The bells of St Margaret’s, Westminster, tolled under the low cloud-lid, into the dark noon. It was three days after Christmas, the House was in recess, but the Prime Minister and Collingwood, top-hatted, in morning suits, walked under the awning into the porch. So did three other Ministers, a group of elderly peers, then Roger and Monty Cave. People on the pavement were not paying much attention; top-hats, a handful of bigwigs, some sort of service.
I sat in the middle of the church, where, by some optical illusion, the light seemed brighter than out of doors: over the altar, the stained glass gleamed and glowed, like the glass in the front door at home, when I was a child, or in the door at the Osbaldiston’s. The vigorous, shining faces round me were composed into gravity, but there was no grief. It was part of the ceremonial, ceremonial which they enjoyed, part of the charm of their lives. Collingwood spent some time on his knees. The other Ministers and Members sat in the two front rows, doing what was expected of them, doing what their successors would do for them, when their own memorial services came round.
In fact, the one they were commemorating that morning would not have considered that enough was being done. He had been a modest old man, but he had had the sharpest sense of the fitness of things. The church was only half-full. Not much of a turn out, he would have said. Much worse, he would have been baffled that the service wasn’t being held in the Abbey. ‘Giving me a consolation prize’, he would have said.
This was the memorial service to old Thomas Bevill, who had died before Christmas at the age of eighty-eight. When he was a Minister at the beginning of the war, I had been one of his personal staff. That had been my introduction to the official life, and I knew him better than most of the other mourners did. No one, least of all himself, could have called him a great man; and yet I had learned much from him. In a limited sense of the word, he was a politician, a born politician. He knew which levers to pull and how to pull them, more exactly than anyone I had met in Government, with a skill one meets more often in people working in a smaller world, such as Arthur Brown in my old college.
Bevill was an aristocrat, and it was part of his manner to appear like a bumbling amateur. He was as much an amateur as one of the Irish manipulators of the American Democratic machine. Bevill had a passion for politics. Like most devoted politicians, he was realistic about everything in them – except his own chances. He had been sacked, politely but firmly, in 1943, at the age of seventy-four. Everyone but himself knew it was the end. But he delayed taking his peerage, still hoping that another Conservative government would call him back. New Conservative governments came, but the telephone did not ring. At last, at eighty-four, he accepted his Viscounty, even then hating it, even then going round asking his friends whether, when the PM went, there mightn’t be the chance of one more job. When he was told no, his blue eyes ceased to look mild, and became hot and furious. But he surrendered. For the last four years, Thomas Bevill had entered another avatar, under the style of Lord Grampound.
This was the end. He would get mentioned, as a very minor figure, in some of the official histories. He wouldn’t rate a biography of his own. I looked at the order of the service – Thomas Bevill, first Viscount Grampound – and felt curiously sad. The dignitaries round me were mumbling the responses. Beside the Prime Minister and Collingwood stood Roger, assured among the assured, his fine voice audible.
I felt, yes, alienated as well as sad. Why, I should have been hard put to it to say. This was the kind of leave-taking any ruling society gave to one of their own. As for Thomas Bevill, I should not have said that I loved him much. He had been an ally of mine in days past, but that had been in the way of business. He had been kind to me, as he always was to his colleagues, out of instinctive policy, unless there were overmastering reasons for not being kind. That was about the size of it. He was a tough old Tory politician, patriotic to the core – and also, the nearer one got to the core, snobbish and callous. Yet I was not really thinking of him like that. Standing among the sound of confident official voices, I was out of it – just as he was out of it, because he was, like any one of us when our time comes, being so easily dismissed.
The service ended, and the congregation trooped out, euphoric, healthy-looking, duty done. I did not hear a word spoken about the old man. The Prime Minister, Collingwood and Roger, got into the same car. As the car drove away, Monty Cave was watching it. He remarked to Sammikins, whom I had not noticed at the service: ‘We’re going on again after lunch.’
He meant, the Cabinet committee had been meeting that morning, and had not finished. This was, we already knew, intended to be their final meeting, and so none of their advisers, none of the scientists or civil servants, except Douglas, was present. Monty, with his clever, imbedded eyes, watched the car turn out of Parliament Square.
‘Well-timed, don’t you think?’ he said to Sammikins.
Abruptly, as though he resented the invitation while he was giving it, he asked us whether we were doing anything for lunch. As we drove round to Cave’s house in Smith Square, which I had not visited before, Sammikins was talking away in undiscouraged form, although both Cave and I were silent. Had he asked us just because he was lonely, I was thinking, or because there was something he intended, or felt obliged, to say?
The tall, narrow house sounded empty as we went in. In the dining-room I looked out of the window through the tawny winter air at the ruined church. It might have been part of a Gothick fancy. Yet the room itself was bright and elegant; on one wall was a fine Sisley, of poplars and sunny water, on another a still life by Nicholas de Staël, pastel fruit in a white dish.
