by C. P. Snow
40: An Evening of Triumph
It was well after ten when we got out of the taxi in Lord North Street. We had been invited, not to dinner, but for an after-debate supper. The door shone open for another guest, light streaming across the lances of rain.
I felt Margaret’s hand tighten in mine. When we had first entered this house, it had seemed enviable. Now it was threatened. Some of us, going up the stairs that night, knew, as well as Roger and Caro themselves, of both the threats.
She greeted us in the drawing-room, eyes flashing, jewels flashing, shoulders splendid under the lights. Her voice wasn’t constricted; she hugged Margaret, perhaps a little more closely than usual, she brushed my cheek. I knew, as we kissed, that this was a performance, gallant as it was. She had never liked me much, but now, if it weren’t for her obligation, she would have put me out of sight for good. She had either found out, or had decided for herself, that I had been in Roger’s confidence. She might be generous and reckless, but she would not forget her wrongs. This one was not to be forgiven.
The clock was striking the half-hour. There were already three or four people in the drawing-room, including Diana Skidmore.
‘They’ve not got back yet,’ said Caro, in her loud, casual tone, as though this were any other parliamentary night, ‘they’ being the politicians.
‘They’ve had quite a day, bless their hearts. I haven’t seen Roger since he went to the Cabinet this morning. Have you seen any of them, Diana?’
‘Not to speak of, you know,’ Diana replied, with a smile as bright, and as communicative, as her emeralds.
‘Isn’t Monty Cave making a great speech tonight?’ Caro went on.
‘I suppose he would have to say something, wouldn’t he?’ said Diana.
Caro told Diana that Monty would be along soon, in a tone which implied that Diana knew already. Diana responded with a question:
‘Is the PM coming?’
Caro replied boldly: ‘I couldn’t get him.’ She added, as though she wouldn’t be outfaced: ‘Reggie Collingwood promised to look in. If they’re not too late.’
It seemed clear – had the news reached Diana yet? – that Caro was trying to do her last service for Roger. She was not just seeing him through, she was doing more than that. She was calling up all her influence, until the debate. She was helping him to win, as thoroughly as if they had been happy.
And yet, though it was chivalrous, though she would truly have done it if she were losing him next week, did she expect, completely expect, to lose him? As I listened, she didn’t seem as if she had quite let go. Did she still hope that if he won, if his career were once more assured, he would have to stay with her? On her own terms? Given a future as brilliant as it had looked the year before, how much of it would he risk or sacrifice?
It would be astonishing if at times, brilliant with certainty, she did not hope like that. For myself, I was at a loss to know whether she was right or wrong.
I wondered also what chances she believed he had of winning. She was radiant with fighting energy. She would go on beyond the last minute. But, though she wasn’t subtle, she was shrewd and had seen much. She had been trying to get signals of encouragement from Diana and had received none. That must have been as patent to Caro as it was to Margaret and me. Not that Diana had finally given Roger up. She knew he was in extreme trouble, that was all. She was playing safe. Maybe she did not want to embarrass her closest political friends, like Collingwood; maybe she had heard from him the first whisper of a scandal: but, deeper than that, she was acting out of instinct.
The beau monde wasn’t kind, Caro had once said to me on a carefree night. If it were kind, it would soon cease to be beau. It was tolerably good-natured, until you were really in trouble. Then you were on your own.
I wondered how many worlds were any better. If you were in trouble in the public eye, who was going to guard you? All the worlds I knew, not only the beau, but the civil servants, the academics, the industrialists, the scientists, huddled together to protect themselves. If you became exposed, they couldn’t do much. It was the odd acquaintance, sometimes the wild, sometimes the sober, who had concealed the fact that he was afraid of nothing and no one, who came out and took the risks and stood by one’s side.
Car in the Street below. Heavy footsteps on the stairs. Roger came in, came in alone.
I had an instant’s anxiety, as though Caro’s guests had let her down, as though her gesture had gone for nothing, and we were left with a useless supper-party, like so many Baltic Deputies.
