The Affair

1: An Unsatisfactory Evening

WHEN Tom Orbell invited me to dinner at his club, I imagined that we should be alone. As soon as I saw him, however — he was waiting by the porter’s box, watching me climb up the Steps from the street — he said, in a confidential, anxious whisper: “As a matter of fact, I’ve asked someone to meet you. Is that all right?”

He was a large young man, cushioned with fat, but with heavy bones and muscles underneath. He was already going bald, although he was only in his late twenties. The skin of his face was fine-textured and pink, and his smile was affable, open, malicious, eager to please and smooth with soft soap. As he greeted me, his welcome was genuine, his expression warm: his big light-blue eyes stayed watchful and suspicious.

He was telling me about my fellow-guest.

“It’s a young woman, as a matter of fact. Lewis, she is really rather beautiful.”

I had forgotten that this club, like a good many others in London in the ’50s, had taken to letting women in to dine. While he was talking, I had no doubt at all that I was there to serve some useful purpose, though what it was I could not begin to guess.

“You’re sure you don’t mind?” Tom pressed me, as I was hanging up my coat. “It is all right, isn’t it?”

He led the way, heavy shoulders pushing forward, into the reading-room. The room was so long, so deserted, that it seemed dank, though outside it was a warmish September night and in the grates coal fires were blazing. By one fire, at the far end of the room, a man and woman were sitting in silence reading glossy magazines. By the other stood a young woman in a red sweater and black skirt, with one hand on the mantelpiece. To her Tom Orbell cried out enthusiastically: “Here we are!”

He introduced me to her. Her name was Laura Howard. She was, as he had promised, comely. She had a shield-shaped face and clear grey eyes, and she moved with energy and grace. Tom got us sitting in armchairs on opposite sides of the fire, ordered drinks, dumped himself on the sofa between us. “Here we are,” he said, as though determined to have a cosy drinking evening.

He proceeded to talk, flattering us both, using his wits and high spirits to get the party going.

I glanced across at Laura. One thing was clear, I thought. She had been as astonished as I was to find she was not dining alone with Tom Orbell: quite as astonished, and much more put out.

“When are you going to come and see us again?” Tom was addressing himself to me, tucking in to a large whisky. “We really do miss you, you know.”

By “us”, he meant the Cambridge college of which I had been a Fellow before the war. I still had many friends there, including my brother Martin, who was himself a Fellow, and went to see them two or three times a year. It was on one of those visits that I had first met Tom, just after he had taken his degree in history. He had made a reputation as a bright young man, and I had heard my old friends saying that they would have to elect him. That had duly happened — so far as I remembered, in 1949, four years before this dinner in his club.

“We really do miss him,” Tom was explaining confidentially to Laura. “It’s like everywhere in this country, the right people are never where you want them. Everything’s got into the hands of those awful old men, and when anyone like Lewis comes along he goes and does something frightfully important and leaves the old men to sit on the heads of the rest of us. He’s a very powerful and slightly sinister figure, is Lewis. Oh, yes, he is. But he’s on the right side. I assure you he is. We miss him very much, do you believe me?”

“I’m sure you do,” she said, in a tone which could scarcely have been less interested.

Tom continued to talk — was he trying to distract her? — as though we were all in a sociological conspiracy. Generalisations poured out: the good young middle-aged, said Tom, flattering me, for I was forty-eight, had got caught up trying to keep the country afloat. The generation coming up, he said, flattering her, for she was about thirty, had got to fight some other battles, had got to smash the “awful old men”.

“We are all in it together,” he said. He had had three stiff drinks, he sounded both hearty and angry. “We’re going to show them. I mean it very sincerely, both of you.”

Upstairs in the dining-room, with Laura sitting between us at a dark corner table, Tom went on with his patter. There were a couple of decanters waiting for us, shining comfortably under the three candles, and soon Tom had put down the best part of a bottle of wine. But, though he showed the effects of drink very quickly, he did not get any more drunk. He was spontaneous, as he usually seemed to be, but whatever his policy was for this evening he had not lost hold of it. He was spontaneous, at the same time he was wily: somehow he managed to use the spontaneity as part of his stock-in-trade.

Meanwhile he was enjoying his dinner with a mixture of appetite and discrimination, with a gusto so intense that he appeared to be blushing. After he had ordered our meal with analytical care, he suddenly had a second thought about his own. Beckoning the waitress, he whispered to her almost as confidentially as though they were having a love-affair. She reappeared with some gulls’ eggs while Laura and I forked away at the smoked salmon.

“Delicious, delicious,” said Tom Orbell, in a gourmet’s transport.

It was when he repeated this performance over the savoury that Laura lost her patience. As he talked at large, she had been half-polite, half-sulking. Not that she was irritated because he was not paying attention to her as a woman. Actually, he was. He was a susceptible young man, he wanted to make a hit with her. To which she was totally indifferent; something was on her mind, but not that.

Tom had just had a new and delectable afterthought about the savoury. When our mushrooms on toast arrived, he had another piece of happy whispering with the waitress. “Do you think I could possibly have…?” Soon he was munching away at chicken livers and bacon, murmuring with content.

Then Laura said to him: “I do want to get down to business, if you don’t mind.”

Tom looked at her, his glance at the same time defensive and bold.

“Is there really anything we can do tonight?”

“When are any of you going to move?”

“It isn’t any use me moving by myself is it?”

“That’s not the point.”

“But isn’t it the point, my dear? Do you think that the blasted Court of Seniors is going to listen to a solitary junior Fellow? Remember this is the last shot you’ve got, if you don’t mind me speaking frankly. And I’m speaking with great affection for you, even more than for Donald, and that isn’t a monstrous thing to say, is it?”

She was looking angry and determined, which made her seem more handsome, and he gazed at her admiringly. “Forgive me,” he said, “I’m afraid I’m slightly drunk.” He was not: he was trying to put up a smoke-screen.

“If you don’t mind me speaking very frankly, you’ve got to be very, very careful about your tactics,” he went on. “And so have I, because there might come a time when I could be a bit of use to you, in a minor way, and it would be a mistake to have shot my bolt before the right time came, wouldn’t it?”

“Not so much a mistake as doing nothing at all.”

“Is there any reason why I shouldn’t let Lewis into this?” he said, beating another retreat.

“Haven’t you heard about it already?” Almost for the first time, she spoke to me directly.

In fact, as I had been listening to them, I knew something of the story. My brother was the most discreet of men: but he and Francis Getliffe had thought that, as an ex-Fellow, I had a right to know. Even so, they had told me the bare minimum. The scandal had been kept so tightly within the college that I had not caught a whisper from anyone else. All I had picked up was that one of the younger Fellows had been caught out in a piece of scientific fraud. Without any noise at all, he had been got rid of. It was a kind of dismissal that had only happened in the college once within living memory. It had been done, of course, after something like a judicial investigation. I assumed that it had been done with more obsessive care even than in a process at law. The final dismissal had happened six months before: and, as I had realised as soon as Laura set to work on Tom Orbell, the man concerned was her husband, Donald Howard.

I said that I knew what they were talking about.

“Have you heard that it’s a piece of unforgivable injustice?” she demanded.

I shook my head.

“You’ve got to remember, just for the sake of getting your own tactics right,” said Tom, “that no one in the college takes that view, haven’t you got to remember that?”

“Have you heard that it’s the result of sheer blind prejudice?”

I shook my head again, and Tom put in: “With great respect, my dear Laura, that’s just misleading you. Of course there’s some strong feeling about it, it wouldn’t be natural if there wasn’t. Of course most of them don’t agree with his opinions. I don’t myself, as you know perfectly well. But then, I don’t agree with Lewis’ opinions either, and I think Lewis would feel pretty safe in his job if I suddenly came into power. Speaking with great affection, you’re really on the wrong track there.”

“I don’t believe it for an instant.”

“Truly you’re wrong—”

“I will believe it when you’ve done something to prove it.”

I watched them as she went on bullying him. Tom Orbell was as clever as they came; psychologically he was full of resource and beneath the anxiety to please there was a tough, wilful core. But his forehead was sweating, his voice was not so mellifluous or easy. He was frightened of her. While she sat there, pretty, set-faced, strong-necked, she had only one thought in her head. She had come to talk to him and make him act. Talking to Tom, who was so much cleverer, she had the complete moral initiative.

She said: “I’m not asking you anything difficult. All I want is to get this business re-opened.”

“How can you expect me to do that? I’m just one out of twenty. I’m a very junior person, I’m not a majority of the college. And I’ve tried to explain to you, but you won’t realise it, that you’re dealing with a society and a constitution, that you need a majority of the college before the thing can be so much as raised again.”

“You can’t get a majority of the college unless you make a beginning now,” she said.

Tom Orbell looked at her with something like appeal. I thought she had got him down. Then I realised that I had underrated him, when he said: “Now look, my dear. I’ve got a serious suggestion to make, and I want you to consider it very carefully. I don’t believe that anyone as junior as I am is going to make any impact on this situation at all. What I suggest, and I mean it very deeply, is that you should try to persuade Lewis here to talk to some of his friends. I’m not saying that you could possibly want him to commit himself to an opinion one way or another, any more than I could commit myself, as far as that goes. But if you could get him so much as to raise the question with the people he knows — after all, he’s become the nearest approach we have to an elder statesman, has Lewis. He can talk to them as I can’t possibly and shan’t be able to for twenty years. I do mean that, I assure you.”

So now I understood why he had enticed me there.

She looked at me with steady, bright, obstinate eyes.

“You don’t see much of them there nowadays, do you?” she asked.

“Not very much,” I said.

“You can’t possibly be really in touch, I should think, can you?”

I said no.

“I don’t see what you could expect to do.”

She said it dismissively and with contempt. Contempt not for Tom Orbell, but for me. I felt a perceptible pique. It was not agreeable to be written off quite so far. But this young woman had decided that I was no good at all. She did not seem even to be considering whether I was well-disposed or not. She just had no faith in me. It was Tom in whom she still had her faith.

When we returned to the reading-room, even she, however, was deterred from forcing him any more. Tom sat there, his face cherubic, sketching out visions of the future like roseate balloons, high-spirited visions that seemed to consist of unworthy persons being ejected from positions of eminence and in their places worthy persons, notably the present company and in particular Tom himself, installed. I thought Laura would start on him again as soon as she got him alone. But for that night, at any rate, he was secure. For he had revealed to us that he was staying in the club, and at last it became my duty to take Laura out into Pall Mall and find her a taxi.

She said a cold good night. Well, I thought, as I went along the street, looking for a taxi for myself, it would not be easy to invent a more unsatisfactory evening. None of the three of us had got away with what he wanted. Laura had not cornered Tom Orbell. He had not managed to slide her off on to me. And I had not done any better. I was not much interested in this story of her husband: it did not even begin to strike me as plausible that there had been an injustice of that kind. No, I was not thinking of that at all, but I was faintly irked. No one likes to be treated as a vacuum inhabited solely by himself.

2: No Sense of the Past

A few weeks after the evening in Tom Orbell’s club, I was sitting in my brother’s rooms in college. It was a routine visit: I had gone down, as I did most years, for the Michaelmas audit feast. It gave me a curious mixture of comfort and unfamiliarity to be sitting there as a guest; for I had once used that great Tudor room as my own dining-room, and had sat talking in it as I now sat talking to Francis Getliffe, on October nights like this one, with draughts running under the wainscot, the fire in the basket grate not quite hot enough to reach out to the window seats.

In the study next door, my brother was interviewing a pupil, and Francis Getliffe and I were alone. He was a couple of years older than I was, and we had known each other since we were young men. I could remember him thin-skinned, conquering his diffidence by acts of will. He still looked quixotic and fine featured; his sunburned flesh was dark over his collar and white tie. But success had pouched his cheeks a little and taken away the strain. In the past few years the success which he had wanted honourably but fiercely as he started his career, and which had not come quickly, had suddenly piled upon him. He was in the Royal Society and all over the world his reputation was as high as he had once longed for it to be. In addition, he had been one of the most effective scientists in the war. It was for that work, not his pure research, that he had been given the CBE whose cross he wore on his shirtfront. For a combination of the two he had, two years before, been knighted.

He was chatting about some of our contemporaries who also had done well. He would always have been fair about them, because he had a strict code of fairness: but now, it occurred to me, he was just a shade more fair. He was showing that special affection which one who has in his own eyes come off feels towards others who have done the same.

Martin came in through the inside door. He had changed before his tutorial hour, and was already dressed for the feast. Straight away he began to ask Francis’ advice about the pupil he had just been seeing: was he, or was he not, right to change from physics to metallurgy? Martin worried away at the problem. He had recently become junior tutor, and he was doing the job with obsessive conscientiousness. He enjoyed doing it like that.

Unlike Francis, whose prestige had been rising for years past, Martin’s had been standing still. A few years before, he had had the chance of becoming one of the atomic energy bosses. He had got the chance, not through being a scientist in Francis’ class, which he never could be, but because people thought he was hard, responsible and shrewd. They were not far wrong: and yet, to everyone’s surprise, he had thrown up the power and come back to the college.

