Corridors of Power (2 page)

As for the others, there appeared to be three couples, all the men Tory back-benchers, none of them older than forty, with wives to match, young, strapping matrons such as one saw in the Kensington streets at four in the afternoon, collecting their children from fashionable pre-preparatory schools. There was also an elderly woman called Mrs Henneker.

As we sat down and drank, Roger Quaife not yet present, they were all talking politics, but politics which any outsider – even one as near to it as I was – needed a glossary to follow. This was House of Commons gossip, as esoteric as theatre-gossip, as continuously enthralling to them as theatre-gossip was to actors. Who was in favour, who wasn’t. Who was going to finish up the debate next week. How Archie pulled a fast one with that question.

There was going to be an election soon, we all knew: this was the spring of 1955. They were swapping promises to speak for one another: one was bragging how two senior Ministers were ‘in the bag’ to speak for him. Roger was safe, someone said, he’d give a hand. What had the PM got in mind for Roger ‘when we come back?’ Monty Cave asked Caro. She shook her head, but she was pleased, and I thought she was touching wood.

The other men spoke of Roger as though he were the only one of them whose success was coming soon, or as though he were different from themselves. The gossip went on. The euphoria grew. Then the maid came in and announced, ‘Lady Caroline, Dr Rubin is here.’

It was not that Roger Quaife had a title – but his wife was the daughter of an earl, one of a rich aristocratic family who in the nineteenth century had been Whig grandees.

I looked round, as Caro stood up with cries of welcome. I was taken aback. Yes, it was the David Rubin I knew very well, the American physicist. He came in, very quiet and guarded, pearl cuff-links in his sleeves, his dinner jacket newer and more exquisite than any man’s there. He was, so my scientific friends said, one of the most distinguished of scientists: but unlike the rest of them, he was also something of a dandy.

Caro Quaife took him to my wife’s side. By this time the drawing-room was filling up, and Caro threw a cushion on the floor and sat by me. ‘You must be used to women sitting at your feet, mustn’t you?’ she said. She couldn’t understand, she went on, why Roger, the old devil, was so late. She spoke of him with the cheerfulness, the lack of anxiety, of a happy marriage. When she spoke to me directly, it was in a manner at once high-spirited, deferential and aggressive, eager to be impressed, used to speaking out and not thinking twice.

‘Hungry,’ said Mrs Henneker, in a trumpeting tone.

She had a fleshy, bulbous nose and eyes which stared out, a fine bright blue, with a disconcerting fixity.

‘Sorry. Have another drink,’ said Caro, without any sign of caring. In fact, it was not yet half-past eight, but it seemed late for a dinner-party in the ’fifties.

The conversation had switched. One of the members’ wives had started talking about a friend of theirs who was having ‘woman trouble’. Just for once, they had got away from the House of Commons. This friend was a banker: he had ‘got it badly’: his wife was worried.

‘What’s the woman like?’ Caro gave a loud, crowing chuckle.

I observed David Rubin’s sad face show signs of animation. He preferred this topic to the previous one.

‘Oh, madly glamorous.’

‘In that case,’ cried Caro, ‘I don’t believe Elsa’ (the wife) ‘has much to worry about. It isn’t the glamorous ones you ought to watch out for when the old man’s showing signs of absent-mindedness. It’s that little quiet grey mouse in the corner, who nobody’s ever noticed. If
she’s
got her claws into him, then the best thing is to call it a day and wonder how you’re going to explain it to the children.’

The other wives were laughing with her. She was not a beauty, I thought, she was too hearty for that. Just then her eyes lit up, and she scrambled off her cushion.

‘Here he is!’ she said. ‘And about time too!’

As Roger walked through the room from an inner door, he looked clumsy, a little comic, quite unselfconscious. He was a big man, heavy and strong; but neither his face nor his body seemed all of a piece. His head was smallish, for a man of his bulk, and well-shaped, his eyes grey and bright, pulled down a little at the outer corners. His nose was flattened at the bridge, his lower lip receded. It was not a handsome face, but it was pleasant. His colleagues in the room, except for Cave, were neat, organized, officer-like; by their side he was shambling and uncoordinated. When I first met him, he had brought back my impression of Pierre Bezukhov in
War and Peace
. Yet his manner, quite unlike Pierre’s, was briskly competent.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said to his wife, ‘someone caught me on the phone–’

It was, it appeared, one of his constituents. He said it simply, as if it were a matter of tactics that she would understand.

