‘I’ve got a meeting,’ Douglas answered. He wasn’t evading me. There was not time to return to his room. We stood there in the corridor, talking in low voices. Occasionally, in the next few minutes, doors opened, young men walked briskly past us, throwing a glance in the direction of their boss. Some would know that he and I were close friends. They might have thought that we were settling a bit of business before the meeting, or alternatively, in the way of the top stratum, at once the casual and machine-like, saving time and an interdepartmental minute.
It wasn’t going quite like that. As we kept our voices down, I was watching his face with a mixture of affection, pity and blind anger. It had changed since his wife’s illness; we had seen it change under our eyes. Now it had the special pathos of a face which, still in essence anachronistically youthful, was nevertheless beginning to look old. Once he had been untouched as Dorian Gray, a character whom he resembled in no other particular, but now all that was gone.
Three times a week, Margaret went to sit with his wife in hospital. By this time, when she wanted to smoke, Mary had to be fed her cigarette. ‘How paralysed can you get?’ she said, with a euphoria and courage that made it worse to watch.
Douglas had come to stay with us some nights, when he couldn’t stand any more either the lonely house or the club. Once he had told us, with bitter, unguarded candour, that there were not two hours together in any day when he didn’t think of her lying there, not to move again, while he was free.
All that was out of my mind. I was saying: ‘How much do you know of the latest attack on Quaife?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Do you realize that they’re going for anyone who has the slightest connection with him? Now it’s Walter Luke–’
‘You can’t have a war,’ said Douglas, ‘without someone getting hurt.’
‘I suppose you’re aware,’ I said angrily, ‘that you’ve been giving aid and comfort to these people?’
‘What are you saying now?’ All of a sudden, his face had become stony. He was as enraged as I was: the more so, because we had in private so often been open with each other.
‘I’m saying, it’s well known that you don’t agree with Quaife.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘Can you tell me that?’
‘I do tell you that, and I expect you to believe it,’ said Douglas.
‘What do you expect me to believe?’
‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘You’ve felt yourself entitled to your private view. Not so private, if I may say so. So have I. I’ve made no secret of it. I haven’t left my Minister in any doubt. I think he’s wrong, and he knows that as well as I do. But no one else knows it, except you, and one or two people I can trust.’
‘So do others.’
‘Do you really think I’m responsible for that?’
‘It depends what you mean by responsible.’
His face had darkened up to the cheekbones.
‘We’d better try to be rational,’ he said. ‘If my Minister wins, then I shall do my best for him. Of course, I shall be carrying out a policy in which I don’t believe. Well, I’ve done that before and I can do it again. I shall try to make the thing work. Without false modesty, I shall do it as well as anyone round here.’
All that he said was absolutely true.
‘You think he can’t win?’ I said.
‘And what do you think?’
His gaze was sharp, appraising. For a second we might have been in a negotiation, listening for a point at which the other would give way.
‘You’ve done a certain amount to make it harder,’ I let fly again.
‘I’ve done exactly what I’ve told you. No more, and no less.’
‘You’re better at singing in unison than some of us, aren’t you?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You realize that the line you’re taking is the line that a good many powerful persons want you to take? Most of them don’t really want Roger Quaife to get away with it, do they?’
With a curious detachment he replied: ‘That is possibly so.’
‘If he doesn’t win, you’ll be sitting pretty, won’t you ? You will have scored a nice new piece of credit for yourself? You’ll have everything waiting for you?’
He looked at me without expression. He said, in a quite friendly voice: ‘One thing. You know I’ve had my own view all along about this business. Don’t you believe it was an honest view?’
I had to say, Yes, of course I did.
I burst out, without remembering that I had once heard Cave make the same accusation to Roger: ‘But all you’ve done or not done – you must have realized that it wouldn’t exactly impede your progress, mustn’t you?’
In my fury, I was astonished to see him give a smile – not an intimate smile, but still genuine.
‘If I’ve worried about that sort of consideration, Lewis, we should never do anything, should we?’
After glancing at his watch he said, in a businesslike tone: ‘You’ve made me a bit late.’
He went off towards his meeting quickly but not in a rush, head thrust forward, papers in hand, along the corridor.