Then, with a disproportionate relief, so that I gave a broad and apparently unprovoked grin in Diana’s direction, I saw Cave at the door, with Collingwood’s hand on his shoulder.
‘Give Monty a drink,’ cried Roger, in his broadest, heartiest voice. ‘He’s made the speech of a lifetime!’
‘He’ll make better speeches some day,’ said Collingwood, with an air of the highest congratulation, rather like Demosthenes commenting on a hitherto tongue-tied pupil.
‘Give him a drink!’ cried Roger. He was standing by his wife. Their faces were open, robust, smiling. They might have been a serene couple, rejoicing, because they were so successful, in a great friend’s success. Looking round, I should have liked to know how many of the others saw them so, and how much they knew.
As we sat down at the dinner-table downstairs, I was on edge and guessing. So were others. Some of the decisions – one could feel the crackle in the air – were not only not revealed, they were not yet taken. If Collingwood had heard the news about his nephew’s wife, he showed no sign of it. His phlegm was absolute. Diana’s self-control, Caro’s flaming courage – they were tightened, because people round the table knew that nothing was settled; were waiting to see in what might pass as a convivial evening, where others would – the old phrase returned to me – ‘come down’.
Cave held up a glass to the candlelight, viewed it with his round sombre, acute eyes, and sat forward, the rolls of chin sinking into his chest. He kept receiving compliments, Collingwood’s magisterial and not specially articulate, Roger’s hearty but increasingly forced. Cave’s glance darted towards them, his eyes sharply on guard, in the podgy, clown-like face. Diana was flattering him, with a brisk, hortatory rasp, as though irritated that he didn’t know how good he was.
About his triumph in the House that evening, there was no ambiguity at all. It had no connection with Roger’s policy or what was to come. Cave had, in a routine debate, wound up for the Government. To anyone outside the Commons, what he said would either be unnoticed or forgotten within days: but on the parliamentary stock exchange, the quotation in Cave had rushed up many points. On a normal evening, there would have been no more to it than that. Roger might have been expected to feel that particular blend of emotions appropriate to an occasion, when a colleague, friend, rival and ally had just had a resplendent professional success.
As we listened that night, this wasn’t all. There was no mystery about the triumph in the evening: but there was considerable mystery about the Cabinet a few hours before. Not that Collingwood or the others would in company have talked about Cabinet proceedings. Nevertheless, Caro and Diana, neither of them over-theoretical or over-delicate, were used to picking up the signs. Of course, they assumed, Roger’s debate next week had been talked about that morning. Of course the Cabinet had taken steps. Caro asked Collingwood a question about the vote next Tuesday, with as much fuss as she would have asked about the prospects of a horse.
‘We’ve been thinking about that, naturally,’ he said. He added gnomically: ‘Not that we’re not always busy. We can’t spend too much time on one thing, you understand.’
He volunteered a piece of information. The proper operations had been set going. A three-line Whip had gone out. Three or four dissidents were being worked on.
There was no side-talk round the table. Everyone was attending. Everyone knew the language. This meant that, in formal terms, the Government was not backing down. This was the
maximum show of pressure on its party. It could do no more.
But also, I was thinking, as I listened to Collingwood’s grating, confident voice, it could do no less. They had gone too far not to bring out the standard procedure now. We were no nearer to knowing what had happened that morning.
Conceivably, Collingwood and the other Ministers could not have told us, even if they had wanted to. Not because of secrecy; not because some had their own different designs: but simply because of the way Cabinet business was done.
Word had come out from the Cabinet room that Lenton was, when he wanted to be, an efficient chairman. More than most recent Prime Ministers, he often let Ministers introduce topics, he encouraged an orderly discussion round the table, and even took a straw-vote at the end. But this didn’t always happen.
Lenton was efficient and managerial. He was more self-effacing than most Prime Ministers. He was also a ruthless politician, and he knew a Prime Minister’s power. This power had increased out of all proportion since Collingwood entered politics. The Prime Minister, they used to say piously, was the first among equals. It might be so, but in that case, the first was a good deal more equal than the others.
