Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

Next morning, meeting me in the hall, she told me that she was too tired to go out with the guns. It was the first time I had known her energies flag. She was still enough herself to give me instructions. I didn’t shoot, I might be bored, but I was to keep Monty Cave company in her place. ‘He’s not to be left by himself just now,’ she said. It sounded matter-of-fact and kind. Actually it was kind, but not entirely matter-of-fact. Diana was providing against the remotest chance of a suicide.

Soon the shooting parties were setting out, with me among them. Reggie Collingwood, Caro and Roger, walked along together through the golden fields. So far as Collingwood had any casual pleasures, shooting was the favourite one. He approved of Roger for sharing it: while Roger, who had taken on the pastimes of Caro’s family when he married her, lolloped tweedily along between them, looking as natural as an Edwardian statesman.

Monty and I veered to the left. When I spoke to him, he answered me, quite sweet-temperedly, but that was all. By the side of the other party, we were funereal. Then quick steps came padding up behind us. I looked round. It was Arthur Plimpton, dressed no more fittingly than I was, but carrying a gun. I did not understand why he had sacrificed a day with a comely young woman, but I was glad to see him. It was possible that he had come out of good nature. He was no fool, and he couldn’t have been in Basset for twenty-four hours without picking up the story of Monty’s wife.

‘Do you like hunting, sir?’ he said cheerfully to Monty.

‘No, I never hunt,’ said Monty, who had just brought down two birds with a right and left.

‘If I may say so, sir, you’re doing pretty well for a beginner.’ Arthur knew as well as I did that the English did not refer to this form of avicide as ‘hunting’. He had used the word out of mischief. He turned out to be a competent shot, about as good as Collingwood or Roger. Of the four of them, Monty was far and away the best. He might be a clever, sad, fat man, whom women were not drawn to: but his eyes and limbs worked like a machine.

At about one o’clock, we all gathered on a mound, eating out of the picnic-baskets. The morning mist had cleared, the light was mellow, clear as Constable’s. Caro stretched herself on the turf with the sensuous virtue of one who has taken exercise; she took a swig from a brandy flask and passed it to Roger. The party looked like a tableau out of someone’s attempt to present a simpler age.

Collingwood gazed at the shining countryside. ‘It’s a nice day,’ he said.

When, in the dying afternoon, we were sitting in the library up at the house, having just got back for tea, Collingwood felt the phrase could not be much improved. He and Roger and Cave sat in their tweeds round Diana, who was pouring out. ‘It’s been a nice day,’ said Collingwood.

Though it would have taken a great expert in Collingwoodian dialogue to detect this, he was not so patriarchally content as he had been at mid-day in the sunshine. During the afternoon, the difference between the bags had mounted. By the time we walked home, Collingwood and Roger had had the worst of the day. Collingwood was inclined to blame it on to Roger.

‘You seem to have been in good form, Cave,’ said Collingwood in the library, with manly frankness, with oblique reproach.

Monty Cave muttered politely, but without interest.

Arthur joined in: ‘He was good all day,’ and began talking to Cave himself. Arthur was suggesting a two-handed shoot, just the two of them, first thing the next morning.

Collingwood was surveying them. He approved of attempts to ‘take his mind off it’. He approved of young men making efforts with their elders. Most of all, he approved of able, rich young men. Drinking whisky instead of tea, he stretched out stockinged legs and gave a well-disposed sigh. Turning to his hostess, he remarked: ‘Diana, I must say, it’s been a nice day.’

When the dispatch-boxes arrived, both Diana and he made their routine grumbles, just as they had been doing since the twenties, when he got his first office, and she was starting to run a political house. As Margaret and I were strolling in the courtyard, in the bluish twilight, a government car drove up. A secretary descended, carrying one of the boxes, red and oblong, which we were all used to. We followed him in: this one was for Monty Cave. Within minutes, two other secretaries, carrying two identical boxes, walked through the great hall of Basset, on their way to Collingwood and Roger Quaife.

In the library, Diana, revived, her face less drawn, went through the minuet of grumbles, while she had the satisfaction of seeing three boxes being opened on three pairs of knickerbockered knees.

‘I’d better put dinner off till nine?’ she said.

‘I’m afraid it looks like it,’ replied Collingwood. His tone was grave and ill-used: yet he couldn’t, any more than Diana, conceal a kind of pleasure, the pleasure, secretive but shining, that they got from being at the centre of things.

Diana had the drill laid on. Dinner to be late, drinks to be sent up at once to the Minister’s rooms. Soon Collingwood was lumbering up the wide staircase, with the step of a man who has to bear too much. The other two followed. I wasn’t wanted, and it was some time before I went up to my room. There, as I dressed, Margaret was baiting me through the door, hilarious at the stately ritual downstairs. Did all men in power behave like this? Why? Because otherwise, I replied, they wouldn’t reach power, enjoy it, or keep it.

Just then, there was a knock on the door. It was one of the menservants, bearing an envelope, addressed to me in Collingwood’s bold Edwardian hand. Inside was a sheet of Basset writing-paper, covered by more of Collingwood’s elephantine writing. It said: ‘I should be grateful if you could spare us a few minutes of your time. It would be a convenience if you could come without delay.’

I took in the note to Margaret without a word, and left her laughing.

Inside Collingwood’s bedroom, which was the biggest in the house, the boxes gaped open on a table, and the great four-poster bed was strewn with papers. All three men were still wearing their outdoor suits, though Collingwood had taken off his jacket. He was sitting on the bed, and the other two had drawn up chairs nearby, each holding a glass in his hand.

‘Oh, there you are,’ said Collingwood. ‘We want to get something fixed up.’

Roger explained that they had received a Cabinet paper. He said to Collingwood: ‘I assume Eliot can see it? He’ll get it in his own office on Monday.’

Collingwood nodded.

I ran through it. It was only a couple of pages, typed in triple spacing on one of the large-letter machines, as though specially designed for longsighted elderly men. It came from the Minister of Labour. It said that if a change in weapons policy was at any time contemplated, the Minister wished the labour position to be established from the beginning. That is, a sudden stop, even in a single isolated project, such as—’ would mean unemployment for seven thousand men, of whom three thousand were specialists, and difficult to assimilate. This would be embarrassing for the Minister. Any more fundamental change in weapons policy would produce large pockets of unemployment. Unless the changes were spread over several years, they would be unacceptable.

It sounded official, cautious, reasonable. But everyone in the room knew that it meant more. It was a sighting-shot: and it was a sighting-shot, as it were, by proxy. It was not really this Minister who was testing Roger’s intentions. It was a set of other interests, who were still keeping quiet. Service groups? Big firms? None of us knew, but all of us were guessing.