‘It’s too late. There were times when I might have taken that offer. Not now.’
They were each speaking with stark honesty. On his side, with the cruelty of a love-relation which is nothing but a love-relation: where they were just naked with each other, with neither children, nor friends, nor the to-and-fro of society to console them, to keep them safe. On her side, she was speaking from loneliness, from the rapacity with which she wanted him, and, yes, from her own code of honour.
Their eyes met again, and fell away. Between them, at that instant, was not love: not desire: not even affection: but knowledge.
As though everything else was irrelevant, she said in a brisk, businesslike manner: ‘Well, you’d better settle how you’re going to handle it next Thursday morning.’
She meant, the Cabinet, at which Roger’s debate would, though possibly only perfunctorily, come up. Once she had been envious of Caro for knowing the political life as she did not. Now she had learned. Whom could he trust? Could he sound his colleagues before the meeting? Could I find out anything in Whitehall? Whom could he trust? More important, whom couldn’t he trust?
We talked on for a couple of hours. The names went round. Collingwood, Monty Cave, the PM, Minister after Minister, his own Parliamentary Secretary, Leverett-Smith. It was like sitting in Cambridge rooms twenty years before, counting heads, before a college election. It was like that. The chief difference was that this time the stakes were a little higher, and the penalties (it seemed to me that night) more severe.
39: Political Arithmetic
During those days before the debate, Roger, whenever he went into the House or the Treasury Building or Downing Street, was under inspection: inspection often neither friendly nor unfriendly, but excited by the smell of human drama: the kind of inspection that I remembered my mother being subjected to, in the provincial back streets, when we were going bankrupt — but it was also just as much a predilection of the old Norse heroes, who, on hearing that your house had been burned down, with you inside, were interested, not in your fate, but in how you had comported yourself.
As they watched him, Roger behaved well. He was a brave man, physically and morally, people were saying. It was true. Nevertheless, on those mornings he could not bring himself to read the political correspondents’ gossip-columns. He listened to accounts of what they said, but could not read them. Though he walked through the lobbies, bulky and composed, cordial to men whom he suspected, he could not manage to invite the opinions of his own nearest supporters. He sat at his desk in the office, staring distantly at me, as though his articulateness and self-knowledge had both gone.
I had to guess what request he was making: yes, he would like to know where his Parliamentary Secretary, Leverett-Smith, stood, and Tom Wyndham too.
This was one of the jobs I fancied least. I had no detachments left. I also did not want to hear bad news. I did not want to convey it. It was easy to understand how leaders in danger got poor information.
In fact, I picked up nothing of much interest, certainly nothing that added to disquiet. Tom Wyndham was, as usual, euphoric and faithful. He had been one of Roger’s best selections. He continued to carry some influence with the smart young ex-officers on the back benches. They might distrust Roger, but no one could distrust Tom Wyndham. He was positive all would turn out well. He did not even seem to understand what the fuss was about. As he stood me drinks at the bar of White’s, I felt, for a short time, reassured and very fond of him. It was only when I got out into the February evening that it came to me, with displeasing clarity, that, though he had a good heart, he was also remarkably obtuse. He couldn’t even see the chessboard, let alone two moves ahead.
With Leverett-Smith next morning — it was now five days before the Opposition motion — the interview was more prickly. It took place in his office, and to begin with, he showed mystification as to why I was there at all. Not unreasonably, he was put out. If the Minister (as he always called Roger) wished for a discussion, here was he, sitting four doors down the corridor, from 9.30 in the morning until he left for the House. His point was reasonable: that didn’t make it more gratifying. He looked at me with his lawyer’s gaze, and addressed me formally, like a Junior Minister putting high civil servants in their place.
‘With great respect—’ he kept saying.
We should never have got on, not in any circumstances, least of all in these. We had hardly a thought or even an assumption in common.
I repeated that for Roger next week was the major crisis. This wasn’t an occasion for protocol. We were obliged to give him the best advice we could.
‘With great respect,’ replied Leverett-Smith, ‘I am confident that neither of us needs to be reminded of his official duty.’
Then he began something like a formal speech. It was a stiff, platitudinous and unyielding speech. He didn’t like me any better as he made it. Yet he was revealing more sense than I gave him credit for. It was ‘common ground’ that the Minister was about to undergo a supreme test. If he (Leverett-Smith) had been asked to give his counsel, he would have suggested festina lente. Indeed, he had so suggested, on occasions that I might conceivably remember. What might provoke opposition if done prematurely, would be accepted with enthusiasm when the time was ripe. Nevertheless, in the Minister’s mind the die was cast, and we all had to put away our misgivings and work towards a happy issue.
We should certainly have six abstentions, Leverett-Smith went on, suddenly getting down to the political arithmetic. Six we could survive. Twenty meant Roger was in peril unless he had reassured the centre of the party. Thirty-five, and he would, without any conceivable doubt, have to go.
‘And you?’ I asked quietly, and without hostility.
‘I consider,’ said Leverett-Smith, formally but also without hostility, ‘that that question should not have been put. Except by the Minister himself. If he weren’t overwrought, he would know that, if I had been going to disagree with my Minister, I should have done so in public before this and I should naturally resign. So it oughtn’t to need saying that now, if the worst comes to the worst, and the Minister has to go — which I still have good hopes is not going to happen — then as a matter of principle I shall go with him.’
Spoken like a stick, I thought. But also like an upright man. The comparison with Roger, in the same position three years before, flickered like a smile on the wrong side of the face.
I was able to report to Roger that afternoon without needing to comfort him. He listened as though brooding: but when he heard of Leverett-Smith’s stuffy speech; he shouted out loud. He sounded amused, but he wasn’t really amused. He was in one of those states of suspicion when any piece of simple human virtue, or even decency, seems more than one can expect or bear.
He was wrapped up in his suspicions, in his plans for the counter-attacks, like a doctor confronted with the x-ray pictures of his own lungs. He did not even tell me, I did not know until I got home to Margaret, that Caro had invited me to their house the following night.
She had not telephoned, she had dropped in at our flat without notice.
‘She obviously had to talk to somebody,’ Margaret said, looking upset, ‘and I suppose she didn’t want to do it with her own friends, so she thought it had better be me.’
I did not ask her what Caro had said, but Margaret wanted to tell me about it.
Caro had begun: ‘I suppose you know?’ — then had launched into a kind of strident abuse, half-real, half-histrionic, punctuated by the routine obscenities she would have heard round the stables at Newmarket. It was not so much abuse of Ellen, though there was some of that too, but of life itself. As the violence began to wear itself out, she had begun to look frightened, then terrified. She had said, her eyes wild, but with no tears in them, ‘I don’t know how I shall bear being alone. I don’t know how I am to bear it.’