‘Didn’t you expect it?’
From the summer onwards I had heard forecasts and thought they were irresponsible. ‘Good God Almighty,’ I said, ‘don’t you think I believed that we had the faintest residue of sense? Do you think any sane man would have taken it seriously?’
‘I’m afraid you’ve got to now,’ said the diplomat.
Just then Arthur Plimpton joined us. He greeted the other two, then looked at me and asked straight out: ‘Is there anything wrong, sir?’
‘Yes, Arthur, there is. We’ve gone off our blasted heads.’ He was a great favourite of mine. He was a craggily handsome young man of twenty-three. When he got older, the cheekbones would protrude and the bright blue eyes sink in: he already looked harder than an Englishman of the same age. He was capable, arrogant, and had a pleasant touch of cheek. He was also considerate, though at that moment the most he could think of doing was reach me another drink.
Within half an hour, he and David Rubin had drawn my wife and me away from the party and had established us in a pub in St John’s Wood. They were surprised, I realized as I became cooler, that we were so much outraged. But they were both kind and tactful men. They wanted to see us happier. For a time they kept off the evening’s news, but finding that made us more preoccupied, Arthur, the younger and more direct, plunged in. He asked what was worrying us most.
Margaret burst out, ‘What isn’t?’
Just for a second, Arthur smiled.
Her eyes were bright, she had flushed down her neck. Then he realized that she was more violent, more intransigent, than I was.
‘They’ve learned nothing and they’re no good,’ she said. ‘I’ve never liked playing along behind them, and I wish we never had!’
‘All I hope,’ said David Rubin, with a sad, sardonic smile, ‘is that if you must do something immoral, you manage to make it work.’
‘How can we bring it off?’ I cried. ‘What century do you think we’re living in? Do you think we can hold the Middle East with a couple of brigade groups?’
‘I don’t know how this’ll go over in our country,’ said Arthur.
‘How will it?’ I said angrily.
Rubin shrugged his shoulders.
I said: ‘Countries, when their power is slipping away, are always liable to do idiotic things. So are social classes. You may find yourselves in the same position some day.’
‘Not yet,’ said Arthur, with confidence.
‘No, not yet,’ said David Rubin.
Margaret and I were humiliated, and the others went on trying to cheer us up. When I had glimmers of detachment, which was not often that night, I thought that their attitudes were diametrically opposite to what one might expect. David Rubin was a man of deep and complex sophistication. His grandparents had been born in Poland, he had no English genes in him at all. Yet it was he who loved England more uncritically, which was strange, for he was one of the most critical of men. He did not like being patronized by English pundits, but he still had a love-affair with England, just a little like that of Brodzinski, who was a scientific enemy of his. He loved the pretty, picture-book England – far more than Margaret and I could have loved it. And at first sight surprisingly, far more so than Arthur Plimpton, who was as Anglo-Saxon as we were, who had the run of Basset and Diana Skidmore’s smart friends, who knew the privileged in our country as well as his own, and who had no special respect for any of them.
If Arthur had been an English boy, I should, when I first met him a couple of years before, have been able to place him within five minutes. As it was, it was apparent that he was well-off. But it had taken Diana to enlighten me that that was putting it mildly. Diana did not show enthusiasm for the idea that he might marry Penelope Getliffe. Diana considered that marriage with the daughter of a scientist, however eminent, would be a come-down. She was laying plans for something more suitable.
Despite, or perhaps because of, all this, Arthur was not over-impressed by England. On that night of Suez, he was full of idealism, genuine idealism, damning the British Government. I distinctly recalled that when he spoke of capitalist enterprises, particularly of methods of adding to his own fortune, he showed an anti-idealism which would have made Commodore Vanderbilt look unduly fastidious. Yet that night, he talked with great hope and purity.
It heartened Margaret, whose nature was purer than mine. Myself, I was discouraged. I was remembering the outbursts of idealism that I had listened to, from young men as good as this one, back in my own group, in a provincial town, when our hopes had been more revolutionary than Arthur could have believed, but still as pure as his. I fell silent, half-hearing the argument, Arthur and Margaret on one side, David Rubin on the other, Rubin becoming more and more elaborate and Byzantine. I was signalling to Margaret to come away. If I stayed there, I should just become more despondent, and more drunk.
