Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

‘Who is it?’ she cried. ‘Is it some madman?’

‘Do you think,’ I said slowly, ‘it sounds like that?’

‘Is it just someone who hates us? Or one of us?’

‘I almost wish it were.’

‘You mean—?’

‘It looks to me,’ I said, ‘more rational than that.’

‘It’s something to do with Roger’s politics?’ She added, her face flushed with fighting anger, ‘I was afraid of that. By God, this is becoming a dirty game!’

I was glad that she was angry, not just beaten down. I said I wanted to take the letters away. I had acquaintances in Security, I explained. Their discretion was absolute. They were good at this kind of operation. If anyone could find out who this man was, or who was behind him, they could.

Ellen, an active woman, was soothed by the prospect of action. Bright-eyed, she made me have another drink before I left. She was talking almost happily, more happily than she had done all the evening, when she said out of the blue, a frown clouding her face: ‘I suppose you know her?’

All of a sudden she got up from the sofa, turned her back on me, rearranged some flowers — as though she wanted to talk about Caro but wasn’t able to accept the pain.

‘Yes, I know her.’

She gazed at me: ‘I was going to ask you what she was like.’ She paused. ‘Never mind.’

At the lift-door, when we said goodbye, she looked at me, so I thought, with trust. But her expression had gone back to that which had greeted me, diffident, severe.

Basset in October, a week before the new session: the leaves falling on the drive, the smoke from the lodge chimney unmoving in the still air, the burnished sunset, the lights streaming from the house, the drinks waiting in the flower-packed hall. It might have been something out of an eclogue, specially designed to illustrate how lucky these lives were, or as an advertisement composed in order to increase the rate of political recruitment.

Even to an insider, it all looked so safe.

It all looked so safe at dinner. Collingwood, silent and marmoreal, sat on Diana’s right: Roger, promoted to her left hand, looked as composed as Collingwood, as much a fixture. Caro, in high and handsome spirits, was flashing signals to him and Diana across the table. Caro’s neighbour, a member of the Opposition shadow cabinet, teased her as though he fitted as comfortably as anyone there, which in fact he did. He was a smooth, handsome man called Burnett, a neighbour of Diana’s whom she had called in for dinner. Young Arthur Plimpton was sitting between my wife and a very pretty girl, Hermione Fox, a relative of Caro’s. It didn’t take much skill to deduce that this was one of Diana’s counter-measures against Penelope Getliffe. Arthur, looking both bold and shifty, was in England for a week, intent upon not drawing too much of my attention and Margaret’s.

But there was at least one person who was putting on a public face. Monty Cave’s wife had at last left him for good; to anyone but himself it seemed a release, but not to him. The morning he received the final note, he had gone to his department and done his work. That was three days ago. And now he was sitting at the dinner table, his clever, fat, subtle face giving away nothing except interest, polite, receptive — as though it were absurd to think that a man so disciplined could suffer much, could ever have wished for death.

He was a man of abnormal control, on the outside. Mrs Henneker did not know what had happened to him.

When Margaret and I came into the house out of the Virgilian evening, Mrs Henneker had been lurking in the hall. I was just getting comfortable, we were having our first chat with Diana, when Mrs Henneker installed herself at my side. She was waiting for the other two to start talking. The instant they did so, she said, with her sparkling, dense, confident look: ‘I’ve got something to show you!’

Yes, it was my retribution. She had finished a draft of her ‘Life,’ as she kept calling it, the biography of her husband. There was no escape. I had to explain to Margaret, who gave a snort of laughter, then, composing her face, told me sternly how fortunate I was to be in on the beginning of a masterpiece. I had to follow Mrs Henneker into the library. Would I prefer her to read the manuscript aloud to me? I thought not. She looked disappointed. She took a chair very close to mine, watching my face with inflexible attention as I turned over the pages. To my consternation, it was a good deal better than I had expected. When she wrote, she didn’t fuss, she just wrote. That I might have reckoned on: what I hadn’t, was that she and her husband had adored each other. She did not find this in the least surprising, and as she wrote, some of it came through.

This was a real love-story, I tried to tell her. The valuable things in the book were there. So she ought to play down the injustices she believed him to have suffered, her own estimate of what ought to have happened to him. I didn’t say, but I thought I might have to, that she wasn’t being over-wise in telling us that as a fighting commander he was in the class of Nelson, as a naval thinker not far behind Mahan, as a moral influence comparable with Einstein — if she wanted us to believe that as a husband, he was as good as Robert Browning.

I had spoken gently, or at least, I had intended to. Mrs Henneker brooded. She stared at me. It was near dinner time, I said, and we had left ourselves only a quarter of an hour to dress. In a stately fashion, Mrs Henneker inclined her head. She had not thanked me for my suggestions, much less commented upon them.

At the dinner table, she was still brooding. She was too much preoccupied to speak to me. When Arthur, accomplished with elderly matrons, took time off to be polite to her, he did not get much further. At last, after the fish, she burst out, not to either of us, but to the table at large: ‘I suppose I must be old-fashioned!’

She had spoken so loudly, so furiously, that everyone attended.

In her briskest tone, Diana said: ‘What is it, Kate?’

‘I believe in happy marriages. I was happy with my husband and I don’t mind anyone knowing it. But my neighbour—’ she meant me, she was speaking with unconcealed distaste — ‘tells me that I mustn’t say so.’

For an instant I was put out. This was what came of giving literary advice. I should never persuade her, nor presumably anyone else, that I had said the exact opposite.

She was put out too. She was indifferent to anyone round her. She said, ‘Doesn’t anyone nowadays like being married, except me?’

The table was quiet. Roger knew about Monty’s state: so did Caro. So did Margaret. I could not prevent my glance deviating towards him. Nor, in that quiet and undisciplined instant, could others. He was sitting with his eyes open and meaningless, his mouth also open: he looked more childlike than clever, foolish, a bit of a clown.

It was Caro who cracked the silence. Her colour had risen. She called out, just like someone offering a bet: ‘Damn it, most of us do our best, don’t we?’ She was teasing Margaret and me, each of whom had been married twice. She laughed at Arthur and Hermione Fox. They had plenty of time ahead, she said, they probably wouldn’t do any better than we had all done.

Arthur gave a creaking laugh. If Caro had been his own age, she would have known exactly how much he fought shy of getting married; she would have had it out of him. He wouldn’t have cared. For some, the flash of sympathy between them was a relief.

Except that, for some moments yet, Monty Cave sat with his clown’s face. Then his expression, and those of the rest of us, became disciplined again.

With one exception, that Margaret and I speculated about. At the head of her own table, Diana was crying. Even when she gave us orders about how long to stay over the port, the tears returned. When we were alone in our bedroom, Margaret and I talked about it. Yes, she had behaved much as usual after dinner; she still sounded like a curious mixture of Becky Sharp and a good regimental officer keeping us all on our toes. We both knew that her marriage to Skidmore was supposed to have been an abnormally happy one. Was that why she had cried?