In the middle of the afternoon, my PA came in with a letter marked ‘Urgent’. It must have been delivered by hand, she said. The handwriting on the envelope looked like a woman’s, but I did not recognize it. Then I found that the note was signed ‘Ellen’. I read:
I expect you will be at the debate Monday and Tuesday. I have got to stay away, of course. I can’t even communicate with him until it’s all over. Will you please – I have to ask you this – let me know how things are going? I trust you to tell me the bare truth, whatever it is. I shall be in the flat alone, on both evenings. Please ring up, whatever you have to tell me.
I thought of her that evening, as Margaret and I went out to the theatre, just as an anaesthetic against the suspense. Roger was at home working at his speech, Caro with him. Ellen was the loneliest of all. I talked of her to Margaret. There she was, hearing nothing of him. Once she had feared that, if his career was broken, she would lose him. Now the blackmail had come out, now Caro had confronted him, Ellen must have the contradictory fear. Yet I was sure that she prayed for his success. Margaret said: ‘She’s not as good as you think she is.’
I said: ‘She tries to be.’
Margaret had met Ellen only socially, and then in the past, with her husband. It was Caro whom Margaret knew and loved, as I did not, Caro whom she had tried to comfort. Now, as we stood in the foyer of the Haymarket, avoiding the sight of acquaintances because we wanted to be together, she asked if the position was clear-cut – was Ellen facing that dilemma, either getting him, or seeing him prevail? I said, I didn’t believe that either of them knew. There could be something in it? I didn’t answer her.
‘If there’s the slightest bit in it,’ said Margaret, ‘I’m grateful was never tested that way about you.’
Monday came and dragged, like a day in my youth when I was waiting for the result of an examination. Hector Rose sent his compliments, and informed me that he expected to be in the Box for the last hours of the debate the following night. Otherwise I had no messages of any kind all that morning.
I hesitated about ringing Roger up. I detested being wished good luck myself (at root I was as superstitious as my mother); and I decided that he, also, would like to be left alone. I did not want to go to a club for lunch, in case I met Douglas or anyone else involved. I was tired of pretending to write or read. Instead, while the others were at lunch, I did what I should have done as a young man, and walked blankly round St James’s Park in the sunshine, catching, and being tantalized by, the first scent of spring; then through the streets, calling in at bookshops, nibbling away at time.
In the afternoon, the office clock swept out the minutes with its second hand. There was no point in leaving until half-past four: I did not wish to sit through question time. I rang my private secretary, and went with obsessive detail into next week’s work. After that, I had a session with my PA, making sure that she knew where I would be each hour of that day and the next. At last it was four twenty-five. Not quite the starting-time, but I could permit myself to go.
Then, as I was hurrying down the corridor, I heard a voice behind me. It was my PA, eager, comely, spectacled. My own devices had gone back on me: she knew the time too well. A lady was on the telephone, said Hilda: she said she had to speak to me immediately, it was desperately important, she couldn’t wait a minute. Thwarted, anxious, not knowing what to be anxious about, I rushed back. Was Caro going to break some news? Or was it Ellen, or from home?
It was none of them. It was Mrs Henneker.
‘I should never have believed it possible.’ Her voice came strongly over the phone. What was it? I asked.
‘What do you think?’
I did not feel inclined for guessing-games. It turned out that she had had a letter by the afternoon post, five minutes before, from a publisher. They had actually told her they didn’t consider her biography of her husband would be of sufficient interest to the general public. ‘What do you think of that?’
She sounded almost triumphant in her incredulity.
Oh well, I said, there were other publishers – trying to put her off, maddened because I was not out of the room.
‘That’s not good enough!’ Her voice rang out like a challenge.
I would talk to her sometime in the nearish future.
‘No.’ Her reply was intransigeant. ‘I think I must ask you to come round straight away.’
I said I had important business.
‘What do you call this, if it isn’t important?’
It was utterly and absolutely impossible, I said. I was occupied all the evening, all the next day, all the week.
‘I’m afraid,’ she said sternly, ‘I consider this entirely unsatisfactory.’
I said, incensed, that I was sorry.
‘Entirely unsatisfactory. Can’t I make you understand what has happened? They actually say – I’d better read you the whole letter.’
I said I hadn’t time.
‘I believe in putting first things first.’
I said goodbye.
Just as I got to the end of the corridor, I heard my telephone ringing again. I was quite sure it was Mrs Henneker. I walked on.