In the middle of the afternoon, my PA came in with a letter marked ‘Urgent’. It must have been delivered by hand, she said. The handwriting on the envelope looked like a woman’s, but I did not recognize it. Then I found that the note was signed ‘Ellen’. I read:
I expect you will be at the debate Monday and Tuesday. I have got to stay away, of course. I can’t even communicate with him until it’s all over. Will you please – I have to ask you this – let me know how things are going? I trust you to tell me the bare truth, whatever it is. I shall be in the flat alone, on both evenings. Please ring up, whatever you have to tell me.
I thought of her that evening, as Margaret and I went out to the theatre, just as an anaesthetic against the suspense. Roger was at home working at his speech, Caro with him. Ellen was the loneliest of all. I talked of her to Margaret. There she was, hearing nothing of him. Once she had feared that, if his career was broken, she would lose him. Now the blackmail had come out, now Caro had confronted him, Ellen must have the contradictory fear. Yet I was sure that she prayed for his success. Margaret said: ‘She’s not as good as you think she is.’
I said: ‘She tries to be.’
Margaret had met Ellen only socially, and then in the past, with her husband. It was Caro whom Margaret knew and loved, as I did not, Caro whom she had tried to comfort. Now, as we stood in the foyer of the Haymarket, avoiding the sight of acquaintances because we wanted to be together, she asked if the position was clear-cut – was Ellen facing that dilemma, either getting him, or seeing him prevail? I said, I didn’t believe that either of them knew. There could be something in it? I didn’t answer her.
‘If there’s the slightest bit in it,’ said Margaret, ‘I’m grateful was never tested that way about you.’
Monday came and dragged, like a day in my youth when I was waiting for the result of an examination. Hector Rose sent his compliments, and informed me that he expected to be in the Box for the last hours of the debate the following night. Otherwise I had no messages of any kind all that morning.
I hesitated about ringing Roger up. I detested being wished good luck myself (at root I was as superstitious as my mother); and I decided that he, also, would like to be left alone. I did not want to go to a club for lunch, in case I met Douglas or anyone else involved. I was tired of pretending to write or read. Instead, while the others were at lunch, I did what I should have done as a young man, and walked blankly round St James’s Park in the sunshine, catching, and being tantalized by, the first scent of spring; then through the streets, calling in at bookshops, nibbling away at time.
In the afternoon, the office clock swept out the minutes with its second hand. There was no point in leaving until half-past four: I did not wish to sit through question time. I rang my private secretary, and went with obsessive detail into next week’s work. After that, I had a session with my PA, making sure that she knew where I would be each hour of that day and the next. At last it was four twenty-five. Not quite the starting-time, but I could permit myself to go.
Then, as I was hurrying down the corridor, I heard a voice behind me. It was my PA, eager, comely, spectacled. My own devices had gone back on me: she knew the time too well. A lady was on the telephone, said Hilda: she said she had to speak to me immediately, it was desperately important, she couldn’t wait a minute. Thwarted, anxious, not knowing what to be anxious about, I rushed back. Was Caro going to break some news? Or was it Ellen, or from home?
It was none of them. It was Mrs Henneker.
‘I should never have believed it possible.’ Her voice came strongly over the phone. What was it? I asked.
‘What do you think?’
I did not feel inclined for guessing-games. It turned out that she had had a letter by the afternoon post, five minutes before, from a publisher. They had actually told her they didn’t consider her biography of her husband would be of sufficient interest to the general public. ‘What do you think of that?’
She sounded almost triumphant in her incredulity.
Oh well, I said, there were other publishers – trying to put her off, maddened because I was not out of the room.
‘That’s not good enough!’ Her voice rang out like a challenge.
I would talk to her sometime in the nearish future.
‘No.’ Her reply was intransigeant. ‘I think I must ask you to come round straight away.’
I said I had important business.
‘What do you call this, if it isn’t important?’
It was utterly and absolutely impossible, I said. I was occupied all the evening, all the next day, all the week.
‘I’m afraid,’ she said sternly, ‘I consider this entirely unsatisfactory.’
I said, incensed, that I was sorry.
‘Entirely unsatisfactory. Can’t I make you understand what has happened? They actually say – I’d better read you the whole letter.’
