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young people starting out. If so, that must have been his game, for she would have been satisfied wherever they had lived.
    She was an excellent cook. On nights when we had worked late together, Rose and I used to split a bottle of wine, and he had recollected that.
    He was talking with elaborate animation to Margaret about the differences between Greats in his time at Oxford, and the philosophy in hers at Cambridge. Jane listened and basked. As for me, I was engaged in a simple reflection. A woman had once told me that she didn’t know, no one could possibly know, what a man was like until she had gone to bed with him. It was the kind of comment that sounded wise when one was young, and probably wasn’t. And yet, looking at that pair, remembering how so many people had pigeon-holed Rose, myself among them, I felt that this once there might be something in it.
    Table pushed back after the meal, for the room was small though high-ceilinged, we sat round the grate, in front of an electric fire. Rose and his wife had finished drinking for the evening, but hospitably he had put a decanter of port on the floor. Some more fine glass, from the archidiaconal or even the Highgate home. I mentioned former colleagues. I tried to get him to say something about his career.
    ‘Oh, my dear Lewis, that’s really water under the bridge, water distinctly under the bridge, shouldn’t you agree? I don’t know whether Lady Eliot has ever had the misfortune to be exposed to the reminiscences of retired athletes,’ he was gazing, bleached-eyed, at Margaret, ‘but I assure you that mine would be, if anything, slightly duller.’
    ‘I don’t believe that,’ said Margaret, who still found him disconcerting.
    ‘But then, my dear Lady Eliot, if you’ll permit me, you haven’t spent getting on for forty years in government departments.’
    ‘Do you regret it?’ I said. I had learned long since that one had to tackle him head on.
    ‘Regret in what particular manner? I’m afraid I’m being obtuse, of course.’
    ‘Spending your life that way.’
    Rose gave his practised, edged, committee smile. ‘I follow. I should be inclined to think that, with my attainments such as they are, I shouldn’t have been markedly more useful anywhere else. Or perhaps markedly less.’
    ‘That’s a bit much, Hector,’ I broke out. I said that, when I first reported to him and for years afterwards, he had been tipped to become head of the Civil Service. That hadn’t happened. He had finished as a senior permanent secretary, one of the half-dozen most powerful men in Whitehall, but not at the absolute top. Most of us thought he had been unlucky, and in fact badly dealt with. (I noticed that this seemed to be news to his wife, who had blushed with something like gratification.) Did he mind?
    ‘I doubt if it would have affected the fate of the nation, my dear Lewis. I think you will agree that the general level of our former colleagues was, judged by the low standard of the human race, distinctly high. That is, granted their terms of reference, which may, I need hardly say, be completely wrong, a good many of them were singularly competent. Far more competent than our political masters. I learned that when I was a very lowly assistant principal, just down from Oxford. And I’m afraid I never unlearned it. Incidentally, out of proportion more competent than the businessmen that it was my misfortune to have to do official business with. Of course my experience has been narrow, I haven’t had Lewis’ advantages, and my opinion is parti pris .’ He was speaking to Margaret. ‘So you must forgive me if I sound parochial. But, for what it is worth, that is my opinion. That is, the competition among my colleagues was relatively severe. So a man who by hook or by crook became a permanent secretary ought to feel that he hadn’t any right to grumble. He’s probably been more fortunate than he deserved. There was an old Treasury saying, Lewis will remember,