Permission to Resign

by Ann Bridge

  ‘That’s nonsense!’ said William. ‘I came into the Northern department in January 1923, before all this began, and I never knew that anyone was gambling in francs till the summer of 1926, when Owen had been in China for six months.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell the Board so?’ I asked him.

  ‘They never asked me about that,’ said William.

  ‘Well, you ought to tell Sir Warren so now!’ I said.

  ‘I would,’ said William, ‘if I got the chance. But I can’t just walk in and see him, you know, Mary Anne.’

  ‘Do you mean it?’ I said. ‘Would you go and tell him that if he would see you?’

  William stuck to his guns, in spite of a slight but evident dismay; he would, if he were allowed to – yes, and read Sir Warren his letter to me too. Very well – it should be arranged.

  I went to the telephone and came back to William a few minutes later. ‘Sir Warren will see you in his room at the Treasury at 11.30 tomorrow.’

  So poor William was mobilized to go as a lamb to the slaughter and throw his mite of evidence into the Treasury.

  We sat up in the Panelled Room, William and I, long after we had packed Owen off to bed. We talked about Owen – his character and his difficulties. I had spent a few minutes with Van on Tuesday morning, and had been very much touched by the way he spoke of Owen: so much admiration for his gifts, such gentle candour over his all-too-well-known failings – his scratchiness, his dogmatic certainty that he was right. They had, if only from motives of policy, to be admitted, though I had tried to convince Van of how much his technical skill in dealing with others had developed in China. William spoke with understanding greater than Van’s, since he spoke from greater love and greater knowledge. And he said some words that I have remembered. ‘He’s leaning on you now, Mary Anne – I can see it.’ I only half-believed it, but I went to bed warmed at heart.

  Chapter VIII

  May Bell was, throughout, one of my best advisers. She has a very remarkable mind. It looks at things as detachedly as a man’s; grasps essentials; and yet is lightning quick and delicate as a seismic needle at picking up tiny indications. I think Tyrrell was her idea. Tyrrell, she felt sure, was the prime obstacle to the success of my campaign. And Tyrrell, as Permanent Head of the Foreign Office, had a real ground for his obstructionist attitude about taking Owen back, or he thought he had. He was saying, according to her information, that if Owen had been difficult before, he would be quite intolerable if he came back to the F.O. with a grievance. And it would save everyone trouble if he were pushed into some other good job. She was convinced, and easily convinced me, fresh from my talk with Van, that I ought to see Tyrrell and give him an assurance that if Owen returned to the Foreign Office, his happiness at being back would override all grievances – that he would be in future more and not less coulant than before.

  Now, Tyrrell was a pretty stiff proposition. I had only met him once, but I knew a good deal about him. And there was Nevile Bland in the way. I had seen Nevile and Portia on Monday night, and had sounded Nevile gingerly on the subject of seeing Tyrrell, simply because, while I was turning so many other stones, it seemed almost pointed to leave him lying. Nevile had been the perfect private secretary and had given me a thousand excellent reasons for not seeing his chief. It couldn’t be done through Nevile, that was clear. But once May had convinced me that to see Sir William was the next step, I knew I could manage it. There was the ever-loyal and efficient Vincent Baddeley. Him I mobilized by telephone next morning. Would he please arrange for me to see Sir William Tyrrell as soon as possible? I was on the point of leaving for town, and should be at 19 Dean’s Yard by 12.30. Yes, Vincent would send a note over at once.

  So, on the morning of Thursday the 22nd, I set off to London for the third time. What do I not owe to Hope Costley-White for her house, so handy to Whitehall, always open to me in those exhausting days? Her telephone at my disposal, meals and a bed always ready, and best of all her extraordinarily steady conviction that I should win in the end. ‘You’ll do it, Mary Anne,’ she would say. ‘I know you’ll do it. You see if I’m not right.’ And then she would throw back her head with her delightful half-mocking laugh – ‘You’re a wonderful woman!’

