Basset in October, a week before the new session: the leaves falling on the drive, the smoke from the lodge chimney unmoving in the still air, the burnished sunset, the lights streaming from the house, the drinks waiting in the flower-packed hall. It might have been something out of an eclogue, specially designed to illustrate how lucky these lives were, or as an advertisement composed in order to increase the rate of political recruitment.
Even to an insider, it all looked so safe.
It all looked so safe at dinner. Collingwood, silent and marmoreal, sat on Diana’s right: Roger, promoted to her left hand, looked as composed as Collingwood, as much a fixture. Caro, in high and handsome spirits, was flashing signals to him and Diana across the table. Caro’s neighbour, a member of the Opposition shadow cabinet, teased her as though he fitted as comfortably as anyone there, which in fact he did. He was a smooth, handsome man called Burnett, a neighbour of Diana’s whom she had called in for dinner. Young Arthur Plimpton was sitting between my wife and a very pretty girl, Hermione Fox, a relative of Caro’s. It didn’t take much skill to deduce that this was one of Diana’s counter-measures against Penelope Getliffe. Arthur, looking both bold and shifty, was in England for a week, intent upon not drawing too much of my attention and Margaret’s.
But there was at least one person who was putting on a public face. Monty Cave’s wife had at last left him for good; to anyone but himself it seemed a release, but not to him. The morning he received the final note, he had gone to his department and done his work. That was three days ago. And now he was sitting at the dinner table, his clever, fat, subtle face giving away nothing except interest, polite, receptive – as though it were absurd to think that a man so disciplined could suffer much, could ever have wished for death.
He was a man of abnormal control, on the outside. Mrs Henneker did not know what had happened to him.
When Margaret and I came into the house out of the Virgilian evening, Mrs Henneker had been lurking in the hall. I was just getting comfortable, we were having our first chat with Diana, when Mrs Henneker installed herself at my side. She was waiting for the other two to start talking. The instant they did so, she said, with her sparkling, dense, confident look: ‘I’ve got something to show you!’
Yes, it was my retribution. She had finished a draft of her ‘Life,’ as she kept calling it, the biography of her husband. There was no escape. I had to explain to Margaret, who gave a snort of laughter, then, composing her face, told me sternly how fortunate I was to be in on the beginning of a masterpiece. I had to follow Mrs Henneker into the library. Would I prefer her to read the manuscript aloud to me? I thought not. She looked disappointed. She took a chair very close to mine, watching my face with inflexible attention as I turned over the pages. To my consternation, it was a good deal better than I had expected. When she wrote, she didn’t fuss, she just wrote. That I might have reckoned on: what I hadn’t, was that she and her husband had adored each other. She did not find this in the least surprising, and as she wrote, some of it came through.
This was a real love-story, I tried to tell her. The valuable things in the book were there. So she ought to play down the injustices she believed him to have suffered, her own estimate of what ought to have happened to him. I didn’t say, but I thought I might have to, that she wasn’t being over-wise in telling us that as a fighting commander he was in the class of Nelson, as a naval thinker not far behind Mahan, as a moral influence comparable with Einstein – if she wanted us to believe that as a husband, he was as good as Robert Browning.
I had spoken gently, or at least, I had intended to. Mrs Henneker brooded. She stared at me. It was near dinner time, I said, and we had left ourselves only a quarter of an hour to dress. In a stately fashion, Mrs Henneker inclined her head. She had not thanked me for my suggestions, much less commented upon them.
At the dinner table, she was still brooding. She was too much preoccupied to speak to me. When Arthur, accomplished with elderly matrons, took time off to be polite to her, he did not get much further. At last, after the fish, she burst out, not to either of us, but to the table at large: ‘I suppose I must be old-fashioned!’
She had spoken so loudly, so furiously, that everyone attended.
In her briskest tone, Diana said: ‘What is it, Kate?’
‘I believe in happy marriages. I was happy with my husband and I don’t mind anyone knowing it. But my neighbour–’ she meant me, she was speaking with unconcealed distaste – ‘tells me that I mustn’t say so.’
For an instant I was put out. This was what came of giving literary advice. I should never persuade her, nor presumably anyone else, that I had said the exact opposite.
