Corridors of Power (16 page)

He was referring to his defence of Sammikins. He was speaking with extreme rancour, as though denouncing the folly, and worse, of somebody else. ‘If I were any good at what I’m trying to do, I never ought to allow myself to take risks for the sake of feeling handsome. I only ought to take one risk. I’ve got a fifty per cent chance of doing what I set out to do.’

He snapped his fingers, less unobtrusively than usual. ‘If I can’t do what we believe in, then I reckon no one is going to do it. For that, I’ll make a great many sacrifices you two would be too genteel to make. I’ll sacrifice all the useless protests. I’ll let you think I’m a trimmer and a time-server. I’ll do anything. But I’m not prepared for you two to come and teach me when I’ve got to be noble. It doesn’t matter whether I look noble or contemptible, so long as I bring this off. I’m fighting on one front. That’s going to be hard enough. Nothing that any of you say is going to make me start fighting on two fronts, or any number of fronts, or whatever you think I ought to fight on.’ There was a pause.

‘I don’t find it as easy as you do,’ said Monty Cave. ‘Isn’t it slightly too easy to find reasons for doing nothing, when it turns out to be advantageous to oneself?’

Roger’s temper had subsided as suddenly as it had blown up.

‘If I were going to fall over backwards to get into trouble, whenever there are decent reasons for keeping out of harm’s way, then I shouldn’t be any use to you, or in this job.’

For a man of action – which he was, as much so as Lord Lufkin – Roger was unusually in touch with his own experience. But as he made that reply, I thought he was speaking like other men of action, other politicians that I had known. They had the gift, common to college politicians like my old friend Arthur Brown, or national performers like Roger, of switching off self-distrust, of knowing when not to be too nice about themselves. It was not a romantic gift: but it was one, as more delicate souls like Francis Getliffe found to their disadvantage, the lack of which not only added to the pain of life, but cost one half the game.

The days of Suez were over. Monty Cave, with two other junior Ministers, had resigned from the Government. There were still dinner-parties from which it was advisable to excuse ourselves. But I could not excuse myself from Gilbey’s speech in the House of Lords.

It was not an occasion made for drama. There were perhaps forty men lolling on the red benches, under the elaboration of stained glass, the brass and scarlet of the galleries, the chamber more flashy than the Commons, the colours hotter. If Roger had not asked me, I should not have thought of listening. The Government spokesman was uttering generalities, at the tranquillizing length which Douglas Osbaldiston judged suitable, about the defence programme after Suez. The Opposition was expressing concern. One very old peer muttered mysteriously about the use of the camel. A young peer talked about bases. Then Gilbey rose, from the back of the Government benches. He was looking ill, iller than he really was, I thought. It occurred to me that he was doing his best to emulate the elder Pitt. But I hadn’t realized what he was capable of. Speaking to an official brief, he was fumbling, incompetent, and had embarrassed us for years. On his own, he was eloquent, and as uninhibited as an actor of his own generation playing Sydney Carton.

‘I should have liked to speak before your lordships in the uniform which has been the greatest pride and privilege of my life,’ he told them in his light, resonant, reedy tenor. ‘But a man should not wear uniform who is not well enough to fight.’ Slowly he put his hand on his heart. ‘In recent days, my lords, I have wished devoutly that I was well enough to fight. When the Prime Minister, God bless him, decided with a justice and righteousness that are as unchallengeable as any in our history, that we had to intervene by force of arms to keep the peace, and our own inalienable rights in Suez, I looked the world in the face as I have not been able to do these last ten years. For a few days, true Englishmen were able to look the whole world in the face. Is this
the last time
that true Englishmen will have that privilege, my lords?’

As usual with Lord Gilbey, it was ham. As usual with his kind of ham, it was perfectly sincere.

But Gilbey, despite his sincerity, was not so simple as he seemed. This speech was a threnody for his own England: but it turned into an opportunity for revenge on those who had kicked him out. He was not clever, but he had some cunning. He had worked out that the enemies of Suez within the Government had been his own enemies. As the rumours that Roger was anti-Suez went round the clubs, Gilbey had decided that these were the forces, this man the intriguer, who had supplanted him. Like other vain and robust men, Gilbey had no capacity for forgiveness whatsoever. He did not propose to forgive this time. Speaking as an elder statesman, without mentioning Roger by name, he expressed his doubts about the nation’s defences, about ‘intellectual gamblers’ who would let us all go soft. ‘This is a
knife in the back
,’ an acquaintance in the gallery wrote on an envelope and passed to me.

