The Affair

8: Ambiguousness and Temper

THROUGH the wet and windy Boxing Day, Martin played in the big drawing-room with the children — played just as I remembered him in our own childhood, concentrated and anxious to win. Irene and Margaret were laughing at us when he and I had a game together. He had invented a kind of ping-pong, played sitting down with rulers at a low table, and complicated by a set of bisques.

Though our wives knew what was on Martin’s mind, for we had told them last thing the night before, no one would have guessed it. He was out to win, within the rules, but just within the rules. His son, Lewis, watched with the same bright eyes, the same concentration, as his father’s: so did my son. When we had finished, Martin coached them both, patiently showing them how to cut the ball, repeating the stroke while the minutes passed, as though going through his head there was no thought of Skeffington’s conversion, no thought of anything except the cut-stroke at ping-pong. Outside, through the long windows, one could see the trees lashing and the grass dazzling in the rain.

Just before tea, the children went of to put records on their gramophone. Martin said to me: “I don’t know. I don’t know. Do you?”

For years we had talked like acquaintances. But we could still get on without explanation: we caught the tone of each other’s voice.

I replied: “I wish I understood the scientific evidence better. I suppose understanding that does make it a bit easier, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose it might,” said Martin, with a tucked-in smile. He did not say any more that day. At the same time the following afternoon, when again we were having a respite from the children, we were sitting with Irene and Margaret. The rain was slashing the windows and the room had turned dark except for a diffused gleam, reflected from the garden, of green and subaqueous light.

“This is a wretched business,” said Martin at large, not with worry so much as annoyance. Again I knew he had not been thinking of much else.

“Tomorrow morning I shall have to have this talk with Skeffington,” he said to me.

“Can’t you put him off?” said Irene.

“What are you going to tell him?” I said.

He shook his head.

Margaret said: “I can’t help hoping you’ll be able to agree with him.”

“Why do you hope that?” Irene broke out.

“If Skeffington’s right, it must have been pretty shattering for Howard, mustn’t it? And I should have thought it was even worse for her,” said Margaret.

“What are you going to say tomorrow?” I came back at Martin.

Margaret asked: “Is Skeffington right?”

Martin looked straight at her. He had a respect for her. He knew that, of all of us, she would be the hardest to refuse an answer to.

He said: “It makes some sort of sense.”

She said: “Do you really think he could be right?” Her tone was even, almost casual: she did not seem to be pressing him. Yet she was.

“It seems to make more sense,” said Martin, “than any other explanation. But still, it’s very hard to take.”

“Do you believe he’s right?”

Martin replied: “Possibly.”

Unexpectedly, Margaret burst into laughter, laughter spontaneous and happy. “Have you thought,” she cried, “what awful fools we should all look?”

Martin said: “Yes, I’ve thought of that.”

“All of us thinking how much we know about people!”

For once Irene did not see any sort of joke. Frowning, she said to Martin: “Look here, have you got to get yourself involved too much with all this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Suppose Skeffington goes ahead. There’s going to be a row, isn’t there?”

Martin glanced at me. “That’s putting it mildly.”

“Well, have you got to get into it? I mean, have you got to start it? It isn’t your business, is it?”

“Not specially, no.”

“Whose is it?” Margaret asked.

He told her that constitutionally it would be for the sub-committee — Nightingale and Skeffington — to take the first steps.

“Well then,” said Irene, “do you need to do much yourself?”

“No, I don’t need to,” said Martin. He added: “In fact, if I don’t want to quarrel with half the society, I can keep out of it more or less.”

“Can you?” said Margaret. She had flushed. She said passionately to Irene, “Do you really want him to sit by?”

Almost as though by reflection, Irene had flushed also. Surprisingly, she and Margaret got on well. Neither then nor at any time could Irene bear to have her sister-in-law disapprove of her, much less to think her crude and selfish. For Irene, despite, or to some extent because of, her worldliness, had both a humble and generous heart.

“Oh,” she said, “someone will put it right if there’s anything to put right. If old Martin were the only chap who could, I suppose he’d have to. But let Julian S do the dirty work, that’s what he’s made for. Those two won’t mind getting in bad with everyone here. All I meant was, we’re settling down nicely now, we haven’t got any enemies for the first time in our lives.”

“Isn’t there a danger — you’re frightened that if Martin makes a fuss over this — it might stand in his way?”

Irene replied, shamefaced with defiance: “If you want the honest truth, yes, I’m frightened of that too.”

Margaret shook her head. Even now, after marrying me, and meeting my colleagues, and getting a spectator’s view of the snakes and ladders of power, she could not quite credit it. Her grandfather and great-uncle had resigned Fellowships over the Thirty-Nine Articles. I sometimes teased her, did she realise how much difference it had meant to them and even to her, that they had both been men of independent means? Yet she stayed as pure as they had been. She did not think that Martin or I were bad men: because she loved me, she thought that in some ways I was a good one: but she could not sympathise with the shifts, the calculations, the self-seekingness of men making their way.

“Do you think,” she said, apparently at random, “that Laura ever had any doubts about him?”

“No,” I said.

“She’s totally wrapped up in him,” said Martin. “I don’t imagine she ever had a second’s doubt.”

“In that case, she must be the only person in the world who didn’t. I wonder what it’s been like for her?”

Margaret, I knew, was deliberately playing on our human interest. She, too, was subtle. She knew precisely what she wanted Martin — and, if I could take part, me also — to do.

But Irene sidetracked her by saying casually: “Well, she’d never tell me. She just can’t bear the sight of me.”

“Why ever not?” I asked.

“I just can’t think.”

“I expect she fancies,” said Martin, “that you’ve cast an eye at Donald.”

“Oh, she can’t think that! She can’t!” cried Irene, as usual hilarious (though she detested Howard and had been for years a faithful wife) at the bare prospect of adultery.

Then she said to Margaret: “It isn’t going to be fun, doing anything for them, don’t you see that?”

“I tell you, that’s putting it mildly,” said Martin.

“You won’t stick your neck out if you don’t need to? That’s all I’m asking you. Will you?”

“Do you think I ever have done?” said Martin.

None of us was certain how he proposed to act, or whether he proposed to act at all. Even when he sounded for opinion that night at the Master’s dinner table, he did it in the same ambiguous tone.

Until Martin began that sounding, the dinner had been a standard and stately specimen of the Crawford régime. It would not have happened if I had not been in Cambridge, for the Crawfords had only returned to the Lodge late on Boxing Day. But Crawford, who had never been a special friend of mine, had a kind of impersonal code that ex-Fellows who had achieved some sort of external recognition should not stay in Cambridge uninvited: so that night, in the great drawing-room at the Lodge, ten of us were drinking our sherry before dinner, the Nightingales, the Clarks, Martin and Irene, me and Margaret, and the Crawfords themselves, the men in white ties and tails, for Crawford, an old-fashioned Cambridge radical, had refused in matters of etiquette to budge an inch.

He stood, hands in pockets, coat-tails over arms, warming his back at his own fireplace, invincibly contented, so it seemed. He was a heavy, shortish, thickly made man who still, at the age of seventy-two, had a soft-footed, muscular walk. He looked nothing like seventy-two. His Buddha-like face, small-featured and round, had something of the unlined youthfulness, or rather agelessness, that one sees often in Asians, but very rarely in Europeans: his hair, glossy black, was smoothed down and did not show any grey at all.

