Corridors of Power

by C. P. Snow

  But if not a personal grudge, was he acting on his own? If not, for whom? Suddenly Ellen went into a brilliant fugue of paranoia. She saw some central intelligence marshalling enemies: enemies watching them, planning, moving in, studying each aspect of Roger’s life and hers. This was one move, Brodzinski’s was another. Who was directing it all?

  I couldn’t pacify her, or persuade her that it wasn’t true. I didn’t myself know what was happening. In that empty room, the reds in the pictures pushing out towards us, I began to feel in a web of persecution myself.

  She wanted to shout, cry, fly out, make love to Roger, anything. Her colour was high – but, as though in a moment-by-moment change, just as a child changes when in illness, when I looked again I saw she had turned pale.

  She went very quiet. The passion had died away. She was afraid. At last I got her to talk again: ‘If this goes on, I don’t know whether I can stand it.’

  The truth was, she did not doubt her own fortitude, but his. ‘I don’t know whether he can stand it.’ That was what the words really meant, deeper than she could express. Also, she could not bring herself to say that she had a new fear about why she might lose him. Some of those fears she could confess, as she had done at our first meeting, when she told me that if he lost his political career because of her, he would not forgive her. This was a new fear, which she could not confess, because it seemed a betrayal. But though she worshipped Roger, she knew him. She believed that these persecutions wouldn’t stiffen him, but would drive him back into safety – back to the company of his colleagues, to the shelter of Lord North Street.

  She could not stop herself from telling me: ‘It’s being away from him that matters now.’ She meant, not being with him every hour of every day. ‘When he comes to me he enjoys himself, you know. So do I.’ She said it with her usual realism, her lack of fuss. ‘But it’s not enough now.’

  She said: ‘I’d give up everything, I tell you, I could live in the back streets, I could live on nothing – I could do anything you like – if only I could be close to him the whole time. I could give up going to bed with him, if I had to, if I could just be near him, night and day, and day after day.’

  Part Four

  Towards A Choice

  29: Memorial Service

  The bells of St Margaret’s, Westminster, tolled under the low cloud-lid, into the dark noon. It was three days after Christmas, the House was in recess, but the Prime Minister and Collingwood, top-hatted, in morning suits, walked under the awning into the porch. So did three other Ministers, a group of elderly peers, then Roger and Monty Cave. People on the pavement were not paying much attention; top-hats, a handful of bigwigs, some sort of service.

  I sat in the middle of the church, where, by some optical illusion, the light seemed brighter than out of doors: over the altar, the stained glass gleamed and glowed, like the glass in the front door at home, when I was a child, or in the door at the Osbaldiston’s. The vigorous, shining faces round me were composed into gravity, but there was no grief. It was part of the ceremonial, ceremonial which they enjoyed, part of the charm of their lives. Collingwood spent some time on his knees. The other Ministers and Members sat in the two front rows, doing what was expected of them, doing what their successors would do for them, when their own memorial services came round.

  In fact, the one they were commemorating that morning would not have considered that enough was being done. He had been a modest old man, but he had had the sharpest sense of the fitness of things. The church was only half-full. Not much of a turn out, he would have said. Much worse, he would have been baffled that the service wasn’t being held in the Abbey. ‘Giving me a consolation prize’, he would have said.

  This was the memorial service to old Thomas Bevill, who had died before Christmas at the age of eighty-eight. When he was a Minister at the beginning of the war, I had been one of his personal staff. That had been my introduction to the official life, and I knew him better than most of the other mourners did. No one, least of all himself, could have called him a great man; and yet I had learned much from him. In a limited sense of the word, he was a politician, a born politician. He knew which levers to pull and how to pull them, more exactly than anyone I had met in Government, with a skill one meets more often in people working in a smaller world, such as Arthur Brown in my old college.

