No movement from anyone else in the room. The man whom Sammikins’ laugh made wretched was reading a leather-bound volume, another was writing a letter, another gazing critically at a glossy magazine.
‘They want stirring up,’ said Sammikins, in a reproving tone. But he was surveying the room with a gambler’s euphoria. He began speaking of the last appointment of a junior minister — who was Roger’s Parliamentary Under-secretary, occupying the job which Roger had filled under Gilbey.
‘He’s no good,’ said Sammikins. The man’s name was Leverett-Smith. He was spoken of as a safe appointment, which to Sammikins meant that there was no merit in it.
‘He’s rich,’ I said.
‘No, he’s pretty well-off, that’s all.’
It occurred to me that Sammikins did not have an indifference which, in my provincial youth, we should have expected of him. Romantically, we used to talk about the aristocratic contempt for money. Sammikins was rough on ordinary bourgeois affluence: but he had no contempt at all for money, when, as with Diana Skidmore, there was enough of it.
‘He’s no good,’ cried Sammikins. ‘He’s just a boring little lawyer on the make. He doesn’t want to do anything, blast him, he doesn’t even want the power, he’s just pushing on, simply to puff himself up.’
I suspected that Leverett-Smith had been put in as a counterweight to Roger, who scarcely knew him and had not been consulted. I said that such men, who didn’t threaten anyone and who were in politics for the sake of the charade, (for I believed Sammikins was right there) often went a long way.
‘So do clothes-moths,’ said Sammikins, ‘that’s what he is — a damned industrious clothes-moth. We’ve got too many of them, and they’ll do us in.’
Sammikins, who had a store of bizarre information, most of which turned out to be accurate, had two addenda on Leverett-Smith. A, that he and his wife were only keeping together for social reasons, B, that she had been a protégée of Lord—, who happened to be a voyeur. Then, with an insistence that I didn’t understand, he returned to talking of government appointments, as though he had appointments on the brain. At that moment, when twenty-seven minutes had gone, I saw with surprise and chagrin one of the generals get up with long, creaking movements of the legs, and go to the bell.
‘Put down one more, Lewis,’ cried Sammikins, with a cracking laugh, ‘three! That’s an odd number, you know.’
The waiter was very quick. The general called for three pints of bitter, in tankards.
‘That’s a very good idea.’ Sammikins gave another violent laugh. He looked at the watch. Twenty-nine minutes had passed, the second hand was going round.
‘Well,’ he said, staring at me, bold and triumphant.
I heard a sniff from close by. With a glance of hate towards Sammikins, the man who had been registering protest about his noisiness, soberly put a marker into his book, closed it, and went towards the bell.
‘Twenty seconds to spare,’ I said. ‘My game, I think.’
Sammikins swore. Like any gambler I had ever known, he expected to make money out of it. It didn’t seem an addiction so much as a process of interior logic. Both he and Caro lost hundreds a year on their horses, but they always thought of them as a business which would pull round. However, he had to write me out a cheque, while his enemy and bane, in a gravelly voice, still with a hostile glare at Sammikins, ordered a glass of tonic water.
Without any preamble, his cheque passed over to me, Sammikins said: ‘The trouble with Roger is, he can’t make up his mind.’
For an instant I was at a loss, as though I had suddenly got mixed up in a different conversation.
‘That’s why I’ve been chasing you,’ he said, so directly, so arrogantly, so innocently, that it didn’t seem either flattering or unflattering: it just sounded like, and was, the bare truth.
‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’
By now I was ready for anything, but not for what he actually said. Noisily he asked me: ‘Roger hasn’t picked his PPS yet, has he?’
It was a question to which I had not given thought. I assumed that Roger would choose one of a dozen young back-benchers, glad to get their first touch of recognition.
‘Or has he, and we haven’t heard?’ Sammikins insisted.
I said I had not heard the matter so much as mentioned.
‘I want the job,’ said Sammikins.
I found myself curiously embarrassed. I didn’t want to meet his eyes, as though I had done something shady. Didn’t he realize that he was a public figure? Didn’t he realize that he would be a political liability? A good many people admired his devil-may-care, but not the party bosses or other solid men. No politician in his senses would want him as an ally, much less as a colleague, least of all Roger, who had to avoid all rows except the big ones.
I thought that I had better try to speak openly myself.
‘He’s taken one big risk for you already,’ I said.
I was reminding him of the time Roger had defended him in Collingwood’s face.
Yes, he knew all about that. ‘He’s a good chap,’ said Sammikins. ‘He’s a damned clever chap, but I tell you, I wish he could make up his mind.’
‘Has Caro told you anything?’
‘What the hell can she tell me? I expect she’s doing her best.’ He took it for granted that she was persuading Roger on his behalf, working for him as she had done all their lives. I wondered whether she was. She must know that she would be doing her husband harm.
‘She knows what I want. Of course she’s doing her best,’ he said with trust, with dismissive trust. It was a younger brother’s feeling — with all the responsibility and most of the love on the sister’s side.
‘I want the job,’ said Sammikins, speaking like a man who is saying his last word.
It was not his last word, however. In his restless fashion, he arranged for us to go round to Lord North Street for a night-cap, shamelessly hoping that his presence would act like blackmail. As he drove me in his Jaguar — it was getting late, Piccadilly was dark and empty under the trees, even after a vinous night he was a beautiful driver — he repeated his last word. Yes, he wanted the job. Listening to him as he went on talking, I was puzzled that he wanted it so much. True, he might be tired of doing nothing. True, his entire family assumed that political jobs were theirs by right, without any nonsense about qualifications. They were not intellectuals, he had scarcely heard intellectual conversation in his life, but since he was a child he had breathed day by day politics in the air, he had heard the familiar, authoritative gossip about who’s in, who’s out, who’s going to get this or that. But it still seemed strange: here was the humblest of ambitions, and all his energies were fixed on it.
In Caro’s drawing-room, he did not get a yes or no, or even an acknowledgement of suspense. Caro knew why he was there; she was protective, but gave nothing away. Roger also knew why he was there. He was friendly and paternal, himself having a soft spot for Sammikins. Roger was skilled in keeping off the point, and even Sammikins was over-awed enough not to force it. Watching the three of them — Caro looked flushed and pretty, but subdued, and was drinking more than usual — I thought I could guess what had happened. I believed she had, in fact, mentioned Sammikins’ hopes to Roger, full of the sneaking shame with which one tries to pull off something for a child one loves, and knows to be unsuited. I did not think that she had pressed Roger: and I didn’t think that he had told her that the idea was mad.
All the time, Roger was certain of what he was going to do. He did it within a week of Sammikins’ — blackmail? appeal? It looked prosaic. Roger appointed Mrs Henneker’s son-in-law, Tom Wyndham, who at the dinner-party, when Roger was interrogating David Rubin had protested about the American scientists ‘kicking us downstairs’. It was a commonplace choice: it was also a cool one.