‘Whatever happens, Quaife or no Quaife, or whether they throw you out at the next election–’ he gave a sardonic smile at the Ministers – ‘and the other chaps come in, there’s only room in this country for a couple of aircraft firms, at most. More likely than not, two is one too many.’
‘I suppose you mean,’ said the other industrialist with a show of spirit, ‘that you ought to be the only firm left in?’
Lufkin was the last man in existence to be worried about being
parti-pris
: or to have qualms because he was safe with a major contract: or to question whether his own interests and the national interests must necessarily coincide.
‘An efficient firm,’ he said, ‘ought to be ready to take its chance. Mine is.’
That sounded like the cue. Again Lufkin, looking at no one in particular, caught my eye.
He said: ‘I might as well tell you. I’m a hundred per cent pro Quaife. I hope you’ll see–’ he was speaking to the Ministers – ‘that
these people’
(by which Lufkin meant anyone he disapproved of) ‘don’t make the job impossible for him. No one’s ever done it properly, of course. With your set-up there isn’t a proper job to do. But Quaife’s the only chap who hasn’t been a hopeless failure. You might as well remember that.’
Having given what, for him, was lavish praise, Lufkin had finished. Dinner proceeded.
The women left us, Margaret casting at me, over her shoulder, a look of one who is doomed. I had known Lufkin, in that room, keep the men talking over the port for two hours while the women waited. ‘You wouldn’t suggest that I was conversationally inept, would you?’ Margaret had said to me after one of these occasions. ‘But several times tonight
I dried
. We talked about the children, and then about the servant problem, and then about the cleaning of jewellery. I found it hard to be chatty about that. You’d better buy me a tiara, so I can join in next time.’ That night, however, Lufkin passed the decanter round twice and then remarked, as though it were self-evident, ‘I don’t believe in segregating the sexes. Anachronistic.’
As the Ministers, the tycoon, the Second Secretary, the PRS, were moving into the drawing-room, Lufkin called out sharply: ‘Wait a minute, Lewis. I want a word with you.’
I sat down opposite to him. He pushed a bowl of flowers aside so that he could stare at me.
There were no preliminaries. He remarked: ‘You heard what I said about Quaife?’
‘I’m grateful,’ I replied.
‘It isn’t a matter for gratitude. It’s a matter for sense.’
It wasn’t getting easier to be on terms with Lufkin.
‘I’d like to tell him,’ I said. ‘He can do with some moral support.’
‘You’re intended to tell him.’
‘Good.’
‘I don’t say something about a man in one place, and something else in another.’
Like a good many of his claims for himself, this also was true.
His eyes, sunk deep in his neat, handsome head, swivelled round to me. ‘That’s not the point,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘That’s not why I sent them away.’
For an instant there was a silence, a negotiator’s silence. Like one tired of stating the obvious, he let out: ‘Quaife’s been a damned fool.’
I didn’t reply. I sat, not showing excessive interest, gazing at him. He gave a sharp recognitory smile.
‘I ought to tell you, I know about this woman of his,’ he said. ‘He’s been a damned fool. I don’t care what you think about his morals. A man doesn’t want to get mixed up with a woman when he’s trying something big.’
Lufkin seldom missed an opportunity to apportion moral blame. But his tone had become less aloof. I still did not reply, nor change my expression.
Once more, Lufkin smiled. ‘My information is,’ he said, ‘that the man Hood is going to blow the news wide open to Quaife’s wife. And to Smith’s connections. Any day now. This being, of course, the most helpful occasion.’
This time, I was astounded. I showed it. All my practice at coping with Lufkin had failed me. I knew he sat at the centre of a kind of intelligence service; business and curiosity got mixed up; his underlings fed him with gossip as well as fact. But this seemed like divination. I must have looked like one of my aunts, confronted with a demonstration of spiritualist phenomena. Lufkin gave a grin of triumph.
Later on, I thought it was not so mysterious. After all, Hood was employed by a firm closely similar to Lufkin’s. Between the two, there was contact, something like espionage, and personal intimacies at every level. There was nothing improbable in Hood’s having a drinking companion, or even a confidential friend, on Lufkin’s staff.
