Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

They had just started on what was becoming more and more a sacramental subject in such a drawing-room — schools for the children, or more exactly, how to get them in. One young wife, proud both of maternity and her educational acumen, with a son born three months before, announced that within an hour of his birth he had been ‘put down’ not only for Eton, but for his first boarding school — ‘And we’d have put him down for Balliol too,’ she went on, ‘only they won’t let you do that, nowadays.’

What had Caro arranged for her children? What was Margaret doing for ours? Across the room I watched David Rubin listening, with his beautiful, careful, considerate courtesy, to plans for buying places thirteen years ahead for children he had never seen, in a system which in his heart he thought fantastic. He just let it slip once that, though he was only forty-one, his eldest son was a sophomore at Harvard. Otherwise he listened, grave and attentive, and I felt a desire to give some instruction to Mrs Henneker, who was sitting beside me. I told her that American manners were the best in the world.

‘What’s that?’ she cried.

‘Russian manners are very good,’ I added, as an afterthought. ‘Ours are some of the worst.’

It was pleasing to have startled Mrs Henneker. It was true, I said, getting immersed in comparative sociology, that English lower-class manners were rather good, appreciably better than American; but once you approached and passed the mid-point of society, theirs got steadily better and ours got steadily worse. American professional or upper-class manners were out of comparison better. I proceeded to speculate as to why this should be.

I had a feeling that Mrs Henneker did not find this speculation profitable.

The men came pelting up the stairs, Roger in the rear. The division was over, the majority up to par. From then on, the party did not get going again and it was not later than half-past eleven when Margaret and I took David Rubin away. The taxi throbbed along the Embankment towards Chelsea, where he was staying. He and Margaret were talking about the evening, but as I gazed out of the window I did not join in much. I let myself drift into a kind of daydream.

When we had said good night to David, Margaret took my hand.

‘What are you thinking about?’ she said.

I couldn’t tell her. I was just staring out at the comfortable, familiar town. The Chelsea back-streets, which I used to know, the lights of Fulham Road: Kensington squares: the stretch of Queen’s Gate up towards the Park. All higgledy-piggledy, leafy, not pretty, nearer the ground than the other capital cities. I was not exactly remembering, although much had happened to me there; but I had a sense, not sharp, of joys hidden about the place, of love, of marriage, of miseries and elations, of coming out into the night air. The talk after dinner had not come back to my mind; it was one of many; we were used to them. And yet, I felt vulnerable, as if soft with tenderness towards the town itself, although in cold blood I should not have said that I liked it overmuch.

The dark road across the Park, the sheen of the Serpentine, the livid lamps of Bayswater Road — I was full of the kind of emotion which one cannot hide from oneself, and yet which is so unrespectable that one wants to deny it, as when a foreigner says a few words in praise of one’s country, and, after a lifetime’s training in detachment, one finds oneself on the edge of tears.

The election went according to plan, or rather, according to the plan of Roger’s friends. Their party came back with a majority of sixty; as prophesied by Mrs Henneker at that dinner-party in Lord North Street, Roger duly got office.

As soon as the appointment was announced, my civil service acquaintances started speculating. The rumour went around Whitehall that he was an ambitious man. It was not a malicious rumour; it was curiously impersonal, curiously certain, carried by people who had never met him, building up his official personality for good and all.

One summer afternoon, not long after the election, as I sat in his office with my chief, Sir Hector Rose — St James’s Park lay green beneath his windows and the sunlight edged across the desk — I was being politely cross-questioned. I had worked under him for sixteen years. We trusted each other as colleagues, and yet we were not much easier in each other’s company than we had been at the beginning. No, I did not know Roger Quaife well, I said — which, at the time, was true. I had a feeling, without much to support it, that he wasn’t a simple character.

Rose was not impressed by psychological guesses. He was occupied with something more businesslike. He assumed that Quaife was, as they said, ambitious. Rose did not find that matter for condemnation. But this job which Quaife had taken had been the end of other ambitious men. That was a genuine point. If he had had any choice, there must be something wrong with his judgement.

‘Which, of course, my dear Lewis,’ said Hector Rose, ‘suggests rather strongly that he wasn’t given any choice. In which case, some of our masters may conceivably not wish him all the good in the world. Fortunately, it’s not for us to inquire into these remarkable and no doubt well-intentioned calculations. He’s said to be a good chap. Which will be at least a temporary relief, so far as this department is concerned.’

The appointment had more than a conversational interest for Hector Rose. Since the war, what in our jargon we called ‘the coordination of defence’ had been split up. The greater part had gone to a new Ministry. It was this Ministry of which Roger had just been appointed Parliamentary Secretary. In the process, Rose had lost a slice of his responsibilities and powers. Very unfairly, I could not help admitting. When I first met him, he had been the youngest Permanent Secretary in the service. Now he was only three years from retirement, having been in the same rank, and at the same job, longer than any of his colleagues. They had given him the Grand Cross of the Bath, the sort of decoration he and his friends prized, but which no one else noticed. He still worked with the precision of a computer. Sometimes his politeness, so elaborate, which used to be as tireless as his competence, showed thin at the edges now. He continued to look strong, heavy-shouldered, thick; but his youthfulness, which had lasted into middle age, had vanished quite. His hair had whitened, there was a heavy line across his forehead. How deeply was he disappointed? To me, at least, he did not give so much as a hint. In his relations with the new super-department, of which he might reasonably have expected to be the permanent head, he did his duty, and a good deal more than his duty.

The new department was the civil servants’ despair. It was true what Rose had said: it had become a good place to send an enemy to. Not that the civil servants had any quarrel with the Government about general policy. Rose and his colleagues were conservatives almost to a man, and they had been as pleased about the election results as the Quaifes’ circle themselves.

The point was, the new department, like anything connected with modern war, spent money, but did not, in administrative terms, have anything to show for it. Rose and the other administrators had a feeling, the most disagreeable they could imagine, that things were slipping out of their control. No Minister had been any good. The present incumbent, Roger’s boss, Lord Gilbey, was the worst of any. Civil servants were used to Ministers who had to be persuaded or bullied into decisions. But they were at a loss when they came against one who, with extreme cordiality, would neither make a decision nor leave it to them.

I had seen something of this imbroglio at first hand. At some points, the business of our department interweaved with theirs, and often Rose needed an emissary. It had to be an emissary of some authority, and he cast me for the job. There were bits of the work that, because I had been doing them so long, I knew better than anyone else. I also had a faint moral advantage. I had made it clear that I wanted to get out of Whitehall and, perversely, this increased my usefulness. Or if not my usefulness, at least the attention they paid to me, rather like the superstitious veneration with which healthy people listen to someone known to be not long for this earth.