He had considerable physical presence, though it was the opposite of an actor’s presence. He shook hands with Rubin and me. All he did and said was easy and direct.

For a moment he and his fellow members had edged away, and on the periphery of the group Mrs Henneker laid a substantial, ringed hand on my arm.

‘Office,’ she said.

I found her conversation hard to cope with.

‘What?’ I replied.

‘That young man is going to get office.’ By which she meant that he would be made a Minister if his party were returned again.

‘Will he?’ I said.

She asked, ‘Are you an idiot?’

She asked it with a dense, confident twinkle, as though I should love her for being rude.

‘I shouldn’t have thought so,’ I said.

‘I meant it in the Greek sense, Sir Leonard,’ she said, and then from a heavy aside, discovered from Caro that my name was Lewis Eliot. ‘Yes, I meant it in the Greek sense,’ she said, quite unabashed. ‘Not interested in politics, y’know.’

She was so proud of her scrap of learning. I wondered how often she had trotted it out, knowing as much Greek as she did Eskimo. There was something childlike about her self-satisfaction. She was sure that she was a privileged soul. She was sure that no one could think otherwise.

‘I am rather interested in politics,’ I said.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Mrs Henneker triumphantly.

I tried to hush her, for I wanted to listen to Roger. His tone was different from that of his friends. I could not place his accent. But it was nothing like that of Eton and the Brigade; any of the others would have known, and Mrs Henneker might have said, that he did not come ‘out of the top drawer’. In fact, his father had been a design engineer, solid provincial middle-class. He wasn’t young, despite Mrs Henneker’s adjective. He was only five years younger than I was, which made him forty-five.

He had interested me from the beginning, though I couldn’t have said why. Listening to him that evening, as we sat round the dinner-table downstairs, I was disappointed. Yes, his mind was crisper than the others’, he was a good deal heavier-weight. But he too, just like the others, was talking about the chessboard of Parliament, the moves of their private game, as though nothing else existed under Heaven. I thought that, with David Rubin present, they were all being impolite. I became impatient. These people’s politics were not my politics. They didn’t know the world they were living in, much less the world that was going to come. I looked at Margaret, who had the eager, specially attentive look she always wore when she was bored, and wished that the evening were over.

All of a sudden, I wasn’t impatient any longer. The women had just gone back upstairs, and we were standing in the candlelight. ‘Come and sit by me,’ Roger said to Rubin, and snapped his fingers, not obtrusively, as if giving himself a signal of some kind. He put me on his other side. As he was pouring brandy into Rubin’s glass, he said, ‘I’m afraid we’ve been boring you stiff. You see, this election is rather on our minds.’ He looked up and broke into a wide, sarcastic grin. ‘But then, if you’ve been attending carefully, you may have gathered that.’

For the first time that evening, David Rubin began to take a part. ‘Mr Quaife, I’d like to ask you something,’ he said. ‘What, according to present thinking, is the result of this election going to be? Or is that asking you to stick your neck out?’

‘It’s fair enough,’ said Roger. ‘I’ll give you the limits. On one side, the worst that can happen to us’ (he meant the Conservative Party) ‘is a stalemate. It can’t be worse than that. At the other end, if we’re lucky we might have a minor landslide.’

Rubin nodded. One of the members said: ‘I’m betting on a hundred majority.’

‘I’d judge a good deal less,’ said Roger.

He was speaking like a real professional, I thought. But it was just afterwards that my attention sharpened. My neighbour’s cigar smoke was spiralling round the candle-flame: it might have been any well-to-do London party, the men alone for another quarter of an hour. Then Roger, relaxed and solid in his chair, turned half-right to David Rubin and said: ‘Now I’d like to ask you something, if I may.’

‘Surely,’ said Rubin.

‘If there are things you mustn’t say, then I hope you won’t feel embarrassed. First, I’d like to ask you – how much does what we’re doing about nuclear weapons make sense?’

Rubin’s face was more sombre, worn, and sensitive than those round him. He was no older than some of the other men, but among the fresh ruddy English skins his stood out dry, pallid, already lined, with great sepia pouches, like bruises, under his eyes. He seemed a finer-nerved, more delicate species of animal.

