There was a pause. He said: ‘Well, that’s all.’
I could feel the effort of his will. His voice tightened and he added: ‘Now I should like to talk some business.’
He held up his copy of the White Paper, which had been lying on the blotter.
‘I want your impression. How is this going down?’
‘How do you think?’
‘I’ve been occupied with other things. Come on, what is your impression?’
I replied: ‘Did anyone expect absolutely universal enthusiasm?’
‘It hasn’t got it, you mean?’
‘There are some malcontents.’
‘From what I’ve been able to pick up,’ said Douglas, ‘that may be putting it mildly.’
As he sat there unrelaxed, the nerve of professional expertness showed through. It was not the White Paper which worried him. It was the interpretation which he knew, as well as I did, Roger wished to make and to act upon. He had never liked Roger’s policy: his instincts were too conservative for that. It was only because Roger was a strong Minister that he had got his way so far: or perhaps because Douglas wasn’t unaffected by Roger’s skills. But now Douglas neither liked the policy nor wanted to gamble on its chances. Just as he hadn’t wished to be linked with a scandal when the Parliamentary Question came up, so he didn’t wish to be linked with a failure.
As he shut out his suffering, his tormented thoughts of his wife, this other concern leaped out.
‘It could be,’ I said. He was much too astute a man to be bluffed.
‘It’s no use deceiving ourselves,’ said Douglas. ‘Anyway, you wouldn’t. There is a finite possibility that my Minister’s present policy may be a dead duck.’
‘How finite?’
We stared at each other. I couldn’t get him to commit himself. I pressed him. An even chance? That would, before this conversation, have been my secret guess. Douglas said: ‘I – I hope he’s sensible enough to cut his losses now. And start on another line. The important thing is, we’ve got to have another line in reserve.’
‘You mean–?’
‘I mean, we have to start working out some alternative.’
‘If that became known,’ I said, ‘it would do great harm.’
‘It won’t get known,’ he replied, ‘and it will have to be done at once. We shan’t have long. It’s a question of thinking out several eventualities and making up our minds which is going to be right.’
‘In this business,’ I said, ‘I’ve never had much doubt what’s right.’
‘Then you’re lucky.’
For the moment, he was back in his off-hand form. Then he went on driving himself, clear, concentrated. He had said ‘which is going to be right’ without any fuss, meaning which policies would, according to the climate of opinion, be both sensible and practicable. He proposed that afternoon to begin writing the draft of a new plan, ‘just to see how it looks.’ Then, if trouble came, the department would have something ‘up its sleeve’.
In everything he said or intended, he was entirely straightforward. His code of behaviour was as rigid as that of Rose. He would inform Roger that afternoon of precisely what he intended to do.
In one respect, however, he differed from Rose. He did not indulge in any hypocrisy of formality or protocol. It never occurred to him to pretend – as Rose had always pretended, and sometimes managed to believe – that he had no influence on events. It never occurred to him to chant that he was simply there to carry out the policy of his ‘masters’. On the contrary, Douglas often found it both necessary and pleasant to produce his own.
As I went down the corridors back to my own office, I was thinking of his interview with Roger that afternoon.
It was late that same afternoon when I received a note from Hector Rose – not a minute, but a note in his beautiful italic handwriting, beginning ‘My dear Lewis’ and ending, ‘Yours ever’. The substance was less emollient. Rose, who did not lack moral courage, and who was sitting three doors down the corridor, had shied away from telling it in person.
Could you possibly make it convenient to come to my room at ten a.m. tomorrow? I know that this is both unpleasantly early and at intolerably short notice: but our friends in—[a branch of Security] are apt to be somewhat pressing. They wish to have a personal interview with you, which is, I believe, the last stage in their proceedings. They have asked for a similar arrangement with Sir F Getliffe in the afternoon. I take it you would not prefer to approach F G yourself, and we are acting on that assumption. I cannot tell you how sorry I am that the notice should be so short, and I have already had a word to say about this.
That night, as I let myself go to Margaret, taking comfort from her fury, I didn’t find Rose’s preoccupation with timing funny. I felt it was another dig, another jab of the needle. When I entered his room, at precisely five minutes to ten the next morning, he had something else to brood about and was as brusque as I was.
‘Have you seen this?’ he said, without any of his greetings.
