I didn’t expect these remarks to be popular. They weren’t. To Douglas, who loved me, they were shocking and best forgotten. To Rose, who didn’t, they were the token of why I had never quite fitted in. Even Francis didn’t like them much. As for the politicians, Cave was reflecting: he was the only man there who might have considered whether in fact there did exist — in a rich and comfortable country — the social forces to call upon.
Leverett-Smith said, ‘I can’t associate myself with that suggestion.’
Caro was frowning. There was no debate. Someone changed the subject, and it was a few minutes later that Roger said: ‘None of this is easy, you know.’
Since his exchange with Cave he had not spoken. He had sat at the end of the table, sipping his port, pre-potent, brooding. Now he took charge. He showed his worry, he did not pretend. He knew, and he knew that we knew, that he had to carry everyone round that table with him. Listening, I thought I had never heard him put on a better performance. Performance? That was true and not true. This might not be all he intended, but it was a good deal. There were ambiguities which might be deliberate: there were also some that he didn’t know himself.
As we said goodnight, his influence was still pervasive. He seemed to have gained all he wanted.
On the way home, and in cooler blood next morning, I wondered what each man thought Roger had actually said. What you wanted to hear, you heard, even with people as experienced as these. Ask them to write down their accounts and the answers would have a certain ironic interest. And yet, Roger had said nothing untruthful or even disingenuous.
As for myself, I was further from predicting his actions than I had been since Rose gave his first warning. Of course, Roger was leaving a channel of retreat: he would be crazy not to do so. Of course, he must have faced the thought — and Caro must have brought it into the open — that there was still time to back down, throw the stress of his policy just where solid men would be comfortable, then take another Ministry, and gain considerable credit into the bargain. So much was clear. I was sure of nothing else.
28: A Name without much Meaning
One morning in December, I received a report. It was brought by one of my acquaintances in Security. I was not allowed to see it, but I was used to their abracadabra. He gave me the name I wanted, and took the report away with him.
The name I wanted was that of Ellen’s persecutor. When I heard it, I said: ‘Oh, yes?’ It sounded matter-of-fact, like the name of a new housekeeper. It sounded — as facts tend to sound, whenever you are mixed up in a secret investigation — as probable or improbable as anything else. Yet, when I was left alone, it seemed very odd. Nothing like what I should have expected. Odd, but not melodramatically odd. I hadn’t been told, as in an old-fashioned thriller, the name of Hector Rose or the Prime Minister, or Roger himself. Dully odd. Within five minutes, I rang up Ellen telling her I wanted to see her before one o’clock.
‘What about?’ But she did not need to ask.
Over the telephone, I made her give me a promise. I couldn’t say anything, I told her, unless she did. When she had this information, she must do nothing with it, nothing of any kind, until we had agreed.
‘I suppose so,’ she said, in a strong reluctant voice.
We had to find somewhere where we could safely meet. It was the Christmas holidays, and at my flat the children would be home. Hers? No, she said: for once, I thought, not practical.
Briskly, she fixed a rendezvous, in an art gallery off Burlington Gardens. There I found her, alone, in the middle of the inner room, on the single chair. Round the walls were slabs and flashes of colour on canvases of enormous size. It occurred to me, walking to her in the deserted gallery, that we might have been two solitary devotees of Action painting: or a middle-aged official, a smartly-dressed, youngish woman, at a first assignation. As she saw me, her eyes were open, dark, apprehensive, waiting.
‘Well?’ she said.
I wasted no time.
‘Apparently,’ I replied, ‘it’s Hood.’
For an instant, she couldn’t believe that she had heard right, or that the Hood of whom I spoke was the man we both knew slightly, the little, pleasant-faced dispenser of drinks, cherry-cheeked, Pickwickian, who had a job, not one of the top jobs, but two or three down on the commercial side, with one of Lufkin’s rivals. I told her I had met him last at Lufkin’s birthday party, when he had been exhaling with admiration at each utterance that Lufkin made, and raising his hands high as if to applaud a diva.
‘I’ve seen him in the library,’ she repeated several times. She went on: ‘But he can’t have anything against me! I’ve hardly talked to him alone.’
She was searching for something personal, a snub, a pass she hadn’t noticed or had not responded to, but she couldn’t flatter herself; she couldn’t even gain that tiny bit of consolation.
‘Perhaps seeing me there somehow put him on to us. How did he get on to us? Does anyone know?’
I said it didn’t matter. To her, in that moment, it mattered so much that she could think of nothing else. Then she cried: ‘I’ve got to have it out with him.’
‘No.’
‘I’ve got to.’
‘That’s why I made you promise,’ I said, ‘an hour ago.’
She looked at me with violence, with something like hate. She was craving for action as though it were a drug. To be kept from it was intolerable. It was like a denial of the whole self, body and soul, body as well as soul.
Passionately she argued. It could do no harm, she said. It could do no good, I replied: it might be dangerous. Now that we had identified him, some of the menace was gone. If it was simply a personal grudge, which I said again that I didn’t believe, he didn’t count, except for nuisance value. She could live with that.
But if not a personal grudge, was he acting on his own? If not, for whom? Suddenly Ellen went into a brilliant fugue of paranoia. She saw some central intelligence marshalling enemies: enemies watching them, planning, moving in, studying each aspect of Roger’s life and hers. This was one move, Brodzinski’s was another. Who was directing it all?
I couldn’t pacify her, or persuade her that it wasn’t true. I didn’t myself know what was happening. In that empty room, the reds in the pictures pushing out towards us, I began to feel in a web of persecution myself.
She wanted to shout, cry, fly out, make love to Roger, anything. Her colour was high — but, as though in a moment-by-moment change, just as a child changes when in illness, when I looked again I saw she had turned pale.
She went very quiet. The passion had died away. She was afraid. At last I got her to talk again: ‘If this goes on, I don’t know whether I can stand it.’
The truth was, she did not doubt her own fortitude, but his. ‘I don’t know whether he can stand it.’ That was what the words really meant, deeper than she could express. Also, she could not bring herself to say that she had a new fear about why she might lose him. Some of those fears she could confess, as she had done at our first meeting, when she told me that if he lost his political career because of her, he would not forgive her. This was a new fear, which she could not confess, because it seemed a betrayal. But though she worshipped Roger, she knew him. She believed that these persecutions wouldn’t stiffen him, but would drive him back into safety — back to the company of his colleagues, to the shelter of Lord North Street.