by C. P. Snow
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.
6: A Weekend in the Country
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.
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 fro
m 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.