That morning, there was a strong rumour, which came from several sources, that some of Roger’s supporters were calling on the Prime Minister. They were trying to arrange for the Prime Minister to interview him. He hadn’t resigned yet. Another rumour: he was backing down. He wouldn’t resign. He would announce that he had stressed one part of the White Paper at the expense of the whole. He had been wrong, but now faithfully accepted the compromise. He would go on implementing the compromise policies: or alternatively, he would take a dimmer job.
I heard nothing from him. I imagined that he was like the rest of us when the worst has happened, in moments still tantalized by hopes, almost by fulfilment, as though it had gone the other way: just as, when Sheila had betrayed me when I was a young man, I walked across the park deceived by gleams of happiness, as though I were going to her bed: just as, when an operation has failed, one lies in hospital and, now and then, has reveries of content, as though one were whole again.
He would be living with temptations. He wasn’t different from most of those who have obtained any kind of power, petty or grand. He wanted to cling to it up to the end, beyond the end. If he went out now, untouched, unbudging, that was fine, that was in the style he would like for himself. And yet, he knew politics too well not to know that he might never come back. It would be bitter to behave as if he had been wrong, to be juggled with, put in an inconspicuous Ministry for years: but perhaps that was the way to win. Would they let him? He must be thinking of the talks that day. Others would be counting the odds, with more degrees of freedom than he had. It might be good management to make sure that he was disposed of. Some might be sorry, but that didn’t count. If they gave him a second chance, it wouldn’t be because of sympathy or even admiration. They owed him no support. It would be because he still had some power. They must be weighing up just how much influence he still possessed. Would he be more dangerous eliminated, or allowed to stay?
In the afternoon I attended a departmental meeting, Rose in the chair. He hadn’t spoken to me that morning; he greeted me with overflowing politeness, as though I were a valuable acquaintance whom he had not seen for months. No one round the table could have guessed that we had been sitting side by side, in anxiety, the night before. He got through the business as accurately, as smoothly, as he would have done when I first sat under him, nearly twenty years before. Next year, he would be sixty, taking his last meeting in this room. He would go on like this till the last day. This particular afternoon, it wasn’t even interesting business: it had to be done.
As soon as I returned to my room, my PA came in.
‘There’s a lady waiting for you,’ she said. She looked inquisitive and apologetic. ‘I’m afraid she seems rather upset.’
I asked who it was.
‘She says her name is Mrs Smith.’
When I had told Ellen the result over the telephone, late the previous night, she had gasped. I had heard a gulp of tears before the receiver crashed down.
That afternoon, as she sat down in the chair beside my desk, her eyes were open, bloodshot, piteous and haughty. They reminded me of someone else’s so hauntingly that I couldn’t at first listen to what she was saying. Then, down the years, I had it. They were like my mother’s, after an intolerable wound to her pride, as on the day my father went bankrupt.
She asked: ‘What is he going to do?’
I shook my head. ‘He’s told me nothing.’
‘I haven’t been able to see him.’
She was crying out for sympathy, and yet she would reject it.
I said, as astringently as I could make myself: ‘Yes, it’s bad. It’s part of the situation.’
‘I mustn’t see him till he’s decided, one way or the other. You understand, don’t you?’
‘I think so.’
‘I mustn’t influence him. I mustn’t even try.’
Then she gave a crisp, ironic, almost cheerful laugh, and added: ‘Do you believe I could?’
I had seen her so often under strain. This day was the worst. But — just in that moment — I could feel how she behaved with Roger. Given a chance, she was, more than most of us, high-spirited and gay.
‘Tell me something,’ she said, her eyes searching mine. ‘Which is better for him?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know well enough.’ Impatiently she explained herself. She might have been reading my own speculations earlier that day. Until she met Roger, she was politically innocent. Now she could follow, by instinct, love and knowledge, the moves, the temptations, the choices. Her insight had told her much what mine did: except that she was certain that, if Roger wanted to climb down, they would welcome him.
‘Which is better for him?’
‘If I knew, which I don’t, ought I to tell you?’ I said.
‘You’re supposed to be a friend of his, aren’t you?’ she flared out.
‘Fortunately,’ this time I could let the temperature drop, and smile sarcastically back, ‘I just don’t know which is better.’
‘But you think you do—’
I said: ‘If we forget your side of it, then I think he’d probably, not certainly but probably, be wiser to stay if he can.’
‘Why?’
‘If he’s out of politics, won’t he feel he’s wasting his life?’
‘It means humiliating himself and crawling to them.’ She flushed. She was hating ‘them’ with all the force of her nature.
‘Yes, it means that.’
‘Do you know that underneath he’s a very proud man?’
I looked at her and said, ‘Hasn’t he learned to live with it?’
‘Has anyone? Don’t you believe that I’m proud too?’
She was speaking without constraint, self-effacingness stripped off, codes of behaviour fallen away. Her face had gone naked and wild.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I believe that.’
‘If he does throw it up and comes to me, will he ever forgive me?’
It was a new fear, different from that which she had once confided in her own flat, yet grown from the same root. Then she had been afraid that, once he had failed, he would blame her and be unable to endure her. Now that fear had gone. She believed that, whatever happened, he would need her. Yet the doubt, the cruelty, the heritage, remained.
‘You have nothing to do with it,’ I said. ‘If he had never fallen in love with any woman at all, he would have been in precisely the same position as he is today.’
‘Are you dead sure?’
I said immediately, ‘I am dead sure.’
I was saying what I almost believed. If she had not been sitting beside me, wounded and suspicious, waiting for the slightest qualification, I might have been less positive. Roger had stood much less of a chance of getting his policy through — I became convinced later, looking back — than we imagined when we were living in the middle of it. It was hard to believe that a personal chance, such as their love affair, had had any effect. And yet — their love affair had had an effect on him: without it, would he have acted precisely as he had?
‘I am dead sure,’ I repeated.
‘Will he ever believe it?’
For an instant, I did not answer. ‘Will he ever believe it?’
She was thinking of Roger coming to her, marrying her: the plain life, after Caro’s home, the high hopes gone: the inquest on the past, the blame. She sat there for a moment or so, not speaking. Ellen, so self-effacing in public as to be inconspicuous, was filled with the beauty of violence, and perhaps with the beauty given her by the passion for sheer action, even if it were action destructive to herself, to all her hopes.
‘I’m telling myself,’ she said, ‘that I ought to get out of it, now. Today.’
I said: ‘Could you?’ She stared at me, her eyes once more piteous and haughty. She asked: ‘What is he going to do?’