He was referring to his defence of Sammikins. He was speaking with extreme rancour, as though denouncing the folly, and worse, of somebody else. ‘If I were any good at what I’m trying to do, I never ought to allow myself to take risks for the sake of feeling handsome. I only ought to take one risk. I’ve got a fifty per cent chance of doing what I set out to do.’
He snapped his fingers, less unobtrusively than usual. ‘If I can’t do what we believe in, then I reckon no one is going to do it. For that, I’ll make a great many sacrifices you two would be too genteel to make. I’ll sacrifice all the useless protests. I’ll let you think I’m a trimmer and a time-server. I’ll do anything. But I’m not prepared for you two to come and teach me when I’ve got to be noble. It doesn’t matter whether I look noble or contemptible, so long as I bring this off. I’m fighting on one front. That’s going to be hard enough. Nothing that any of you say is going to make me start fighting on two fronts, or any number of fronts, or whatever you think I ought to fight on.’ There was a pause.
‘I don’t find it as easy as you do,’ said Monty Cave. ‘Isn’t it slightly too easy to find reasons for doing nothing, when it turns out to be advantageous to oneself?’
Roger’s temper had subsided as suddenly as it had blown up.
‘If I were going to fall over backwards to get into trouble, whenever there are decent reasons for keeping out of harm’s way, then I shouldn’t be any use to you, or in this job.’
For a man of action — which he was, as much so as Lord Lufkin — Roger was unusually in touch with his own experience. But as he made that reply, I thought he was speaking like other men of action, other politicians that I had known. They had the gift, common to college politicians like my old friend Arthur Brown, or national performers like Roger, of switching off self-distrust, of knowing when not to be too nice about themselves. It was not a romantic gift: but it was one, as more delicate souls like Francis Getliffe found to their disadvantage, the lack of which not only added to the pain of life, but cost one half the game.
16: Pretext for a Conversation
The days of Suez were over. Monty Cave, with two other junior Ministers, had resigned from the Government. There were still dinner-parties from which it was advisable to excuse ourselves. But I could not excuse myself from Gilbey’s speech in the House of Lords.
It was not an occasion made for drama. There were perhaps forty men lolling on the red benches, under the elaboration of stained glass, the brass and scarlet of the galleries, the chamber more flashy than the Commons, the colours hotter. If Roger had not asked me, I should not have thought of listening. The Government spokesman was uttering generalities, at the tranquillizing length which Douglas Osbaldiston judged suitable, about the defence programme after Suez. The Opposition was expressing concern. One very old peer muttered mysteriously about the use of the camel. A young peer talked about bases. Then Gilbey rose, from the back of the Government benches. He was looking ill, iller than he really was, I thought. It occurred to me that he was doing his best to emulate the elder Pitt. But I hadn’t realized what he was capable of. Speaking to an official brief, he was fumbling, incompetent, and had embarrassed us for years. On his own, he was eloquent, and as uninhibited as an actor of his own generation playing Sydney Carton.
‘I should have liked to speak before your lordships in the uniform which has been the greatest pride and privilege of my life,’ he told them in his light, resonant, reedy tenor. ‘But a man should not wear uniform who is not well enough to fight.’ Slowly he put his hand on his heart. ‘In recent days, my lords, I have wished devoutly that I was well enough to fight. When the Prime Minister, God bless him, decided with a justice and righteousness that are as unchallengeable as any in our history, that we had to intervene by force of arms to keep the peace, and our own inalienable rights in Suez, I looked the world in the face as I have not been able to do these last ten years. For a few days, true Englishmen were able to look the whole world in the face. Is this the last time that true Englishmen will have that privilege, my lords?’
As usual with Lord Gilbey, it was ham. As usual with his kind of ham, it was perfectly sincere.
But Gilbey, despite his sincerity, was not so simple as he seemed. This speech was a threnody for his own England: but it turned into an opportunity for revenge on those who had kicked him out. He was not clever, but he had some cunning. He had worked out that the enemies of Suez within the Government had been his own enemies. As the rumours that Roger was anti-Suez went round the clubs, Gilbey had decided that these were the forces, this man the intriguer, who had supplanted him. Like other vain and robust men, Gilbey had no capacity for forgiveness whatsoever. He did not propose to forgive this time. Speaking as an elder statesman, without mentioning Roger by name, he expressed his doubts about the nation’s defences, about ‘intellectual gamblers’ who would let us all go soft. ‘This is a knife in the back,’ an acquaintance in the gallery wrote on an envelope and passed to me.
Gilbey was finishing. ‘My lords, I wish for nothing more than that I could assure you that the country’s safety is in the best possible hands. It is a long time since I lay awake at night. I have found myself lying awake, these last bitter nights, wondering whether we can become strong again. That is our only safety. Whatever it costs, whether we have to live like paupers, this country must be able to defend itself. Most of us here, my lords, are coming to the end of our lives. That matters nothing to me, nothing to any of us, if only, at the hour of our death, we can know that the country is safe.’
Again, slowly, Gilbey put his hand on his heart. As he sat down, he took from his waistcoat pocket a small pill-box. There were ‘Hear hears’, and one or two cheers from the benches round him. Gilbey took a capsule, and closed his eyes. He sat there with eyes closed, hand on heart, for some minutes. Then, bowing to the Woolsack, leaning on the arm of a younger man, he left the Chamber.
When I had to report this performance to Roger, he took it better than other bad news. ‘If it comes to playing dirty,’ he said, ‘aristocrats have got everyone else beaten, any day of the week. You should see my wife’s relatives when they get to work. It’s a great disadvantage to be held back by middle-class morality.’
He spoke with equanimity. We both knew that the enemies, both as people and as groups, would become visible from now on. The extreme right, he was saying, was bound to be ten times more powerful in any society like ours, or the American society, than the extreme left. He had been watching them before this. It was not only Gilbey who would be talking, he said.
No, it was not only Gilbey who would be talking, as Caro proved to me a few days later, when she came to have a drink at our flat. She herself, like all her family, had been pro-Suez. At the dinner-table in Lord North Street, she had been outspoken for it, while Roger had not said much. Had they arranged this between themselves, or did they know the moves so well that they did not need to? It was good tactics for Roger to have a wife, and a Seymour, who was talking the party line. Good tactics or not, pre-arranged or not, Caro believed what she said. Once again, people were not clever enough to dissimulate. When Caro talked to me with a bold, dashing, innocent stare, I was furious with her, but I did not doubt that she was honest. She was as much pro-Suez as Lord Gilbey, and for the same reason. What was more, she insisted that Roger’s constituents were pro-Suez too, including many of the poor.