Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

Yes, I said, we were all being shot at. There were great advantages in absorbing the attacks, in showing passive strength. Made enemies worried about what one had in reserve. But one mustn’t stay passive forever. If so, they ceased to worry, and treated one like a punchball. The whole art was, to stay silent, to select one’s time, and then pick them off. Perhaps the time had come, or was coming. This attack on Ellen — there the man was wide-open. If he had any connection with others, which we were no nearer knowing, it would interest them to hear that he had been coped with; anyway, this was the thing to do. Roger gave up, with only a token struggle. Except in little things, as Caro had once told me, he was the hardest of men to influence. In all our connection, I had scarcely once persuaded him: certainly not over-persuaded him. Sitting there, round the little table, it did not occur to me that I was over-persuading him. I felt as reasonable as I sounded. Almost at once, the three of us were talking, not of whether anything should be done, but of what.

Later on, when it was all over, I wondered what responsibility I had to accept. Perhaps I was being easy on myself — but had it made much difference, what I said that night? Surely it had been Ellen’s will, or more precisely, her desire, which had been decisive? For once, Roger had wanted to slump into acquiescence and let her have her way. He gave the impression, utterly unlike him, of being absent — not from strain so much as from a kind of comfort. He did not even speak much. When he did speak, he said, as though it were one of his most pointed reflections, ‘I must say, it will make things smoother, when we don’t hear from him again.’

Ellen hissed at him like a cat.

‘By God, that’s helpful!’ she cried. She broke into a grin, a lop-sided grin, furious and loving. As for him, he would be absent until he could take her in his arms.

The truth was, I now accepted, that the love was not one-sided. He loved her in return. It wasn’t a passing fancy, such as a man of Roger’s age and egotism might often have. He admired her, just as he admired Caro, and oddly enough for some of the same reasons: for these women were not so unlike as they seemed. Ellen was as upright as Caro, and as honourable: in her way, she was as worldly, though she had more grievances about the world. Perhaps she was deeper, nearer to the nerve of life. I believed Roger thought they were both better people than he was. And, of course, between him and Ellen there was a link of the senses, so strong that sitting with them was like being in a field of force. Why it was so strong, I should probably never know. It was better that I shouldn’t. If one reads the love-letters that give the details of a grand passion, they make one forget that the passion can still be grand.

There was one other thing. Just as Ellen’s judgement and mine had been distorted, so was his. He loved her. But in a fashion strange to him, he felt he had no right to love her. Not only, perhaps not mainly, because of his wife. People thought of him as a hard professional politician. There was truth in that. How complete the truth was, I still didn’t know. I still wasn’t sure which choices he would make. And yet I was sure that he had a hope of virtue. He wanted perhaps more strongly than he himself could tell, to do something good. Somehow, as though he was dragged back to the priests and prophets, he would have felt more certain of virtue, more fit to do something good, if like the greatest politicians, he could pay a price. It sounded atavistic and superstitious, as I looked at the two of them, the sharp, self-abnegating woman, the untransparent hulk of a man: yet, somewhere in my mind, was nagging the myth of Samson’s hair.

Ellen and I, with Roger mostly silent, were arguing what was to be done. Private detectives? No, no point. Then I had an idea. This man was employed by one of Lord Lufkin’s competitors. If Lufkin would talk to the other chairman — ‘Have you ever seen that done?’ said Roger, suddenly alive.

Yes, I said, I had once seen it done.

It would mean telling Lufkin everything, Roger was saying.

‘It would mean telling him a good deal.’

‘I’m against it,’ said Ellen.

Roger listened to her, but went on: ‘How far do you trust him?’

‘If you gave him a confidence, he’d respect it,’ I said.

‘That’s not enough, is it?’

I said that Lufkin, cold fish as he was, had been a good friend to me. I said that he was, in his own interest, without qualification on Roger’s side. I left them talking it over, as I went to the bar to get more drinks. As I stood there, the landlady spoke to me by name. I had used that pub for years, since the time during the war when I lived in Pimlico. There was nothing ominous in her addressing me, but her tone was hushed.

‘There’s someone I want to show you,’ she said.

For an instant I was alarmed. I looked round the room, the sense of being watched acute again. There weren’t many people there, no one I knew or could suspect.

‘Do you know who that is?’ she whispered reverentially, pointing to the far end of the bar. There, sitting on a stool, eating a slice of veal and ham pie, with a glass of stout beside the plate, was a commonplace-looking man in a blue suit.

‘No,’ I said.

‘That,’ said the landlady, her whisper more sacramental, ‘is Grobbelaar’ s brother-in-law!’

It might have sounded like gibberish, or alternatively, as if Grobbelaar were a distinguished public figure. Not a bit of it. Distinguished public figures were not in the landlady’s line. In that pub, Roger stayed anonymous and, if she had been told his name, she would have had no conception who he was. On the other hand, she had a clear conception who Grobbelaar was, and so had I. Grobbelaar had been, in fact, an entirely respectable South African, but an unfortunate one. About five years before, living, so far as I could remember, in Hammersmith, he had been murdered for the sake of a very small sum, about a hundred pounds. There had been nothing spectacular about the murder itself, but the consequences were somewhat gothic. For Grobbelaar had been in an amateurish fashion dissected, and the portions made into brown paper parcels, weighted down with bricks, and dropped, at various points between Blackfriars and Putney, into the river. It was the kind of bizarre crime which, unbeknown to the landlady, foreigners thought typical of her native town, the fate which waited for many of us, as we groped our way through endless streets, in a never-ending fog. It was the kind of crime, true enough, which brought the landlady and me together. As she gave me this special treat, as she invited me to gaze, she knew that she was showing me an object touched by mana . It was true enough that this brother-in-law was another entirely respectable man, who had not had the slightest connection with the gothic occurrences. Did he, as an object of reverence, seem a little remote? Had the mana worn just a shade thin? The landlady’s whisper was in a tone which meant that mana never wore thin.

‘That,’ she repeated, ‘is Grobbelaar’s brother-in-law.’

I went back to our table with a grin. Ellen had noticed me conferring with the landlady, she looked at me with apprehensive eyes. I shook my head and said, ‘No, nothing.’

They had decided against Lufkin. The straightforward method was to write a couple of lines to the man himself, saying without explanation that she wished to receive no further communications from him, and that any further letters would be returned. Nothing but that. It implicated no one but herself, and it told him that she knew.

At that we left it, and sat in the cheerful pub, now filling up, with the landlady busy, but her gaze still drawn by the magnet in the blue suit at the end of the bar.