She was put out too. She was indifferent to anyone round her. She said, ‘Doesn’t anyone nowadays like being married, except me?’
The table was quiet. Roger knew about Monty’s state: so did Caro. So did Margaret. I could not prevent my glance deviating towards him. Nor, in that quiet and undisciplined instant, could others. He was sitting with his eyes open and meaningless, his mouth also open: he looked more childlike than clever, foolish, a bit of a clown.
It was Caro who cracked the silence. Her colour had risen. She called out, just like someone offering a bet: ‘Damn it, most of us do our best, don’t we?’ She was teasing Margaret and me, each of whom had been married twice. She laughed at Arthur and Hermione Fox. They had plenty of time ahead, she said, they probably wouldn’t do any better than we had all done.
Arthur gave a creaking laugh. If Caro had been his own age, she would have known exactly how much he fought shy of getting married; she would have had it out of him. He wouldn’t have cared. For some, the flash of sympathy between them was a relief.
Except that, for some moments yet, Monty Cave sat with his clown’s face. Then his expression, and those of the rest of us, became disciplined again.
With one exception, that Margaret and I speculated about. At the head of her own table, Diana was crying. Even when she gave us orders about how long to stay over the port, the tears returned. When we were alone in our bedroom, Margaret and I talked about it. Yes, she had behaved much as usual after dinner; she still sounded like a curious mixture of Becky Sharp and a good regimental officer keeping us all on our toes. We both knew that her marriage to Skidmore was supposed to have been an abnormally happy one. Was that why she had cried?
Next morning, meeting me in the hall, she told me that she was too tired to go out with the guns. It was the first time I had known her energies flag. She was still enough herself to give me instructions. I didn’t shoot, I might be bored, but I was to keep Monty Cave company in her place. ‘He’s not to be left by himself just now,’ she said. It sounded matter-of-fact and kind. Actually it was kind, but not entirely matter-of-fact. Diana was providing against the remotest chance of a suicide.
Soon the shooting parties were setting out, with me among them. Reggie Collingwood, Caro and Roger, walked along together through the golden fields. So far as Collingwood had any casual pleasures, shooting was the favourite one. He approved of Roger for sharing it: while Roger, who had taken on the pastimes of Caro’s family when he married her, lolloped tweedily along between them, looking as natural as an Edwardian statesman.
Monty and I veered to the left. When I spoke to him, he answered me, quite sweet-temperedly, but that was all. By the side of the other party, we were funereal. Then quick steps came padding up behind us. I looked round. It was Arthur Plimpton, dressed no more fittingly than I was, but carrying a gun. I did not understand why he had sacrificed a day with a comely young woman, but I was glad to see him. It was possible that he had come out of good nature. He was no fool, and he couldn’t have been in Basset for twenty-four hours without picking up the story of Monty’s wife.
‘Do you like hunting, sir?’ he said cheerfully to Monty.
‘No, I never hunt,’ said Monty, who had just brought down two birds with a right and left.
‘If I may say so, sir, you’re doing pretty well for a beginner.’ Arthur knew as well as I did that the English did not refer to this form of avicide as ‘hunting’. He had used the word out of mischief. He turned out to be a competent shot, about as good as Collingwood or Roger. Of the four of them, Monty was far and away the best. He might be a clever, sad, fat man, whom women were not drawn to: but his eyes and limbs worked like a machine.
At about one o’clock, we all gathered on a mound, eating out of the picnic-baskets. The morning mist had cleared, the light was mellow, clear as Constable’s. Caro stretched herself on the turf with the sensuous virtue of one who has taken exercise; she took a swig from a brandy flask and passed it to Roger. The party looked like a tableau out of someone’s attempt to present a simpler age.
Collingwood gazed at the shining countryside. ‘It’s a nice day,’ he said.
When, in the dying afternoon, we were sitting in the library up at the house, having just got back for tea, Collingwood felt the phrase could not be much improved. He and Roger and Cave sat in their tweeds round Diana, who was pouring out. ‘It’s been a nice day,’ said Collingwood.
Though it would have taken a great expert in Collingwoodian dialogue to detect this, he was not so patriarchally content as he had been at mid-day in the sunshine. During the afternoon, the difference between the bags had mounted. By the time we walked home, Collingwood and Roger had had the worst of the day. Collingwood was inclined to blame it on to Roger.