He talked to each of us with impersonal cordiality. He said to me that he had “heard talk” of me in the “club” (the Athenaeum) just before Christmas, to Nightingale that the college had done well to get into that last list of American equities, to Martin that a new American research student seemed to be highly thought-of. When we had gone in to dinner and settled down to the meal, with the same cordiality he addressed us all. The subject that occurred to him, as we ate an excellent dinner, was privilege. He went on: “Speaking as the oldest round this table by a good few years, I have seen the disappearance of a remarkable amount of privilege.”

Crawford continued to deliver himself. The one thing on which all serious people were agreed, all over the world, was that privilege must be done away with; the amount of it had been whittled away steadily ever since he was a young man. All the attempts to stop this process had failed, just as reaction in its full sense had always failed. All over the world people were no longer prepared to see others enjoying privilege because they had a different coloured skin, or spoke in a different tone, or were born into families that had done pretty well for themselves. “The disappearance of privilege — if you want something that gives you the direction of time’s arrow,” said Crawford, “that’s as good as anything I know.”

Hanna could not restrain herself. With a sharp smile, she said: “It’s still got some way to go, shouldn’t you say?”

She looked round the table at the white ties, the evening dresses, the panelled walls beyond, the amplitude of the Lodge dining-room, the lighted pictures on the walls.

“Fair comment, Mrs Clark,” said Crawford, imperturbable, gallant. “But we mustn’t be misled by appearances. Speaking as the present incumbent, I assure you that I can’t imagine how my successors in the next generation are going to manage to run this Lodge. Unless indeed a society which is doing away with privilege decides to reward a few citizens for achievement by housing them in picturesque surroundings that no one else is able to afford. It would be interesting if a certain number of men of science in the next generation were still enabled to live in Lodges like this or the Carlsberg mansion at Copenhagen.”

As the talk became chit-chat, I was paying attention to Mrs Nightingale, whom I had not met before. She was a plump woman in the late thirties, a good twenty years younger than he was. Her shoulders and upper arms were beginning to ham out with fat; her eyes were full, sleepy, exophthalmic. But that sleepy plumpness was deceptive. Underneath she seemed energetic and quick-moving. When I said to her, pompously, as we were considering whether to pour sauce on to the pudding: “Now if we’re wise—”, she replied, dead-panned but instantaneous: “Don’t let’s be wise.” Between her and Nightingale there passed glances sparkling with both humour and trust. She referred to him as the Lord Mayor, a simple private joke which continued to delight him. They were happy, just as Martin and the others had told me. I was astonished that he had found such a nice woman.

I had been half-expecting Martin to lead in Howard’s name. All through dinner he did not mention him; he was still playing his part in the chit-chat when the women left us. But in fact it would have been surprising if he had not waited until the men were alone. College manners were changing in some of the young men, but not in Martin. He would no more have thought of discussing college business in the Lodge in front of wives than Crawford would, or Brown, or old Winslow. Though Martin was used to the company of women like Margaret or Hanna, though he knew how they detested the Islamic separation, Martin would not have considered raising his question that night until they had gone.

When the door had closed behind them, Crawford called for us to sit nearer to him. “Come up, here, Nightingale! Come beside me, Eliot! Will you look after yourself, Martin?” It occurred to me, still thinking of Martin’s manners, that while he kept some of old-style Cambridge, Crawford had, in just one respect, dropped his. Crawford called his contemporaries by their surnames, and that had been common form until the ’20s. Even in my time, there were not many Fellows who were generally called by their Christian names. But, since the young used nothing else, since Martin and Walter Luke and Julian Skeffington had never been known by anything but their Christian names to their own contemporaries, the old men also began to call them so. With the result that Crawford and Winslow, who after fifty years of friendship still used each other’s surnames, seemed oddly familiar when they spoke to the younger Fellows. As it happened, I came just at the turning-point, and to both Crawford and Winslow, though my brother was “Martin”, I remained “Eliot”.

The five of us had been alone for some time, the decanter had gone round, before Martin spoke. He asked, in a casual, indifferent, almost bored manner: “Master, I suppose you haven’t thought any more about the Howard business?”

“Why should I? I don’t see any reason why I should, do you?” said Crawford.

Martin replied: “Why should you indeed?”

He said it dismissively, as though his original question had been silly. He was sitting back in his chair, solid and relaxed, with Clark between himself and Crawford. Though he looked relaxed, his eyes were on guard, watching not only Crawford, but Nightingale and Clark. He said: “As a matter of fact, I thought I heard that it was just possible some fresh evidence might still turn up.”

“I don’t remember hearing the suggestion,” said Crawford. He spoke without worry. “I must say, Martin, it sounds remarkably hypothetical.”

“I suppose,” said Martin, “that if more evidence really did turn up, we might conceivably have to consider reopening the case, mightn’t we?”

“Ah well,” said Crawford, “we don’t have to cross that bridge till we come to it. Speaking as a member of our small society, I’ve never been fond of hypothetical situations involving ourselves.”

It was a reproof, good-humoured, but still a reproof. Martin paused. Before he had replied, Nightingale gave him a friendly smile and said: “There’s a bit more to it than that, Master.”

“I’m getting slightly muddled,” said Crawford, not sounding so in the least. “If there is any more to it, why haven’t I been informed?”

“Because, though there is a bit more to it on paper,” Nightingale went on, “it doesn’t amount to anything. It certainly doesn’t amount to enough to disturb you with at Christmas. I mean, Martin is perfectly right to say that a certain amount of fresh evidence has come in. It’s not fair to accuse him of inventing hypothetical situations.”

Crawford laughed. “Never mind about that. If he’s not used to being misjudged at his age, he never will be.”

“No,” Nightingale persisted. “I for one am grateful that he mentioned the matter.”

“Yes, Bursar?” said Crawford.

“It gives us the chance to settle it without any more commotion.”

Martin leaned forward and spoke to Nightingale: “When did you hear about this?”

“Last night.”

“Who from?”

“Skeffington.”

Just for an instant, Martin’s eyes flashed.

“It’s all perfectly in order, Master,” Nightingale said to Crawford. “You’ll remember, Skeffington and I were the committee deputed to make a technical report to the Seniors in the first instance. Naturally we’ve assumed it was our duty to keep our eyes open for any development since. It happens that the last instalments of Professor Palairet’s scientific papers have arrived at the Bursary since the Seniors made their decision. Both Skeffington and I have gone through them. I think it’s only fair for me to say that he’s made a more thorough job of it than I’ve been able to do. The only excuse I’ve got is that the Bursary manages to keep me pretty busy.”

“We all know that,” said Crawford.

“So these very last notebooks I hadn’t been able to do more than skim through. It was those that Skeffington brought to my attention last night.”

“When did you hear?” Suddenly Clark spoke in a quiet voice to Martin, but Nightingale had gone on: “I’m glad to say that I saw nothing which makes the faintest difference to my original opinion. If I were writing my report to the Seniors again today, I should do it in the same terms.”

“That’s exactly what I should have expected.” Crawford said it with dignity and authority.

“I don’t think I ought to conceal from you, in fact I’m sure I oughtn’t,” said Nightingale, “that in the heat of the moment Skeffington didn’t take entirely the same view. He gave to one piece of evidence an importance that I couldn’t begin to, and I think, if I have to take the words out of his mouth, that he would have felt obliged to include it, if he were re-writing his own report. Well, that’s as may be. But even if that happened, I am quite sure that in the final result it wouldn’t have had the remotest effect on the Seniors’ findings.”

“Which means,” said Crawford, “that we should have been bound to take the same action.”

“Inevitably it does,” said Nightingale.

“Of course,” said Clark.

Crawford had settled himself, his hands folded on his paunch, his eyes focused on the wainscot.

