Neither Martin nor I was willing to admit it. After sitting silent, Francis said, at any rate one had to go on acting as though it were not true.
Yes, he said, shrugging himself free, suddenly speaking as though he were a younger man, in command again, he thought my idea was worth trying. Yes, he agreed, it was no use Martin approaching the most senior scientists. He, Francis, would have to take on another job: he would do it himself. We were not to hope for much. He had used his influence too many times, and there was not much of it left.
As we went on talking, I was only half-thinking of the scientists. I could not get rid, completely or for long, of the thought of Porson. There was something I had heard in the voice over the telephone: something that the voice, confident as it sounded, hadn’t uttered. They would have liked to ask me to come back, so that I could help him myself.
Years before, that was what I should have done. By now this kind of compulsion had grown dim. I was the worse for it. For most of us, the quixotic impulses might stay alive, but in time the actions didn’t follow. I had used money to buy off my fellow-feeling, to save trouble, to save myself the expense of spirit that I was no longer impelled to spend.
38: ‘A Small Room and a Gas-ring’
Lord Lufkin summoned Margaret and me to a dinner-party at twenty-four hours’ notice, just as he summoned many guests. He had done the same for thirty years, long before his great success had come: he had done it during the years when he was hated: and still his guests had obeyed.
That February night — it was in the week after my visit to Cambridge — we trooped dutifully into Lufkin’s drawing room in St James’s Court. No one could have called it a cheerful room. Lufkin had had it panelled in dark pine, and there was not a picture on the walls except a portrait of himself. No one went to Lufkin’s expecting a cheerful party. His gifts as a host were negative. Yet in that room there were standing a couple of Ministers, a Treasury boss, the President of the Royal Society, a fellow tycoon.
Lufkin stood in the middle, not making any small talk, nor any other size of talk; not shy so much as not feeling it worthwhile. He took it for granted that he was holding court. The interesting thing was, so did everyone round him. In the past, I had sometimes wondered why. The short answer was, the magnetic pull of power. Not simply, though that added, because he had become one of the top industrialists in England. Much more, because he had complete aptitude for power, had assumed it all his life, and now could back it with everything he had won.
He announced to his guests at large, that he had taken over the suite adjoining this one. He ordered a door to be thrown open to show a perspective of tenebrous rooms.
‘I decided we needed it,’ he said.
Lufkin’s tastes were austere. He spent little on himself: his income must have been enormous, but he was pernicketily honest, he didn’t use any half-legitimate devices for sliding away from taxes, and he had not made an impressive fortune. On the other hand, as though in revenge, he insisted on his firm giving him all the luxuries he had no liking for. This suite was already too big for him, but he had made them double it. He made them pay for his court-like dinner parties. He made them provide not one car, but half a dozen.
Even so, Lufkin had a supreme talent for getting it both ways. ‘I don’t regard this flat as my own, of course,’ he was saying, with his usual moral certainty.
People near him, hypnotized into agreeing, were sagely nodding their heads.
‘I regard it as the company’s flat, not mine. I’ve told my staff that time and time again. This flat is for the use of the whole company.’
If I had been alone with Lufkin, whom I had known much longer than had his other guests, I couldn’t have resisted analysing that arcane remark. What would have happened, if some member of his staff had taken him at his word, and booked the flat for the weekend?
‘As for myself,’ he said, ‘my needs are very simple. All I want is a small room and a gas-ring.’
The maddening thing was, it was quite true.
Though Lufkin might have preferred a round of toast, we moved into a dinner which was far from simple. The dining room, through another inexplicable decree, was excessively bright, the only bright room in the flat. The chandeliers flashed heavily down above our heads. The table was over-flowered. The hierarchy of glasses glittered and shone.
Lufkin, himself content with a whisky and soda for the meal, looked on with approbation as the glasses filled with sherry, hock, claret, champagne. He sat in the middle of his table, his skull-face still young, hair neat and dark in his sixties, with the air of a spectator at what he regarded as a well-conducted dinner. He did not trouble to speak much, though occasionally he talked in a manner off-hand but surreptitious, to Margaret. He enjoyed the presence of women. Though he spent most of his time in male company, with his usual cross-grainedness he never liked it much. It was half-way through the meal when he addressed the table. His fellow-tycoon had begun talking of Roger Quaife and the White Paper. The Ministers were listening, attentive, deadpan, and so was I. Suddenly Lufkin, who had been sitting back, as though utterly detached, his knife and fork aligned, three-quarters of his pheasant left uneaten, intervened.
In his hard, clear voice he said: ‘What’s that you were saying?’
‘I said the City’s getting bearish about some of the long-term consequences.’
‘What do they know?’ said Lufkin, with inspissated contempt.
‘There’s a feeling that Quaife’s going to run the aircraft industry into the ground.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Lufkin, at his bleakest. He had caught my eye. Even Lufkin was not usually as rude as this without a purpose. I had suspected that this dinner wasn’t such an accidental gathering as it seemed.
‘There’s nothing in that.’ He spoke as one who does not propose to say any more. Then he condescended to explain himself.
‘Whatever happens, Quaife or no Quaife, or whether they throw you out at the next election—’ he gave a sardonic smile at the Ministers — ‘and the other chaps come in, there’s only room in this country for a couple of aircraft firms, at most. More likely than not, two is one too many.’
‘I suppose you mean,’ said the other industrialist with a show of spirit, ‘that you ought to be the only firm left in?’
Lufkin was the last man in existence to be worried about being parti-pris: or to have qualms because he was safe with a major contract: or to question whether his own interests and the national interests must necessarily coincide.