by C. P. Snow
‘I’m not interested in his psychology,’ said Lufkin. ‘I’m not interested in his motives. All I’m interested in, is seeing him on the bread-line.’
We did not speak again on our way to the drawing-room. There the party, in Lufkin’s absence, had begun to sound a little gayer. He damped it down by establishing us in groups of three with no chance of transfer. For myself, I was preoccupied, and I noticed Margaret glancing at me, a line between her eyes, knowing that something was wrong. In my trio, I heard, as though she were a long way off, the wife of one of the Ministers explaining analytically why her son had not got into Pop, a subject which, at the best of times, I should have found of limited interest.
One might have thought that Lufkin’s dinner-parties broke up early. But they didn’t, unless Lufkin broke them up himself. That night it was half-past eleven before, among the first uprising of departures, I managed to get in a word with Margaret. I told her that Lufkin had been warning me, and about what.
Looking at me, she did not need to ask much. ‘Ought you to go and see Roger?’ she said.
I half-wanted to leave it till next day. She knew that I was tired. She knew that I should be more tired if I didn’t act till next morning. She said, ‘You’d better go to him now, hadn’t you?’
While Margaret waited with Lufkin, I telephoned Lord North Street. I heard Roger’s voice, and began: ‘Lufkin’s been talking to me. There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Can I come round?’
‘You can’t come here. We’ll have to meet somewhere else.’
Clubs would be closed by this time: we couldn’t remember a restaurant near by: at last I said, anxious to put down the telephone, that I would see him outside Victoria Station and was leaving straight away.
When I told Lufkin that I was going to Roger, he nodded with approval, as for any course of behaviour recommended by himself. ‘I can lay on transport,’ he said. ‘Also for your charming wife.’
Two cars, two drivers, were waiting for us in the street. As mine drew up under the Victoria clock, I did not go into the empty hall, booking-offices closed as in a ghost station, but stayed outside on the pavement, alone except for some porters going home.
A taxi slithered from the direction of Victoria Street, through the rain-glossed yard.
As Roger came heavily towards me, I said: ‘There’s nowhere to go here.’ For an instant I was reminded of Hector Rose greeting me outside the darkened Athenaeum, months before.
I said there was a low-down coffee bar not far away. We were both standing stock-still.
Roger said, quite gently, ‘I don’t think there is anything you can tell me. I think I know it all.’
‘My God,’ I said, in bitterness, ‘we might have been spared this.’
I was angry, not with Hood, but with him. My temper had broken loose because of the risks we had run, of what we had tried to do, of the use he had made of me. He gave a grimace, of something like acquiescence.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘to have got everyone into a mess.’
Those were the kind of words I had heard before in a crisis: apathetic, inadequate, flat. But they made me more angry. He looked at me.
‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It’s not lost yet.’
As we stood there in front of the station, it was not I who was giving support and sympathy. It was the other way round.
In silence we walked across the station yard, through the dripping rain. By the time we were sitting in the coffee bar, under the livid lights, I had recovered myself.
We sipped tea so weak that it tasted like metal against the teeth. Roger had just said, ‘It’s been very bad,’ when we were interrupted.
A man sat down at a table, and remarked ‘Excuse me’, in a voice that was nearly cultivated, not quite. His hands were trembling. He had a long, fine-drawn face, like the romantic stereotype of a scientist. His manner was confident. He told us a hard-luck story of considerable complexity. He was a lorry-driver, so he said. By a series of chances and conspiracies, his employers had decided to sack him. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was short of money. Could we see him through the night?
I didn’t like him much, I didn’t believe a word of it, above all I was maddened by his breaking in. Yet, as I shook my head, I was embarrassed, as though it were I who was doing the begging. As for him, he was not embarrassed in the least. ‘Never mind, old chap,’ he said.
Roger looked at him and, without a word, took out his wallet and gave him a ten-shilling note. The intruder took it civilly, but without any demonstration. ‘Always glad of a little encouragement,’ he said. He made polite goodbyes.
Roger did not watch or notice. He had given him money not out of fellow-feeling, or pity, or even to be rid of him. It had been the kind of compulsion that affects men who lead risky lives. Roger had been trying to buy a bit of luck.
Suddenly he told me straight out that Caro would ‘put a face on things’, until the struggle was over. She would laugh off the rumours which would soon, if Lufkin’s intelligence were correct, once more be sparking round all J C Smith’s connections. Caro was ready to deny them to Collingwood himself.
But there was some other damage. Many people, including most of the guests at Lord North Street, and Diana Skidmore’s friends, would have expected Caro – and Roger also – not to make much of the whole affair. Yes, Ellen had behaved badly, a wife ought to stick to her sick husband. Roger wasn’t faultless either. Still, there were worse things. After all, Caro had lived in the world all her life. Her friends and family were not models of the puritan virtues. Caro herself had had lovers before her marriage. Like the rest of her circle, she prided herself on her rationality and tolerance. They all smoothed over scandals, were compassionate about sins of the flesh, by the side of which a man having a mistress, even in the circumstances of Roger and Ellen – was nothing but a display of respectability.
That day, since Caro first read the unsigned letter, none of that had counted, nor had ever seemed to exist. There was no enlightenment or reason in the air, just violence. They hadn’t been quarrelling about his public life, nor the morality of taking a colleague’s wife: nor about love: nor sex: but about something fiercer. He was hers. They were married. She would not let him go.
He too felt the same violence. He felt tied and abject. He had come away, not knowing where to turn or what to do.
So far as I could tell, there had been no decision. Or rather, there seemed to have been two decisions which contradicted each other. As soon as the crisis was over, win or lose – Caro gave her ultimatum – he had to choose. She would not endure it more than a matter of weeks, months at the most. Then he had to look after his own career. It must be ‘this woman’ or her. At the same time, she had said more than once that she would not give him a divorce.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. His face was blank and open. He did not look like a man a few days away from his major test.
For a while we sat, drinking more cups of the metallic tea, not saying much. Then he remarked:‘I told her’ (he meant Ellen) ‘earlier in the day. I promised I’d ring her up before I went to bed. She’ll be waiting.’
Blundering, as though his limbs were heavy, he went off to look for a telephone behind the bar. When he came back he said flatly: ‘She wants me to go and see her. She asked me to bring you too.’
For an instant, I thought this was not meant seriously.
‘She asked me,’ he repeated. Then I thought perhaps I understood. She was as proud as Caro: in some ways, she was prouder. She was intending to behave on her own terms.
The rain had stopped, and we went on foot to Ebury Street. It was well past one. At her door, Ellen greeted us with the severeness which I had long ago forgotten, but which took me back to the first time I saw her there. Once we were inside the smart little sitting-room, she gave Roger a kiss, but as a greeting, no more. It wasn’t the hearty, conjugal kiss I had seen before, the kiss of happy lovers used t
o each other, pleased with each other, sure of pleasure to come.
She offered us drinks. Roger took a whisky, so did I. I pressed her to join us. As a rule, she enjoyed her drink. But she was one of those who, in distress, refuse to accept any relief.
‘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.
39: Political Arithmetic
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 hi
mself. 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.’
