Corridors of Power (25 page)

He stopped short, and stood there in silence. He went on in a quiet tone: ‘We have, all of us here, a good deal to be thankful for. This is an autumn night, and there is no war. An autumn night, and no war. For ten years out of the lives of almost every man here, we could not have said as much. We are lucky now, tonight. We have to make sure that that luck lasts. Some of us have fought in two wars. Most of us have fought in one. I don’t need to tell anyone who has fought, that war is hell. We have seen better men than ourselves killed beside us. We have seen the way they died. We have seen our dead. But that is not the worst of it. In the wars we fought, there were times when we could still admire our friends: one was terrified oneself, but others were brave. War was stink, and rot, and burning, but human beings were often fine. Individual men still counted. It is hard to imagine how, in any major war which we can now foresee, they can count much again.’

At that point, Roger had to break off into official language and point out how the armed services were still all-important. But soon he was talking in his own voice again. That was the knack – it was more than a knack, it was a quality which had drawn some of us to him – which held his audience. The hall was quiet. He went on: ‘We all think, from time to time, of thermo-nuclear war. Of course we do. We should be foolish, as well as wicked, if we didn’t. We can dimly imagine what such a war would be like. By its side, any horrors that men have so far contrived to inflict upon other men, would look like a tea-party. So we know that this must never happen. Yet, though we know that, we do not know the way to stop it. I have met men of good will, who don’t easily give up hope, thinking to themselves that we are all – all mankind – caught in a hideous trap. I don’t believe that, I believe that with courage and intelligence and a little luck, we shall find a way out. I don’t pretend it will be easy. I doubt whether there is any total solution. Perhaps we’ve got to hack away here and there, trying to do comparatively small things, which may make war that much less likely. That is why I am taking the opportunity tonight to ask a few questions. No one in the world, I think, knows the answers to all of them, perhaps not to many. That is a reason why we should at least ask them. Most of all, in this country. Ours is a country which has been as stable as any in the world for the longest time. We are an experienced people. We have been through many dangers. It happens, through no fault of our own, that this new danger, this change in the nature of war, this thermo-nuclear breakthrough, threatens us more vitally and completely than any major power. Simply because, by world standards, we are no bigger than a pocket-handkerchief, and live so close together. This degree of danger, of course, ought not to affect our judgement. I know there are some – most of all, old people living alone, and some of the young, who feel this predicament as unfair – who quite naturally, in their own hearts, occasionally feel frightened.’

There had been no noise, almost no coughing, in the hall. I had been aware of the faces round me, some naked with interest, the banker’s reflective and morose. Just then, a voice down the end of the opposite table shouted, thick with drink: ‘Speak for yourself!’

Sammikins was on his feet, berserk, calling to the interrupter.

‘Shut up, you blasted swine!’

‘Speak for yourself!’ came a drunken voice.

Sammikin’s neighbours were pulling him down, as he cried, ‘Where have you fought? This man has, you pig!’

Roger held up his hand. He stood, impassive, immobile, without a flicker. He said: ‘I’m prepared for anyone to accuse me of being cowardly. That doesn’t matter. It’s hard, I sometimes think, for a man with young children not to be. But I’m not prepared for anyone to accuse the people of this country of being cowardly. They’ve proved the opposite quite enough for any reasonable man. Anything we decide, now or in the future, about our military position, will be done because it seems to us moral and sensible, not because we’re frightened, or because, on the other hand, we have to prove that we’re not.’ He drew the first rumble of ‘hear, hears’. He let them run, then held up his hand again.

‘Now, after this bit of pleasantry, I’m going to ask the questions. As I say, no one knows the answers. But if all of us think about them, we may some day be able to say something that decent people, people of good will all over the world, are waiting to hear. First, if there is no agreement or control, how many countries are going to possess thermo-nuclear weapons by, say, 1967? My guess, and this is a political guess, and yours is as good as mine, is that four or five will actually have them. Unless it is not beyond the wit of man to stop them. Second, does this spread of weapons make thermo-nuclear war more or less likely? Again, your guess is as good as mine. But mine is sombre. Third, why are countries going to possess themselves of these weapons? Is it for national security, or for less rational reasons? Fourth, can this catastrophe – no, that is going further than I feel inclined, I ought to say, this extreme increase of danger – can it be stopped? Is it possible that any of us, any country or group of countries, can give a message or indication that will, in fact make military and human sense?’

