Corridors of Power (38 page)

‘I must say,’ I said, ‘it all looks remarkably placid.’

Martin’s controlled features broke into a grin.

‘I must say,’ he jeered at me.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Do you realize that’s exactly what used to infuriate you when big bosses came down from London and met you in the college, and told you what a peaceful place it was?’

His eyes were bright with fraternal malice. He told me one or two of the latest stories about the new Master’s reign. Some of the college officers were finding it appropriate to write him letters rather than expose themselves to conversation. Martin gave a bleak smile. ‘You live in a sheltered world, you know,’ he said.

I wished that he had been with us in the Whitehall struggles. He was a harder man than Francis, tougher and more apt for politics than most of us. Curiously, he was one of the few scientists who had got out of atomic energy and made a sacrifice for conscience’ sake. He had chosen a dimmish career as a college functionary: it seemed likely that that was where he would stay. And yet, in his middle forties, his face set in the shape it would remain until he was old, eyes watchful, he gave out an air not only of detachment but content.

His wife, Irene, brought in the tea-tray. Once she had been a wild young woman, and had made him live with jealousy. But now time had played on her one of its picnic practical jokes. She had become mountainous, the flesh had blown up as though she were a Michelin advertisement. She must have weighed fifty or sixty pounds more than when I first met her, before the war. Her yelp of a laugh was still youthful and flirtatious. Her spirits had stayed high, he had long ago won the battle of wills in their marriage, she had come totally to love him, and also was content.

‘Plotting?’ she said to me. She behaved to me, she had done for years, much as she did to Martin, as though knowing one brother she knew the other: as though neither of us was as sedate as he seemed.

‘Not yet,’ I said.

As we drank our tea I asked Francis, just to delay my mission, whether he had heard from Penelope.

‘As a matter of fact,’ he replied, ‘I had a letter a couple of days ago.’

‘What’s she doing?’

He looked puzzled: ‘That’s what I should like to know.’

‘What does she
say
?’ Irene burst in.

‘I’m not quite sure,’ said Francis.

He looked round at the three of us, hesitated, and then went on: ‘Look here, what do you make of this?’ He pulled an envelope out of his pocket, put on his long-sighted glasses, and began to read. He read, I couldn’t help thinking, as though the letter were written in a language like Etruscan, in which most of the words were still unknown.

‘Dearest Daddy,

‘Please do not
flap
. I am
perfectly
alright, and
perfectly
happy, working like a beaver, and all is fine with Art and me, and we haven’t any special plans, but he may come back with me in the summer – he isn’t sure. There’s no need for you to worry about us, were just having a lot of fun, and nobody’s bothering about marriage or anything like that, so do stop
questioning
. I think that you and Mummy must be
sex-maniacs
.

‘I have met a nice boy called Brewster (
first
name), he dances as badly as I do so that suits us both. His father owns
three
night clubs in Reno but I don’t tell Art that!!! Anyway it is not at all serious and is only a bit of fun. I may go to Art’s people for the weekend if I can raise the dollars. I don’t always want him to pay for me.

‘No more now. Brew is fuming (much I care) because he’s double-parked and says he’ll get a ticket if I don’t hurry. Must go.

‘Lots and lots of love,

‘Penny.’

‘Well,’ said Francis, taking off his glasses. He broke out irritably, as though it were Penny’s major crime: ‘I wish she could spell “
all right
”.’

The rest of us did not find it prudent to meet one another’s eyes.

‘What do you do?’ said Francis. ‘What sanctions has one got?’

‘You could cut off supplies,’ said Martin, who was a practical man.

‘Yes,’ said Francis indecisively. After a long pause he went on: ‘I don’t think I should like to do that.’

‘You’re worrying too much,’ cried Irene, with a high, delighted laugh.

‘Am I?’

‘Of course you are.’

‘Why?’ He was turning to her for reassurance.

‘When I was her age, I could have written a letter just like that.’