‘This’ was an editorial in one of the popular papers. It was an attack on the White Paper, under the heading: ARE THEY THROWING AWAY OUR INDEPENDENCE?
The paper went on asking: Do they intend to sell us out? Do they intend to stop us being a great power?
‘Good God alive,’ cried Rose, ‘what kind of world are they living in? Do you think that if there were a single way in heaven or earth which could keep this damned country a great power, some of us wouldn’t have killed ourselves to find it?’
Savagely, he went on swearing. I could scarcely remember hearing an oath from him, much less a piece of rhetoric. ‘Do these silly louts imagine,’ he burst out, ‘that it’s specially easy to accept the facts?’
He looked at me, his eyes bleak.
‘Ah, well,’ he said, ‘our masters will have a good deal on their plate. Now, before Monteith arrives, there is something I wanted to explain to you.’ Once more, smooth as a machine, he was on the track of protocol. ‘Monteith is going to conduct this business himself. We thought that was only fitting, both for you and Getliffe. But there was some difference of opinion about the venue. They thought it was perhaps hardly suitable to talk to you in your own room, as being your home ground, so to speak. Well, I was not prepared to let them invite you to their establishment, so we reached a compromise that Monteith should meet you here. I hope that is as much to your liking as anything can be, my dear Lewis, in these somewhat egregious circumstances.’
He allowed himself that one flick. It was as near a token of support as he could manage. I nodded, and we gazed at each other. He announced, as though it were an interesting piece of social gossip, that he would soon vacate the room for the entire day.
Shortly afterwards, the private secretary brought in Monteith. This time Rose’s greetings were back at their most profuse. Turning to me, he said: ‘Of course, you two must have met?’
In fact we hadn’t, though we had been present together at a Treasury meeting. ‘Oh, in that case,’ said Rose, ‘do let me introduce you.’
Monteith and I shook hands. He was a brisk, strong-boned man, with something like an actor’s handsomeness, dark haired, with drifts of white above the ears. His manner was quite unhistrionic, subdued and respectful. He was much the youngest of the three of us, probably ten years younger than I was. As we made some meaningless chat, he behaved like a junior colleague, modest but assured.
After Rose had conducted the ceremony of chit-chat for five minutes, he said: ‘Perhaps you won’t mind if I leave you two together?’
When the door closed, Monteith and I were left looking at each other.
‘I think we might sit down, don’t you?’ he said. Politely he showed me to an armchair, while he himself took Rose’s. There was a bowl of blue hyacinths in front of him, fresh that morning, witness to Rose’s passion for flowers. The smell of hyacinths was, for me, too sickly, too heavy, to stir up memories, as it might have done, of business-like talks with Rose going back nearly twenty years. All the smell did was to give me a discomfort of the senses, as I sat there, staring into Monteith’s face.
I did not know precisely what his function was. Was he the boss? Or a grey eminence, working behind another boss? Or just a deputy? I thought I knew: Rose certainly did. But, with a passion for mystification, including self-mystification, none of us discussed those agencies or their chains of command.
‘You have had a most distinguished career–’ Firmly, gracefully, Monteith addressed me in full style. ‘You will understand that I have to ask you some questions on certain parts of it.’
He had not laid out a single note on the desk, much less produce a file. Throughout the next three hours, he worked from nothing but memory. In his own office, there must have been a dossier a good many inches high. I already knew that he had interviewed, not only scientists and civil servants who had been colleagues of mine during the war and after, not only old acquaintances at Cambridge, such as the former Master and Arthur Brown, but also figures from my remote past, a retired solicitor whom I had not seen for twenty-five years, even the father of my first wife. All this material he had stored in his head, and deployed with precision. It was an administrator’s trick, which Rose or Douglas or I could have done ourselves. Still, it was impressive. It would have been so if I had watched him dealing with another’s life. Since it was my own life, I found it at times deranging. There were facts about myself, sometimes facts near to the bone, which he knew more accurately than I did.
My earliest youth, my father’s bankruptcy, poverty, my time as a clerk, reading for the Bar examinations – he had the dates at command, the names of people. It all sounded smooth and easy, not really like one’s past at all. Then he asked: ‘When you were a young man in—’ (the provincial town), ‘you were active politically?’ Speeches at local meetings, the ILP, schoolrooms, the nights in pubs: he ticked them off.
‘You were then far out on the left?’
