I should have liked to stay. But somehow, the fact that they were so un-anxious, so island-like, had the reverse effect on me. In the noisy and youthful pub, they were rooting up a half-memory, buried somewhere in my mind. Yes! It was another evening, another part of London, Roger questioning David Rubin, the uninflected replies.
This was not the place for me. I finished my drink, said goodbye to Porson who ‘insisted’ on inviting me there another time. I pushed through the crowd, affable, cordial and happy, and went out into the street, lights from the shops doubled in the moist pavements of the Fulham Road.
10: News in South Street
By the early summer, gossip was bubbling and bursting. Gilbey had left the Clinic and gone home. One political columnist was prophesying that he would soon be back. Elsewhere, rumours appeared that he had already accepted a government post abroad. As for his successor, names were being mentioned, Roger’s usually among them, but not prominently, except in one Sunday paper.
Nearer the point of action, we were mystified. Some of the rumours we knew to be nonsense, but not all. Men like Douglas Osbaldiston and Hector Rose, or even Roger himself, were not sure where they came from. Diana Skidmore and Caro’s relatives, people who made an occupation out of being in the know, could pick up nothing, or at least what they did pick up was useless. It was one of those occasions, commoner than one might think, when the ‘insiders’ were reading their newspapers for enlightenment as inquisitively as anyone else.
Of us all, Roger put on the most impassive front. He did his job in the office without any fuss; he answered questions in the House: he made a couple of speeches. In all this, he was behaving like a competent stand-in. As I watched him, through those weeks, I realized that he had one singular natural advantage, besides his self-control. He had the knack of appearing more relaxed, far less formidable, than he really was. One night, after a debate which Douglas and I were attending, a young member took us all to Pratt’s. In the tiny parlour, round the kitchen fire, there were several hard, able faces, but Roger’s was not among them. He sat there, drinking pints of beer, a heavy, clumsy man, looking amiable, idealistic, clever, simple, rather like an impressive innocent among card-sharpers. Among hard-featured faces, his stood out, full of enjoyment, full of feeling, revealing neither ambition nor strain.
One afternoon in June, I received another summons from Lord Gilbey. This time I was asked to call, so my personal assistant said, at his ‘private residence’. What for? No, the invitation had come, not from Green, but from some humbler person, who was unwilling to say. Had anyone else been asked? My PA missed nothing. She had already rung up Hector Rose’s office, and Douglas’. Each had been summoned also: Rose was busy at a meeting, Douglas was already on his way.
It was a short distance to Gilbey’s, for he had a flat, one of the last in private occupation, in Carlton House Terrace. It was a short distance, but it took some time. Cars were inching, bonnet to tail, along the Mall, cars with crosses on the windscreens, on their way to a Palace Garden Party. It must have been a Thursday.
The flat, when I finally got there, was at the top of the building. A smart young woman came to greet me. I inquired, ‘Mr Green?’
Mr Green was no longer working for Lord Gilbey.
Lady Gilbey was out for tea, but Lord Gilbey would like to see me at once. He and Douglas were standing by the drawing-room window, from which one looked, in the gusty, sparkling sunshine, right across St James’s Park, across the glitter of the lake, to the towers and turrets of our offices, away above the solid summer trees. Below, the roofs of cars, hurrying now the Mall was thinning, flashed their semaphores in the sun. It was a pleasant London vista: but Lord Gilbey was regarding it without enthusiasm. He welcomed me gracefully, but he did not smile.
He moved to a chair. As he walked, and as he sat down, he seemed to be deliberating how each muscle worked. That must have been the result of his illness, automatic now. Otherwise he had forgotten it, he was preoccupied with chagrin and etiquette.
‘Sir Hector Rose isn’t able to join us, I hear,’ he said, with distant courtesy. ‘I should be grateful if you would give him my regrets. I wanted to speak to some of you people who have been giving me advice. I’ve already spoken to some of my colleagues.’ He gazed at us, immaculate, fresh-faced, sad. ‘I’d rather you heard it from me first,’ he went on. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll believe it, but this morning, just before luncheon, I had a letter from the Prime Minister.’
Suddenly he broke out: ‘He ought to have come himself. He ought to have!’
He lifted a hand carefully, as though not exerting himself too jerkily, and pointed out of the window in the direction of Downing Street.
‘It’s not very far,’ he said. ‘It’s not very far.’
Another aspect of etiquette struck him, and he went on: ‘I must say it was a very decent letter. Yes. It was a decent letter, I’ve got to give him that.’
Neither of us knew when to begin condoling. It was some while before Gilbey got to the bare facts. At last he said: ‘The long and the short of it is, they’re getting rid of me.’
He turned his gaze, absently, from Douglas to me: ‘Do you know, I really can’t believe it.’ He was having fugues, as one often does under the impact of bad news, in which the bad news hadn’t happened and in which he was still planning his return to the department. Then the truth broke through again.
‘They haven’t even told me who my successor is going to be. They ought to have asked my advice. They ought to have.’
He looked at us: ‘Who is it going to be?’ Douglas said none of us knew.
‘If I believed what I saw in the papers,’ said Gilbey, outrage too much for him, ‘they’re thinking of replacing a man like me—’ very slowly he raised his right hand just above the height of his shoulder — ‘by a man like Grigson.’ This time his left hand descended carefully, palm outwards, below his knee.
He got on to a more cheerful topic. ‘They,’ (after his first complaint he could not bring himself to refer to the Prime Minister in the singular, or by name) had offered him a ‘step-up’ in the peerage. ‘It’s civil of them, I suppose.’
It was the only step-up the Gilbeys had had since they were ennobled in the eighteenth century, when one of them, a Lancashire squire, had married the daughter of a wealthy slave-trader. ‘Rascals. Awful rascals,’ said Lord Gilbey, with the obscure satisfaction that came over him as he meditated on his origins. When anyone else meditated so, he did not feel the same satisfaction. I had heard him comment on a scholarly work which traced the connection of some English aristocratic families with the African slave trade — ‘I should have thought,’ he had said in pain, ‘that that kind of thing is rather unnecessary.’
Gilbey was dwelling on the consequences of the step-up. Place in ceremonies, change in the coronet. ‘I don’t suppose I shall see another coronation, but you never know. I’m a great believer in being prepared.’
Gilbey was lonely, and we stayed for another half-hour.
When at last we left, he said that he proposed to attend the Lords more regularly, not less. ‘They can do with an eye on them, you know.’ His tone was simple and embittered.
Out in the open, crossing the path beside the Park, Douglas, black hat pulled down, gave a grin of surreptitious kindness. Then he said: ‘That’s that.’
Ministers came, Ministers went. On his side, Douglas wouldn’t have expected his Minister to mourn for him if he were moved to a dim job, or rejoice if he clambered back to the Treasury.