Charles Snow: Corridors of Power

Prompt to the last stroke of eight, we were back in Lord North Street. A maid took us upstairs to the drawing-room, bright with chandeliers, drink-trays, the dinner-shirts of the two men already standing there, the necklace of Caro Quaife glittering as she took our hands.

‘I expect you know everyone, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Of course you do!’

She was tall and pretty, in her middle thirties, just beginning, though she was still elegant, to thicken a little through the waist. Her voice was warm, full, and often disconcertingly loud. She gave out a sense of natural and exuberant happiness — as though it were within the power of everyone around her to be as happy as she was.

Other people had followed us up. They all knew one another, establishing Caro’s principle of mutual intimacy: Christian names flew about, so that, when the principle broke down, I didn’t know whom I was being introduced to. There was, in fact, only one man whom Margaret and I had met as often as the Quaifes. That was Monty Cave, who, according to the political talent spotters, was another coming star. He had a plump face, lemur-like eyes, a quiet, subtle, modulated voice.

As for the others, there appeared to be three couples, all the men Tory back-benchers, none of them older than forty, with wives to match, young, strapping matrons such as one saw in the Kensington streets at four in the afternoon, collecting their children from fashionable pre-preparatory schools. There was also an elderly woman called Mrs Henneker.

As we sat down and drank, Roger Quaife not yet present, they were all talking politics, but politics which any outsider — even one as near to it as I was — needed a glossary to follow. This was House of Commons gossip, as esoteric as theatre-gossip, as continuously enthralling to them as theatre-gossip was to actors. Who was in favour, who wasn’t. Who was going to finish up the debate next week. How Archie pulled a fast one with that question.

There was going to be an election soon, we all knew: this was the spring of 1955. They were swapping promises to speak for one another: one was bragging how two senior Ministers were ‘in the bag’ to speak for him. Roger was safe, someone said, he’d give a hand. What had the PM got in mind for Roger ‘when we come back?’ Monty Cave asked Caro. She shook her head, but she was pleased, and I thought she was touching wood.

The other men spoke of Roger as though he were the only one of them whose success was coming soon, or as though he were different from themselves. The gossip went on. The euphoria grew. Then the maid came in and announced, ‘Lady Caroline, Dr Rubin is here.’

It was not that Roger Quaife had a title — but his wife was the daughter of an earl, one of a rich aristocratic family who in the nineteenth century had been Whig grandees.

I looked round, as Caro stood up with cries of welcome. I was taken aback. Yes, it was the David Rubin I knew very well, the American physicist. He came in, very quiet and guarded, pearl cuff-links in his sleeves, his dinner jacket newer and more exquisite than any man’s there. He was, so my scientific friends said, one of the most distinguished of scientists: but unlike the rest of them, he was also something of a dandy.

Caro Quaife took him to my wife’s side. By this time the drawing-room was filling up, and Caro threw a cushion on the floor and sat by me. ‘You must be used to women sitting at your feet, mustn’t you?’ she said. She couldn’t understand, she went on, why Roger, the old devil, was so late. She spoke of him with the cheerfulness, the lack of anxiety, of a happy marriage. When she spoke to me directly, it was in a manner at once high-spirited, deferential and aggressive, eager to be impressed, used to speaking out and not thinking twice.

‘Hungry,’ said Mrs Henneker, in a trumpeting tone.

She had a fleshy, bulbous nose and eyes which stared out, a fine bright blue, with a disconcerting fixity.

‘Sorry. Have another drink,’ said Caro, without any sign of caring. In fact, it was not yet half-past eight, but it seemed late for a dinner-party in the ’fifties.

The conversation had switched. One of the members’ wives had started talking about a friend of theirs who was having ‘woman trouble’. Just for once, they had got away from the House of Commons. This friend was a banker: he had ‘got it badly’: his wife was worried.

‘What’s the woman like?’ Caro gave a loud, crowing chuckle.

I observed David Rubin’s sad face show signs of animation. He preferred this topic to the previous one.

‘Oh, madly glamorous.’

‘In that case,’ cried Caro, ‘I don’t believe Elsa’ (the wife) ‘has much to worry about. It isn’t the glamorous ones you ought to watch out for when the old man’s showing signs of absent-mindedness. It’s that little quiet grey mouse in the corner, who nobody’s ever noticed. If she’s got her claws into him, then the best thing is to call it a day and wonder how you’re going to explain it to the children.’

The other wives were laughing with her. She was not a beauty, I thought, she was too hearty for that. Just then her eyes lit up, and she scrambled off her cushion.

‘Here he is!’ she said. ‘And about time too!’

As Roger walked through the room from an inner door, he looked clumsy, a little comic, quite unselfconscious. He was a big man, heavy and strong; but neither his face nor his body seemed all of a piece. His head was smallish, for a man of his bulk, and well-shaped, his eyes grey and bright, pulled down a little at the outer corners. His nose was flattened at the bridge, his lower lip receded. It was not a handsome face, but it was pleasant. His colleagues in the room, except for Cave, were neat, organized, officer-like; by their side he was shambling and uncoordinated. When I first met him, he had brought back my impression of Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace . Yet his manner, quite unlike Pierre’s, was briskly competent.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said to his wife, ‘someone caught me on the phone—’

It was, it appeared, one of his constituents. He said it simply, as if it were a matter of tactics that she would understand.

He had considerable physical presence, though it was the opposite of an actor’s presence. He shook hands with Rubin and me. All he did and said was easy and direct.

For a moment he and his fellow members had edged away, and on the periphery of the group Mrs Henneker laid a substantial, ringed hand on my arm.

‘Office,’ she said.

I found her conversation hard to cope with.

‘What?’ I replied.

‘That young man is going to get office.’ By which she meant that he would be made a Minister if his party were returned again.

‘Will he?’ I said.

She asked, ‘Are you an idiot?’

She asked it with a dense, confident twinkle, as though I should love her for being rude.

‘I shouldn’t have thought so,’ I said.

‘I meant it in the Greek sense, Sir Leonard,’ she said, and then from a heavy aside, discovered from Caro that my name was Lewis Eliot. ‘Yes, I meant it in the Greek sense,’ she said, quite unabashed. ‘Not interested in politics, y’know.’

She was so proud of her scrap of learning. I wondered how often she had trotted it out, knowing as much Greek as she did Eskimo. There was something childlike about her self-satisfaction. She was sure that she was a privileged soul. She was sure that no one could think otherwise.

‘I am rather interested in politics,’ I said.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Mrs Henneker triumphantly.

I tried to hush her, for I wanted to listen to Roger. His tone was different from that of his friends. I could not place his accent. But it was nothing like that of Eton and the Brigade; any of the others would have known, and Mrs Henneker might have said, that he did not come ‘out of the top drawer’. In fact, his father had been a design engineer, solid provincial middle-class. He wasn’t young, despite Mrs Henneker’s adjective. He was only five years younger than I was, which made him forty-five.