He did not seem to mind having a future behind him. With the obsessive satisfaction with which he was now speaking of his pupil’s course, he applied himself to his teaching, to the bread-and-butter work that came his way. He looked very well on it. He was getting on for forty, but he might have passed for younger. As he spoke to Francis, his eyes were acute, brilliant with a kind of sarcastic fun, although everything he said was serious and business-like.

Then he mentioned another pupil called Howarth, and the name by chance plucked at something at the back of my mind to which, since it happened, I had not given a thought.

“Howarth, not Howard?” I said.

“Howarth, not Howard,” said Martin.

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I heard something about your ex-colleague Howard. In September young Orbell introduced me to his wife.”

“Did he now?” said Martin, with a tight smile. “She’s a pretty girl, isn’t she?”

“She was crying out loud that there had been a miscarriage of justice. I suppose that’s all nonsense, isn’t it?”

“Quite nonsense,” said Martin.

Francis said: “There’s nothing in that.”

“She seemed to think that he’d been turned out because of some sort of prejudice, which I never got quite clear—”

“That’s simple,” said Francis. “He was, and I suppose he still is, a moderately well-known fellow-traveller.”

“He wouldn’t be the favourite character of some of our friends, then, would he?”

“If I’d thought that was deciding anything, I should have made a noise,” said Francis. “I needn’t tell you that, need I?”

He said it stiffly, but without being touchy. He took it for granted that no one who knew him, I least of all, would doubt his integrity. In fact, no one in his senses could have done so. In the ’30s, Francis himself, like so many of his fellow-scientists, had been far to the left. Now he was respectable, honoured, he had moved a little nearer to the centre, but not all that much. In politics both he and Martin remained liberal and speculative men, and so did I. It was a topic on which the three of us in that room were close together.

“I don’t want to give you a false impression,” Francis said. “This man was disliked inside the college, of course he was, and there’s no getting away from it, with most of them his politics made them dislike him more. But that wasn’t the reason why we had to throw him out. It was a reason, if you like, why we found it difficult to get him elected in the first place. We had to be pretty rough with them, and tell them that politics or no politics, they mustn’t shut their eyes to an Alpha man.”

“In which,” said Martin, “we don’t seem to have done superlatively well.”

Francis gave a grim smile, unamused.

“No,” he said, “it’s a bad business. He just went in for a piece of simple unadulterated fraud. That’s all there is to it.”

So far as he could make it intelligible to a layman, Francis told me about the fraud. A paper of Howard’s, published in collaboration with his professor, an eminent old scientist now dead, had been attacked by American workers in the same field — and the attack had said that the experimental results could not be repeated. Francis and some of his Cavendish colleagues had had private warning that there was something “fishy” about Howard’s published photographs. Two of the scientists in the college, Nightingale and Skeffington, had had a look at them. There was no doubt about it: at least one photograph had been, as it were, forged. That is, a photograph had been enlarged, what Francis called “blown up”, to look like the result of a totally different experiment: and this photograph became the decisive experimental evidence in Howard’s Fellowship thesis and later in his published paper.

The fraud could not be accidental, said Francis. Neither he nor Martin had worked on Howard’s subject, but they had looked at the photograph. It was only too straightforward. The technical opinion that Nightingale and Skeffington had given was the one that any other scientist would have had to give, and it was on this technical opinion that the Court of Seniors had acted. The Court of Seniors, so Francis and Martin told me, had been the Master, Arthur Brown, old Winslow, and Nightingale, this time in his capacity as Bursar. “Of course,” said Francis, “they had to go on what the scientists told them. Nightingale’s the only one of them who’d have any idea what a diffraction photograph was.

“Still,” he added, “they went into it very thoroughly. If it hadn’t been a clear case, they would still have been at it.”

Somehow a question of mine set him reflecting on other cases of scientific fraud. There hadn’t been many, he said, less even than one might expect. Considering the chances and the temptation, the number was astonishingly low. In the last fifty years, he could tick off the notorious ones on the fingers of two hands. He produced names at which Martin nodded, but which, of course, meant nothing to me. Rupp, the J-phenomenon (“but that, presumably, was an honest mistake”): Francis spoke of them with the incredulous relish which professional scandals often evoke in a hyper-scrupulous man. He was wondering about the motives of those who perpetrated them, when the college bell started clanging for the feast.

As we picked up our gowns and went downstairs into the court, Francis was saying: “But there’s no mystery why Howard did it. He just wanted to make his marble good.”

Sitting in hall in the candlelight, I let the story drift comfortably out of mind. It was over and tied up now, and the college was going on. I was enough of a stranger to draw an extra pleasure out of being there. I was also enough of a stranger to be put up on the dais among the old men. This was not such a privilege as it looked: for my next-door neighbour was so old that the places beside him were not competed for.

“Ah,” he said, gazing at me affably. “Excuse me. Do you mind telling me your name?”

The colour in his irises had faded, and they were ringed with white. Otherwise he did not show the signs of extreme age: his cheeks were ruddy pink, his hair and beard silky but strong.

I said that I was Lewis Eliot. It was the second time since dinner began that he had asked the question.

“Indeed. Tell me, have you any connection with the college?”

It was too embarrassing to tell him that we had been Fellows together for ten years. This was M H L Gay, the Icelandic scholar. In his presence one felt as though confronted by one of those genealogical freaks, as I once felt when I met an old lady whose father, not as a boy but as a young man, had been in Paris during the French Revolution. For Gay had been elected a Fellow over seventy years before. He had actually retired from his professorship before Tom Orbell and half a dozen of the present society were born. He was now ninety-four: and in a voice shaky, it is true, but still resonant, was loudly demanding a second glass of champagne.

“Capital. Ah. That’s a drink and a half, if ever there was one. Let me persuade you, sir” — he was addressing me — “to have a glass of this excellent wine.”

He began to speak, cordially and indiscriminately, to all around him: “I don’t know whether you realise it, but this is positively my last appearance before my annual hibernation. Indeed. Yes, that is a prudent measure of mine. Indeed it is. I adopted that prudent measure about ten years ago, when I had to realise that I was no longer as young as I used to be. So after this splendid audit feast of ours, I retire into hibernation and don’t make the journey into college until we have the spring with us again. That means that I have to miss our fine feast for the Commemoration of Benefactors. I have suggested more than once to some of our colleagues that perhaps the summer might be a more opportune time for that fine feast. But so far they haven’t taken the hint, I regret to say.”

For an instant his face looked childish. Then he cheered up: “So I retire to my own ingle-nook for the winter, indeed I do. And I listen to the great gales roaring over the Fens, and I thank God for a good stout roof over my head. Not one of those flat roofs these modern architects try to foist off on us. A good stout pitched roof, that’s what a man wants over his head. Why, one of those flat roofs, our Fenland gales would have it off before you could say Jack Robinson.”

A few places along the table, a distinguished Central European architect was listening. “I do not quite understand, Professor Gay,” he said, with a serious, puzzled and humourless expression. “Are you thinking of the turbulent flow round a rectangle? Or are you thinking of the sucking effect? I assure you—”

“I am thinking of the force of our Fenland gales, sir,” cried Gay triumphantly. “Our ancestors in their wisdom and experience knew about those gales, and so they built us good, stout, pitched roofs. Ah, I often sit by my fire and listen, and I think, ‘That’s a gale and a half. I’d rather be where I am than out at sea.’”

Old Gay kept it up throughout the feast. Sitting by him, I found it impossible to feel any true sense of the past at all. The candles blew about, in the middle of the table the showpieces of gold and silver gleamed; all, including Gay’s conversation, was as it would have been at a feast twenty years earlier. The food was perhaps a little, though only a little, less elaborate, the wines were just as good. No, I got pleasure out of being there, but no sense of the past. True, I now knew half the Fellows only slightly. True, some of those I had known, and the one I had known best, were dead. But, as I sat by Gay, none of that plucked a nerve, as a visitant from the true past did. I could even think of the Baron de Charlus’ roll-call of his friends, and say to myself, “Despard-Smith, dead, Eustace Pilbrow, dead, Chrystal, dead, Roy Calvert, dead.” Not even that last name touched me; it was all a rhetorical flourish, as though one were making a nostalgic speech after a good dinner. Now I came to think of it, wasn’t Charlus’ roll-call just a flourish too?

In the shadows on the linenfold, I noticed a picture which was new since my last visit. Above the candlelight it was too dark to make out much of the face, although it did not look any better done than most of the college portraits. On the frame I could, however, read the gold letters:

Doctor R T A Crawford, FRS, Nobel Laureate, Forty-First Master.

Master 1937 –

My eyes went from the picture to the original, solid, Buddha-faced, in the middle of the table. His reign, so they all said, had been pretty equable. There did not seem to have been much to scar it. Now it was nearly over. They had prolonged him for three years above the statutory age of seventy, but he was to go in a year’s time: he would preside at the next Michaelmas audit feast, and that would be his last.

“Ah, Master,” Gay was calling out. “I congratulate you on this splendid evening. I congratulate you. Indeed I do.”

From his previous conversation, I thought he was not clear which, of all the Masters he had known, this was. Masters came and Masters went, and Gay, who was telling us that port did not agree with him, applied himself to the nuts.

In the jostle of the combination room afterwards, I felt my arm being squeezed. “Nice to see you,” came a round, breathy, enthusiastic whisper. “Slip out as soon as you decently can. We still finish up in my rooms, you know.”

It was Arthur Brown, the Senior Tutor. Some time passed before I could get free and when I entered Brown’s sitting-room it was already full. Brown gripped my hand.

“This is more like it,” he said. “I’ve been telling them, people got into the habit of dropping in here after feasts more years ago than I care to remember. I take it amiss that you haven’t been here since this time last year. You mustn’t forget us altogether, you know. Now I hope I can tempt you to a drop of brandy? I always think it’s rather soothing after a long dinner.”

He was a man of sixty-three, padded with flesh, broad-jowled, high-coloured. The residual wings of hair were white over his ears. He looked kind, he looked like someone who enjoyed seeing others happy: and that was true. He looked a bit of a buffer — to those who did not notice the eyes behind his spectacles, sparkling with inquisitiveness, or how, under the paunchy flesh, he carried his stomach high. In fact, when I had been a colleague of his in the college, I thought that he was one of the shrewdest managers of people that I had met. I still thought so, after meeting a good many more. He contrived to be at the same time upright, obstinate and very cunning.

The room was cosier, the temperature higher, than in most college sets. On the walls hung a collection of English watercolours, of which Brown had come to be a connoisseur. There were so many men in the room that they had split up into groups: that would not have happened in the first after-feast parties which I had attended there. The college was larger now, the average age of the Fellows lower, the behaviour just perceptibly less formal. Glass in hand, Francis Getliffe was talking to a knot of three young scientists; Martin and a handsome man whom I recognised as Skeffington were away in a corner with two arts Fellows, Clark and Lester Ince, both elected since I left.

By the fire, Brown and I were sitting drinking our brandy when Tom Orbell came and joined us. His face was pink, flushed and cheerful, but in Brown’s presence he was comporting himself with decorum, with a mixture of expansiveness and caution. What could be done about the chaplain? he was asking. Apparently there was a danger that he would be enticed away. He was intelligent, so Tom was saying, and it wasn’t all that easy nowadays to find an intelligent man in orders.

“Of course,” he turned to me with a flush of defiance, “that wouldn’t matter to you, Lewis. You wouldn’t mind if every clergyman in the country was mentally deficient. I expect you’d think it would make things easier if they were. But Arthur and I can’t take that view, can we?”

“I should have thought it was slightly extreme,” said Brown.

But he was not prepared to let Tom flaunt his piety at my expense. Brown was a “pillar of society”, conservative and Anglican, but he went to church out of propriety more than belief, and he was not entirely easy when young men like Orbell began displaying their religion. So Brown told a story in my favour, designed to show how careful I was about others’ faith.

“I’m sorry, Lewis,” said Tom, at his jolliest and most repentant, instantaneously quick to catch the feeling of someone like Brown, “it was absolutely monstrous of me to accuse you of that. You’re frightfully good, I know you are. And by the way, it was absolutely monstrous of me to inflict that evening on you with Laura Howard.”

“What’s that?” said Brown, his eyes alert and peering. “How did you come to be meeting Mrs Howard, Lewis?”

“I saddled him with it, I’m afraid,” Tom replied. “You see, she was wanting me to raise Cain in the college about her husband — which, as I believe all those protests of hers are just sheer nonsense, I couldn’t very well do, could I? Just sheer nonsense which she’s managed to make herself believe because she loves him, God knows why. So I didn’t want to make it easy for her to get to work on me, did I? Mind you, Arthur,” he said, “if I thought there was the slightest bit of sense in her case or even the chance that there could be a bit of sense in it, I’d have come and told you straight out that I was going to bring it up. I do mean that. I think it’s very important that people of my age should be ready to throw their weight about. I know you agree, Arthur, don’t you?”

