Next day, when I called in Roger’s office, he sat calm and stoical, like a man without passions, as though any story about an outbreak of his was one’s own invention and couldn’t be referred to. Yet once more his tic returned: in a distant, cold, almost inimical manner, he asked me to report what the papers were rumouring that morning. ‘There’s not much,’ I said.
‘Good.’ His face, his voice, became smooth. He was for the moment over-easily reassured, like a man jealous in love, snatching at the bits of news which comfort him.
There was a report in one paper about a meeting of a few back-benchers and some scientists, which seemed to have ended in the scientists quarrelling – that was about all, I said.
Immediately, again like a jealous man, he started on the detective work of anxiety: who could they be? Where? This was the ultra-Conservative paper, they were enemies, we knew which member slipped them the gossip. Yet this man, who was venal but abnormally amiable, had already written to Roger pledging his support. Was he reneging at the last minute? I shook my head. I was positive that he was all right. Not that he minded collecting his retainer from the paper.
‘One of these days,’ said Roger, relieved and savage, ‘we’ll get men like him expelled from the House.’
What about the scientists? I said. Who were they, anyway? He wasn’t interested. Nothing could interest him except the lobbies now. As I left him, he was working out, repetitiously, unable to shake off the obsession, who these members were, and whether he could count on their votes.
Back in my own room, I wasn’t much better. The debate was to begin on Monday afternoon. They would vote the night after that. Four days and a half before it would be over. I pulled down a file from my in-tray. There was a minute written in the most beautiful handwriting, in the most lucid prose. I did not feel like reading it.
I sat there day-dreaming, not pleasantly. Once I rang up Margaret, asking if there were any news, though what I expected I hadn’t an idea.
A knock sounded on my door, not the door leading to my assistants, through which visitors should come, but the corridor door, usually inviolable. Hector Rose came in, perhaps for the second time since we had been colleagues, paying me a visit unannounced.
‘Forgive me, my dear Lewis, I do apologize many, many times for interrupting you like this–’
‘There isn’t much to interrupt,’ I said.
‘You’re so much occupied that there’s always something to interrupt.’ He gazed at the empty desk, at the in-tray with its stack of files. He gave a faint, arctic smile. ‘In any case, my dear Lewis, forgive me for disturbing some of your valuable meditations.’
Even now, after all those years, even in stress, I didn’t know the response to his singular brand of courtesy. The bright young Treasury officials, certain by this time that he would soon be retiring, and that they would never, as they once imagined, have to answer to him, had invented a quip, the sort of quip which, like a premature obituary, gets circulated when a formidable man is passing out: ‘With old Hector Rose, you’ve got to take the smooth with the smooth.’
Little they knew.
After some more apologies he sat down. He looked at me with bleached eyes and said: ‘I thought you ought to know that I had the curious experience of meeting your friend Dr Brodzinski last night.’
‘Where?’
‘Oddly enough, with some of our political acquaintances.’ Suddenly, the item in the newspaper flashed back, and I guessed: ‘So you were there!’
‘How have you heard?’
I mentioned the paper.
Rose gave a polite smile and said: ‘I don’t find it necessary to read that particular journal.’
‘But you were there?’
‘I was trying to make that clear, my dear Lewis.’
‘How did you get invited?’
Again he smiled politely: ‘I made it my business to be.’
He cut out the flourishes, and with sarcastic relevance told me the story. Brodzinski, in a last attempt to whip up opposition to Roger’s policy, had made an appeal to some of his Tory contacts. Instead of again attacking Roger directly, he had done it through an attack on Walter Luke. He had told some of the extreme right, the pro-Suez relics, that it was Luke’s advice which had led Roger into bad judgement. So Brodzinski had been asked to dine with a small splinter group. So, by a piece of upright pig-headed good manners, had Walter Luke. So, through his own initiative, had Hector Rose.
‘I wasn’t prepared to have the excellent Luke thrown to the wolves,’ he said. ‘Also, I thought I might as well listen to what was going on. I have a certain influence with Lord A—’ (the leader of the splinter-group, and the man responsible for the pig-headed good manners. It sounded improbable that he should be a friend of Hector Rose’s, but in fact – in the minuteness of the English official world – they had been at school together.)
