Charles Snow - Homecomings

I nodded yes, we were all right.

‘That’s one thing settled then.’

‘As long,’ I said, ‘as you’re not going to be too disappointed—’

‘I don’t expect too much.’

‘You mustn’t expect anything,’ I said.

‘But he is a gifted man, isn’t he?’ cried Sheila, her face softer and less worn.

‘I think he is,’ I said.

‘I might be able to get him going again,’ she said.

She went on, wistfully and yet with something like bravado: ‘That would be something . If I haven’t done anything else, that would be something, wouldn’t it?’

ON the track of someone she might serve, Sheila worked as fast as a confidence trickster. It must have been that same week, probably the very next day, that R S Robinson came to dine. Certainly I arrived straight from Lufkin’s office; for long afterwards the juxtaposition struck me as ironic.

I had spent all day in Lufkin’s suite. To begin, he had asked me to be available in the early morning and had then kept me waiting, which was not unusual, for a couple of hours. Outside his office, in an ante-room so thickly carpeted that men walked through it with no noise at all, I passed the time with the member of Lufkin’s entourage whom I knew best, a man of my own age called Gilbert Cooke. He was a kind of personal assistant to Lufkin, in theory giving advice on export problems, just as in theory I gave advice on legal ones; but in practice Lufkin used us both as utility men. The company was one of the smaller oil-businesses, but the smallness was relative, and in 1938, the fourth year of Lufkin’s chairmanship, he had already a turnover of thirty million pounds. He had also his own legal staff, and when he offered me a consultant’s job he did not want another lawyer; but it suited him to pick up young men like me and Cooke, keep them on call, and then listen to them.

In the ante-room, Gilbert Cooke pointed to the office door.

‘He’s running behind time,’ he said, as though Lufkin were a train. Cooke was fleshy, powerfully muscled, with a high-coloured Corinthian face and hot brown eyes; he gave at once an impression of intimacy, kindness and considerable weight of nature. In fact, he spoke as though we were more intimate than we actually were.

‘How is Sheila just now?’ he asked me while he waited, as though he knew the whole history.

I said she was well, but he was not put off.

‘Are you absolutely sure she’s been to the right doctor?’ he said.

I said she had not been near one for some time.

‘Who did she go to?’

He was intrusive, pressing, but kind: it was hard to remember that he had only been inside our house twice. He had taken me often enough to his clubs, we had talked politics and games and Lufkin’s business, but I had not given him a confidence.

At last we were shown into Lufkin’s office: in that suite, as one moved from room to room, the air wafted against the skin like warm breath.

Lufkin sat up straight in a hard chair. He scarcely greeted us: he was inconsiderate, but also informal and without pomp. He was off-hand in personal relations because he was so bad at them, and yet, perversely, they gave him pleasure.

‘You know the point?’ he said.

Yes, we had both been briefed.

‘What do I do?’

It sounded as though we should have finished in ten minutes. In actuality, it took all day, and nothing we said mattered much. Lufkin sat there, indifferent to time, straight, bony, skull-faced. He was only ten years older than Cooke or me; his skin was dark, and his business enemies put it about that he looked Jewish and that his name was Jewish, while as a matter of fact his father was a nonconformist parson in East Anglia.

The point before us was simple enough. He had been asked whether he wanted to buy another distributing business; should he? From the beginning of the talk, throughout the long, smoky, central-heated, unromantic hours, two things stood out. First, this was a point on which neither Cooke’s judgement nor mine was worth much — certainly no more than that of any moderately intelligent man round the office. Second, I was sure that, whatever we or anyone else argued, Lufkin had already made up his mind to buy.

Yet all day Cooke behaved like a professional no-man. He became argumentative and rude, oddly so for a middle-rank employee in the presence of a tycoon. The tone of the discussion was harsh and on the whole impersonal; the arguments were prosaic. Cooke was loquacious, much more than Lufkin or me: he went on pestering, not flattering: as I listened, I knew that he was closer to Lufkin than most people in the firm, and wondered why.

Most of the men Lufkin bought had a bit of professional success behind them; but Cooke had nothing to show but social connexions, except for his own curious kind of personal force.

Once, in the middle of the afternoon, after we had lunched on sandwiches and coffee, Cooke switched from his factual line. Suddenly, staring at Lufkin with his full eyes, he said: ‘I’m afraid you’re liable to overstretch yourself.’

‘Maybe.’ Lufkin seemed willing to consider the idea.

‘I mean, with any empire like yours ’ — their eyes met, and Lufkin smiled bleakly — ‘there comes a time when you’ve got to draw in your horns, or else—’

‘What do you say to that, Eliot?’

I said that the firm was short of men, and that the able men were spread thin. He ought to acquire a dozen future managers before he bought much more.

‘I agree that,’ he said. For half-an-hour he got down to detail, and then asked: ‘That make you feel any better, Cooke?’

‘No, it seems easy to you, but it’s not easy.’

‘What seems easy?’

‘Biting off more than anyone can chew.’

Underneath his remote, off-hand manner, Lufkin was obscurely gratified. But he had a knack of pushing away his own gratification, and we returned to figures again.

The sky outside the office windows darkened, the air seemed more than ever hot. Nothing was settled. There had scarcely been a flight of fancy all day. No one would have guessed, though it was the truth, that Lufkin was a man of remarkable imagination; nor that this marathon talk was his technique of coming to the point of action; nor that Gilbert Cooke was swelling with pride, ardent but humble, at being in on anything so big.

When at last we parted, it was nearly seven and still nothing was settled. The whole range of facts about the new business had been re-sorted, except the purchase price, which Lufkin had only mentioned once, and then obliquely. ‘There’s always money for a good business,’ he had added indifferently, and passed on. And yet that purchase price gave a tang to the repetitive, headachey hours, the only tang I was left with on the way to Chelsea in the cold taxi, for it could not have been less than a million pounds.

When I reached home, I met a different kind of business method. R S Robinson was already there in the drawing-room; he was standing plumply by the fire, soft silver-shining hair venerable above smooth baby skin. He looked comfortable, he looked sedate; behind his spectacles, his eyes glinted from Sheila to me, sharp with merriness and suspicion. He made no secret that he wanted Sheila’s backing for a sum as great as he could persuade out of her, as great as a thousand pounds.

‘I’ve not come here just for the sake of your intelligent conversation,’ he told her. His voice was fluent, modulated, flattering, high-spirited.

‘I mustn’t come on false pretences, must I?’ he said. ‘I warn you, I’m a dangerous man to let into your house.’

A thousand was the maximum which he let himself imagine; he did not hope to get away with so much, although he was not too delicate to mention it. He set himself to persuade her, and incidentally me as a possible influence, with all the art of which he was so proud.