Corridors of Power (34 page)

He was gazing straight at me, but did not speak.

‘But I want to be open with you,’ I said. ‘In terms of honour and behaviour, I think you and I would speak the language. In terms of ultimate politics, we almost certainly don’t. I said that I’m not emotional about the operations of politics. But about the hopes behind them, I’m deeply so. I thought it was obvious that the Revolution in Russia was going to run into some major horrors of power. I wasn’t popular with Ann March and R—and some of my other friends for telling them so. But that isn’t all. I always believed that the power was working two ways. They were doing good things with it, as well as bad. When once they got some insight into the horrors, then they might create a wonderful society. I now believe that, more confidently than I ever did. How it will compare with the American society, I don’t know. But so long as they both survive, I should have thought that many of the best human hopes stand an excellent chance.’

Monteith was still expressionless. Despite his job, or perhaps because of it, he did not think about politics except as something he had to give a secret answer to. He was not in the least a speculative man. He coughed, and said: ‘A few more questions on the same subject, sir. Your first wife, just before the war, made a large donation to a certain communist?’

‘Who was it?’

He mentioned a name which meant nothing to me.

‘Are you sure?’ I asked.

‘Quite sure.’

I knew absolutely nothing of him.

‘If you’re right,’ I said, ‘it wasn’t for ideological reasons.’

Just for an instant, he had stripped away the years. I was a youngish man, distraught, with a wife I had to look after: still capable of jealousy, but schooled to watching her in search of anyone who might alleviate the inner cold: still appalled because I did not know where she was or whom she was with, at the mercy of anyone who dropped news of her: still listening for her name.

There was a silence. With a stiff sensitivity he said: ‘I have informed myself about your tragedy. I need not ask you anything more about her.’

He broke out sharply: ‘But you yourself. You attended meetings of—?’ He gave the title of what, not at the time but later, we had come to call a ‘Front’ organization.

‘No.’

‘Please think again.’

‘I tell you no,’ I said.

‘This is very curious.’ His manner throughout had been professional. He had kept hostility out: but now there was an edge. ‘I have evidence from someone who remembers sitting next to you. He remembers exactly how you looked. You pushed your chair back from the table and made a speech.’

‘I tell you, there is not a word of truth in it.’

‘My evidence is from someone reliable.’

‘Who is it?’

Monteith answered, ‘You ought to know that I can’t reveal my sources.’

‘It is utterly and absolutely untrue.’ I was speaking harshly and angrily. ‘I take it you’ve got it from one of your ex-communists? I take it that most of your information comes that way?’

‘You’ve no right to ask those questions.’

I was suffused with outrage, with a disproportionate bitterness. After a moment I said: ‘Look here, you ought to be careful about these channels of yours. This isn’t specially important. So far as I know, this Front you’re speaking of was quite innocuous. I had plenty of acquaintances far more committed than that. I’ve told you so, and I’m prepared to go on telling you so. But, as it happens, I never went anywhere near that particular group. I repeat, I never went to a meeting of theirs, or had any communication with them. That is flat. It has got to be accepted. Your man has invented this whole story. I also repeat, you ought to be careful of his stories about other people. This one doesn’t matter much to me. But there may be others which could do more harm – to people who are more helpless.’

For the first time, I had shaken him. Not, I later thought, by anger: he must have been used to that. More likely, because his technical expertness was being challenged. He had had a good deal of experience. He knew that I, or any competent man, would not have denied a point so specific without being dead sure.

‘I will look into it,’ he said.

‘I suppose you’ll give a report of this interview to Hector Rose?’ I said.

‘That is so.’

‘When you do, I should like you to mention this matter. And say that you are doing so at my request.’

‘I should have done that in any case.’

Just then he was talking, not like an interrogator, but as though we were all officials together, getting to work on ‘a difficult one’. ‘It’s very curious.’ He was puzzled and distracted. When he went on with his questions, the snap had left him, like a man who is absent-minded because of trouble at home.