Between Brodzinski and Luke, there had been a violent row. Lord North Street was not the only place, the night before, where eminent persons came to physical violence. ‘How these scientists love one another,’ said Rose. He added: ‘Brodzinski could certainly be sued for defamation, if Luke cared to go to law.’ With crisp detachment he gave a few examples.
‘Is anyone going to believe that?’
‘My dear Lewis, don’t you agree that if anyone is accused of anything, literally anything, most of our friends believe it?’
He went on: ‘While I am about it, you might drop a word to our potentially supreme colleague. Douglas Osbaldiston. There appears to be no doubt that Brodzinski has been trying to spill this particular poison into his ear,’
Once before – just once, in that disciplined life where personal relations were left unstated – Rose had let fall his feelings about Douglas. He did not let himself be so direct again, not even when I said that Douglas, whatever Rose thought of him, was honest and fair.
‘I am perfectly certain,’ said Rose, half-bowing as he spoke, ‘that our colleague has been utterly correct. In fact, I gathered that he had refused to grant Brodzinski an interview at the present juncture. No one could be more correct, could he? Our colleague has every qualification for the perfect public servant. But still, I do suggest you drop a word. He is just a shade inclined to believe in reconciliation for its own sake. When all this is settled, he might find it was wiser and safer to have Brodzinski in rather than out. I should regard that as reconciliation carried to a somewhat excessive extent. Our colleague has a slightly greater veneration than I have for the general good sense of everybody in this part of London.’
Our eyes met. For this occasion, we were allies. He said: ‘By the way, one fact seems to be generally known.’
‘Yes?’
‘That he’s not a hundred per cent happy about his master’s policy, or shall I say his master’s ultimate intentions about policy?’ Rose was not given to underlining. That morning he was thinking of Tuesday’s voting, not with Roger’s concentration, for that was total, but with something as channelled as mine. Name by name, he gave his prognosis about last night’s party. There had been twelve members present. All but one were on the extreme right, and so possible enemies of Roger. Of these, three would vote for him, including Lord A—(Rose was, as he might have said himself, most correct. He did not give a vestigial hint that he, a functionary, could possibly have used any persuasion.) Of the others, a maximum of nine would certainly abstain. ‘It’s beginning to look uncomfortable,’ said Hector Rose. He broke off, and went on about the vote. There were bound to be more abstentions. I told him, not the full story of Sammikins, but that he would vote against.
Rose clicked his tongue. He looked at me as though he were going to give a verdict. Then he shook his head, and in a cool tone remarked: ‘I take it you will let your friend Quaife know at once. That is, about the information I was able to collect. I needn’t tell you, you’ll have to do it discreetly, and I’m afraid you mustn’t reveal your source. But he ought to know about these abstentions. You can tell him these people by name, I think.’
‘What good can that do him?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you believe that, if he saw them now, he could possibly persuade them back?’
‘No,’ said Rose.
‘Well, then, all he can do is make his speech. He’ll make a better speech the more hope he’s got left.’
‘My dear Lewis, with great diffidence, I think he ought to be able to reckon up his opponents–’
‘I repeat,’ I said with force, ‘what good can that do?’
‘You’re taking a responsibility on yourself.’ Rose stared at me, surprised, disapproving. ‘If I were he,’ he said, ‘I should want to be able to reckon up every scrap of news, however bad it was, until the end.’
I stared back. ‘I believe you would,’ I said.
It wasn’t necessarily the toughest and hardest-nerved who lived in public. Yet sometimes I wondered whether a man as tough and hard-nerved as Rose could imagine what the public life was like, or how much it would have tested him.
He got up. ‘Well, that’s all the bad news for the present.’ He made the grim, Greek messenger joke, said this seemed as far as we could go, and began his paraphernalia of thanks and apologies.
As soon as he had gone, I looked at the clock. It was nearly twenty to twelve. This time I didn’t brood or wait. I went out, through my private office, into the corridor, past the doors of my own department, round three sides of the Treasury quadrangle, on my way to Osbaldiston. I didn’t notice, as I had done times enough, the bizarre architecture, the nineteenth-century waste of space, the gigantic unfilled hole in the centre of the building, like a Henry Moore sculpture pretending to be functional. I didn’t even notice the high jaundiced walls, the dark stretch of corridor up to the next bend, the compartments where the messengers sat on stools reading the racing editions, the labels on the doors just visible in the half light, Sir W— H—, GBE, Sir W— D—, KCB. It was just dark, domesticated, familiar: a topological journey: the doors passing me by like the stations seen from an underground train.