  She met me on the doorstep that morning when I drove up. ‘At last!’ she said. ‘My dear, the telephoning! You’re to go to the Foreign Office at once to see Sir William Tyrrell – Sir Vincent Baddeley has been ringing up every five minutes for the last hour to know if you’ve come. Wait – here’s a note too.’

  I tore open the note – it was from Vincent. ‘Sir William will see you at 12.45 this morning. V.B.’ It was 12.42 then. I got into a taxi outside Dean’s Yard and drove like blazes to the Foreign Office.

  I was five minutes late. Sir William received me with terrifying courtesy. I thanked him for seeing me with more sincerity if less polish. A curious interview ensued. I confined myself to making two points. First, May’s point about O.O’M.’s returning without a grievance. I told him that I recognized what his fears must be, as head of the Service, and offered him my solemn assurance that these fears would be proved groundless in the event of reinstatement. (You can’t give assurances to Sir William – you can only offer them.) He spoke remorselessly if courteously about that. Owen was a mauvais coucheur – there was no getting round it. He was very sticky. With immense difficulty, I kept myself at it, and made my second point. No other job was any good to Owen. What he cared about was the Service. If he lost that, he lost all that he lived for. Sir William received this with incredible tepidity. I have never in my life been so terrified for so long on end. Once I thought he had finished a sentence, and opened my mouth to speak; he hadn’t, and somehow bared his teeth at me with a glare in his yellow eyes like that of one of the Greater Cats. Still, he need not have seen me, and I was grateful. Preparing to take my leave, I thanked him again. I said it must seem ridiculous to him that I should have wished to trouble him, or thought that any words of mine could have made any difference – but that I had wished it, and was comforted to have been allowed the interview.

  ‘Don’t say that,’ said Sir William peremptorily. ‘Always remember this: if anything should come of all this, your husband will owe it to you alone, and to nothing and nobody but you.’

  He wagged his forefinger at me at each phrase, and spoke with terrific emphasis. ‘To you alone,’ he repeated. ‘Never forget it – and never let him forget it either. Never let him forget that he will owe it all to you.’

  This was so unexpected that I was completely taken aback. In my embarrassment my first instinct was to turn off what seemed to me an outrageous compliment, and to his final ‘Never let him forget it’, I said laughing – ‘That will be easy, for I shall never make him believe it!’ He flashed his eyes and teeth at me again, at that. At the door I ventured to congratulate him on the Paris appointment. Ah well, he said, it was hard to know. But he was glad for Anne’s sake. He had really taken it for Anne. It would be a great experience for her.

  ‘And when you have only one child left,’ he added, ‘you are prepared to do a great deal for them.’

  Quite suddenly the Greater Cat, the super-diplomat, had become a human being. But no defences had been breached this time.

  That last remark of mine to Tyrrell was extraordinarily unlucky. Within forty-eight hours it was all over the place. It was quoted to me by May Bell, by William Strang, by Vincent, and even – later on – by Fisher. Sir William made what I considered a rather unfair use of a remark made only pour rire and in a moment of embarrassment. ‘There’, was the line, ‘You see the sort of man O’Malley is. Even his wife has to admit that he doesn’t know the meaning of gratitude.’ It was, of course, a very silly thing to say. But I found it extraordinarily hard to think in advance of what were the right and the wrong things to say. I am no diplomatist, and never was clever with my tongue in that way, and all these interviews with trained intelligences were a frightful tax on my mental outfit. Later I wrote to Sir William
– primarily to thank him for seeing me, but also to send him a note from the Doctor, who had seen Owen in my absence, which made it clear that the latter was really ill and unable to come to London. I had an uneasy feeling that Tyrrell might also be saying that Owen was deliberately remaining embusqué in the country and letting me fight his battles for him. But at the end of the letter I ventured on something else. I reminded Sir William of what he had said about his daughter, Anne, and what the Paris Embassy might mean to her – ‘at that moment I felt that we touched common ground as at no other point of our interview.’ I told him that I, too, had a daughter, for whom I had had, later and on a smaller scale, some of the same hopes and wishes that he had for Anne, and had laboured at her languages so that she might miss nothing when the moment came. And I begged him, when he was weighing mercy in the scales against expediency, to remember how many and how dear hopes would come crashing down if he turned the balance against us.

