Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

In his hard, clear voice he said: ‘What’s that you were saying?’

‘I said the City’s getting bearish about some of the long-term consequences.’

‘What do they know?’ said Lufkin, with inspissated contempt.

‘There’s a feeling that Quaife’s going to run the aircraft industry into the ground.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Lufkin, at his bleakest. He had caught my eye. Even Lufkin was not usually as rude as this without a purpose. I had suspected that this dinner wasn’t such an accidental gathering as it seemed.

‘There’s nothing in that.’ He spoke as one who does not propose to say any more. Then he condescended to explain himself.

‘Whatever happens, Quaife or no Quaife, or whether they throw you out at the next election—’ he gave a sardonic smile at the Ministers — ‘and the other chaps come in, there’s only room in this country for a couple of aircraft firms, at most. More likely than not, two is one too many.’

‘I suppose you mean,’ said the other industrialist with a show of spirit, ‘that you ought to be the only firm left in?’

Lufkin was the last man in existence to be worried about being parti-pris : or to have qualms because he was safe with a major contract: or to question whether his own interests and the national interests must necessarily coincide.

‘An efficient firm,’ he said, ‘ought to be ready to take its chance. Mine is.’

That sounded like the cue. Again Lufkin, looking at no one in particular, caught my eye.

He said: ‘I might as well tell you. I’m a hundred per cent pro Quaife. I hope you’ll see—’ he was speaking to the Ministers — ‘that these people’ (by which Lufkin meant anyone he disapproved of) ‘don’t make the job impossible for him. No one’s ever done it properly, of course. With your set-up there isn’t a proper job to do. But Quaife’s the only chap who hasn’t been a hopeless failure. You might as well remember that.’

Having given what, for him, was lavish praise, Lufkin had finished. Dinner proceeded.

The women left us, Margaret casting at me, over her shoulder, a look of one who is doomed. I had known Lufkin, in that room, keep the men talking over the port for two hours while the women waited. ‘You wouldn’t suggest that I was conversationally inept, would you?’ Margaret had said to me after one of these occasions. ‘But several times tonight I dried . We talked about the children, and then about the servant problem, and then about the cleaning of jewellery. I found it hard to be chatty about that. You’d better buy me a tiara, so I can join in next time.’ That night, however, Lufkin passed the decanter round twice and then remarked, as though it were self-evident, ‘I don’t believe in segregating the sexes. Anachronistic.’

As the Ministers, the tycoon, the Second Secretary, the PRS, were moving into the drawing-room, Lufkin called out sharply: ‘Wait a minute, Lewis. I want a word with you.’

I sat down opposite to him. He pushed a bowl of flowers aside so that he could stare at me.

There were no preliminaries. He remarked: ‘You heard what I said about Quaife?’

‘I’m grateful,’ I replied.

‘It isn’t a matter for gratitude. It’s a matter for sense.’

It wasn’t getting easier to be on terms with Lufkin.

‘I’d like to tell him,’ I said. ‘He can do with some moral support.’

‘You’re intended to tell him.’

‘Good.’

‘I don’t say something about a man in one place, and something else in another.’

Like a good many of his claims for himself, this also was true.

His eyes, sunk deep in his neat, handsome head, swivelled round to me. ‘That’s not the point,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘That’s not why I sent them away.’

For an instant there was a silence, a negotiator’s silence. Like one tired of stating the obvious, he let out: ‘Quaife’s been a damned fool.’

I didn’t reply. I sat, not showing excessive interest, gazing at him. He gave a sharp recognitory smile.

‘I ought to tell you, I know about this woman of his,’ he said. ‘He’s been a damned fool. I don’t care what you think about his morals. A man doesn’t want to get mixed up with a woman when he’s trying something big.’

Lufkin seldom missed an opportunity to apportion moral blame. But his tone had become less aloof. I still did not reply, nor change my expression.

Once more, Lufkin smiled. ‘My information is,’ he said, ‘that the man Hood is going to blow the news wide open to Quaife’s wife. And to Smith’s connections. Any day now. This being, of course, the most helpful occasion.’

This time, I was astounded. I showed it. All my practice at coping with Lufkin had failed me. I knew he sat at the centre of a kind of intelligence service; business and curiosity got mixed up; his underlings fed him with gossip as well as fact. But this seemed like divination. I must have looked like one of my aunts, confronted with a demonstration of spiritualist phenomena. Lufkin gave a grin of triumph.

Later on, I thought it was not so mysterious. After all, Hood was employed by a firm closely similar to Lufkin’s. Between the two, there was contact, something like espionage, and personal intimacies at every level. There was nothing improbable in Hood’s having a drinking companion, or even a confidential friend, on Lufkin’s staff.

‘It’s likely to be true,’ said Lufkin.

‘It may be,’ I said.

‘This man,’ said Lufkin, ‘needs all his energy for the job in hand. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know, how his wife will take it. But it isn’t the kind of trouble any of us would want hanging over us when we’re fighting for our skins.’

He was a tough ally. For his own sake, he wanted Roger to survive. But he was speaking with unusual sympathy, with something like comradely feeling. Once or twice in my own life, I had known him come out of his carapace and show something which was not affection, but might have been concern. It had happened only when one was in trouble with wife or children. No one knew much about his own marriage. His wife lived in the country and there was a rumour that she was afflicted. He could have had mistresses, but if so they had been concealed with his consummate executive skill. None of this we were likely to know for sure until after he was dead.

My instructions were clear. I was to warn Roger, and then look after him. That being understood, the conference was over, and Lufkin got up to join his guests. As he did so, I asked about Hood. Was he being used by others? Were there people behind him?

‘I don’t believe in chance,’ said Lufkin.

As for the man himself, was he obsessed?

‘I’m not interested in his psychology,’ said Lufkin. ‘I’m not interested in his motives. All I’m interested in, is seeing him on the bread-line.’

We did not speak again on our way to the drawing-room. There the party, in Lufkin’s absence, had begun to sound a little gayer. He damped it down by establishing us in groups of three with no chance of transfer. For myself, I was preoccupied, and I noticed Margaret glancing at me, a line between her eyes, knowing that something was wrong. In my trio, I heard, as though she were a long way off, the wife of one of the Ministers explaining analytically why her son had not got into Pop, a subject which, at the best of times, I should have found of limited interest.

One might have thought that Lufkin’s dinner-parties broke up early. But they didn’t, unless Lufkin broke them up himself. That night it was half-past eleven before, among the first uprising of departures, I managed to get in a word with Margaret. I told her that Lufkin had been warning me, and about what.