There was one glint of original sin, as Arthur saw Margaret and me getting ready to go. He might have been talking with extreme purity; but he was not above using his charm on Margaret, persuading her to invite Penelope to stay at our flat, and, as it were coincidentally, him too. I supposed he was trying to get her out of the atmosphere of the Cambridge house. But I was feeling corrupt that night, and it occurred to me that, like most of the very rich people I had known, he was trying to save money.
On the Sunday afternoon, Margaret and I walked down, under the smoky, blue-hazed autumn sky, to Trafalgar Square. We could not get nearer than the bottom of the Haymarket. Margaret was taken back, high-coloured, to the ‘demos’ of her teens. For her, more than for me, the past might be regained; she could not help hoping to recapture the spirit of it, just as she hoped that places we had visited together in the past might always hold a spark of their old magic. She was not as possessed by time lost as I was, yet I believed she could more easily possess herself of it. The speeches of protest boomed out. We were part of a crowd, we were all together. It was a long time since I had been part of a crowd, and, that day, I felt as Margaret did.
During the next few days, wherever I went, in the offices, clubs and dinner-parties, tempers were more bitter than they had been in this part of the London world since Munich. As at the time of Munich, one began to refuse invitations to houses where the quarrel would spring up. This time, however, the divide took a different line. Hector Rose and his colleagues, the top administrators, had most of them been devoted Municheers. Now, conservative as they were, disposed by temperament and training to be at one with Government, they couldn’t take it. Rose astonished me when he talked.
‘I don’t like committing my own future actions, my dear Lewis, which in any case will shortly be of interest to no one but myself – but I confess that I don’t see how I’m going to hypnotize myself into voting Conservative again.’
He was irked because for once he had known less than usual about the final decision: but also, he was shocked. ‘I don’t mind these people–’ he meant the politicians, and for once did not use the obsequious ‘our masters’ – ‘failing to achieve an adequate level of intelligence. After all, I’ve been trying to make them understand the difference between a precise and an imprecise statement for nearly forty years. But I do mind, perhaps I mind rather excessively, when they fail to show the judgement of so many cockatoos.’ Bitterly, Rose considered the parallel, and appeared to find it close enough.
He was sitting in his room behind the bowl of flowers. He said: ‘Tell me, Lewis, you are rather close to Roger Quaife‚ is that true? Closer, that is, than one might expect a civil servant, even a somewhat irregular civil servant, to be to a politician, even a somewhat irregular politician?’
‘That’s more or less true.’
‘He must have been in it, you know. Or did you hear?’
‘Nothing at all,’ I said.
‘The rumour is that he put up some sort of opposition in Cabinet. I should be mildly curious to know. I have seen a good many Ministers who were remarkably bold outside, but who somehow were not quite so intransigent when they got round the Cabinet table.’
There was a new rasp in Rose’s tone. He went on: ‘It might conceivably do a trivial amount of good, if you dropped the word to Quaife that a number of comparatively sensible and responsible persons have the feeling that they suddenly find themselves doing their sensible and responsible work in a lunatic asylum. It can’t do any harm, if you communicate that impression. I should be very, very grateful to you.’
Even for Rose, it took an effort of discipline that afternoon to return to his duties, to his ‘sensible and responsible work’.
Meanwhile, Tom Wyndham and his friends of the back benches were happy. ‘I feel I can hold my head up at last,’ said one of them. I did not see Diana Skidmore during those days, but I heard about her: the whole of the Basset circle was solid for Suez. Just as the officials seemed slumped in their chairs, the politicians became brilliant with euphoria. Sammikins, for once not odd man out, exuded more euphoria than any of them. In his case, there was a special reason. He happened, alone among his right wing group, to be pro-Zionist. Whether this was just a whim, I did not know, but he had applied for a commission in the Israeli Army, and he was riotously happy at the prospect of getting in one more bout of fighting before he grew too old.