  Tyrrell’s only other reaction to our interview, so far as I could learn, was roughly this: It is all very well, all this fuss to get O’Malley back, but the person I miss every hour of the day is Don Gregory. On the whole, I could not feel that that interview was a brilliant success. Yet I was told long afterwards that I had ‘swung Tyrrell right round’. I wonder! I wonder very much whether anyone has ever swung the late Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in any direction.

  By this time it was about 1.30. It was only decent to go and see how William had fared at Sir Warren’s hands, so I went to enquire. William came and sat with me in the waiting-room. He had escaped alive – Fisher had been very decent to him. Yes, he had told him about his ignorance of the francs business till 1926.

  ‘Did you read him your letter?’

  ‘Only the first part; Sir Claude Schuster was announced and I had to go then. I’m sorry – I did my best.’

  This remark about Schuster just dropped into my mind and stayed there – later it had its uses. At the time I thought nothing of it, and we went on talking about Fisher.

  Chapter IX

  But I had another idea in my head, and got to work on it at once. I was very much worried over the course of the whole affair. Sir Warren had said that it was going badly, and the night before, when I spoke to him about William, he said – ‘I wish you well, and I am doing all I can – but I am not an autocrat.’ And Sir Warren, whom I was coming to regard as my main prop and stay, was going down to South Wales that afternoon to see miners, only returning on Sunday, and leaving again on Monday for Northumberland. I was terribly discouraged. Every now and then my sense of the power and weight of the machine that I was fighting almost smothered me. Talk of tilting at a wind-mill! – I was riding at a battleship. My idea now was this: if I could get evidence, discreetly, that the Labour Party was not as inimical to Owen as I had reason to suppose the Government thought it to be, and if I could get them to make some démarche, I thought it might help. But I could not approach any Labour member directly. Therefore, I had to find someone who was in relations with them but not of them – and my mind turned as before to Lord Chelmsford.

  I went to Church House. I found Sybil Thesiger, his cousin, just off to a Committee. I said I wanted her. She abandoned her committee and came with me. Oh wonderful friends! (This misery was almost worth while if only to show us what friends can be.) While I got some lunch in a nasty little tea-room in Tothill Street, I first gave her some instruction on the Report, and then told her that I wanted to see Lord Chelmsford. Well, there ought to be no difficulty getting hold of Fred, Sybil thought – he was generally at the New South Wales Office. She telephoned – he would be there at three. It was now 2.40. ‘We’d better go now,’ said Sybil. So we set forth on a bus for Bush House.

  Sybil has told me since of the way in which she ‘jumped’ her unlucky cousin into seeing me. She spoke of the unhappy O’M.s – he was mildly sympathetic. She said Mrs O’M. wished for his advice – would he be willing to see her? Quite generally, and in principle, of course he would. Splendid! – well here she was, in the next room – and she ran out before he could stop her and brought me in, and, with a word of introduction, left us.

  One expects ex-Viceroys to be more impressive than Lord Chelmsford – the Curzonian tradition, perhaps. He was embarrassed and formal, though kind. It ought to have been a ghastly interview. It was not in the least. I asked his leave to unfold my mission, and then made him a short speech. My questions, I said, were two. The second arose out of the first, but depended on the answer to it. I would deal then with the first. The Report, which he might have seen, seemed to us to be untrue in many essential respects. I would not trouble him with more than one – and I told him of the admitted mistake in seniority. I could see that that told. Good. Because of all this, we were moving for revision of sentence. I could not but see that the Government were bound to take into consideration the two factors of public opinion and opinion in the House of Commons. Would he tell me whether, in his view, public opinion would raise an outcry over reinstatement?

  He considered – he spoke. No; though public opinion had been profoundly shocked by the whole business, in my husband’s case he thought it would not object to his reinstatement, in view of his notable public record.

  Excellent – then my second question did arise. Might I put it? Certainly. I had reason to suppose that a section of the Labour Party, at any rate, deplored my husband’s sentence and his loss to the Service. Could he tell me if that was so – and if it were so, how one could make that opinion audible to the Government? It must be clear to him that any expression of such an opinion would carry great weight.

