Homecomings (35 page)

Polite, patient, judicious, Rose and the others questioned him, their expressions showing neither encouragement nor discouragement, neither excessive interest nor dismissal. They were all three sensible at judging men, or at least at judging men as creatures to do business with. They were on their own ground, selecting for the bureaucratic skills in which not only Rose, but also the youngest of the three, Osbaldiston, was expert.

The third was John Jones, who was now Sir John and a year off retirement: still looking handsome and high-coloured, and as though bursting with a heterodox opinion, a revelation straight from the heart, but after forty years of anxiety to please hypnotized by his own technique, unable to take his eye away from watching Rose’s response. Rose found him agreeable: granted Jones’ modest degree of talent, he had got on a good deal better as a snurge than he would have done as a malcontent, and it was romantic to think otherwise: but, when it came to serious business, his view did not count with Rose by the side of Osbaldiston’s, who was twenty-five years younger.

Osbaldiston, a recent arrival, was an altogether more effective man. Unlike Rose or Jones, he had not started in a comfortable professional family, and socially he had travelled a long way farther than me or my friends: born in the East End, a scholarship, Oxford, the Civil Service examination. In the Treasury he had fitted so precisely that it seemed, though it was not, a feat of impersonation: Christian names, the absence of jargon, the touch of insouciant cultivation carried like a volume in the pocket – they all sounded like his native speech. Long, thin, unworn, he seemed to many above the battle and a bit of a dilettante. He was as much above the battle as a Tammany boss and as much a dilettante as Paul Lufkin. He was so clever that he did not need to strain, but he intended to have Rose’s success and more than Rose’s success. My private guess was that he was for once over-estimating himself: nothing could prevent him doing well, one could bet on his honours, one could bet that he would go as high as Jones – but perhaps not higher. It might be that, in the next ten years when he was competing with the ablest, he would just lack the weight, the sheer animal force, to win the highest jobs.

The first interview closed in courtesies from Rose to the candidate. As the door closed, Rose, without expression, looked round the table. Osbaldiston at once shook his head: I shook mine, then Jones shook his.

‘I’m afraid the answer is no,’ said Rose, and without any more talk began writing on the nomination form.

‘He’s a nice chap,’ said Osbaldiston.

‘Charming,’ said Jones.

‘He’s been quite useful within his limits,’ said Rose, still writing.

‘He’s got a service pension of seven hundred pounds, as near as makes no matter,’ said Osbaldiston. ‘He’s forty-six, and he’s got three children, and it’s a bit of a fluke whether he collects another job or not. What I can’t see, Hector, is how on those terms we’re going to recruit an officer corps at all.’

‘It’s not our immediate pigeon,’ replied Rose from his paper, ‘but we shall have to give it a bit of thought.’

The curious thing was, I knew that they would.

‘Well,’ said Rose, signing his name, ‘I think we’ll have Passant in now.’

When George entered, he wore a diffident, almost soapy smile, which suggested that, just as on his first appearance in the room, he expected to be tripped up inside the door. As he sat in the vacant chair, he was still tentatively smiling: it was not until he answered Rose’s first question that his great head and shoulders seemed to loom over the table, and I could, with my uneasiness lulled, for an instant see him plain. His forehead carried lines by now, but not of anxiety so much as turbulence. Looking from Osbaldiston’s face and Rose’s to George’s, one could see there the traces of experiences and passions they had not known – and yet also, by the side of those more disciplined men, his face, meeting the morning light, seemed mysteriously less mature.

Rose had begun by asking him what he considered his ‘most useful contribution so far’ to the work of the Department.

‘The A— job I’m doing now is the neatest,’ said George, as always relishing the present, ‘but I suppose that we got farther with the original scheme for Tube Alloys’ (that is, the first administrative drafts about atomic energy).

‘Would you mind running over the back history, just to get your part and the Department’s part in something like perspective?’ Rose inquired with unblinking politeness. ‘Perhaps you’d better assume that our colleague here’ – he looked at Osbaldiston – ‘is pretty uninformed about the early stages, as he wasn’t in at the beginning.’