It wasn’t a matter of charisma. It wasn’t even a matter of personality. The awe existed, but it was practical awe. The Prime Minister had the jobs in his hand. He could sack anyone, and appoint anyone. Even a modest man like Lenton did just that. Any of us, on the secretariat of committees, who had seen any Prime Minister with his colleagues, noticed that they were frightened of him, whoever he might be.
If he didn’t want a decision in Cabinet, it took a bold man to get one. In office, men tended not to be bold. Lenton, who could be so businesslike, had become a master at talking round a subject, and then leaving it in the air. It looked sloppy: little he cared: it was a useful technique for getting his own way.
Perhaps that, or something like it, had happened that day. None of us except Collingwood knew what the Prime Minister thought of Roger or his policy. My guess, for some time past, had been that he thought it was rational but that it couldn’t be pressed too far. If Roger could placate, or squeeze by, the solid centre of the party, then it would be good for the Government. They might win the next election on it. But if Roger had stirred up too much opposition, if he went beyond his brief and campaigned only for the Getliffe portions of the White Paper, he needn’t be rescued. Roger was expendable. In fact, it was possible that the Prime Minister would not be heartbroken if Roger had to be expended. For that pleasantly modest man had some of the disadvantages of modesty. He might not be over-fond of seeing, at the Cabinet, a colleague much more brilliant than himself, and some years younger.
I fancied that little had been said, either in Cabinet or in meetings tête-à-tête. Maybe the Prime Minister had spoken intimately to Collingwood, but I doubted even that. This kind of politics, which could be the roughest of all, went on without words.
That night, Collingwood, bolt upright on Caro’s right hand, showed no sign of embarrassment, or even of the disfavour one can’t totally suppress towards someone to whom one is doing a bad turn. His quartz eyes might have been blind. So far as he was capable of cordiality, he was giving it, like a moderate-sized tip, to Monty Cave. Cave was the hero of the evening, Cave looked on the short list for promotion. But Collingwood bestowed a smaller, but judicious, cordiality upon Roger. It was hard to believe that he bore him rancour. This was the behaviour, straightforward, not forthcoming, of someone who thought Roger might still survive, and who would within limits be content if he did so.
He was just as straightforward when Caro pressed him about who would speak in the debate. Roger would have the last word, said Collingwood. The First Lord would have to open. ‘That ought to do,’ said Collingwood. To Caro, to me – did Diana know already? – this was the first sharp warning of the night. The First Lord was a light-weight; it sounded as if Roger was not being given a senior Minister to help him out.
‘Are you going to speak, Reggie?’ said Caro, as unabashed as she had ever been in Roger’s cause.
‘Not much in my line,’ said Collingwood, as though inadequacy in speech were a major virtue. He rarely spoke in the House, and then mumbled through a script so execrably that he seemed unable not only to speak, but to read. Yet he managed to communicate to the back-bench committees. Perhaps that was what he meant when he looked up the table at Roger and said, with self-satisfaction, ‘I’ve done something. I’ve done something for you already, you know.’
Roger nodded. But suddenly I noticed, so did others, that his eyes were fixed on Monty Cave. The pretence of heartiness, the poise, the goodwill, had all drained away from Roger’s expression. He was gazing at Cave with intense anxiety, not with liking, not with anything as final as enmity, but with naked concern.
We followed his glance. Cave gave no sign of recognition. The rest of us had finished eating, but Cave had cut himself another slice of cheese. His lips, fat man’s lips, glutton’s lips, child’s lips, were protruding. He looked up, eyes hard in the soft face.
Just for an instant even Caro’s nerve failed. There was a silence. Then her voice rang out, full, unquailing; ‘Are you going to speak, Monty?’
‘The Prime Minister hasn’t asked me to,’ said Cave.
This meant that he couldn’t speak, even if he wanted to. But there was a note in his voice, quiet, harmonious, that rasped the nerves.
