Corridors of Power (10 page)

The taxi chugged through the afternoon traffic, south-west across London. I was so angry that I did not know why I was going there. I had lost touch with my own feelings. Guilt, concern, personal fates, public ends – I hadn’t the patience to think of any of them. Nothing except pushing the taxi on.

At last, after the driver had made false shots, trying squares, places, mews, we drove up a street all of tall terraced houses, shabby, unpainted. In front of one, I looked at the slips of cardboard by the bells. The other names were handwritten, but against the top floor bell was a soiled visiting card: Mr R Porson, Barrister-at-Law.

Empty milk bottles stood on the steps. Inside the door, which was on the latch, letters and newspapers lay in the unlit hall. I climbed upstairs. On the second landing the door of a bathroom opened, the only one, it seemed, in the house. I went up to the top floor and knocked. A thick, strident voice answered, and I entered. Yes, it was the man I used to know – twenty years older, more than half drunk. He greeted me noisily, but I cut him short by giving him the telegram.

‘Did you send this?’

He nodded.

‘Why?’

‘I wanted to cheer him up.’

In the attic flat, which had a skylight and a high window, Porson peered at me, ‘What’s the matter, old boy? You look a bit white. I insist on prescribing for you. What you need is a good stiff drink.’

‘Why did you send this?’

‘The poor chap hasn’t got long to go. It’s been all over the papers,’ said Porson. ‘I’ve got a great respect for him. We don’t breed men like him nowadays. He’s a bit different from all these young pansies. So I wanted him to know that some of us were thinking about him. I wasn’t prepared to let him go out alone.’

Fiercely he cried out: ‘Well, is there anything the matter with that?’

He lurched back into his chair. He said: ‘I don’t mind telling you, I don’t run to telegrams unless I have to. Four bob. But I thought it was the least I could do.’

‘What in Heaven’s name,’ I shouted, ‘do you imagine it was like for him–’

He was too drunk to understand. I was shouting for my own benefit alone. In time I gave it up. There was nothing to do. I accepted his drink.

‘Well,’ he said, examining me with a critical, patronizing air, ‘from all I hear, you haven’t done so badly, young man. I’ve always insisted you’d have done better, though, if you had listened to me more in the old days.’

‘What about you?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got a great many talents. You know that as well as anybody. Somehow they haven’t done as much for me as they should. There’s still plenty of time to pull something off. Do you realize,’ he said in a threatening tone, ‘that I’m only sixty-two?’

He had gone many steps down hill since I last saw him before the war. This tiny room, furnished with a divan bed, a table, one easy chair and one hard one, showed still the almost pernickety, aunt-like tidiness that I remembered, but it must have been the cheapest he could find. Even then, the rent must have come out of his bit of capital. So far as I knew, he had done no work for years. On the mantelpiece he kept a picture of Ann March, his symbol of unrequited love, his
princesse lointaine
. There were also photographs of two young men. In himself he looked broken down, his face puce, flecked with broken veins. The tic down his left cheek convulsed it more than ever. Yet at some moments he appeared – in his expression, not only in his spirit – much younger than he was, instead of older: as though unhappiness, discontent, frustration, failure, drink, had been a preservative during which time stood still, as it could not for luckier and stabler men. All his old hatreds came boiling out, just as fresh as they had always been – the Jews, the Reds, the Pansies. He was particularly violent about the pansies, much more so than in the past. I couldn’t pretend that Lord Gilbey was any of those things, could I? ‘He’s a man after my own heart, I insist on that,’ he cried belligerently. ‘Do you understand why I had to send a personal message? Because if you don’t now, my boy, you never will.’

The outburst died down. He seemed glad to have me there; he took it without surprise, as though I had seen him the day before and had just called in again. In a tone both gentle and defiant he said: ‘You may not believe it, but I’m very comfortable here.’

He went on: ‘There are a lot of young people round this neighbourhood. I like the young. I don’t care what anyone says against them, I like the young. And it’s very good for them to have an older man with plenty of experience to come to for advice.’