‘It’s likely to be true,’ said Lufkin.
‘It may be,’ I said.
‘This man,’ said Lufkin, ‘needs all his energy for the job in hand. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know, how his wife will take it. But it isn’t the kind of trouble any of us would want hanging over us when we’re fighting for our skins.’
He was a tough ally. For his own sake, he wanted Roger to survive. But he was speaking with unusual sympathy, with something like comradely feeling. Once or twice in my own life, I had known him come out of his carapace and show something which was not affection, but might have been concern. It had happened only when one was in trouble with wife or children. No one knew much about his own marriage. His wife lived in the country and there was a rumour that she was afflicted. He could have had mistresses, but if so they had been concealed with his consummate executive skill. None of this we were likely to know for sure until after he was dead.
My instructions were clear. I was to warn Roger, and then look after him. That being understood, the conference was over, and Lufkin got up to join his guests. As he did so, I asked about Hood. Was he being used by others? Were there people behind him?
‘I don’t believe in chance,’ said Lufkin.
As for the man himself, was he obsessed?
‘I’m not interested in his psychology,’ said Lufkin. ‘I’m not interested in his motives. All I’m interested in, is seeing him on the bread-line.’
We did not speak again on our way to the drawing-room. There the party, in Lufkin’s absence, had begun to sound a little gayer. He damped it down by establishing us in groups of three with no chance of transfer. For myself, I was preoccupied, and I noticed Margaret glancing at me, a line between her eyes, knowing that something was wrong. In my trio, I heard, as though she were a long way off, the wife of one of the Ministers explaining analytically why her son had not got into Pop, a subject which, at the best of times, I should have found of limited interest.
One might have thought that Lufkin’s dinner-parties broke up early. But they didn’t, unless Lufkin broke them up himself. That night it was half-past eleven before, among the first uprising of departures, I managed to get in a word with Margaret. I told her that Lufkin had been warning me, and about what.
Looking at me, she did not need to ask much. ‘Ought you to go and see Roger?’ she said.
I half-wanted to leave it till next day. She knew that I was tired. She knew that I should be more tired if I didn’t act till next morning. She said, ‘You’d better go to him now, hadn’t you?’
While Margaret waited with Lufkin, I telephoned Lord North Street. I heard Roger’s voice, and began: ‘Lufkin’s been talking to me. There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Can I come round?’
‘You can’t come here. We’ll have to meet somewhere else.’
Clubs would be closed by this time: we couldn’t remember a restaurant near by: at last I said, anxious to put down the telephone, that I would see him outside Victoria Station and was leaving straight away.
When I told Lufkin that I was going to Roger, he nodded with approval, as for any course of behaviour recommended by himself. ‘I can lay on transport,’ he said. ‘Also for your charming wife.’
Two cars, two drivers, were waiting for us in the street. As mine drew up under the Victoria clock, I did not go into the empty hall, booking-offices closed as in a ghost station, but stayed outside on the pavement, alone except for some porters going home.
A taxi slithered from the direction of Victoria Street, through the rain-glossed yard.
As Roger came heavily towards me, I said: ‘There’s nowhere to go here.’ For an instant I was reminded of Hector Rose greeting me outside the darkened Athenaeum, months before.
I said there was a low-down coffee bar not far away. We were both standing stock-still.
Roger said, quite gently, ‘I don’t think there is anything you can tell me. I think I know it all.’
‘My God,’ I said, in bitterness, ‘we might have been spared this.’
I was angry, not with Hood, but with him. My temper had broken loose because of the risks we had run, of what we had tried to do, of the use he had made of me. He gave a grimace, of something like acquiescence.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘to have got everyone into a mess.’
Those were the kind of words I had heard before in a crisis: apathetic, inadequate, flat. But they made me more angry. He looked at me.
‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It’s not lost yet.’
As we stood there in front of the station, it was not I who was giving support and sympathy. It was the other way round.
In silence we walked across the station yard, through the dripping rain. By the time we were sitting in the coffee bar, under the livid lights, I had recovered myself.
