So far as I could judge Commons receptions, his was a warm one, not only on his own side. Certainly Caro was in no doubt. Gazing down with an expression that was loving, gratified and knowledgeable, she said,
‘Now I call that a bit of all right.’
On my other side, Osbaldiston, still preoccupied with professional values, was reflecting: ‘I must say, it does make us look a bit more respectable, anyway.’
In the lobby, where we went to meet him, he was being congratulated. Members whom he scarcely knew, hounds of success, were trying to catch his eye. Shining with sweat and well-being, he nevertheless wanted our opinion too. ‘Satisfactory?’ he asked Osbaldiston and me, with a vigilant look. It was not until he had had enough praise that he switched to another topic. Now he was ready to think about some of the scientists’ troubles, he said. He and Caro were going out to dinner. Could we come round to Lord North Street after eleven, and start straight away?
Later that night, I sat in the Quaifes’ drawing-room, waiting for them. I was sitting there alone, since Osbaldiston, who lived out in the suburbs, had left me to it. They were not late home: they ran up the stairs brimming with excitement: but it was a long time before Roger and I got down to business.
They were excited because they had been dining with the editor of The Times, and had been given a glimpse of next day’s (Friday morning’s) paper.
I was amused. This was real privilege, I said. In London at that time, one could not buy the earliest editions until the small hours. The other notices they would not see before the morning. Still, Roger was prepared to concede, The Times was the most important. They couldn’t have done him better. His had been the statement they examined, while Lord Gilbey, his boss, received a few indifferent lines.
He saw me watching him. I asked, what did Gilbey’s speech look like on paper? Roger shrugged his shoulders, said he had been too close to it. He didn’t know how it would read in the House of Lords Hansard.
Caro, radiant, gave us more drink, and took a stiff one herself. She was as excited as he was, but much more confident. She could trust her judgement about success much more easily than he could. He was still thinking of next morning’s papers. That evening in the House, he had sounded grown-up, unusually speculative, responsible. It was arguable, unless one believed that we were wholly at the mercy of blind and faceless fortune, that his decisions might turn out to be important. More than most men, that was the feeling he gave one. Yet, in the bright drawing room in Lord North Street, all he was thinking of, without any deviation or let-up, was what the Telegraph, the Guardian, the popular press, would say next day. Caro sat stroking the side of her glass, proud, loving, full of certainties. She could have written the headlines herself.
Of the people I knew, I often thought, it was only the politicians and the artists who lived nakedly in public. The great administrative bosses, the Roses and Osbaldistons, scarcely ever heard a public word about themselves, certainly not a hostile one. As for the industrial tycoons like Paul Lufkin, as soon as they got near the top, they would have felt the virtues outraged if they had heard so much as a whisper of personal criticism. Those lives were out of comparison more shielded. It was the politicians and artists who had to get used to being talked about in public, rather as though they were patients in a hospital visited daily by troops of medical students, who didn’t hate them, but who saw no reason to lower their voices. Of course, the politicians and artists had asked for it, or rather, some part of their temperament had. Yet, though they might have asked for it, they didn’t like it. Their skins did not thicken, even if they became world figures. I was sure that Roger’s never would.
I wished that I were as sure of what, in his job, he intended to do. That night, at last, we were talking business. He was as familiar with ‘the papers’, (which meant a drawer-full of files, memoranda marked ‘Top Secret’, and even one or two books) as I was. He had mastered both the proposals of the Brodzinski group, and what Getliffe and the others argued in reply. All Roger said was intelligent and precise — but he would not give me an opinion of his own.
I did not get any further that night. We went on in the same fashion, sniffing at each other like dogs, in the weeks before the summer recess. He must have guessed where I stood, I thought — even though guardedness was catching, and soon one didn’t put out one’s feelers as far.
Intermittently, during the summer, on holiday with the family, I wondered about him. It was possible that he was testing me. It was possible that he had not yet made up his mind.
As a rule I would have waited. This time I had to know. It was often naïf to be too suspicious, much more naïf than to believe too easily. It often led to crasser action. But there were occasions — and this was one — where you needed to trust.
In September, arriving back in London, I thought it would do no harm if I tried to spend an evening with him alone. Then, my first morning in Whitehall, I felt the sensation of having put one’s shoulder hard against a door already on the latch. A telephone call came through before I had glanced at my in-tray. I heard a familiar, rich, off-beat voice. Roger was asking me whether I had any time free in the next few days, and whether we might spend a bachelor evening at his club.
4: Something in the Open
At the Carlton, Roger and I had our dinner at a corner table. Although he waved now and then to passers-by, he was concentrating on his meal. He was enjoying himself, we were sharing a bottle of wine and he ordered another. When I had been with him before, he had not cared what he ate or drank, or whether he did so at all. Now he was behaving like a gold-miner coming into town. It struck me that he had the irregular habits, the mixture of rapacity and self-denial, which I had seen before in people who set themselves big tasks.
Through the dinner, I was stonewalling. He wanted something out of me: I wanted to find out something about him. But I could afford to let it ride. So we talked about books, where he uttered strong opinions, and about common acquaintances, where he was more interested and would not utter any opinion whatever. Rose, Osbaldiston, Luke, Getliffe, a couple of top Ministers: we discussed them all. He produced detail after detail, but would not admit that he liked one more than another. I taunted him by saying that this neutrality didn’t suit his style. He was putting on the neutrality of men of action who, except under extreme provocation, never admitted that one man was preferable to another.
Roger gave a boisterous laugh, a laugh so unrestrained that I saw other people glancing towards our table.
It was a point to me. Without any introduction, preparation or lead in, Roger leaned across the table and suddenly said: ‘Lewis, I want your help.’
I was taken by surprise, and went back to stonewalling again. I looked, not at him, but at the people round about us, at an old man with a crimson face who was chewing with exaggerated slowness, at a serious youth impressed by his first glimpse of a London club.
I said:‘What for?’
‘I thought you had just been blaming me for being neutral.’
‘What am I being neutral about?’ I asked.
‘I can play that game as long as you can. Is it going to get us anywhere?’
Roger had seized the initiative and held it. He was speaking easily, with inexplicable intimacy, with something like anger.