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same rank, and at the same job, longer than any of his colleagues. They had given him the Grand Cross of the Bath, the sort of decoration he and his friends prized, but which no one else noticed. He still worked with the precision of a computer. Sometimes his politeness, so elaborate, which used to be as tireless as his competence, showed thin at the edges now. He continued to look strong, heavy-shouldered, thick; but his youthfulness, which had lasted into middle age, had vanished quite. His hair had whitened, there was a heavy line across his forehead. How deeply was he disappointed? To me, at least, he did not give so much as a hint. In his relations with the new super-department, of which he might reasonably have expected to be the permanent head, he did his duty, and a good deal more than his duty.
    The new department was the civil servants’ despair. It was true what Rose had said: it had become a good place to send an enemy to. Not that the civil servants had any quarrel with the Government about general policy. Rose and his colleagues were conservatives almost to a man, and they had been as pleased about the election results as the Quaifes’ circle themselves.
    The point was, the new department, like anything connected with modern war, spent money, but did not, in administrative terms, have anything to show for it. Rose and the other administrators had a feeling, the most disagreeable they could imagine, that things were slipping out of their control. No Minister had been any good. The present incumbent, Roger’s boss, Lord Gilbey, was the worst of any. Civil servants were used to Ministers who had to be persuaded or bullied into decisions. But they were at a loss when they came against one who, with extreme cordiality, would neither make a decision nor leave it to them.
    I had seen something of this imbroglio at first hand. At some points, the business of our department interweaved with theirs, and often Rose needed an emissary. It had to be an emissary of some authority, and he cast me for the job. There were bits of the work that, because I had been doing them so long, I knew better than anyone else. I also had a faint moral advantage. I had made it clear that I wanted to get out of Whitehall and, perversely, this increased my usefulness. Or if not my usefulness, at least the attention they paid to me, rather like the superstitious veneration with which healthy people listen to someone known to be not long for this earth.
    Thus I was frequently in and out of their offices, which were only a few hundred yards away from ours, at the corner of the Park. Like everyone else, I had become attached to Lord Gilbey. I was no better than anyone else, and in some ways worse, at getting him to make up his mind. A few days after that talk with Rose, I was making another attempt, in conjunction with Gilbey’s own Permanent Secretary, to do just that.
    The Permanent Secretary was an old colleague of mine, Douglas Osbaldiston, who was being talked of now just as Rose had been, nearly twenty years before. He was the newest bright star, the man who, as they used to say about Rose, would be Head of the Civil Service before he finished.
    On the surface, he was very different from Rose, simple, unpretentious, straightforward where Rose was oblique, humbly born while Rose was the son of an Archdeacon, and yet as cultivated as an old-fashioned civil servant, and exuding the old-fashioned amateur air. He was no more an amateur than Rose, and at least as clever. Once, when he had been working under Rose, I had thought he would not be tough enough for the top jobs. I could not have been more wrong.
    He had studied Rose’s career with forethought, and was determined not to duplicate it. He wanted to get out of his present job as soon as he had cleaned it up a little – ‘This is a hiding to nothing,’ he said simply – and back to the Treasury.
    He was long, thin, fresh-faced, still with the relics of an undergraduate air. He was