Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

Roger was regarding him with hard eyes.

‘Would you take the responsibility, if I gave you your head and left Brodzinski outside?’

‘I suppose so,’ Walter said.

Roger said: ‘You needn’t worry. I’m going to over-rule you.’

A week later, at the same place, at the same time, Michael Brodzinski was making his first appearance on the committee. The others were standing round, before the meeting, when a secretary came to tell me that Brodzinski had arrived. I went out to welcome him, and, before we had shaken hands, just from the joyful recognition on his face, I was certain that he had received some account of the first discussion, that he knew I was partly responsible for getting him there, and so gave me his trust.

I led him into Roger’s room. Approaching the knot of scientists, who were still standing, Brodzinski looked very powerful physically. He was much the most heavily muscled, more so than Walter, who was a strong man.

Once more I was certain that he had heard precisely how he had been discussed. ‘Good afternoon, Sir Laurence,’ he said to Astill, with great politeness and qualified trust. To Francis Getliffe the politeness was still great, the trust more qualified. To Walter the politeness became extreme, the politeness of an enemy.

Roger called out a greeting. It was a hearty, banal bit of cordiality, something like how grateful Roger was to have his help. At once Brodzinski left Walter, and listened as though he were receiving a citation. With his splendid, passionate, luminous eyes, he was looking at Roger as more than a supporter, as something like a saviour.

Twice that month, I was invited out by Caro’s brother. It seemed a little taxing, but on the second occasion, when my wife was staying with her sister, I said yes. It seemed more taxing still, face to face with Sammikins — a name I found increasingly unsuitable for this loud-voiced, untameable man — in one of the military clubs.

He had given me dinner, and a good one. Then, sitting in the library, under the oil-paintings of generals of the Crimean war, the Mutiny, fierce-looking generals of the late-Victorian peace, we had gone on to the port. I was lying back relaxed in my chair. Opposite me, Sammikins sat straight up, wild and active as a hare. He was trying to persuade me to bet.

It might have been because he couldn’t resist it. Earlier that evening he had been inviting me to a race-meeting. Like his sister, he owned race-horses, and he thought it was unnatural, he thought I was holding something back, when I professed boredom in the presence of those romantic animals. But if I wouldn’t bet on horses, surely I would on something else? He kept making suggestions, with cheerful, manic, loud-voiced glee. It might have been just the addiction. Or it might have been that he was provoked by anyone like me. Here was I, fifteen years older, my manner restrained by the side of his, (which didn’t differentiate me too sharply from most of the human race). Did he want to prove that we weren’t all that unlike?

I took him on. I said that, if we were going to bet, he had one advantage; he was, at any rate potentially, richer than I was. I also had an advantage: I understood the nature of odds, and I doubted if he did. If I were ready to bet, it was going to be on something which gave us each precisely an even chance.

‘Done,’ he said.

Finally we settled that Sammikins should order more glasses of port, and afterwards not touch the bell again. Then, for the period of the next half-hour, we would mark down the number of times the waiter’s bell was rung. He would bet on an odd number, I on even. How much? he said.

‘Ten pounds,’ I replied.

Sammikins put his watch on the table between us. We agreed on the starting and finishing time, and watched the second hand go round. As it came up to the figure twelve, Sammikins cried: ‘They’re off!’

On a sheet of club writing-paper, I kept the score. There were only half a dozen men in the library, one of whom kept sniffing in an irritated fashion at Sammikins’ barks of laughter. The only likely orders appeared to be a party of three senior officers. Immediately after the start, they rang for the waiter, and I heard them asking for large whiskys all round. With decent luck, I was reckoning, they ought to manage another.

Watching them with bold, excited eyes, Sammikins, who knew two of them, discussed their characters. I was embarrassed in case his voice should carry. Like his sister’s, his judgements were simple and direct. He had much more insight than staider men. He told stories about those two in the last war. He liked talking about the military life. Why hadn’t he stayed in the army? I asked him. Yes, he had loved it, he said. With his fierce, restless look, he added that he couldn’t have stood being a peace-time officer. It occurred to me that, in different times, he might have been happy as a soldier of fortune.

No, he couldn’t have stood being a peace-time officer, he said: any more than he could stand the thought of keeping up the estate when his father died.

‘I suppose,’ said Sammikins, with a laugh loud even for him, ‘that I shall have to dodder about in the Lords. How would you like that? Eh?’

He meant, that he would detest it. He was speaking, as usual, the naked truth. Though it didn’t seem to fit him, he had all his family’s passion, which Caro shared, for politics. No one could possibly have less of a political temperament than Sammikins had: yet he loved it all. He loved the House of Commons, it didn’t matter how many enemies he made there. He was talking about his party’s leaders, with the same devastating simplicity with which he had talked about the generals, but with his eyes popping with excitement. He didn’t think any better of the politicians, but they entranced him more.

One of the generals pressed the button by the fireplace, and the waiter came in. Sixteen minutes had passed. They ordered another round. I make a stroke on the writing paper and smiled.

‘Soaking,’ said Sammikins, who was not a specially abstemious man, with disapproval.

No movement from anyone else in the room. The man whom Sammikins’ laugh made wretched was reading a leather-bound volume, another was writing a letter, another gazing critically at a glossy magazine.

‘They want stirring up,’ said Sammikins, in a reproving tone. But he was surveying the room with a gambler’s euphoria. He began speaking of the last appointment of a junior minister — who was Roger’s Parliamentary Under-secretary, occupying the job which Roger had filled under Gilbey.

‘He’s no good,’ said Sammikins. The man’s name was Leverett-Smith. He was spoken of as a safe appointment, which to Sammikins meant that there was no merit in it.

‘He’s rich,’ I said.

‘No, he’s pretty well-off, that’s all.’

It occurred to me that Sammikins did not have an indifference which, in my provincial youth, we should have expected of him. Romantically, we used to talk about the aristocratic contempt for money. Sammikins was rough on ordinary bourgeois affluence: but he had no contempt at all for money, when, as with Diana Skidmore, there was enough of it.

‘He’s no good,’ cried Sammikins. ‘He’s just a boring little lawyer on the make. He doesn’t want to do anything, blast him, he doesn’t even want the power, he’s just pushing on, simply to puff himself up.’

I suspected that Leverett-Smith had been put in as a counterweight to Roger, who scarcely knew him and had not been consulted. I said that such men, who didn’t threaten anyone and who were in politics for the sake of the charade, (for I believed Sammikins was right there) often went a long way.

‘So do clothes-moths,’ said Sammikins, ‘that’s what he is — a damned industrious clothes-moth. We’ve got too many of them, and they’ll do us in.’