Soon afterwards, Tom attached himself to Martin’s group. I was thinking that, as he explained himself to Brown, he had shown a delicate blend of the deferential and the man-to-man; beautiful to listen to. In private, out of hearing of persons in authority, few people rebelled as eloquently as Tom Orbell. In the hearing of persons in authority, the eloquence remained, but the rebellion not. In the company of Arthur Brown, Tom seemed above all desirous of growing into someone just like Arthur Brown — solid, rooted, statesmanlike, a man on top.

“So our young friend has been involving you with the Howards, has he?” asked Arthur Brown.

“You’ve been having more trouble than I thought, haven’t you?” I said.

“I need hardly say,” said Brown, “that none of this ought to be so much as mentioned outside the college. I needn’t tell you that, I know. Put it another way: I should have thought it was safer, if you only talked about it, even in this place, with Martin or the people you know well.”

“What’s this man Howard like, Arthur?” I asked.

The colour, heavy puce, deepened in Brown’s cheeks. He was frowning as though angry with me even for asking the question.

“He’s an unmitigated swine,” he said.

For an instant I was both astonished and thrown off my stride. I did not know many people more tolerant of others than Brown was. Also, he had spent so many years guarding his speech that it often seemed he couldn’t speak any other way.

Even Brown himself seemed startled at hearing his own outburst. He said, once more judicious, weighing his words: “No, I don’t think I feel inclined to withdraw what I’ve just said. I never have been able to find anything to set down in his favour. He’s a twister, but there are plenty of twisters that have some redeeming qualities, and I can’t recall this chap showing a single one. He’s graceless, he’s never been able to get on with anyone, and I shouldn’t be surprised if that’s why he wants to pull the world down round our ears. But I might have been able even to put up with that, if he hadn’t behaved so vilely to the people he owed everything to. When he started biting the hand that fed him, I decided I wasn’t going to look for any more excuses or listen to anyone else making them. He’s no good, Lewis. I don’t mind telling you that I considered at the time, and I still do, that we ought to have gone the whole hog and struck his name off the books.”

Brown had been speaking in a reasonable, moderate tone, but heavily, almost as though he had been giving his judgment to the other seniors. He added: “There’s only one good thing to be said about this wretched business. The whole college was absolutely solid about it. I don’t need to tell you that that’s not exactly common form. But if the college hadn’t been solid for once, it would have made things difficult. The place wouldn’t have been any too comfortable to live in. And I don’t want to exaggerate, but we might have walked straight into trouble outside. This is just the kind of thing that could have got us into the papers, and if that had happened, it would have done us more harm than I like to think about.”

Francis Getliffe had already gone, and the party was breaking up. Just as Martin said goodnight to Brown, and waited to take me across the staircase to his rooms, I was remarking on the new picture of the Master in the hall. “There’s exactly room for one more beside it,” I said as I stood up to go, “and then you’ll have to think again.”

I noticed Brown glancing sharply at me. Still sitting in his armchair, he tugged at my sleeve.

“Stay here a few minutes,” he said. He smiled at Martin: “He can find his own way to your bedroom, can’t he? After all, he’s done it plenty of times, more than you have, I suppose. And I don’t get many chances to talk to him these days.”

Martin said that it was time he went home to his wife. Like me, he suspected that Arthur Brown was not just idly keeping me back for the sake of company. When we were left alone, Brown made sure that I was settled in the chair opposite to him. He became more than ever hospitable and deliberate. “More brandy?”

No, I wouldn’t drink any more that night.

“Old chap,” he said, “it’s very nice to see you sitting there again.”

He had always been fond of me. At times he had defended and looked after me. Now he had the warm, sharp-edged, minatory affection that one feels for a protégé who has done pretty well. Was everything going all right? How was my wife? My son?

“So everything’s reasonably smooth just now, is it? That’s perfectly splendid. Do you know, Lewis, there was a time when I was afraid things weren’t going to turn out smooth for you.”

He gave me a kind, satisfied smile. Then he said, quite casually: “By the way, when you were talking about the Master’s picture, it just crossed my mind that you might have heard something. I suppose you haven’t, by any chance, have you?”

“No,” I said, surprised.

Brown said: “No, of course, I thought you couldn’t have.”

His expression was steady and unperturbed.

“Just for a moment, though on second thoughts I can see you couldn’t have been, I fancied you might be casting a fly.”

I shook my head, but now I thought I was following him.

“Well, what’s happening?” I said.

“The trouble is,” said Brown with satisfied gravity, “I’m not quite sure how much I’m at liberty to tell you. The whole matter is very much at the stage where no one has wanted to come out in the open. In my judgment the longer they put it off the more chance we have of avoiding ructions and coming to a decent conclusion.”

“What’s the point?” I asked again.

Brown pursed his lips. “Well, within these four walls, I think I’m not breaking any obligations if I tell you this. When the present Master retires, which is at the end of next year, not the academic but the calendar year, some of the society have asked me whether I would consider offering myself as a candidate.”

Yes, I had got there five minutes before. But, until he began to talk, I had not been expecting it. I had taken it for granted that Francis Getliffe had the next Mastership in the bag. On and off over the last two years, I had heard it discussed. The only name that anyone mentioned seriously was that of Francis.

“Who are your backers, Arthur?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “without their permission I don’t think that I ought to specify them at this stage, but I believe they’d let me say that there are enough of them to make the suggestion not entirely frivolous. And I think I might indicate that there were one or two of them recently present in this room.”

He was smiling blandly. He did not seem anxious, elated or depressed.

“If I were to ask for your advice whether to let my candidature go forward or not, Lewis, I wonder what you’d say?”

I hesitated. They were both friends of mine, and I was glad that I should be out of it. But I was hesitating for a different reason. I was afraid, despite what Brown had just said, that he would get few votes — perhaps so few as to be humiliating. I did not like the thought of that. I could not see any college not preferring Francis Getliffe when it came to the point.

“I think I know what’s in your mind,” Brown was saying. “You’re thinking that our friend Francis is out of comparison a more distinguished man than I am, and of course you’re right. I’ve never made any secret of it, I should be satisfied to see Francis Getliffe as Master of this college. Between ourselves, there are only three distinguished men here, and he’s one of them, the other two being the present Master and I suppose we’ve still got to say old Gay. I’ve never had delusions about myself, I think you’ll grant me that, old chap. I’ve never been really first rate at anything. It used to depress me slightly when I was a young man.”

He meant, I knew, precisely what he said. He was genuinely humble: he did not credit himself with any gifts at all.

I said: “I was thinking something quite different.”

Brown went on: “No, it’s perfectly right that the college should consider whether they could put up with an undistinguished person like me, in comparison with a very distinguished one like Francis. But one or two members of the society have put an interesting point of view which has made me think twice before saying no once and for all. Their view is that we’ve just had a Master of great external distinction, even more so than Francis’. So one or two people have represented to me that the college can afford someone who wasn’t much known outside but who could keep things going reasonably well among ourselves. And they paid me the compliment of suggesting that I might have my uses in that respect.”

“They are dead right,” I said.

“No,” he said, “you’ve always thought too much of me. Anyway, some time within the next twelve months I shall have to decide whether to let my name go forward. Of course, it’s my last chance and it isn’t Francis’. Perhaps I should be justified in taking that into account. Well, I’ve got plenty of time to make up my mind. I don’t know which way I shall come down.”

He had, of course, already “come down”. He was thinking, I was sure — although he had no vanity, he was a master-politician — about how his supporters ought to be handling his campaign and about how much more capably he would do it in their place. He was thinking too, I guessed, that it had been useful to talk to me, apart from warmth, affection and reciprocal support. I believed that he was hoping I should mention this conversation to Martin.

3: A Sealing-Day

ABOUT half past twelve the next morning, which was a Sunday, Martin and I were sitting in one of his window seats gazing over the court. On the far wall, most of the leaves of creeper had fallen by now, but in the milky sunlight one or two gleamed, nearer scarlet than orange. Martin was just saying to me — did I notice one difference from before the war? There were no kitchen servants carrying trays round the paths, green baize over the trays. Martin was saying that for him green baize was what he first remembered about the college, when the telephone rang.

As he answered it, I heard him reply: “Yes, I can come. Glad to.” Then he was listening to another question, and answered: “I’ve got my brother Lewis here. He’ll do for one, won’t he?” Martin put the receiver down and said, “The Bursar’s polishing off some conveyances, and he wants us to go and sign our names.”

“Is he working on Sunday?”

“He enjoys himself so much,” said Martin with a sharp but not unfriendly grin.

As we climbed up the Bursary staircase, which was in the same court, Nightingale had thrown open the door and was waiting for us.

“I must say, it’s good of you to come.” He shook hands with me. He greeted me with a kind of cagey official courtesy, as though anxious to seem polite. He was much better at it than he used to be, I thought. When we had both lived in the college, we had never got on. So far as I had had an enemy, it had been he. Now he was shaking hands, as though we had been, not friends exactly, but at any rate friendly acquaintances.

He was getting on for sixty, but he had kept his fair wavy hair, and he was well-preserved. He did not look anything like so strained as he used to. Several times I had heard Martin and others saying that he was a man whose life had been saved by the war. When I knew him, he had been a scientist who had not come off, and at the same time an embittered bachelor. But he happened, so it seemed, to be one of those people who were made for the military life. He had had a hard war, spectacularly hard for a man of his age: he had been decorated, as he had been in 1917, and he finished up as a brigadier. On top of that, while in hospital, he had managed to get married to a nurse. When he returned, people in the college thought he was transformed. They were so impressed that they wanted to do something for him. As it happened, the Bursar died suddenly: and almost unanimously, or so I gathered, they had given Nightingale the job. They all said that he loved it. No incumbent had ever spent so much time in the bursarial office. As he showed us in, his whole manner was active and proud.

“I’m sorry to drag you up here, Martin,” he said, “but there’s no point in letting things pile up.”

“That would be very serious, wouldn’t it?” Martin was teasing him. I was surprised to see that the two of them were on such easy terms. Yet I ought to have known that when, as with Nightingale and me, two people dislike each other without reason, or more strongly than reason justifies, either of them often tends to make it up with some close attachment of the other.

The Bursary was like a lawyer’s office, the walls piled with metal boxes painted black, letters standing out in white. From the window one could see the hall and lodge, newly washed, light gold Ketton stone in the autumn sun. The room was full of the smell of melted wax.

“I don’t know whether you’ve ever taken part in a sealing, Martin,” Nightingale said with bustling officious pride. “I’m afraid we shall have to leave you out of this one, Eliot,” he turned to me, with the same pleasure in performing the ceremonies, in getting the ritual right. “Only present Fellows are allowed to sign after the college seal. When I put the seal on, I am afraid that for our purpose ex-Fellows don’t exist.” He gave a triumphant smile.

In the mould the wax shone crimson and he tested it with the tip of a finger. Steadily, with a scientist’s precision, he laid the wafer-covered seal on top, closed the mould, and took it to an antiquated iron vice. He spun the arm of the vice round and back, putting pressure on the mould: then he brought it out, replaced it on the table, and undid it. “If it hasn’t taken,” he said, “I shall just have to do it again, of course.”

Meticulously he studied the wax.

“No, it’s all right,” he cried.

As a matter of fact, the result was not startling: for on each side of the impress was a wafer of paper, so that all one could see were indentations something like a faint brass rubbing.

“Now, Martin, if you don’t mind,” said Nightingale, “will you sign on this line here? I shall want another Fellow’s signature, of course. I’ve asked Skeffington to come along. To make it absolutely watertight he ought to have witnessed the sealing too, but I think I’m prepared to stretch a point.”

Within a few minutes, Skeffington had entered the office, while Nightingale was cleaning the great seal. As Skeffington wrote his name on the line beneath Martin’s, Nightingale with delicate, patient fingers extracted fragments of wax. Then reverently he laid the seal on the table in front of us.

“It is a beautiful thing, isn’t it?” he said.

It was not really beautiful. It was a piece of fifteenth-century silver-work, heavy and over-elaborate. Nightingale looked at it as though there could not be a more delectable sight. To him it was lovely. He looked at it with piety for all it meant to him. He had had so many grudges, he had never trusted anyone; he had longed for the college to trust him, and had not expected them to. Now here he was in the Bursary. What to most men would already have become a habit, was to him a delight, a security, a joy.

“Well,” he said, “now this is where Eliot comes in. If you don’t mind filling in your present address and occupation, we want those too. You’re not allowed to put ‘sometime Fellow of the College’, I’m afraid.”

His voice was gleeful. He liked reminding himself that others — particularly me, that morning — were outside the charmed circle, that they did not possess the mana of the college, the mana that he shared in and loved.

After we had signed, Nightingale brought out a bottle of sherry and three glasses. It was a surprise to me, for he had always been a teetotaller, the only one in the college in my time. He still was, so it appeared: but somehow, he was explaining, he always liked to let people celebrate a sealing.

As we were drinking the sherry and getting ready to go, Martin pointed to one of the black boxes on which was painted, in white letters, PROFESSOR C J B PALAIRET, FRS.

“Howard’s professor,” he remarked.

“What?” I said.

“The old man Howard worked with. Francis G was telling you about him last night.”