‘You seem to have been in good form, Cave,’ said Collingwood in the library, with manly frankness, with oblique reproach.
Monty Cave muttered politely, but without interest.
Arthur joined in: ‘He was good all day,’ and began talking to Cave himself. Arthur was suggesting a two-handed shoot, just the two of them, first thing the next morning.
Collingwood was surveying them. He approved of attempts to ‘take his mind off it’. He approved of young men making efforts with their elders. Most of all, he approved of able, rich young men. Drinking whisky instead of tea, he stretched out stockinged legs and gave a well-disposed sigh. Turning to his hostess, he remarked: ‘Diana, I must say, it’s been a nice day.’
When the dispatch-boxes arrived, both Diana and he made their routine grumbles, just as they had been doing since the twenties, when he got his first office, and she was starting to run a political house. As Margaret and I were strolling in the courtyard, in the bluish twilight, a government car drove up. A secretary descended, carrying one of the boxes, red and oblong, which we were all used to. We followed him in: this one was for Monty Cave. Within minutes, two other secretaries, carrying two identical boxes, walked through the great hall of Basset, on their way to Collingwood and Roger Quaife.
In the library, Diana, revived, her face less drawn, went through the minuet of grumbles, while she had the satisfaction of seeing three boxes being opened on three pairs of knickerbockered knees.
‘I’d better put dinner off till nine?’ she said.
‘I’m afraid it looks like it,’ replied Collingwood. His tone was grave and ill-used: yet he couldn’t, any more than Diana, conceal a kind of pleasure, the pleasure, secretive but shining, that they got from being at the centre of things.
Diana had the drill laid on. Dinner to be late, drinks to be sent up at once to the Minister’s rooms. Soon Collingwood was lumbering up the wide staircase, with the step of a man who has to bear too much. The other two followed. I wasn’t wanted, and it was some time before I went up to my room. There, as I dressed, Margaret was baiting me through the door, hilarious at the stately ritual downstairs. Did all men in power behave like this? Why? Because otherwise, I replied, they wouldn’t reach power, enjoy it, or keep it.
Just then, there was a knock on the door. It was one of the menservants, bearing an envelope, addressed to me in Collingwood’s bold Edwardian hand. Inside was a sheet of Basset writing-paper, covered by more of Collingwood’s elephantine writing. It said: ‘I should be grateful if you could spare us a few minutes of your time. It would be a convenience if you could come without delay.’
I took in the note to Margaret without a word, and left her laughing.
Inside Collingwood’s bedroom, which was the biggest in the house, the boxes gaped open on a table, and the great four-poster bed was strewn with papers. All three men were still wearing their outdoor suits, though Collingwood had taken off his jacket. He was sitting on the bed, and the other two had drawn up chairs nearby, each holding a glass in his hand.
‘Oh, there you are,’ said Collingwood. ‘We want to get something fixed up.’
Roger explained that they had received a Cabinet paper. He said to Collingwood: ‘I assume Eliot can see it? He’ll get it in his own office on Monday.’
Collingwood nodded.
I ran through it. It was only a couple of pages, typed in triple spacing on one of the large-letter machines, as though specially designed for longsighted elderly men. It came from the Minister of Labour. It said that if a change in weapons policy was at any time contemplated, the Minister wished the labour position to be established from the beginning. That is, a sudden stop, even in a single isolated project, such as—’ would mean unemployment for seven thousand men, of whom three thousand were specialists, and difficult to assimilate. This would be embarrassing for the Minister. Any more fundamental change in weapons policy would produce large pockets of unemployment. Unless the changes were spread over several years, they would be unacceptable.
It sounded official, cautious, reasonable. But everyone in the room knew that it meant more. It was a sighting-shot: and it was a sighting-shot, as it were, by proxy. It was not really this Minister who was testing Roger’s intentions. It was a set of other interests, who were still keeping quiet. Service groups? Big firms? None of us knew, but all of us were guessing.
‘They’ve been getting at him,’ said Collingwood.
‘It’s very easy, as I said before,’ Roger leaned back, ‘for them to overplay their hands.’
