Corridors of Power (40 page)

‘This is atrocious,’ she said.

Roger repeated to her what he had told me. She listened with an expression impatient, strained and intent. She was hearing little new, most of it had been said already over the telephone. When he repeated that his wife would ‘see him through’ the crisis, she burst out in scorn: ‘What else could she do?’

Roger looked hurt, as well as angry. She was sitting opposite to him across the small table. She gave a laugh which wasn’t a laugh, which reminded me of my mother when an expectation came to nothing or one of her pretensions was deflated, when she had, by laughing, to deny the moment in which we stood.

‘I mean, you have to win. She couldn’t spoil that!’

He said nothing. For a moment he looked desperately tired, fretted, drained, as if he had lost interest in everything but the desire to be alone, to switch off the light, turn his face into the pillow and sleep.

Shortly afterwards she cried: ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘I haven’t the right to stop you.’

‘It was disloyal.’

She meant, disloyal to him, not to Caro: and yet her emotions towards Caro were not simple. All three of them were passionate people. Under the high-spirited surface, she was as violent as Caro. If those two had met that night, I thought more than once, the confrontation might have gone any way at all.

She sat back and said; ‘I’ve been dreading this.’

‘Don’t you think I know?’ Roger replied.

There was a long silence. At last Ellen turned to me and said in a sharp, steady tone: ‘I’m willing to give him up.’

‘It’s too late for that,’ said Roger.

‘Why is it?’ She looked straight at him. ‘You trust me, don’t you? I’ve got that left, haven’t I?’

‘I trust you.’

‘Well, then, I meant what I said.’

‘It’s too late. There were times when I might have taken that offer. Not now.’

They were each speaking with stark honesty. On his side, with the cruelty of a love-relation which is nothing but a love-relation: where they were just naked with each other, with neither children, nor friends, nor the to-and-fro of society to console them, to keep them safe. On her side, she was speaking from loneliness, from the rapacity with which she wanted him, and, yes, from her own code of honour.

Their eyes met again, and fell away. Between them, at that instant, was not love: not desire: not even affection: but knowledge.

As though everything else was irrelevant, she said in a brisk, businesslike manner: ‘Well, you’d better settle how you’re going to handle it next Thursday morning.’

She meant, the Cabinet, at which Roger’s debate would, though possibly only perfunctorily, come up. Once she had been envious of Caro for knowing the political life as she did not. Now she had learned. Whom could he trust? Could he sound his colleagues before the meeting? Could I find out anything in Whitehall? Whom could he trust? More important, whom couldn’t he trust?

We talked on for a couple of hours. The names went round. Collingwood, Monty Cave, the PM, Minister after Minister, his own Parliamentary Secretary, Leverett-Smith. It was like sitting in Cambridge rooms twenty years before, counting heads, before a college election. It was like that. The chief difference was that this time the stakes were a little higher, and the penalties (it seemed to me that night) more severe.

During those days before the debate, Roger, whenever he went into the House or the Treasury Building or Downing Street, was under inspection: inspection often neither friendly nor unfriendly, but excited by the smell of human drama: the kind of inspection that I remembered my mother being subjected to, in the provincial back streets, when we were going bankrupt – but it was also just as much a predilection of the old Norse heroes, who, on hearing that your house had been burned down, with you inside, were interested, not in your fate, but in how you had comported yourself.

As they watched him, Roger behaved well. He was a brave man, physically and morally, people were saying. It was true. Nevertheless, on those mornings he could not bring himself to read the political correspondents’ gossip-columns. He listened to accounts of what they said, but could not read them. Though he walked through the lobbies, bulky and composed, cordial to men whom he suspected, he could not manage to invite the opinions of his own nearest supporters. He sat at his desk in the office, staring distantly at me, as though his articulateness and self-knowledge had both gone.

I had to guess what request he was making: yes, he would like to know where his Parliamentary Secretary, Leverett-Smith, stood, and Tom Wyndham too.

This was one of the jobs I fancied least. I had no detachments left. I also did not want to hear bad news. I did not want to convey it. It was easy to understand how leaders in danger got poor information.