Even now, I was slow to pick up the reference. In the Howard affair I was an outsider; it still meant nothing to me. Whereas they had been living within the situation. They had kept it to themselves; so all three in that room, together with Brown, Getliffe, Orbell and the others, had lived within the situation more completely even than a society as closed as theirs was used to doing. They all knew every move that had been made.

“The old man’s left a nice bequest to the college, I’m glad to say,” said Nightingale. “Which makes it all the worse.”

“It was a bad enough show anyway, God knows,” said Skeffington. “But I agree, that last gambit — that’s more than anyone can take.”

Just for a second, they were showing their anger. Then Nightingale said: “Wait a minute. I suppose we oughtn’t to discuss it while Eliot is with us, ought we?”

I was irritated. I said: “I’m not quite a stranger here, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” said Nightingale. “But I believe that no one outside the college ought to have heard a word.”

“Arthur Brown and Getliffe didn’t take that view. They were talking to me about it last night.”

“I’m sorry. But I think they’re wrong.”

“I also heard some of it from Howard’s wife,” I said, “and I can’t for the life of me see how you’re going to keep her quiet.”

“We shall keep it all quiet enough for our purposes,” said Nightingale.

When we had left Nightingale alone in the Bursary, and the three of us were walking through the court, Skeffington said: “Bad mark from the Bursar. Loose talk.”

He was a very tall man, and he threw back his head. Just as I had been irritated, so was he. He was a man of means, he had been a regular officer in the Navy: he did not like being what he called “ticked off”. He seemed arrogant and also vain: vain of his striking looks, among other things, I thought. He had strong features, a fleshy chin and handsome eyes; they were the kind of looks that seem to chime with riches, an influential family, an easy life. Nevertheless, he had not chosen such an easy life as he could have had. He was about Martin’s age, just under forty: his career in the Navy had been going according to plan, when he decided that he wanted to make himself into a scientist. That had happened just after the war, and at thirty-two he had started as an undergraduate, taken his degree, and then gone on to research. It was only two years since the college had elected him a research fellow. Academically he was junior not only to Martin and his other contemporaries, but to young men like Tom Orbell. His Fellowship was not yet a permanent one, and within the college he was on probation.

“The Bursar would have been right, if it had been anyone but you, don’t you think?” Martin said to me. He was himself tight-mouthed as a clam.

“The trouble is,” I said, “keeping it a secret as you have done — if ever the story breaks, you’re in a worse mess than ever, aren’t you?”

“There’s something in that,” said Skeffington.

“There’s something in it. But it’s not the whole story,” said Martin. We had stopped at the foot of his staircase. “We took the risk into account. You don’t think we were all that careless, do you?”

“If I’d been you,” I replied, “I’m sure I should have wanted the college to come right out with it as soon as you’d made up your minds.”

“And I’m moderately sure that you’d have been wrong. The point is,” said Martin, “we’ve got enough against this man so that it’s a fair bet he’ll have to go on holding his tongue. Then if he doesn’t hold his tongue, we shall have to bring it all into the open and explain in so many words why we’ve been keeping it dark—”

“Softlee softlee catchee monkey,” said Skeffington.

Quietly, his eyes sharp, Martin explained what they had done. I began to think I had been airy-fairy in my criticism. The more I heard of the story, the more I thought that they had been decent, cautious, hard-headed. When the two men who were asked to enquire into Howard’s work — that is, Nightingale and Skeffington himself — reported to the Master and Seniors that at least one of Howard’s photographs could not be explained in any way other than as a fraud, he had been asked for any defence he wanted to put up. He had been interviewed twice by the Court of Seniors, and each time he had said nothing to the point. Both the Master and Brown had written to him formally, telling him to put his case on paper. He had still produced nothing as a defence: until, quite suddenly, he asked to appear again before the court. Then he announced that he had now decided there had been a fraud, but that the fraud was not his but old Palairet’s.

“Which must have taken some cooking up,” said Skeffington.

At last I could understand some of the eddies of anger. Palairet had just died; as long as most of us could remember, he had been a college worthy. Not that he had visited the place much, even when he was younger. I recalled seeing him at a feast once or twice, twenty years before, when he must have been in his fifties. He had gone off to be a professor at a Scottish university when he was a young man and had stayed there till he died. He had had a long and eminent career, not quite as distinguished as the Master’s, but about on the level of Francis Getliffe’s.

Just then a couple of undergraduates passed by us on the path and Skeffington, his face flushed and authoritative, had to hold himself in. When he could speak, he had got more savage, not less so.

“It’s a bad show,” he said. “Only the worst sort of Red would have done anything like that.”

“Does that come in?” I asked. But my detachment, which usually had an effect on Skeffington, only vexed him more.

“If the man had had anything to keep him straight,” he said furiously, “if he’d had a faith or even had the sort of code you two have, he might have done lots of bad things, but he would never have done that.”

I said that the younger generation in the college were moving to the Right so fast that survivals like myself would soon be left standing outside the gates. Skeffington was not amused. He was a devout Anglo-Catholic, more pious, so I thought, than Tom Orbell, though not so given to protesting his faith. He was also a Tory, as Tom Orbell claimed to be. In fact, my gibe was somewhere near the truth. Most of the young Fellows were conservative, if they were political at all. At high table one heard a good deal of the reactionary apologists Tom and his friends had resurrected, such as De Maistre and Bonald. I did not mind that so much: but I did mind the tone in which Skeffington had just introduced Howard’s politics.

Nevertheless, I thought, as Martin went on explaining, no body of men could have been much more thorough, when it came to investigating the fraud. When Howard made his accusation-cum-defence, the seniors had insisted that, though it was the most improbable anyone could have invented, they must act as though it might be true. The old man’s executors were asked to turn over his working notebooks to the college, which, since he had bequeathed them his entire estate, was within the rules. He had, incidentally, left thirty-five thousand, and Nightingale wanted to put the money into a building fund and call it after him.

“It was a slap in the eye for the family,” said Skeffington. Then I discovered, what was news to me, that his wife was Palairet’s niece.

The notebooks, scientific papers, fragments of researches, had arrived in batches at the Bursary, and after Nightingale and Skeffington had inspected them, were filed in the college archives. If Howard’s story had had any foundation, there would have been signs of faked evidence in some of the old man’s recent notebooks: all the scientists were certain of that. There was no such sign. Not only Skeffington and Nightingale, but also Francis Getliffe and Martin, and those who worked in related subjects, had gone through the notebooks. Each one of the old man’s diffraction photographs, taken either by himself or his collaborators, had been studied millimetre by millimetre.

“It was about as likely we should find anything wrong,” said Skeffington, “as that any of us would be nabbed in the buttery lifting a case of whisky.”

To him there was no doubt. All that search had seemed disrespectful to the dead. It was to his credit, I thought, that he had worked as scrupulously as anyone. I also thought, once again, that no body of men I knew of would have been more punctilious and fair.

4: Two United Fronts

ONE night in December, not long before Christmas, the telephone rang in the drawing-room of our flat. My wife answered it. As she listened, she looked puzzled and obscurely amused.

“Won’t I do?” she asked. She went on: “Yes, I can get him if it’s really necessary. But he’s very tired. Are you certain it can’t wait?”

For some time the cross-talk went on. Then Margaret raised an eyebrow and held the receiver away from her. “It’s Mrs Howard,” she said. “I’m afraid you’d better.”

Down the telephone came a strong, pleasant-toned, determined voice.

“This is Laura Howard. Do you remember that we met one night in Tom Orbell’s club?”

I said yes.

“I’m really asking if you can spare me half an hour one day this week?”

I said that I was abnormally busy. It was true, but I should have said it anyway. Somewhere in her tone there was an insistent note.

“I shan’t keep you more than half an hour, I promise you.” I began reciting some of my engagements for the week, inventing others.

“I can manage any time that suits you,” her voice came back, agreeable, not at all put off.

I said that I might be freer after Christmas, but she replied that “we” were only in London for a short time. She went on: “You were in Cambridge a few weeks ago, weren’t you? Yes, I heard about that. I do wish I’d had a chance to see you there.”

She must, I thought, have revised her first impression of me. Presumably she had made enquiries and people had told her that I might be useful. I had a feeling that she didn’t in the least mind her judgment being wrong. She just wiped the slate clean, and resolved to chase me down.

Margaret was smiling. She found it funny to see me overborne, cut off from all escape routes.

Aside, I said to her: “What in God’s name ought I to do?”

“You’re under no obligation to spend five minutes on her, of course you’re not,” said Margaret. Then her face looked for a second less decorous. “But I don’t know how you’re going to avoid it, I’m damned if I do.”

“It’s intolerable,” I said, cross with her for not keeping her sense of humour down.

“Look here,” said Margaret, “you’d better ask her round here and get it over. Then you’ve done everything that she can possibly want you to.”

That was not quite so. Laura was also set on having me meet her husband. Since his dismissal, she told me over the telephone, he had been teaching in a school in Cambridge: that was the reason he could not often get to London. In the end, I had to invite them both to dinner later that same week.

When they arrived, and I looked at Howard for the first time — for now I realised that I had not once, visiting the college while he was still a Fellow, so much as caught sight of him — I thought how curiously unprepossessing he was. The skin of his face was coarse and pale; he had a long nose and not much chin. His eyes were a washed-out blue. He had a long neck and champagne-bottle shoulders; it was a kind of physique that often went with unusual muscular strength, and also with virility. Somehow at first sight he would have struck most people as bleak, independent, masculine, even though his voice was high-pitched and uninflected. As he spoke to me, he seemed awkward, but not shy.

“I believe you know that chap Luke, don’t you?” he said.

He meant Walter Luke, the head of the Barford atomic energy establishment, knighted that January at the age of forty, one of the most gifted scientists of the day. Yes, I said, Luke was an old friend of mine.

“He must be an extraordinary sort of chap?” said Howard.

“Just why?”

“Well, he’s got a finger in this bomb nonsense, hasn’t he? And I don’t know how a scientist can bring himself to do it.”

I was annoyed, more annoyed than I was used to showing. I was fond of Walter Luke: and also I had seen how he and his colleagues had tried to settle it with their consciences about the bomb, Luke choosing one way, my brother Martin the other.

“He happens to think it’s his duty,” I said.

“It’s a curious sort of duty, it seems to me,” replied Howard.

Meanwhile Margaret and Laura had been talking. Glancing at them, vexed at having this man inflicted on me, I noticed how young and slight Margaret looked beside the other woman. Against Laura’s, Margaret’s skin, still youthful over her fine bones, seemed as though it would be delicate to the touch. Actually it was Margaret who was ten years the elder, who had had children; but she seemed like a student beside the other, dark, handsome, earnest.

I could not hear what they were saying. As we sat round the table in the dining-room, Howard mentioned one or two more acquaintances he and Margaret and I had in common. Listening to him, I had already picked up something that no one had told me. He was farouche and a roughneck, and some of his manners might — to anyone without an English ear — have seemed working-class. Actually he was no more working-class than Margaret, who had been born among the academic aristocracy. His parents and hers could easily have gone to the same schools, though his probably came from Service families, not from those of clerics or dons. It was his wife who had gone up in the world, Howard not at all.

Margaret, who was watching Laura’s face, did not let the chit-chat dribble on.

“You’ve come to tell Lewis something, haven’t you?” she said before we had finished the soup. She was kind: and she did not like being oblique. “Wouldn’t you rather do it straight away?”

Laura smiled with relief. She looked across at her husband: “Who’s going to begin?”

“I don’t mind,” he said, without any grace.

“We’re not going to ask you very much,” said Laura to me, her brows furrowed. “They’re still shilly-shallying about opening the case again, and we want you to use your influence on them, that’s all.”

Suddenly she said, in a formal, dinner-party manner, addressing Margaret in full style: “I’m afraid this is boring for you. How much have you heard about this difficulty of ours?”

“I think about as much as Lewis has, by now,” said Margaret.

“Well, then, you can understand why we’re absolutely sickened by the whole crowd of them,” cried Laura. Her total force — and she was a passionate woman, one could not help but know — was concentrated on Margaret. But Margaret was the last person to be overwhelmed. She looked fine-nerved, but she was passionate herself, she was tough, and her will was at least as strong as Laura’s.

She was not going to be bulldozed into a conviction she did not feel, or even into more sympathy than she had started with.

“I think I can understand the kind of time you’ve had,” she said, gently but without yielding.

“Perhaps I ought to say,” I broke in, “that I know a good deal more about this business now—”

“How do you know?” Laura cried.

“I heard a certain amount in college.”

“I hope you were pleased with everything you heard,” she said.

There had been a time when I should have found this kind of emotion harder to resist than my wife found it. Though it was difficult for people to realise, though Laura exerted her first effort on Margaret because she seemed the softer option, I was more suggestible than she was. I had had to train and discipline myself out of it. But actually I had no temptation to acquiesce too much that night. Laura had not got me on her side; I felt antipathy for Howard; I was ready to speak plainly.

“That’s neither here nor there,” I said. I waited until the next course was in front of us, and then spoke to Laura again: “You talked about people in the college shilly-shallying about opening your case again. That’s nothing like the situation.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that, so far as I heard, and I think I should have heard if it was being talked about, no one there has the slightest intention of opening the case again.”

