There was one other thing. Just as Ellen’s judgement and mine had been distorted, so was his. He loved her. But in a fashion strange to him, he felt he had no right to love her. Not only, perhaps not mainly, because of his wife. People thought of him as a hard professional politician. There was truth in that. How complete the truth was, I still didn’t know. I still wasn’t sure which choices he would make. And yet I was sure that he had a hope of virtue. He wanted perhaps more strongly than he himself could tell, to do something good. Somehow, as though he was dragged back to the priests and prophets, he would have felt more certain of virtue, more fit to do something good, if like the greatest politicians, he could pay a price. It sounded atavistic and superstitious, as I looked at the two of them, the sharp, self-abnegating woman, the untransparent hulk of a man: yet, somewhere in my mind, was nagging the myth of Samson’s hair.
Ellen and I, with Roger mostly silent, were arguing what was to be done. Private detectives? No, no point. Then I had an idea. This man was employed by one of Lord Lufkin’s competitors. If Lufkin would talk to the other chairman — ‘Have you ever seen that done?’ said Roger, suddenly alive.
Yes, I said, I had once seen it done.
It would mean telling Lufkin everything, Roger was saying.
‘It would mean telling him a good deal.’
‘I’m against it,’ said Ellen.
Roger listened to her, but went on: ‘How far do you trust him?’
‘If you gave him a confidence, he’d respect it,’ I said.
‘That’s not enough, is it?’
I said that Lufkin, cold fish as he was, had been a good friend to me. I said that he was, in his own interest, without qualification on Roger’s side. I left them talking it over, as I went to the bar to get more drinks. As I stood there, the landlady spoke to me by name. I had used that pub for years, since the time during the war when I lived in Pimlico. There was nothing ominous in her addressing me, but her tone was hushed.
‘There’s someone I want to show you,’ she said.
For an instant I was alarmed. I looked round the room, the sense of being watched acute again. There weren’t many people there, no one I knew or could suspect.
‘Do you know who that is?’ she whispered reverentially, pointing to the far end of the bar. There, sitting on a stool, eating a slice of veal and ham pie, with a glass of stout beside the plate, was a commonplace-looking man in a blue suit.
‘No,’ I said.
‘That,’ said the landlady, her whisper more sacramental, ‘is Grobbelaar’ s brother-in-law!’
It might have sounded like gibberish, or alternatively, as if Grobbelaar were a distinguished public figure. Not a bit of it. Distinguished public figures were not in the landlady’s line. In that pub, Roger stayed anonymous and, if she had been told his name, she would have had no conception who he was. On the other hand, she had a clear conception who Grobbelaar was, and so had I. Grobbelaar had been, in fact, an entirely respectable South African, but an unfortunate one. About five years before, living, so far as I could remember, in Hammersmith, he had been murdered for the sake of a very small sum, about a hundred pounds. There had been nothing spectacular about the murder itself, but the consequences were somewhat gothic. For Grobbelaar had been in an amateurish fashion dissected, and the portions made into brown paper parcels, weighted down with bricks, and dropped, at various points between Blackfriars and Putney, into the river. It was the kind of bizarre crime which, unbeknown to the landlady, foreigners thought typical of her native town, the fate which waited for many of us, as we groped our way through endless streets, in a never-ending fog. It was the kind of crime, true enough, which brought the landlady and me together. As she gave me this special treat, as she invited me to gaze, she knew that she was showing me an object touched by mana. It was true enough that this brother-in-law was another entirely respectable man, who had not had the slightest connection with the gothic occurrences. Did he, as an object of reverence, seem a little remote? Had the mana worn just a shade thin? The landlady’s whisper was in a tone which meant that mana never wore thin.
‘That,’ she repeated, ‘is Grobbelaar’s brother-in-law.’
I went back to our table with a grin. Ellen had noticed me conferring with the landlady, she looked at me with apprehensive eyes. I shook my head and said, ‘No, nothing.’
They had decided against Lufkin. The straightforward method was to write a couple of lines to the man himself, saying without explanation that she wished to receive no further communications from him, and that any further letters would be returned. Nothing but that. It implicated no one but herself, and it told him that she knew.
At that we left it, and sat in the cheerful pub, now filling up, with the landlady busy, but her gaze still drawn by the magnet in the blue suit at the end of the bar.
32: Symptoms
The White Paper was published at last; the House had not reassembled. This concatenation was not just an amiable coincidence. We wanted official opinion to form, the more of it the better. There was our best chance. As soon as the Paper, Command 8964, came out, Roger’s supporters were trying to read the signs.
The newspapers didn’t tell us much. One paper cried: ‘Our Deterrent To Go?’ To our surprise, the slogan did not immediately catch on. Most of the comments of the defence correspondents were predictable: we could have written them ourselves. In fact, to an extent, we had written them ourselves, for two or three of the most influential correspondents were friends and disciples of Francis Getliffe. They knew the arguments as well as he or Walter Luke. They understood the White Paper, though it deserved fairly high marks for deliberate obscurity. They accepted that, sooner or later, there was only one answer.
The danger was that we were listening to ourselves. It was the occupational danger of this kind of politics: you cut yourselves off from your enemies, you basked in the echo of your own voice. That was one of the reasons why the real bosses stayed more optimistic than the rest of us. Even Roger, more realistic than other bosses, knowing that this was the moment, knowing that he had to be certain what the back-benchers were saying, had to force himself to visit the Carlton or White’s.
The Cabinet had, as a compromise, accepted the White Paper. But Roger knew — inarticulate men like Collingwood could sometimes make themselves very clear — that they meant the compromise to be kept. If he tilted the balance, if he put his weight on the side of his own policy, he was in danger. The Prime Minister and his friends were not simple men, but they were used to listening to men simpler than themselves. If the backbenchers became suspicious of Roger, then simple men sometimes had grounds for their suspicions. It was by his own party that he would be judged.
As for me, I liked hearing bad news no more than Roger did. But for the next fortnight, I called on acquaintances and used my clubs as I had not done since I married Margaret. I did not pick up many signs. With those I did pick up, I was not sure which way they pointed. Walking along Pall Mall, one wild windy January night, I was thinking that on the whole it was going a shade worse, but not decisively worse, than I reckoned on. Then I went up the steps of a club, where I was not a member, but was meeting a Whitehall colleague. He was the head of a service department, and after a few minutes with him I was encouraged. As he talked, one eye to his watch, needing to catch a train back to East Horsley for dinner, the odds seemed perceptibly shorter. I caught sight of Douglas Osbaldiston walking through the colonnades. My host said goodbye, and I stayed for a word, what I thought would be a casual word, with Douglas. As he came out into the light, I saw his face, and I was shocked. He looked ravaged.