In the clubs, the journalists and political commentators carried the rumours along. We were all at the pitch of credulity or suspiciousness – because in crisis these states are the same, just as they are in extreme jealousy – when anything seemed as probable as anything else. Some supporters of the Government were restive, we heard. I had a conversation myself with Cave and a couple of his friends, who were speaking the same bitter language as the officials, the professional men. ‘This is the last charge of Eton and the Brigade of Guards,’ said one young Conservative. How could we stop it? How many members of the Cabinet had been against it? Was—going to resign? Above all, what had Roger done?
One morning, during a respite from Cabinet meetings, Roger sent for me to give some instructions about the scientists’ committee. He did not volunteer a word about Suez. I thought that, just then, it would do no good to press it. Soon a secretary came in: Mr Cave had called. Would the Minister see him?
On the instant, as soon as the name was mentioned, Roger’s equable manner broke. ‘Am I never going to get a minute’s peace? Good God alive, why don’t some of you protect me a bit?’
He relapsed into sullenness, saying he was too busy, too pestered, she must make some excuse. The girl waited. She knew, as well as Roger did, that Cave was the most talented of Roger’s party supporters. She knew he ought not to be turned away. At last Roger, with a maximum of ill-grace, said he supposed she had better send him in.
I made to go out, but Roger, frowning, shook his head. When Cave entered, his head was thrown back from his slack, heavy body, eyes flickering under the thick arches of brow. Roger had made himself seem matey again. It was Cave who came to the point.
‘We can’t grumble about things being dull, can we?’
There were a few remarks, affable, half-malicious, to which Roger did not need to reply. All of a sudden, Cave ceased being devious.
‘Is there really any bit of sanity in this affair?’ he said.
‘What am I expected to say to that?’
‘I’m speaking for some of your friends, you know,’ said Cave. ‘Is there anything which you know and we don’t, that would alter our opinion?’
‘I shouldn’t think so, should you?’
‘No, Roger,’ said Cave, who, having thrown away side-digs or any kind of malice, was speaking with authority. ‘I was asking you seriously. Is there anything we don’t know?’
Roger replied, for a second friendly and easy: ‘Nothing that would make you change your minds.’
‘Well, then; you must know what we think. This is stupid. It’s wrong. On the lowest level, it won’t work.’
‘This isn’t exactly an original opinion, is it?’
Neither Cave nor I knew then, though I was able to check the date later, that on the night before the Cabinet had heard of the veto from Washington.
‘I’m quite sure it’s your own. But how much have you been able to put it across?’
‘You don’t expect me to tell you what’s happened in the Cabinet, do you?’
‘You have been known to drop a hint, you know.’ Cave, his chin sunk down, had spoken with a touch of edge.
At that remark, Roger’s temper, which I had not seen him lose before, except as a tactic, broke loose. His face went white: his voice became both thick and strangulated. He cried: ‘I’ll tell you one thing. I’ve not lost my senses. I don’t believe this is the greatest stroke of English policy since 1688. How in hell can you imagine that I don’t see what you see?’ His anger was ugly and harsh. He did not relish the voice of conscience, perhaps most of all, when it came from a man as clever, as much a rival, as Monty Cave: but that wasn’t all. That was only the trigger.
‘I’ll tell you another thing,’ Roger shouted. ‘You’re wondering what I said in Cabinet. I’ll tell you. I said absolutely nothing.’
Cave stared at him, not put off by violence, for he was not an emotional coward, but astonished. In a moment he said, steadily: ‘I think you should have done.’
‘Do you? Then it’s time you learned something about the world you’re living in.’ He rounded on me.
‘You
pretend to know what politics is like! It’s time you learned something, too. I tell you, I said absolutely nothing. I’m sick and tired of having to explain myself every step of the way.
This
is the politics you all talk about. Nothing I could have said would make the slightest difference. Once these people had got the bit between their teeth, there was no doubt what was going to happen. Yes, I let it go on round me. Yes, I acquiesced in something much more indefensible than you’ve begun to guess. And you expect me to explain, do you? Nothing I could have said would have made the faintest difference. No, it would have made one difference. It would have meant that one newcomer would have lost whatever bit of credit he possessed. I’ve taken risks. You’ve both seen me take an unjustified risk.’