“Do you believe that?” said Laura to her husband.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said.

She stared at me steadily, with angry eyes. She came straight out: “If you were there, would you be content with that?”

For an instant I caught Margaret’s eye, and then looked at Howard on her right. His head was lowered, as it were sullenly, and he did not show any sign of recognition at all. I turned back to his wife and said: “I am afraid I haven’t yet heard anything which would make me take any steps.”

I felt, rather than heard, that Howard had given something like a grin or snigger. Laura flushed to the temples and cried: “What right have you got to say that?”

“Do you really want me to go on?”

“What else can you do?”

“Well, then,” I said, trying to sound impersonal, “I couldn’t take any other view, in the light of what the scientists report about the evidence. Remember, I’m totally unqualified to analyse the evidence myself, and so are most of the people in the college. That’s one of the difficulties of the whole proceedings. If I were there, I should just have to believe what Francis Getliffe and the other scientists told me.”

“Oh, we know all about them—”

I stopped her. “No, I can’t listen to that,” I said. “Francis Getliffe has been a friend of mine for twenty-five years.”

“Well—”

“I trust him completely. So would anyone who knew him.”

“Getliffe,” Howard put in, in a tone both sneering and knowing, “is a good example of a man who used to be a progressive and has thought better of it.”

“I shouldn’t have thought that was true,” I replied. “If it were true, it wouldn’t make the faintest difference to his judgment.”

“Then I should like to know what would,” Howard went on in the same sneering tone.

“You must know what would.” I had nearly lost my temper. “And that is what he thought, as a scientist, of the evidence under his eyes.”

“I suppose they weren’t prejudiced when I gave them the explanation?”

“I’ve heard exactly what they did about it—”

“Who from?”

“Skeffington.”

Laura laughed harshly.

“Did you think he wasn’t prejudiced?”

“I don’t know him as I know Getliffe, but he strikes me as an honest man.”

“He’s a religious maniac, he’s the worst snob in the college—”

“I also heard from my brother.”

“Do you really think he worried?” Laura burst out. “All he wants is to step into old Brown’s shoes—”

I saw Margaret flinch, then look at me with something like apprehension, as if she felt responsible for her guest.

“I suppose you think,” said Howard, “that the precious Court of Seniors weren’t prejudiced either? I suppose they weren’t anxious to believe what Skeffington and that crowd told them?”

I had got tired of this. I went on eating and, as I did so, organised a scheme of questions in my mind, just as I used to when, as a young man, I had practised at the bar.

Everyone was quiet.

“I’d like to clear up two or three points, simply for my own satisfaction,” I said to Howard. “May I?”

“I don’t mind,” he said.

“Thank you. According to my information, you actually appeared before the Court of Seniors several times. Is that true?”

He nodded his head.

“How many times?”

“I suppose it must have been three.”

“That agrees with what I’ve been told. The first time you appeared there you were told that the scientists had decided that one of your photographs in your paper was a fraud. Were you told that?”

“I suppose that is what it amounted to.”

“It must have been clear one way or another, mustn’t it? It’s important. Were you told in so many words that the photograph was a fraud?”

“Yes, I suppose I was.”

His eyes had not dropped but risen. They were fixed on the picture-rail in the top left-hand corner of the room. It was a long time since I had examined a witness, but I caught the feel of it again. I knew that he had gone on the defensive right away: he was hostile, slightly paranoiac, beating about to evade the questions. I asked: “Was it, in fact, a fraud?”

He hesitated: “I don’t quite get you.”

“I mean just what I say. Was that photograph a fraud? That is, was it faked to prove something in your paper?”

He hesitated again: “Yes, I suppose you could say that.”

“Is there any shade of doubt whatsoever?”

Just for a second, his upturned, averted eyes looked at me sidelong with enmity. He shook his head.

“Did you agree with the Court of Seniors, then, when they told you it was a fraud?”

“Yes, I told them so.”

“My information is that you denied it totally the first couple of times you appeared before them. Is that true?”

“I told them.”

“On your third appearance?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you deny it?”

“Because I didn’t believe it was true.”

“Yet every other competent scientist who saw the evidence didn’t take long to be certain it was true?”

He broke out: “They were glad of the chance to find something against me—”

“That won’t get us anywhere. Why did you take so long to be certain? Here was this photograph, you must have known it very well? But even when you’d been told about it, you still didn’t admit that it was a fraud? Why not?”

He just shook his head. He would not answer: or rather, it seemed that he could not. He sat there as though in a state of hebephrenia. I pressed him, but he said nothing at all.

I took it up again: “In the long run, you decided it really was a fraud?”

“I’ve told you so.”

“Then when you decided it was a fraud, you were able to produce an explanation?”

“Yes, I was.”

“What was it?”

“You must have picked up that,” he said offensively, “among the other information they’ve given you.”

“In fact you blamed the fraud on to your collaborator?”

He inclined his head.

“Who’d just died, at the age of, what was it, seventy-five? Your explanation was that he had faked one of your own photographs in your own thesis?”

“Yes, it was.”

“Did that seem to you likely?”

“Of course it didn’t,” Laura broke in, her expression fierce and protective. She spoke to her husband: “You had a great respect for him, of course you had.”

“Did you have a great respect for him?” I asked.

“Not specially,” he answered.

“What reason did you think he could have, at that age and in his position, for this kind of fraud?”

“Oh, he must have gone gaga,” he answered.

“Were there any signs of that?”

“I never noticed.”

“One last question. When you decided that he had faked this photograph of yours, you also said that you’d seen similar photographs before — did you say that?”

“Yes.”

“Who had taken those photographs?”

“The old man, of course,” he said.

“How many had you seen?”

He looked confused. His reactions seemed very slow.

“I can’t tell you,” he said at last.

“Many?”

“I shouldn’t think so.”

“Only one?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re sure you saw one? At least one more, besides yours?”

“I’ve told you I did.”

“Did you know there are no signs of any such photographs in the whole of his scientific notebooks?”

His face went vague and heavy. “I suppose they told me that,” he said. Then he asked: “What I want to know is, who looked?”

Then I stopped. “I don’t think it’s any use going further,” I said.

Margaret tried to make some conversation, I joined in. Howard fell into silence, with an expression that looked both injured and apathetic. Even Laura had lost her nerve. She did not refer to the case again. The evening creaked slowly on, with gaps of strained silence as Margaret or I invented something to say. I offered them whisky within half an hour of the end of dinner: Laura took a stiff one, he would not drink at all. At last, it was only a few minutes after ten, she said that they must go. Margaret, usually gentle-mannered and polite, was out of her chair with alacrity.

As we stood by the door, waiting for Howard to come out of the lavatory, Laura suddenly looked up at me.

“Well? Will you talk to Getliffe or your brother?”

I was startled. Even now, she did not know when she was beaten.

“What do you think I could say?”

“Can’t you just tell them that they’ve got to open this business all over again?”

Her eyes were wide open. She looked like a woman making love. She was so fervent that it was uncomfortable to be near her.

“I shall have to think whether there’s anything I can do,” I said.

By then Howard was on his way towards us, and she did not speak any more.

As the door closed behind them, Margaret remarked, “Of course there isn’t anything you can do.”

“Of course there isn’t,” I said.

“He hasn’t got a leg to stand on, has he?”

“Less than that, I should have thought.”

We sat down, neither of us in good spirits, and held hands. “No one,” I said, “could call that a particularly agreeable party.”

“Anyway,” said Margaret, “you’re not required to see them again.”

I said no.

Margaret was smiling.

“I must say, I thought you got pretty rough with him.”

“I couldn’t think of anything else to do.”

“That’s not quite all, is it?”

I smiled. We knew each other’s intuitive likes and dislikes too well.

“I can’t pretend,” I said, “that he’s exactly my cup of tea.”

“Whereas, if he hadn’t done what he unfortunately has done, you wouldn’t be surprised if I thought he’d got a sort of integrity, would you?”

We were laughing at each other. The fret of the evening was passing away. We were reminding each other in the shorthand of marriage that, when we made mistakes about people, they were liable to be a specific kind of mistake. As a young man, I had been fascinated by, and so had overvalued, the ambivalent, the tricky, the excessively fluid, and even now, though they no longer suggested to me the mystery of life as they once did, I had a weakness for them. I saw value in Tom Orbell, for instance, that others didn’t. Certainly not Margaret, whose own weakness was the exact opposite. The moral roughneck, the mauvais coucheur, often seemed to her to have a dignity and elevation not granted to the rest of us. She was not taken in by the fluid, but on the other hand, just because a character was not fluid, was craggy in its egotism, she was likely to think it specially deserving of respect. If, as she said, grinning at her own expense, Howard had come to us with different credentials, I could easily have imagined her regarding him as a man of fine quality.

“I grant you that he’s not two-faced,” I said. “But what’s the use of that, when the one face he has got is so peculiarly unpleasant?”

5: A Party for a Purpose

DURING our parting from Laura Howard, when she was demanding that I talk to my brother, we had not told her that we were spending Christmas in his house. In fact, we arrived there on Christmas Eve, and after dinner Martin’s wife and I were for a few minutes alone in the drawing-room. Or alone, to be more exact, in a room of which the drawing-room was only half: for Irene had invited some of the Fellows and their wives for wine and cheese at nine o’clock, and she had already furled back the bronze doors between drawing-room and dining-room. Yes, bronze doors: the house, before the college acquired it, had been a piece of luxurious modernist building of a generation before. Now it was divided into two sections, and let out to college officers. By the standards of the ’50s, Martin’s section, which was the larger one, was sizeable for a professional man’s house.

The children were all in bed, their boy and girl, Margaret’s son by her first marriage, and ours. Margaret was upstairs: Martin was uncorking bottles in the kitchen: Irene and I sat alone on opposite sides of the fire. She had been asking me about my work, and presumably I gave a heavy reply, for she broke out with a yelp of glee: “The trouble is, Margaret doesn’t make fun of you enough!”

If one had just heard her voice without seeing her, one would have guessed that she was a very young woman, mischievous, light, high-spirited. Actually, as I glanced across the fireplace, I saw a woman in the early forties, looking much more worn than her husband. She had always been tall and big-framed, but recently her shoulders had rounded and she had put on weight; not only had her bosom got full and shapeless, but she had thickened through the middle. By contrast to this body, comfortably slumped into middle-age, her face seemed thinner and fined-down; the skin of her cheeks had lost its bloom, and underneath the make-up there was a faint, purplish undertint. And yet, it was still a reckless face. Some men would still find her attractive. Underneath full lids, her eyes were narrow, treacle-brown, disrespectful and amused.

Nevertheless, when Martin came in with a complaint, she was not amused, but dead serious. Where was the specimen he had picked up yesterday on Wicken Fen? Who could have moved it? Martin was for once off-balance. There was a distraught, hare-like look in his eye. As a small boy he had been more of a collector than any of us. Now the addiction was coming back. Was it because he was reconciling himself to not making a go of academic physics? Was that why he concentrated so much on his pupils, and then in his spare time went of in search of botanical species? Anyway, he was methodically ticking off the English flora. That night he thought he had lost one: he was showing the signs of phobia of loss.

Worried, active, Irene started from her chair and went out with him. Within three minutes she was back.

“That’s all right,” she said, her expression relieved and earnest.

“The trouble is,” I said maliciously, “you don’t make fun of him enough.”

Irene giggled, but she did not really think that it was funny. She broke out: “But how do you think he is?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I think so,” she said honestly, “but I’m never sure.”

I nodded. He was a secretive man: people, even those nearest to him, thought him cautious, calculating, and capable of being ruthless.

“I don’t believe you need worry,” I said. “I fancy he’s pretty happy.”

“Do you?” She shone with pleasure.

“I should be surprised if he wasn’t.”

“I must say,” she cried, “I should like to bring off something for him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Wouldn’t it be good if he could get something?”

For a second, I was surprised at her. She was no fool. She knew that, after throwing away the chance of power, even if he had thrown it away for a qualm or set of qualms that she did not share or understand, he must have times when he would like the chance back again. So, with the energy she had once scattered on her own adventures, she was now not only longing, but working, for him to get another kind of job. It was mildly ironic, when one thought how, as a young woman, she had shocked the bourgeois, to find her set on seeing him a cosy, bourgeois success. She had closed her mind to what she used to think of as “the big world”: she wanted him to climb in the college’s little one.

“That’s what this is in aid of,” she said, pointing to the glasses in the dining-room.

She was doing it without hypocrisy. She did not possess in the slightest degree the gift, so desirable in the life of affairs, of being able to keep the right hand from knowing what the left is doing. Her right hand knew, all right. Shamelessly, innocently, she wanted to help push him up the college ladder and install them both in the Lodge before the end.

