At my secretary’s slightest summons the barber would leave his little shop and come running to my house. His joy in this house exceeded my own. I had built it a few years before, when my marriage was breaking up; it was modelled on the house of the Vetii in Pompeii, with a swimming-pool replacing the impluvium. The happy barber would run his hands through my hair and say, ‘Your hair very soft, sir. What you use? Something special?’ It was the sort of thing Lieni might have said; and I would grieve for the man. It was naturally fine hair, it was true, and Lord Stockwell himself complimented me on it at our first meeting: ‘You’ll never grow bald, that’s for sure.’ But that was at an awkward moment; it was during our little nationalization crisis, and Stockwell’s estates were at issue. By this sentence Lord Stockwell not only removed tension but also, as I could not help noticing with admiration, dismissed his own immense, clumsy height, from which he could no doubt see little more of me than my hair. For Lord Stockwell there was an excuse, and for Lieni. But not for the lowly barber; and I thought, ‘How can this man endure? How, running his hands daily through the hair of other people, can he bear to keep on?’ And not only the barber and the ridiculous shoeshine men, applying themselves with vigour and a curious feminine pleasure to the removal of the last speck of dust and dirt from my shoes, and inviting me to commend their work. How could the newspaper men endure, ‘meeting me at the airport’ — words which occurred, deliciously, in their printed reports? They ran so eagerly to meet me, as full of the importance of their jobs as the girl apprentice at the hairdresser’s. They had lost their sense of their place in the scheme of things. How did they preserve their self-esteem?
To everyone I sought, secretly, and from the height of my power, to transmit my sympathy and above all my admiration for a courage which I thought I could never myself have. So that in the very midst of power I came upon a centre of stillness within myself, a centre of detachment, which my behaviour in no way revealed; for the confident, flippant dandy that was my character in Mr Shylock’s house was the character I retained and promoted, almost without design now, as soon as I spoke. To encounters with people of all conditions I gave much; they exhausted me quickly; the effort of sympathy was so great. And yet, when the time came, I was accused of arrogance and aloofness.
I remember one interview. It was at the time our bauxite royalties were about to be renegotiated. This was a personal triumph and I was, as the saying is, the man of the hour. It was with the eye of pure compassion that, while we spoke, I studied the reporter’s clothes, his shining tie, his young face fussy and tired with worry, his uncertain voice attempting bluntness, his slender weak hands. At the end, putting away his notebook, he became momentarily abstracted, a man with problems of his own. I thought he was going to speak about himself. I had found this to be the pressing need of those whose business it was merely to report the views of others; I never discouraged it. How startling it was, then, when without malice and as though seeking personal solace, he had asked: ‘And, sir, if all this were to come to an end tomorrow, what would you do?’ It was my technique instantly to begin a reply to any question. But now I hesitated. So many absurd pictures came to me. Relief: this was my first reaction, and it was a reaction to the man in front of me. Not in any unkind way, for with the word there came a picture of myself in some forest clearing, dressed as a knight, dressed as a penitent, in hermit’s rags, approaching a shrine on my knees, weeping, performing a private penance for the man in front of me, for myself, for all men, for whom in the end nothing could be done. Relief, solitude; penance, peace. Words and pictures came confusedly together. For a tremulous instant I felt a suffusing joy: to suffer for all men. Do not misunderstand; do not accuse me of presuming. Understand only that centre of stillness, that withdrawal, that compassion which was really fear. Understand my unsuitability for the role I had created for myself, as politician, as dandy, as celebrant. But it was in this role that, recovering quickly, I replied. Why, I said, I would return to my business affairs and the life I had led before, in the days of my marriage; it had been a pleasant enough life.
And I spoke sincerely. As though, in the drama we had created, it was possible simply to step down and return to the order of the past! As though I hadn’t seen the point of the reporter’s question! What made the reporter ask, I wonder. Some personal insecurity, perhaps; the weak man’s wish to tease. Whatever it was, he has had his revenge. The doers come and go, the recorders go on. And my reporter now doubtless runs to interview others, while for my own views the world cares not at all. Be kind to those you meet on the way up, runs the saying; for they are the very people you are going to meet on the way down. Frivolous; and very safe; and very smug. The tragedy of power like mine is that there is no way down. There can only be extinction. Dust to dust; rags to rags; fear to fear.
4
IN the active period of my life, which I have described as a period in parenthesis, marriage was an episode; and it was the purest accident that I should have entered politics almost as soon as this marriage came to an end. Cause and effect, it seemed to many; but the obvious and plausible is often wrong. At the time my marriage and the circumstances of its break-up won me much sympathy; later these very things were to win me much abuse. It seemed a textbook example of the ill-advised mixed marriage. I was seen as the victim, the exploited, offering comfort and status to a woman who was denied these things in her own country. There is something in this, but it is not the whole story. I never thought of myself as the victim, and even now all I have against Sandra is her name which, whether pronounced with a short or long first vowel, never ceases to jar on me. Hostile comment would have it that, for reasons of glamour, I pursued her. Sympathetic comment makes her the pursuer. And in fact marriage was her idea.
It was during the time of breakdown and mental distress when, as I have said, I travelled about England and the Continent with no purpose, not even pleasure. After each of these journeys I came back more exhausted than before, more oppressed by a feeling of waste and helplessness; and it was in such a mood that one afternoon in the last week of the vacation, having nothing to do, I drifted into the School and, discovering nothing to do there either, stood in front of the notice-board and dully read the last notices of the previous term. Those student associations! Playing at being students, playing at being questioning and iconoclastic, playing at being young and licensed, playing at being in preparation for the world! The dishonesty of the young! I belonged to none of their associations. The confession, I know, will surprise those who try to link my subsequent career with my membership of this celebrated School. Its reputation, I have since seen, lay especially heavily on those who were to sink without a trace into their respective societies.
I read the badly typewritten notice of something called the Turkish League or Turkish Association: the Annual General Meeting was being indefinitely and apparently quite arbitrarily postponed. Below, scrawled right across the sheet in ink of a vivid blue, was P.S. Rigret Inconvinience! and under this exclamation was a flamboyant, extensive signature. The exuberant, defaulting Turk! I had reason to remember him, for it was while I was idly examining his notice for further absurdities that I was aware of Sandra coming down the corridor towards me. We exchanged glances but for some reason did not speak. She came and stood directly beside me. She looked at the Turk’s notice and pretended to be as absorbed in it as I was. Waiting to be greeted, she did not herself speak. It was I, after some seconds, who broke the silence.