Corridors of Power (12 page)

All Francis wanted for himself was to live in Cambridge, to spend long days in his laboratory, to watch, with worried, disapproving love, how his second and favourite daughter was getting on with an American research student. He wanted no more struggles. That afternoon, as he said yes, he felt nothing but trapped.

Sir Laurence Astill was speaking firmly: ‘If in your judgement, Minister, you feel that I have a contribution to make, then I shall consider myself obliged to accept.’

‘That’s very good of you,’ said Roger.

‘Though how you expect us to fit in these various kinds of service and look after our departments at the same time–’ Sir Laurence had not finished. ‘Some time I’d like a word with you, on the position of the senior university scientist in general.’

‘Any time,’ said Roger.

Sir Laurence nodded his head with satisfaction. He liked being in the company of Ministers: talk with Ministers was big stuff. Just as Francis was sated with the high political world, Astill was insatiable.

The others, without fuss, agreed to serve. Then Roger came to what, in his mind and mine, was the point of the meeting. What he was going to suggest, we had agreed between ourselves. I was as much behind it as he was; later on, I had to remind myself of that. ‘Now that we’ve got a committee together, and a quite exceptionally strong one,’ said Roger, blandishment coming into his tone for the first time that afternoon, ‘I should like to know what you’d all feel if I added another member.’

‘Minister?’ said Astill acquiescently.

‘I’m bringing it up to you, because the man I’m thinking of does present some problems. That is, I know he doesn’t see eye to eye with most of us. He might easily make you waste a certain amount of time. But I have a strongish feeling that it might be worth it.’

He paused and went on: ‘I was thinking of Michael Brodzinski.’

Faces were impassive, the shut faces of committee men. After an interval, Astill took the lead. ‘I think I can probably speak for our colleagues, Minister. Certainly I should have no objection to working with Dr Brodzinski.’

Astill liked agreeing with a Minister. This wasn’t time-serving, it wasn’t even self-seeking: it was just that Astill believed that Ministers were likely to be right. ‘I dare say we shall have our points of difference. But no one has ever doubted that he is a man of great scientific quality. He will have his own contribution to make.’

Someone said, in a low voice – was it Pearson? – ‘If you can’t beat them, join them. But this is the other way round.’ The other academics said that they could get on with Brodzinski. Francis was looking at his watch, as though anxious to be back in Cambridge. He said: ‘Minister, I agree with the rest. I’m inclined to think that he’d be more dangerous outside than in.’

‘I’m afraid that doesn’t quite represent my attitude,’ said Astill.

‘Still,’ Roger said, ‘you’re quite happy about it, Astill?’

‘I’m not. I think you’re all wrong,’ Walter Luke burst out. ‘As bloody wrong as you can be. I thought so when I first heard this idea, and I think so now.’

Everyone looked at him. I said quietly, ‘I’ve told you, you can watch him–’

‘Look here,’ said Walter, ‘you’re all used to reasonable ways of doing business, aren’t you?’

No one replied.

‘You’re all used to taking people along with you, aren’t you?’

Again, silence.

‘So am I, God help me. Sometimes it works, I grant you that. But do you think it’s going to work in anything as critical as this?’

Someone said we had to try it.

‘You’re wiser old bastards than I am,’ said Walter, ‘but I can’t see any good coming out of it.’

The whole table was stirring with impatience. Walter’s outburst had evoked the group-sense of a meeting. Getliffe, Astill, everyone there, wanted him to stop. Technical insight they all gave him credit for; but not psychological insight. He gave himself no credit for it, either. Battered looking he might be, but he still often thought of himself as younger than he was. That strain of juvenility, of deliberate juvenility – for he was proud of this, and in his heart despised the ‘wise old bastards’ – took away the authority with which he might have spoken that afternoon.

Roger was regarding him with hard eyes.

‘Would you take the responsibility, if I gave you your head and left Brodzinski outside?’

‘I suppose so,’ Walter said.

Roger said: ‘You needn’t worry. I’m going to over-rule you.’

