‘That’s not much, is it?’ Roger gave a friendly smile. ‘You’re a very wise man,’ He paused again. ‘And yet, you know, it’s pretty hard to take. In that case, one might as well not be here at all. Anyone could just wait until it’s easy. I don’t think I should have lived this life if that were all.’
For a moment his tone had been passionate. Then it became curiously formal and courteous as he added: ‘I’m most grateful for your advice. I very much wish I could accept it. It would make things easier for me.’
He looked up the table and said to Caro, as though they were alone: ‘I wish I could do what you want.’
It seemed to me that had Caro known she was fighting for her marriage, she would not so openly have implied her opposition to Roger that night. He was guilt-ridden enough to welcome the smallest loophole of escape, just to feel to himself that it could not have gone on, anyway. Yet was that really so? He had known her mind, he had always known it. To her, loyalty to Roger would have seemed less if she had gone in for pretences. She had said nothing new that night. But I believed that her repetition, before Rubin, of what had already been said in private, might have given Roger some vestigial sense of relief, of which he was nevertheless ashamed.
He said, ‘I wish I could.’
I wondered when Rubin had realized that Roger was going through with it? At what point, at what word? In intellect Rubin was by far the subtler; in emotion, he was playing with a master.
There was another oddity. In private, Rubin was as high-principled, as morally-fastidious, as Francis Getliffe. And yet – it was a disconcerting truth – there were times, and most important times, when the high-principled were not to be trusted – and perhaps Roger was. For to Roger there were occasions, not common, but not so rare as we all suspected, when morality grew out of action. In private, Rubin lived a better life than most men; and yet he would have been incapable of contemplating walking into obloquy, risking his reputation, gambling his future, as in clear sight Roger was doing now.
I wondered when I myself had realized that Roger was going through with it. In a sense, I had believed it soon after we became intimate, and I had backed my judgement. Yet simultaneously, I had not trusted my judgement very far. In the midst of his obfuscation, I had been no surer than anyone else that he would not desert us. And so, in that sense, I had not realized, or at least had not been certain, that he was going through with it until – until that night.
When did Roger realize it? He would not have known, or been interested to know. Morality sprang out of action, so did choices, certainly a choice as complex as this. Even now, he might not know in what terms he would have to make it nor from what motives it would come.
How much part, it occurred to me again, had his relation with Ellen played?
‘I can’t accept your advice, David,’ said Roger, ‘but I do accept your estimate of my chances. You don’t think I’m going to survive, do you? Nor do I. I’d like you to understand that I agree.’
He added, with a hard and radiant smile: ‘But it isn’t absolutely cut and dried even now. They haven’t quite finished with me yet.’
Until that moment he had been speaking with total realism. Suddenly his mood had switched. He was suffused with hope, the hope of crises, that hope which just before a struggle, warms one with the assurance that it is already won. With the anxious pouches darker under his eyes, Rubin gazed at him in astonishment, and something like dismay.
He felt, we could all feel, that Roger was happy. He was not only happy and hopeful, he was also serene.
The Vote
The light on Big Ben was shining like a golden bead in the January evening; the House had reassembled. It was a season of parties. Three times that week my wife and I went out before dinner, to Diana’s house on South Street, to a private Member’s flat, to a Government reception. The faces revolved about one like a stage army. Confident faces, responding to other confident faces, as though this parade was preserved forever, like a moment in time. Ministers and their wives linked themselves with other Ministers and their wives, drawn by the magnetism of office: groups of four, groups of six, sturdy, confident, confidential backs presented themselves not impolitely, but because it was a treat to be together, to the room. Roger and Caro were there, looking as impregnable as the rest.
There was an hallucination about high places which acted like alcohol, not only on Roger under threat, but on whole circles. They couldn’t believe they had lost the power till it had gone. Even when it had gone, they didn’t always believe it.