I said I hadn’t time.
‘I believe in putting first things first.’
I said goodbye.
Just as I got to the end of the corridor, I heard my telephone ringing again. I was quite sure it was Mrs Henneker. I walked on.
Down in Great George Street, the evening light bland and calm, I still felt menaced by that monomaniac voice, as though that was the cause of my worry, and not what I was going to listen to in the House. Looking up, I could see the informatory light shining above Big Ben, with a clear violet sky beyond. Though I had seen it so often, it stirred a memory, or at least a disquiet, the reason for which seemed mixed with the monomaniac voice. I was tugging at the roots of memory, but they would not be pulled out. Was it the night my wife and I went to dine at Lord North Street and, arriving too early, had walked round by St Margaret’s? The light had been shining that evening, too; yet there had been no disquiet, we had been at leisure, and content.
In the central lobby, busy with cavernous activity, members were meeting constituents, acquaintances, taking them off to tea. When I got into the officials’ box, I could have counted less than a hundred members in the chamber. There seemed as yet no special excitement in the air. The Opposition opener was speaking, like a man who is settling down to a steady lecture. He was prosy but confident, saying nothing new. It was a standard speech, gaining nothing, losing nothing. For a while I felt the needle pass away.
On the front bench, Roger was leaning back, fingers entwined, hands under his chin: Tom Wyndham sat dutifully behind him. There were three other Ministers on the front bench, Collingwood among them. A few members entered, others left. Figures were dotted here and there on the empty benches, some not listening. It might have been a borough council, assembled out of duty, for a discussion of something not specially earth-shaking, such as a proposal for a subsidy to the civic theatre.
In the box, Douglas and two other Whitehall acquaintances were already sitting. Douglas, who was writing a note on the small desk flap, gave me a friendly smile. They were all professionals, they had been here before. The climax was a long way off. This was just the start, as perfunctory as the first hour of a county cricket match, or the exposition of a drawing-room comedy.
During the opening speech I went along to the Speaker’s Gallery. There Caro and Margaret were sitting together. ‘He’s not doing any harm,’ whispered Caro. They were going back to Lord North Street for a sandwich some time. They knew I shouldn’t eat till the sitting was over. ‘Come along then, and pick up Margaret,’ said Caro, in another whisper. Now that at last we were all in it, all immersed, she could put hostilities aside until another day. Her eyes looked at me, bold and full, just as her brother’s did when he gambled. No one could expect her to be happy. Yet she wasn’t in the true sense anxious, and in her excitement there was a glint, not only of recklessness, but of pleasure.
Back in my place at Douglas’ side, I listened to the First Lord making the first reply. He too was competent, more so than I had been told. He was using much the same language as the Opposition spokesman. In fact, I found myself thinking, as the words rolled out like the balloons from characters in comic strips, an observer from Outer Mongolia would have been puzzled to detect the difference between them. ‘Deterrence’ was a word they both used often. The First Lord was preoccupied with ‘potential scaling-down’, not scaling-down in the here and now, but ‘potential scaling-down if we can have the assurance that this will influence others’. He also talked of ‘shield and sword’, ‘striking power’, ‘capability’. It was a curious abstract language, of which the main feature was the taking of meaning out of words.
As I listened to their speeches and those which followed, I wasn’t interested in speculation, or even the arguments as such. We had heard them all, for years. So I was listening, with concentrated and often obsessed attention, not to the arguments, but simply to what they meant in terms of votes next night. That was all. For all those hours, it was enough. The House grew fuller during the early evening, then thinned at dinner-time. Until nine o’clock there were no surprises. A Labour Party back-bencher expressed views close to Francis Getliffe’s or mine. When it came to the vote there would, we already knew, be plenty of abstentions on the Labour side – how many we were not certain, but too many for comfort. Though these abstentions meant support for Roger’s policy, it was once again the support he could not afford. A Labour Party front-bencher expressed views that a member of Lord A—’s splinter group, or an American admiral, might have found reactionary. Lord A— himself made a Delphic speech, in which he stated his suspicions of the Government’s intentions and his determination to vote for them. Another ultra-Conservative, whom we had counted as lost, followed suit.