When I realised what she was up to, I thought she was pitching her hopes far too high. The Mastership, the Vice-Chancellorship — her fancy was making pictures of them, just as it used to make pictures of the dashing ideal lover when she was a girl. But Martin had no chance at all of ever becoming Master. She was not cut out for politics, she did not know when to hope and when not to hope. The most she could expect for Martin was that, if Arthur Brown were elected next year (which I still could not believe was on the cards), Martin might get the senior tutorship. That was his ceiling, so far as the college was concerned. Then I remembered Laura Howard’s sneer, that Martin was planning to step into Brown’s shoes. Was that true, I wondered? I had seen my brother’s command of tactics when he was spending his time in the corridors of power. Why should I think he was committed to Francis Getliffe? Why should not Martin be preparing to come in on Brown’s side, incidentally freeing an agreeable niche for himself?

At any rate, I was prepared to bet that this was in Irene’s mind. Soon the first guests were coming into the room, and I could not get more out of her. But I began to watch those whom she had invited. Was it just a coincidence that the Getliffes were not coming? Were the people here going to form the hard core of Brown’s party?

Standing up, plate and glass in hand, overhearing a conversation about the English faculty, I found myself talking to G S Clark. Like the other Fellows at that party, he had been elected since the war; but unlike Tom Orbell and Ince, and two or three of the others, he was not a young man. I did not know for certain, but I guessed that he was over forty. He had been paralysed by poliomyelitis as a child, and his face had the gentle, petulant, youthful and hopeful expression that one sometimes sees in cripples; his skin was pink and fresh. Although his left leg was in a metal brace, he would not sit down. He stood there obstinately and argued with me.

“No,” he said, “with great respect, I don’t agree.”

I teased him. I said I had only made the modest suggestion that the examination system as it existed in Cambridge that night, December 24th, 1953, might just possibly not be perfect for all time. Was that so shocking? He smiled, a gentle, patient, invalid’s smile.

“But I’m making the modest suggestion,” he said, “that it’s easy to tamper with things just now and make them worse.”

Whenever I met him, which was fairly often, since he occupied the other section of Martin’s house, I liked his sweet and hopeful smile and then ran up against that kind of brick wall. But this was not the night for an argument: I asked him about his work. He was a don in Modern Languages, and he was writing a book about the German novelist Fontane. His accent became broader and flatter as he warmed up to the nineteenth-century romantic-realists: he came from Lancashire, his origins were true working-class. It was very rare, I had thought before, for anyone genuinely working-class to struggle through to the high table, though a sprinkling had come, as I did myself, from the class just above. In the whole history of the college, there could not have been more than three or four who started where he did.

Just then his wife’s voice, just a shade off-English, the consonants a little too sharp for English, broke in.

“I’m going to take Lewis from you, G S. Remember, I have known him longer than I have you.”

That was true. When she first knew me, she had been a refugee and the wife of another. Then she had been called Hanna Puchwein; she had been a pretty, elegant young woman with a neat, glossy, hamitic head, snapping black eyes, disconcerting in her integrity and bitter temper. She had got rid of Puchwein in what seemed a fit of pique; there were plenty of men round her, and she nearly married the most unsuitable. We had thought her then the worst of pickers: even so, I was astonished when I heard that she had suddenly married Clark. It was not only astonishing to hear, it was obscurely disagreeable.

That night, her face was still pretty, her forehead bland and intelligent in her pointed, cat-like face: but the black hair was going grey, and she was not bothering to do anything with it, even to keep it tidy. She used to be beautifully groomed, but she seemed to have given up.

She said that she had been talking to Margaret, she asked after our child, but with the touch of impatience of people who haven’t any. In turn, I asked her how she liked Cambridge now.

“It is all right,” she said, with sharpness and pride.

Did she see much of the college, I asked her.

“As much as a woman can.”

“What are they thinking about just now?”

“Are they ever thinking about anything?” She said it just as contemptuously as she would have in the past. I was glad, it showed the old Adam was not dead. She corrected herself: “No, that is not fair. Some of them are clever men, some of them do good work. But a lot of them are not precisely what I was brought up to think of as intellectuals. Even those who do good work are often not intellectuals. Perhaps that is one of the secrets of this country that a foreigner is not expected to understand.”

I asked her, were there any major rifts in the college at present?

“What is there for them to have rifts about?” she said.

I grinned to myself. She had always had a lucid grasp of theoretical politics: I imagined that, unlike her husband, she was passionately radical still. But, intelligent as she was, she had not much insight, less perhaps than anyone of her intelligence I had known.

“Lewis!” came an enthusiastic, modulated voice over my shoulder. “Hanna, my dear Hanna!” Tom Orbell came between us, carrying not only a glass but a bottle, his cheeks gleaming pink almost as though they were a skin short, sweat on his forehead, his blue eyes cordial and bold. Punctiliously he gave me the bottle to hold, murmuring happily, “I’m afraid I’m rather drunk,” seized Hanna’s hand and bent down to kiss it.

“My dear and most admired Hanna!” he said.

“Have you finished that article?” Her tone was cross, but there was a dash of affection in it.

“Of course I have,” said Tom, with the indignation of one who, for once, is in the right. As a matter of fact, I knew, and she ought to have known, that he was an industrious man.

“I’m very glad to hear it,” said Hanna.

“Will you let me tell you about it? When will you let me give another little dinner-party for you?”

“Oh, in the New Year,” she said. “Now look, Tom, I don’t often see Lewis—”

“Why have I got to leave you with him? He’s a bit of a menace, is Lewis—”

Hanna frowned, and Tom, who had regripped the bottle, gave it to me again. Once more with great elaboration, and a bow that became something like a genuflexion, he kissed her hand.

When he had merged into the party, Hanna said: “Why does that young man behave in the way he imagines Continentals to behave? I suppose he imagines that Continentals are polite to women. Why does he think so? Why does he think I should like it? Why do young Englishmen like that go in for hand-kissing? Is it only those like that young man who are sexually insecure?”

She still sounded ratty. Nevertheless, I thought she had a soft spot for him.

“Yes,” she was saying with asperity, “I think it is because he is sexually insecure that he kisses hands. You cannot imagine Martin performing like that, can you?” I could not. “Or that lourdon Lester Ince?”

Irene split us up, and for a few moments I stood on the fringe of the party, watching Martin, as usual deliberate, easy-mannered, planted among his guests, while his wife moved avidly about.

As a young woman she would have been on the look-out for a man. She still moved just as frenetically, just as darting-eyed. Yet that had gone, all gone. Not that she regretted it much, I thought. She was happy here, and across the room I could hear her squeals of glee.

I heard another sound of glee at my shoulder, and Tom, in a state of airborne hilarity, was whispering to me a story about Mrs Skeffington. She had not long arrived, and within two minutes, Tom was telling me, had dropped her biggest “clanger” yet. I did not know her, and across the room he pointed her out. She was very tall, almost as tall as her husband, but as plain as he was handsome. According to Tom she was something of a grande dame and, what made it worse, spoke like one. Apparently she had improved the occasion, soon after she got to the party, by announcing to Irene: “I think it’s so sensible of people to think out how to entertain, and strike out for themselves. If they can’t give dinner-parties, why shouldn’t they give bits and pieces afterwards?”

Tom rejoiced. Observant, labile, malicious, he was a very good mimic. Somehow he managed, not only to sound, but to look like Mrs Skeffington, county to the bone, raw-faced.

“It still goes on, my dear Lewis,” said Tom. “It still goes on.”

“At some levels,” I said, “I think it’s getting worse.”

“Give me your hand.” Tom, half-way between inflation and rage, insisted on gripping my hand in his, which was unexpectedly large and muscular for so fat a man. He wanted to go on denouncing exponents of English snobbery, radicals, complacent politicians, unbelievers, all the irreconcilable crowd of enemies that he managed to fuse into one at this time of night. He had not said a word about the Howards. They had not been so much as mentioned since I arrived at Martin’s house.

“But what do you want, Tom?” I enquired, getting impatient.

“I want something for this college.”

“Do other people here” — I waved my hand at the party — “want anything definite?”

He gazed at me with eyes wider open, but guarded. He was deciding not to let me in.

“I want something for this college, Lewis. I mean that very sincerely.”

Before long I was confronted by Skeffington, who called his wife and introduced me to her. I thought that, though his manner was as lofty as ever, he looked jaded and ill at ease. He did not say much, while his wife and I conscientiously made some Cambridge exchanges — new buildings, traffic, comparison of College gardens. Suddenly Skeffington interrupted us: “What are your plans for tomorrow?” he said.

It seemed a curious question.

“Well,” I said, “we’ve got four children in this house—”

“Yes, but when the fun and games are packed up and you’ve got them to bed?”

It still seemed an odd cross-examination. However, I said that, since we should have the big meal at mid-day (“quite right,” said Mrs Skeffington) Martin and I had thought of giving our wives a rest and dining in hall at night.

“I’ve never done it before on Christmas Day.”

Skeffington was not interested in my experiences.

“That’s cut and dried, is it? You’re going to show up there?”

“Well, we’ve put our names down,” I said.

Skeffington nodded, as though for the time being placated.

He did not appear to resent it, when Lester Ince, who had broken away from his own group, put in: “Well, I call that a nice Christmassy programme for old Lew.”

No one, either living or dead, had been known to call me Lew before. I was senior enough, however, to find it agreeable. It was not often that I met anyone as off-handed as this young man. He had a heavy, pasty, cheerful face. Although his stance was slack, he was thick-set and strong. He was not really a “lourdon”, as Hanna thought. He had a sharp, precise mind which he was devoting — incongruously, so it seemed to most people — to a word-by-word examination of Nostromo. But though he was not really a “lourdon”, he liked making himself a bit of a lout.

“Come to that,” he said to Skeffington, “how do you propose to celebrate the Nativity?”

“Much as usual.”

“Midnight service with all the highest possible accompaniments?”

“Certainly,” Skeffington replied.

“Stone the crows,” said Lester Ince.

“It happens to be a religious festival. That’s the way to do it, you know.” Skeffington looked down at Ince, who was not a short man, from the top of his height, not exactly snubbingly, but with condescension and a gleam of priggishness.

“I tell you what I’m going to do,” said Ince. “I shall have to do my stuff with wife and kiddies, confound their demanding and insatiable little hearts. I shall then retire with said wife — who’s doing herself remarkably well over there in the corner, by the way — I shall retire with her and three bottles of the cheapest red wine I’ve been able to buy, and the old gramophone. We shall then get gently sozzled and compare the later styles of the blessed Duke with such new developments as the trumpet of Miles Davis. You wouldn’t know what that means, any of you. You two wouldn’t know, it’s since your time,” he said to Skeffington and his wife. “As for old Lew, he’s certainly non-hep. I sometimes have a suspicion that he’s positively anti-hep.”

Soon after, just as the Skeffingtons were leaving, Tom Orbell wafted himself towards me again. “I wish I could get Hanna to myself,” he confided, “but she’s holding a court and they won’t leave her alone, not that I’m in a position to blame them.” He was the only person in the room who had been drinking heavily, and he had now got to the stage when, from second to second, he was switched from exhilaration to fury, and neither he nor I knew which way he was going to answer next. “It is a great party, I hope you agree that it’s a great party, Lewis?” I said yes, but he wanted more than acquiescence. “I hope you agree that the people here ought to throw their weight about in the college. These are the people who ought to do it, if we’re not going to let the place go dead under our feet.” He looked at me accusingly.

I said, “You know the position, and I don’t.”

“That’s not good enough,” said Tom Orbell.

He seemed just then — did this happen often? — to have changed out of recognition from the smooth operator, the young man anxious to please and on the make. He nodded his head sullenly: “If that’s what you think, then that’s all right.” He said it as though it were at the furthest extreme from being all right.

“What do you want me to say?”

“I’ve told you, I want something for this college. There are some people I’ll choose for my government, and some people I’ll see in hell first.”

He spoke of “my government” as though he were a Prime Minister who had just returned from the Palace with the job. His own studies of history seemed to be taking possession of him. “Some of these chaps I’ll have in my government straight away. There are some in the college we’ve got to keep out, Lewis, or else the place won’t be fit to live in. I know he used to be a friend of yours, but do you think I’m going to have Sir Francis Getliffe in my government?”

“What do you mean? Now then, what is all this about?” I spoke brusquely, to make him talk on the plane of reason.

Without paying attention he went on.

“There are one or two others who think as I do, I can tell you. I wish we knew what your brother Martin thought.”

He was still enough in command of himself to be trying to sound me. When he got no response, he gave his sullen nod.

“Martin’s a dark horse. I should like to know what he wants for the college. I can tell you, Lewis, I want something for it.”

“So you should,” I said, trying to soothe him.

“Give me your hand,” he said. But he was still obscurely angry with me, with Martin, with the party, with — I suddenly felt, though it seemed altogether overdone — his own fate.

Just then I noticed that Skeffington, though he was wearing his overcoat, had still not left the house. For once he looked dithering, as though he was not sure why he was hanging about. All he did was to check with Martin, in the peremptory tone he had used to me, that we were likely to be dining in college the following night.

6: College Dinner on Christmas Day

THE Cambridge clocks were striking seven when, on Christmas Day, Martin and I walked through the Backs towards the college. It was a dark night, not cold, with low cloud cover. After the noisy children’s day, we, who were both paternal men, breathed comfortably at being out in the free air.