“Well, this is a complication we could reasonably have been spared,” he said. “I am inclined to think the Bursar is right, Martin has done us a service by bringing up the subject. Speaking as Master for a moment, there is one thing I should like to impress upon you all. I should also like to impress it on Skeffington and our other colleagues. In my judgment, this college was remarkably lucky to avoid a serious scandal over this business. I never took the violent personal objection to Howard that some of you did, but a piece of scientific fraud is of course unforgivable. And any unnecessary publicity about it, even now, is as near unforgivable as makes no matter. We’ve come out of it internally with no friction that I know of. And externally, better than any of us could have hoped. I do impress on you, this is a time to count our blessings and not disturb the situation. In my view, anyone who resurrects the trouble is taking a grave responsibility upon himself. We did justice so far as we could, and as the Bursar says, we have every reason within the human limits to believe that our findings were the right ones. Anyone who tries to open it all over again is going to achieve nothing except a certain amount of harm for the college, and a risk of a good deal more.”

“I’d just like to ask again, as I’ve asked you all in private often enough,” said Nightingale, “if this man felt he had been hard done by, why in Heaven’s name didn’t he bring an action for wrongful dismissal?”

“I agree with every word you’ve both said,” Clark broke in. He was hunched round to ease the weight on his leg. His smile was sweet, a little helpless, a little petulant. All of a sudden I realised that, just as Martin had said, he was a man of formidable moral force. “Except, if I may say so, personally I think worse of the man responsible for it all. I always thought it was a mistake to elect him, and I was sorry that our scientific friends got their way. I know we all kept off the question of his politics. Politics is becoming a taboo word. I’m going to be quite frank. I should have to be convinced that, in present conditions, a man of Howard’s politics can be a man of good character, as I understand the term. And I am not prepared to welcome such men in the name of tolerance, the tolerance that they themselves despise.”

“I wish I’d had the courage to say that earlier,” Nightingale broke out.

Martin had not spoken for a long time. In the same tone, neither edgy nor over-concerned, in which he had made his first approach, he said: “But that isn’t really the point, is it? The real point is what the Bursar said about the evidence.”

Clark replied: “What the Bursar said settled that, didn’t it?”

The curious thing was, I thought, that Nightingale, Clark, and Martin liked one another. When we went into the drawing-room there was no sign of argument on any of them. In fact, there had not been a word of disagreement spoken.

As the college clock struck the half-hour, it must have been half past eleven, Martin and Irene, Margaret and I, were walking up Petty Cury on the way home. In the empty street, Martin said softly: “I got even less change than I reckoned on.”

He had spoken in a matter-of-fact tone, but when Margaret said: “The Nightingales know all about it, don’t they?” he turned on her: “How did you hear that?”

“I wanted to see what she and Hanna were thinking—”

“You talked about the Howard business, did you?”

“Of course—”

“You told them that Skeffington was worried?”

“Naturally.”

“Can none of you be trusted?” Martin broke out.

“No, I won’t take that—”

“Can none of you be trusted?” He had quite lost his temper, something so rare for him that Irene and I glanced at each other with discomfort, a discomfort different from just looking on at her husband and my wife snacking. As his voice sharpened, his face lost its colour: while Margaret, whose hot temper had risen to meet his cold one, was flushing, her eyes snapping, looking handsome and less delicate.

“Has everyone got to talk the minute you get hold of a piece of gossip? Has that fool Skeffington got to blurt out the whole story before any of us have had a chance to have a look at it? Has none of you any idea when it’s useful to keep your mouths shut?”

“Don’t you realise Connie Nightingale is a good sort? She and Hanna will have some influence—”

“They’ll have that, without your talking to them before the proper time.”

“Why should you think no one else can judge the proper time?”

“Just from watching the mess you’re all getting into.”

“I must say,” said Margaret violently, “you seem to assume this is a private game of yours. I’m damned if that is good enough for me. You’d better face it, this isn’t just your own private game.”

Speaking more quietly than she had done, but also more angrily, Martin said: “It might be more convenient if it were.”

9: Treat for a Worldly Man

THE next morning, the 28th, Martin was as controlled as usual. Without fuss, without making an explicit apology to Margaret, he did apologise to her, by asking if she could bear to sit round and join the “conference” with Julian Skeffington. “I remember that you’ve shown an interest in the matter,” Martin permitted himself to say, unsmiling but bright-eyed.

Skeffington was due at ten o’clock: Margaret and I had to go back to London that afternoon. It was a bright morning, the sunny interval in the warm cyclonic weather, and the children were playing in the garden. The air was so mild that we left the French windows open, and from the end of the long lawn we could hear them shouting, as they chased each other through the bushes. On the grass there shone a film of dew, gossamer-white in the sunshine, with firm black trails of footsteps across it, like a diagram in a detective story.

When Skeffington came in, punctual to the first stroke of ten, he gazed round the room with what looked like distaste or pity for our sloppiness. Where we had had breakfast in the garden end of the big double room, Irene had not yet cleared away; I was wearing a sweater instead of a jacket. Himself, he stood there beautifully groomed, blue tie pinned down, hair smooth, skin ruddy. Before we had moved from the table he was into his problem.

“I’ve got to admit it,” he told Martin, “I can’t come to terms with some of those chaps of ours.”

“Who in particular?”

“I was dining in the combination room last night, there were only one or two chaps there, I told them that Howard’s case would have to be re-opened.”

“You did, did you?” said Martin.

“I didn’t see any point in beating about the bush,” said Skeffington. “Well, one of those chaps — they were both very junior — said that meant getting a majority of the college. Do you know what he said then?”

Martin shook his head.

“He had the brass to tell me that he didn’t feel very much like helping to form that majority.”

“Who was this?”

“That man Orbell.”

Irene yelped with surprise, Margaret caught my eye. Martin was saying, at his most disciplined, without any sign of irritation: “I can’t help wishing you hadn’t jumped the gun. You know, it might have been better to tackle Orbell later—”

“It couldn’t have been worse,” said Skeffington. “I’m sorry. False move.”

“By the way,” Martin went on, “you spoke to Nightingale the night before, so I heard. I thought we were going to leave that until we’d thought it over?”

“Yes, I spoke to him. I’m not sorry about that. He’s the other man on the committee. After I saw you, I decided I was under an obligation to tell him. It was the straightforward thing to do.”

“I suppose it was the straightforward thing to do.” Martin’s voice was neutral. Just for an instant I saw in his face the temper of the night before. But he knew when to cut his losses. He had realised that it was profitless to scold Skeffington. It was done now. Martin contented himself by saying: “You’re not making it any easier for yourself, you know.”

“That can’t be helped.”

“You understand that it isn’t going to be easy, don’t you?”

“I hadn’t thought much about it. But it’s not going to be a pushover, I see that.”

“Doesn’t Orbell’s reaction show you something?”

“It was a bit of a facer, yes.” Skeffington threw back his head, and his expression was puzzled, irritated, sulky.

“It’s a good deal more than that.” Martin leaned forward into the fireplace, picked up a spill from the holder, twisted it into a knot. Then he looked across at Skeffington and began to speak easily, naturally, and in earnest. “Look, this is what I wanted to talk to you about. I want you to be absolutely clear what the position is. I wouldn’t like you to do any more, I really didn’t want you to do anything at all, before you realise what you’re running yourself in for.”

“I think I know the form,” said Skeffington.

“Do you?” Martin was watching him. “I intend to make sure you do. That’s the whole object of this exercise.”

Skeffington had begun to ask me a question but Martin interrupted: “No, I really want to say this. There are just two courses you can take, it seems to me. Now this evidence has come along, and taking the view of it you do—”

“And you do too,” Margaret broke in.