Down in Great George Street, the evening light bland and calm, I still felt menaced by that monomaniac voice, as though that was the cause of my worry, and not what I was going to listen to in the House. Looking up, I could see the informatory light shining above Big Ben, with a clear violet sky beyond. Though I had seen it so often, it stirred a memory, or at least a disquiet, the reason for which seemed mixed with the monomaniac voice. I was tugging at the roots of memory, but they would not be pulled out. Was it the night my wife and I went to dine at Lord North Street and, arriving too early, had walked round by St Margaret’s? The light had been shining that evening, too; yet there had been no disquiet, we had been at leisure, and content.
In the central lobby, busy with cavernous activity, members were meeting constituents, acquaintances, taking them off to tea. When I got into the officials’ box, I could have counted less than a hundred members in the chamber. There seemed as yet no special excitement in the air. The Opposition opener was speaking, like a man who is settling down to a steady lecture. He was prosy but confident, saying nothing new. It was a standard speech, gaining nothing, losing nothing. For a while I felt the needle pass away.
On the front bench, Roger was leaning back, fingers entwined, hands under his chin: Tom Wyndham sat dutifully behind him. There were three other Ministers on the front bench, Collingwood among them. A few members entered, others left. Figures were dotted here and there on the empty benches, some not listening. It might have been a borough council, assembled out of duty, for a discussion of something not specially earth-shaking, such as a proposal for a subsidy to the civic theatre.
In the box, Douglas and two other Whitehall acquaintances were already sitting. Douglas, who was writing a note on the small desk flap, gave me a friendly smile. They were all professionals, they had been here before. The climax was a long way off. This was just the start, as perfunctory as the first hour of a county cricket match, or the exposition of a drawing-room comedy.
During the opening speech I went along to the Speaker’s Gallery. There Caro and Margaret were sitting together. ‘He’s not doing any harm,’ whispered Caro. They were going back to Lord North Street for a sandwich some time. They knew I shouldn’t eat till the sitting was over. ‘Come along then, and pick up Margaret,’ said Caro, in another whisper. Now that at last we were all in it, all immersed, she could put hostilities aside until another day. Her eyes looked at me, bold and full, just as her brother’s did when he gambled. No one could expect her to be happy. Yet she wasn’t in the true sense anxious, and in her excitement there was a glint, not only of recklessness, but of pleasure.
Back in my place at Douglas’ side, I listened to the First Lord making the first reply. He too was competent, more so than I had been told. He was using much the same language as the Opposition spokesman. In fact, I found myself thinking, as the words rolled out like the balloons from characters in comic strips, an observer from Outer Mongolia would have been puzzled to detect the difference between them. ‘Deterrence’ was a word they both used often. The First Lord was preoccupied with ‘potential scaling-down’, not scaling-down in the here and now, but ‘potential scaling-down if we can have the assurance that this will influence others’. He also talked of ‘shield and sword’, ‘striking power’, ‘capability’. It was a curious abstract language, of which the main feature was the taking of meaning out of words.
As I listened to their speeches and those which followed, I wasn’t interested in speculation, or even the arguments as such. We had heard them all, for years. So I was listening, with concentrated and often obsessed attention, not to the arguments, but simply to what they meant in terms of votes next night. That was all. For all those hours, it was enough. The House grew fuller during the early evening, then thinned at dinner-time. Until nine o’clock there were no surprises. A Labour Party back-bencher expressed views close to Francis Getliffe’s or mine. When it came to the vote there would, we already knew, be plenty of abstentions on the Labour side – how many we were not certain, but too many for comfort. Though these abstentions meant support for Roger’s policy, it was once again the support he could not afford. A Labour Party front-bencher expressed views that a member of Lord A—’s splinter group, or an American admiral, might have found reactionary. Lord A— himself made a Delphic speech, in which he stated his suspicions of the Government’s intentions and his determination to vote for them. Another ultra-Conservative, whom we had counted as lost, followed suit.
To the surprise of everyone round me, the first hours of the debate didn’t produce much animus. It was a full-dress parliamentary occasion. Everyone had heard the passions over the issue and the personality seething for weeks. They were waiting for violence, and it hadn’t come.
Then, precisely at nine, the member for a county division was called. When I saw him rise, I settled back without any apprehensions at all. His name was Trafford, and I knew him slightly. He wasn’t well-off, he lived on a small family business. He wasn’t on the extreme right, he wasn’t smart. He didn’t speak often, he asked pertinacious questions: he was never likely to be invited to Basset. I had met him because, in his constituency, there were people who had known me in my youth. I thought he was dull, determined, over-anxious to do all the listening.