Roger had been speaking for ten minutes, and he continued for as long again. In the whole of the second half of his speech, he went off again into official language, the cryptic, encyclical language of a Minister of the Crown. The effect was odd, but I was sure that it was calculated. He had tried them deep enough: now was the time to reassure them. They would be glad of platitudes, and he was ready to oblige them.

He did not make much of a peroration, and sat down to steady, though not excessive, applause. There was an amiable and inept vote of thanks, and the Prime Warden’s procession, maces in front, Roger alongside Lufkin, left the hall.

When I recalled the evening, I thought that few of the people round me realized that they had been listening to what would become a well-known speech. I was not certain that I realized it myself. There was a sense of curiosity, in some sense of
malaise
, in some of let-down. I heard various speculations on my way out. Most of them were respectful but puzzled.

In the press of men jostling towards the cloakroom, I saw Sammikins, his eyes flaring, his face wild as a hawk’s. He was not far from me, but he shouted: ‘I’m sick of this mob! Come for a walk.’

I had a feeling that the invitation was not specially calculated to please his neighbours, who stood stolid and heavy while he pushed through them, lean, elegant, decorations on his lapel.

We had neither of us brought overcoats or hats, and so got straight out before the others, into the night air.

‘By God!’ cried Sammikins.

He had drunk a good deal, but he was not drunk. Yet it would have been an error to think that he was tractable. He was inflamed with his grievance, his vicarious grievance of the interruption.

‘By God, he’s’ (he was talking of Roger) ‘a better man than they are. I know men in his regiment. I tell you, he’s as brave as a man can reasonably be.’

I said that no one doubted it.

‘Who the hell was that bloody man?’

‘Does it matter?’ I asked.

‘I expect he was a colonel in the Pay Corps. I’d like to ram the words down his fat throat. What in God’s name do you mean, “Does it matter?”’

I said, being accused of something one knows oneself to be ridiculous, and which everyone else knows to be ridiculous, never hurt one. As I said it, I was thinking: Is that true? It pacified Sammikins for the time being, while I was brooding. No, I had sometimes been hurt by an accusation entirely false: more so than by some which were dead accurate.

In silence we walked to a corner and paused there for a moment, looking across the road at the bulk of the Monument, black against the moonlight blue of the sky. It was not cold; a south-west wind was blowing. We turned down Arthur Street and into Upper Thames Street, keeping parallel with the wharves. Beyond the ragged bomb-sites, where the willow herb was growing still, since the air raids nearly twenty years before, we saw the glitter of the river, the density of warehouses, the skeletal cranes.

‘He’s a great man, isn’t he?’ said Sammikins.

‘What is a great man?’

‘By God, are you turning on him now?’

I had spoken carelessly, but his temper was still on the trigger.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ve thrown everything I could behind him. And I’m taking more risks than most of his friends.’

‘I know that, I know that. Yes, damn it, he’s a great man.’

He gave me a friendly smile. As we walked along what used to be a narrow street, now wide open to the moonlight, he said: ‘My sister did well for herself when she married him. I suppose she was bound to make a happy marriage and have a brood of children. But, you know, I always thought she’d marry one of us. She was lucky that she didn’t.’

When Sammikins said that he thought she would marry ‘one of us’, he spoke as unselfconsciously as his great-grandfather might have done, saying he thought that his sister might have married a ‘gentleman’. Despite his hero-worship of Roger, that was exactly what Sammikins meant. As he spoke, however, there was something which took my attention more. Caro was more concerned about him, loved him more, than he loved her. Nevertheless, he was fond of her; and yet he saw her marriage in terms of happiness, exactly as the world saw it. Diana, seeing them walking in the grounds at Basset, or as allies at a Government dinner-table, might have seen it so. This despite the fact that both Diana, and even more Sammikins, had lived all their lives in a raffish society, where the surface was calm and the events not so orderly. Listening to Sammikins talking of his sister’s marriage, I thought of Ellen, alone in her flat in the same town.