“Taking that view of it, you’re bound to do something. If you wrote a statement and sent it to the Master saying, for the sake of argument, that some new technical data made it seem to you extremely unlikely that Howard had been responsible for any fraud — that’s all that reasonable men could expect you to do. I think you’re obliged to do that. I’m the last man to run into unnecessary trouble, but if I were you I’m afraid I should have to do that.”

“I should think you damned well would,” said Skeffington.

“And I shouldn’t expect it to have any effect,” said Martin with a grin that was calculating, caustic, and uncharacteristically kind. “You see, the evidence isn’t quite clinching enough to convince anyone who desperately doesn’t want to be convinced. There are quite a number of our friends who desperately don’t want to be convinced. I suppose you have realised that?”

“They’ve got to be, that’s all,” said Skeffington.

“Well, that is the second course. Which means you set yourself, first, to get the case re-opened and then, which I might remind you isn’t the same thing, make the Seniors go back on their decision about Howard. I don’t say it’s impossible—”

“That’s something,” Skeffington said.

“—but it’s going to be very difficult. Some of the steps you’ve taken already have made it slightly more difficult. It’s going to need a certain number of qualities I am not sure you possess.”

Martin said it simply. Skeffington blushed. His haughtiness had left him for an instant: he wasn’t used, as Martin and I and our friends were, to direct personal examination.

“Come clean. What does it need?”

“Obstinacy,” said Martin. “We’re all prepared to credit you with that.”

Irene laughed as though glad of the excuse, just to break the tension.

“Patience,” said Martin. “How do you fancy yourself in that respect?”

Skeffington gave a sheepish smile.

“Persuasive power,” said Martin. “There you might be better than you think. And, I’m afraid this is going to be necessary, considerable command of tactics. I mean, political tactics. I don’t think you’ll like it, I don’t think Margaret will, but it’s going to need a good deal of politics to put Howard in the clear.”

“Perhaps you know more about that than I do—”

“I do, Julian.”

Martin was still explaining carefully. “This business is going to split the college from top to bottom. Anyone who’s seen anything of this kind of society would know that. Lewis knows it as well as I do. It will make the place unlivable in and do some of us a certain amount of harm into the bargain. And this is the last thing I want to say to you. I wouldn’t feel quite easy until I’d said it in so many words, before you plunge in. If you do plunge in, you’ve got to be ready for certain consequences to yourself. You’re bound to make yourself conspicuous. You’re bound to say things which people don’t want to hear. The odds are that it will damage your chances. Look, let me be brutal. I know you want your Fellowship renewed when it runs out. I know you’d like to be a fixture. I’d like you to be, too. But if you make too much of a nuisance of yourself, there’s going to be a cloud round the name of Skeffington. I don’t mean that they’d do anything flagrantly unjust, or which they thought was unjust. If you were Rutherford or Blackett or Rabi or G I Taylor, they would keep you as a Fellow even if you insulted the Master every night of your life. But most of us aren’t all that good. With most of us there is a perfectly genuine area of doubt about whether we’re really any better than the next man. And then, if there’s a cloud round your name, they’re liable to think, and it’s very hard to blame them, that perhaps they might let your Fellowship run out, and give someone else a go. Just as they might think, perfectly reasonably, that half a dozen people would do the Senior Tutorship as well or better than I should. So, if they have anything against us, the net result is liable to be that Skeffington is out, and M F Eliot doesn’t get promotion.”

“What does all that add up to?” said Skeffington.

“I just wanted you to know. If I’m going to take a risk myself, I like to reckon out the chances beforehand.”

“Do you seriously think any of that is going to keep me quiet?” Skeffington had flushed again, and he looked at Martin as though he despised him.

“No, I didn’t think so.”

“So you are going in up to the neck, are you?” Irene asked Skeffington.

“What else do you expect me to do?”

Suddenly she turned to her husband, and said: “What about you?”

Martin answered straight away: “Oh, there’s nothing for it. I shall have to help him as much as I can.”

“I knew you would! I knew you would!” Irene cried out, half in reproach, half in pleasure, still youthful, that he should do something dashing.

Of us all, Skeffington was the only one totally surprised. He sat with his mouth slightly open; I wondered if Martin remembered that our mother used a word for just that expression — “flabbergasted”. Just for an instant, Skeffington did not seem pleased to have a comrade; he had an expression of resentment, as if Martin had made a fool of him. He liked Martin, and he expected people he liked to behave like himself, simply and honourably. He had been led astray by Martin’s deviousness, his habit, growing on him as he became older, of giving nothing away.

Myself, I believed that Martin had two motives. The nearer one was to him, the more often he seemed hard, selfish, cautious, calculating. With his wife, for instance, he was so inconsiderate that it could be harassing to be in their house. And he could not stop himself planning the next move ahead on the chessboard of power. I was pretty sure that the rumours about him were right, that he had not been able to resist working out the combinations for the next magisterial election. I was pretty sure that he had decided it was worth trying for Brown as Master, so that if it came off, he could walk into the Senior Tutorship himself.

That was all true. But it was not all. There was something else within him which made him a more interesting man. At its roots it might not be more amiable than those other roots which made him a hard self-seeker; but it certainly made him more surprising and more capable of good. It was something like a curious kind of self-regard. He knew as well as anyone else that he was hard, selfish, obsessively careful: but he knew, what no one else did, that he had sometimes wanted to be different from that. This self-regard, “romantic” if you like, had twice in his life made him step right out of his ordinary casing. He had, as it were deliberately, made an imprudent marriage, not only by his own standards but by anyone else’s. He had been more than imprudent when humanity got the better of him and, with real power waiting on his table, he had quit the atomic establishment and come back to hide himself within the college.

Now he was doing it again. Not out of patrician high principle edged with contempt, as in Skeffington. Martin, who was not such a lofty character, had no contempt for his brother men. No, out of that special kind of self-regard, tinged with and disentangleable from his feeling that he had to be responsible. He did not like being pushed so — out of the predictable, calculating life, with its pickings, small-scale but predictable for years ahead. That would be disturbed now. He did not like it: that was why he had been so bad-tempered the night before. But he was pushed, and he could not stop himself.

That was one motive. The other, it seemed to me, was much simpler. Martin was a natural politician. Inside the college, there was no one in his class, except Arthur Brown. Like anyone with a set of unusual skills, Martin enjoyed using them. This was a perfect opportunity. He felt like an opening bowler on a moist morning, his first two fingers itching for the ball. It looked to Martin a situation adapted to his talents. Skeffington would certainly mishandle it. If anyone could take it through to success, Martin could.

There was one other thing, I thought. Martin enjoyed using his political skills. As a rule, he had used them for his own purposes, sometimes petty, often selfish. It was a treat for him — and I believed that unless one understood that, one didn’t understand him or other worldly men — to think of using them for a purpose which he felt, without any subtlety or complexity at all, to be nothing but good.

10: Preoccupation of a Distinguished Scientist

AS we sat in the sunny room after Irene had cried, “I knew you would,” Martin got down to tactics. He reiterated what he had already told Skeffington, that getting a majority to re-open the case was only the start. This wasn’t the sort of argument that would be settled by “counting heads”. The essential thing was to bring in men who would “carry weight”. Could Skeffington, or Martin himself, persuade Nightingale to stay neutral? Even after the night before, Martin thought it worth trying. Above all, Francis Getliffe was a key man. Get him active, and all the scientists, the Master included, would have to listen.

Within half an hour, Martin had telephoned the Cavendish, and he and Skeffington and I were on our way there. At first I was surprised that Martin had not only asked if I would care to come with them, but pressed me to. Then I realised that he had a reason. He wanted Francis at his easiest. He knew that with me Francis still sometimes talked like a young man, like the young man I still — with the illusion that invests a friend one has known since twenty — half-thought him to be. But his juniors in the college, even Martin, did not think of him in the least like that. To them — it struck me with one of the shocks of middle-age — he had become stiff and inaccessible.