  Bevill was an aristocrat, and it was part of his manner to appear like a bumbling amateur. He was as much an amateur as one of the Irish manipulators of the American Democratic machine. Bevill had a passion for politics. Like most devoted politicians, he was realistic about everything in them – except his own chances. He had been sacked, politely but firmly, in 1943, at the age of seventy-four. Everyone but himself knew it was the end. But he delayed taking his peerage, still hoping that another Conservative government would call him back. New Conservative governments came, but the telephone did not ring. At last, at eighty-four, he accepted his Viscounty, even then hating it, even then going round asking his friends whether, when the PM went, there mightn’t be the chance of one more job. When he was told no, his blue eyes ceased to look mild, and became hot and furious. But he surrendered. For the last four years, Thomas Bevill had entered another avatar, under the style of Lord Grampound.

  This was the end. He would get mentioned, as a very minor figure, in some of the official histories. He wouldn’t rate a biography of his own. I looked at the order of the service – Thomas Bevill, first Viscount Grampound – and felt curiously sad. The dignitaries round me were mumbling the responses. Beside the Prime Minister and Collingwood stood Roger, assured among the assured, his fine voice audible.

  I felt, yes, alienated as well as sad. Why, I should have been hard put to it to say. This was the kind of leave-taking any ruling society gave to one of their own. As for Thomas Bevill, I should not have said that I loved him much. He had been an ally of mine in days past, but that had been in the way of business. He had been kind to me, as he always was to his colleagues, out of instinctive policy, unless there were overmastering reasons for not being kind. That was about the size of it. He was a tough old Tory politician, patriotic to the core – and also, the nearer one got to the core, snobbish and callous. Yet I was not really thinking of him like that. Standing among the sound of confident official voices, I was out of it – just as he was out of it, because he was, like any one of us when our time comes, being so easily dismissed.

  The service ended, and the congregation trooped out, euphoric, healthy-looking, duty done. I did not hear a word spoken about the old man. The Prime Minister, Collingwood and Roger, got into the same car. As the car drove away, Monty Cave was watching it. He remarked to Sammikins, whom I had not noticed at the service: ‘We’re going on again after lunch.’

  He meant, the Cabinet committee had been meeting that morning, and had not finished. This was, we already knew, intended to be their final meeting, and so none of their advisers, none of the scientists or civil servants, except Douglas, was present. Monty, with his clever, imbedded eyes, watched the car turn out of Parliament Square.

  ‘Well-timed, don’t you think?’ he said to Sammikins.

  Abruptly, as though he resented the invitation while he was giving it, he asked us whether we were doing anything for lunch. As we drove round to Cave’s house in Smith Square, which I had not visited before, Sammikins was talking away in undiscouraged form, although both Cave and I were silent. Had he asked us just because he was lonely, I was thinking, or because there was something he intended, or felt obliged, to say?

  The tall, narrow house sounded empty as we went in. In the dining-room I looked out of the window through the tawny winter air at the ruined church. It might have been part of a Gothick fancy. Yet the room itself was bright and elegant; on one wall was a fine Sisley, of poplars and sunny water, on another a still life by Nicholas de Staël, pastel fruit in a white dish.

  I asked him about another picture. He was vague: he didn’t know the painter. He was better-read than most
men, but he seemed not to have any visual sense. He was living in a museum of his wife’s taste.

  The maid brought in avocado pears, cold chicken, tongue, cheese. Cave ate greedily: Sammikins did not eat so much, or with such relish, but he appropriated the bottle of hock. Cave and I had adopted the habit, common among the younger administrators, of not drinking before the evening.

  ‘This is the nicest sort of meal,’ Sammikins burst out, ‘why do we waste our time sitting down to bloody great set luncheons?’

  Monty Cave smiled at him: yes, with affection: yes, perhaps with an envy for the dash, the abandon, he himself had never had. He said, as though casually, with his mouth full, ‘Well, we’ve had a not uneventful morning.’

  He said it more to me than to Sammikins. I knew that he was devious, subtle, cleverer than any of us. I suspected that he was not being casual. Certainly I wasn’t. I asked: ‘How did it go, then?’

  ‘Oh, you know how these things usually go.’

