Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

He had lost his head. Within twenty-four hours he had regained it. He was outfacing me, daring me to suggest that he had been upset. This time, smoothly in charge, he was doing what ought to be done. One of his supporters had summoned a meeting of the Private Members’ defence committee. No one at that meeting would have guessed that he had, even for a single evening, not been able to trust his nerve. No one would have guessed that he could stand inept, lost, among a crowd of acquaintances.

Reports came flicking through the lobbies that Roger was ‘holding them’, that he was ‘in form’, ‘back again’. I saw one of my journalist informants talking, as though casually, with a smart, beaming-faced member fresh from the meeting.

Once, to most of us, it had merely been a matter of gossipy interest, to identify the leaks, the sources of news. Now we weren’t so detached. This, as it happened, was good news.

I took the journalist back to El Vino’s. He was so eupeptic, so willing to cheer me up, that I was ready to stand him many drinks. Yes, Roger had carried them with him. ‘That chap won’t be finished till he’s dead,’ said my acquaintance, with professional admiration. After another drink, he was speculating about Roger’s enemies. Four or five, he said: anyway, you could count them on one hand. Men of straw. The phrase ‘oddballs’ had a tendency to recur, giving him a sense of definition, illumination, perfection, denied to me.

On the Sunday afternoon, my taxi drove through the empty, comfortable Cambridge streets, across the bridge by Queen’s, along the Backs towards my brother’s house. There he and Francis Getliffe were waiting for me. I hadn’t come just to make conversation, but for a while we sat round the fire in the drawing-room: the bronze doors were not closed, and through the far window the great elm stood up against the cyclorama of sunset sky.

‘I must say,’ I said, ‘it all looks remarkably placid.’

Martin’s controlled features broke into a grin.

‘I must say,’ he jeered at me.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Do you realize that’s exactly what used to infuriate you when big bosses came down from London and met you in the college, and told you what a peaceful place it was?’

His eyes were bright with fraternal malice. He told me one or two of the latest stories about the new Master’s reign. Some of the college officers were finding it appropriate to write him letters rather than expose themselves to conversation. Martin gave a bleak smile. ‘You live in a sheltered world, you know,’ he said.

I wished that he had been with us in the Whitehall struggles. He was a harder man than Francis, tougher and more apt for politics than most of us. Curiously, he was one of the few scientists who had got out of atomic energy and made a sacrifice for conscience’ sake. He had chosen a dimmish career as a college functionary: it seemed likely that that was where he would stay. And yet, in his middle forties, his face set in the shape it would remain until he was old, eyes watchful, he gave out an air not only of detachment but content.

His wife, Irene, brought in the tea-tray. Once she had been a wild young woman, and had made him live with jealousy. But now time had played on her one of its picnic practical jokes. She had become mountainous, the flesh had blown up as though she were a Michelin advertisement. She must have weighed fifty or sixty pounds more than when I first met her, before the war. Her yelp of a laugh was still youthful and flirtatious. Her spirits had stayed high, he had long ago won the battle of wills in their marriage, she had come totally to love him, and also was content.

‘Plotting?’ she said to me. She behaved to me, she had done for years, much as she did to Martin, as though knowing one brother she knew the other: as though neither of us was as sedate as he seemed.

‘Not yet,’ I said.

As we drank our tea I asked Francis, just to delay my mission, whether he had heard from Penelope.

‘As a matter of fact,’ he replied, ‘I had a letter a couple of days ago.’

‘What’s she doing?’

He looked puzzled: ‘That’s what I should like to know.’

‘What does she say ?’ Irene burst in.

‘I’m not quite sure,’ said Francis.

He looked round at the three of us, hesitated, and then went on: ‘Look here, what do you make of this?’ He pulled an envelope out of his pocket, put on his long-sighted glasses, and began to read. He read, I couldn’t help thinking, as though the letter were written in a language like Etruscan, in which most of the words were still unknown.

‘Dearest Daddy,

‘Please do not flap . I am perfectly alright, and perfectly happy, working like a beaver, and all is fine with Art and me, and we haven’t any special plans, but he may come back with me in the summer — he isn’t sure. There’s no need for you to worry about us, were just having a lot of fun, and nobody’s bothering about marriage or anything like that, so do stop questioning . I think that you and Mummy must be sex-maniacs .

‘I have met a nice boy called Brewster ( first name), he dances as badly as I do so that suits us both. His father owns three night clubs in Reno but I don’t tell Art that!!! Anyway it is not at all serious and is only a bit of fun. I may go to Art’s people for the weekend if I can raise the dollars. I don’t always want him to pay for me.

‘No more now. Brew is fuming (much I care) because he’s double-parked and says he’ll get a ticket if I don’t hurry. Must go.

‘Lots and lots of love,

‘Penny.’

‘Well,’ said Francis, taking off his glasses. He broke out irritably, as though it were Penny’s major crime: ‘I wish she could spell “ all right ”.’

The rest of us did not find it prudent to meet one another’s eyes.

‘What do you do?’ said Francis. ‘What sanctions has one got?’

‘You could cut off supplies,’ said Martin, who was a practical man.

‘Yes,’ said Francis indecisively. After a long pause he went on: ‘I don’t think I should like to do that.’

‘You’re worrying too much,’ cried Irene, with a high, delighted laugh.

‘Am I?’

‘Of course you are.’

‘Why?’ He was turning to her for reassurance.

‘When I was her age, I could have written a letter just like that.’

‘Could you?’ Francis gazed at her. She was good-natured, she wanted him to be happy. But he did not find the reassurance quite so overwhelming as she had expected; her youth wasn’t perhaps the first model he would have chosen for his daughter.

When she left us, I got down at last to business. It was simple.

For Quaife to survive was going to be a close-run thing. Any bit of help was worth the effort. Could they whip up some scientific support for him — not from the usual quarters, not from the Pugwash group who had dismissed Brodzinski, but from uncommitted men? A speech or two in the House of Lords: a letter to The Times with some ‘respectable’ signatures? Any demonstration might swing a vote or two.

I was still making my case at the moment that Irene returned, apologizing, smelling a secret. There was someone on the telephone for me, a long-distance call. With a curse I went off into the lobby under the stairs: a voice came down the line that I didn’t recognize, giving a name that I didn’t know. We had met at Finch’s, the voice was saying. That meant nothing. The pub on the Fulham Road, came the explanation, brisk, impatient. They had traced me to my home, and so to Cambridge. They thought I should know what to do. Old Ronald Porson had been arrested the night before. What for? Importuning in a lavatory.