As she was leaving Dr. Eastwood came in. She curtsied to him, he bowed gravely, and then inquired, when she was gone, whether he might see Frederick.
“By all means, though he seems in the pink of health. Might his head injury have changed his personality?”
Eastwood laughed. “It is not likely. It was a soft blow, though I admit he has come up under it strong, very strong indeed.”
Lenox lingered in the hallway reading Cornhill after Eastwood had gone to Frederick’s study, waiting for the doctor to come out. As he was waiting the third and fourth visitors arrived. The bell rang and Lenox, being nearby, went to the door, but found that Nash had hurried, indeed rather pushed, beyond him, giving a soft exasperated sigh at Lenox’s infringement upon his rightful terrain.
Nash stepped backward to admit the visitors. “Mr.—”
He needn’t have said a word, though, for Lenox could have spotted the two gentlemen from a Somerset mile off. “Edmund! And Graham! What on earth are you two doing here!”
Edmund laughed, taking off his hat, handing over his cane and cloak to the butler. “The cavalry has arrived, Charles. We cannot have you getting knocked on the head and missing out on your speech and going into pistol fights with bit fakers. It won’t do. And Graham has been pining to see the text you’ve drafted; he won’t stop complaining.”
One look at Graham’s silent, smiling face showed that there was some truth in this. Lenox shook his hand, thrilled to see his old butler, now his political secretary — indeed one of the savviest political secretaries in the Commons, despite the handicap of his birth, as most such jobs went to recent graduates of the great public schools, sometimes even one of the two universities.
“It’s true,” he said, “I am desperate to see it, after the prime minister himself stopped me in the halls yesterday to ask about your progress.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
It is the commonest observation in the world that a week can sometimes pass in an hour and an hour in a week, but it is true. Lenox’s final days at Everley had been idyllic — long rides out on Sadie, afternoon tea in the great drawing room, walks in the garden with Sophie and Jane — and had passed in such a flash that now, sitting in a small anteroom outside the House of Commons, he felt practically dazed.
From the chamber there was a steady hum of human voices, each, because it belonged to a member of Parliament, more than usually accustomed to attention.
“Are they preparing for a great failure, do you think?” asked Lenox, and then laughed rather weakly.
Graham was the only other person in the dim room. Frabbs, their carrot-haired clerk, was at the door, prepared to reject entrance by anyone other than the prime minister himself. Or, if he were to stretch a point, the Queen. “I’ve no doubt they’re speaking of their suppers and their women,” said Graham.
“You are right of course.”
They were on two blue leather sofas, with a mahogany table between them. There was a plate of biscuits and a bottle of claret there. Both were untouched as yet. Bottlesworth — that noble expert on comestibles who had advised Lenox to have two pints of porter and a passel of sandwiches before his speech — would have been distressed.
Lenox shuffled through the papers in his hand, looking at them and seeing nothing. He was all nerves; Lady Jane was in the visitors’ gallery, McConnell too, and the press box, he had seen, was jammed. The prime minister had sent him a very civil communication, congratulating him on the tone of the speech and inviting him to dine together afterward.
“We shall see about that, if it goes badly,” muttered Lenox.
“Sir?”
“Oh, nothing.”
The door opened. Lenox assumed it was Frabbs and didn’t turn, but then noticed with some consternation that a man in a snuff-colored suit of clothes had entered the room, and said, in a hoarse voice, “I have come to give my best wishes for your speech.”
Lord preserve me from well-wishers, thought Charles, and why has Frabbs—but as he turned, artificial smile on his face to accept the compliment, he saw that it was his brother. Of course! Edmund had a cold in his head and shouldn’t have been here at all, were it not for the occasion.
“Why, thank you, Ed.” Charles’s face was flushed with true pleasure as he spoke these words.
“I am prepared to hear a thumper.”
“Lower your expectations, for the love of all that’s good.”
Edmund smiled. “Graham, I wish you joy of your achievement today, too.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Will it be a third or a fourth, Charles?”
“Anyhow not a second.”
In the brothers’ experience there were four kinds of speeches delivered in the House of Commons, and this shorthand, long since developed, helped them communicate to each other — in the lobby of the House, for instance — whether it was necessary to go and sit upon the benches for a speech, or whether it could be tolerably missed.
Of the four types, two were good and two were bad. The first was a sympathetically bad speech, often full of painstaking research, mumbling, and indecisively argued points (for true intelligence welcomes dissent, unlike a good political speech); the second was an unsympathetically bad speech, full of bluster and steadily increasing passion without much bottom; the third was a powerful speech, with conviction and right on its side, also full of bluster and steadily increasing passion; but the fourth, the cynosure of parliamentary addresses, crowned all of these. It had circumspection, careful argument, passion, rhythm, suasion, wit, poignancy, ease, command, all stitched together seamlessly.
Lenox had aimed to make his speech a fourth. Time would tell.
Very little time, in fact. “A glass of wine, sir?” asked Graham.
“I think not, thank you.”
“It would be wise to take something, Charles,” said Edmund.
“I have spoken before the House, you know. Some thirty times.”
Graham shook his head. “You cannot know how hungry you are, sir. You will rise and feel weak in the knees.”
It was rare that Graham was insistent upon anything other than Lenox’s schedule, and so the member took a half-cup of wine and a biscuit, albeit with great churlishness. Immediately he felt better and more solid. “A full House?” he asked his brother.
Edmund smiled. “Tolerably full.”
“You ought to go in.”
The older brother looked at his pocket-watch, their father’s. “Yes, you’re right. Two or three minutes is all that’s in it. I say, good luck, Charles. Graham, mind that he doesn’t bolt for the channel.”
Graham and Lenox both laughed; then, as Edmund left to take his seat and Frabbs went out to check the composition of the house for them, they were alone.
For many, many years, since Lenox was an undergraduate at Balliol, they had lived almost changelessly together, the same house, the same daily pursuits, Graham often helping Lenox with his cases — the same rhythm of life. Then all had changed. Lenox had married, been elected to Parliament, had a child, cobbled his house together with Jane’s into a rambling new hybrid. Most radically of all he had asked Graham, and not a lad fresh from Charterhouse or Downing, to act as his political secretary. It had been a change that demanded Graham endure the slights of those above him in station and work harder than he ever had before. Now, more thanks to his efforts than any other single man’s, Lenox was opening Parliament. It was a friendship that Lenox reflected upon only very occasionally — perhaps because whenever he did he felt some strange emotion, which with greater deliberation he might have identified as true brotherly love. One might have used the word loyal about Graham, did it not imply one-sidedness: In their friendship the loyalty was mutual and equal in weight.