Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

Looking at me, she did not need to ask much. ‘Ought you to go and see Roger?’ she said.

I half-wanted to leave it till next day. She knew that I was tired. She knew that I should be more tired if I didn’t act till next morning. She said, ‘You’d better go to him now, hadn’t you?’

While Margaret waited with Lufkin, I telephoned Lord North Street. I heard Roger’s voice, and began: ‘Lufkin’s been talking to me. There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I come round?’

‘You can’t come here. We’ll have to meet somewhere else.’

Clubs would be closed by this time: we couldn’t remember a restaurant near by: at last I said, anxious to put down the telephone, that I would see him outside Victoria Station and was leaving straight away.

When I told Lufkin that I was going to Roger, he nodded with approval, as for any course of behaviour recommended by himself. ‘I can lay on transport,’ he said. ‘Also for your charming wife.’

Two cars, two drivers, were waiting for us in the street. As mine drew up under the Victoria clock, I did not go into the empty hall, booking-offices closed as in a ghost station, but stayed outside on the pavement, alone except for some porters going home.

A taxi slithered from the direction of Victoria Street, through the rain-glossed yard.

As Roger came heavily towards me, I said: ‘There’s nowhere to go here.’ For an instant I was reminded of Hector Rose greeting me outside the darkened Athenaeum, months before.

I said there was a low-down coffee bar not far away. We were both standing stock-still.

Roger said, quite gently, ‘I don’t think there is anything you can tell me. I think I know it all.’

‘My God,’ I said, in bitterness, ‘we might have been spared this.’

I was angry, not with Hood, but with him. My temper had broken loose because of the risks we had run, of what we had tried to do, of the use he had made of me. He gave a grimace, of something like acquiescence.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘to have got everyone into a mess.’

Those were the kind of words I had heard before in a crisis: apathetic, inadequate, flat. But they made me more angry. He looked at me.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It’s not lost yet.’

As we stood there in front of the station, it was not I who was giving support and sympathy. It was the other way round.

In silence we walked across the station yard, through the dripping rain. By the time we were sitting in the coffee bar, under the livid lights, I had recovered myself.

We sipped tea so weak that it tasted like metal against the teeth. Roger had just said, ‘It’s been very bad,’ when we were interrupted.

A man sat down at a table, and remarked ‘Excuse me’, in a voice that was nearly cultivated, not quite. His hands were trembling. He had a long, fine-drawn face, like the romantic stereotype of a scientist. His manner was confident. He told us a hard-luck story of considerable complexity. He was a lorry-driver, so he said. By a series of chances and conspiracies, his employers had decided to sack him. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was short of money. Could we see him through the night?

I didn’t like him much, I didn’t believe a word of it, above all I was maddened by his breaking in. Yet, as I shook my head, I was embarrassed, as though it were I who was doing the begging. As for him, he was not embarrassed in the least. ‘Never mind, old chap,’ he said.

Roger looked at him and, without a word, took out his wallet and gave him a ten-shilling note. The intruder took it civilly, but without any demonstration. ‘Always glad of a little encouragement,’ he said. He made polite goodbyes.

Roger did not watch or notice. He had given him money not out of fellow-feeling, or pity, or even to be rid of him. It had been the kind of compulsion that affects men who lead risky lives. Roger had been trying to buy a bit of luck.

Suddenly he told me straight out that Caro would ‘put a face on things’, until the struggle was over. She would laugh off the rumours which would soon, if Lufkin’s intelligence were correct, once more be sparking round all J C Smith’s connections. Caro was ready to deny them to Collingwood himself.

But there was some other damage. Many people, including most of the guests at Lord North Street, and Diana Skidmore’s friends, would have expected Caro — and Roger also — not to make much of the whole affair. Yes, Ellen had behaved badly, a wife ought to stick to her sick husband. Roger wasn’t faultless either. Still, there were worse things. After all, Caro had lived in the world all her life. Her friends and family were not models of the puritan virtues. Caro herself had had lovers before her marriage. Like the rest of her circle, she prided herself on her rationality and tolerance. They all smoothed over scandals, were compassionate about sins of the flesh, by the side of which a man having a mistress, even in the circumstances of Roger and Ellen — was nothing but a display of respectability.

That day, since Caro first read the unsigned letter, none of that had counted, nor had ever seemed to exist. There was no enlightenment or reason in the air, just violence. They hadn’t been quarrelling about his public life, nor the morality of taking a colleague’s wife: nor about love: nor sex: but about something fiercer. He was hers. They were married. She would not let him go.

He too felt the same violence. He felt tied and abject. He had come away, not knowing where to turn or what to do.

So far as I could tell, there had been no decision. Or rather, there seemed to have been two decisions which contradicted each other. As soon as the crisis was over, win or lose — Caro gave her ultimatum — he had to choose. She would not endure it more than a matter of weeks, months at the most. Then he had to look after his own career. It must be ‘this woman’ or her. At the same time, she had said more than once that she would not give him a divorce.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. His face was blank and open. He did not look like a man a few days away from his major test.

For a while we sat, drinking more cups of the metallic tea, not saying much. Then he remarked:‘I told her’ (he meant Ellen) ‘earlier in the day. I promised I’d ring her up before I went to bed. She’ll be waiting.’

Blundering, as though his limbs were heavy, he went off to look for a telephone behind the bar. When he came back he said flatly: ‘She wants me to go and see her. She asked me to bring you too.’

For an instant, I thought this was not meant seriously.

‘She asked me,’ he repeated. Then I thought perhaps I understood. She was as proud as Caro: in some ways, she was prouder. She was intending to behave on her own terms.

The rain had stopped, and we went on foot to Ebury Street. It was well past one. At her door, Ellen greeted us with the severeness which I had long ago forgotten, but which took me back to the first time I saw her there. Once we were inside the smart little sitting-room, she gave Roger a kiss, but as a greeting, no more. It wasn’t the hearty, conjugal kiss I had seen before, the kiss of happy lovers used to each other, pleased with each other, sure of pleasure to come.

She offered us drinks. Roger took a whisky, so did I. I pressed her to join us. As a rule, she enjoyed her drink. But she was one of those who, in distress, refuse to accept any relief.

‘This is atrocious,’ she said.

Roger repeated to her what he had told me. She listened with an expression impatient, strained and intent. She was hearing little new, most of it had been said already over the telephone. When he repeated that his wife would ‘see him through’ the crisis, she burst out in scorn: ‘What else could she do?’