With a smile George backed out, the door closed, Rose looked not at me but out of the window. His arms were folded on his chest, and it was some moments before he spoke.
‘Well,’ he said.
I waited.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘he’s obviously a man of very high intelligence.’
In that respect, Rose in half an hour could appreciate George’s quality more than his employer in the solicitors’ firm, who had known him half a lifetime. He went on: ‘He’s got a very strong and precise mind, and it’s distinctly impressive. If we took him as a replacement for Cooke, on the intellectual side we should gain by the transaction.’
Rose paused. His summing-up was not coming as fluently as usual.
He added: ‘But I must say, there seems to be altogether too much on the negative side.’
I stiffened, ready to sit it out.
‘What exactly?’
‘Not to put too fine a point on it, a man of his ability who just rests content in a fourth-rate job must have something wrong with him.’
A stranger, listening to the altercation which went on for many minutes, would have thought it business-like, rational, articulate. He might not have noticed, so cool was Rose’s temper, so long had I had to learn to subdue mine, that we were each of us very angry. I knew that I had only to be obstinate to get my way. I could rely on Rose’s fairness. If George had been an impossible candidate, he would have vetoed him. But, although Rose felt him unsuitable and even more alien, he was too fair to rule him out at sight.
That being so, I should get George if I stuck to it; for this was the middle of the war, and I was doing a difficult job. In peace-time, I should have had to take anyone I was given. Rose had been trained not to expect to make a personal choice of a subordinate, any more than of an office chair: it offended him more, because mine was nothing but a personal choice. It was wartime, however; my job was regarded as exacting and in part it was abnormally secret. In the long run I had to be given my head. But I knew that I should have to pay a price.
‘Well, my dear Lewis, I am still distinctly uneasy about this suggestion. If I may say so, I am slightly surprised that you should press it, in view of what I have tried, no doubt inadequately, to explain.’
‘I wouldn’t do so for a minute,’ I replied, ‘if I weren’t unusually certain.’
‘Yes, that’s the impression you have managed to give.’ For once Rose was letting his bitter temper show. ‘I repeat, I am surprised that you should press the suggestion.’
‘I am sure of the result.’
‘Right.’ Rose snapped off the argument, like a man turning a switch. ‘I’ll put the nomination through the proper channels. You’ll be able to get this man started within a fortnight.’
He glanced at me, his face smoothed over.
‘Well, I’m most grateful to you for spending so much time this afternoon. But I should be less than honest with you, my dear Lewis, if I didn’t say that I still have a fear this may prove one of your few errors of judgement.’
That was the price I paid. For Rose, who in disapproval invariably said less than he meant, was telling me, not that I might turn out to have made an error of judgement, but that I had already done so. That is, I had set my opinion against official opinion beyond the point where I should have backed down. If I had been a real professional, with a professional’s ambitions, I could not have afforded to. For it did not take many ‘errors of judgement’ — the most minatory phrase Rose could use to a colleague — docketed in that judicious mind, to keep one from the top jobs. If I became a professional, I should have the future, common enough if one looked round the Pall Mall clubs, of men of parts, often brighter than their bosses, who had inexplicably missed the top two rungs.
I did not mind. When I was a young man, too poor to give much thought to anything but getting out of poverty, I had dreamed of great success at the Bar; since then I had kept an interest in success and power which was, to many of my friends, forbiddingly intense. And, of course, they were not wrong: if a man spends half of his time discussing basketball, thinking of basketball, examining with passionate curiosity the intricacies of basketball, it is not unreasonable to suspect him of a somewhat excessive interest in the subject.
Yet, over the last years, almost without my noticing it, for such a change does not happen in a morning, I was growing tired of it: or perhaps not so much tired, as finding myself slide from a participant into a spectator. It was partly that now I knew I could earn a living in two or three different ways. It was partly that, of the two I had loved most, Sheila had ignored my liking for power, while Margaret actively detested it. But, although I believed that Margaret’s influence might have quickened the change within me, I also believed it would have happened anyway.
Now that I felt a theme in my life closing, I thought it likely that I had started off with an interest in power greater than that of most reflective men, but not a tenth of Lufkin’s or Rose’s, nothing like enough to last me for a lifetime. I expect that I should keep an eye open for the manoeuvres of others: who will get the job? and why? and how? I expected also that sometimes, as I watched others installed in jobs I might once have liked, I should feel regret. That did not matter much. Beneath it all, a preoccupation was over.
As it vanished step-by-step, so another had filled its place. But this other was genuine; I had been clear about it, although I had had to push it out of sight, even when I was a child. I had known that sooner or later I should have some books to write; I did not worry about it; I was learning what I had to say. In trouble, that knowledge had often steadied me, and had given me a comfort greater than any other. Even after Margaret left me, in the middle of the war, when I was too busy to write anything sustained, nevertheless I could, last thing at night, read over my notebooks and add an item or two. It gave me a kind of serenity; it was like going into a safe and quiet room.
After the cold parting with Rose I went to my own office, where George was sitting by the window smoking a pipe.
‘That will be all right, barring accidents,’ I told him at once.
‘He was extraordinarily nice to me,’ said George enthusiastically, as though the manner of his reception by Rose was much more important than the prosaic matter of the result.
‘You’d expect him to be civil, wouldn’t you?’
‘He was extraordinarily nice to me, right from the minute I went in,’ said George, as though he had anticipated being tripped up inside the door.
I realized that George had not speculated on why Rose and I had been discussing him for so long. He was not given to meeting danger halfway; he had been happy, sitting by my window, looking down into Whitehall, waiting for me to bring the news. He was happy also, later that evening, as we walked through the streets under a frigid moon, though not in the way I was. I was happy that night because it took me back through the years to the time when he and I walked the harsher streets of the provincial town, George making grandiose plans for me, his brightest protégé — to the time which seemed innocent now, before I met Sheila, to those years in the early twenties when the world outside us seemed innocent too.
It was unlikely that George gave a thought to that past, for he was not in the least a sentimental man. No, he was happy because he enjoyed my company, my company as a middle-aged man in the here and now; because he had been received politely by an important person; because he saw work ahead on which he could stretch himself; because he was obscurely scoring against all the people who had kept him dim and unrecognized so long; and because, in the moonlit night, he saw soldiers and women pairing off in the London streets. For George, even in his forties, was one of those men who can find romantic magnificence in sex without trappings; the sight of the slit of light around the nightclub door, and he was absent-minded with happiness; his feet stumped more firmly on the pavement, and he cheerfully twirled his stick.