That week and the next, mornings in the office were like war time. Roger was sitting in his room, never looking bored, sending out for papers, asking for memoranda, intimate with no one, so far as I knew, certainly not with me. Ripples of admiration and faith were flowing down the corridors. They reached middle-grade civil servants who, as a rule, wanted only to get home and listen to long-playing records. As for the scientists, they were triumphing already. Walter Luke, who had believed in Roger from the beginning, stopped me in a gloomy, lavatory-like passage in the Treasury where his uninhibited voice reverberated round: ‘By God, the old bleeder’s going to get away with it! It just shows, if you go on talking sense for long enough, you wear ’em down in time.’
When I mentioned Walter’s opinion to Hector Rose, he said, with a frigid but not unfriendly smile:
‘Sancta simplicitas.’
Even Rose was not immune from the excitement. Yet he found it necessary to tell me that he had been in touch with Monteith. The piece of false information, which I had protested about, had been checked. Rose had satisfied himself that it was an honest mistake. He told me this, as though the first imperative for both of us was that the official procedures should be proved correct. Then he felt free to pass on to Roger’s chances.
During those days I talked once or twice to Douglas, but only to try to comfort him about his wife. The prognosis had been confirmed: she would become paralysed, she would die within five years. At his desk he sat stoically writing upon official paper. When I went in, he talked of nothing but her.
February had come, it was warm for the time of year, Whitehall was basking in the smoky sunlight.
By the end of the month, Roger was due to make his speech on the White Paper. We were all lulling ourselves with work. All of a sudden the lull broke. It broke in a fashion that no one had expected. It was a surprise to the optimistic: but it was even more of a surprise to the experienced, it didn’t look much, in the office. Just a note on a piece of paper. Harmless looking, the words.
The Opposition had put down a motion to reduce the Navy vote by ten pounds.
It would have sounded archaic, or plain silly, to those who didn’t know Parliament. Even to some who did, it sounded merely technical. It was technical, but most of us knew it meant much more. Who was behind it? Was it a piece of political chess? We did not believe it. Roger did not pretend to believe it.
Our maximum hope had been that, when the House ‘took notice’ of the White Paper, the Opposition would not make much of the debate, or force a division. This hadn’t seemed unrealistic. Some of them believed that Roger was as good – as near their line – as anyone they could expect. If he lost, they would get something worse. They had tried to damp down their own ‘wild men’. But now the switch was sudden and absolute. They were going for him, attacking him before his White Paper speech. They were ready to give up two of their supply days for the job. They must have known something about Roger’s side. They must have known more than that.
Roger had scarcely seen me, since the night at his house with Rubin. Now he sent for me.
He gave a smile as I entered his room, but it wasn’t a comradely one. He had kept his command intact, and his self-control: but, so it seemed, at the price of denying that we knew each other well. We were talking like business partners, with years of risk behind us, with a special risk present now: no closer than that: his face was hard, impatient, over-clear.
What did I know about it? No more than he did, probably less, I said.
‘I doubt if you can know less,’ he said. He broke out: ‘What does it mean?’
‘How in God’s name should I know?’
‘You must have an idea.’
I stared at him without speaking. Yes, I had an idea. I suspected we were fearing the same thing.
‘We’re grown men,’ he said. ‘Tell me.’
I did so. I said it looked to me like a classical case of fraternization behind the lines. That is, some of his enemies, on his own back benches, had been making a bargain with their Opposition counterparts. The Opposition backbenchers had pressed their leaders to bring the vote. They would get support – how much support? – from the Government side. It was more decent that way. If Roger made a compromising speech, his colleagues and party would stay with him. But if he were too unorthodox – well if a Minister were too unorthodox to be convenient, there were other methods of dislodging him: this was one which gave least pain to his own party.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think you’re quite likely right. That may be it.’
He had spoken neutrally. He went on, in an impatient, active tone: ‘Well, there’s nothing for it. We’ve got to know.’
He meant, we had to know, not only whether we were right, but if so, who the enemy were. One or two dissidents in his own party he could write off: but thirty or forty – and the more so if they were respected members – would mean the end.
Unless he behaved as Collingwood and his colleagues would have done, and denied that he meant to do anything at all. For an instant the temptation flickered again. Then he shut it away. He was set.