‘I don’t know that I’m following you,’ he said. ‘Do you mean what the UK is doing about your weapons? Or what we’re doing? Or do you mean the whole world?’

‘They all enter, don’t they?’ Everyone was looking at Roger as he asked the matter-of-fact question. ‘Anyway, would you start on the local position, that is, ours? We have a certain uncomfortable interest in it, you know. Would you tell us whether what this country’s doing makes sense?’

Rubin did not, in any case, find it easy to be as direct as Roger. He was an adviser to his own government; further, and more inhibiting, he was hyper-cautious about giving pain. So he did a lot of fencing. Was Roger talking about the bombs themselves, or the methods of delivery? He invoked me to help him out – as an official, I had heard these topics argued between the Americans and ourselves for years.

There were other considerations besides the scientific ones, beside military ones, said Rubin, back on his last line of defence, why the UK might want their own weapon.

‘It’s our job to worry about that, isn’t it?’ said Roger gently. ‘Tell us – look, you know this as well as anyone in the world – how significant, just in the crudest practical terms, are our weapons going to be?’

‘Well, if you must have it,’ Rubin answered, shrugging his shoulders, ‘anything you can do doesn’t count two per cent.’

‘I say, Professor Rubin,’ came a bass voice, ‘you’re kicking us downstairs pretty fast, aren’t you?’

Rubin said: ‘I wish I could tell you something different.’ His interlocutor was Mrs Henneker’s son-in-law, a man called Tom Wyndham. He confronted Rubin with a cheerful stare, full of the assurance of someone brought up in a ruling class, an assurance which did not exactly ignore changes in power, but shrugged them off. Rubin gave an apologetic smile. He was the most polite of men. He had been born in Brooklyn, his parents still spoke English as a foreign language. But he had his own kind of assurance: it did not surprise him to be told that he was the favourite for that year’s Nobel physics prize.

‘No,’ said Monty Cave, ‘Roger asked you to tell us.’ He gave a sharp grin. ‘He usually gets what he asks for.’

Roger smiled, as though they were friends as well as allies. For five years, since they entered the House, they had been leading their group of back-benchers.

‘Now David, if I may call you so,’ he said, ‘do you mind if I go one step further. About the United States – does your policy about the weapons make sense?’

‘I hope so.’

‘Doesn’t it depend upon the assumption that you’re going to have technical superiority for ever? Don’t some of our scientists think you’re under-estimating the Russians? Is that so, Lewis?’

I was thinking to myself, Roger had been well-briefed; for Francis Getliffe, Walter Luke and their colleagues had been pressing just that view.

‘We don’t know,’ said Rubin.

He was not at his most detached. And yet, I saw that he had respect for Roger as an intelligent man. He was a good judge of intelligence and, courteous though he was, respect did not come easily to him.

‘Well then,’ said Roger, ‘let us assume, as I should have thought for safety’s sake we ought to, that the West – which means you – and the Soviet Union may get into a nuclear arms race on something like equal terms. Then how long have we got to do anything reasonable?’

‘Not as long as I should like.’

‘How many years?’

‘Perhaps ten.’

There was a pause. The others, who had been listening soberly, did not want to argue. Roger said: ‘Does that suggest an idea to anyone?’

He said it with a sarcastic twist, dismissively. He was pushing his chair back, signalling that we were going back to the drawing-room.

Just as he was holding open the door, bells began to ring in the passage, up the stairs, in the room we were leaving. It was something like being on board ship, with the bells ringing for lifeboat-drill. Immediately Roger, who a minute before had seemed dignified – more than that, formidable – took on a sheepish smile. ‘Division bell,’ he explained to David Rubin, still wearing the smile, ashamed, curiously boyish, and at the same time gratified, which comes on men when they are taking part in a collective private ritual. ‘We shan’t be long!’ The members ran out of the house, like schoolboys frightened of being late, while David and I went upstairs alone.

‘They’ve gone off, have they? Time something broke you up.’ Caro greeted us robustly. ‘Whose reputations have you been doing in? Men ought to have–’ With lively hand, she exemplified cats’ whiskers sprouting.

I shook my head, and said that we had been talking about David’s expert subject, and the future. Margaret looked at me. But the division bell had quite smashed the mood. I no longer felt any eschatological sense, or even any responsibility. Instead, in the bright drawing-room, all seemed serene, anti-climactic, and slightly comic.