‘Could you?’ Francis gazed at her. She was good-natured, she wanted him to be happy. But he did not find the reassurance quite so overwhelming as she had expected; her youth wasn’t perhaps the first model he would have chosen for his daughter.

When she left us, I got down at last to business. It was simple.

For Quaife to survive was going to be a close-run thing. Any bit of help was worth the effort. Could they whip up some scientific support for him – not from the usual quarters, not from the Pugwash group who had dismissed Brodzinski, but from uncommitted men? A speech or two in the House of Lords: a letter to
The Times
with some ‘respectable’ signatures? Any demonstration might swing a vote or two.

I was still making my case at the moment that Irene returned, apologizing, smelling a secret. There was someone on the telephone for me, a long-distance call. With a curse I went off into the lobby under the stairs: a voice came down the line that I didn’t recognize, giving a name that I didn’t know. We had met at Finch’s, the voice was saying. That meant nothing. The pub on the Fulham Road, came the explanation, brisk, impatient. They had traced me to my home, and so to Cambridge. They thought I should know what to do. Old Ronald Porson had been arrested the night before. What for? Importuning in a lavatory.

I felt – first – sheer blind irritation at being distracted. Then a touch of pity, the black pity of the past. Then, most of all, the tiredness of the ties one couldn’t escape, the accretion of the duties, the years, the acquaintanceships. I muttered something, but the brisk active male voice pressed on. They didn’t know the ropes as well as I did.

I collected myself. I gave the name of a solicitor. If they hadn’t got one already, they must make Porson listen to this man and do what he was told. Yes: this young friend of Porson’s sounded efficient, they were all trying to look after him. The ‘old man’ hadn’t a penny, the voice said. Was I prepared to contribute? Of course, I said, anxious to be away: they must tell the solicitor that I would meet the bill. I felt tired, relieved, as I put the receiver down, trying to put the message out of mind.

As I went back to the hearth, Martin looked at me.

‘Anything wrong?’ he said.

‘Someone in trouble,’ I replied. No, not anyone close. No one he knew.

I said impatiently, ‘Let’s get on.’ I had made a proposal, we had been interrupted, there was not much time.

For a long time, as we sat round the fire, Martin did most of the talking. I knew, without our having spoken together, what he thought. He did not believe that we stood more than an outside chance. He did not believe that any government could bring off more than a poor compromise. He believed that any government would have to repudiate a man who tried to do more. But he did not tell me so. He had been close enough to decisions to know the times when it was better not to be told. Instead, he was ready to help: and yet, as he said, he wasn’t eminent enough as a scientist to carry weight. Somehow, he remarked, the high scientific community had lost either its nerve or its will. There were plenty of people like himself, he went on, ready to be active. But the major scientists had retired into their profession – ‘There’s no one of your standing,’ he said to Francis, ‘who’s ready to take the risks you took twenty years ago.’ It wasn’t that a new generation of scientists hadn’t as much conscience or more: or as much good will: or even as much courage. Somehow the climate had changed, they were not impelled. Had the world got too big for them? Had events become too big for men?

Neither Martin nor I was willing to admit it. After sitting silent, Francis said, at any rate one had to go on acting as though it were not true.

Yes, he said, shrugging himself free, suddenly speaking as though he were a younger man, in command again, he thought my idea was worth trying. Yes, he agreed, it was no use Martin approaching the most senior scientists. He, Francis, would have to take on another job: he would do it himself. We were not to hope for much. He had used his influence too many times, and there was not much of it left.

As we went on talking, I was only half-thinking of the scientists. I could not get rid, completely or for long, of the thought of Porson. There was something I had heard in the voice over the telephone: something that the voice, confident as it sounded, hadn’t uttered. They would have liked to ask me to come back, so that I could help him myself.

Years before, that was what I should have done. By now this kind of compulsion had grown dim. I was the worse for it. For most of us, the quixotic impulses might stay alive, but in time the actions didn’t follow. I had used money to buy off my fellow-feeling, to save trouble, to save myself the expense of spirit that I was no longer impelled to spend.

