Read Online A Coat of Varnish by C. P. Snow - Free Book Online Page B

that he was abstemious about food he wasn’t so about giving disquisitions. He had the gift of making commonplace statements about himself as though he were baring his soul. He had been born just fifty years before, he said. In Birmingham. That didn’t get the worst of the Depression. But it was bad enough. You wouldn’t see what you saw last night. There was more respect. Better behaviour, if people our age have any right to judge. ‘But I tell you, Humphrey (he was already using Christian names), I wouldn’t have that world back in place of what we have now.’ He had been a young accountant in Birmingham, without a penny – that was at the end of the forties. Then there was the first sign of a breakthrough. That was when he had begun to make his money, and had realised that it was his duty, in the long run, to go into politics. Duty , said Thirkill, so that his listener couldn’t miss the word.
    The thick eyebrows, mobile mouth confronted Humphrey across the table. From most politicians, this would have been a conventional apologia. He wasn’t showing any originality of view; but Humphrey, more than he had bargained for, was being bombarded by an originality of temperament. One mightn’t like Thirkill, or want to do business with him, but it was hard to think that he was negligible. He began a similar bombardment about the future.
    ‘What is going to happen to us?’ He challenged Humphrey.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘I mean this country, this year.’
    ‘I can’t pretend to be bubbling with optimism.’
    That year, and for years past, none of Humphrey’s friends in private had been bubbling with optimism about the state of the nation, or its economy or, deeper down, of the state of the Western world.
    ‘There I must take issue with you. We (he meant the Government, and his own Labour Party) can get the finances into shape. We had. We shall. With a bit of luck and good management and the right men in the right places, we ought to get things straight.’
    Once again, those remarks could have come from any conventional politician, especially one with ambitions, seeing clearly the necessity for getting one right man into one right place. Politicians had to be optimistic; otherwise they wouldn’t be politicians. In parliamentary societies like this one, the future was as close as their own hopes, and world concern was a very long way distant. They had to live in the present. Thinking ten years ahead, even five, was for spectators, not for them.
    Here in the restaurant Thirkill was uplifted by the prospect before him, speaking like any other professional politician but with a temperament that Humphrey hadn’t often met before. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘we shall manage it. The finances will look brighter next year. Our lot can do it. The others can’t. It’ll come out all right in the wash. No one really wants the other lot. Not the fellows who understand finance. Not industry. Not the City. I give you my solemn word.’
    Soon Thirkill had other reflections. ‘I don’t mind telling you, Humphrey, I happen to have about the tenth safest seat in the country. My father was a parliamentary agent, he never earned more than £300 in his life, but he taught me most of what I know about politics. Politics is about bread and butter, he used to tell me when I was a boy. So I waited until I could get a seat like mine. Some of the lefty boys in the party don’t like me having it, at all, at all. They’d like to get me. Let them try.’
    Suddenly, as between one moment and another, in the midst of the confident, confidential, authoritative voice, had come a tone quite different, so different that for a moment Humphrey might have been listening to another man.
    ‘I suppose you’ve heard all about these libels that are going round? You know they keep on printing libels about me?’
    ‘Yes, I did know something.’
    ‘They come,’ said Thirkill, ‘from some of those boys in the party. I can’t prove it, but I know