Up to now, I had shut up the doubt which Hector Rose had not spoken, but had, with acerbity, implied. I knew Roger and Rose didn’t, and wouldn’t have wanted to. Rose would have been totally uninterested in his purpose, his aspirations, in his faith. Rose judged men as functional creatures, and there he was often, more often than I cared to remember, dead right. He was asking one question about Roger, and one alone: What — when it came to the point — would he do?
Roger told me nothing. In the next week, I received only one message from him. And that was an invitation to a ‘bachelor supper’ in Lord North Street, the night after the Lancaster House reception.
At Lancaster House, Roger was present, walking for a few minutes arm-in-arm with the Prime Minister, up and down the carpet, affable under the chandeliers. That did not distinguish him from other Ministers, or even from Osbaldiston or Rose. The Prime Minister had time for all, and was ready to walk arm-in-arm with anyone, affable, under chandeliers. It was the kind of reception, I thought as I stood on the stairs, that might have happened in much the same form and with much the same faces, a hundred years before, except that then, it would probably have been held in the Prime Minister’s own house, and that nowadays, so far as I remembered accounts of Victorian political parties, there was a good deal more to drink.
The occasion was the visit of some western Foreign Minister. The politicians and their wives were there, the Civil Servants and their wives. The politicians’ wives were more expensively dressed than the Civil Servants’, and in general more spectacular. On the other hand, the Civil Servants themselves were more spectacular than the politicians, so that a stranger might have thought them a more splendiferous race. With their white ties, they were wearing their crosses, medals and sashes, and the figure of Hector Rose, usually subfusc, shone and sparkled, more ornamented, more be-sashed, than that of anyone in the room.
The room itself was filling up, so was the staircase. Margaret was talking to the Osbaldistons. On my way to join them, I was stopped by Diana Skidmore. I admired her dress, her jewellery; star-sapphires. Underneath it all, she looked strained and pale. But she could assume high spirits; or else, they were as much part of her as the bones of her monkey face. She kept giving glances, smiling, recognizing acquaintances as they passed.
She gazed at the Prime Minister, now walking up and down with Monty Cave. ‘He’s doing it very nicely, isn’t he?’ she said. She spoke of the Prime Minister rather like a headmaster discussing the performance of the best thirteen-year-old in a gymnastic display. Then she asked me: ‘Where’s Margaret?’ I pointed her out, and began to take Diana towards her. Though Diana knew far more people at the reception than I did, she had not met the Osbaldistons.
She said she would like to, vivacious and party-bright. Before we had gone three steps, she stopped: ‘No. I don’t want to meet anyone else. I’ve met quite enough.’
For an instant, I wondered if I had heard right. It wasn’t like her breakdown at her own dinner-table. Her eyes were bright with will, not tears.
We were in the middle of the party. Yes, since that night at Basset, her backbone had stiffened again. She was miserable when we talked of marriage. She wasn’t used to being miserable without doing something about it. She couldn’t go on living alone in that great house. She wanted someone to talk to her. The pupillages she went through, the times when, like an adoring girl, she changed the colour of her thoughts — they weren’t enough. Love-affairs wouldn’t be enough. She wanted someone all the time.
‘You’re no good,’ she said, practical and open. ‘You’ve got a wife.’
In the great drawing-room, most of the faces looked happy. Happier than in most gatherings, I thought. Then I saw Caro walking out on Roger’s arm, an impressive smiling couple, unselfconscious, used to catching the public eye. Were there others there with this kind of secret? There were bound to be some: if one knew these lives, there would be some surprises. But not, perhaps, so many as one might think. In this drawing-room the men and women were vigorous and hearty. ‘Peach-fed’ I had heard them called, though not by themselves. There were some love-affairs floating around. But most of them didn’t chafe against the limits of the sexual existence. Often they got more out of it than those who did. But they didn’t live, or talk, or excite themselves, as though there were, there must be, a sexual heaven round the corner. Perhaps, I sometimes thought, that was a pre-condition for the active life.
Anyway, most of them were happy. That night, they seemed to be getting a special happiness out of one another’s reflected glory: even the Prime Minister, though the glory reflected was his own. It was one of their rewards. What others were there?
In the hall, after Margaret and I had made our goodbyes, we waited while car after car, government car, firm’s car, were shouted for by name. Lord Bridgewater: Mr Leverett-Smith: the Belgian Ambassador: Sir Hector Rose. Margaret asked me why I was smiling. I had just remembered that I had once asked Lord Lufkin what rewards he thought he got, for a life which many people would have judged arduous beyond compare. Power, of course, I said. We took that for granted. The only other thing, I had suggested, was transport. He had not used a public vehicle in London for a generation: transport was always laid on. In the midst of his dog’s life, he travelled as though on a magic carpet. Lord Lufkin had not been amused.
When I saw the other men, brought together for dinner in Lord North Street the following night, I thought Roger had made a tactical mistake. Monty Cave was there, Leverett-Smith, Tom Wyndham: both Rose and Osbaldiston, and also Francis Getliffe. It was easy to see the rationale. Cave was Roger’s closest political ally, Leverett-Smith and Wyndham had had to know what was going on. The rest of us had all through been close to Roger’s policy. But everyone there, except Francis, had attended the reception the night before. If I had been Roger, I should have waited for the afterglow from the charmed circle to fade; then they might not mind so much the risk of being out of it.
As I sat at the dinner-table, Islamic except for Caro at the far end, I began to wonder what Roger’s intentions were. He wasn’t likely to speak openly, in front of Hector Rose or Douglas, or several of the others. He and Caro, who was working like an ally who has been rehearsed, seemed to be casting round for opinions: just how were the reactions coming in? They weren’t asking specific questions. They were sitting back, waiting for any information that was collecting in the air.
Just as when Roger talked to me about religion, I could not rely on my judgement of him, or even be sure, because it was flickering, what my judgement was. Was this the way he would start, if he were looking for an opportunity to withdraw? Perhaps he was not making a tactical mistake after all.
Certainly — and this was clear and explicit — he was giving everyone present the chance to come out with his doubts. He was not only giving them the chance, he was pressing them to do so.
After dinner, Caro did not leave. She was one of the junta, she sat over the port like the rest of us. Before the port was put on the table, something happened that I did not remember having seen in that house or anywhere else. The maids took off the tablecloth, then laid the wine-glasses on the bare and polished rosewood. It was, so she said, an old nineteenth-century custom which had been kept up in her father’s house. The glasses, the silver, the decanters, the rounded pinkness from a bowl of roses, were reflected in the table-top: perhaps that was what her ancestors had enjoyed, perhaps that was how she imagined them sitting, forming Victoria’s governments, handing out the jobs.