  It wasn’t exactly a snub, but it was maddening. It was deviousness carried to the point of perversity. I looked at him, the bones of his chin sunk into the flesh, his eyebrows like quarter moons, his eyes watchful, malicious and, in that slack face and body, disconcertingly bold. He said: ‘Old Roger’s taken to making jokes in meetings, nowadays. In Cabinets, as well as in this one. Rather good jokes, I must say, but I don’t think Reggie sees them.’

  Sammikins gave his brazen laugh, but Cave had one sly eye on me, and went on: ‘I sometimes wonder a little whether it’s wise for politicians to make too many jokes. What do you think? I mean, it sometimes looks as though they’re getting worried and are trying to put a bit too much of a face on it. Do you think that’s possible?’

  ‘Do you think Roger’s getting worried?’ I asked.

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought so. I can’t for the life of me imagine why, can you?’

  At that, even Sammikins, not listening so intently as I was, looked baffled.

  We all knew that Roger was in his private crisis of politics. Cave knew it as well as any man alive. Suddenly I wondered whether, with extravagant indirectness, he was hinting at something which was not political at all. Was he really suggesting that Roger had another concern, different in kind? He was an observant and suspicious man, and he might have had his suspicions sharpened by unhappiness. Had he guessed that another marriage was in danger?

  ‘No,’ I said to Cave, ‘I can’t imagine why. Unless things went worse this morning than you’ve told us. And you’re wondering if he’s got to back down. And of course you too.’

  ‘Oh, no, no, no,’ Cave said rapidly. His whole face was transformed by a smile which seemed to come from within, evanescent, amused, youthful. ‘I assure you, it’s all gone easier than I expected. Of course, the White Paper hasn’t really got all that many teeth, has it? Unless someone is going to read it in a way Reggie Collingwood wouldn’t approve.’

  He added: ‘Roger was exceptionally good. It was one of the times when he does look the biggest man among us – you know what I mean. It’s true, he did just drop one hint, not very loudly and he threw it away – that, in certain circumstances, he conceivably might want to say a word or two in public. It was nothing like as vulgar as threatening to resign, you understand.’ Cave smiled again. ‘I may be wrong, of course, but I rather got the impression that some of our colleagues took the point.’

  With a glint in his eye, Cave said to me, in a very quiet tone: ‘So far as I remember that last party of Caro’s, Roger might have learned that trick from you, mightn’t he?’

  It was just on two. The meeting was to start again in half an hour, and soon he would have to be going. We walked upstairs to the drawing-room, also bright, also hung with paintings. But what struck the eye was a large photograph of his wife. It made her look handsomer than she really was: clear-featured, vivid, strong. Not right for him, not conceivably right for him, as anyone studying that face would have guessed. But there it stood. He must have seen it every night when he came in alone. One had a feeling, both of pity and discomfort, that he was living, not only with, but on his sorrow.

  With a directness that I could not have matched, nor most of us, Sammikins marched up to the photograph and said: ‘Have you heard from her?’

  ‘Only through her solicitors.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘What do you think?’ said Cave.

  Sammikins turned on him and said, in a hard, astringent tone, ‘Look here, the sooner you say good-riddance, the better it’ll be for you. I don’t suppose you care about that. But the better it will be for her, too, and you do care about that, worse luck. And the better it’ll be for everyone around you.’

  He might have been a regimental officer dealing with marital trouble in the ranks. Somehow it didn’t sound like a wild young roisterer talking to an eminent man. It was not embarrassing to listen to.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Cave gently, with a touch of gratitude, speaking quite genuinely, as Sammikins had spoken. Soon he was saying goodbye, on his way to Great George Street. I thought he was genuine again when, in sympathy and reassurance, he said to me: ‘Don’t worry about this afternoon. It’s all going according to plan.’

  But he could not resist one last twist, dig, or mystification: ‘The only question is, whose plan?’