My record over the atomic bomb. Yes, I had known about it from the start. Yes, I had been close to the scientists all along. Yes, I had known Sawbridge, who gave away some secrets. Yes, he and my brother had been to school together. But Monteith was doing it mechanically: he knew that in the end it was my brother who had broken Sawbridge down.

Monteith was watchful again, as he talked of what I had done and thought about the dropping of the first bomb.

‘I’ve made it public. You’ve only got to read, you know,’ I said. ‘And you’ll find a certain amount more on the files.’

‘That has been done,’ replied Monteith. ‘But still, I should like to ask you.’

Hadn’t I, like many of the scientists, been actively opposed to the use of the bomb? Certainly, I said. Hadn’t I met the scientists, just before Hiroshima, to see how they could stop it? Certainly, I said. Wasn’t that going further than a civil servant should feel entitled to? ‘Civil servants have done more effective things than that,’ I said. ‘Often wish I had.’

Then I explained. While there was a chance of stopping the bomb being dropped, we had used every handle we could pull: this wasn’t improper unless (I couldn’t resist saying) it was improper to oppose in secret the use of any kind of bomb at any time.

When the thing had happened, we had two alternatives. Either to resign and make a row, or else stay inside and do our best. Most of us had stayed inside, as I had done. For what motives? Duty, discipline, even conformity? Perhaps we had been wrong. But, I thought, if I had to make the choice again, I should have done the same.

After that, the interrogation petered out. My second marriage. Hadn’t my father-in-law, before the war, before I knew either of them, belonged to various Fronts? asked Monteith, preoccupied once more. I didn’t know. He might have done. He was an old-fashioned intellectual liberal. Official life – nothing there, though he was curious about when I first knew Roger. It was past one o’clock. Suddenly he slapped both palms on the desk.

‘That is as far as I want to go.’ He leaped up, agile and quick, and gave me a lustrous glance. He said in a tone less formal, less respectful than when he began: ‘I believe what you have told me.’ He shook my hand and went out rapidly through the outer office, leaving me standing there.

It had all been very civil. He was an able, probably a likeable, man doing his job. Yet, back in my office through the January afternoon, I felt black. Not that I was worrying about the result. It was something more organic than that, almost like being told that one’s heart is not perfect, and that one has got to live carefully in order to survive. I did not touch a paper and did no work.

Much of the afternoon I looked out of the window, as though thinking, but not really thinking. I rang up Margaret. She alone knew that I should not shrug it off. She knew that in middle age I was still vain, that I did not find it tolerable to account for my actions except to myself. Over the telephone I told her that this ought to be nothing. A few hours of questions by a decent and responsible man. In the world we were living in, it was nothing. If you’re living in the middle of a religious war, you ought to expect to get shot at, unless you go away and hide. But it was no use sounding robust to Margaret. She knew me.

I should bring Francis back to dinner, I said, after they had finished with him. This she had not expected, and she was troubled. She had already invited young Arthur Plimpton, once more in London: partly out of fun, partly out of matchmaking.

‘I’d put him off,’ she said, ‘but I haven’t the slightest idea where he’s staying. Shall try to get him through the Embassy?’

‘Don’t bother,’ I told her. ‘At best, he may lighten the atmosphere.’

‘And there might be something of an atmosphere,’ she replied.

No, it was no use sounding robust to Margaret – but it was to Francis. As we drove home, under the lights of the Mall, he did not refer to my interrogation, although he knew of it. He believed me to be more worldly, less quixotic, than he was: which was quite true. He assumed that I took what came to me as all in the day’s work.

As for himself, he said: ‘I’m sorry that I let them do it.’

He was very quiet. When we got into the flat, Arthur was waiting in the drawing-room, greeting us politely. He went on: ‘Sir Francis, you look as though you could use a drink.’ He took charge, installed us in the armchairs, poured out the whisky. He was more adept than Francis’ own son, I was thinking. Which didn’t make him more endearing to Francis. But just then, Francis was blaming him, not only for his charm, but for his country. As Francis sat there, silent, courteous, hidalgo-like, he was searching for culprits on whom to blame that afternoon.