He was impatient for me to meet them. But we had to wait until the pub opened, he said. He was restless, he stumped over to the whisky bottle several times, he kept looking at his watch. As the afternoon light edged through the high window, he got to his feet and gazed out.

‘Anyway,’ he said loudly, ‘you can’t deny that I’ve got a nice view.’

Porson’s acquaintances came to the pub at the corner of his street, where he installed us both at the crack of opening time. They were mostly young, not many over thirty. Some of them were living on very little; one or two might have some money from home. There were painters there, there were one or two writers and schoolteachers. They were friendly, and gave Porson what he wanted. They made him a bit of a figure. They treated me amiably, as though I were someone of their age, and I liked them. It might have been a sentimentality, the consequence of my abortive anger and this resurrection of the past in Porson, an old acquaintance become not more respectable, but considerably less so. It might have been a sentimentality, but I was speculating whether there was a higher proportion of kind faces there than in the places I nowadays spent my time. It might have been a sentimentality, and probably was. But theirs was a life which, if one has ever lived it or been close to it, never quite relinquishes its last finger-hold upon one. I could think of contemporaries of mine, middle-aged persons with a public face, who dreamed a little more often than one would think likely of escaping back to places such as this.

Some of the people in that pub seemed to live in a present which to them was ideal. They could go on, as though the future would always be like this. It was a slap-happy March evening. They kept standing Porson drinks. I was enjoying myself: and yet, at the same time, I was both softened and shadowed. I knew well enough what anyone of political insight would say, whether they were Marxists, or irregulars like Roger Quaife, or hard anti-communists from the
Partisan Review
. They would agree about the condition, though they fought about the end. They would say that there was no protest in this pub. Not that these people shared Porson’s fits of crazed reaction. They had good will, but except for one or two picked causes, they could not feel it mattered. Nearly everyone there would have joined in a demonstration against hanging. Otherwise, they shrugged their shoulders, lived their lives, and behaved as though they were immortal. Was this their version of the Basset house-party, which also talked as though there would never be a change again?

They would have had no use for Roger Quaife. To them, he would be part of an apparatus with which they had no connection, from which they were alienated, as completely as if it were the governing class of San Domingo. So was he alienated from them. How could he reach them? How could he, or any politician, find a way through?

They were not going to worry about Roger Quaife, or the scientists, or the civil servants, or anybody else who had to take a decision. They did not thank anybody for worrying about them. Yes, there were unhappy people in the pub, now it was filling up. A schoolmaster with an anxiety-ridden face, who lived alone: a girl sitting at the bar, staring with schizoid stillness at a glass of beer. For them, there were friends here prepared to worry. Even for old Porson, drunken, boastful, violent, a little mad.

I should have liked to stay. But somehow, the fact that they were so un-anxious, so island-like, had the reverse effect on me. In the noisy and youthful pub, they were rooting up a half-memory, buried somewhere in my mind. Yes! It was another evening, another part of London, Roger questioning David Rubin, the uninflected replies.

This was not the place for me. I finished my drink, said goodbye to Porson who ‘insisted’ on inviting me there another time. I pushed through the crowd, affable, cordial and happy, and went out into the street, lights from the shops doubled in the moist pavements of the Fulham Road.

By the early summer, gossip was bubbling and bursting. Gilbey had left the Clinic and gone home. One political columnist was prophesying that he would soon be back. Elsewhere, rumours appeared that he had already accepted a government post abroad. As for his successor, names were being mentioned, Roger’s usually among them, but not prominently, except in one Sunday paper.

Nearer the point of action, we were mystified. Some of the rumours we knew to be nonsense, but not all. Men like Douglas Osbaldiston and Hector Rose, or even Roger himself, were not sure where they came from. Diana Skidmore and Caro’s relatives, people who made an occupation out of being in the know, could pick up nothing, or at least what they did pick up was useless. It was one of those occasions, commoner than one might think, when the ‘insiders’ were reading their newspapers for enlightenment as inquisitively as anyone else.