Gilbey was finishing. ‘My lords, I wish for nothing more than that I could assure you that the country’s safety is in the best possible hands. It is a long time since I lay awake at night. I have found myself lying awake, these last bitter nights, wondering whether we can become strong again. That is our only safety. Whatever it costs, whether we have to live like paupers, this country must be able to defend itself. Most of us here, my lords, are coming to the end of our lives. That matters nothing to me, nothing to any of us, if only, at the hour of our death, we can know that the country is safe.’

Again, slowly, Gilbey put his hand on his heart. As he sat down, he took from his waistcoat pocket a small pill-box. There were ‘Hear hears’, and one or two cheers from the benches round him. Gilbey took a capsule, and closed his eyes. He sat there with eyes closed, hand on heart, for some minutes. Then, bowing to the Woolsack, leaning on the arm of a younger man, he left the Chamber.

When I had to report this performance to Roger, he took it better than other bad news. ‘If it comes to playing dirty,’ he said, ‘aristocrats have got everyone else beaten, any day of the week. You should see my wife’s relatives when they get to work. It’s a great disadvantage to be held back by middle-class morality.’

He spoke with equanimity. We both knew that the enemies, both as people and as groups, would become visible from now on. The extreme right, he was saying, was bound to be ten times more powerful in any society like ours, or the American society, than the extreme left. He had been watching them before this. It was not only Gilbey who would be talking, he said.

No, it was not only Gilbey who would be talking, as Caro proved to me a few days later, when she came to have a drink at our flat. She herself, like all her family, had been pro-Suez. At the dinner-table in Lord North Street, she had been outspoken for it, while Roger had not said much. Had they arranged this between themselves, or did they know the moves so well that they did not need to? It was good tactics for Roger to have a wife, and a Seymour, who was talking the party line. Good tactics or not, pre-arranged or not, Caro believed what she said. Once again, people were not clever enough to dissimulate. When Caro talked to me with a bold, dashing, innocent stare, I was furious with her, but I did not doubt that she was honest. She was as much pro-Suez as Lord Gilbey, and for the same reason. What was more, she insisted that Roger’s constituents were pro-Suez too, including many of the poor.

She pressed me to visit them, wanted so urgently to take me, that I suspected she might have another motive. She wore me down. One afternoon in November, she drove me down to what she called her ‘office’. We had not far to go, for Roger held one of the safe Kensington seats. Caro drove through the remnants of gentility in Queen’s Gate, the private hotels, the flats, the rooming-houses, the students’ hostels, past the end of Cromwell Road and Earl’s Court – crowded with the small-part actresses, the African students, the artists, all displaying themselves in the autumn sun, and (I remarked to Caro) as remote from Lord Gilbey’s concerns as if he were a Japanese
daimyo
. Caro just said: ‘Most of them don’t vote anyway.’

Her ‘office’ turned out to be in one of the back streets close by Olympia, a back-street of terrace houses, like those I used to walk past in my childhood on the way home. Each Monday afternoon, Caro used, so I gathered, to sit from two to six in the ‘front room’ of one of her constituency ‘chums’, a big woman with a glottal Cockney accent, who made us a pot of tea, was on hearty, patting, egalitarian terms with Caro, and cherished her delight at calling a woman of title by her Christian name.

That room, that street, seemed unbusinesslike for Caro. It was the wrong end of the constituency. The seat was safe, the Kensington end would go on returning Roger, if he turned into a gorilla. But down here she was surrounded by the working-class. Among the knockabout poor, the lumpen proletariat, she might pick up a vote or two; but the rest, with similar English impartiality and phlegm, would go on voting for another gorilla, provided he was Roger’s opponent.