  30: A Sense of Insult

  On Sunday afternoon, a couple of days after the Memorial Service, Margaret and I were sitting at home. The children had gone out to Christmas parties and we were peaceful. Then the telephone rang. As she answered it, I saw her look surprised. Yes, he is in, she was saying. Apparently the other person was trying to make a date with me: Margaret, protective, suggested that we should be alone, so wouldn’t it be better to come in for a drink? There was a long explanation. At last, she left the receiver off and came to me with a commiserating curse. ‘Hector Rose,’ she said.

  Over the telephone, his voice sounded more than ever glacial. ‘I am most extremely sorry to disturb you, my dear Lewis, I wouldn’t have done so if I hadn’t a rather urgent reason. Do make my apologies to your wife. I really am very, very sorry.’

  When the polite wind-up had finished, it came out that he needed to see me that same afternoon. He would give me tea at the Athenaeum at half-past four. I didn’t want to go, but he pressed me, all flah-flah dropped, clear and firm. Then, arrangements made, the apologies and thanks started over again.

  Seeing our afternoon broken, Margaret and I were cross. I told her that I could not remember him doing this on a Sunday, not even in the busiest time of the war: he must be coming in specially himself, from right beyond Highgate: it occurred to me that I had never been inside his house. Margaret, not placated, was scolding me for not saying no.

  She took it for granted, as I did, that the summons had something to do with Roger’s White Paper. Yet we had heard, on the Friday night, that Cave’s prediction had been correct, and that the Cabinet Committee had agreed. Margaret said: ‘Whatever it is, it could wait till tomorrow morning.’

  Leaving the comfortable room, leaving my wife, going out into the drizzling cold, I felt she was right.

  It was not perceptibly more encouraging when my taxi drew up in front of the club. The building was in darkness: there, on the pavement, in the slush and the half-light, stood Hector Rose. He began apologizing before I had paid my driver. ‘My dear Lewis, this is more than usually incompetent of me. I am most terribly sorry. I’d got it into my head that this was one of the weekends we are open. I must say, I’m capable of most kinds of mistakes, but I shouldn’t have thought I was capable of this.’ The courtesies grew more elaborate, at the same time more sarcastic, as though beneath them all he was really blaming me.

  He went on explaining, with the same elaboration, that perhaps the consequences of his ‘fatuity’ were not irretrievably grave: since ‘the club’ was closed, the Senior would by agreement be open, and we could perhaps, without too much inconvenience, have our tea there. I was as familiar with these facts as he was.
Fifty yards from us, just across the Place, the lights of what he called the ‘Senior’ (the United Services Club) streamed through the first flutter of sleet. All I wanted to do was cut the formalities short and get into the warm.

  We got into the warm. We sat in a corner of the club drawing-room and ordered tea and muffins. Rose was dressed in his weekend costume, sports jacket, grey flannel trousers. Still the formalities were not cut short. This was so unlike him that I was at a loss. As a rule, after the ceremonies had in his view been properly performed, he got down to business like a man turning on a switch. His manner was so artificial, so sharply split from the personality beneath, that it was always difficult to pick up his mood. And yet, as he went on describing great labyrinthine curves of politeness, I had a sense, a distressing sense, that he was under strain.

  We drank the tea, we ate the muffins. Rose was expressing a mannerly interest in the book reviews in the Sunday papers. He had noticed something on a subject that was bound to interest my wife, to whom again, his regrets for intruding that day –

  Usually I was patient: but I could wait no longer. I said: ‘What’s all this about?’

  He gazed at me with an expression I could not read.

  ‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘that something has happened about Roger Quaife. Is that it?’

  ‘Not directly,’ said Rose, in his brisk, businesslike tone. So at last he was engaged. He went on:‘No, so far as I know, that’s all right. Our masters appear to be about to sanction what I must say is an unusually sensible White Paper. It’s going to the Cabinet next week. It’s a compromise, of course, but it has got some good points. Whether our masters stick to those when they get under shot and shell – that’s quite another matter. Will our friend Quaife stick to it when they really get at him? I confess I find it an interesting speculation.’ He was speaking from his active, working self: but he was still watching me.