He was estimating the odds, and also our sources of information. He would be talking to the Whips himself that day and to friends in the party. The trouble was, he said, still talking cold sense, this didn’t sound like a respectable revolt. He hadn’t received a letter of regret, and no one had spoken to him face to face. We should have to go in for subterranean talking ourselves. Some of my Opposition friends might know something. So might the Press.
‘You’d better find out,’ said Roger, as briskly as though he were himself only remotely concerned, but was advising me for my own good.
From two sources I learned much the same story. An Opposition front-bencher whom I had known at Cambridge told it to me: a journalist took me along to El Vino’s to meet a couple of lobby correspondents. Next day, I had some news – not hard news, but more solid than a rumour – for Roger.
Yes, the correspondents had confirmed, our guess had something in it. There had been chaffering (one journalist claimed to know the place of the meeting) between a group of Opposition members and a few conservatives. The Opposition members were mostly on the extreme right wing of the Labour Party, though there were one or two pacifists and disarmers. I kept asking who the conservatives were, and how many. There, just at the point of fact – the rumour got wrapped in wool. Very few, one of my informants thought – maybe only two or three. No one who counted. One was, they were sure, the young man who had asked the Parliamentary Question about Brodzinski’s speech. ‘Oddballs’, my acquaintance kept repeating in the noisy pub, as the drinks went round, as though he found the phrase satisfactory.
It wasn’t bad news, so far as it existed. Considering our expectations, we might have been consoled. But Roger did not take it so. We were grown men, he had said. But it was one thing to face the thought of a betrayal, even a little one: another to hear that the thoughts were true. He was angry with me for bringing the news. He was bitter with himself. ‘I’ve never spent enough time drinking with fools,’ he cried. ‘I’ve never made them feel they’re important. It’s the one thing they can’t forgive.’
That evening, he did something out of character. Accompanied by Tom Wyndham, he spent hours in the smoking room at the House, trying to be matey. I heard the story from Wyndham next day, who said in a puzzled fashion: ‘It’s the first time I’ve known the old boy lose his grip.’ The great figure, clumsy as a bear, standing in the middle of the room, catching acquaintances’ eyes, downing tankards of beer, performing the only one of the personal arts at which he was downright bad. In a male crowd, he was at a loss. There he stood inept, grateful for the company of a colleague who was no use to him, until Tom Wyndham led him away.
He had lost his head. Within twenty-four hours he had regained it. He was outfacing me, daring me to suggest that he had been upset. This time, smoothly in charge, he was doing what ought to be done. One of his supporters had summoned a meeting of the Private Members’ defence committee. No one at that meeting would have guessed that he had, even for a single evening, not been able to trust his nerve. No one would have guessed that he could stand inept, lost, among a crowd of acquaintances.
Reports came flicking through the lobbies that Roger was ‘holding them’, that he was ‘in form’, ‘back again’. I saw one of my journalist informants talking, as though casually, with a smart, beaming-faced member fresh from the meeting.
Once, to most of us, it had merely been a matter of gossipy interest, to identify the leaks, the sources of news. Now we weren’t so detached. This, as it happened, was good news.
I took the journalist back to El Vino’s. He was so eupeptic, so willing to cheer me up, that I was ready to stand him many drinks. Yes, Roger had carried them with him. ‘That chap won’t be finished till he’s dead,’ said my acquaintance, with professional admiration. After another drink, he was speculating about Roger’s enemies. Four or five, he said: anyway, you could count them on one hand. Men of straw. The phrase ‘oddballs’ had a tendency to recur, giving him a sense of definition, illumination, perfection, denied to me.
On the Sunday afternoon, my taxi drove through the empty, comfortable Cambridge streets, across the bridge by Queen’s, along the Backs towards my brother’s house. There he and Francis Getliffe were waiting for me. I hadn’t come just to make conversation, but for a while we sat round the fire in the drawing-room: the bronze doors were not closed, and through the far window the great elm stood up against the cyclorama of sunset sky.