Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

When we moved into the dining-room, Lufkin sat on Roger’s right, neat-headed, skull-faced, appearing younger than most of the company, although he was the oldest man present. He was also the most successful man present, in the terms of that world. He was a nonconformist minister’s son who had made a big fortune. But it wasn’t his money which made him so important to Roger: it was partly the concentration of industrial power he had in his hands, partly because he was the most unusual of tycoons. He had taken a peerage from a Labour government, but he was so powerful, so indifferent, that his fellow tycoons had by now to forgive him even that. Able, technically far-sighted, bleak, he sat by Roger’s side, like one who is above the necessity to talk. If I knew him, there would be only one subject on which he would discover the necessity to talk: he would not be above probing the Minister’s intention about the contract. When he knew, which would not be tonight, that the contract might be cancelled, he would then discover the necessity to talk about which alternative contract the Minister was proposing to give him in exchange. I was certain that Roger was prepared for these bargains months ahead. With Lufkin placated, the other tycoons in the industry would have lost their hardest voice. This was one of the oldest tactics of all.

Lufkin’s birthday party, the great table, the flowers, the glass, the miscellaneous crowd — looked a singular festivity. Lufkin himself, who was spare and ascetic, ate almost nothing — the caviare passed him, the pâté passed him. He allowed himself two strong whiskys, which he drank along with his fish, and let the rest of the meal go by. Meanwhile, as I heard, sitting opposite them, Roger was getting to work with flattery.

To an outsider, it would have sounded gross, the flattery squeezed out like toothpaste. My own fear was, not that Roger was overdoing it, but that he was not doing it enough. Lufkin was one of the ablest men, and certainly one of the most effective, that I had known. He was tough, shrewd, curiously imaginative, and for his own purposes a first-rate judge of men. But none of that, none of it at all, conflicted with a vanity so overwhelming that no one quite believed it. In days past, when he had paid me as a legal consultant, I used to hear his own staff chanting his praises like so many cherubim; yet even they, he felt, missed important points in his character and achievements. I remembered hearing spinster-aunts of mine telling me in my childhood that great men never cared for flattery. Well, Lufkin would have been a shock to my aunts. It would have been even more of a shock for them to discover that among my most gifted acquaintances, he liked flattery more than the others — but not all that much more.

Lufkin showed no pleasure as he listened to the eulogies. Occasionally he corrected Roger on points of fact — such as when Roger suggested, in stretching his interests from the chemical industry to aircraft, that he had taken a risk. Lufkin commented: ‘It wasn’t a risk if you knew what you were doing.’

‘It must have taken nerve as well as judgement,’ said Roger.

‘That’s as maybe,’ Lufkin replied. Perhaps from the set of his small, handsome head, one might have told that he was not displeased.

Once or twice they were exchanging serious questions. ‘Don’t touch it. You’ll be throwing good money after bad,’ said Lufkin, as though he couldn’t be wrong. Roger knew, as I did, that he was not often wrong.

I could not guess how they were feeling about each other. I hoped that Lufkin, whose vanity did not fog his cold eye for ability, could scarcely miss Roger’s. I was encouraged when, after Roger had proposed the guest of honour’s health, Lufkin got up to reply. He began to tell the story of his life. I had heard it a good many times, and it was always a sign of favour.

He was a very bad speaker, following a very good one. He had no sense of an audience, while Roger’s tone had been just right. None of that worried Lufkin. He stood, erect and bony as a young man, as confident of his oratory as Winston Churchill in one of his less diffident moods. He began by a few bleak words about governments in general, and ministers in particular. He would have been a richer man, he informed us, if he had never listened to any Minister. Then, with his characteristic gift of getting the moral edge both ways, he added that money had never mattered to him. He just wanted to do his duty, and he was glad Roger Quaife had understood him.

There was nothing oblique or hypocritical about Lufkin. Like a supreme man of action, he believed in what he said and the obvious goodness of his intention. He proceeded to illustrate this by his own story. It was always the same. It bore a curious family resemblance to Mein Kampf . It consisted of about six highly abstract anecdotes, most of which had happened, so far as they had a historical origin at all, before he was twenty. One consisted of the young Lufkin being taken by the family doctor — it was not clear why — to see a factory working at half-strength. ‘I decided there and then that when I had factories of my own, they were going to be full. Or they weren’t going to be open at all. Period.’ Another, which I specially liked, told of a slightly older Lufkin being warned by some anonymous wiseacre — ‘Lufkin, you’ll fail , because you won’t remember that the best is the enemy of the good.’ Lufkin’s skull-face looked impassive, and he added ominously: ‘Well, I had to make that chap an allowance in his old age.’ The story of Lufkin’s life always ended in his early twenties. It did so now, which meant that he had reached a date when many of the dinner-party were scarcely born. That did not concern him. Abruptly he sat down, with a grim smile of satisfaction, and folded his arms on his chest.

There was great sycophantic applause, Hood clapping his hands higher than the hands of the rest, his face radiant, as if he had been swept away by the performance of a world-famous soprano, and thought a standing ovation would be in order. Roger patted Lufkin on the back. Yet, I was becoming pretty sure, neither of them underrated the other. Roger had seen too much of powerful men to be put off by the grotesque aspect of Lufkin. It looked as though they might reach a working agreement, and if so, Roger had scored his first tactical success.

A week after Lufkin’s birthday, I was standing in a crowded drawing-room at the American Ambassador’s house, deafened by the party’s surge and swell. Margaret and I had been exchanging a word or two with the wife of J C Smith, Collingwood’s nephew. I had not met her before. She was a short, slender woman, dark, attractive in a muted way, not very talkative. I wondered incuriously why I hadn’t seen her husband’s name in Hansard for so long. She passed away from us. Someone else called out to Margaret, and in the huddle I found myself against David Rubin.

Soon I was shaking my fingers to restore the circulation while he looked at me with sombre-eyed Schadenfreude . I had asked for whisky with plenty of ice, and had got it: the glass was so thin that my hand had become numbed with cold. Just then, one of the embassy counsellors came towards Rubin, looking for him, not drifting in the party’s stream. Although he knew me well, his manner was constrained. After a few cordialities, he apologized and took Rubin aside.

For an instant I was left alone in the ruck of the party. Over the heads of the people nearby I could see the flaxen hair of Arthur Plimpton, the young American who was going round with Francis Getliffe’s daughter. I caught his eye and beckoned him: but before he could make his way through the crowd, Rubin and the diplomat were back.