‘Perhaps you’d better,’ said Osbaldiston offhandedly. ‘Though as a matter of fact I’ve done some of my homework since.’

Starting to enjoy himself, George gave the history of the atomic energy project from the time he entered the office. Even to me, his feat of memory was fantastic; my own memory was better than most, I had been as close to this stuff as he had, but I could not have touched that display of recapitulation. I could feel that, round the table, they were each impressed, and all took for granted that it was unthinkable for him to give a date or a paper fact wrong. But he was a shade too buoyant, and I was not quite easy. It was partly that, unlike Osbaldiston, he had not taken on a scrap of protective coloration; given the knowledge, he would have made his exposition in the identical manner, in the same hearty voice, when I first met him in a provincial street twenty-five years before. And also – this made me more uneasy – he had not put our part in the project in exact proportion: we had been modestly important, but not quite so important as he thought.

George was beaming and at ease. Jones, who I knew liked him, put in some questions about method which might have been designed to show George at his most competent. George’s answer was lucidly sober. Just then it seemed to me unthinkable that any body of men, so fair-minded as these, could reject him.

Jones had lit a pipe, so that the chrysanthemum smell no longer prevailed over the table; outside the windows at our back, the sun must have been brilliant to make the room so light. Rose continued with the interview: present work? how much could be dispensed with? One answer business-like, another again too buoyant and claiming too much, the third fair and good. At all interviews Rose was more than ever impassive, but he gave a slight acquiescent nod: so at once did Jones.

Then, as though lackadaisically, Osbaldiston spoke.

‘Look here,’ he said to George, ‘there’s something we are bound to have at the back of our minds, and it’s far better to have it in the open, I should have thought. You’re obviously an intelligent chap, if I may say so. But with due respect you don’t seem to have done much with your life until you got dragged here by the war, and then you were forty-three already. It’s bound to strike all of us as curious. Why was it? Can you give us some sort of lead?’

George stared at him.

‘I’m afraid,’ George said, with diffidence, ‘that I didn’t get much of a start.’

‘Nor did a lot of us, you know.’

‘I’ve got to make it clear that my family was very poor.’

‘I bet it wasn’t as poor as mine.’ Osbaldiston made a point of not being snobbish about his origin. It was for that reason that he was more pressing about George’s lack of ambition than Rose had been in the first interview three years ago.

‘And of course,’ said George, ‘everyone at school thought that becoming a solicitor’s clerk was a step up in the world for me, a bit above my station, as a matter of fact. No one ever pointed out, even if they knew, which I’m inclined to doubt, that there was anything else open to me.’

‘I suppose schools were worse in your time,’ said Osbaldiston. ‘And afterwards you were with your firm, Eden and Martineau, for over twenty years and I take it the job is still open for you – I confess I’m still puzzled that you didn’t see your way out.’

‘Perhaps I didn’t give it as much attention as others might have done, but at first there were things which interested me more. Somehow the right chance never seemed to present itself–’

‘Bad luck,’ said Osbaldiston casually, but they were looking at each other with incomprehension, the young man who, wherever you put him, knew how the successful world ticked, George who was always a stranger there.

Osbaldiston told Rose that he had no more questions: punctiliously Rose asked George if he had anything more he wished to tell us. No, said George, he thought he had been given a very full hearing. With a curious unobsequious and awkward grace, George added: ‘I should like to say that I am grateful for your consideration.’

We listened to George’s footsteps down the corridor. When they had died away, Rose, again without expression and in a tone utterly neutral, said: ‘Well, what do you think of him?’

Quick off the mark and light-toned, Osbaldiston said: ‘At any rate, he’s not a nobody.’

‘I thought he interviewed rather well,’ said Jones.

‘Yes. He had his ups and downs,’ said Osbaldiston. ‘On the whole he interviewed much as you’d expect. He showed what we knew already, that there’s something in him.’

Rose said nothing, while Osbaldiston and Jones agreed that George’s mind was powerful, that he would have done well in any academic course. If he had sat for the competitive examination as a young man at the regulation age, he would have got in comfortably, Osbaldiston reflected, and had an adequate career.

‘What do you think, Hector?’ Jones inquired.