As we made our way along the path to Garret Hostel Bridge, Martin said, out of the dark, in his soft, deep voice: “Stinking ditches.”

We smiled. We had not been talking intimately: we had not done so for a long time: but we still remembered what we used to talk about. That was a phrase of a colleague of Martin’s when he first started his researches, an Antipodean who had come to Cambridge determined not to be bowled over by the place.

“Wouldn’t some of these boys like Master Ince think that was a reasonable description?”

“I must walk along the Backs with him and see,” said Martin. He sounded amused. I asked him more about the people I had been speaking to the night before. Yes, he found Ince’s knock-about turn a bit of a bore: yes, he wished Ince had settled down rather less and Tom Orbell considerably more.

Of course, said Martin, G S Clark was the strongest character among them.

If so, I had quite misjudged him. It set me thinking, and I asked: “What are they like inside the college?”

“Well, it’s never been altogether an easy place, has it?”

Whether he had his mind on politics at all, I still did not know. If he had, he was not going to show it. Nevertheless we were both relaxed, as we went through the lane, all windows dark, to the back of the Old Schools and out into the marketplace. There it was empty: no one was walking about on Christmas night, and the shop-windows were unlighted. It was the same down Petty Cury: and in the college itself, entering the first court in the mild blowy evening, we could see just one window shining. Everything else was dark under the heavy sky. The Lodge looked deserted, nothing but blank windows in the court: but between the masses of the Lodge and the hall there was a window glowing, dull red through the curtains, golden through a crack between them.

“Cosy,” said Martin.

It was the combination room. Unlike most colleges of its size, ours kept up the tradition of serving dinner every night of the year; but in the depth of vacation, the Fellows dined in the combination room, not in hall. When we entered, the table, which at this time on a normal night would be set out for the after-dinner wine, was laid for the meal. The napery gleamed under the lights; the side of the table-cloth nearest the fire had a rosy sheen. In the iron grate, the fire was high and radiant, altogether too much for so mild a night. Old Winslow, the only man to arrive before us, had pulled his chair back towards the curtains, out of the direct heat. He gave us a sarcastic smile, the lids hooded over his eyes.

“Escaping the cold supper at home, as a colleague of mine used to say?” he greeted us.

“Not entirely,” I said.

“We don’t expect the singular pleasure of the company of married men on these occasions, my dear Eliot.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to get it,” I said.

When I had lived in the college, I had got on better than most with Winslow. Many people were frightened of him. He was a savage, disappointed man who had never done more than serve his time in college administrative jobs. When he was Bursar, people had been more frightened of him than ever. After he retired, it seemed for a time that the old sting had left him. But now at eighty, with the curious second wind that I had seen before in very old men, he could produce it again, far more vigorously than ten years before. Why, no one could explain. His son, to whom he had been devoted, was living abroad and had not visited him for years: his wife had died, and in his late seventies he had come back to live in college. By all the rules he should have been left with nothing, for the bitter, rude old malcontent had had a marriage happier than most men’s. But in fact, whenever I met him, he appeared to be in some subfusc fashion enjoying himself. He looked very old; his cheeks had sunk in; his long nose and jaw grew closer together. To anyone unused to old men, he might have seemed in the same stage of senescence as M H L Gay. Yet, as one talked to him, one soon forgot to take any special care or make any allowances at all.

“My dear Tutor,” he was saying to Martin, “I suppose we ought to consider ourselves indebted to you — for producing your brother to give us what I believe is known as ‘stimulus’ from the great world outside.”

“Yes, I thought it was a good idea,” said Martin, in a polite but unyielding tone. Like me, he did not believe in letting Winslow get away with it. “Perhaps I might present a bottle afterwards to drink his health?”

“Thank you, Tutor. Thank you.”

Tom Orbell came in, deferential and sober, and after him the chaplain, a middle-aged man who was not a Fellow. Then two young scientists, Padgett and Blanchflower, whom I knew only by sight, and another of the young Fellows whom I did not know at all. “Doctor Taylor,” Winslow introduced him, inflecting the “doctor” just to make it clear that he, in the old Cambridge manner, disapproved of this invention of the Ph.D. “Doctor Taylor is our Calvert Fellow. On the remarkable foundation of Sir Horace Timberlake.”

It did not strike strange, it sounded quite matter-of-fact, to hear of a Fellowship named after a dead friend. Taylor was stocky, small and fair: like all the rest of us except one of the scientists, he was wearing a dinner-jacket, since that was the custom when the college dined in the combination room on Christmas Day. I was thinking that, since the college, which in my time had been thirteen, had expanded to twenty, some of the young men seemed much more like transients than they used to. Blanchflower, for example, stood about like a distant acquaintance among a group of people who knew each other well.

I was thinking also that, if Martin and I had not dropped in by chance, no one present would have had a wife. One old man who had lost his: one bachelor clergyman: and the rest men who were still unmarried, one or two of whom would never marry. About them all there was that air, characteristic of bachelor societies, of colleges on days like this, of the permanent residents of clubs — an air at the same time timid, unburdened, sad and youthful. Somehow the air was youthful even when the men were old.

We took our places at table, Winslow at the head, me at his right hand. We were given turtle soup, and Tom Orbell at my side was muttering, “Delicious, delicious.” But he was on his best behaviour. Champagne was free that night, as the result of a bequest by a nineteenth-century tutor: Tom, shining at the thought of his own lack of self-indulgence, took only a single glass.

Smoothly he asked Winslow if he had been to any Christmas parties.

“Certainly not, my dear Orbell.”

“Have you really neglected everyone?”

“I gave up going to my colleagues’ wives’ parties before you were born, my dear young man,” Winslow said.

He added: “I have no small talk.”

He made the remark with complacency, as though he had an abnormal amount of great talk.

Just then I heard Taylor talking in a quiet voice to his neighbour. Taylor was off to Berlin, so he was saying, to see some of the Orientalists there: he produced a couple of names, then one that, nearly twenty years before, I had heard from Roy Calvert, Kohlhammer. The name meant nothing to me. I had never met the man. I did not know what his speciality was. Yet hearing that one word mumbled, in a pinched Midland accent, by Taylor, I was suddenly made to wince by the past. No, it was not the past, it was the sadness of the friend dead over ten years before, present as it used to be. That single name gave me a stab of grief, sickening as a present grief — whereas the name of Roy Calvert himself I had heard without emotion. Often enough in the college, I had looked up at the window of his old sitting-room, or as at the feast made up my own Charlusian roll-call of the dead — all with as little homesickness as though I were being shown round a new library. But at the sound of that meaningless German name, I felt the present grief.

When the table, the glasses, the fire, which had retreated to the far distance, came back and focused themselves, I could still hear Tom Orbell deferentially baiting Winslow.

“Have you been to any services today, Winslow?”

“My dear young man, you should know by now that I don’t support these primitive survivals.”

“Not even for the sake of gravitas?”

“For the sake of what you’re pleased to call gravitas — which incidentally historians of your persuasion usually misunderstand completely — I am prepared to make certain concessions. But I’m not in the least prepared to give tacit support to degrading superstitions.”

The chaplain made a protesting noise.

“Let me bring it to a point, my dear chaplain. I’m not prepared to lend my presence to your remarkable rituals in the chapel.”

“But I’ve seen you set foot in the place, haven’t I?” I said.

Winslow replied: “I’ve now been a Fellow of this college for slightly more than fifty-eight years. I was elected fifty-eight years last June, to be precise, which is no doubt not a date which many of my colleagues would feel inclined to celebrate. During that period I have attended exactly seven obsequies, or whatever you prefer to call them, in the chapel. Each of those seven times I went against my better judgment, and if I had my time again I should not put in an appearance at any one of them. I believe you have never gone in for these curious superstitions, Eliot?”

“I’m not a believer,” I said.

“Nor you, Tutor?”

Winslow turned to Martin with a savage, cheerful grin.

“No.”

“Well, then, I hope you will keep my executors up to the mark. In my will, I have given strict instructions that when I die, which in the nature of things will be quite shortly, there is to be not the faintest manifestation of this mumbo-jumbo. I have endeavoured to make testamentary dispositions which penalise any of my misguided relatives who attempt to break away from these instructions. I should nevertheless be grateful to men of good sense if they keep an eye open for any infringement. Your co-believers, my dear chaplain, are remarkably unscrupulous and remarkably insensitive about those of us who have come perfectly respectably, and with at least as much conviction as any of you, to the opposite conclusion.”

Winslow was enjoying himself, so were some of the others. I thought the chaplain was not fair game, though Tom Orbell would have been, and so I said: “You’ve been in chapel more than seven times, you know.”

“My dear boy?”

“Electing Masters and so on.”

“I take the point,” said Winslow. “Though I’m not sure that those occasions can fairly be counted against me. But yes, I grant you, I’ve been inside the building four times for magisterial elections. Three of which, it became fairly clear soon after the event, showed the college in its collective wisdom choosing the wrong candidate.” He added: “Now I come to think of it, I suppose that by this time next year I shall have to go inside the building again for the same purpose. My dear Tutor, have you worked out when the election falls due?”

“December 20th,” said Martin without hesitation.

“Unless I die first,” said Winslow, “I shall have to assist in the French sense at that ceremony. But I’m happy to say that this time I can’t see even this college being so imbecile as to make a wrong choice. Just for once, the possibility does not appear to be open.”

“You mean —?”

“It’s not necessary to ask, is it? Francis Getliffe will do it very well.”

No one contradicted the old man. I could not resist making things slightly more awkward for Tom Orbell.

“I seem to remember,” I said, “having heard Brown’s name mentioned.”

“My dear Eliot,” said Winslow, “Brown’s name was mentioned last time. I then said it would mean twenty years of stodge. I should now say, if anyone were crass enough to repeat the suggestion, that it would mean seven years of stodge. It is true, seven would be preferable to twenty, but fortunately it is impossible for my colleagues, even with their singular gift for choosing the lowest when they see it, to select stodge at all this term.”

“Getliffe is generally agreed on, is he?”

“I’ve scarcely thought the matter worth conversation,” said Winslow. “The worthy Brown is not a serious starter by the side of Francis Getliffe. And that is the view of all the seniors in the college, who are showing surprising unanimity for once in a way. I had a word with the Bursar recently. We agreed that there would have to be a pre-election meeting, but we saw no reason why there should be more than one. Which, I may tell you young men” — Winslow looked round the table — “is entirely unprecedented in the last sixty years in this college. I even find that our late Senior Tutor, the unfortunate Jago, is completely at one with the Bursar and myself. As I say, we all think Getliffe will do it very well.”

As my eyes met Tom Orbell’s, his were bold, light, wide open. For whatever reason, he was not going to argue. Was it deference, or was he just not ready to show his hand? While Martin, listening politely to Winslow, gave no sign whether he agreed or disagreed. In a moment he got the old man talking of past college follies: of how a “predecessor of mine in the office of Bursar showed himself even more egregiously unfitted for it” by selling the great Lincolnshire estate. “If it hadn’t been for that remarkable decision, which shouldn’t have been made by anyone with the intelligence of a college servant, this institution would be approximately half as rich again.”

Further inanities occurred to Winslow. As we stood up while the waiters cleared the table and arranged chairs in a crescent round the fire, he was reflecting on the number of Fellows in his time who had been men of a “total absence of distinction”.

“A total absence of distinction, my dear Tutor,” he said to Martin, with even greater cheerfulness.

“Wasn’t there something to be said for old —?” said Martin, his own eyes bright.

“Nothing at all, my dear boy, nothing at all. He would have made a very fair small shopkeeper of mildly bookish tastes.”

He settled into the President’s chair, which was the second, as one proceeded anti-clockwise from the far side of the fireplace. In the middle of the room, the rosewood table shone polished and empty: when the college dined in the combination room, it was the habit to drink wine round the fire.

“It can’t be too often said,” Winslow addressed himself to Taylor and the youngest of the others, both in their twenties, well over fifty years his juniors, “that, with a modicum of exceptions, Cambridge dons are not distinguished men. They are just men who confer distinctions upon one another. I have often wondered who first uttered that simple but profound truth.”

The port glasses were filled as Winslow announced: “I believe this bottle is being presented by Mr Eliot, for the purpose — correct me if I am wrong, my dear Tutor — of marking the appearance here of his brother. This is a remarkable display of fraternal good wishes.”

With sardonic gusto, Winslow proposed my health and then Martin’s. We sipped the port. The fire was warm on our faces. Martin and I, not to be outfaced by Winslow, spoke of previous times when we had dined together in that room. The old man, satisfied with his performance, was becoming a little sleepy. The room was hot and comfortable. Some of the young men began to talk. Then the door clicked open: for a second I thought it was the waiter with the coffee, coming early because it was Christmas night: but it was Skeffington.

Winslow roused himself, his eyes red round the rims.

“My dear boy,” he said, “this is a most unexpected pleasure. Pray take a glass of port.”

“I apologise, Mr President,” said Skeffington. I noticed that his first glance had been in the direction of Martin.

“Don’t apologise, but sit down and fill your glass.”

