Margaret said, ‘She does love him. She says she can’t imagine not hearing his key in the lock, not having the last drink with him at night. It’s true: I don’t know how she is going to bear it.’
40: An Evening of Triumph
It was well after ten when we got out of the taxi in Lord North Street. We had been invited, not to dinner, but for an after-debate supper. The door shone open for another guest, light streaming across the lances of rain.
I felt Margaret’s hand tighten in mine. When we had first entered this house, it had seemed enviable. Now it was threatened. Some of us, going up the stairs that night, knew, as well as Roger and Caro themselves, of both the threats.
She greeted us in the drawing-room, eyes flashing, jewels flashing, shoulders splendid under the lights. Her voice wasn’t constricted; she hugged Margaret, perhaps a little more closely than usual, she brushed my cheek. I knew, as we kissed, that this was a performance, gallant as it was. She had never liked me much, but now, if it weren’t for her obligation, she would have put me out of sight for good. She had either found out, or had decided for herself, that I had been in Roger’s confidence. She might be generous and reckless, but she would not forget her wrongs. This one was not to be forgiven.
The clock was striking the half-hour. There were already three or four people in the drawing-room, including Diana Skidmore.
‘They’ve not got back yet,’ said Caro, in her loud, casual tone, as though this were any other parliamentary night, ‘they’ being the politicians.
‘They’ve had quite a day, bless their hearts. I haven’t seen Roger since he went to the Cabinet this morning. Have you seen any of them, Diana?’
‘Not to speak of, you know,’ Diana replied, with a smile as bright, and as communicative, as her emeralds.
‘Isn’t Monty Cave making a great speech tonight?’ Caro went on.
‘I suppose he would have to say something, wouldn’t he?’ said Diana.
Caro told Diana that Monty would be along soon, in a tone which implied that Diana knew already. Diana responded with a question:
‘Is the PM coming?’
Caro replied boldly: ‘I couldn’t get him.’ She added, as though she wouldn’t be outfaced: ‘Reggie Collingwood promised to look in. If they’re not too late.’
It seemed clear — had the news reached Diana yet? — that Caro was trying to do her last service for Roger. She was not just seeing him through, she was doing more than that. She was calling up all her influence, until the debate. She was helping him to win, as thoroughly as if they had been happy.
And yet, though it was chivalrous, though she would truly have done it if she were losing him next week, did she expect, completely expect, to lose him? As I listened, she didn’t seem as if she had quite let go. Did she still hope that if he won, if his career were once more assured, he would have to stay with her? On her own terms? Given a future as brilliant as it had looked the year before, how much of it would he risk or sacrifice?
It would be astonishing if at times, brilliant with certainty, she did not hope like that. For myself, I was at a loss to know whether she was right or wrong.
I wondered also what chances she believed he had of winning. She was radiant with fighting energy. She would go on beyond the last minute. But, though she wasn’t subtle, she was shrewd and had seen much. She had been trying to get signals of encouragement from Diana and had received none. That must have been as patent to Caro as it was to Margaret and me. Not that Diana had finally given Roger up. She knew he was in extreme trouble, that was all. She was playing safe. Maybe she did not want to embarrass her closest political friends, like Collingwood; maybe she had heard from him the first whisper of a scandaclass="underline" but, deeper than that, she was acting out of instinct.
The beau monde wasn’t kind, Caro had once said to me on a carefree night. If it were kind, it would soon cease to be beau. It was tolerably good-natured, until you were really in trouble. Then you were on your own.
I wondered how many worlds were any better. If you were in trouble in the public eye, who was going to guard you? All the worlds I knew, not only the beau, but the civil servants, the academics, the industrialists, the scientists, huddled together to protect themselves. If you became exposed, they couldn’t do much. It was the odd acquaintance, sometimes the wild, sometimes the sober, who had concealed the fact that he was afraid of nothing and no one, who came out and took the risks and stood by one’s side.
Car in the Street below. Heavy footsteps on the stairs. Roger came in, came in alone.
I had an instant’s anxiety, as though Caro’s guests had let her down, as though her gesture had gone for nothing, and we were left with a useless supper-party, like so many Baltic Deputies.
Then, with a disproportionate relief, so that I gave a broad and apparently unprovoked grin in Diana’s direction, I saw Cave at the door, with Collingwood’s hand on his shoulder.
‘Give Monty a drink,’ cried Roger, in his broadest, heartiest voice. ‘He’s made the speech of a lifetime!’
‘He’ll make better speeches some day,’ said Collingwood, with an air of the highest congratulation, rather like Demosthenes commenting on a hitherto tongue-tied pupil.
‘Give him a drink!’ cried Roger. He was standing by his wife. Their faces were open, robust, smiling. They might have been a serene couple, rejoicing, because they were so successful, in a great friend’s success. Looking round, I should have liked to know how many of the others saw them so, and how much they knew.
As we sat down at the dinner-table downstairs, I was on edge and guessing. So were others. Some of the decisions — one could feel the crackle in the air — were not only not revealed, they were not yet taken. If Collingwood had heard the news about his nephew’s wife, he showed no sign of it. His phlegm was absolute. Diana’s self-control, Caro’s flaming courage — they were tightened, because people round the table knew that nothing was settled; were waiting to see in what might pass as a convivial evening, where others would — the old phrase returned to me — ‘come down’.
Cave held up a glass to the candlelight, viewed it with his round sombre, acute eyes, and sat forward, the rolls of chin sinking into his chest. He kept receiving compliments, Collingwood’s magisterial and not specially articulate, Roger’s hearty but increasingly forced. Cave’s glance darted towards them, his eyes sharply on guard, in the podgy, clown-like face. Diana was flattering him, with a brisk, hortatory rasp, as though irritated that he didn’t know how good he was.
About his triumph in the House that evening, there was no ambiguity at all. It had no connection with Roger’s policy or what was to come. Cave had, in a routine debate, wound up for the Government. To anyone outside the Commons, what he said would either be unnoticed or forgotten within days: but on the parliamentary stock exchange, the quotation in Cave had rushed up many points. On a normal evening, there would have been no more to it than that. Roger might have been expected to feel that particular blend of emotions appropriate to an occasion, when a colleague, friend, rival and ally had just had a resplendent professional success.
As we listened that night, this wasn’t all. There was no mystery about the triumph in the evening: but there was considerable mystery about the Cabinet a few hours before. Not that Collingwood or the others would in company have talked about Cabinet proceedings. Nevertheless, Caro and Diana, neither of them over-theoretical or over-delicate, were used to picking up the signs. Of course, they assumed, Roger’s debate next week had been talked about that morning. Of course the Cabinet had taken steps. Caro asked Collingwood a question about the vote next Tuesday, with as much fuss as she would have asked about the prospects of a horse.