Before I could ask him, he broke out: ‘Lewis, I’m nearly off my head with worry.’ He sat beside me. I said, ‘What is it?’
In reply, he said one word. ‘Mary.’ The name of his wife. Then he added, that she might be very ill.
As though released, he told me of her signs and symptoms, hyper-attentively, almost with fervour, just as a sick person tells one about his own. About two weeks before — no, Douglas corrected himself with obsessive accuracy — eleven days before, she had complained of double vision. Holding her cigarette at arm’s length, she had seen a replica alongside it. They had laughed. They were happy together. She had always been healthy. A week later, she said that she had lost feeling in her left arm. Suddenly they had looked at each other in distress. ‘We’ve always known, ever since we were married, when either of us was afraid.’ She had gone to her doctor. He couldn’t reassure her. Forty-eight hours before, she had got up from a chair and been unable to control her legs. ‘She’s been walking like a spastic,’ he cried. That morning she had been taken to hospital. He couldn’t get any comfort. It would be a couple of days before they gave him any sort of answer.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I’ve got the best neurologists in the place. I’ve been talking to them most of the day.’ It had been a consolation to use influence and power, to find out the names of the specialists, to have them brought in government cars to his office. That day, Douglas had given up being unassuming.
‘I suppose you know what we’re afraid of?’ he asked in a quiet tone.
‘No.’ I failed him. All through his description I had been at a loss.
Even when he brought out the name of the disease, it was his manner that harrowed me most. ‘Disseminated sclerosis,’ he said. He added, ‘You must remember reading about Barbellion’s disease.’
Then, quite suddenly, he was full of an inexplicable hope.
‘It may not be anything of the sort,’ he said robustly, almost as though it were for him to cheer me up. ‘They don’t know. They can’t know yet awhile. Don’t forget, there are several possibilities which are more or less benign.’
He had a surge of happiness, of confidence in the future. I did not know how soon his mood would change. Not liking to leave him in the club, I offered to take him home to my wife, or to go with him to his own house, deserted now. He gave an intimate smile, some of the freshness returning to his face. No, he wouldn’t hear of it. He was perfectly all right, nothing could happen that night. He was staying at the club, he would go to bed with a good book. I ought to know he wasn’t the man to take to the bottle by himself.
All he said in that patch of euphoria was, for him, curiously indirect, but when I said goodbye, he gripped my hand.
During the next few days, at meetings, in the office, speculations about Roger got sharper. Parliament would be sitting again in a week. Before Easter, there would, Rose and the others agreed, have to be a full-dress debate on the White Paper. But they did not agree either on the strength of Roger’s position nor on his intentions. Rose, very distant from me at this time, merely gave a polite smile.
On the fourth morning after I had met Douglas at his club, his secretary rang up mine. Would I please go along at once?
As soon as I entered his room, I had no doubt. He was standing by the window. He gave me some sort of greeting. He said: ‘You were worried about her too, weren’t you?’ Then he burst out: ‘The news is bad.’
What had they said?
He replied, no, it wasn’t exactly what they had expected. It wasn’t disseminated sclerosis. But that wasn’t much improvement, he said, with a quiet and bitter sarcasm. The prognosis of what she had got was as bad or worse. It was another disease of the central nervous system, a rarer one. They could not predict its course with accuracy. The likelihood was, she would be dead within five years. Long before that, she would be completely paralysed. He said, his expression naked and passionate: ‘Can you imagine how horrible it is to know that? About someone you’ve loved in the flesh?’ He added: ‘About someone you still love in the flesh?’
For minutes I stayed silent, and he broke out in disjointed, violent spasms.
‘I shall have to tell her soon.’
‘She’s been kind all her life. Kind to everyone. Why should this happen to her?
‘If I believed in God, I should throw him back his ticket.’
‘She’s good.’
‘She’s got to die like this.’
At last, when he fell silent, I asked whether there was anything I could do.
‘There’s nothing,’ he said, ‘that anyone can do.’ Then he said, in a level tone, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Lewis. She’ll need her friends. She’ll have a lot of time to see her friends. She’ll want you and Margaret, of course she will.’
There was a pause. He said: ‘Well, that’s all.’
I could feel the effort of his will. His voice tightened and he added: ‘Now I should like to talk some business.’
He held up his copy of the White Paper, which had been lying on the blotter.
‘I want your impression. How is this going down?’
‘How do you think?’
‘I’ve been occupied with other things. Come on, what is your impression?’
I replied: ‘Did anyone expect absolutely universal enthusiasm?’
‘It hasn’t got it, you mean?’
‘There are some malcontents.’
‘From what I’ve been able to pick up,’ said Douglas, ‘that may be putting it mildly.’
As he sat there unrelaxed, the nerve of professional expertness showed through. It was not the White Paper which worried him. It was the interpretation which he knew, as well as I did, Roger wished to make and to act upon. He had never liked Roger’s policy: his instincts were too conservative for that. It was only because Roger was a strong Minister that he had got his way so far: or perhaps because Douglas wasn’t unaffected by Roger’s skills. But now Douglas neither liked the policy nor wanted to gamble on its chances. Just as he hadn’t wished to be linked with a scandal when the Parliamentary Question came up, so he didn’t wish to be linked with a failure.
As he shut out his suffering, his tormented thoughts of his wife, this other concern leaped out.
‘It could be,’ I said. He was much too astute a man to be bluffed.
‘It’s no use deceiving ourselves,’ said Douglas. ‘Anyway, you wouldn’t. There is a finite possibility that my Minister’s present policy may be a dead duck.’
‘How finite?’
We stared at each other. I couldn’t get him to commit himself. I pressed him. An even chance? That would, before this conversation, have been my secret guess. Douglas said: ‘I–I hope he’s sensible enough to cut his losses now. And start on another line. The important thing is, we’ve got to have another line in reserve.’
‘You mean—?’
‘I mean, we have to start working out some alternative.’
‘If that became known,’ I said, ‘it would do great harm.’
‘It won’t get known,’ he replied, ‘and it will have to be done at once. We shan’t have long. It’s a question of thinking out several eventualities and making up our minds which is going to be right.’
‘In this business,’ I said, ‘I’ve never had much doubt what’s right.’