Even now, after half a lifetime, I wasn’t certain. If I had made the other choice, despite the suffering, despite the years of something like maiming, I might have been less reconciled. And that, I thought, could very well prove true for this young woman. If she married Pat (which I regarded as certain, since he wasn’t exactly a spiritual athlete and wouldn’t give up his one patch of safe ground) she would go through all the torments of a marriage without trust. If she didn’t, she would go through another torment, missing – whoever else she married – what she couldn’t help wanting most of all. No, I wouldn’t have stopped her. She might even come out of it better than he did. Sometimes there were ironies on the positive side, one of them being that the faithful were often the more strongly sexed and in the end got the more fun.
It wasn’t often that Francis, who had gone to extreme trouble about our children or Martin’s (in his cheerful patriarchal home he loved to entertain, and it was there, as a bad joke, that Vicky, staying as a guest of Leonard’s, had first met and fallen for Pat), had come for any sort of comfort about his own. But sometimes the kind liked to receive kindness, and he didn’t want us to leave until the house was up.
In the taxi, as it purred up the midnight-smooth tarmac, under the trees to Hyde Park Corner, Margaret was saying, what a bloody mess. That triangle, Vicky, Leonard, Pat. People anything like Pat – even if they were more decent than he was – always did more destruction than anyone else. She broke off: ‘Was Francis sounding you out? Early on. Was he really making you the offer? Had they asked him to?’
No, I said, I didn’t think it would be done like that. ‘Anyway, I hope that doesn’t happen; you know, don’t you?’
That was all she said, before returning to brisk comments upon Pat.
It did happen, and it happened very fast. Late the following night, just as we were thinking it was time for bed, the telephone rang. Private secretary at Downing Street. Apologies, the sharp civil servant’s apologies that I used to hear, from someone whom I used to meet. Could I come along at once? Logistic instructions. I was to be careful not to use the main entrance. Instead, I was to go in through the old Cabinet Offices in Whitehall. There would be an attendant waiting at the door.
It all sounded strangely, and untypically, conspiratorial. Later I recalled what Francis had said about ‘hawking the job round’: they were taking precautions against another visitor being spotted: hence presumably this Muscovite hour, hence the eccentric route. The secretary had asked whether I knew the old office door, next to the Horseguards. Better than he did, it occurred to me, as I went through the labyrinth to the Cabinet room: for it was in the room adjoining the outside door, shabby, coal-fire smoking, that I used to work with old Bevill at the beginning of the war.
I was back again, going past the old offices into Whitehall, within twenty minutes. Time, relaxed time, for the offer and one drink. I had asked, and obtained, forty-eight hours to think it over. Outside, Whitehall was free and empty, as it had been in wartime darkness, when the old minister and I had been staying late and walked out into the street, sometimes exhilarated because we had won a struggle or perhaps because of good news on the scrambled line.
When I opened the door of our drawing-room, Margaret, who was sitting with a book thrown aside, cried out: ‘You haven’t been long!’
Then she asked me, face intent: ‘Well?’
I said, cheerful, buoyed up by the night’s action: ‘It’s exactly what we expected.’
Margaret knew as well as I did the appointment which Francis had turned down: and that this was it.
She said: ‘Yes. I was afraid of that.’
For once, and at once, there was strain between us. She was speaking from a feeling too strong to cover up, which she had to let loose however I was going to take it. She had been preparing herself for the way in which I should take it: if you didn’t quarrel often, quarrels were more dreaded. But even then she couldn’t – and in the end didn’t wish – to hold back.
‘What’s the matter?’ I was put out, more than put out, angry.
‘I don’t want you to make a mistake–’
‘Do you think I’ve decided to take the job?’ I had raised my voice, but hers was quiet, as she replied:
‘Haven’t you?’
It had never been pleasant when we clashed. I didn’t like meeting a will as strong as my own, though hers was formed differently from mine, hers hard and mine tenacious: just as her temper was hot and mine was smouldering. Also I didn’t like being judged – some of my secret vanity had gone by now, but not quite all, the residual and final vanity of not liking to be judged by the one who knew me best.
Just to add an edge to it, I thought that she was misjudging me that night. Not dramatically, only slightly – but still enough. It was true – she had heard me amuse myself at others’ expense as they solemnly professed to wonder whether they should accept a job they had been working towards for years – that most decisions were taken on the spot. When one asked for time to ‘sleep on it’, old Arthur Brown’s immemorial phrase, when one asked for the forty-eight hours’ grace of which I was bad-temperedly telling Margaret – one was, nine times out of ten, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, merely enjoying the situation or alternatively searching for rationalisations and glosses to prettify a decision which was already made.
That wasn’t quite the case with me that night. I had in my mind all the reasons why I should say no. So far Margaret was wrong. But only a little wrong. What I wanted was for her to join in dismissing those reasons, take it all lightly, and push me, just a fraction, into saying yes.
Reasons against – they were the same for me as for Francis, and perhaps by this time a shade stronger. He had said that he couldn’t do much – or any – good. I was as convinced of that as he was, whoever did the job: more so because I had lived inside the government apparatus, as he had never done. That hadn’t made me cynical, exactly (for cynicism came only to those who were certain they were superior to less splendid mortals): but it had made me Tolstoyan, or at least sceptical of the effect that any man could have, not just a junior minister, but anyone who really seemed to possess the power, by contrast to the tidal flow in which he lived. Some sort of sense about nuclear armaments might one day arise: what Francis and David Rubin and the rest of us had said, and within our limits done, might not have been entirely useless: but the decisions – the apparent decisions, the voices in cabinets, the signatures on paper – would be taken by people who couldn’t avoid taking them, because they were swept along, unresisting, on the tide. The tide which we had failed to catch.
That wasn’t a reason for not acting. In fact, Francis and his colleagues believed – and so did I – that, in the times through which we had lived, you had to do what little you could in action, if you were to face yourself at all. But it was a reason, this knowledge we had acquired, for not fooling ourselves: for not pretending to take action, when we were one hundred per cent certain that it was just make-believe. If you were only ninety per cent certain, then sometimes you hadn’t to be too proud to do the donkey work. But, if you were utterly certain, then pretending to take action could do harm. It could even drug you into feeling satisfied with yourself.
By this time, our certainties had hardened, that nothing useful could be done in this job. The year before, when Francis was offered it, we thought we had known all about the limits of government. We had flattered ourselves. The limits were tighter than self-styled realistic men had guessed. Azik Schiff couldn’t resist saying that he had warned us about social democracies. Vietnam was hag-riding us. Bitterly Francis said that a country couldn’t be independent in foreign policy if it wasn’t independent in earning its living. That remark had been made in the presence of some of Charles’ friends, and had scandalised them. To many of us, the window of public hope, which had seemed clearer for a few years past, was being blacked out now.