In fact, I picked up nothing of much interest, certainly nothing that added to disquiet. Tom Wyndham was, as usual, euphoric and faithful. He had been one of Roger’s best selections. He continued to carry some influence with the smart young ex-officers on the back benches. They might distrust Roger, but no one could distrust Tom Wyndham. He was positive all would turn out well. He did not even seem to understand what the fuss was about. As he stood me drinks at the bar of White’s, I felt, for a short time, reassured and very fond of him. It was only when I got out into the February evening that it came to me, with displeasing clarity, that, though he had a good heart, he was also remarkably obtuse. He couldn’t even see the chessboard, let alone two moves ahead.

With Leverett-Smith next morning – it was now five days before the Opposition motion – the interview was more prickly. It took place in his office, and to begin with, he showed mystification as to why I was there at all. Not unreasonably, he was put out. If the Minister (as he always called Roger) wished for a discussion, here was he, sitting four doors down the corridor, from 9.30 in the morning until he left for the House. His point was reasonable: that didn’t make it more gratifying. He looked at me with his lawyer’s gaze, and addressed me formally, like a Junior Minister putting high civil servants in their place.

‘With great respect–’ he kept saying.

We should never have got on, not in any circumstances, least of all in these. We had hardly a thought or even an assumption in common.

I repeated that for Roger next week was the major crisis. This wasn’t an occasion for protocol. We were obliged to give him the best advice we could.

‘With great respect,’ replied Leverett-Smith, ‘I am confident that neither of us needs to be reminded of his official duty.’

Then he began something like a formal speech. It was a stiff, platitudinous and unyielding speech. He didn’t like me any better as he made it. Yet he was revealing more sense than I gave him credit for. It was ‘common ground’ that the Minister was about to undergo a supreme test. If he (Leverett-Smith) had been asked to give his counsel, he would have suggested
festina lente
. Indeed, he had so suggested, on occasions that I might conceivably remember. What might provoke opposition if done prematurely, would be accepted with enthusiasm when the time was ripe. Nevertheless, in the Minister’s mind the die was cast, and we all had to put away our misgivings and work towards a happy issue.

We should certainly have six abstentions, Leverett-Smith went on, suddenly getting down to the political arithmetic. Six we could survive. Twenty meant Roger was in peril unless he had reassured the centre of the party. Thirty-five, and he would, without any conceivable doubt, have to go.

‘And you?’ I asked quietly, and without hostility.

‘I consider,’ said Leverett-Smith, formally but also without hostility, ‘that that question should not have been put. Except by the Minister himself. If he weren’t overwrought, he would know that, if I had been going to disagree with my Minister, I should have done so in public before this and I should naturally resign. So it oughtn’t to need saying that now, if the worst comes to the worst, and the Minister has to go – which I still have good hopes is not going to happen – then as a matter of principle I shall go with him.’

Spoken like a stick, I thought. But also like an upright man. The comparison with Roger, in the same position three years before, flickered like a smile on the wrong side of the face.

I was able to report to Roger that afternoon without needing to comfort him. He listened as though brooding: but when he heard of Leverett-Smith’s stuffy speech; he shouted out loud. He sounded amused, but he wasn’t really amused. He was in one of those states of suspicion when any piece of simple human virtue, or even decency, seems more than one can expect or bear.

He was wrapped up in his suspicions, in his plans for the counter-attacks, like a doctor confronted with the x-ray pictures of his own lungs. He did not even tell me, I did not know until I got home to Margaret, that Caro had invited me to their house the following night.

She had not telephoned, she had dropped in at our flat without notice.

‘She obviously had to talk to somebody,’ Margaret said, looking upset, ‘and I suppose she didn’t want to do it with her own friends, so she thought it had better be me.’

I did not ask her what Caro had said, but Margaret wanted to tell me about it.

Caro had begun: ‘I suppose you know?’ – then had launched into a kind of strident abuse, half-real, half-histrionic, punctuated by the routine obscenities she would have heard round the stables at Newmarket. It was not so much abuse of Ellen, though there was some of that too, but of life itself. As the violence began to wear itself out, she had begun to look frightened, then terrified. She had said, her eyes wild, but with no tears in them, ‘I don’t know how I shall bear being alone. I don’t know how I am to bear it.’