Of us all, Roger put on the most impassive front. He did his job in the office without any fuss; he answered questions in the House: he made a couple of speeches. In all this, he was behaving like a competent stand-in. As I watched him, through those weeks, I realized that he had one singular natural advantage, besides his self-control. He had the knack of appearing more relaxed, far less formidable, than he really was. One night, after a debate which Douglas and I were attending, a young member took us all to Pratt’s. In the tiny parlour, round the kitchen fire, there were several hard, able faces, but Roger’s was not among them. He sat there, drinking pints of beer, a heavy, clumsy man, looking amiable, idealistic, clever, simple, rather like an impressive innocent among card-sharpers. Among hard-featured faces, his stood out, full of enjoyment, full of feeling, revealing neither ambition nor strain.

One afternoon in June, I received another summons from Lord Gilbey. This time I was asked to call, so my personal assistant said, at his ‘private residence’. What for? No, the invitation had come, not from Green, but from some humbler person, who was unwilling to say. Had anyone else been asked? My PA missed nothing. She had already rung up Hector Rose’s office, and Douglas’. Each had been summoned also: Rose was busy at a meeting, Douglas was already on his way.

It was a short distance to Gilbey’s, for he had a flat, one of the last in private occupation, in Carlton House Terrace. It was a short distance, but it took some time. Cars were inching, bonnet to tail, along the Mall, cars with crosses on the windscreens, on their way to a Palace Garden Party. It must have been a Thursday.

The flat, when I finally got there, was at the top of the building. A smart young woman came to greet me. I inquired, ‘Mr Green?’

Mr Green was no longer working for Lord Gilbey.

Lady Gilbey was out for tea, but Lord Gilbey would like to see me at once. He and Douglas were standing by the drawing-room window, from which one looked, in the gusty, sparkling sunshine, right across St James’s Park, across the glitter of the lake, to the towers and turrets of our offices, away above the solid summer trees. Below, the roofs of cars, hurrying now the Mall was thinning, flashed their semaphores in the sun. It was a pleasant London vista: but Lord Gilbey was regarding it without enthusiasm. He welcomed me gracefully, but he did not smile.

He moved to a chair. As he walked, and as he sat down, he seemed to be deliberating how each muscle worked. That must have been the result of his illness, automatic now. Otherwise he had forgotten it, he was preoccupied with chagrin and etiquette.

‘Sir Hector Rose isn’t able to join us, I hear,’ he said, with distant courtesy. ‘I should be grateful if you would give him my regrets. I wanted to speak to some of you people who have been giving me advice. I’ve already spoken to some of my colleagues.’ He gazed at us, immaculate, fresh-faced, sad. ‘I’d rather you heard it from me first,’ he went on. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll believe it, but this morning, just before luncheon, I had a letter from the Prime Minister.’

Suddenly he broke out: ‘He ought to have come himself. He
ought
to have!’

He lifted a hand carefully, as though not exerting himself too jerkily, and pointed out of the window in the direction of Downing Street.

‘It’s not very far,’ he said. ‘It’s not
very
far.’

Another aspect of etiquette struck him, and he went on: ‘I must say it was a very decent letter. Yes. It was a decent letter, I’ve got to give him that.’

Neither of us knew when to begin condoling. It was some while before Gilbey got to the bare facts. At last he said: ‘The long and the short of it is, they’re getting rid of me.’

He turned his gaze, absently, from Douglas to me: ‘Do you know, I really can’t believe it.’ He was having fugues, as one often does under the impact of bad news, in which the bad news hadn’t happened and in which he was still planning his return to the department. Then the truth broke through again.

‘They haven’t even told me who my successor is going to be. They ought to have asked my advice. They ought to have.’

He looked at us: ‘Who is it going to be?’ Douglas said none of us knew.

‘If I believed what I saw in the papers,’ said Gilbey, outrage too much for him, ‘they’re thinking of replacing a man like me–’ very slowly he raised his right hand just above the height of his shoulder – ‘by a man like Grigson.’ This time his left hand descended carefully, palm outwards, below his knee.

He got on to a more cheerful topic. ‘They,’ (after his first complaint he could not bring himself to refer to the Prime Minister in the singular, or by name) had offered him a ‘step-up’ in the peerage. ‘It’s civil of them, I suppose.’