation.

Back in the house, I felt the constraint tightened again, as soon as the Quaifes arrived. I caught Margaret’s eye: in the midst of the party we couldn’t talk. Yet soon I realized that, whatever the reason, it was not that which had worried me most: for just before lunch, I found Caro and Diana drinking whisky, and agreeing that Gilbey must be got rid of.

‘You’re in on this, Lewis!’ cried Diana. ‘Old Bushey’ (Gilbey) ‘has never been the slightest bit of good to us, has he?’

I sat down. ‘I don’t think this is his line,’ I said.

‘Don’t be pie-faced,’ said Diana. ‘He’s a nice, smart cavalry officer, and he’d have married an actress if they’d let him, but that’s his ceiling and you know it.’

‘He’d never have married an actress, he’s the biggest snob of the lot of them,’ said Caro.

‘Do you think the priests would have got to work?’ said Diana. Gilbey’s family was Catholic, and to these two he seemed to have lived in the backwoods. There was much hooting hilarity, which did not disguise the truth that Diana and Caro understood each other and meant business.

‘The point is,’ said Diana, ‘he’s no good. And we can’t afford him.’

She glanced at Caro with appraising eyes, at a pretty woman twenty years younger than herself, at a pretty woman as tough as herself, at an ally.

‘I can tell you this,’ Diana added sharply, ‘Reggie Collingwood is certain that we can’t afford him.’

It ought to have been good news. After an instant, Caro frowned.

‘I’m afraid I’ve got no special use for Reggie,’ she said.

‘Listen,’ said Diana, ‘you have got to be careful. And Roger, of course. But
you
have got to be very careful.’

If I had not been there, she would have said more. A few minutes later we went in to lunch.

As for me, until after dinner on the Sunday night, I remained half-mystified. The hours seeped away, punctuated by meals; I might have been on an ocean crossing, wondering why I hadn’t taken an aircraft. The rain beat down, the windows streamed, the horizon was a couple of fields away; it was, in fact, singularly like being on a ship in gloomy, but not rough, weather.

I did not get a word with Roger alone. Even with Margaret, I managed to speak only in our own rooms. She was having more than her share of the philosophy of Lord Bridgewater, while in the great drawing-room of Basset, in various subsidiary drawing-rooms, in the library, I found myself occupied with Mrs Henneker.

She was nothing like so brassy as I had previously known her. When she discovered me alone in the library on Saturday afternoon, she still looked dense, but her confidence had oozed away. The curious thing was, she was outfaced. Through the misted window, we watched Diana and Caro stepping it out along the drive in mackintoshes and hoods, taking their exercise in the drenching rain.

‘The rich think they can buy
anything
,’ said Mrs Henneker heavily. The
mana
of Diana’s wealth was too much for her, just as it might have been for my relatives or my old friends or others really poor. There was a certain irony, I thought. Mrs Henneker herself must have been worth a hundred thousand pounds or so.

Mrs Henneker did not listen to any repartee of mine. But she had a use for me. Perhaps under the provocation of the Basset opulence, her purpose had crystallized. She was going to write that biography of her husband, and I could be of minor assistance.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I’ve never done any writing, I’ve never had the time. But my friends always tell me that I write the most amusing letters. Of course, I should want a bit of help with the technique. I think the best thing would be for me to send you the first chapters when I’ve finished them. Then we can really get down to work.’

She had obsessive energy, and she was methodical. On the Sunday morning, while most of the house-party, Roger among them, went to church, cars squelching on the muddy gravel, she brought me a synopsis of her husband’s life. After the drawn-out luncheon, Diana’s neighbours staying until after tea, Mrs Henneker got hold of me again, and told me with triumph that she had already written the first two paragraphs, which she would like me to read.

When at last I got up to my dressing-room, light was streaming in from our bedroom and Margaret called out. I’d better hurry, she said. I replied that I had been with Mrs Henneker: she found my experience funnier than I did. As I pulled off my coat, she called out again: ‘Caro’s brother seems to have stirred up the dovecotes.’

She had been hearing about it after tea. At last I understood one of Cave’s obliquities the morning before. For Caro’s brother was called, not only by his family but by acquaintances, ‘Sammikins’. He was also Lord Houghton, a Tory MP, young and heterodox. Recently, Margaret and I recalled, he had published a short book on Anglo-Indian relations. Neither of us had read it, but the newspapers had splashed it about. From the reviews, it seemed to be anti-Churchill, pro-Nehru, and passionately proGandhi. It sounded a curious book for a Tory MP to write. That was part of his offence. ‘He’s not exactly their favourite character, should you say?’ said Margaret. She was frowning at herself, and her dress, in the glass. She was not quite so uncompetitive, these days, as she would have had me think.