Yet, when we had climbed up the steps of the old Cavendish, and walked down the dingy corridors to his room, we found him lit up with happiness. The room, which was not his laboratory but his office, was dark and shabby, a room that minor Civil Servants would have refused to live in. On the walls were graphs, scientific photographs, pictures of scientists, one of Rutherford. At one side stood two packing-cases covered with dust. On the desk, under two anglepoise lamps, were pinned down what looked like long stretches of photographic print, with up and down curves in white clear upon them.

“Have a look at this,” called Francis. No man could have been less stiff. “Isn’t this lovely?”

He explained to them, he explained to me as though I knew as much as they did, what he had found out. “It’s a new kind of source,” he was saying. “I’ve been keeping my fingers crossed, but this is it.”

They were all three talking quickly, Martin and Skeffington asking questions which were incomprehensible to me. Out of it all I gathered that he was “on to something”, not as big as his major work, but scientifically both unexpected and sharp-edged. He had made his name by research into the ionosphere, but since the war he had moved into radio astronomy; he was over fifty, he was keeping on at creative work when most of his contemporaries had stopped. As I watched him, his long face warm with delight, I thought this discovery was giving him as much joy as those of twenty years before — perhaps a purer joy, because then he had not satisfied his ambitions. Now he was free to be enraptured with the thing itself.

“Really it is beautiful,” he said. He smiled at us all, shamefaced because he was so happy.

Then reluctantly, in a sharp brisk tone, he broke off: “But I mustn’t go on talking all morning. I think you had something to see me about, Martin?”

“I’d rather go on with this,” said Martin.

“Oh, this can wait — that is, if your job is important. Is it?”

“In a way, it might be. But we want your advice on that.”

“You’d better go ahead.”

With dexterous care, Francis was fitting a plastic cover over the print; he was still studying the trace, and his eyes did not leave it as Martin spoke.

“As a matter of fact, it’s Julian’s show more than mine.”

“Well then?”

Skeffington began to explain, much as he had done on the night of Christmas Day. The story was better organised than it had been then; he had had time to get it into proportion. The instant he said that they had been blaming the wrong man, Francis looked up from the print. He gazed at Skeffington without any interruption or gesture, except to draw at his pipe. As he gazed, his expression, which had been happy, receptive and welcoming when we first saw him, changed so much that one did not know what to expect.

When Skeffington paused, Francis said in a harsh voice: “That all?”

“Yes, I think it puts you in the picture,” Skeffington replied. “Is that what you call it?” Francis broke out. “It’s just about the most incredible picture I’ve ever heard of.” He was flushed with resentment. His courtesy, which was usually just a shade more formal than most of ours, had quite left him, and he was speaking to Skeffington with the special hostility kept for those who bring bad news. In fact, he spoke to Skeffington as though he, and only he, were the culprit and that it was his duty to obliterate the bad news and restore the peace of the morning.

“What do you mean, incredible?” said Martin, in a conversational tone. “Do you mean it’s incredible that we’ve all been such fools?”

“I should like to be told when we stop being fools,” Francis snapped. Then he tried to collect himself. In a level, reasonable voice, but his face still stern, he said to Skeffington: “Don’t you see that your explanation is very hard to credit?”

Skeffington had become angry too. He answered back: “Then are you prepared to make a better one?”

“From what you’ve told me, I shouldn’t have thought it was beyond the wit of man.”

“If we’d believed that,” said Skeffington, “we shouldn’t have come to waste your time.”

I said something, and Francis was sharp with me: “Lewis, you’re not a scientist, after all.”

“If you studied the evidence, what else do you think you could make of it?” said Skeffington. He had begun his exposition with much deference towards Francis, and now, though he looked angry and baited, the deference had not all gone.

Francis ignored the question and spoke coldly and sensibly: “Don’t you want to realise how this is bound to strike anyone who isn’t committed one way or the other?”

“We not only want to realise that, we’ve got to,” said Martin.

Was he as puzzled as I was by Francis’ response? He did not know him so well: perhaps that made it less mystifying to Martin than to me. But he was certainly at a loss to know how to get on terms with Francis, and was feeling his way.

“Remind me,” Francis said to Skeffington, “who acted as referees on Howard’s work when we elected him?”

“There was one external — old Palairet, naturally. One internal — Nightingale. I was asked to write a note along with Nightingale’s. Of course, I was still a new boy myself.”

“And you and Nightingale reported on his work when we dismissed him. That’s fair enough. But you admit that it isn’t precisely convincing when you suddenly tell us that you and Nightingale have ceased to agree?”

“He’s not got a leg to stand on—”

“That won’t do,” said Francis. “He knew as much as you did about the whole background, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“And you showed him the new data and told him your explanation, and he didn’t think there was much in it?”

“He didn’t think there was anything in it,” said Skeffington.

“Well, there it is,” said Francis. “If you’re going to attack the memory of a distinguished old man, you’ll want something firmer than that.”

“The facts are firm,” Skeffington broke out.

Martin spoke quietly and fairly, still trying to persuade Francis to match his tone: “At any rate, they’re as firm as one could expect. If only that photograph weren’t missing.”

“Presuming that there was ever a faked photograph there,” said Francis.

“Presuming that. Given that photograph, I should have thought there was enough evidence to satisfy a court of law. What do you think, Lewis?”

I also set out to be fair.

“It would be a terribly difficult case for an ordinary court, of course. Too much would depend on the technical witnesses. But I think I agree with Martin. I believe that if that photograph weren’t missing, a court would probably see that Howard was cleared. Without it — without it he wouldn’t stand more than an even chance.”

Francis looked from Martin to me, but without any sign that he was willing to talk our language. He said to Skeffington: “I take it Nightingale knows all the facts you know, by now?”

“He’s seen everything.”

“And he still doesn’t admit the facts are firm?”

“I told you right at the beginning. I didn’t want to give you any false impression. Nightingale wouldn’t admit to me — and I hear he said the same a good deal more strongly when these two were at the Lodge — he wouldn’t admit that the facts add up to anything.”

For some instants Francis sat silent. Somewhere in the room a clock gave a lurching, clonking tick: I thought I had noticed it as we came in, tapping out the half-minutes, but I did not look round. I was watching Francis’ expression. Despite his strong will, he hadn’t any of the opacity that I was used to in men of affairs. By their side his nerves were too near the surface. When in the war he was successful among men of affairs, it had been through will and spirit, not through the weight of nature most of them had. As he sat at his desk, faced with a situation that colleagues of mine like Hector Rose would have taken in their stride without a blink, the shadows of his thoughts chased themselves over his face as theirs never would. His expression was upset and strained, out of proportion, much more than Skeffington’s or Martin’s had been at any time in the last few days. As he sat there, his eyes clouded, his lips pulled themselves in as though he had had a new thought more vexing than the rest.

At last he said, putting his hands on the table, making his voice hearty and valedictory: “Well, that seems as far as we can go just now.” He continued, in the same dismissive tone, but deliberately, as though he had been working out the words: “My advice to you” — he was speaking to Skeffington — “is to keep on at Nightingale and see if you can’t convince each other of the points that are still left in the air. By far the best thing would be for the two of you to produce a combined report. The essential thing is that the two of you ought to agree. Then I’m sure nearly all the rest of us would accept your recommendation, whether you wanted us to stay put or take some action. In fact, I’m sure that’s the only satisfactory way out, either for you or the rest of us.”

