Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

‘What about?’ But she did not need to ask.

Over the telephone, I made her give me a promise. I couldn’t say anything, I told her, unless she did. When she had this information, she must do nothing with it, nothing of any kind, until we had agreed.

‘I suppose so,’ she said, in a strong reluctant voice.

We had to find somewhere where we could safely meet. It was the Christmas holidays, and at my flat the children would be home. Hers? No, she said: for once, I thought, not practical.

Briskly, she fixed a rendezvous, in an art gallery off Burlington Gardens. There I found her, alone, in the middle of the inner room, on the single chair. Round the walls were slabs and flashes of colour on canvases of enormous size. It occurred to me, walking to her in the deserted gallery, that we might have been two solitary devotees of Action painting: or a middle-aged official, a smartly-dressed, youngish woman, at a first assignation. As she saw me, her eyes were open, dark, apprehensive, waiting.

‘Well?’ she said.

I wasted no time.

‘Apparently,’ I replied, ‘it’s Hood.’

For an instant, she couldn’t believe that she had heard right, or that the Hood of whom I spoke was the man we both knew slightly, the little, pleasant-faced dispenser of drinks, cherry-cheeked, Pickwickian, who had a job, not one of the top jobs, but two or three down on the commercial side, with one of Lufkin’s rivals. I told her I had met him last at Lufkin’s birthday party, when he had been exhaling with admiration at each utterance that Lufkin made, and raising his hands high as if to applaud a diva .

‘I’ve seen him in the library,’ she repeated several times. She went on: ‘But he can’t have anything against me! I’ve hardly talked to him alone.’

She was searching for something personal, a snub, a pass she hadn’t noticed or had not responded to, but she couldn’t flatter herself; she couldn’t even gain that tiny bit of consolation.

‘Perhaps seeing me there somehow put him on to us. How did he get on to us? Does anyone know?’

I said it didn’t matter. To her, in that moment, it mattered so much that she could think of nothing else. Then she cried: ‘I’ve got to have it out with him.’

‘No.’

‘I’ve got to.’

‘That’s why I made you promise,’ I said, ‘an hour ago.’

She looked at me with violence, with something like hate. She was craving for action as though it were a drug. To be kept from it was intolerable. It was like a denial of the whole self, body and soul, body as well as soul.

Passionately she argued. It could do no harm, she said. It could do no good, I replied: it might be dangerous. Now that we had identified him, some of the menace was gone. If it was simply a personal grudge, which I said again that I didn’t believe, he didn’t count, except for nuisance value. She could live with that.

But if not a personal grudge, was he acting on his own? If not, for whom? Suddenly Ellen went into a brilliant fugue of paranoia. She saw some central intelligence marshalling enemies: enemies watching them, planning, moving in, studying each aspect of Roger’s life and hers. This was one move, Brodzinski’s was another. Who was directing it all?

I couldn’t pacify her, or persuade her that it wasn’t true. I didn’t myself know what was happening. In that empty room, the reds in the pictures pushing out towards us, I began to feel in a web of persecution myself.

She wanted to shout, cry, fly out, make love to Roger, anything. Her colour was high — but, as though in a moment-by-moment change, just as a child changes when in illness, when I looked again I saw she had turned pale.

She went very quiet. The passion had died away. She was afraid. At last I got her to talk again: ‘If this goes on, I don’t know whether I can stand it.’

The truth was, she did not doubt her own fortitude, but his. ‘I don’t know whether he can stand it.’ That was what the words really meant, deeper than she could express. Also, she could not bring herself to say that she had a new fear about why she might lose him. Some of those fears she could confess, as she had done at our first meeting, when she told me that if he lost his political career because of her, he would not forgive her. This was a new fear, which she could not confess, because it seemed a betrayal. But though she worshipped Roger, she knew him. She believed that these persecutions wouldn’t stiffen him, but would drive him back into safety — back to the company of his colleagues, to the shelter of Lord North Street.

She could not stop herself from telling me: ‘It’s being away from him that matters now.’ She meant, not being with him every hour of every day. ‘When he comes to me he enjoys himself, you know. So do I.’ She said it with her usual realism, her lack of fuss. ‘But it’s not enough now.’

She said: ‘I’d give up everything, I tell you, I could live in the back streets, I could live on nothing — I could do anything you like — if only I could be close to him the whole time. I could give up going to bed with him, if I had to, if I could just be near him, night and day, and day after day.’

The bells of St Margaret’s, Westminster, tolled under the low cloud-lid, into the dark noon. It was three days after Christmas, the House was in recess, but the Prime Minister and Collingwood, top-hatted, in morning suits, walked under the awning into the porch. So did three other Ministers, a group of elderly peers, then Roger and Monty Cave. People on the pavement were not paying much attention; top-hats, a handful of bigwigs, some sort of service.

I sat in the middle of the church, where, by some optical illusion, the light seemed brighter than out of doors: over the altar, the stained glass gleamed and glowed, like the glass in the front door at home, when I was a child, or in the door at the Osbaldiston’s. The vigorous, shining faces round me were composed into gravity, but there was no grief. It was part of the ceremonial, ceremonial which they enjoyed, part of the charm of their lives. Collingwood spent some time on his knees. The other Ministers and Members sat in the two front rows, doing what was expected of them, doing what their successors would do for them, when their own memorial services came round.

In fact, the one they were commemorating that morning would not have considered that enough was being done. He had been a modest old man, but he had had the sharpest sense of the fitness of things. The church was only half-full. Not much of a turn out, he would have said. Much worse, he would have been baffled that the service wasn’t being held in the Abbey. ‘Giving me a consolation prize’, he would have said.

This was the memorial service to old Thomas Bevill, who had died before Christmas at the age of eighty-eight. When he was a Minister at the beginning of the war, I had been one of his personal staff. That had been my introduction to the official life, and I knew him better than most of the other mourners did. No one, least of all himself, could have called him a great man; and yet I had learned much from him. In a limited sense of the word, he was a politician, a born politician. He knew which levers to pull and how to pull them, more exactly than anyone I had met in Government, with a skill one meets more often in people working in a smaller world, such as Arthur Brown in my old college.

Bevill was an aristocrat, and it was part of his manner to appear like a bumbling amateur. He was as much an amateur as one of the Irish manipulators of the American Democratic machine. Bevill had a passion for politics. Like most devoted politicians, he was realistic about everything in them — except his own chances. He had been sacked, politely but firmly, in 1943, at the age of seventy-four. Everyone but himself knew it was the end. But he delayed taking his peerage, still hoping that another Conservative government would call him back. New Conservative governments came, but the telephone did not ring. At last, at eighty-four, he accepted his Viscounty, even then hating it, even then going round asking his friends whether, when the PM went, there mightn’t be the chance of one more job. When he was told no, his blue eyes ceased to look mild, and became hot and furious. But he surrendered. For the last four years, Thomas Bevill had entered another avatar, under the style of Lord Grampound.