He looked confident, full of weight, springy with resource. Collingwood turned his handsome head and watched him in silence. So far as I could feel it in the air, there had been no argument.
‘Well, then, Quaife, I’m with you. I agree, the Committee’ (he meant the Cabinet committee on defence policy, about which Rose had given me the first news) ‘ought to meet tomorrow or Tuesday. That’s where we want you to help us–’ He spoke to me. He gave, as usual, the impression that he was ill at ease and that he didn’t care whether he was at ease or not. Everyone at Basset called him Reggie, but he still found it an effort not to speak to those two Cabinet colleagues of his as Mr Quaife and Mr Cave. He just managed to use their surnames. As for me, though I had met him a dozen times in the house, he could not become as familiar as that.
He assumed that I was at his disposal for a modest task.
They wanted the Committee convened over the weekend. As Douglas Osbaldiston was the Secretary, that was his job. Would I telephone him and get that in motion before dinner?
It was barely polite. It was certainly not adroit. Yet, within the next ten minutes, I saw, or thought I saw, how he kept his power. Before I arrived, they had been talking about three big firms: how much influence could they pull out? By this time, Roger and Cave spoke of ‘pressure groups’, or ‘lobbies’, as though they were Americans.
‘If they were solid together, they might be more of a menace,’ said Roger. ‘But they’re not, we haven’t given them a chance to be. There are always going to be some Government contracts. For some of our friends, that prospect carries its own simple logic.’
By the side of Roger, braced for the struggle, his voice taking on its taunting edge, Cave looked slack and gone to seed. But he was more at home than he had been all the weekend. He didn’t see, he said, any lobby being effective by itself. ‘But I should make two qualifications. First, Government must know its own mind. Second, and this isn’t quite a platitude, lobbies may be important if they happen to touch opinion deeper than their own. That is, if they touch opinion which hasn’t their own axe to grind.’
‘Fair comment,’ said Roger.
Collingwood stirred, and put one arm round the bedpost. ‘I see.’ He was speaking to neither of them in particular, making pauses like one reading from a script: but the authority was there. ‘If I understand you both right, there isn’t much between us. I take it Cave means that we’ve got to feel our way. I agree to that. We’ve got to watch whether any of these forces are having any effect on the Party. We can’t push the Party further than it’s prepared to go. I’m not presuming to give Quaife any advice. I never give anyone any advice.’ He said this as though it were the most exalted claim a man could make. ‘But, if I were Quaife, I should wrap up some of his intentions. I shouldn’t let them get down to particular consequences until we’ve carried most of them with us. Carried them further than they thought. But not further than some of us are ready to go. I shouldn’t let the White Paper give them much idea which weapons were being struck off straight away. I should wrap it up.’ He was still addressing the wall. ‘If I were Quaife, I should remember one other thing. I’ve got a feeling that the Party needs a lead. And by the Party, I mean the country as well. They need to feel that they’re doing something new. I’ve got a feeling that, if anyone gives them a lead, they’ll forgive him a lot. They may not like everything he’s doing, but they’ll be ready to forgive him.’
It was a curious speech, I thought, as I listened, and even more so later. A good deal of it was common form, not specially ominous, but carefully uncommitted. The last part was not such common form. He seemed to be inviting Roger to take a risk. As he did so, I had felt for the first time that he was, in his own right, a formidable man. Was he inducing Roger to take one risk too many? He had sounded, in a stony way, sincere. What did he wish for Roger? He had done him good turns. Did he like him? Men like Collingwood did not like or dislike freely. I was still uncertain about his feelings for Roger, or whether he had any feelings for him at all.
Next day, Margaret and I had to leave the house after tea. The weather had not changed. Just as when we arrived, it was an evening so tranquil that the chimney smoke seemed painted on the sky, and in the air there was a smell of burning leaves. Diana stood by herself in the courtyard, waving us off.
It had been a weekend in the country, with unhappiness in the house, and foreboding. As we settled down in the car, though, I felt, not relief to get away, but disquiet. For some of the disquiet I could find reason; but it was still there, swelling, nagging, changing, as though I were back in my childhood after a holiday, returning home, not knowing what I should find nor what I feared.