“Do you think it’s likely?” Martin asked sharply, pressing him for the first time.

“That I don’t know.”

Francis’ thoughts had turned into themselves again. Martin rose to go. He knew they were getting nowhere: it would be a mistake to test Francis any more that day. But Skeffington, although he got up too, was not acquiescing. In an impatient, aggrieved tone, he said to Francis: “When you mentioned me changing my mind about the explanation, you don’t seriously think that’s on the cards, do you? You don’t seriously think that now I’ve had this evidence through my hands, I could possibly change my mind, do you? If you still think I could, why don’t you have a look at the evidence for yourself?”

“No,” said Francis. “I’ve got enough to do without that.”

He had replied bleakly. When he was opening the door for us he said to Skeffington, as though intending to take the edge off the refusal: “You see, these new results of mine are taking up all my time. But if you and Nightingale do a report, either alone or together, then I’ll be glad to have a look at that.”

11: Looking Out into the Dark

THAT night, when we were back in our flat in London and the children had gone to bed, Margaret told me that she would like to write to Laura Howard. Just as Skeffington felt on Christmas Day, she wanted them to be sure she was on their side.

“Do you mind?” she asked, her eyes steady and clear. She would take care not to harm me; but she was irking to act, springy on her feet with restlessness. She was more headstrong than the rest of us.

“I’m thinking of writing to her fairly soon,” said Margaret speculatively, as though it might be within the next month, while she was moving with the certainty of a sleep-walker towards her typewriter.

During the weeks which followed, she heard several times from Laura, and it was in that way that I kept an insight into the tactics. Nothing had come of Francis Getliffe’s idea of a combined report. It became common knowledge that both Skeffington and Nightingale were writing to the Master on their own. Before either report was in, the sides were forming. They were still three or four votes short of a majority for re-opening the case. By the end of January Skeffington’s report was known to be complete and in the Master’s hands. It was said to go into minute detail and to run to a hundred pages of typescript. (I wondered how Martin had let that pass.) Nightingale’s, which was delivered a little later, was much shorter. Within the college, these reports were not secret and any Fellow could read them who chose. But it had been agreed, for security reasons, that there should only be three copies of each in existence.

Laura’s letters were a curious mixture of business-like information and paranoia. Margaret said: “Has it ever struck you that when people get persecution mania, they usually have a good deal to feel persecuted about?”

It all seemed to be going slowly, but on the lines one could have forecast. It was clear that Martin could not risk putting forward a formal motion for re-opening until he had his majority secure.

One Friday evening in February, I arrived home later than usual, tired and jaded. It was raining hard, and I had had to walk from Marble Arch the quarter of a mile or so along the Bayswater Road. The warmth of the flat was comforting. From the nursery I could hear Margaret playing with the little boy. I went into the drawing-room looking forward to the quiet, and there, sitting under the standard lamp by the window, the light full on her face, was Laura Howard.

I saw her with surprise, and with something stronger than surprise, involuntary recoil. I had a phobia of entering a room expecting to be by myself, and finding someone there. For an instant I was inclined to gibber. Was Margaret looking after her? I asked, my tongue feeling too large for my mouth, resentfully wishing to push her out, knowing — what usually I did not know at all — exactly what it is to be pathologically shy. Of course Margaret was looking after her, said Laura, firm, composed, utterly unflirtatious. She added: “We’ve been putting our heads together.”

“Have you?”

“I’m not satisfied with the way things are going. I don’t want them to get stuck, and they will get stuck unless we’re careful.”

I was recovering myself. She did not think of explaining what “things” were. She was as single-minded as ever. I had never seen a woman of her age so inseparably fused into her husband’s life. She sat there, pretty, healthy, and most men would have felt that beneath her skin there was the inner glow of a sensual, active, joyous woman. Most men would have also known that none of that inner glow was for them.

When Margaret came in, she heard Laura repeating that “things were getting stuck”.

“Yes,” said Margaret, glancing at me guiltily, her colour high, “Laura rang me up and so I thought it might be useful if she came along.”

“I see,” I said.

“Would you like to hear what she’s been telling me?”

I could not refuse.

Succinctly, competently, Laura brought out something new. According to “information from the other side”, there had been a suggestion that, if the feeling became strong enough, the Seniors ought to offer to re-open the case before a majority asked for it. I nodded my head. That sounded reasonable, precisely the sort of step that experienced men would consider. Apparently the suggestion had been made by Crawford first, and “the other side”, or rather, the more influential members, Arthur Brown, Nightingale and Winslow, had spent some time discussing it. Now they had decided that it wasn’t necessary: the feeling was not more than “a storm in a teacup”, it would soon blow over. All they had to do was “stick in their heels”.

Even the phrases sounded right.

“Your intelligence service is pretty good, isn’t it?” I said to Laura.

“I think it is.”

“Where does it come from?”

“I’m not at liberty to say,” she replied without a blench.

She was not worried. The situation was less promising than three weeks before — “We’ve gone backwards,” she said. But, like so many active people, like Margaret herself, she was freed from worry just by taking action. Why had things deteriorated, I was trying to get her to explain. So far as I could gather, it must have been the effect of the reports. Nightingale’s seemed to have been fair in tone, but uncompromising in its conclusion, and that had gone home.

What were Martin and Skeffington doing? I asked her. Martin was “plugging on”. She did not complain of the way he was handling the tactics. To her, men were good or bad. Skeffington and Martin, who had been bad men the first time she came to our house, had now been transformed into good. When she trusted, she trusted absolutely. But she wanted “to put on some more pressure”. One waverer had decided not to vote for re-opening: they were now four short of a majority. Who was against, of the people I knew, I asked? The old men and the reactionaries, she said with passion (whether she started with any politics I could not tell, but she had taken over her husband’s), Arthur Brown, Winslow, Nightingale of course. One or two — such as Gay, because he was “too old to understand”, and Crawford from magisterial neutrality — would not vote either way, but that was equivalent to voting against. The “young reactionaries”, like G S Clark and Lester Ince, were flat against. So was Tom Orbell. As she mentioned his name, Laura swore and Margaret joined in. Abusing him, they made a united front — “Blast the fat snake,” said Margaret.

Francis Getliffe? I asked. Laura cursed again. “He’s still sitting on the fence.” She gave an account, second-hand from her husband, with the pained, knowing smile of the innocent being cynical, of how one can never trust people who pretend to be liberal. They were always the worst. It seemed hardly tactful of her, since she was disposing of Margaret, Martin, and, Skeffington apart, their entire side.

Meanwhile Margaret was frowning, not because Laura was being heavy-footed, but because Francis was a favourite of hers. Of my old friends, he was the one she respected most.

While Laura was with us, Margaret did not ask me anything direct. I could see that she was anxious for Laura to go. Once or twice Laura missed her cue. Then Margaret promised to ring her up during the week, and at last we were alone.

I had gone to the window, and was looking down on the road, over the centre of which the vapour lamps were swinging in the wind. A bare and lurid glimmer reached the trees opposite, but it was too dark to make out the fringes of the park. As I stood there, Margaret had put her arm round me.

“This isn’t going too well, is it?” she said.

“Well, it looks as though it might take some time.”

“Is that fair?”

“I should have thought so.” I was being evasive, and we both knew it. She wanted us to be loving, but she was too much committed to stop.

“No,” she said. “Doesn’t it look as though it might go wrong?”

“Everything that can be done is being done, you needn’t worry about that. Martin knows that place like the palm of his hand.”

“But it can go wrong, can’t it?”

“However do I know?”

Just for an instant, she smiled at me, the smile of marriage, the smile of knowledge. Then, with all her ardour, she broke out: “Do you feel like taking a hand yourself?”

