Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

‘Look, there are some peculiar features about the situation,’ Douglas pressed on. ‘It isn’t only Brodzinski and the wild men who are clamouring for Quaife, you know. There’s your old chum, Francis Getliffe and his friends. Now whatever sleight of hand Quaife goes in for, and I fancy he’s pretty good at that, He’s not going to please both gangs. Tell me, do you know what he’s really going to do?’

I nearly came out into the open. I had one clear and conscious reason for not doing so. I knew that Douglas, like nearly all his colleagues, was deeply conservative. He was too clever not to see the arguments for Roger’s policy, but he would not like them. Yet that was not the reason which kept me quiet. There was another, so worn into me that I did not notice it was there. I had lived too long in affairs; I had been in too many situations like this, where discretion was probably the right, and certainly the easiest, course. Sometimes in the past I had got into trouble, and that had happened when I followed my impulse and blasted discretion away.

So that night it was second nature to say something noncommittal. Douglas gazed at me, his face for an instant more youthful. Then he smiled, and passed the decanter over.

We made something of a night of it. In the taxi going home, Margaret, holding my hand against her cheek, said: ‘You made a mistake, you know.’ She went on to say that he was a man one could trust completely. She did not say, but she meant, that we all four liked each other, and that it was a mistake to deny affection. I was angry with her. I had a sharp sense of injustice, the sense of injustice which is specially sharp when one knows one is in the wrong.

In March, three weeks after the Basset and Clapham combination, there was more news, which none of us could have allowed for. One morning at the office, Douglas Osbaldiston rang me up: Gilbey had been taken ill during the night, and they were not certain that he would live. The story ran round Whitehall all that morning, and reached the clubs at lunch-time. It was announced in the evening papers. Everyone that I met assumed from the start, just as I did myself, that Gilbey was going to die. A friend of mine was busy adding a hundred words about Gilbey’s political achievements to an account of his career; the chief of the obituary department of a morning paper had appealed in distress, saying that he was in ‘an impossible situation’ with his editor, having been ‘caught short about a man like Gilbey’.

As usual, at the prospect of a death, everyone else was a little more alive. There was a tang of excitement in the air. As usual, also, the professional conversations were already beginning: Douglas was invited to have a drink with a cabinet Minister, Rose spent the afternoon with our own Minister, talking about a scheme for redistributing the work between the two departments. I had seen the same in a smaller world twenty years before, when I was living in a college. How many deaths mattered, really mattered, mattered like an illness of one’s own, to any individual man? We pretended they did, out of a kind of biological team spirit; in some ways, it was a valuable hypocrisy. But the real number was smaller than we dared admit.

As I heard men talking about Gilbey during the next day or two, I could not help remembering what Thomas Bevill, that cunning, simple old man, used to tell me was the first rule of politics: Always be on the spot. Never go away. Never be too proud to be present . Perhaps, after all that was only the second rule, and the first was: Keep alive.

Another person seemed to have a similar thought that week. That other person was Lord Gilbey. Four days after the first news, I received a telephone call from his private secretary. The rumours of the illness, came a chanting Etonian voice, were very much exaggerated. It was utter nonsense to suggest that he was dying. All that had happened was a ‘minor cardiac incident’. Lord Gilbey was extremely bored, and would welcome visitors: he very much hoped that I would call upon him at the London Clinic some afternoon the following week.

A similar message, I discovered, had been sent to politicians, senior officers, Douglas Osbaldiston and Hector Rose. Rose commented: ‘Well, we may have to agree that the noble Lord is not precisely a nonpareil as a departmental minister, but we can’t reasonably refuse him marks for spirit, can we?’

When I visited him at the Clinic, no one could have refused him marks, though it was a spirit we were not used to. He was lying flat, absolutely immobile — the sight recalled another invalid I used to visit — like the effigy of a knight on a tomb, a knight who had not gone on crusade, for his legs were thrust straight out. The bed was so high that, as I sat by its side, my face was on a level with his, and he could have whispered. He did not whisper: he enunciated, quietly, but in something like his usual modulated and faintly histrionic tone.

‘This is very civil of you,’ he said. ‘When I’m safely out of here, we must meet somewhere pleasanter. You must let me give you dinner at the In and Out.’ I said I should like it.

‘I ought to be out of here in about a month. It will be another two months, though—’ he added in a minatory manner, as though I had been indulging in over-optimism — ‘before I’m back in the saddle again.’ I replied with something banal, that that wouldn’t be very long.

‘I never thought I was going to die.’ He did not move at all: his cheeks were beautifully shaven, his hair was beautifully trimmed. Looking at the ceiling as he asked a question, he permitted himself one change of expression: his eyes opened into incredulous circles, as he said: ‘Do you know, people have sat in this very room and asked me if I was afraid of death?’

There was the slightest emphasis on the pronoun. He went on: ‘I’ve been close to death too often to be frightened of it now.’

It sounded ham. It was ham. He began talking about his life. He had lost most of his closest friends, his brother officers, ‘on the battle-field’, in the first war. Every year he had been given since, he had counted as a bonus, he said. He had seen more of the battle-field in the second war than most men of his own age. Several times he thought his hour had come. Had he enjoyed the war? I asked. Yes, of course he had enjoyed it. More than anything in life.

I asked him, after all this, what virtues did he really admire?

‘That’s very simple. There’s only one virtue for me, when it comes down to the last things.’

‘What is it, then?’

‘Physical courage. I can forgive anything in a man who has it. I can never respect a man without it.’

This seemed to me at the time, and even more later, the oddest conversation I had ever had with a brave man. I had met others who took their courage as a matter of course, and who were consoling to anyone who did not come up to their standard. Not so Lord Gilbey. He was the only soldier I knew who could refer, with poetic enthusiasm, to the battle-field.

It occurred to me that all his life Lord Gilbey had been in search of glory. Glory in the old pre-Christian sense, glory such as the Myceneans and Norsemen fought for. Put him in with a shipload of Vikings, and he would have endured what they did, and boasted as much. True, he was Catholic-born: he did his religious duties, and that morning, so he had told me, he had been visited by his ‘confessor’ . But it was not salvation that he prayed for, it was glory.

Looking at him prostrate, so handsome, so unlined, I wondered if that was why this attack had knocked him out. It must have been — one didn’t need to be a doctor to see it — graver than we had officially been told. Was it the kind of attack that comes to men who have been taught to suppress their own anxieties? No one could be less introspective; but even he must have known that he had made a mess of his political job, which needed, by a curious irony, a variety of courage that he did not begin to possess. He must certainly have known that he was being criticized, conspired against, threatened with being kicked upstairs. He had shown no sign of it. He had sat among the colleagues who thought least of him, and remained charming, vain, armoured. Probably he didn’t let himself think what their opinion of him was, or what they intended. Was this the price he paid?