Margaret said, ‘She does love him. She says she can’t imagine not hearing his key in the lock, not having the last drink with him at night. It’s true: I don’t know how she is going to bear it.’

It was well after ten when we got out of the taxi in Lord North Street. We had been invited, not to dinner, but for an after-debate supper. The door shone open for another guest, light streaming across the lances of rain.

I felt Margaret’s hand tighten in mine. When we had first entered this house, it had seemed enviable. Now it was threatened. Some of us, going up the stairs that night, knew, as well as Roger and Caro themselves, of both the threats.

She greeted us in the drawing-room, eyes flashing, jewels flashing, shoulders splendid under the lights. Her voice wasn’t constricted; she hugged Margaret, perhaps a little more closely than usual, she brushed my cheek. I knew, as we kissed, that this was a performance, gallant as it was. She had never liked me much, but now, if it weren’t for her obligation, she would have put me out of sight for good. She had either found out, or had decided for herself, that I had been in Roger’s confidence. She might be generous and reckless, but she would not forget her wrongs. This one was not to be forgiven.

The clock was striking the half-hour. There were already three or four people in the drawing-room, including Diana Skidmore.

‘They’ve not got back yet,’ said Caro, in her loud, casual tone, as though this were any other parliamentary night, ‘they’ being the politicians.

‘They’ve had quite a day, bless their hearts. I haven’t seen Roger since he went to the Cabinet this morning. Have you seen any of them, Diana?’

‘Not to speak of, you know,’ Diana replied, with a smile as bright, and as communicative, as her emeralds.

‘Isn’t Monty Cave making a great speech tonight?’ Caro went on.

‘I suppose he would have to say something, wouldn’t he?’ said Diana.

Caro told Diana that Monty would be along soon, in a tone which implied that Diana knew already. Diana responded with a question:

‘Is the PM coming?’

Caro replied boldly: ‘I couldn’t get him.’ She added, as though she wouldn’t be outfaced: ‘Reggie Collingwood promised to look in. If they’re not too late.’

It seemed clear – had the news reached Diana yet? – that Caro was trying to do her last service for Roger. She was not just seeing him through, she was doing more than that. She was calling up all her influence, until the debate. She was helping him to win, as thoroughly as if they had been happy.

And yet, though it was chivalrous, though she would truly have done it if she were losing him next week, did she expect, completely expect, to lose him? As I listened, she didn’t seem as if she had quite let go. Did she still hope that if he won, if his career were once more assured, he would have to stay with her? On her own terms? Given a future as brilliant as it had looked the year before, how much of it would he risk or sacrifice?

It would be astonishing if at times, brilliant with certainty, she did not hope like that. For myself, I was at a loss to know whether she was right or wrong.

I wondered also what chances she believed he had of winning. She was radiant with fighting energy. She would go on beyond the last minute. But, though she wasn’t subtle, she was shrewd and had seen much. She had been trying to get signals of encouragement from Diana and had received none. That must have been as patent to Caro as it was to Margaret and me. Not that Diana had finally given Roger up. She knew he was in extreme trouble, that was all. She was playing safe. Maybe she did not want to embarrass her closest political friends, like Collingwood; maybe she had heard from him the first whisper of a scandal: but, deeper than that, she was acting out of instinct.

The
beau monde
wasn’t kind, Caro had once said to me on a carefree night. If it were kind, it would soon cease to be
beau
. It was tolerably good-natured, until you were really in trouble. Then you were on your own.

I wondered how many worlds were any better. If you were in trouble in the public eye, who was going to guard you? All the worlds I knew, not only the
beau
, but the civil servants, the academics, the industrialists, the scientists, huddled together to protect themselves. If you became exposed, they couldn’t do much. It was the odd acquaintance, sometimes the wild, sometimes the sober, who had concealed the fact that he was afraid of nothing and no one, who came out and took the risks and stood by one’s side.