She knew, just as well as I did, that I should be cross, should feel trapped. She had known that, when she let Laura stay there, so that I was plunged into the middle of it. She knew, better than I did because she had struggled with it, how I disliked a choice forced upon me, not approached by myself “in my freedom”. Now she had done precisely that.

The choice was there. Left to myself I could have blurred it. I wasn’t unused to living with situations which were morally ambiguous, or aspects of myself that I didn’t specially like. I didn’t have so much self-regard as Martin, and thus I hadn’t so much compulsion to make a gesture. I had lived for a long time in the corridors of power. It was a condition of living there that the gestures were not made. Most of my colleagues, the men who had the power, would not have considered interfering about Howard. They would have said it wasn’t the business of anyone outside the college. They were not cynical, but they kept their eyes on the sheet of paper in front of them. They were not in the least cynical: they believed, quite humbly though comfortingly for themselves, that “the world was usually right”.

I was too much of an odd man out to believe that. In fact, doing so seemed to me one of the less dramatic but most dangerous of all the temptations of power. Yet I had lived that disciplined life for nearly twenty years. Perhaps I was the last person to see the changes it made, just as one doesn’t see the changes in one’s own face, and then, in a photograph, notices an ageing man — can that be me?

I could fairly think to myself that I had no responsibility about Howard. It just was not my business. If I did as Margaret was pressing me, some of my old friends would resent it, because I was being a busybody. They would resent it more, incidentally, because I was being a busybody on the opposition side. I was not likely to be in Arthur Brown’s confidence again. That would be a sacrifice, nothing like so heavy a one as Skeffington risked in the line of duty, but still a sacrifice. Why should I make it, when I had lost any taste for exhibition that I ever had, when I plain disliked even the prospect of being thought officious?

If I had added up the arguments, there would scarcely have seemed any in favour. True, I was inquisitive, acutely so, and my inquisitiveness was not weakening: the only way I could satisfy it in this business was to get right inside. Also I knew, and I knew it with the wreckage and guilt of part of my life behind me, that there were always good, sound, human, sensitive reasons for contracting out. There is great dignity in being a spectator: and if you do it for long enough, you are dead inside. I knew that too well, because it was only by luck that I had escaped.

As I stood there, though, gazing down on the road, Margaret’s arm round me, I was not searching down into my experience. I was merely aware of a kind of heavy vexation. I was thinking, I had met few people who, made aware beyond all self-deception of an inconvenient fact, were not at its mercy. Hypocrites who saw the naked truth and acted quite contrary — they were a romantic conception. Those whom we call hypocrites simply had a gift for denying to themselves what the truth was. On this occasion, that was a gift which I did not possess.

I said to Margaret, ungraciously, that I would think it over. She had heard me say, often enough, that choices never took as long to make as we pretend: the time was taken in finding the reasons to justify them. She was watching me, face averted, looking out into the dark. She knew precisely what was going on. She knew that I was fretted and sullen because she had not let me evade, or put off, the choice — and that I was not willing to admit to her that it was already made.

12: The Stare of Delusion

THERE was another result of the disciplined life, I thought when I was in a better mood, as well as its temptations. It was a week before I could manoeuvre even a day or two free in Cambridge. So far as leisure went, I was living my life backwards: while Martin and the others in the college were no more tied than I had been as a young man.

On the Thursday afternoon following Laura’s visit, Martin, to whom I had telephoned, had arranged for us both to meet Howard at his school. My train was late: the taxi slithered through the wet streets, the shop windows already spilling pools of light on to the pavement; through the streets of Romsey town, in which I could not recall, in my time at Cambridge, having been before, which seemed as remote from the collegiate Cambridge as the town where I was born. The school was right at the edge of the suburb: as the taxi drove up, there outside the gates, in the February murk, stood Martin.

He wanted a word about some questions we should ask Howard. While the rain drizzled on us, we agreed how to try it. Then we started to push our way through crowds of children, rushing and squealing into the corridor, just set free from the last lesson of the afternoon.

A boy took us into the physics classroom, where Howard was sitting on the lecture table. As we went in, he muttered some sort of greeting, but, if he looked at us, it was only out of the corner of his eye. To make conversation I said, glancing round the room, that it was an improvement on those I had been taught in as a boy.

“If they had some apparatus,” said Howard, “you might begin to talk.”

“Still, it’s better than nothing—”

“Not much,” he said.

That seemed the end of that. It was, in fact — I was gazing round for want of anything to say — a model of a room, new, bright, shining, with seats at a good rake and windows taking up the two side walls. On the blackboard behind the table Howard had been writing: the smell of chalk hung in the air. His writing was high, stiff, broken-backed. There were calculations I couldn’t follow: this must have been a sixth-form lesson. One word stuck out — “inductence”. Could that be right? It didn’t seem possible, even in scientific English. Was he one of those people, without visual memory, who just couldn’t spell?

“Can we talk here?” said Martin.

“I don’t see why not.”

Martin settled himself against one of the desks in the front row.

“I don’t think I’ve got any news for you yet awhile—” he began.

“Why did you want to see me, then?”

“There are one or two things we’d like to ask—”

“I’m sick and tired of going over stuff you know as well as I do,” said Howard, not meeting Martin’s eye, staring unfocused beyond the darkening windows.

“It’s mainly for my benefit,” I said.

“I’m not clear where you come in.”

“Perhaps Lewis had better tell you,” said Martin, glancing at me.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s very simple. I should like to say that I believe you are in the right in this business. I’m sorry that I doubted you before. If I can be of any use at this stage, I should like to do what I can.”

For an instant, Howard’s eye flickered in my direction and then away again. He said: “You don’t expect me to be exactly overcome with gratitude, do you?”

As a rule I was not touchy, but Howard had a knack of getting under my skin. Martin intervened.

“Come off it, Donald.” His tone was hard but comradely. “We’ve got enough to cope with, without you.”

Howard, whose head had been turned away, brought it round to face us: but it sank down on to his chest and he was gazing, not at the window, but at his feet.

“Anyway,” he said, without a mollifying word, “I don’t see what you can do.”

He was speaking to me, and I replied: “I’ve known some of these people a long time. I’ve arranged to see Francis Getliffe tomorrow morning, I thought it might be worthwhile.”

“A fat lot of good that will do.”

“I’m glad you’re doing that—” Martin was saying, but Howard interrupted: “I don’t believe in seeing these people. The facts are on paper. They can read, can’t they? Well, let them get on with it.”

The curious thing was that, though he spoke with such surliness, he was full of hope. It wasn’t simply one of those flashes of random hope that come to anyone in trouble. This was a steady hope that he had kept from the beginning. At the same time he managed to be both suspicious and childishly hopeful.

Martin started to question him about the missing photograph. It seemed to be old ground for both of them, but new to me. Had Howard still no idea when old Palairet could have taken such a photograph? Had he never seen one which fitted the caption at the bottom? Couldn’t he make his memory work and find anything that would help?

“I’m not a lawyer,” he said, gibing at me, “it’s no use asking me to cook up a nicer story.”

“That isn’t specially valuable, even in the law,” I replied. Martin, who knew him better, was rougher with him.

“We’re not asking you that. We’re asking you to use what you’re pleased to call your mind.”

For the first time that evening Howard grinned.

I went on to say that anything he could tell us about Palairet might be a point in argument. Even people whose minds were not closed couldn’t be swung over until they had some idea what had happened. None of us seemed to have a completely clear idea: I certainly hadn’t myself.