A week later, at the same place, at the same time, Michael Brodzinski was making his first appearance on the committee. The others were standing round, before the meeting, when a secretary came to tell me that Brodzinski had arrived. I went out to welcome him, and, before we had shaken hands, just from the joyful recognition on his face, I was certain that he had received some account of the first discussion, that he knew I was partly responsible for getting him there, and so gave me his trust.

I led him into Roger’s room. Approaching the knot of scientists, who were still standing, Brodzinski looked very powerful physically. He was much the most heavily muscled, more so than Walter, who was a strong man.

Once more I was certain that he had heard precisely how he had been discussed. ‘Good afternoon, Sir Laurence,’ he said to Astill, with great politeness and qualified trust. To Francis Getliffe the politeness was still great, the trust more qualified. To Walter the politeness became extreme, the politeness of an enemy.

Roger called out a greeting. It was a hearty, banal bit of cordiality, something like how grateful Roger was to have his help. At once Brodzinski left Walter, and listened as though he were receiving a citation. With his splendid, passionate, luminous eyes, he was looking at Roger as more than a supporter, as something like a saviour.

Twice that month, I was invited out by Caro’s brother. It seemed a little taxing, but on the second occasion, when my wife was staying with her sister, I said yes. It seemed more taxing still, face to face with Sammikins – a name I found increasingly unsuitable for this loud-voiced, untameable man – in one of the military clubs.

He had given me dinner, and a good one. Then, sitting in the library, under the oil-paintings of generals of the Crimean war, the Mutiny, fierce-looking generals of the late-Victorian peace, we had gone on to the port. I was lying back relaxed in my chair. Opposite me, Sammikins sat straight up, wild and active as a hare. He was trying to persuade me to bet.

It might have been because he couldn’t resist it. Earlier that evening he had been inviting me to a race-meeting. Like his sister, he owned race-horses, and he thought it was unnatural, he thought I was holding something back, when I professed boredom in the presence of those romantic animals. But if I wouldn’t bet on horses, surely I would on something else? He kept making suggestions, with cheerful, manic, loud-voiced glee. It might have been just the addiction. Or it might have been that he was provoked by anyone like me. Here was I, fifteen years older, my manner restrained by the side of his, (which didn’t differentiate me too sharply from most of the human race). Did he want to prove that we weren’t all that unlike?

I took him on. I said that, if we were going to bet, he had one advantage; he was, at any rate potentially, richer than I was. I also had an advantage: I understood the nature of odds, and I doubted if he did. If I were ready to bet, it was going to be on something which gave us each precisely an even chance.

‘Done,’ he said.

Finally we settled that Sammikins should order more glasses of port, and afterwards not touch the bell again. Then, for the period of the next half-hour, we would mark down the number of times the waiter’s bell was rung. He would bet on an odd number, I on even. How much? he said.

‘Ten pounds,’ I replied.

Sammikins put his watch on the table between us. We agreed on the starting and finishing time, and watched the second hand go round. As it came up to the figure twelve, Sammikins cried: ‘They’re off!’

On a sheet of club writing-paper, I kept the score. There were only half a dozen men in the library, one of whom kept sniffing in an irritated fashion at Sammikins’ barks of laughter. The only likely orders appeared to be a party of three senior officers. Immediately after the start, they rang for the waiter, and I heard them asking for large whiskys all round. With decent luck, I was reckoning, they ought to manage another.

Watching them with bold, excited eyes, Sammikins, who knew two of them, discussed their characters. I was embarrassed in case his voice should carry. Like his sister’s, his judgements were simple and direct. He had much more insight than staider men. He told stories about those two in the last war. He liked talking about the military life. Why hadn’t he stayed in the army? I asked him. Yes, he had loved it, he said. With his fierce, restless look, he added that he couldn’t have stood being a peace-time officer. It occurred to me that, in different times, he might have been happy as a soldier of fortune.

No, he couldn’t have stood being a peace-time officer, he said: any more than he could stand the thought of keeping up the estate when his father died.

‘I suppose,’ said Sammikins, with a laugh loud even for him, ‘that I shall have to dodder about in the Lords. How would
you
like that? Eh?’

