She pressed me to visit them, wanted so urgently to take me, that I suspected she might have another motive. She wore me down. One afternoon in November, she drove me down to what she called her ‘office’. We had not far to go, for Roger held one of the safe Kensington seats. Caro drove through the remnants of gentility in Queen’s Gate, the private hotels, the flats, the rooming-houses, the students’ hostels, past the end of Cromwell Road and Earl’s Court — crowded with the small-part actresses, the African students, the artists, all displaying themselves in the autumn sun, and (I remarked to Caro) as remote from Lord Gilbey’s concerns as if he were a Japanese daimyo. Caro just said: ‘Most of them don’t vote anyway.’
Her ‘office’ turned out to be in one of the back streets close by Olympia, a back-street of terrace houses, like those I used to walk past in my childhood on the way home. Each Monday afternoon, Caro used, so I gathered, to sit from two to six in the ‘front room’ of one of her constituency ‘chums’, a big woman with a glottal Cockney accent, who made us a pot of tea, was on hearty, patting, egalitarian terms with Caro, and cherished her delight at calling a woman of title by her Christian name.
That room, that street, seemed unbusinesslike for Caro. It was the wrong end of the constituency. The seat was safe, the Kensington end would go on returning Roger, if he turned into a gorilla. But down here she was surrounded by the working-class. Among the knockabout poor, the lumpen proletariat, she might pick up a vote or two; but the rest, with similar English impartiality and phlegm, would go on voting for another gorilla, provided he was Roger’s opponent.
There Caro sat, in the tiny, close-smelling front room, ready to talk to any caller for hours to come. Through the window, the houses opposite stood near and plain, so near that one could see the wood-pocks on the doors. The first of Caro’s visitors — perhaps clients was a better word — were Conservative supporters, elderly people living on small private means or pensions, who had made the trip from Courtfield Gardens or Nevern Square, from single rooms in the high nineteenth-century houses, who had come out here — for what? Mostly to have someone to talk to, I thought.
A good many of them were lonely, pointlessly lonely, cooking for themselves, going out to the public library for books. Some wanted to speak of their young days, of gentilities past and gone. They were irremediably lonely in the teeming town, lonely, and also frightened. They worried about the bombs: and though some of them would have said they had nothing to live for, that made them less willing to die. ‘Dying is a messy business anyway,’ said an old lady who had thirty years before taught at a smart girls’ school, putting a stoical face on it. I couldn’t have comforted her: dying was a messy business, but this was a hard way to die, frightened, neglected and alone. I couldn’t have comforted her, but Caro could, not through insight, not even through sympathy, for Caro was as brave as her brother — but through a kind of comradeship, unexacting, earthy, almost callous as though saying: We’re all dirty flesh, we’re all in the same boat.
Those genteel clients, some eccentric and seedy, some keeping up appearances, were pro-Suez all right. That wasn’t a surprise. It was more of a surprise when I listened to the later ones. They came from the streets round about, working people finished for the day; they were the sort of mixture you could pick up anywhere, just beyond the prosperous core of the great, muddled, grumbling town; they worked on the Underground and in small factories, they filled in their pools coupons and bet with a street bookmaker. They were members of trade unions and voted Labour. Their reasons for coming along were matter-of-fact — mostly to do with housing, sometimes with schools.
In her turn, Caro was brisk and matter-of-fact: yes, that could be taken up, no, that wasn’t on.
She gave one or two a tip for a race next day — not de haut en bas, but because she was, if possible, slightly more obsessed with horse-racing than they were themselves. She was playing fair, but once or twice she mentioned Suez, sometimes the others did. It was true what she had stated: there were several who would never have voted for ‘her people’, they would have said they were against the bosses — but just then, in a baffled, resentful fashion, they were on her side and Lord Gilbey’s, not on mine.
When she had said her goodbyes, and we went outside into the sharp night, the stars were bright for London. Behind the curtains, lights shone pallid in the basement rooms. At the corner, the pub stood festooned with bulbs, red, yellow and blue. The whole street was squat, peaceful, prosaic, cheerful. Caro was insisting that I should go back to Lord North Street for a drink. I knew that Roger was in the country making a speech. I knew she was not so fond of my company as all that. She still had something on her mind.
She was driving fast, the eastward traffic was slight on the way home to Westminster.
‘You see,’ she said. She meant that she had been right.
I wasn’t pleased. I began arguing with her; this was a tiny sample which showed nothing, not the real midland or northern working-class. But I wasn’t sure. Some politicians brought back from their constituencies the same report as hers.
‘I hope they’re all pleased with the result,’ I said. ‘I hope you are, too.’
‘We ought to have gone through with it,’ said Caro.
‘You’re all clinging with your fingernails on to the past,’ I said. ‘Where in God’s name do you think that is going to take us?’
‘We ought to have gone through with it.’
Out of patience with each other, tempers already edged, we sat in her drawing-room. She had been talking all the afternoon. I was tired with having just sat by: but she was restless and active. She mentioned the two boys, both at preparatory schools. Neither of them was ‘bright’, she said, with an air of faint satisfaction. ‘My family was never much good at brains.’
I fancied that when I left she would go on drinking by herself. She was looking older that night, the skin reddened and roughened round her cheek-bones. But it made no difference to her prettiness, and she walked about the room, not with grace, but with the spring, the confidence in her muscles, of someone who loved the physical life.
She went back to the sofa, curled her legs under her, and gazed straight at me.
‘I want to talk,’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘You knew, did you?’ She was staring at me as boldly as her brother had done in his club. She went on: ‘You know that Roger has had his own line on this?’ (She meant Suez.) ‘You know it, I know you know it, and it’s dead opposite to the way I feel. Well, that’s all down the drain now. It doesn’t matter a hoot what any of us thought. We’ve just got to cut our losses and start again.’
Suddenly she asked me: ‘You see Roger quite a lot nowadays, don’t you?’ I nodded.
‘I suppose you realize that no one has any influence on him?’
She gave her loud, unconstricted laugh.
‘I don’t mean he’s a monster. He lets me do anything I want round the house, and he’s good with the children. But when it comes to things outside, it’s a different kettle of fish. When it comes to where he’s going and how he’s going to get there, then no one has a scrap of influence on him.’