‘But, Parliamentary Secretary, when do we get something done?’ he cried. ‘Even if we start now, tonight, it will take us to 1962 or ’63 before we have the weapons—’
‘And they won’t have any strategic meaning,’ said Francis Getliffe, irritated at the way the conversation was going.
‘Sir Francis, Sir Francis, I believe there is meaning in having weapons in your hands, if the country is going to survive. I suppose you mean, I hope you mean, that America will have their own armaments, much greater than ours, and I hope they will. The more the better, and good luck to them. But I shall not sleep happy until we can stand beside them—’
‘I mean something more serious—’ Francis interrupted. But once more Roger stopped the argument.
Brodzinski burst out: ‘Parliamentary Secretary, when can we get some action?’
After a pause, Roger replied, carefully, considerately: ‘You know, I mustn’t raise false hopes—’
Brodzinski raised his head. ‘I know what you’re going to say. And I agree with it. You are going to say that this will cost a thousand million pounds. Some say we cannot afford to do it. I say, we cannot afford not to do it.’
Roger smiled at him. ‘Yes, I was going to raise that point. But also I was going to say that there are many people to convince. I am only a junior Minister, Professor. Let me say something to you in confidence that I really oughtn’t to. Within these four walls, I think it will be necessary to convince my own Minister. Without him behind it, no government could even begin to listen—’
Brodzinski was nodding. He did not need explanations about the English political machine. He was nodding, passionately thoughtful. As for Luke and Getliffe, they were looking stupefied. They knew, or thought they knew, what Roger wanted as a policy. They had just heard him, not exactly state the opposite, but leave Brodzinski thinking that he had.
Soon Roger was saying goodbye, inviting Brodzinski to visit him in Whitehall, repeating that they would keep in touch. Brodzinski clung to his hand, looking at him with beautiful candid eyes, the colour of sea-water. Brodzinski’s goodbyes to Walter and Francis were cold, and when they were back in the car they themselves spoke coldly to Roger. They were, in their different fashions, straightforward and honourable men, and they were shocked.
Roger, apparently at ease, invited them to tea before the car had moved a hundred yards. Utterly aware of the chill, utterly ignoring it as he spoke, he said that, when he was a young man, he used to go to a café‚ not far away: was it still there? Stiffly, Francis said that he ought to get back to Cambridge. No, said Roger, come and have tea. Again they refused. ‘I want to talk to you,’ said Roger — not with official authority, but his own. In a sullen silence, we sat at a table in the café‚ window, the December mists thick in the street outside. It was one of those anonymous places, neither a rackety one for the young nor a tearoom for the elderly: the atmosphere was something between that of a respectable pull-up for carmen and a coffee-room for white collar workers.
Roger said: ‘You disapproved of what I’ve just done.’
‘I’m afraid I did,’ Francis replied.
‘I think you’re wrong,’ said Roger.
Francis said curtly that he had given Brodzinski too much encouragement. Walter Luke, more violent, asked if he didn’t realize that the man was a mad Pole, whose only uncertainty was whether he hated Russians as Russians more than Russians as Communists, and who would cheerfully die himself along with the entire population of the United States and Great Britain, so long as there wasn’t a Russian left alive. If that was the sort of lunacy we were going to get mixed up in, he, Luke, for one, hadn’t bargained on it.
Roger said that he knew all that. But Walter was wrong on just one point. Brodzinski was not mad. He had a touch of paranoia. But a touch of paranoia was a very useful part of one’s equipment. On far more people than not, it had a hypnotic effect.
‘I wish I had it,’ Roger added, with a grim smile. ‘If I had, I shouldn’t have to spend time telling you I am not deserting. No, your colleague Brodzinski is a man of power. Don’t deceive yourselves about that. My bet is that his power is likely to influence quite a number of people before we’re through. He’s going to require very careful handling. You see, he’s got one great advantage. What he wants, what he’s saying, is very simple and it’s what a lot of people want to hear. What you want — and what I want quite as much as you do, if I may say so — is very difficult and not in the least what a lot of people want to hear. That’s why we’re going to need all the luck in the world if we’re going to get away with it. If you think it’s going to be easy and painless, then my advice to you is to cut all your connections with Government as fast as you possibly can. It’s going to be hell, and we may easily lose. As for me, I’m committed. But I’m taking bigger risks than any of you, and you’ve got to let me do it in my own way.’
Yes, I thought then, and in cooler blood afterwards, he was taking risks. Just as he had done, talking to me at the Carlton Club. He was taking risks in speaking in that tone to Getliffe and Luke. And yet, he knew they were both, in spite of Luke’s raucous tongue, men trained to discretion. He also knew, what was more significant, that they were ‘committed’ in the sense he had used the word. For years before Hiroshima, they had foreseen the technological dangers. They could be relied upon as allies.
Luke was still grumbling. Why had Roger taken them there? What did he think he had achieved?
Roger explained that he wanted to shower Brodzinski with attentions: he wouldn’t be satisfied, but it might for the time being keep him quiet.
That reply satisfied Walter Luke. It would not have satisfied me.
It was part of Roger’s technique to seem more spontaneous than he was. Or rather, it was part of his nature which he had developed into a technique. His spontaneity was genuine, it gave him some of his bite: but he could govern it. He had not given Luke and Getliffe the slightest indication of what, I was now certain, was his strongest reason for buttering up Brodzinski.
The reason was simple. Roger was set on easing Lord Gilbey out and getting the job himself. He wanted Brodzinski to do the opposite of keeping quiet, to shout his discontent. I had seen too many examples of this process not to recognize it now.
Roger was less hypocritical than most men. He would have made the same moves without excuse. Yet, I was coming to believe that, as he had just said, he was committed. Old Thomas Bevill used to lecture me, in his Polonius-like fashion, on the forces driving the great politicians he had known. He rolled out his Victorian phrases: one force, Bevill used to say, was a consciousness of powers. Another, and a rarer one, was a consciousness of purpose. For men seeking excuses for themselves, that was the best of all.
Neither Getliffe nor Luke realized what Roger was up to. Yet, if they had, they would not have minded much. It seemed strange, but they would have minded less than I did. For I had an affection for Lord Gilbey. Sometimes my affections ran away with me. They had done so years before, I now believed, in a struggle on a pettier scale when I had been voting for a Master of my college. They had made me forget function, or justice, or even the end to be served. Now I was getting older, I could realize those mistakes in the past, mistakes which a man like Francis, high-principled as he was, would never have made. For him, this issue would be simple. Lord Gilbey never ought to have been in this job in the first place: the sooner he was removed the better. Roger had to be rough. Gilbey would cling like a mollusc, in distinguished incompetence. If Roger was not prepared to be rough, then he was no good to us.