With Arthur present, I couldn’t talk directly to Francis: nor, when Margaret came in, could she. She saw him, usually the most temperate of men, taking another drink, very stiff: she hated minuets, she longed to plunge in. As it was, she had to talk about Cambridge, the college, the family. Penelope was still in the United States – how was she? Quite well, when they last heard, said Francis, for once sounding not over-interested in his favourite daughter.

‘I heard from her on Sunday, Sir Francis,’ said Arthur, dead-pan, like a man scoring an unobtrusive point.

‘Did you,’ Francis replied, not as a question.

‘Yes, she put in a transatlantic call.’

Margaret could not resist it. ‘What did she say?’

‘She wanted to know which was the best restaurant in Baltimore.’

Arthur had spoken politely, impassively, and without a glint in his eye. Margaret’s colour rose, but she went on. What was he going to do himself? Was he going back to the United States? Yes, said Arthur, he had settled on his career. He had arranged to enter the electronic industry. He talked about his firm-to-be with dismaying confidence. He knew more about business than Francis and Margaret and I all rolled together.

‘So you’ll be home again soon?’ asked Margaret.

‘It’ll be fine,’ said Arthur. Suddenly, with an owlish look, he said: ‘Of course, I don’t know Penny’s plans.’

‘You don’t,’ said Margaret.

‘I suppose she won’t be back on this side?’

For once Margaret looked baffled. In Arthur’s craggy face, the blue eyes shone dazzlingly sincere: but under the flesh there was a lurking grin.

When he left us – out of good manners, because, listening, he had picked up what was unspoken in the air – I felt saddened. I looked at Francis, and saw, not the friend I had grown up with, but an ageing man, stern, not serene, not at all at peace. I had first met him when he was Arthur’s age. It had been pleasant – or so it seemed that night – to be arrogant and young.

‘Francis,’ said Margaret, ‘you’re being rather stupid about that boy.’

Francis gave an unprofessorial curse.

There was a silence.

‘I think,’ he spoke to her with trust and affection, as though it were a relief, ‘I’ve just about ceased to be useful. I think I’ve come to the limit.’

She said, that couldn’t be true.

‘I think it is,’ said Francis. He turned on me. ‘Lewis oughtn’t to have persuaded me. I ought to have got out of it straight away. I shouldn’t have been exposed to this.’

We began to quarrel. There was rancour in our voices. He blamed me, we both blamed Roger. Politicians never take care of their tools, said Francis, with increasing anger. You’re useful so long as you’re useful. Then you’re expendable. No doubt, said Francis bitterly, if things went wrong, Roger would play safe. In a gentlemanly fashion, he would go back to the fold: and in an equally gentlemanly fashion, his advisers would be disgraced.

‘You can’t be disgraced,’ said Margaret.

Francis began to talk to her in a more realistic tone. They would not keep him out just yet, he said. At least, he didn’t think so. They wouldn’t dare to say that he was a risk. And yet, when all this was over, win or lose, somehow it would be convenient for them not to involve him. The suggestion would go round that he didn’t quite fit in. It would be better to have safer men. As our kind of world went on, the men had to get safer and safer. You couldn’t afford to be different. No one could afford to have you, if you showed a trace of difference. The most valuable single gift was the ability to sing in unison. And so they would shut him out.

We went on quarrelling.

‘You’re too thin-skinned,’ I said, at my sharpest.

Margaret looked from him to me. She knew what in secret I had felt that day. She was wondering when, after Francis had gone, she could make a remark about the thinness of other skins.

The next evening, Margaret and I got out of the taxi on the Embankment and walked up into the Temple gardens. All day news had come prodding in, and I was jaded. The chief Government Whip had called on Roger. Some backbenchers, carrying weight inside the party, had to be reassured. Roger would have to meet them. Two Opposition leaders had been making speeches in the country the night before. No one could interpret the public opinion polls.

Yes, we were somewhere near a crisis, I thought with a kind of puzzlement, as I looked over the river at the lurid city sky. How far did it reach? Maybe in a few months’ time, some of the offices in this part of London would carry different names. Was that all? Maybe other lives stood to lose, lives stretched out under the lit-up sky. Roger and the others thought so: one had to think it, or it was harder to go on.