She was gazing down at me, and she looked loving, sarcastic, in charge.
No, I thought, I would not break this paradisal state; let us have it for a little longer; it did not matter if I procrastinated until later that night, or next week, so long as I was certain we should he happy.
Thus I did not ask her. Instead, in the thickness of near-sleep, in the luxury of fatigue, I began gossiping about people we knew. Her fingers touching my cheeks, she joined in one of those conspiracies of kindness that we entered into when we were at peace, as though out of gratitude for our own condition we had to scheme to bring the same to others. Was there anything we could do for Helen? And couldn’t we find someone for Gilbert Cooke? We were retracing old arguments, about what kind of woman could cope with him, when, suddenly recalling another aspect of my last talk with Lufkin, I broke out that Gilbert might soon have a different kind of problem on his hands.
I explained that, like me, he would be engaged in the negotiations over which firm to give the contract to — which, now that the decision had gone in favour of the project, was not just a remote debating point but something we should have to deal with inside a month. Just as Lufkin was too competent not to know my part in the negotiations, so he would know Gilbert’s; it might be small, but it would not be negligible. And Gilbert, after the war, would certainly wish to return to Lufkin’s firm: would he be welcome, if he acted against Lufkin now?
I told Margaret of how, right at the end of our tête-à-tête, when we were both tired and half-drunk, Lufkin had let fly his question about my future, and I still could not be sure whether it was a threat. Gilbert might easily feel inclined to be cautious.
Margaret smiled, but a little absently, a little uncomfortably, and for once brushed the subject aside, beginning to talk of a man she had just met, whose name I had not heard. He was a children’s doctor, she said, and I did not need telling how much she would have preferred me to live such a life. The official world the corridors of power, the dilemmas of conscience and egotism — she disliked them all. Quite indifferent to whether I thought her priggish, she was convinced that I should be a better and happier man without them. So, with a touch of insistence, she mentioned this new acquaintance’s work in his hospital. His name was Geoffrey Hollis; perhaps it was odd, she admitted, that so young a man should devote himself to children. He was as much unlike Gilbert as a man could be, except that he was also a bachelor and shy.
‘He’s another candidate for a good woman,’ she said.
‘What is he like?’
‘Not much your sort,’ she replied, smiling at me.
Years before, each time Sheila had thrown the name of a man between us, I had been pierced with jealousy. She had meant me to be, for, in the years before we married and I loved her without return, she was ruthless, innocent and cruel. What had passed between us then had frightened me of being jealous, and with Margaret, though sometimes I had watched for it, I had been almost immune.
Nevertheless, the grooves of habit were worn deep. Hearing of Hollis, even though her face was holding nothing back, I wished that I had asked her to marry me half an hour before, when there was not this vestigial cramp keeping me still, when I had not this temptation, growing out of former misery and out of a weakness that I was born with, to retreat into passiveness and irony.
I was gazing at her, sitting by the bedside in the cold and browning light. Slowly, as her eyes studied mine, her mouth narrowed and from it edged away the smile of a loving girl, the smile of a mother. Upon us seeped — an instant suddenly enlarged in the rest and happiness of the afternoon — the sense of misunderstanding, injustice, illimitable distance, loss.
In time she said, still grave: ‘It’s all right.’
‘Yes,’ I answered.
She began to smile again and asked, putting Gilbert’s dilemma aside, what I was going to do about Lufkin and how much I minded. She had never pressed me before about what I should choose to do when the war ended. I could break with the past now, there were different ways of earning a living ahead of me, she had been content to leave it so; but now in the half-light, her hands pressing mine, she wanted me to talk about it.
23: Gigantesque
THE Minister tended to get irritated with me when there was an issue which he had to settle but wished to go on pretending did not exist. His manner remained matey and unpretentious but, when I had to remind him that the Barford contract must be placed within a fortnight, that two major firms as well as Lufkin’s were pressing for an answer, Bevill looked at me as though I had made a remark in bad taste.
‘First things first,’ he said mysteriously, as though drawing on fifty years of political wisdom, the more mysteriously since in the coming fortnight he had nothing else to do.
In fact, he strenuously resented having to disappoint two or three influential men. Even those like me who were fond of the old man did not claim that political courage was his most marked virtue. To most people’s astonishment, he had shown some of it in the struggle over Barford; he had actually challenged opinion in the Cabinet and had both prevailed and kept his job; now that was over, he felt it unjust to be pushed into more controversy, to be forced to make more enemies. Enemies — old Bevill hated even the word. He wished he could give the contract to everyone who wanted it.
Meanwhile, Sir Hector Rose was making up his own mind. The secret Barford file came down to me, with a request from Rose for my views on the contract.
It did not take me much time to think over. I talked to Gilbert, who knew the inside of Lufkin’s firm more recently than I did. He was more emphatic than I was, but on the same side. It was an occasion, I decided without worry, to play safe both for my own sake and the job’s.
So at last I did not hedge, but wrote that we ought not to take risks; this job did not need the special executive flair that Lufkin would give it, but hundreds of competent chemical engineers, where the big chemical firms could outclass him; at this stage he should be ruled out.
I suspected that Rose had already come to the same opinion. All he committed himself to, however, were profuse thanks on the telephone and an invitation to come myself, and bring Cooke, to what he called ‘a parley with Lufkin and his merry men’.
The ‘parley’ took place on a bitter December morning in one of the large rooms at the back of our office, with windows looking out over the Horse Guards towards the Admiralty: but at this date most of the glass had been blown in, the windows were covered with plasterboard, so that little light entered but only the freezing air. The chandeliers shone on to the dusty chairs: through the one sound window the sky was glacial blue: the room was so cold that Gilbert Cooke, not over-awed enough to ignore his comfort, went back for his greatcoat.
Lufkin had brought a retinue of six, most of them his chief technicians; Rose had only five, of whom a Deputy Secretary, myself and Cooke came from the Department and two scientists from Barford. The Minister sat between the two parties, his legs twisted round each other, his toes not touching the ground; turning to his right where Lufkin was sitting, he began a speech of complicated cordiality. ‘It’s always a pleasure, indeed it’s sometimes the only pleasure of what they choose to call office,’ he said, ‘to be able to sit down round a table with our colleagues in industry. You’re the chaps who deliver the goods and we know a willing horse when we see one and we all know what to do with willing horses.’ The Minister continued happily, if a trifle obscurely; he had never been a speaker, his skill was the skill of private talks but he enjoyed his own speech and did not care whether he sounded as though his head were immersed in cotton-wool. He made a tangential reference to a ‘certain project about which the less said the better’, but he admitted that there was an engineering job to be done. He thought, and he hoped Mr Lufkin would agree, that nothing but good could accrue if they all got together round the table and threw their ideas into the pool.