When Sammikins said that he thought she would marry ‘one of us’, he spoke as unselfconsciously as his great-grandfather might have done, saying he thought that his sister might have married a ‘gentleman’. Despite his hero-worship of Roger, that was exactly what Sammikins meant. As he spoke, however, there was something which took my attention more. Caro was more concerned about him, loved him more, than he loved her. Nevertheless, he was fond of her; and yet he saw her marriage in terms of happiness, exactly as the world saw it. Diana, seeing them walking in the grounds at Basset, or as allies at a Government dinner-table, might have seen it so. This despite the fact that both Diana, and even more Sammikins, had lived all their lives in a raffish society, where the surface was calm and the events not so orderly. Listening to Sammikins talking of his sister’s marriage, I thought of Ellen, alone in her flat in the same town.
‘Yes, she’s got her children.’ He was going on about Caro. ‘And I am a barren stock.’
It was the only self-pity I had known him indulge in, and incidentally, the only literary flourish I had ever heard him make.
There was plenty of gossip as to why he had not married. He was in his thirties, as handsome as Caro in his own fashion. He was chronically in debt, partly because of his gambling, partly because his money, until his father died, was tied up in trusts he was always trying to break. But sooner or later, as well as inheriting the earldom, he would become a very rich man. He was one of the most eligible of bachelors. Diana commented briskly, with the mercilessness of the twentieth century, that there must be ‘something wrong with him’. It was said that he liked young men.
All that might easily be true. I suspected that he was one of those — and there were plenty, often young men of his spectacular courage— who didn’t find the sexual life straightforward, but who, if left to themselves, came to terms with it as well as simpler men. Half-sophistication, I was convinced as I grew older, was worse than no sophistication: half-knowledge was worse than no knowledge. Label someone a homosexual too quickly, and he will believe you. Tell him he is predestined to keep out of the main stream, and you will help push him out. The only service you can do him — it was a very hard truth — was to keep quiet. So the last thing I wanted that night was to force a confidence. I did not even want to receive it. I was glad (though faintly cheated, my inquisitiveness unsatisfied) when, after a few more laments at large, he gave a strident laugh and said: ‘Oh, to hell with it.’
Immediately he wanted me to accompany him to—’s (a gambling club). When I refused, he pressed me at least to come to Pratt’s and make a night of it. No, I said, I must be getting home. Then let’s walk a bit, he said. He said it scornfully, as though despising my bourgeois habit of going to bed. He did not want to be left alone.
We walked through the streets of the old City. From the bottom of Ducks Foot Lane, we caught sight of the dome of St Paul’s and, as if adjacent to it, the pinnacles of Dick Whittington’s church, white as sugar icing in the moonlight. The City of London, in its technical sense, as opposed to the great incomprehensible town, meant little either to him or to me. It evoked no memories, I had never worked there, all it brought back were taxi-rides on the way to Liverpool Street Station. Yet something played on us — the sight of the vast cathedral? The bomb sites? The absolute loneliness, not another person in the streets? The false-romantic memory of the past, the history which is not one’s own but lives in the imagination? Something played on us, not only on him but on me, who was more sober and less adrift.
We had passed Great Trinity Lane and had turned right: St Paul’s sprang now into open view before us, soot and whitewash.
Sammikins said: ‘I suppose Roger is right. If there is another war, it’ll be the end of us, won’t it?’
I said yes.
He turned to me: ‘How much does it matter?’
He was speaking in earnest. I couldn’t make a sarcastic reply. I answered: ‘What else matters?’
‘No. I’m asking you. How much do any of us believe in human life? When it comes to the point?’
‘If we don’t, then there’s no hope for us.’
‘Perhaps there isn’t,’ he said. ‘I tell you, aren’t we becoming hypocritical? How much do any of us care, really care, for human life?’
I was silent. And in a clear tone, neither fierce nor wild, he went on: ‘How much do you care? Except for the people round you? Come on. What is the truth?’
I could not answer straight away. At last I said: ‘I think I do. At any rate, I want to.’
He said: ‘I doubt if I do. I’ve taken life before now, and I could do it again. Of course I care for a few lives. But as for the rest, I don’t believe — when you strip away the trappings — that I give a rap. And that’s truer of more people than any of us would like to think.’
26: Parliamentary Question
The headlines, on the morning after the dinner in Fishmongers’ Hall, had a simple but pleasing eloquence. ARMED SERVICES ALL–IMPORTANT: then, in smaller letters, ‘No Substitute for Fighting Men. Minister’s Strong Speech,’ said the Daily Telegraph (Conservative). SECURITY COMES FIRST, ‘Mr R. Quaife on World Dangers,’ said The Times (moderate Conservative). SPREAD OF ATOMIC WEAPONS, ‘How Many Countries Will Possess the Bomb?’ said the Manchester Guardian (centre). CHANCE FOR THE COMMONWEALTH, ‘Our Lead in Atomic Bomb,’ said the Daily Express (irregular Conservative). TAGGING BEHIND THE US, said the Daily Worker (Communist).
The comments were more friendly than I had expected. It looked as though the speech would soon be forgotten. When I went over the press with Roger, we were both relieved. I thought he felt, as much as I did, a sense of anti-climax.
In the same week, I noticed a tiny news item, as obscure as a fait divers, in the ‘Telegrams in Brief’ column of The Times.
‘Los Angeles. Dr Brodzinski, British physicist, in a speech here tonight, attacked “New Look” in British defence policy as defeatist and calculated to play into hands of Moscow.’
I was angry, much more angry than apprehensive. I was sufficiently on guard — or sufficiently trained to be careful — to put through a call to David Rubin in Washington. No, he said, no reports of Brodzinski’s speech had reached the New York or Washington papers. They would carry it now. He thought we could forget about Brodzinski. If he, Rubin, were Roger, he’d play it rather cool. He would be over to talk to us in the New Year.
That sounded undisquieting. No one else seemed to have noticed the news item. It did not arrive in the departmental press-cuttings. I decided not to worry Roger with it, and put it out of mind myself.
A fortnight later, in the middle of a brilliant, eggshell blue November morning, I was sitting in Osbaldiston’s office. We had been working on the new draft of the White Paper, Collingwood having contorted Douglas’ first. Douglas was good-humoured. As usual, he took no more pride in authorship than most of us took in the collective enterprise of travelling on a bus.
His personal assistant came in with an armful of files, and put them in the in-tray. Out of habit his eye, like mine, had caught sight of a green tab on one of them. ‘Thank you, Eunice,’ he said equably, looking not much older than the athletic girl. ‘A bit of trouble?’
‘The PQ is on top, Sir Douglas,’ she said.
It was part of the drill he had been used to for twenty-five years. A parliamentary question worked like a Pavlovian bell, demanding priority. Whenever he saw one, Douglas, who was the least vexable of men, became a little vexed.