Corridors of Power by C.P. Snow

In March, three weeks after the Basset and Clapham combination, there was more news, which none of us could have allowed for. One morning at the office, Douglas Osbaldiston rang me up: Gilbey had been taken ill during the night, and they were not certain that he would live. The story ran round Whitehall all that morning, and reached the clubs at lunch-time. It was announced in the evening papers. Everyone that I met assumed from the start, just as I did myself, that Gilbey was going to die. A friend of mine was busy adding a hundred words about Gilbey's political achievements to an account of his career; the chief of the obituary department of a morning paper had appealed in distress, saying that he was in ‘an impossible situation' with his editor, having been ‘caught short about a man like Gilbey'.

As usual, at the prospect of a death, everyone else was a little more alive. There was a tang of excitement in the air. As usual, also, the professional conversations were already beginning: Douglas was invited to have a drink with a cabinet Minister, Rose spent the afternoon with our own Minister, talking about a scheme for redistributing the work between the two departments. I had seen the same in a smaller world twenty years before, when I was living in a college. How many deaths mattered, really mattered, mattered like an illness of one's own, to any individual man? We pretended they did, out of a kind of biological team spirit; in some ways, it was a valuable hypocrisy. But the real number was smaller than we dared admit.