Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

‘They’ve got their own techniques. You’ll have to be patient, won’t you?’

‘Am I good at being patient?’

Roger said, ‘You’re having the worst of this. You’ve got to put up with it.’ He said it sharply, with absolute confidence.

She asked me, was there anything else she could do? Had she just got to sit tight?

‘It’s pretty hard, you know,’ she said.

Roger said: ‘Yes, I know it is.’

Soon afterwards, he looked at his watch and said he would have to leave in another half-hour. On my way home, I thought of them a little, free together, by themselves.

It needed no one to instruct Roger about gossip. He picked it up in the air: or more exactly, for there was nothing supernatural about it, he read it in the expressions of acquaintances, without a word spoken, as he walked about the House, his clubs, the offices, Downing Street. We all knew, in those November days, that it was boiling up: some of it sheer random gossip — malicious, mischievous, warm with human relish — some politically pointed.

I had not yet heard a whisper about Ellen, or any other woman. The PQ seemed to have fallen dead. One reason why he was being talked about was that he was getting precisely the support he could least afford. The Fishmongers’ Hall speech, or bits of it, or glosses upon it, was passing round. It had made news. It was drawing the kind of publicity which, because no one understood it, the theatre people called ‘word of mouth’. Roger had, within two or three weeks, become a favourite, or at any rate a hope, of liberal opinion. Liberal opinion? To some on the outside, certainly to the Marxists, it didn’t mean much. It might use different language from the Telegraph , Lord Lufkin’s colleagues, or the Conservative back-benchers, but if ever there was a fighting-point, it would come down on the same side. Maybe. But this, inconveniently for Roger, was not how it appeared to the Telegraph , Lord Lufkin’s colleagues, or the Conservative back-benchers. To them, the New Statesman and the Observer looked like Lenin’s paper, Iskra , in one of its more revolutionary phases. If Roger got praise in such quarters, he was a man to be watched.

There was praise from other quarters, more dangerous still. Irregulars on the opposition benches had begun to quote him: not the official spokesmen, who had their own troubles and who wanted to quieten the argument down, but the disarmers, the pacifists, the idealists. They were not an organized group; in numbers they might be less than thirty, but they were articulate and unconstrained. When I read one of their speeches, in which Roger got an approving word, I thought with acrimony, save us from our friends.

Roger knew all this. He did not speak of it to me; he held back any confidence about what he feared, or hoped, or planned to do. Once he talked of Ellen; and another time, in the bar of a club, he brought me a tankard of beer and suddenly said: ‘You’re not religious, are you?’

He knew the answer. No, I said, I was an unbeliever.

‘Curious,’ he said. His face looked puzzled, uncalculating, simple. ‘I should have thought you would have been.’

He gulped at his own tankard. ‘You know, I can’t imagine getting on without it.’

‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘there are plenty of people who like the Church, even though they don’t really believe. I think I should still like the Church, if I didn’t believe. But I do.’

I asked: just what did he believe?

‘I think,’ he said, ‘almost everything I learned as a child. I believe in God In Heaven, I believe in an after-life. It’s no use telling me that Heaven isn’t the place I used to think it was. I know that as well as they do. But I can’t help believing.’

He went on talking about faith. His tone was gentle, like a man blundering on. He would have liked me to say, Yes, that’s how I feel. He was utterly sincere: no one could confide like that and lie. And yet, half suspiciously, at the back of my mind I was thinking, it is possible for a man to confide, quite genuinely, one thing, because he wants to conceal another.

At the back of my mind I was thinking, this wasn’t a device, it came to him by nature. Yet it would be just as effective in keeping me away from his next moves.

Up to now, I had shut up the doubt which Hector Rose had not spoken, but had, with acerbity, implied. I knew Roger and Rose didn’t, and wouldn’t have wanted to. Rose would have been totally uninterested in his purpose, his aspirations, in his faith. Rose judged men as functional creatures, and there he was often, more often than I cared to remember, dead right. He was asking one question about Roger, and one alone: What — when it came to the point — would he do?

Roger told me nothing. In the next week, I received only one message from him. And that was an invitation to a ‘bachelor supper’ in Lord North Street, the night after the Lancaster House reception.

At Lancaster House, Roger was present, walking for a few minutes arm-in-arm with the Prime Minister, up and down the carpet, affable under the chandeliers. That did not distinguish him from other Ministers, or even from Osbaldiston or Rose. The Prime Minister had time for all, and was ready to walk arm-in-arm with anyone, affable, under chandeliers. It was the kind of reception, I thought as I stood on the stairs, that might have happened in much the same form and with much the same faces, a hundred years before, except that then, it would probably have been held in the Prime Minister’s own house, and that nowadays, so far as I remembered accounts of Victorian political parties, there was a good deal more to drink.

The occasion was the visit of some western Foreign Minister. The politicians and their wives were there, the Civil Servants and their wives. The politicians’ wives were more expensively dressed than the Civil Servants’, and in general more spectacular. On the other hand, the Civil Servants themselves were more spectacular than the politicians, so that a stranger might have thought them a more splendiferous race. With their white ties, they were wearing their crosses, medals and sashes, and the figure of Hector Rose, usually subfusc, shone and sparkled, more ornamented, more be-sashed, than that of anyone in the room.

The room itself was filling up, so was the staircase. Margaret was talking to the Osbaldistons. On my way to join them, I was stopped by Diana Skidmore. I admired her dress, her jewellery; star-sapphires. Underneath it all, she looked strained and pale. But she could assume high spirits; or else, they were as much part of her as the bones of her monkey face. She kept giving glances, smiling, recognizing acquaintances as they passed.

She gazed at the Prime Minister, now walking up and down with Monty Cave. ‘He’s doing it very nicely, isn’t he?’ she said. She spoke of the Prime Minister rather like a headmaster discussing the performance of the best thirteen-year-old in a gymnastic display. Then she asked me: ‘Where’s Margaret?’ I pointed her out, and began to take Diana towards her. Though Diana knew far more people at the reception than I did, she had not met the Osbaldistons.

She said she would like to, vivacious and party-bright. Before we had gone three steps, she stopped: ‘No. I don’t want to meet anyone else. I’ve met quite enough.’

For an instant, I wondered if I had heard right. It wasn’t like her breakdown at her own dinner-table. Her eyes were bright with will, not tears.

We were in the middle of the party. Yes, since that night at Basset, her backbone had stiffened again. She was miserable when we talked of marriage. She wasn’t used to being miserable without doing something about it. She couldn’t go on living alone in that great house. She wanted someone to talk to her. The pupillages she went through, the times when, like an adoring girl, she changed the colour of her thoughts — they weren’t enough. Love-affairs wouldn’t be enough. She wanted someone all the time.