Before I got into the last straight, which led to Douglas’ office, I saw him coming round the corner, head forward, a docket of papers in his hand. ‘I was looking for you,’ I said.
‘I’ve got a meeting,’ Douglas answered. He wasn’t evading me. There was not time to return to his room. We stood there in the corridor, talking in low voices. Occasionally, in the next few minutes, doors opened, young men walked briskly past us, throwing a glance in the direction of their boss. Some would know that he and I were close friends. They might have thought that we were settling a bit of business before the meeting, or alternatively, in the way of the top stratum, at once the casual and machine-like, saving time and an interdepartmental minute.
It wasn’t going quite like that. As we kept our voices down, I was watching his face with a mixture of affection, pity and blind anger. It had changed since his wife’s illness; we had seen it change under our eyes. Now it had the special pathos of a face which, still in essence anachronistically youthful, was nevertheless beginning to look old. Once he had been untouched as Dorian Gray, a character whom he resembled in no other particular, but now all that was gone.
Three times a week, Margaret went to sit with his wife in hospital. By this time, when she wanted to smoke, Mary had to be fed her cigarette. ‘How paralysed can you get?’ she said, with a euphoria and courage that made it worse to watch.
Douglas had come to stay with us some nights, when he couldn’t stand any more either the lonely house or the club. Once he had told us, with bitter, unguarded candour, that there were not two hours together in any day when he didn’t think of her lying there, not to move again, while he was free.
All that was out of my mind. I was saying: ‘How much do you know of the latest attack on Quaife?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Do you realize that they’re going for anyone who has the slightest connection with him? Now it’s Walter Luke–’
‘You can’t have a war,’ said Douglas, ‘without someone getting hurt.’
‘I suppose you’re aware,’ I said angrily, ‘that you’ve been giving aid and comfort to these people?’
‘What are you saying now?’ All of a sudden, his face had become stony. He was as enraged as I was: the more so, because we had in private so often been open with each other.
‘I’m saying, it’s well known that you don’t agree with Quaife.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘Can you tell me that?’
‘I do tell you that, and I expect you to believe it,’ said Douglas.
‘What do you expect me to believe?’
‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘You’ve felt yourself entitled to your private view. Not so private, if I may say so. So have I. I’ve made no secret of it. I haven’t left my Minister in any doubt. I think he’s wrong, and he knows that as well as I do. But no one else knows it, except you, and one or two people I can trust.’
‘So do others.’
‘Do you really think I’m responsible for that?’
‘It depends what you mean by responsible.’
His face had darkened up to the cheekbones.
‘We’d better try to be rational,’ he said. ‘If my Minister wins, then I shall do my best for him. Of course, I shall be carrying out a policy in which I don’t believe. Well, I’ve done that before and I can do it again. I shall try to make the thing work. Without false modesty, I shall do it as well as anyone round here.’
All that he said was absolutely true.
‘You think he can’t win?’ I said.
‘And what do you think?’
His gaze was sharp, appraising. For a second we might have been in a negotiation, listening for a point at which the other would give way.
‘You’ve done a certain amount to make it harder,’ I let fly again.
‘I’ve done exactly what I’ve told you. No more, and no less.’
‘You’re better at singing in unison than some of us, aren’t you?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You realize that the line you’re taking is the line that a good many powerful persons want you to take? Most of them don’t really want Roger Quaife to get away with it, do they?’
With a curious detachment he replied: ‘That is possibly so.’
‘If he doesn’t win, you’ll be sitting pretty, won’t you ? You will have scored a nice new piece of credit for yourself? You’ll have everything waiting for you?’
He looked at me without expression. He said, in a quite friendly voice: ‘One thing. You know I’ve had my own view all along about this business. Don’t you believe it was an honest view?’
I had to say, Yes, of course I did.
I burst out, without remembering that I had once heard Cave make the same accusation to Roger: ‘But all you’ve done or not done – you must have realized that it wouldn’t exactly impede your progress, mustn’t you?’
In my fury, I was astonished to see him give a smile – not an intimate smile, but still genuine.
‘If I’ve worried about that sort of consideration, Lewis, we should never do anything, should we?’
After glancing at his watch he said, in a businesslike tone: ‘You’ve made me a bit late.’
He went off towards his meeting quickly but not in a rush, head thrust forward, papers in hand, along the corridor.