I tried to hush her, for I wanted to listen to Roger. His tone was different from that of his friends. I could not place his accent. But it was nothing like that of Eton and the Brigade; any of the others would have known, and Mrs Henneker might have said, that he did not come ‘out of the top drawer’. In fact, his father had been a design engineer, solid provincial middle-class. He wasn’t young, despite Mrs Henneker’s adjective. He was only five years younger than I was, which made him forty-five.
He had interested me from the beginning, though I couldn’t have said why. Listening to him that evening, as we sat round the dinner-table downstairs, I was disappointed. Yes, his mind was crisper than the others’, he was a good deal heavier-weight. But he too, just like the others, was talking about the chessboard of Parliament, the moves of their private game, as though nothing else existed under Heaven. I thought that, with David Rubin present, they were all being impolite. I became impatient. These people’s politics were not my politics. They didn’t know the world they were living in, much less the world that was going to come. I looked at Margaret, who had the eager, specially attentive look she always wore when she was bored, and wished that the evening were over.
All of a sudden, I wasn’t impatient any longer. The women had just gone back upstairs, and we were standing in the candlelight. ‘Come and sit by me,’ Roger said to Rubin, and snapped his fingers, not obtrusively, as if giving himself a signal of some kind. He put me on his other side. As he was pouring brandy into Rubin’s glass, he said, ‘I’m afraid we’ve been boring you stiff. You see, this election is rather on our minds.’ He looked up and broke into a wide, sarcastic grin. ‘But then, if you’ve been attending carefully, you may have gathered that.’
For the first time that evening, David Rubin began to take a part. ‘Mr Quaife, I’d like to ask you something,’ he said. ‘What, according to present thinking, is the result of this election going to be? Or is that asking you to stick your neck out?’
‘It’s fair enough,’ said Roger. ‘I’ll give you the limits. On one side, the worst that can happen to us’ (he meant the Conservative Party) ‘is a stalemate. It can’t be worse than that. At the other end, if we’re lucky we might have a minor landslide.’
Rubin nodded. One of the members said: ‘I’m betting on a hundred majority.’
‘I’d judge a good deal less,’ said Roger.
He was speaking like a real professional, I thought. But it was just afterwards that my attention sharpened. My neighbour’s cigar smoke was spiralling round the candle-flame: it might have been any well-to-do London party, the men alone for another quarter of an hour. Then Roger, relaxed and solid in his chair, turned half-right to David Rubin and said: ‘Now I’d like to ask you something, if I may.’
‘Surely,’ said Rubin.
‘If there are things you mustn’t say, then I hope you won’t feel embarrassed. First, I’d like to ask you — how much does what we’re doing about nuclear weapons make sense?’
Rubin’s face was more sombre, worn, and sensitive than those round him. He was no older than some of the other men, but among the fresh ruddy English skins his stood out dry, pallid, already lined, with great sepia pouches, like bruises, under his eyes. He seemed a finer-nerved, more delicate species of animal.
‘I don’t know that I’m following you,’ he said. ‘Do you mean what the UK is doing about your weapons? Or what we’re doing? Or do you mean the whole world?’
‘They all enter, don’t they?’ Everyone was looking at Roger as he asked the matter-of-fact question. ‘Anyway, would you start on the local position, that is, ours? We have a certain uncomfortable interest in it, you know. Would you tell us whether what this country’s doing makes sense?’
Rubin did not, in any case, find it easy to be as direct as Roger. He was an adviser to his own government; further, and more inhibiting, he was hyper-cautious about giving pain. So he did a lot of fencing. Was Roger talking about the bombs themselves, or the methods of delivery? He invoked me to help him out — as an official, I had heard these topics argued between the Americans and ourselves for years.
There were other considerations besides the scientific ones, beside military ones, said Rubin, back on his last line of defence, why the UK might want their own weapon.
‘It’s our job to worry about that, isn’t it?’ said Roger gently. ‘Tell us — look, you know this as well as anyone in the world — how significant, just in the crudest practical terms, are our weapons going to be?’
‘Well, if you must have it,’ Rubin answered, shrugging his shoulders, ‘anything you can do doesn’t count two per cent.’
‘I say, Professor Rubin,’ came a bass voice, ‘you’re kicking us downstairs pretty fast, aren’t you?’
Rubin said: ‘I wish I could tell you something different.’ His interlocutor was Mrs Henneker’s son-in-law, a man called Tom Wyndham. He confronted Rubin with a cheerful stare, full of the assurance of someone brought up in a ruling class, an assurance which did not exactly ignore changes in power, but shrugged them off. Rubin gave an apologetic smile. He was the most polite of men. He had been born in Brooklyn, his parents still spoke English as a foreign language. But he had his own kind of assurance: it did not surprise him to be told that he was the favourite for that year’s Nobel physics prize.
‘No,’ said Monty Cave, ‘Roger asked you to tell us.’ He gave a sharp grin. ‘He usually gets what he asks for.’
Roger smiled, as though they were friends as well as allies. For five years, since they entered the House, they had been leading their group of back-benchers.
‘Now David, if I may call you so,’ he said, ‘do you mind if I go one step further. About the United States — does your policy about the weapons make sense?’
‘I hope so.’
‘Doesn’t it depend upon the assumption that you’re going to have technical superiority for ever? Don’t some of our scientists think you’re under-estimating the Russians? Is that so, Lewis?’
I was thinking to myself, Roger had been well-briefed; for Francis Getliffe, Walter Luke and their colleagues had been pressing just that view.
‘We don’t know,’ said Rubin.
He was not at his most detached. And yet, I saw that he had respect for Roger as an intelligent man. He was a good judge of intelligence and, courteous though he was, respect did not come easily to him.
‘Well then,’ said Roger, ‘let us assume, as I should have thought for safety’s sake we ought to, that the West — which means you — and the Soviet Union may get into a nuclear arms race on something like equal terms. Then how long have we got to do anything reasonable?’
‘Not as long as I should like.’
‘How many years?’
‘Perhaps ten.’
There was a pause. The others, who had been listening soberly, did not want to argue. Roger said: ‘Does that suggest an idea to anyone?’
He said it with a sarcastic twist, dismissively. He was pushing his chair back, signalling that we were going back to the drawing-room.
Just as he was holding open the door, bells began to ring in the passage, up the stairs, in the room we were leaving. It was something like being on board ship, with the bells ringing for lifeboat-drill. Immediately Roger, who a minute before had seemed dignified — more than that, formidable — took on a sheepish smile. ‘Division bell,’ he explained to David Rubin, still wearing the smile, ashamed, curiously boyish, and at the same time gratified, which comes on men when they are taking part in a collective private ritual. ‘We shan’t be long!’ The members ran out of the house, like schoolboys frightened of being late, while David and I went upstairs alone.