It might have been a jibe, I couldn’t tell. If so, it was a gentle one. Roger was speaking without strain or edge. He said: ‘My one trouble is, I can’t help thinking the present situation is slightly different. I think, if we don’t bring this one off now, we never shall. Or we shan’t until it’s too late. Isn’t that the only difference between us? Perhaps you can tell me that it isn’t so.’
‘The honest answer is,’ said Rubin slowly, ‘that I don’t know.’
‘You believe everything will drift along, with no one able to stop anywhere?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Most of us understand the situation. Can none of us affect it?’
‘Does any one person matter very much? Can any one person do very much?’
‘You’re a wise man,’ said Roger.
There was a long pause. Roger spoke with complete relaxation, so that it was surprising to hear how strong his voice sounded. He said: ‘You’re saying, we’re all caught. All the world. The position has crystallized on both sides. There’s nothing for any of us to do. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? All we can do is stick to our position, and be humble enough to accept that there’s practically nothing we can do.’
‘In detail there may be a little,’ said Rubin.
‘That’s not much, is it?’ Roger gave a friendly smile. ‘You’re a very wise man,’ He paused again. ‘And yet, you know, it’s pretty hard to take. In that case, one might as well not be here at all. Anyone could just wait until it’s easy. I don’t think I should have lived this life if that were all.’
For a moment his tone had been passionate. Then it became curiously formal and courteous as he added: ‘I’m most grateful for your advice. I very much wish I could accept it. It would make things easier for me.’
He looked up the table and said to Caro, as though they were alone: ‘I wish I could do what you want.’
It seemed to me that had Caro known she was fighting for her marriage, she would not so openly have implied her opposition to Roger that night. He was guilt-ridden enough to welcome the smallest loophole of escape, just to feel to himself that it could not have gone on, anyway. Yet was that really so? He had known her mind, he had always known it. To her, loyalty to Roger would have seemed less if she had gone in for pretences. She had said nothing new that night. But I believed that her repetition, before Rubin, of what had already been said in private, might have given Roger some vestigial sense of relief, of which he was nevertheless ashamed.
He said, ‘I wish I could.’
I wondered when Rubin had realized that Roger was going through with it? At what point, at what word? In intellect Rubin was by far the subtler; in emotion, he was playing with a master.
There was another oddity. In private, Rubin was as high-principled, as morally-fastidious, as Francis Getliffe. And yet — it was a disconcerting truth — there were times, and most important times, when the high-principled were not to be trusted — and perhaps Roger was. For to Roger there were occasions, not common, but not so rare as we all suspected, when morality grew out of action. In private, Rubin lived a better life than most men; and yet he would have been incapable of contemplating walking into obloquy, risking his reputation, gambling his future, as in clear sight Roger was doing now.
I wondered when I myself had realized that Roger was going through with it. In a sense, I had believed it soon after we became intimate, and I had backed my judgement. Yet simultaneously, I had not trusted my judgement very far. In the midst of his obfuscation, I had been no surer than anyone else that he would not desert us. And so, in that sense, I had not realized, or at least had not been certain, that he was going through with it until — until that night.
When did Roger realize it? He would not have known, or been interested to know. Morality sprang out of action, so did choices, certainly a choice as complex as this. Even now, he might not know in what terms he would have to make it nor from what motives it would come.
How much part, it occurred to me again, had his relation with Ellen played?
‘I can’t accept your advice, David,’ said Roger, ‘but I do accept your estimate of my chances. You don’t think I’m going to survive, do you? Nor do I. I’d like you to understand that I agree.’
He added, with a hard and radiant smile: ‘But it isn’t absolutely cut and dried even now. They haven’t quite finished with me yet.’
Until that moment he had been speaking with total realism. Suddenly his mood had switched. He was suffused with hope, the hope of crises, that hope which just before a struggle, warms one with the assurance that it is already won. With the anxious pouches darker under his eyes, Rubin gazed at him in astonishment, and something like dismay.
He felt, we could all feel, that Roger was happy. He was not only happy and hopeful, he was also serene.
Part Five
The Vote
36: Something out of Character
The light on Big Ben was shining like a golden bead in the January evening; the House had reassembled. It was a season of parties. Three times that week my wife and I went out before dinner, to Diana’s house on South Street, to a private Member’s flat, to a Government reception. The faces revolved about one like a stage army. Confident faces, responding to other confident faces, as though this parade was preserved forever, like a moment in time. Ministers and their wives linked themselves with other Ministers and their wives, drawn by the magnetism of office: groups of four, groups of six, sturdy, confident, confidential backs presented themselves not impolitely, but because it was a treat to be together, to the room. Roger and Caro were there, looking as impregnable as the rest.
There was an hallucination about high places which acted like alcohol, not only on Roger under threat, but on whole circles. They couldn’t believe they had lost the power till it had gone. Even when it had gone, they didn’t always believe it.
That week and the next, mornings in the office were like war time. Roger was sitting in his room, never looking bored, sending out for papers, asking for memoranda, intimate with no one, so far as I knew, certainly not with me. Ripples of admiration and faith were flowing down the corridors. They reached middle-grade civil servants who, as a rule, wanted only to get home and listen to long-playing records. As for the scientists, they were triumphing already. Walter Luke, who had believed in Roger from the beginning, stopped me in a gloomy, lavatory-like passage in the Treasury where his uninhibited voice reverberated round: ‘By God, the old bleeder’s going to get away with it! It just shows, if you go on talking sense for long enough, you wear ’em down in time.’
When I mentioned Walter’s opinion to Hector Rose, he said, with a frigid but not unfriendly smile: ‘Sancta simplicitas.’
Even Rose was not immune from the excitement. Yet he found it necessary to tell me that he had been in touch with Monteith. The piece of false information, which I had protested about, had been checked. Rose had satisfied himself that it was an honest mistake. He told me this, as though the first imperative for both of us was that the official procedures should be proved correct. Then he felt free to pass on to Roger’s chances.
During those days I talked once or twice to Douglas, but only to try to comfort him about his wife. The prognosis had been confirmed: she would become paralysed, she would die within five years. At his desk he sat stoically writing upon official paper. When I went in, he talked of nothing but her.