Corridors of Power Read Free Page A

My neighbour’s cigar smoke was spiralling round the candle-flame: it might have been any well-to-do London party, the men alone for another quarter of an hour. Then Roger, relaxed and solid in his chair, turned half-right to David Rubin and said: ‘Now I’d like to ask you something, if I may.’
    ‘Surely,’ said Rubin.
    ‘If there are things you mustn’t say, then I hope you won’t feel embarrassed. First, I’d like to ask you – how much does what we’re doing about nuclear weapons make sense?’
    Rubin’s face was more sombre, worn, and sensitive than those round him. He was no older than some of the other men, but among the fresh ruddy English skins his stood out dry, pallid, already lined, with great sepia pouches, like bruises, under his eyes. He seemed a finer-nerved, more delicate species of animal.
    ‘I don’t know that I’m following you,’ he said. ‘Do you mean what the UK is doing about your weapons? Or what we’re doing? Or do you mean the whole world?’
    ‘They all enter, don’t they?’ Everyone was looking at Roger as he asked the matter-of-fact question. ‘Anyway, would you start on the local position, that is, ours? We have a certain uncomfortable interest in it, you know. Would you tell us whether what this country’s doing makes sense?’
    Rubin did not, in any case, find it easy to be as direct as Roger. He was an adviser to his own government; further, and more inhibiting, he was hyper-cautious about giving pain. So he did a lot of fencing. Was Roger talking about the bombs themselves, or the methods of delivery? He invoked me to help him out – as an official, I had heard these topics argued between the Americans and ourselves for years.
    There were other considerations besides the scientific ones, beside military ones, said Rubin, back on his last line of defence, why the UK might want their own weapon.
    ‘It’s our job to worry about that, isn’t it?’ said Roger gently. ‘Tell us – look, you know this as well as anyone in the world – how significant, just in the crudest practical terms, are our weapons going to be?’
    ‘Well, if you must have it,’ Rubin answered, shrugging his shoulders, ‘anything you can do doesn’t count two per cent.’
    ‘I say, Professor Rubin,’ came a bass voice, ‘you’re kicking us downstairs pretty fast, aren’t you?’
    Rubin said: ‘I wish I could tell you something different.’ His interlocutor was Mrs Henneker’s son-in-law, a man called Tom Wyndham. He confronted Rubin with a cheerful stare, full of the assurance of someone brought up in a ruling class, an assurance which did not exactly ignore changes in power, but shrugged them off. Rubin gave an apologetic smile. He was the most polite of men. He had been born in Brooklyn, his parents still spoke English as a foreign language. But he had his own kind of assurance: it did not surprise him to be told that he was the favourite for that year’s Nobel physics prize.
    ‘No,’ said Monty Cave, ‘Roger asked you to tell us.’ He gave a sharp grin. ‘He usually gets what he asks for.’
    Roger smiled, as though they were friends as well as allies. For five years, since they entered the House, they had been leading their group of back-benchers.
    ‘Now David, if I may call you so,’ he said, ‘do you mind if I go one step further. About the United States – does your policy about the weapons make sense?’
    ‘I hope so.’
    ‘Doesn’t it depend upon the assumption that you’re going to have technical superiority for ever? Don’t some of our scientists think you’re under-estimating the Russians? Is that so, Lewis?’
    I was thinking to myself, Roger had been well-briefed; for Francis Getliffe, Walter Luke and their colleagues had been pressing just that view.
    ‘We don’t know,’ said Rubin.
    He was not at his most detached. And yet, I saw that he had respect for Roger as an intelligent man. He was a good judge of intelligence and, courteous though he was,