I asked him about another picture. He was vague: he didn’t know the painter. He was better-read than most men, but he seemed not to have any visual sense. He was living in a museum of his wife’s taste.
The maid brought in avocado pears, cold chicken, tongue, cheese. Cave ate greedily: Sammikins did not eat so much, or with such relish, but he appropriated the bottle of hock. Cave and I had adopted the habit, common among the younger administrators, of not drinking before the evening.
‘This is the nicest sort of meal,’ Sammikins burst out, ‘why do we waste our time sitting down to bloody great set luncheons?’
Monty Cave smiled at him: yes, with affection: yes, perhaps with an envy for the dash, the abandon, he himself had never had. He said, as though casually, with his mouth full, ‘Well, we’ve had a not uneventful morning.’
He said it more to me than to Sammikins. I knew that he was devious, subtle, cleverer than any of us. I suspected that he was not being casual. Certainly I wasn’t. I asked: ‘How did it go, then?’
‘Oh, you know how these things usually go.’
It wasn’t exactly a snub, but it was maddening. It was deviousness carried to the point of perversity. I looked at him, the bones of his chin sunk into the flesh, his eyebrows like quarter moons, his eyes watchful, malicious and, in that slack face and body, disconcertingly bold. He said: ‘Old Roger’s taken to making jokes in meetings, nowadays. In Cabinets, as well as in this one. Rather good jokes, I must say, but I don’t think Reggie sees them.’
Sammikins gave his brazen laugh, but Cave had one sly eye on me, and went on: ‘I sometimes wonder a little whether it’s wise for politicians to make too many jokes. What do you think? I mean, it sometimes looks as though they’re getting worried and are trying to put a bit too much of a face on it. Do you think that’s possible?’
‘Do you think Roger’s getting worried?’ I asked.
‘I shouldn’t have thought so. I can’t for the life of me imagine why, can you?’
At that, even Sammikins, not listening so intently as I was, looked baffled.
We all knew that Roger was in his private crisis of politics. Cave knew it as well as any man alive. Suddenly I wondered whether, with extravagant indirectness, he was hinting at something which was not political at all. Was he really suggesting that Roger had another concern, different in kind? He was an observant and suspicious man, and he might have had his suspicions sharpened by unhappiness. Had he guessed that another marriage was in danger?
‘No,’ I said to Cave, ‘I can’t imagine why. Unless things went worse this morning than you’ve told us. And you’re wondering if he’s got to back down. And of course you too.’
‘Oh, no, no, no,’ Cave said rapidly. His whole face was transformed by a smile which seemed to come from within, evanescent, amused, youthful. ‘I assure you, it’s all gone easier than I expected. Of course, the White Paper hasn’t really got all that many teeth, has it? Unless someone is going to read it in a way Reggie Collingwood wouldn’t approve.’
He added: ‘Roger was exceptionally good. It was one of the times when he does look the biggest man among us – you know what I mean. It’s true, he did just drop one hint, not very loudly and he threw it away – that, in certain circumstances, he conceivably might want to say a word or two in public. It was nothing like as vulgar as threatening to resign, you understand.’ Cave smiled again. ‘I may be wrong, of course, but I rather got the impression that some of our colleagues took the point.’
With a glint in his eye, Cave said to me, in a very quiet tone: ‘So far as I remember that last party of Caro’s, Roger might have learned that trick from you, mightn’t he?’
It was just on two. The meeting was to start again in half an hour, and soon he would have to be going. We walked upstairs to the drawing-room, also bright, also hung with paintings. But what struck the eye was a large photograph of his wife. It made her look handsomer than she really was: clear-featured, vivid, strong. Not right for him, not conceivably right for him, as anyone studying that face would have guessed. But there it stood. He must have seen it every night when he came in alone. One had a feeling, both of pity and discomfort, that he was living, not only with, but on his sorrow.
With a directness that I could not have matched, nor most of us, Sammikins marched up to the photograph and said: ‘Have you heard from her?’
‘Only through her solicitors.’
‘What about?’
‘What do you think?’ said Cave.
Sammikins turned on him and said, in a hard, astringent tone, ‘Look here, the sooner you say good-riddance, the better it’ll be for you. I don’t suppose you care about that. But the better it will be for her, too, and you do care about that, worse luck. And the better it’ll be for everyone around you.’
He might have been a regimental officer dealing with marital trouble in the ranks. Somehow it didn’t sound like a wild young roisterer talking to an eminent man. It was not embarrassing to listen to.
‘Never mind,’ said Cave gently, with a touch of gratitude, speaking quite genuinely, as Sammikins had spoken. Soon he was saying goodbye, on his way to Great George Street. I thought he was genuine again when, in sympathy and reassurance, he said to me: ‘Don’t worry about this afternoon. It’s all going according to plan.’
But he could not resist one last twist, dig, or mystification: ‘The only question is, whose plan?’