Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

This time her smile was brilliant.

‘That’s easier said than done, you know.’

I tried to take the edge off both of us. I asked what she had been doing that day. She told me that she had been out as usual at her job. She seemed to be working in a reference library. We mentioned the names of acquaintances, among them Lord Lufkin. I said that I had once worked for him. ‘I’m sure that was good for you,’ she said with a faint flash of mischief. Strained as she was, her spirits did not take much to revive them. She did not forget about my comfort, either. The glass was refilled, the cigarette-box was open. She broke out: ‘I am not fretting about him and me. You do believe that, don’t you?’

She went on: ‘I’m happy about us. I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life. And I think he’s happy too. It sounds too conceited to live, but I think he’s happy too.’

She had no conceit at all, I was thinking, far too little for her own good.

She had spoken so directly that I could do the same. I asked, where was her husband, what had happened to her marriage? She shook her head.

‘I’ve got to tell you,’ she said. ‘It sounds ugly. If I heard it about someone else, I should write her off. I know I should.’ She said that, beside Roger, only her husband’s parents knew the truth about him. It was to be kept a dead secret. Then she said, flat and hard: ‘He’s in a mental home.’ It wasn’t certain that he would get better, she said. His constituency had been told that he was ill and might not contest his seat at the next election.

‘It’s been coming on for years. Yes, and that hasn’t stopped me. I saw the chance to be happy, and I took it.’ She looked at me with an expression honest, guilty and stern. ‘I’m not going to make excuses. But you might believe this. It sounds disloyal, but if he hadn’t been getting unbalanced I should have left him long ago. I tried to look after him. If it hadn’t been for that, I should have left him long before Roger came along.’ She gave a sharp-eyed smile, not merciful to herself. ‘There’s something wrong with a woman who falls for a man she can’t endure and then for one she can’t marry, isn’t there?’

‘It could be bad luck.’

‘It’s not all bad luck.’ Then she said, without pretence: ‘But, do you know, just now I can’t feel that there’s much wrong with me. You can understand that, can’t you?’

She laughed out loud. One couldn’t doubt her warmth, her ardour, her capacity for happiness. And yet I felt that this was not a life for which she was made. Plenty of women I knew in London made the best of this sort of bachelor life in flats like this — though hers was brighter, more expensive, than most of theirs. Plenty of women came back from offices as she did, looked after their little nests, waited for their men. Some of them could take it: light come, light go. Some even felt their blood run hotter because they had to keep a secret, because the curtains were drawn and they were listening — alone — for the snap of the lift-door. Looking at Ellen, I was sure that, though she would bear it in secrecy if she couldn’t get him any other way, she was paying a price, maybe higher than she knew.

I asked how long had their affair been going on.

‘Three years,’ she said.

That set me back. Three years. All the time I had known him well. For an instant I was piqued, at having noticed nothing.

There was a silence. Her eyes, dark blue, painfully honest, were studying me. She said: ‘I want to ask you something. Very seriously.’

‘Yes?’ I replied.

‘Ought I to get out of it?’

I hesitated.

‘Is that a fair question?’ I asked.

‘Isn’t it?’

I said: ‘But could you get out of it?’

Her eyes stayed steady. She did not reply. After a moment she said: ‘I couldn’t do him harm. We’ve been good for each other. You’d expect him to be good for me, of course, but somehow it isn’t all one-sided. I don’t know why, but sometimes I think I’ve been good for him.’ She was speaking simply, tentatively: then she broke out: ‘Anyway, it would be the end for me if I let him go.’

Her voice had risen; tears had come. With a rough, schoolgirlish gesture, she brushed her cheeks with the back of her fingers. Then she sniffled, and made herself go on in a braver tone. ‘But I couldn’t do him harm, you know that, don’t you?’

‘I think I do.’

‘I believe in what he’s doing. You believe in it, isn’t that true?’ She said she wasn’t ‘political’, but she was shrewd. She knew where his position was weak.

She gave a sharp smile: ‘I’m not fooling you, am I? I’m not the sort of person to make gestures. Naturally I couldn’t do him harm. I couldn’t bear to damage his career, just because it’s him. But I couldn’t bear to damage him — because I’m pretty selfish. If he suffered any sort of public harm because of him and me, he’d never really forgive me. Do you think he would?’

I noticed, not for the first time, her curious trick of throwing questions at me, questions about herself which I could not have enough knowledge to answer. In another woman, it would have seemed like an appeal for attention — ‘Look at me! — an opening gambit to intimacy, to flirtation. But she was not thinking of me at all as a man, only as someone who might help her. This was her method, not precisely of confiding, so much as of briefing me, so that if the chance came I could be some use.

I said something non-committal.

‘No,’ she said, ‘it would be the end.’

In an even, realistic, almost sarcastic tone, she added: ‘So I get the rough end of the stick however I play it.’

I wanted to comfort her. I told her the only use I could be was practical. What was happening now? Had she been to a lawyer? What else had she done?

Up till then, she had been too apprehensive to get to the facts. And yet, was that really so? She was apprehensive, all right, but she had spirit and courage. In theory, she had asked me there to talk about the facts. After the years of silence, though, it was a release to have a confidant. Even for her, who had so little opinion of herself — perhaps most of all for her — it was a luxury to boast a little.

The facts did not tell me much. Yes, she had been to a lawyer. He had got her telephone calls intercepted: once or twice the voice had broken through. Always from call boxes, nothing to identify it. The same voice? Yes. What sort? Not quite out of the top drawer, said Ellen, just as Mrs Henneker would have said it, as only an Englishwoman would have said it. Rough? Oh, no. Like someone fairly refined, from the outer suburbs. Obscene? Not in the least. Just saying that her liaison with Roger was known, telling her the evenings when he visited her, and asking her to warn Roger to be careful.

Since the check on telephone calls, she had received a couple of anonymous letters. That was why, she said when it was nearly time for me to leave, she had begged me to call that night. Yes, she had shown them to the lawyer. Now she spread them out on the table, beside the tumblers.

I had a phobia about anonymous letters. I had been exposed to them myself. I could not prevent my nerve-ends tingling, from the packed, paranoid handwriting, the psychic smell, the sense of madness whirling in a vacuum, of malice one could never meet in the flesh, of hatred pulsating in lonely rooms. But these letters were not of the usual kind. They were written in a bold and normal script on clean quarto paper. They were polite and business-like. They said that Roger had been known to visit her between five and seven in the evening, on the dates set down. (‘Correct?’ I asked. ‘Quite correct,’ said Ellen.) The writer had documentary proof of their relations (‘Possible?’ ‘I’m afraid we’ve written letters.’) If Roger continued in the public eye, this information would, with regret, have to be made known. Just that, and no more.