Roger said: ‘No, the point is: politics are not like that. God knows, I’ve played it rougher than that before now. If necessary I shall play it rough again. But not like that.’ He was speaking with complete reasonableness. ‘Of course politics can be corrupt. But not corrupt in that fashion. No one makes that kind of bargain. It’s not that we’re specially admirable. But we’ve got to make things work, and they couldn’t work like that, and they don’t. I’ve never seen anyone make a deal of that kind in my life. It’s only people who don’t know how the world ticks who think it ticks like that.’
I was thinking, I had once, twenty years before, seen someone propose such a deal. It had happened in my college. The college politicians had turned it down at sight, outraged, just as Roger was, by a man who didn’t know ‘how the world ticks’, by a man who made the world look worse than it was because he had all the cynicism of the unworldly.
We had not drawn the curtains, and through the open windows a breeze was blowing in. For an instant I leaned out. There was a smell of petrol from the Bayswater Road, mixed with the smell of spring. It was a clear night for London, and above the neon haze, over the trees in the park, I could make out some stars.
I turned back to the room. Roger was stretched out, quiet, and happy again, on the sofa. Margaret had asked him a question I did not catch. He was replying without fuss that the decisions had to be taken soon. He might soon cease to be useful. He would be lucky if he had ten years.
19: Sudden Cessation of a Nuisance
It puzzled me, not that Brodzinski kept pressing for a private talk with Roger, but that all of a sudden he left off doing so. Once he had given me up, letters came into Roger’s office. Brodzinski begged for an interview on a matter of grave public concern. He wished to explain his disagreement with his scientific colleagues. He had been alarmed by the attitude of the secretary of the committee.
It was a nuisance, but Ministers’ offices were used to nuisances. Roger asked Osbaldiston to see Brodzinski. Douglas, more guarded and official than I had been, gave a reply as though to a parliamentary question: no, the Minister had not reached a conclusion: he was studying both the majority report and Brodzinski’s minority report. For a few days, this seemed to reassure Brodzinski. Then the letters began again. Once more I told Roger not to underestimate him.
Roger asked, what could he do? Write to The Times? Talk to the Opposition military spokesmen? There we were safeguarded. We had, through Francis Getliffe and others, our own contacts. Francis and I had, for years, been closer to them than to Roger’s colleagues. What could the man do? I had to agree. After the talk in the Athenaeum, I had come away apprehensive. Now the anxiety had lost its edge. As out of habit, I repeated that Roger ought to have a word with him.
On the Thursday which followed his dinner with the Prime Minister, Roger had been invited to a conversazione of the Royal Society. The day after, he mentioned that he had spent a quarter of an hour with Brodzinski alone.
It looked as though Roger had spread himself. The next letters from Brodzinski said, he had always known that the Minister understood. If they could continue the conversation undisturbed, he, Brodzinski, was certain that all the obstacles would be removed. In a few days Roger replied politely. Another letter arrived by return. Then telephone calls. Would the Minister’s Private Secretary arrange a meeting? Could the Minister be told that Brodzinski was on the line? Could he be put straight through?
Suddenly it all stopped. No more telephone calls. No more letters. It was bewildering. I took what precautions I could. We knew his points of influence in the Air Ministry, in the House. Was he pressing them, instead? But no: he seemed not to have been near them. There was no disquiet anywhere, there were not even any rumours hissing round.
The patient young men in Roger’s private office allowed themselves a shrug of relief. He had got tired of it at last, they said. Four months of commotion: then absolute silence. From their records, they could date when silence fell. It was the third week in May.
In that same week, I happened to have been inquiring whether certain invitations to accept Honours had been sent out. My question had nothing to do with Brodzinski, though I thought mechanically that his invitation must have gone out too. It did not occur to me, not remotely, to connect the two dates.
As the summer began, all of us round Roger were more confident than we had yet been. First drafts of the White Paper were being composed. Francis Getliffe came from Cambridge twice a week to confer with Douglas and Walter Luke. Papers passed between Douglas’ office and Rose’s. Roger had issued an instruction that the office draft must be ready for him by August. Then he would publish when he guessed the time was right. In private, he was preparing for the month after Christmas, the beginning of 1958.
While we were drafting, Diana Skidmore was going through her standard summer round. On the last day of Ascot Week, she invited some of us to a party in South Street. She had heard — as though she had a ticker-tape service about American visitors — that David Rubin was in England. She had not met him: ‘He’s brilliant, isn’t he?’ she asked. Yes, I assured her, he was certainly brilliant. ‘Bring him along,’ she ordered. There had been a time when the Basset circle was supposed to be anti-Semitic. That, at least, had changed.
When Margaret, David Rubin and I stood at the edge of Diana’s drawing-room, about seven o’clock on the wet June evening, not much else seemed to have changed. The voices were as hearty as ever: the champagne went around as fast: the women stood in their Ascot frocks, the men in their Ascot uniforms. There were a dozen Ministers there, several of the Opposition front bench, many Conservative members, and a few from the other side.
There was a crowd of Diana’s rich friends. She welcomed us with vigour. Yes, she knew that David Rubin was talking to the English nuclear scientists.
‘People over here being sensible?’ she said to him. ‘Come and tell me about them. I’ll arrange something next week.’ She was peremptory as usual, and yet, because she took it for granted that it was for her to behave like a prince, to open England up to him, he took it for granted too.
How was it, I had sometimes wondered, that, despite her use of her riches, she didn’t attract more resentment? Even when she put a hand, with complete confidence, into any kind of politics? She had been drawn back into the swirling, meaty, noisy gaggle: there she was, listening deferentially to a handsome architect. Even in her devoted marriage, she had had a hankering for one guru after another. Just as she took it for granted that she could talk to Ministers, so she loved being a pupil. If it seemed a contradiction to others, it seemed natural to her, and that was all she cared about.
Margaret had been taken away by Monty Cave. I noticed Rubin being shouted at hilariously by Sammikins. I walked round the party, and then, half an hour after we came in, found myself by Rubin’s side again. He was watching the crowd with his air of resignation, of sad intelligence.
‘They’re in better shape, aren’t they?’ He meant that these people, or some of them, had lost their collective confidence over Suez. Now they were behaving as though they had found it again. Rubin knew, as well as I did, that political sorrows did not last long. Political memory lasted about a fortnight. It did not count beside a new love-affair, a new job, even, for many of these men, the active glow after making a good speech.
‘No country’s got a ruling class like this.’ David Rubin opened his hands towards the room. ‘I don’t know what they hope for, and they don’t know either. But they still feel they’re the lords of this world.’