Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

The White Paper was published at last; the House had not reassembled. This concatenation was not just an amiable coincidence. We wanted official opinion to form, the more of it the better. There was our best chance. As soon as the Paper, Command 8964, came out, Roger’s supporters were trying to read the signs.

The newspapers didn’t tell us much. One paper cried: ‘Our Deterrent To Go?’ To our surprise, the slogan did not immediately catch on. Most of the comments of the defence correspondents were predictable: we could have written them ourselves. In fact, to an extent, we had written them ourselves, for two or three of the most influential correspondents were friends and disciples of Francis Getliffe. They knew the arguments as well as he or Walter Luke. They understood the White Paper, though it deserved fairly high marks for deliberate obscurity. They accepted that, sooner or later, there was only one answer.

The danger was that we were listening to ourselves. It was the occupational danger of this kind of politics: you cut yourselves off from your enemies, you basked in the echo of your own voice. That was one of the reasons why the real bosses stayed more optimistic than the rest of us. Even Roger, more realistic than other bosses, knowing that this was the moment, knowing that he had to be certain what the back-benchers were saying, had to force himself to visit the Carlton or White’s.

The Cabinet had, as a compromise, accepted the White Paper. But Roger knew — inarticulate men like Collingwood could sometimes make themselves very clear — that they meant the compromise to be kept. If he tilted the balance, if he put his weight on the side of his own policy, he was in danger. The Prime Minister and his friends were not simple men, but they were used to listening to men simpler than themselves. If the backbenchers became suspicious of Roger, then simple men sometimes had grounds for their suspicions. It was by his own party that he would be judged.

As for me, I liked hearing bad news no more than Roger did. But for the next fortnight, I called on acquaintances and used my clubs as I had not done since I married Margaret. I did not pick up many signs. With those I did pick up, I was not sure which way they pointed. Walking along Pall Mall, one wild windy January night, I was thinking that on the whole it was going a shade worse, but not decisively worse, than I reckoned on. Then I went up the steps of a club, where I was not a member, but was meeting a Whitehall colleague. He was the head of a service department, and after a few minutes with him I was encouraged. As he talked, one eye to his watch, needing to catch a train back to East Horsley for dinner, the odds seemed perceptibly shorter. I caught sight of Douglas Osbaldiston walking through the colonnades. My host said goodbye, and I stayed for a word, what I thought would be a casual word, with Douglas. As he came out into the light, I saw his face, and I was shocked. He looked ravaged.

Before I could ask him, he broke out: ‘Lewis, I’m nearly off my head with worry.’ He sat beside me. I said, ‘What is it?’

In reply, he said one word. ‘Mary.’ The name of his wife. Then he added, that she might be very ill.

As though released, he told me of her signs and symptoms, hyper-attentively, almost with fervour, just as a sick person tells one about his own. About two weeks before — no, Douglas corrected himself with obsessive accuracy — eleven days before, she had complained of double vision. Holding her cigarette at arm’s length, she had seen a replica alongside it. They had laughed. They were happy together. She had always been healthy. A week later, she said that she had lost feeling in her left arm. Suddenly they had looked at each other in distress. ‘We’ve always known, ever since we were married, when either of us was afraid.’ She had gone to her doctor. He couldn’t reassure her. Forty-eight hours before, she had got up from a chair and been unable to control her legs. ‘She’s been walking like a spastic,’ he cried. That morning she had been taken to hospital. He couldn’t get any comfort. It would be a couple of days before they gave him any sort of answer.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I’ve got the best neurologists in the place. I’ve been talking to them most of the day.’ It had been a consolation to use influence and power, to find out the names of the specialists, to have them brought in government cars to his office. That day, Douglas had given up being unassuming.

‘I suppose you know what we’re afraid of?’ he asked in a quiet tone.

‘No.’ I failed him. All through his description I had been at a loss.

Even when he brought out the name of the disease, it was his manner that harrowed me most. ‘Disseminated sclerosis,’ he said. He added, ‘You must remember reading about Barbellion’s disease.’

Then, quite suddenly, he was full of an inexplicable hope.

‘It may not be anything of the sort,’ he said robustly, almost as though it were for him to cheer me up. ‘They don’t know. They can’t know yet awhile. Don’t forget, there are several possibilities which are more or less benign.’

He had a surge of happiness, of confidence in the future. I did not know how soon his mood would change. Not liking to leave him in the club, I offered to take him home to my wife, or to go with him to his own house, deserted now. He gave an intimate smile, some of the freshness returning to his face. No, he wouldn’t hear of it. He was perfectly all right, nothing could happen that night. He was staying at the club, he would go to bed with a good book. I ought to know he wasn’t the man to take to the bottle by himself.

All he said in that patch of euphoria was, for him, curiously indirect, but when I said goodbye, he gripped my hand.

During the next few days, at meetings, in the office, speculations about Roger got sharper. Parliament would be sitting again in a week. Before Easter, there would, Rose and the others agreed, have to be a full-dress debate on the White Paper. But they did not agree either on the strength of Roger’s position nor on his intentions. Rose, very distant from me at this time, merely gave a polite smile.

On the fourth morning after I had met Douglas at his club, his secretary rang up mine. Would I please go along at once?

As soon as I entered his room, I had no doubt. He was standing by the window. He gave me some sort of greeting. He said: ‘You were worried about her too, weren’t you?’ Then he burst out: ‘The news is bad.’

What had they said?

He replied, no, it wasn’t exactly what they had expected. It wasn’t disseminated sclerosis. But that wasn’t much improvement, he said, with a quiet and bitter sarcasm. The prognosis of what she had got was as bad or worse. It was another disease of the central nervous system, a rarer one. They could not predict its course with accuracy. The likelihood was, she would be dead within five years. Long before that, she would be completely paralysed. He said, his expression naked and passionate: ‘Can you imagine how horrible it is to know that? About someone you’ve loved in the flesh?’ He added: ‘About someone you still love in the flesh?’

For minutes I stayed silent, and he broke out in disjointed, violent spasms.

‘I shall have to tell her soon.’

‘She’s been kind all her life. Kind to everyone. Why should this happen to her?

‘If I believed in God, I should throw him back his ticket.’

‘She’s good.’

‘She’s got to die like this.’

At last, when he fell silent, I asked whether there was anything I could do.

‘There’s nothing,’ he said, ‘that anyone can do.’ Then he said, in a level tone, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Lewis. She’ll need her friends. She’ll have a lot of time to see her friends. She’ll want you and Margaret, of course she will.’