Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

Early in February, Roger told me that he was spending the weekend at Basset, Diana Skidmore’s house in Hampshire. It was not a coincidence that Margaret and I had just received the same invitation. Diana had an intelligence network of her own, and this meant that the connection between Roger and me was already spotted. So far as Roger went, it meant more. Diana was a good judge of how people’s stock was standing, whatever their profession was: upon stock prices within the government, her judgement was something like infallible. Since Diana had a marked preference for those on the rise, the frequency of a man’s invitation to Basset bore a high correlation to his political progress.

People said that about her, and it was true. But, hearing it before one met her, one felt one had been misled. Driving down the Southampton road, the wiper skirling on the windscreen, the wind battering behind us, Margaret and I were saying that we should be glad to see her. The road was dark, the rain was pelting, we lost our way.

‘I like her really,’ said Margaret, ‘she’s so relaxing.’

I questioned this.

‘One hasn’t got to compete, because one can’t. You wouldn’t know. But I should never buy a special frock to go to Basset in.’

I said it would be nice to get there, in any garments whatsoever. When at last we saw the lights of the Basset lodge, we felt as travellers might have done in a lonelier and less domesticated age, getting a glimpse of light over the empty fields.

It was a feeling that seemed a little fatuous once we had driven up from the lodge through the dark and tossing parkland and stood in the great hall of Basset itself. The façade of the house was eighteenth century, but this enormous hall was as warm as a New York apartment, smelling of flowers, flowers spread out in banks, flowers dominating the great warm space as though this were a wedding-breakfast. It was a welcome, not only of luxury, but of extreme comfort.

We went across the hall, over to the guest-list. The order of precedence had an eloquence of its own. Mr Reginald Collingwood got the star suite: Collingwood was a senior Cabinet Minister. The Viscount and Viscountess Bridgewater got the next best. That designation marked the transformation of an old acquaintance of mine, Horace Timberlake, not a great territorial magnate but an industrial boss, who had since become one of the worthies of the Tory party. We came third, presumably because we had been there a good many times. Then Mr Roger Quaife and Lady Caroline Quaife. Then Mr Montagu Cave. He had become a junior Minister at the same time as Roger. We noticed that, as had happened before, he was alone, without his wife. There were rumours that she was enjoying herself with other men. Then Mrs Henneker. I made a displeased noise and Margaret grinned. Finally Mr Robinson, by himself and unexplained.

Diana’s brisk, commanding voice rang out from a passageway. She came into the hall, kissed us, led us into one of her sitting-rooms, brilliant, hung with Sisleys and Pissarros. She remembered what we drank, gave orders to the butler without asking us, said, ‘Is that right?’ — knowing that it was right — and looked at us with bold, sharp, appraising eyes.

She was a woman in her early fifties, but she had worn well. She was slender, but wiry, not delicate. She had never been beautiful, so I had heard, perhaps not even pretty, and it was possible that her looks, which in middle-age suggested that she had once been lovely, were now at their best. She had a dashing, faintly monkey-like attractiveness, the air of a woman who had always known that she was attractive to men. As she herself was fond of saying, ‘Once a beauty, always a beauty’, by which she didn’t mean that the flesh was permanent, but that the confidence which underlay it was. Her great charm, in fact, was the charm of confidence. She was not conceited, though she liked showing off. She knew, she was too wordly not to know, that some men were frightened away. But for many she had an appeal, and she had not doubted it since she was a child.

She was wearing a sunblaze of diamonds on her left shoulder. I looked a little apologetically at my wife, who had put on my latest present, a peridot brooch. Margaret’s taste did not run to ostentation, but face to face with Diana, she would not have minded a little more.

The curious thing was that the two of them came from the same sort of family. Diana’s father was a barrister, and her relatives, like Margaret’s, were academics, doctors, the upper stratum of professional people. Some of them even penetrated into the high Bloomsbury into which Margaret had been born. Nevertheless, despite her family, Diana had taken it for granted, from her childhood, that she belonged to the smartest of smart worlds. Taking it for granted, she duly got there, with remarkable speed. Before she was twenty-one, she had married Chauncey Skidmore, and one of the bigger American fortunes. Seeing her in middle-age, one couldn’t help thinking that it was she, not the Skidmores, not her friends in the international circuit, who had been made for just that world.

It seemed like the triumph of an adventuress: but it didn’t seem so to her, and it didn’t seem so when one was close to her. She was self-willed and strong-willed; she was unusually shrewd: but she had the brilliance and yes, the sweetness, of one who had enjoyed everything that happened to her. When she married Chauncey Skidmore, she loved him utterly. She had been widowed for over a year, and she still mourned him.

At dinner that night, there were — although the Quaifes were not arriving till the next day — eighteen at table. Diana had a habit of commanding extra guests from people to whom she let houses on the estate, or from masters at Winchester close by. I looked up at the ceiling, painted by some eighteenth-century Venetian now forgotten. The chatter had gone up several decibels, so that one could hear only in lulls the rain slashing against the windows at one’s back. Confidentially, the butler filled my glass: the four footmen were going round soft-footed. For an instant it seemed to me bizarre that all this was still going on. It was, however, fair to say that it did not seem bizarre to others present. A spirited conversation was proceeding about what, when Diana’s son inherited the house, would need doing to the structure: or whether she ought to start on it, bit by bit. In her ringing voice, Diana turned to Collingwood on her right: ‘Reggie, what do you think I ought to do?’ Collingwood did not usually utter unless spoken to. He replied: ‘I should leave it for him to worry about.’ That seemed to show the elements of realism. It occurred to me that, a quarter of a century before, I had sat in rich houses, listening to my friends, the heirs, assuming that before we were middle-aged, such houses would exist no more. Well, that hadn’t happened. Now Diana’s friends were talking as though it never would happen. Perhaps they had some excuse.

I was watching Collingwood. I had met him before, but only in a group. He struck me as the most puzzling of political figures — puzzling, because politics seemed the last career for him to choose.

He was a handsome man, lucky both in his bone-structure and his colouring. His skin tone was fresh and glowing, and he had eyes like blue quartz, as full of colour, as opaque. For his chosen career, however, he had what one might have thought a handicap; for he found speech, either in public or private, abnormally difficult. As a public speaker he was not only diffident and dull, but he gave the impression that, just because he disliked doing it so much, he was going to persevere. In private he was not in the least diffident, but still the words would not come. He could not, or did not care to, make any kind of conversation. It seemed a singular piece of negative equipment for a politician.