Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

‘It doesn’t make it any more agreeable,’ he said stiffly, ‘but this has nothing to do with suggestions from our allies. They have asked questions about Getliffe, but nothing about you. No, you seem to have some enemies at home. I take it that isn’t exactly a surprise to you?’

‘Do you expect me to stand for it?’

‘I’ve got to say to you what I said about Getliffe.’

After a while, during which we sat mute opposite each other, he said, strained, cold, hostile: ‘I think I ought to make it as smooth for you as I can. If you don’t care to submit to this business, then I will make an excuse, which shouldn’t be beyond human ingenuity, and someone they’re less interested in can take over the defence work. Not of course’ — with an effort, punctilio returned — ‘that anyone else could be so valuable to us, my dear Lewis.’

‘Do you seriously think I could take that offer?’

‘I made it in good faith.’

‘You knew I couldn’t possibly accept?’

Rose had become as angry as I was. ‘Do you really believe that I haven’t resisted this business for weeks?’

‘But it has still happened.’

Rose spoke with deliberate fairness, with deliberate reasonableness: ‘I repeat, I’m sorry. As a matter of historical fact, I have been arguing your case and Getliffe’s most of the autumn. But yesterday they gave me no option. I also repeat, I want to do anything in the department’s power to make it smooth for you. If I were you, I think I should feel very much as you do. Please forget about telephoning Getliffe. It was inconsiderate of me to ask you that, when I had to talk about something which was even more unpleasant for you. And, incidentally, for me. There’s no need to decide anything tonight. Let me know tomorrow what you would like done.’

He had spoken with fairness. But I was a reproach, sitting there. All he wanted was for me to get out of his sight. As for me, I could not manage even the grace of his fairness.

‘No, there’s no choice,’ I said roughly. ‘You may as well tell these people to go ahead.’

That night I did my duty, and rang up Francis in Cambridge. I was angry with him, just as Rose had been with me, because I had to persuade him. I was angry because he was so stiff-necked and hard to persuade. I was angry with Margaret, because of love and her own high-principled temper she was saying what I wanted to say: that Francis and I should each of us resign and leave them to it.

But I felt something else, which I had not felt before, or not since I was a very young man — the intense, mescalin-vivid sense of being watched. When I picked up the receiver and asked for the Cambridge number, I was listening (was the line tapped?) to sounds on the aural threshold. The clicks and tinkles seemed to me as though they had been picked up by an amplifier.

It was the same for days to come. I remembered a refugee, years before, telling me one of the prices of exile. One had to think about actions which, before one left home, were as unconscious as dreaming. Now I knew what that meant. I found myself looking round before I took a taxi. Though the light was dim, the trees of the Park appeared to be preternaturally sharp; I felt I could have counted each twig. The top-light of another taxi shone like a beacon.

Early in the week, Ellen telephoned: she had that morning received another anonymous letter: she and Roger wanted to talk to me together. Once more the world outside seemed over-brilliant. As we talked of where to meet, we sounded reasonable, to each other and to ourselves, but we weren’t quite. We had lost our sense of fact, just as people do when they are hypnotized by secrets: just as my brother and I had once done, when, in the war, worried by what we knew, we had gone into the middle of Hyde Park so as not to be overheard.

In the end — it was like being young and poor again, with nowhere to take one’s young woman — we dropped in, one by one, into a pub on the Embankment. When I arrived, the lounge was empty and I sat at a table in the corner. Soon Roger joined me. I noticed that, despite all the photographs, no one behind the bar recognized him. Ellen came in: I went and greeted her, and brought her to the table.

She gave Roger her severe introductory smile, but her skin was glowing and the whites of her eyes as clear as a child’s. She looked as though strain and suspicion were good for her, as though energy was pumping through her. Of the three of us, it was Roger who seemed physically subdued. Yet, as I read the new letter Ellen had brought out of her bag, he was watching me with eyes as alert as hers.

The letter was in the same handwriting, but the words had run close together. The tone was threatening (‘you haven’t much longer to make him change his mind’) and, for the first time, obscene. It was a curious kind of obscenity — as though the writer, setting out for a hard-baked business purpose — had gone off the track, had become as obsessed as someone scrawling in a public lavatory. The obsession slithered on, insinuating, sadistic, glassy-eyed.

I didn’t want to go on reading, and pushed the letter away over the glass table-top.

‘Well?’ cried Ellen.

Roger sank back in his chair. Like me, he was shocked, and at the same time didn’t like being shocked. In a deliberately off-hand tone he said: ‘One thing is fairly clear. He doesn’t like us very much.’

‘I’m not going to stand it,’ she said.

‘What else can we do?’ Roger asked her, in a placating voice.

‘I’m going to do something.’ She appealed to me — no, announced to me: ‘Don’t you agree, this is the time to do something?’

In the past minute, I had realized that for the first time they were split. That was why I had been asked there that night. She wanted me on her side: and Roger, as he sat back in his chair, giving sensible, cautious reasons why they had to go on enduring this in silence, believed that I had to be on his.

He had spoken with caution, but without much authority. The words came slowly. As for this man, there was no sign that the threats would come to anything. Let it alone. Pretend they were unmoved. It was a nuisance they could live with.

‘That’s easy for you,’ said Ellen.

He stared at her. It was nearly always wrong, he said quietly, to take steps when you couldn’t see the end.

‘This man can be stopped,’ she insisted.

‘You can’t be sure.’

‘We can go to the police,’ she said sharply. ‘They’ll protect you. Do you know that he could get six months for this?’

‘I dare say so.’ Roger looked at her with a touch of exasperation, as if she were a child being obtuse about her sums. ‘But I am not in a position to appear in a witness-box as Mr X. One has to be singularly anonymous for that particular activity. You must see that. I can’t be Mr X.’

She was silent for a minute. ‘No. Of course you can’t.’

He put his hand on hers for a second.

Then she flared up again. ‘But that isn’t the only way. As soon as I knew who he was, I knew he could be stopped. He’ll crumple up. This is my business, and I’m going to do it.’ Her eyes were wide open with passion. She fixed her glance on me.

‘What do you think, Lewis?’

After a pause I replied, turning to Roger: ‘It’s a slight risk. But I fancy it’s probably time to take the offensive.’

I said it with every appearance of reason, of deliberate consideration, and perhaps as persuasively as I ever said anything.

Roger had been talking sense. Ellen was as gifted with sense as he was: but she was made for action, her judgement was always likely to leave her if she couldn’t act. I ought to have known that. Maybe, with half my mind, I did know. But my own judgement had gone, for reasons more complex than hers, and much more culpable. As I grew older, I had learned patience. The influence I had on people like Roger was partly because they thought me a tough and enduring man; but this wasn’t as natural as it seemed, nor so much all of a piece. I had been born spontaneous, excessively so, emotional, malleable. The stoical public face had become real enough, but the earlier nature went on underneath, and when the patience and control snapped, was still, in my middle-age, capable of breaking through. This was dangerous for me, and for those round me, since fits of temper, or spontaneous affection, or sheer whims, filtered through the public screen, and sounded as disciplined, as reliable, as some part of my character had now become, and as I should have liked the rest of it to be. It didn’t happen often, because I was on my guard: but occasionally it happened still, as on that evening. No one but Margaret knew it, but for days, since the dialogue with Rose, my temper had been smouldering. Like Ellen, I had gone into the pub craving for action. Unlike her, though, I didn’t sound as though I needed it. The craving came out through layers of patience, mixed with all the qualifications and devices of discipline, as though it were the reasonable, considered recommendation of a wise and prudent man.