Rose was still sitting silent, with his arms folded on his chest. ‘Perhaps he would,’ he said after a pause. ‘But of course that isn’t the point. He’s not a young man now, he’s a middle-aged one of forty-seven, and I think it’s fair to say a distinctly unusual one.

‘I’m inclined to think,’ Rose added, his face blank, ‘that the answer this time isn’t immediately obvious.’

At once, I knew what I was in for. Indeed, I had known it while Rose sat, politely listening to the other’s views, non-committal in his quietness. For, in the long run, the decision was his: the rest of us could advise, argue, persuade: he would listen to the sense of opinion, but his was the clinching voice. Though it did not sound like it, though the manners were egalitarian and not court manners, this was as much a hierarchy as Lufkin’s firm, and Rose’s power that morning, concealed as it was, was as free as Lufkin’s.

The only chance was for me to match will against will. He had opposed George’s entry right at the beginning; Rose was not the man to forget his own judgements. In that one impartial comment of his, I could hear him believing inflexibly that he had been right.

Yet within the human limits he was a just man: and, screwing myself up for the argument, there were some fears which I could wipe away. I could rely on it that he would not mention George’s prosecution fourteen years before: he had been acquitted, that was good enough. I could also rely on it that neither he nor the others would be much put off by rumours of George’s womanizing. Compared with those three round the table that morning, not many men, it struck me afterwards, would have been so correct, uninquisitive, unbiased.

‘It might help us,’ said Rose, ‘if Lewis, who has seen more of Passant’s work than any of us, would give us his views. I’m very anxious,’ he said to me, ‘that you should feel we’ve been seized of all the information we ought to have.’

Addressing myself to Rose, I made my case. Probably I should have made it more fluently for anyone but George. I was not relaxed, I had to force myself into the professional idiom.

I described his work, trying to apportion his responsibility, remembering that to Rose it would not seem right if I did not also demarcate my own. I said that he was a man of immense capacity. It was true – I was straining not to overstate my case – that his immediate judgement was not always first-class, he hadn’t the intuitive feel for what could or could not be done. But he had two qualities not often combined – zest for detail and executive precision, together with a kind of long-term imagination, a forecaster’s insight into policy. In the area between detail and the long term, he was not so good as our run-of-the-mill administrators: but nevertheless his two qualities were so rare that he was more valuable than any of them.

I had been talking on the plane of reason, but I heard my own voice harsh, emphatic without helping the sense.

‘We’re most grateful to you for that piece of exposition, my dear Lewis. We really are very, very much obliged to you.’

Jones sucked at his pipe: one could feel him sniffing dissension in the air. He said: ‘I imagine that, if old Passant didn’t get established, he’d just go straight back to those solicitors and it wouldn’t be any terrific hardship for him.’

‘He’d be about £200 a year better off with us,’ said Osbaldiston, ‘but you can knock some of that off for living in London.’

‘I wonder whether it would be really a kindness to establish him?’ Jones was meditating. ‘Because he’s obviously an unusual man, as Hector says, but with the best will in the world we can’t do much for him. He’d have to begin as a principal and he’s nearly fifty now, and at his age he couldn’t possibly go more than one step up. That’s not much for someone who really is a bit of a fellow in his own way.’

‘It may not be much, but he wants it,’ I burst out.

‘All that is off the point,’ said Rose, with untypical irritation. ‘We’re not required to say what is good for him or what isn’t, and we’re not concerned with his motives. He’s applied to be established, and he’s got a right to apply, and our business starts there and ends there. The only conceivable point we have got to decide is whether on his merits we ought to recommend him. I suggest,’ he said, recapturing his politeness but with a flick in his tone, ‘that we shall find the problem quite sufficiently intricate without introducing any psychological complications.’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Osbaldiston, ‘that I can see a strong enough reason for not having him.’

‘Do you see one, Hector?’ asked Jones.

‘Aren’t you making very heavy weather of it?’ I said, thinking the time for caution had gone. ‘Here’s a man everyone agrees to have some gifts. We’re thinking of him for a not desperately exalted job. As a rule we can pass people, like Cooke for example, without half this trouble. Does anyone really consider that Cooke is a quarter as competent as Passant?’