Caro could not help asking him: ‘Isn’t there anything else you can do for Roger?’
‘I can’t think of anything. Can you?’
‘How should we handle it then?’ she cried.
Suddenly I was sure that this question had been asked before. At the morning’s Cabinet? It was easy to imagine the table, Lenton droning away with deliberate amiability, not letting the issue emerge, as though there weren’t an issue, as though no policy and no career depended upon it. It was easy to imagine Cave sitting silent. He knew as well as any man alive that Roger needed, not just his acquiescence, but his support. There was he, the bright hope of the party avant-garde, its best debater, maybe a leader. They were waiting for him. He knew what depended on it.
‘How should we handle it, Monty?’
‘I’m afraid it all depends on Roger. He’s got to settle it for himself,’ he said in a soft, modulated, considered tone, along the table to Caro.
It was out now. For years Cave’s attitude to Roger had been veiled. He had disagreed with some of Roger’s policy in detail: but yet, he should have been on the same side. He knew why he was making pretexts for minor disagreements. Much more than most politicians, Cave knew himself. He hadn’t forgiven Roger for holding back over Suez. Far more than that, Roger was a rival, a rival, in ten years’ time, for the first place. By keeping quiet, Cave might be able to see that rival done for.
For once, though, it was possible that the career did not come first. Cave might have concealed from others, but not from himself, that he profoundly envied Roger. In the midst of all else, he was letting the envy rip. Envy, most of all, of Roger’s careless masculine potence: envy, because Roger did not have women leave him: envy of what, with a certain irony, he thought of as Roger’s sturdy, happy marriage. From the sadness of his diffident, frustrated sexual life, he regarded Roger. The contrast made him cruel. As he gave his answer to Caro, his voice was soft with cruelty.
She did not think it worth while pressing further. Soon afterwards the party broke up, although it was only half-past twelve. Yet, even then, as they said goodbye, Roger kept hold of himself. He might suspect, he was capable of suspecting anything by now, that Cave had in secret stimulated the attack upon him. But reproach, anger, scorn – he could afford none of them. Cave would keep his hostility quiet. In public, he would behave like a colleague. Once more, Roger congratulated him on the evening’s feat. As Roger did so, Collingwood patted him on the shoulder.
Below, the cars were driving away. In the drawing-room, Margaret and I were getting up to go. Now that we were alone, Roger looked
at his wife and said, with a curious harsh trustfulness: ‘Well, it couldn’t be much worse, could it?’
‘It might be better,’ said Caro, bitter and honest.
The moment after, up the stairs came a rapid, stumbling tread. Sammikins marched into the room and gave a brassy hail. He was wearing a dinner-jacket, unlike anyone at the supper-party: a carnation shone in his lapel. He had been drinking, hard enough for his eyes to stare with fierce, wild, arrogant happiness. ‘It’s too late,’ said Caro.
‘I shan’t stay long,’ he shouted. ‘I want a drink.’
‘You’ve had enough.’
‘You don’t know what I’ve had.’ He spoke with the glee of one who had come, not only from drinking, but from bed. He laughed at her, and went on in a confident cry: ‘I want to talk to your husband.’
‘I’m here.’ Roger sat forward on the sofa.
‘By God, so you are!’ Sammikins again asked for a drink. This time Caro poured him a whisky, and told him to sit down.
‘I’m not going to. Why should I?’ He gulped his drink and stared down at Roger.
He announced at the top of his voice: ‘It won’t do!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I can’t go along with you next week. It sticks in my throat.’
For an instant I had thought, so had Margaret, that he was denouncing Roger for breaking up the marriage. But he couldn’t have known yet about that. If he had known, his sister had protected him too much – his side of their relation was too defiant – for him to care.
Caro had stood up. She took his arm and said passionately: ‘No, no, you musn’t go back on him now.’
Sammikins shrugged her off. He shouted down at Roger: ‘I shan’t abstain. That’s a boring thing to do. I shall vote against you.’
Roger did not look up. He snapped his fingers against his thigh.