‘Yes, she’s got her children.’ He was going on about Caro. ‘And I am a barren stock.’

It was the only self-pity I had known him indulge in, and incidentally, the only literary flourish I had ever heard him make.

There was plenty of gossip as to why he had not married. He was in his thirties, as handsome as Caro in his own fashion. He was chronically in debt, partly because of his gambling, partly because his money, until his father died, was tied up in trusts he was always trying to break. But sooner or later, as well as inheriting the earldom, he would become a very rich man. He was one of the most eligible of bachelors. Diana commented briskly, with the mercilessness of the twentieth century, that there must be ‘something wrong with him’. It was said that he liked young men.

All that might easily be true. I suspected that he was one of those – and there were plenty, often young men of his spectacular courage– who didn’t find the sexual life straightforward, but who, if left to themselves, came to terms with it as well as simpler men. Half-sophistication, I was convinced as I grew older, was worse than no sophistication: half-knowledge was worse than no knowledge. Label someone a homosexual too quickly, and he will believe you. Tell him he is predestined to keep out of the main stream, and you will help push him out. The only service you can do him – it was a very hard truth – was to keep quiet. So the last thing I wanted that night was to force a confidence. I did not even want to receive it. I was glad (though faintly cheated, my inquisitiveness unsatisfied) when, after a few more laments at large, he gave a strident laugh and said: ‘Oh, to hell with it.’

Immediately he wanted me to accompany him to—’s (a gambling club). When I refused, he pressed me at least to come to Pratt’s and make a night of it. No, I said, I must be getting home. Then let’s walk a bit, he said. He said it scornfully, as though despising my bourgeois habit of going to bed. He did not want to be left alone.

We walked through the streets of the old City. From the bottom of Ducks Foot Lane, we caught sight of the dome of St Paul’s and, as if adjacent to it, the pinnacles of Dick Whittington’s church, white as sugar icing in the moonlight. The City of London, in its technical sense, as opposed to the great incomprehensible town, meant little either to him or to me. It evoked no memories, I had never worked there, all it brought back were taxi-rides on the way to Liverpool Street Station. Yet something played on us – the sight of the vast cathedral? The bomb sites? The absolute loneliness, not another person in the streets? The false-romantic memory of the past, the history which is not one’s own but lives in the imagination? Something played on us, not only on him but on me, who was more sober and less adrift.

We had passed Great Trinity Lane and had turned right: St Paul’s sprang now into open view before us, soot and whitewash.

Sammikins said: ‘I suppose Roger is right. If there is another war, it’ll be the end of us, won’t it?’

I said yes.

He turned to me: ‘How much does it matter?’

He was speaking in earnest. I couldn’t make a sarcastic reply. I answered: ‘What else matters?’

‘No. I’m asking you. How much do any of us believe in human life? When it comes to the point?’

‘If we don’t, then there’s no hope for us.’

‘Perhaps there isn’t,’ he said. ‘I tell you, aren’t we becoming hypocritical? How much do any of us care, really care, for human life?’

I was silent. And in a clear tone, neither fierce nor wild, he went on: ‘How much do you care? Except for the people round you? Come on. What is the truth?’

I could not answer straight away. At last I said: ‘I think I do. At any rate, I want to.’

He said: ‘I doubt if I do. I’ve taken life before now, and I could do it again. Of course I care for a few lives. But as for the rest, I don’t believe – when you strip away the trappings – that I give a rap. And that’s truer of more people than any of us would like to think.’

The headlines, on the morning after the dinner in Fishmongers’ Hall, had a simple but pleasing eloquence. ARMED SERVICES ALL-IMPORTANT: then, in smaller letters, ‘No Substitute for Fighting Men. Minister’s Strong Speech,’ said the
Daily Telegraph
(Conservative). SECURITY COMES FIRST, ‘Mr R. Quaife on World Dangers,’ said
The Times
(moderate Conservative). SPREAD OF ATOMIC WEAPONS, ‘How Many Countries Will Possess the Bomb?’ said the
Manchester Guardian
(centre). CHANCE FOR THE COMMONWEALTH, ‘Our Lead in Atomic Bomb,’ said the
Daily Express
(irregular Conservative). TAGGING BEHIND THE US, said the
Daily Worker
(Communist).