Lord Lufkin summoned Margaret and me to a dinner-party at twenty-four hours’ notice, just as he summoned many guests. He had done the same for thirty years, long before his great success had come: he had done it during the years when he was hated: and still his guests had obeyed.

That February night – it was in the week after my visit to Cambridge – we trooped dutifully into Lufkin’s drawing room in St James’s Court. No one could have called it a cheerful room. Lufkin had had it panelled in dark pine, and there was not a picture on the walls except a portrait of himself. No one went to Lufkin’s expecting a cheerful party. His gifts as a host were negative. Yet in that room there were standing a couple of Ministers, a Treasury boss, the President of the Royal Society, a fellow tycoon.

Lufkin stood in the middle, not making any small talk, nor any other size of talk; not shy so much as not feeling it worthwhile. He took it for granted that he was holding court. The interesting thing was, so did everyone round him. In the past, I had sometimes wondered why. The short answer was, the magnetic pull of power. Not simply, though that added, because he had become one of the top industrialists in England. Much more, because he had complete aptitude for power, had assumed it all his life, and now could back it with everything he had won.

He announced to his guests at large, that he had taken over the suite adjoining this one. He ordered a door to be thrown open to show a perspective of tenebrous rooms.

‘I decided we needed it,’ he said.

Lufkin’s tastes were austere. He spent little on himself: his income must have been enormous, but he was pernicketily honest, he didn’t use any half-legitimate devices for sliding away from taxes, and he had not made an impressive fortune. On the other hand, as though in revenge, he insisted on his firm giving him all the luxuries he had no liking for. This suite was already too big for him, but he had made them double it. He made them pay for his court-like dinner parties. He made them provide not one car, but half a dozen.

Even so, Lufkin had a supreme talent for getting it both ways. ‘I don’t regard this flat as my own, of course,’ he was saying, with his usual moral certainty.

People near him, hypnotized into agreeing, were sagely nodding their heads.

‘I regard it as the company’s flat, not mine. I’ve told my staff that time and time again. This flat is for the use of the whole company.’

If I had been alone with Lufkin, whom I had known much longer than had his other guests, I couldn’t have resisted analysing that arcane remark. What would have happened, if some member of his staff had taken him at his word, and booked the flat for the weekend?

‘As for myself,’ he said, ‘my needs are very simple. All I want is
a small room and a gas-ring
.’

The maddening thing was, it was quite true.

Though Lufkin might have preferred a round of toast, we moved into a dinner which was far from simple. The dining room, through another inexplicable decree, was excessively bright, the only bright room in the flat. The chandeliers flashed heavily down above our heads. The table was over-flowered. The hierarchy of glasses glittered and shone.

Lufkin, himself content with a whisky and soda for the meal, looked on with approbation as the glasses filled with sherry, hock, claret, champagne. He sat in the middle of his table, his skull-face still young, hair neat and dark in his sixties, with the air of a spectator at what he regarded as a well-conducted dinner. He did not trouble to speak much, though occasionally he talked in a manner off-hand but surreptitious, to Margaret. He enjoyed the presence of women. Though he spent most of his time in male company, with his usual cross-grainedness he never liked it much. It was half-way through the meal when he addressed the table. His fellow-tycoon had begun talking of Roger Quaife and the White Paper. The Ministers were listening, attentive, deadpan, and so was I. Suddenly Lufkin, who had been sitting back, as though utterly detached, his knife and fork aligned, three-quarters of his pheasant left uneaten, intervened.

In his hard, clear voice he said: ‘What’s that you were saying?’

‘I said the City’s getting bearish about some of the long-term consequences.’

‘What do
they
know?’ said Lufkin, with inspissated contempt.

‘There’s a feeling that Quaife’s going to run the aircraft industry into the ground.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Lufkin, at his bleakest. He had caught my eye. Even Lufkin was not usually as rude as this without a purpose. I had suspected that this dinner wasn’t such an accidental gathering as it seemed.

‘There’s nothing in that.’ He spoke as one who does not propose to say any more. Then he condescended to explain himself.