We sipped tea so weak that it tasted like metal against the teeth. Roger had just said, ‘It’s been very bad,’ when we were interrupted.
A man sat down at a table, and remarked ‘Excuse me’, in a voice that was nearly cultivated, not quite. His hands were trembling. He had a long, fine-drawn face, like the romantic stereotype of a scientist. His manner was confident. He told us a hard-luck story of considerable complexity. He was a lorry-driver, so he said. By a series of chances and conspiracies, his employers had decided to sack him. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was short of money. Could we see him through the night?
I didn’t like him much, I didn’t believe a word of it, above all I was maddened by his breaking in. Yet, as I shook my head, I was embarrassed, as though it were I who was doing the begging. As for him, he was not embarrassed in the least. ‘Never mind, old chap,’ he said.
Roger looked at him and, without a word, took out his wallet and gave him a ten-shilling note. The intruder took it civilly, but without any demonstration. ‘Always glad of a little encouragement,’ he said. He made polite goodbyes.
Roger did not watch or notice. He had given him money not out of fellow-feeling, or pity, or even to be rid of him. It had been the kind of compulsion that affects men who lead risky lives. Roger had been trying to buy a bit of luck.
Suddenly he told me straight out that Caro would ‘put a face on things’, until the struggle was over. She would laugh off the rumours which would soon, if Lufkin’s intelligence were correct, once more be sparking round all J C Smith’s connections. Caro was ready to deny them to Collingwood himself.
But there was some other damage. Many people, including most of the guests at Lord North Street, and Diana Skidmore’s friends, would have expected Caro – and Roger also – not to make much of the whole affair. Yes, Ellen had behaved badly, a wife ought to stick to her sick husband. Roger wasn’t faultless either. Still, there were worse things. After all, Caro had lived in the world all her life. Her friends and family were not models of the puritan virtues. Caro herself had had lovers before her marriage. Like the rest of her circle, she prided herself on her rationality and tolerance. They all smoothed over scandals, were compassionate about sins of the flesh, by the side of which a man having a mistress, even in the circumstances of Roger and Ellen – was nothing but a display of respectability.
That day, since Caro first read the unsigned letter, none of that had counted, nor had ever seemed to exist. There was no enlightenment or reason in the air, just violence. They hadn’t been quarrelling about his public life, nor the morality of taking a colleague’s wife: nor about love: nor sex: but about something fiercer. He was hers. They were married. She would not let him go.
He too felt the same violence. He felt tied and abject. He had come away, not knowing where to turn or what to do.
So far as I could tell, there had been no decision. Or rather, there seemed to have been two decisions which contradicted each other. As soon as the crisis was over, win or lose – Caro gave her ultimatum – he had to choose. She would not endure it more than a matter of weeks, months at the most. Then he had to look after his own career. It must be ‘this woman’ or her. At the same time, she had said more than once that she would not give him a divorce.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. His face was blank and open. He did not look like a man a few days away from his major test.
For a while we sat, drinking more cups of the metallic tea, not saying much. Then he remarked:‘I told her’ (he meant Ellen) ‘earlier in the day. I promised I’d ring her up before I went to bed. She’ll be waiting.’
Blundering, as though his limbs were heavy, he went off to look for a telephone behind the bar. When he came back he said flatly: ‘She wants me to go and see her. She asked me to bring you too.’
For an instant, I thought this was not meant seriously.
‘She asked me,’ he repeated. Then I thought perhaps I understood. She was as proud as Caro: in some ways, she was prouder. She was intending to behave on her own terms.
The rain had stopped, and we went on foot to Ebury Street. It was well past one. At her door, Ellen greeted us with the severeness which I had long ago forgotten, but which took me back to the first time I saw her there. Once we were inside the smart little sitting-room, she gave Roger a kiss, but as a greeting, no more. It wasn’t the hearty, conjugal kiss I had seen before, the kiss of happy lovers used to each other, pleased with each other, sure of pleasure to come.
She offered us drinks. Roger took a whisky, so did I. I pressed her to join us. As a rule, she enjoyed her drink. But she was one of those who, in distress, refuse to accept any relief.