There Caro sat, in the tiny, close-smelling front room, ready to talk to any caller for hours to come. Through the window, the houses opposite stood near and plain, so near that one could see the wood-pocks on the doors. The first of Caro’s visitors – perhaps clients was a better word – were Conservative supporters, elderly people living on small private means or pensions, who had made the trip from Courtfield Gardens or Nevern Square, from single rooms in the high nineteenth-century houses, who had come out here – for what? Mostly to have someone to talk to, I thought.

A good many of them were lonely, pointlessly lonely, cooking for themselves, going out to the public library for books. Some wanted to speak of their young days, of gentilities past and gone. They were irremediably lonely in the teeming town, lonely, and also frightened. They worried about the bombs: and though some of them would have said they had nothing to live for, that made them less willing to die. ‘Dying is a messy business anyway,’ said an old lady who had thirty years before taught at a smart girls’ school, putting a stoical face on it. I couldn’t have comforted her: dying was a messy business, but this was a hard way to die, frightened, neglected and alone. I couldn’t have comforted her, but Caro could, not through insight, not even through sympathy, for Caro was as brave as her brother – but through a kind of comradeship, unexacting, earthy, almost callous as though saying: We’re all dirty flesh, we’re all in the same boat.

Those genteel clients, some eccentric and seedy, some keeping up appearances, were pro-Suez all right. That wasn’t a surprise. It was more of a surprise when I listened to the later ones. They came from the streets round about, working people finished for the day; they were the sort of mixture you could pick up anywhere, just beyond the prosperous core of the great, muddled, grumbling town; they worked on the Underground and in small factories, they filled in their pools coupons and bet with a street bookmaker. They were members of trade unions and voted Labour. Their reasons for coming along were matter-of-fact – mostly to do with housing, sometimes with schools.

In her turn, Caro was brisk and matter-of-fact: yes, that could be taken up, no, that wasn’t on.

She gave one or two a tip for a race next day – not
de haut en bas
, but because she was, if possible, slightly more obsessed with horse-racing than they were themselves. She was playing fair, but once or twice she mentioned Suez, sometimes the others did. It was true what she had stated: there were several who would never have voted for ‘her people’, they would have said they were against the bosses – but just then, in a baffled, resentful fashion, they were on her side and Lord Gilbey’s, not on mine.

When she had said her goodbyes, and we went outside into the sharp night, the stars were bright for London. Behind the curtains, lights shone pallid in the basement rooms. At the corner, the pub stood festooned with bulbs, red, yellow and blue. The whole street was squat, peaceful, prosaic, cheerful. Caro was insisting that I should go back to Lord North Street for a drink. I knew that Roger was in the country making a speech. I knew she was not so fond of my company as all that. She still had something on her mind.

She was driving fast, the eastward traffic was slight on the way home to Westminster.

‘You see,’ she said. She meant that she had been right.

I wasn’t pleased. I began arguing with her; this was a tiny sample which showed nothing, not the real midland or northern working-class. But I wasn’t sure. Some politicians brought back from their constituencies the same report as hers.

‘I hope they’re all pleased with the result,’ I said. ‘I hope you are, too.’

‘We ought to have gone through with it,’ said Caro.

‘You’re all clinging with your fingernails on to the past,’ I said. ‘Where in God’s name do you think that is going to take us?’

‘We ought to have gone through with it.’

Out of patience with each other, tempers already edged, we sat in her drawing-room. She had been talking all the afternoon. I was tired with having just sat by: but she was restless and active. She mentioned the two boys, both at preparatory schools. Neither of them was ‘bright’, she said, with an air of faint satisfaction. ‘My family was never much good at brains.’

I fancied that when I left she would go on drinking by herself. She was looking older that night, the skin reddened and roughened round her cheek-bones. But it made no difference to her prettiness, and she walked about the room, not with grace, but with the spring, the confidence in her muscles, of someone who loved the physical life.

She went back to the sofa, curled her legs under her, and gazed straight at me.

‘I want to talk,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘You knew, did you?’ She was staring at me as boldly as her brother had done in his club. She went on: ‘You know that Roger has had his own line on this?’ (She meant Suez.) ‘You know it, I
know
you know it, and it’s dead opposite to the way I feel. Well, that’s all down the drain now. It doesn’t matter a hoot what any of us thought. We’ve just got to cut our losses and start again.’