‘Why should you?’ His glance was suspicious, and at the same time hopeful.
‘Why not?’
He cupped his hands round the tankard on the table.
‘Well,’ he said, with a hesitating, unwilling pleasure, ‘if it’s not too much of an infliction, I should be damned relieved if you would.’
The room, not yet lit up, was cool as a church in the summer evening, but Gilbert glowed in his chair: other men had gone up to dinner and we were left alone. He glowed, he swallowed another pint of beer, in the chilly room he seemed to be exuding warmth; but that was all he gave out. Although he had accepted my offer, he was returning nothing.
I was thinking: I should have to play his game, and bring in her name myself. It meant a bit of humiliation, but that did not matter; what did matter was that he would see too much. It was a risk I ought not to take. As I bought myself a drink, I asked: ‘By the way, have you seen Margaret lately?’
‘Now and again.’
‘How is she?’
‘Is there anything wrong with her?’ His eyes were sparkling.
‘How should I know?’ I replied evenly.
‘Isn’t she much as you’d expect?’
‘I’ve quite lost touch.’
‘Oh.’ He was briskly conversational. ‘Of course, I’ve kept my eye on all of them, I suppose I see them once every two months, or something like that.’ He was spinning it out. He told me, what I knew from the newspapers, that Margaret’s mother had died a year before. He went on to say, with an air of enthusiasm and good-fellowship: ‘Of course, I’ve seen quite a lot of Helen and her husband. You did meet him, didn’t you? He’s a decent bird—’
‘Yes, I met him,’ I said. ‘When did you see Margaret last?’
‘It can’t have been very long ago.’
‘How was she?’
‘I didn’t notice much change.’
‘Was the child all right?’
‘I think so.’
I broke out: ‘Is she happy?’
‘Why shouldn’t she be?’ Gilbert asked affably. ‘I should have thought she had done as well as most of us. Of course you can’t tell, can you, unless you’ve known someone better than I ever did Margaret?’
He knew, of course, how my question had been wrung out of me. He had been waiting for something like it: I might as well have confided straight out that I still loved her. But he was refusing to help. His mouth was smiling obstinately and his eyes, merry and malicious, taunted me.
35: Simple Question on Top of a Bus
I had to honour my offer to Gilbert, and I arranged to call on Paul Lufkin. When I arrived at the Millbank office, where in the past he had kept me waiting so many stretches of hours and from which I used to walk home to Sheila, he was hearty. He was so hearty that I felt the curious embarrassment which comes from the spectacle of an austere man behaving out of character.
Some of his retinue were waiting in the ante-room but I was swept in out of turn, and Lufkin actually slapped me on the back (he disliked physical contact with other males) and pushed out the distinguished visitors’ chair. Now that I was, in his eyes, an independent success, a power in my own right though still minor compared to him, he gave me the appropriate treatment. The interesting thing was, he also truly liked me more.
He said: ‘Well, old chap, sit down and make yourself comfortable.’
He was sitting at his own desk, showing less effects of the last years than any of us, his handsome skull face unravaged, his figure still as bony as an adolescent’s.
‘Believe it or not,’ he went on, ‘I was thinking of asking you to come to one of my little dinner-parties.
‘We must fix it,’ he said, still acting his impersonation of heartiness. ‘We’ve had some pretty jolly parties in our time, haven’t we?’
I responded.
‘There’s a secret I was going to tell you. But now you’ve given me the pleasure of a visit’ — said Lufkin with an entirely unfamiliar politeness — ‘I needn’t wait, I may as well tell you now.’
I realized that he was delighted to have me sitting there. He wanted someone to talk to.
‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘these people want to send me to the Lords.’
‘These people’ were the first post-war Labour government, and at first hearing it sounded odd that they should want to give Lufkin a peerage. But although he was one of the most eminent industrialists of his day, he had, with his usual long-sightedness, kept a foot in the other camp. He had never been inside the orthodox Conservative party: he had deliberately put some bets on the other side, and since 1940 that policy had been paying off.
In private his politics were the collectivist politics of a supreme manager, superimposed on — and to everyone but himself irreconcilable with — a basis of old-fashioned liberalism.
‘Shall you go?’
‘I don’t see any good reason for turning them down. To tell you the honest truth, I think I should rather like it.’
‘Your colleagues won’t.’
I meant what he must have thought of, that his fellow-bosses would regard him as a traitor for taking honours from the enemy.
‘Oh, that will be a nine days’ wonder. If I’m useful to them, they’ll still want me. And the minute I’m not useful they’ll kick me, whether I’ve got a coronet or not.’
He gave a savage, creaking chuckle.
‘Most of them would give their eyes for one, anyway. The main advantage about these tinpot honours — which I still think it’s time we got rid of—’ he put in, getting it both ways, as so often, ‘isn’t the pleasure they cause to the chaps who get them: it’s the pain they cause to the chaps who don’t.’
He was very happy, and I congratulated him. I was pleased: he was as able in his own line as anyone I knew, in the world’s eye he had gone the farthest, and I had an inexplicable liking for him.
I inquired what title he would choose.
‘Yes, that’s the rub,’ said Lufkin.
‘Haven’t you settled it?’
‘I suppose it will have to be the Baron Lufkin of somewhere or other. Lord Lufkin. It’s a damned awful name, but I don’t see how I can hide it. It might be different if I believed in all this flummery. It would have been rather fun to have a decent-sounding name.’
‘Now’s your chance,’ I teased him, but he snapped: ‘No. We’re too late for that. It’s no use rich merchants putting on fancy dress. It’s damned well got to be Lord Lufkin.’
He had the shamefaced, almost lubricious, grin of a man caught in a bout of day-dreaming. He had been writing down names on his blotter: Bury St Edmunds was his birthplace, how would Lord St Edmunds look? Thurlow, Belchamp, Lavenham, Cavendish, Clare, the villages he knew as a boy: with his submerged romanticism, he wanted to take a title from them. He read them out to me.
‘Pretty names,’ he said, inarticulate as ever. That was all the indication he could emit that they were his Tansonville, his Méséglise, his Combray.
‘Why not have one?’ Just for once I wanted him to indulge himself.
‘It’s out of the question,’ he said bleakly.
I thought he was in a good mood for my mission. I said I had a favour to ask him.
‘Go ahead.’
‘I should like to talk to you about Gilbert Cooke.’
‘I shouldn’t.’ Instantaneously the gracious manner — fingertips together, Lufkin obliging a friend — had broken up. All at once he was gritty with anger.
As though not noticing him, I tried to put my case: Cooke had done well in the Civil Service, he was highly thought of by Hector Rose and the rest –
‘I don’t think we need waste much time on this,’ Lufkin interrupted. ‘You mean, you’re asking me to give Cooke his job back?’