He meant, that he would detest it. He was speaking, as usual, the naked truth. Though it didn’t seem to fit him, he had all his family’s passion, which Caro shared, for politics. No one could possibly have less of a political temperament than Sammikins had: yet he loved it all. He loved the House of Commons, it didn’t matter how many enemies he made there. He was talking about his party’s leaders, with the same devastating simplicity with which he had talked about the generals, but with his eyes popping with excitement. He didn’t think any better of the politicians, but they entranced him more.

One of the generals pressed the button by the fireplace, and the waiter came in. Sixteen minutes had passed. They ordered another round. I make a stroke on the writing paper and smiled.

‘Soaking,’ said Sammikins, who was not a specially abstemious man, with disapproval.

No movement from anyone else in the room. The man whom Sammikins’ laugh made wretched was reading a leather-bound volume, another was writing a letter, another gazing critically at a glossy magazine.

‘They want stirring up,’ said Sammikins, in a reproving tone. But he was surveying the room with a gambler’s euphoria. He began speaking of the last appointment of a junior minister – who was Roger’s Parliamentary Under-secretary, occupying the job which Roger had filled under Gilbey.

‘He’s no good,’ said Sammikins. The man’s name was Leverett-Smith. He was spoken of as a safe appointment, which to Sammikins meant that there was no merit in it.

‘He’s rich,’ I said.

‘No, he’s pretty well-off, that’s all.’

It occurred to me that Sammikins did not have an indifference which, in my provincial youth, we should have expected of him. Romantically, we used to talk about the aristocratic contempt for money. Sammikins was rough on ordinary bourgeois affluence: but he had no contempt at all for money, when, as with Diana Skidmore, there was enough of it.

‘He’s no good,’ cried Sammikins. ‘He’s just a boring little lawyer on the make. He doesn’t want to do anything, blast him, he doesn’t even want the power, he’s just pushing on, simply to puff himself up.’

I suspected that Leverett-Smith had been put in as a counterweight to Roger, who scarcely knew him and had not been consulted. I said that such men, who didn’t threaten anyone and who were in politics for the sake of the charade, (for I believed Sammikins was right there) often went a long way.

‘So do clothes-moths,’ said Sammikins, ‘that’s what he is – a damned industrious clothes-moth. We’ve got too many of them, and they’ll do us in.’

Sammikins, who had a store of bizarre information, most of which turned out to be accurate, had two addenda on Leverett-Smith. A, that he and his wife were only keeping together for social reasons, B, that she had been a protégée of Lord—, who happened to be a
voyeur
. Then, with an insistence that I didn’t understand, he returned to talking of government appointments, as though he had appointments on the brain. At that moment, when twenty-seven minutes had gone, I saw with surprise and chagrin one of the generals get up with long, creaking movements of the legs, and go to the bell.

‘Put down one more, Lewis,’ cried Sammikins, with a cracking laugh, ‘three! That’s an odd number, you know.’

The waiter was very quick. The general called for three pints of bitter, in tankards.

‘That’s a very good idea.’ Sammikins gave another violent laugh. He looked at the watch. Twenty-nine minutes had passed, the second hand was going round.

‘Well,’ he said, staring at me, bold and triumphant.

I heard a sniff from close by. With a glance of hate towards Sammikins, the man who had been registering protest about his noisiness, soberly put a marker into his book, closed it, and went towards the bell.

‘Twenty seconds to spare,’ I said. ‘My game, I think.’

Sammikins swore. Like any gambler I had ever known, he expected to make money out of it. It didn’t seem an addiction so much as a process of interior logic. Both he and Caro lost hundreds a year on their horses, but they always thought of them as a business which would pull round. However, he had to write me out a cheque, while his enemy and bane, in a gravelly voice, still with a hostile glare at Sammikins, ordered a glass of tonic water.

Without any preamble, his cheque passed over to me, Sammikins said: ‘The trouble with Roger is, he can’t make up his mind.’

For an instant I was at a loss, as though I had suddenly got mixed up in a different conversation.

‘That’s why I’ve been chasing you,’ he said, so directly, so arrogantly, so innocently, that it didn’t seem either flattering or unflattering: it just sounded like, and was, the bare truth.

‘That’s
what I wanted to talk to you about.’

By now I was ready for anything, but not for what he actually said. Noisily he asked me: ‘Roger hasn’t picked his PPS yet, has he?’