I had set myself to tell the absolute truth. Yet it was difficult. We had a few terms in common. I wasn’t in complete control of my temper. Carefully, but in a sharpened tone, I said: ‘I believed in socialism. I had all the hopes of my time. But I wasn’t a politician as real politicians understand the word. At that age, I wasn’t dedicated enough for that. I was too ambitious in other ways.’
At this, Monteith’s fine eyes lit up. He gave me a smile, not humorous, but comradely. I was dissatisfied with my answer. I had not been interrogated before. Now I was beginning to understand, and detest, the pressures and the temptations. What I had said was quite true: and yet it was too conciliatory.
‘Of course,’ said Monteith, ‘it’s natural for young men to be interested in politics. I was myself, at the University.’
‘Were you?’
‘Like you, but on the other side. I was on the committee of the Conservative Club.’ He said this with an air of innocent gratification, as though that revelation would astonish me, as though he was confessing to having been chairman of a Nihilist cell.
Once more he was efficient, concentrated, ready to call me a liar.
The Thirties, my start at the bar, marriage, the first days of Hitler, the Spanish Civil War.
‘You were strongly on the anti-Nationalist side?’
‘In those days,’ I said, ‘we called it something different.’
‘That is, you were opposed to General Franco?’
‘Of course,’ I replied.
‘But you were very strongly and actively opposed?’
‘I did what little came easy. I’ve often wished I’d done more.’
He went over some Committees I had sat on. All correct, I said.
‘In the course of these activities, you mixed with persons of extreme political views?’
‘Yes.’
He addressed me formally again, and then – ‘You were very intimate with some of these persons?’
‘I think I must ask you to be more specific.’
‘It is not suggested that you were, or have been at any time, a member of the Communist Party–’
‘If it were suggested,’ I said, ‘it would not be true.’
‘Granted. But you have been intimate with some who have?’
‘I should like the names.’
He gave four – those of Arthur Mounteney, the physicist, two other scientists, R— and T—, Mrs Charles March.
I was never a close friend of Mounteney, I said. (It was irksome to find oneself going back on the defensive.)
‘In any case, he left the party in 1939,’ said Monteith, with brisk expertness.
‘Nor of T—.’ Then I said: ‘I was certainly a friend of R—. I saw a good deal of him during the war.’
‘You saw him last October?’
‘I was going to say that I don’t see him often nowadays. But I am very fond of him. He is one of the best men I have ever known.’
‘Mrs March?’
‘Her husband and I were intimate friends when we were young men, and we still are. I met Ann at his father’s house twenty odd years ago and I have known her ever since. I suppose they dine with us three or four times a year.’
‘You don’t deny that you have remained in close touch with Mrs March?’
‘Does it sound as though I were denying it?’ I cried, furious at seeming to be at a moral disadvantage.
He gave a courteous, non-committal smile.
I made myself calm, trying to capture the initiative.
I said: ‘Perhaps it’s time that I got one or two things clear.’
‘Please do.’
‘First of all, though this isn’t really the point, I am not inclined to give up my friends. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to do so – either because they were communists or anything else. Ann March and R—happen to be people of the highest character, but it wouldn’t matter if they weren’t. If you extend your researches, you’ll find that I have other friends, respectable politically, but otherwise disreputable by almost any standards.’
‘Yes, I was interested to find how remarkable your circle was,’ he said, not in the least outfaced.
‘But that isn’t the point, is it?’
He bowed his fine head.
‘You want to know my political views, don’t you? Why haven’t you asked me? – Though I can’t answer in one word. First of all, I haven’t altered much as I’ve got older. I’ve learned a bit more, that’s all. I’ll have another word about that a little later. As I told you, I’ve never been dedicated to politics as a real politician is. But I’ve always been interested. I think I know something about power. I’ve watched it in various manifestations, almost all my working life. And you can’t know something about power without being suspicious of it. That’s one of the reasons why I couldn’t go along with Ann March and R—. It seemed to me obvious in the Thirties, that the concentration of power which had developed under Stalin was too dangerous by half. I don’t think I was being emotional about it. I just distrusted it. As a matter of fact, I’m not emotional about the operations of politics. That is why I oughtn’t to give you any anxiety. I believe that, in the official life, we have to fall back on codes of honour and behaviour. We can’t trust ourselves to do anything else.’