  But here he could not help me. ‘I am not in touch with these people any more – the man you want is Lord Haldane.’ He considered again. ‘Would you see him?’ Yes, of course I would. ‘Yes, I think I could do that – I will give you a letter to him.’ And drawing a sheet of paper to him he wrote, slowly and deliberately.

  When he had finished he gave it to me. ‘Take this to Lord Haldane’ he said. ‘I feel sure he will see you. When you see him, say to him exactly what you have said to me – in precisely the same order and, if you can do so, in the same words. Lord Haldane is a lawyer, and you, if you will allow me to say so’ – he smiled for the first time – ‘would make a very able advocate’.

  He looked at his watch. ‘If you go at once, you will catch him at Queen Anne’s Gate before he starts for the House of Lords.’

  I thanked him warmly, and went. I had clean forgotten Sybil, and started when I met her outside. She laughed at me. She told me afterwards how she went in to thank her cousin Fred, and found him quite excited, and feeling very conspiratorial and dashing.

  ‘I’ve given her a letter to Haldane!’ he said – in the tone of one who should say ‘I’ve given her a dagger and a bomb!’

  In the taxi I considered. What about seeing Haldane? This was almost the first step I had taken without first getting the concurrence of Sir Warren. Had I better do it? I looked at my watch. 3.45. No use going to Queen Anne’s Gate – the old man would just be starting for the House. I would go and consult Albert Napier first, and see Lord Haldane either at the House of Lords, after the sitting, or later at his own, if it seemed prudent.

  So I stopped my taxi at the House of Lords. I found Albert in his room.

  ‘Oh, here you are,’ he said, as if he were expecting me. ‘Good – you got my note, then?’

  ‘No – what note?’

  ‘I sent a note to you at Dean’s Yard, and a telephone message too.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Just after lunch.’

  ‘Ah, I haven’t been there since 12.30,’ I said.

  But I did not want to talk about Albert’s notes – I wanted to discuss with him the wisdom or otherwise of seeing Lord Haldane. Albert, on the other hand, had his own schemes in his head and didn’t in the least want either to think or talk about Lord Haldane. And from our mutual absorption in our own private preoccupations it arose I think c
hiefly that I ran my head into such a famous hornet’s nest that afternoon.

  I showed Albert Lord Chelmsford’s letter, and asked him when, if at all, would be a good time to see Lord Haldane. Without answering Albert rang a bell, and a messenger appeared. ‘Bring me the Order Paper’ – or some such thing.

  Then he turned to me. ‘I wanted very much to see you,’ he said. ‘You remember what we were talking about on Monday? I have got some questions here which I want you to answer.’

  The messenger at this point reappeared with a paper. Albert studied it. I had no idea what all this was about, and when Albert wrote a note and handed it to the messenger I paid little attention, never dreaming that it was to ask Lord Haldane to see me when the House rose. I tried to get Albert back onto the subject of Haldane – but Albert stubbornly kept on with his questions. He had a list in front of him.

  ‘I want you to get me Owen’s memorandum, today,’ he said. ‘And a copy of the minutes of his evidence too. It’s important to get them as soon as possible.’

  His tone was almost peremptory – quite different from that which he had used on Monday, only three days ago. A curious suspicion flickered into my mind. Sir Claud Schuster was Albert’s chief. Sir Claud Schuster had been announced at the Treasury soon after twelve that morning, and had caused William to leave before he had finished his tale to Sir Warren. And immediately after lunch Albert was sending for me, to ask me, insistently, for the things he had enquired for tentatively three days before. H’m!

  ‘Does Sir Claud know Sir Warren Fisher?’ I asked Albert casually. Yes, quite well – they had worked together in the Insurance. Aha! and Oho! But it was still not clear to me, and while I was turning it over in my mind the messenger came back with a little pencil note for Albert. It was from Lord Haldane – he would see us at any time during the Debate if we would go to his room and send in word that we were there.