It was unusual, but not startlingly so, for Fellows who had missed dinner to drop in afterwards for wine. As a rule, one would have taken it without curiosity, as most of them were taking it that night. But I couldn’t; nor, I felt sure, could Martin. Skeffington had sat down, and in silence watched his glass being filled. He was not dressed: for him, so formal and stiff with protocol, that was odd in itself. In a blue suit, his head thrown back, his cheeks high-coloured, he looked out of place in that circle.

The conversation went on, but Skeffington did not take part in it and Winslow was nearly asleep again. It was not long before Martin got to his feet. When we had said our good nights, and were outside in the court, I was not surprised to hear Skeffington come up behind us. “As a matter of fact,” he said to Martin, “I should like a word with you.”

“Do you want me alone?” said Martin.

“I’d just as soon Lewis knew,” said Skeffington.

Martin said that we had better go up to his rooms. They struck dank and cold, even on that muggy night. He switched on the electric fire, standing incongruously in the big sixteenth-century hearth.

“Well, Julian?” said Martin.

“I didn’t think I ought to keep it to myself any longer.”

“What is it?”

“The last few days I’ve been going more into the business of this chap Howard.”

“Yes?” Martin was still impassive, but bright-eyed.

“I can’t see any way out of it. I believe that he’s been telling the truth.”

7: The Component of Contempt

FOR an instant, none of us moved. It would have been hard to tell whether Martin had heard what Skeffington had just said. He was not looking at Skeffington. He gazed steadily at the hearth, in which the electric fire had one small incandescent star, much brighter than the glowing bars, where a contact had worked loose.

“What made you go into the business again?” he said at last, as though merely curious, as though that were the only question on his mind.

“I tell you,” said Skeffington, temper near the surface, “that he’s been telling the truth.”

“Can you prove it?” said Martin sharply.

“I can prove it enough to satisfy myself. Damn it, do you think I want to blackguard the old man?”

“That’s fair comment,” said Martin. “But have you got a hundred per cent proof that’ll satisfy everybody else?”

“Have you?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know what you intend to do,” I said, “but can you do anything without what a lawyer would think of as a proof? Have you got one?”

He looked flushed and haughty.

“In that sense,” he said, “I’m not sure that I have. But it will be good enough for reasonable people.”

“Then what do you intend to do?” Martin took up my question.

“The first thing is to get this chap Howard a square deal. That goes without question.”

He said it simply, honourably, and with his habitual trace of admonition and priggishness.

“When did you decide that?”

“The moment I realised that there was only one answer to the whole business. That was yesterday afternoon, though for forty-eight hours I hadn’t been able to see any other option.”

“I’m sorry,” said Martin, turning to him, “but it’s not so easy to accept that there can’t be one.”

“Don’t you think I’ve made sure that I’ve closed all the holes?”

“Don’t you think you might be wrong? After all, you’re saying you’ve been wrong once before, aren’t you?”

“You’ll see that I’m not wrong,” said Skeffington. “And there’s one point where I’d like your advice, both of you.”

He began answering the question Martin had asked first — what had made him “go into the business again”? It happened that, though Skeffington’s wife had not often seen her uncle Palairet while he was alive, she was on good terms with his solicitors. A partner in the firm had mentioned to the Skeffingtons that the last box of the old man’s papers was being sent to the college. Skeffington had, of course, thought it his duty to go through them.

As he explained, I thought, as I had done before, that his voice did not live up to his looks. It was both monotonous and brittle. But his mind was more competent than I had given him credit for. It was precise, tough, not specially imaginative, but very lucid. People had given me the impression that he was an amateur, and lucky ever to have been elected. I began to doubt it.

I was interested in his attitude towards old Palairet. Obviously he had not known him well. Skeffington seemed to have had an impersonal respect for him as a scientist of reputation, such as Skeffington himself longed to be. For Skeffington felt a vocation for science. He might be rich, he might be smart: he was not at ease with the academics, he could not talk to them as he had been able to talk to his brother-officers: the reason why he could get on with Martin and me was that he had met us in the official world, and knew some of the people we knew. Yet for all that, though he could not in his heart accept most of “those chaps” as social equals, he longed to win their recognition. He longed to do good work, as Palairet and Getliffe had done; he might have said this was setting his sights too high, but he was seeking exactly that kind of esteem.

“How did your wife get on with her uncle?” I asked, just as he was leading off into the scientific exposition.

“Oh,” said Skeffington, “he never saw her jokes.”

For a second I caught a sparkle in Martin’s eye. As I had heard him give both Skeffingtons maximum marks for humourlessness, I wondered what astonishing picture that reply conveyed.

As Skeffington went on, I found both him and Martin agreeing that whatever the old man was like, most of his scientific work was sound and safely established on the permanent record. His major set of researches were “textbook stuff”, Skeffington insisted.

“That’s what I don’t understand,” said Skeffington, simple, high-minded, incredulous. “Because, assuming that he cooked this other business, it couldn’t have done him tuppence-ha’pennyworth of good. It just doesn’t count beside the real good, solid stuff he’d got behind him. Was he crackers, do you think?”

The old man had done first-class scientific research, they told me: his major work, on the diffraction of atomic particles, was “quite water-tight”: some of the photographs were reproduced in the standard books. Martin fetched down a couple of volumes, and showed me the photographs, rather like rifle targets with alternate rings of light and dark. Those results were beyond dispute: they had been repeated, time and time again, in laboratories all over the world.

It was also beyond dispute that Palairet had become interested in an extension of his technique — not an important extension, something which only counted “marginally”, by the side of his established work. He had expected to be able to apply his technique to a slightly different kind of particle-diffraction. “For a rather highbrow reason, that no one could possibly have thought up a year ago, we now know it couldn’t work,” said Skeffington. But the old man had expected it to work. So had Howard, doing his research under the old man’s eye. The photograph in Howard’s paper demonstrated that it did work, said Martin, with a grim chuckle: demonstrated it by the unorthodox device of taking a genuine diffraction photograph and “blowing it up”, just like enlarging an ordinary photograph, so as to increase the distances between the light rings and the dark. It was from these distances that Howard in his paper had calculated the wave-lengths of the particles. “After blowing it up, someone got the results he expected,” said Skeffington.

For the first time I heard how the fraud had been detected. When the negative had been “blown up”, the hole left by a drawing-pin which had held it up to dry had been expanded too. As soon as the result had been proved to be theoretically impossible, the Americans had enquired why the white blob at the top centre of the photograph seemed so singularly large. It was just as simple as that.

According to Howard, when at last he gave the Court of Seniors his explanation, that photograph had not been the first the old man had shown him. He had told me the same.

To credit his story, one had to assume that he was absolutely trusting. If it were feasible at all, it meant that he had been indoctrinated beforehand. However uncritical he was, he must have been ready to believe in the evidence, he must have taken for granted that the technique was “on”, before he put that final photograph into his paper.

“Even so,” said Martin, “he would have to be pretty wooden.”

“That’s as may be,” said Skeffington, who had until a few days before thought the whole account so preposterous as to be an insult. It was only out of mechanical duty, automatic conscientiousness, that when he heard that more of the old man’s manuscripts had reached the college, he went into the Bursary, borrowed the key of the Palairet box, and took them away.

“Had the Bursar told you they’d arrived?” asked Martin.

“The usual piece of formal bumf,” said Skeffington. As soon as any scientific document arrived from Palairet’s executors, Nightingale sent a reference number to Skeffington, so I gathered.

Without interest Skeffington had sat in his rooms, reading through the last notebooks.

“Have we got them all now?” asked Martin.

“So far as they know, we’ve got them all.”

Without interest, Skeffington had read on. “Old man’s stuff, most of it,” he said. Jottings about researches which Palairet would never do: occasional sets of data, corrections of earlier papers. But at last, on the Saturday afternoon before Christmas, something had turned up. “I don’t mind telling you, I didn’t take in what it meant. I was sitting in my rooms in the Fellows’ building, and I went out and walked in the garden, and I couldn’t see anything that made sense. I don’t mind telling you, I wasn’t very bright about it.”

He looked at Martin. “As a matter of fact, I’ve brought it along with me.”

“May I see it?” Even Martin’s politeness was wearing sharp.

Skeffington opened a briefcase which he had brought with him into the room, and produced a thick exercise book, such as I remembered using in the Oxford Senior class at school. Sticking out of it was a bookmarker. “Yes,” said Skeffington, “I’ve kept the place.” It sounded so matter-of-fact as to be absurd. Just as it did when he assured us that he had signed a receipt for the exercise book with the Bursar’s clerk.

“All right, Julian,” said Martin. Then Skeffington put his fingers, delicate, square-tipped, on the marker and said: “Here we are.”

I had gone across to glance at the book over Martin’s shoulder. My first impression was of an almost empty page. Then I read at the top, in a spiky, old-fashioned holograph, the date, July 20th, 1950. Underneath the date were several lines of handwriting, which began: Tried diffraction experiments using neutron source A and crystal grating B, encouraging results. Then a blank space in the middle of the page, with a rim of sticky paper, as though something had been removed. Underneath, at the bottom of the page, the handwriting went on: Above print gives strong support for view that diffraction of neutrons at higher speeds, corresponding to wavelengths shown above, follows precisely the same pattern as at low speeds (see CJBP, Proc. Roy. Soc. A…1942, 1947). Have always predicted this. Follow up.

“The photograph’s missing, is it?” said Martin.

“The point is,” Skeffington said loudly to me, “that what he says at the bottom can’t be true. This is where the Howard paper starts off.” He tapped the page. “It can’t be true.”

“If there ever was a print there,” Martin was reflecting, “either it couldn’t have shown anything at all—”

“Or else that had been blown up too.”

“Where is it?” said Martin.

Skeffington shrugged his shoulders.

“Something was there once, wasn’t it?”

“The point is,” he went on loudly again, “if Howard saw that print and that entry, then his story stands up as near as makes no matter. However you read that entry, the old man was fooling himself, if he wasn’t fooling anybody else. I don’t know what he was up to — he must have been crackers. But I do know that it gees with the Howard story, and I don’t believe that there’s any way out of it. Can you see one?”

“If the print were there,” said Martin in a soft, deliberate tone, “then I don’t think I could.”

“But still.”

Martin sat frowning. He asked me for a cigarette. After a time he said: “I can’t believe there isn’t a way out of it.”

“Do you think I want to believe it?” Skeffington’s tone, just as when he started to explain, was haughty and annoyed. “It isn’t exactly pleasant for me to stir up mud about the old man — and, if I had to stir up mud about someone connected with my family, I shouldn’t choose to do it on behalf of anyone like Howard. We never ought to have let in a chap like that. But the point is, we did let him in, and I believe he’s an innocent man—”

“Oh, yes, Julian,” Martin roused himself, and for once was speaking restlessly, sarcastically, and without civility. “We know that you believe that. It’s like G H Hardy’s old crack: If the Archbishop of Canterbury says he believes in God, that’s all in the way of business, but if he says he doesn’t, one can take it he means what he says. We don’t need persuading that you mean what you say. We know you believe it. But I don’t see that recognising your conviction gets us very far.”

At Martin’s tone, so untypically sharp, Skeffington showed no resentment. He just threw his head back and said: “It might get us a bit further when I’ve settled what to do next.”

Martin was composed and cautious again. He said: “I hope you won’t do anything until we’ve all thought it over.”

“I can’t wait long.”

“I’m not asking you to wait long.”

“I should like to see Nightingale tomorrow.”

“I hope you won’t do anything,” said Martin, “until we’ve thought it over.”

“I can’t put it off. That isn’t good enough—”

“No one’s asking you to put it off. Look, it’s Boxing Day tomorrow. I’d be grateful for another twenty-four hours after that. Then I’ll be ready to talk.”

Reluctantly, Skeffington acquiesced. He went on: “But there’s something I want your advice on now. Lewis, you’ve heard the state of the game. I want to know, shall I write to this chap Howard tonight? I mean, I don’t feel specially inclined to talk to him. But he hasn’t had a square deal, and I think he’s entitled to know that someone like me is going to make it his business to see that he gets one.”

“It would be a good thing to write to him, I should have thought,” I said. “So long as you make it clear you’re only speaking for yourself.”

I was thinking, Skeffington was a brave and honourable man. He had not had an instant’s hesitation, once he believed that Howard was innocent. He was set on rushing in. Personal relations did not matter, his own convenience did not matter, nor how people thought of him. Both by nature and by training, he was single-minded: the man had his rights, one had to make sure that justice was done. Yet, inside that feeling, there was no kindness towards Howard. There was no trace of a brotherly emotion at all. The only residue of feeling he had for Howard was contempt. Contempt not because he and Skeffington had not an idea in common, but just because he was an object of justice. I had seen the same in other upright men: one was grateful for their passion to be just, but its warmth was all inside themselves. They were not feeling as equals: it was de haut en bas: and, not only towards those who had perpetrated the injustice, but also, and often more coldly, towards the victim, there was directed this component of contempt.

“The chief thing is, isn’t it,” I said, “that you mustn’t raise false hopes?”

“I think it would be much better,” said Martin, “if you didn’t write at all until we’ve talked it over. Won’t that give you a clearer idea of just what you can and cannot say?”