He got up, heavy-shouldered, raw-skinned. Within a minute, he was ripping into an attack. It was an attack which, from the first sounding note, was virulent. He was a loyal supporter of the Government, he said: he hoped to be so in the future: but he couldn’t support this particular policy and this particular Minister. The policy was the policy of an adventurer. What else was this man? What had he done? What was his record of achievement? All he did was play the field, look out for the main chance, find the soft option. This was the kind of adventurer’s progress he was leading the country into. Why? What were his credentials? What reason had he given us for trusting him? Trust him? Trafford’s tone got more violent. Some of us compared him with a man we could truly trust, the Honourable Member for Brighton South. We wished that the Honourable Member for Brighton South were in his place tonight, bringing us back to our principles. We believed that he had been a victim to his own high standards.
As the constituency of Brighton South was shouted out, I could not recall the member’s name. I whispered a question to Douglas.
‘J C Smith,’ he said.
So it had got so far. The abuse went on, but the accusation became no more direct. It couldn’t have been understood, except by those who knew already; yet the hate was palpable. Was this man Trafford one of Smith’s disciples? It might be so. How far were they in touch with Hood, how far was he their weapon?
My own suspicion had crystallized. I did not believe that he was just a man unbalanced, on his own. Or rather, he might be unbalanced, or have become so, as he carried the persecution on. But I believed that there were cool minds behind it. There was evidence that he had a fanatical devotion to his own aircraft firm, the kind of devotion, passionate and pathetic, of one who didn’t get the rewards himself, but hero-worshipped those who did. There could have been people shrewd enough to use him, shrewd enough to know that he got excitement from the sexual life of others.
I thought that there were cool minds behind him. But it seemed to me that these were business minds. They might have their links with Smith’s disciples; but it didn’t sound like the work of those disciples, not even the work of this man himself, snarling in the chamber.
Adventurers were dangerous, he was saying. They might be ingratiating, they might have attractions for all those round them, they might be clever, but they were the ruin of any government and any nation. It was time this Government went back to the solid virtues, and then Trafford and his friends and the whole country would support them once more.
It wasn’t a long speech. Twice he was shouted into silence, but even Roger’s partisans were embarrassed and for a time hypnotized by his venom. Roger sat through it, eyes hard, face expressionless.
I hadn’t heard such an outburst in the House before. What harm had it done? For a few, for Collingwood, the reference to Smith wouldn’t be missed. The attack came from a quarter we should least have chosen, the respectable middle-of-the road of the Tory members. Had it been too violent for man to take? That seemed the best hope. When two of Hector Rose’s dinner companions got up to say they couldn’t support the Government, they were noticeably civil and restrained, and one paid a compliment to Roger’s character.
When the House rose, I couldn’t trust my judgement. A policeman was shouting ‘Who goes home?’ as I telephoned Ellen, not knowing what to say. I heard her quick, breath catching ‘Yes’, and told her all had gone as we expected, except – again a ‘Yes?’ – except, I said, for one bit of malice. I couldn’t tell what the effect would be. It had been meant to kill. It might result in nothing worse than a single unexpected abstention. ‘You’re not holding back?’ she said. I had to tell her there had been a hint about her husband: not many would have grasped it. Down the telephone came a harsh sigh: What difference would it make? Was it going to tip the balance? Her voice had risen. I said, in flat honesty, that no one could tell: I believed, for better or worse, it wouldn’t count. I added, meaninglessly, Try to sleep.
Through the sparkling, frosty night, I hurried round to Lord North Street. On the stairs I heard laughter from the drawing-room. As I got inside, I saw with astonishment, with the desire to touch wood, that Caro, Margaret and Roger were all looking cheerful. A plate of sandwiches was waiting for me, since I had not eaten all day.
‘What have you been doing to Trafford?’ Roger asked, as though to put me at my ease.
‘Do you understand it?’ I cried.
‘Whatever does he hope for?’ Caro spoke with genuine, full-throated scorn, not pretending. She must have heard each overtone of the insinuation, but she laughed like one saying – ‘If that is the worst they can do!’
‘Have you had any repercussions?’ I asked.
‘Not one.’ Roger spoke with studious interest, with the euphoria which sometimes breaks through in the middle of a crisis, ‘Do you know, I can’t begin to imagine why he did it. Can you?’
I couldn’t answer.
‘If no one can supply any motive – Why, I shall soon be forced to think that he meant what he said.’ His tone was unforced, free from rancour. He gave a laugh, like a man easy among his friends. He had drunk little, he was keyed up for action next day. He was hoping more simply than he had hoped for weeks.