“Why should you think I have?” asked Howard. “I didn’t have anything to do with him apart from the work. He was always decent to me. I don’t pay any attention to what other people say about a man. I take him as I find him, and by how he is to me.”

“And you’re satisfied with the result?” I could not resist saying, but he did not see the point. He described how Palairet had given him the photograph which he had used in his thesis — the photograph with the dilated pin-marks. According to Howard, Palairet had said that it would “help out” the experimental evidence. Howard had not wondered for an instant whether it was genuine or not. He had just taken it with gratitude. Even now, he could not imagine when Palairet had faked the photograph. He said, with a curiously flat obstinacy, that he was not certain it was a conscious fake at all.

“What else could it be?” said Martin sharply.

“Oh, just an old man being silly.”

“No,” said Martin.

I was thinking that Howard was one of the two or three worst witnesses I had listened to. So bad that it seemed he could not be so bad. Once or twice I found myself doubting my own judgment.

Howard said that he had seen another photograph of the same kind: he had repeated that often enough. But this photograph could not have been the one missing from the notebook. Whatever the photograph in the notebook had been, he had never seen it.

“You’re positive about that?” I said.

“Of course I am.”

“It’s a pity,” said Martin.

“Then it’s got to be a pity,” said Howard.

Martin said, “If that photograph was still in the notebook, there might have been a bit of resistance but there’s no doubt we should have got you home in the end.”

As Martin spoke, not with any special edge, saying something which we all knew, Howard’s expression had undergone a change. His eyes had widened so that one could see rims of white round the pupils; the sullen, dead-pan, sniping obstinacy had all gone; instead his face seemed stretched open, tightly strained, so exposed that he had lost control over his eyes and voice. In a high, grating tone he said: “Perhaps that’s why it isn’t there.”

“What do you mean?” Martin asked him.

“Perhaps the people who wanted to get at me found it convenient to get rid of that photograph. Perhaps it isn’t an accident that it isn’t there.”

I had heard someone, in. a state of delusion, speak just like that. Martin and I glanced at each other. Martin nodded. We both knew what had to be said, and Martin began: “You must never say anything like that again. That is, if you want to have a fighting chance. We can’t do anything for you, we couldn’t even take the responsibility of going on, if there’s the slightest risk of your saying that again.”

“I don’t see why not.”

“It’s time you did,” said Martin. I broke in: “Don’t you see that it’s a very serious accusation? Don’t you see that, if it once got round the college, you’d have to answer for it—”

“So would the people who were standing up for you,” said Martin. “Either you cut it out, or we should have to wash our hands of the whole business.”

Without speaking, without any sign of acquiescence, Howard had lost the wild open look. He had slumped back again, his eyes looking at his feet, his head on his chest.

“All right?” said Martin.

Howard raised his eyes and Martin was satisfied. The classroom clock showed five to six, and he said that it was time to go out for a drink. As he led us out of the room, Martin said: “All aboard,” like a cricket captain calling his men out to field, or like an old leader of mine before we went into court. He could put on that kind of heartiness very easily. That evening, it worked better with Howard than anything I could have done. In the pub, he was less suspicious than I had seen him. It was a new and shining pub, as bright, as freshly built as the school. Among the chromium plate and the pin-tables, Howard sank into a corner as though he were for the time being safe, and put down a pint of bitter. The second tankard was soon in front of him, and he was replying almost good-naturedly to Martin, who had abandoned his normal carefulness and was questioning him head on. Did he like teaching? Yes, said Howard surprisingly, he wouldn’t have minded making his career at it. Why had he settled in a Cambridge school? Was it just to embarrass the college? Howard, who had previously shown no sense of humour, thought that was a good joke.

Martin, who had drunk a couple of pints himself, asked if he were deliberately following the good old college pattern. There had only been one other Fellow in living memory who had ever been dismissed. Did Howard know the story? Howard, prepared to think Martin a remarkably good comedian, said no. Martin said that he was disappointed. He had hoped Howard was following suit. The story was that during the ’90s, the college had elected someone from outside, actually from as far away as Oxford, as a Fellow. He had turned out to be an alcoholic of a somewhat dramatic kind, and his pupils, attending for supervision at five o’clock, had found him not yet out of bed and with empty bottles on the floor. So the college sacked him. He had promptly married a publican’s daughter and set up in a fish-and-chip shop two hundred yards from the college’s side gate. I remembered hearing the story used, forty years later, by one of the old men as an argument against electing a Fellow from outside.

“Don’t you admit the precedent is rather close?” Martin said to Howard. “You must have decided that by staying in Cambridge you could make more of a nuisance of yourself. Now didn’t you?”

“Oh, well,” said Howard, “if I’d cleared out it would have made things easier for them. I was damned if I could see why I should.”

That reminded me of another question, which Nightingale had brought up at the Lodge.

“In that case,” I said, “I wonder you didn’t think of appealing to the Visitor, and then bringing an action for wrongful dismissal.”

“I did think of it.”

“Why didn’t you bring it, then?”

“Should I have won it?”

“I don’t think so. But it wouldn’t have made things easier for them, would it?”

He hedged. He did not want to answer straight. I was nothing like so good with him as Martin was. He prevaricated, became embarrassed and wrapped up in his own thoughts. He said that he had preferred other methods. I did not begin to understand why he was suddenly so shy. I asked again: “I should have thought, when nothing happened, you might have brought an action?”

“I wasn’t keen on washing this kind of dirty linen in public.” That was all I could get out of him. After we had all three taken a bus into the town, he left us in the Market Place. He offered to drop my bag in the college, where I was sleeping, since I wanted to go off with Martin to have supper at his house.

“Do you mind?” I said.

“Do I mind putting my head in the porter’s lodge,” said Howard, prickly but not at his most offensive, “is that what you mean? The answer is, I don’t.”

As Martin and I were walking towards the Backs, Martin said: “Not as useful as it might have been, was it?” He meant the last few hours.

“Have you ever got anything more out of him?”

“Nothing to speak of.” Martin went on: “I suppose we might have got someone more difficult to work for, but off-hand I can’t think of one.”

Then he asked, how was I going to handle Francis Getliffe next day? He thought I ought to come right out in the open, and say that we should probably never be able to prove our case “down to the last drawing-pin”. Without the second photograph we could not do it. With a man like Francis, it would be a mistake to minimise the difficulties or try to cover up where we were weak.

As we planned, each of us felt kinship and a curious kind of support. It was comforting — it was more than comforting, it was an active pleasure — to be at one, to be using our wits on the same side.

13: Turns Across the Lawn

THE next morning after breakfast, I was looking out of the guest room window into the Fellows’ garden when Francis Getliffe arrived. The trees were bare, the branches were not stirring. It seemed to be a windless day with the cloud-cap very low. Francis said that it was warm outside, we might as well walk in the garden, I should not need a coat.

The turf was soft with rain, still springy under our feet, brilliant as moss. In the flower-bed to our right I could not see a single flower, not even the last of the snowdrops. We were walking slowly, but Francis nevertheless moved with lunging strides, a foot longer than mine, although he was two or three inches the shorter man.

We had not gone far, we had not gone out of the formal garden into the “wilderness”, when Francis said: “I think I know what you’ve come for.”

“Do you?”

“It doesn’t really need an inspired guess, does it?” Then he said, stiffly and proudly, “I’m going to save you a certain amount of trouble. I’d better say straight away that I regard myself as very much to blame. I’m sorry that I’ve delayed so long. There’s no doubt about it, Martin and Skeffington have produced a case that no one has got a serious answer to yet. I’m sorry that I didn’t tell them so, when they first came to see me. The sooner this business is cleared up, the better.”

I felt a sense of anticlimax, a sense of absurd let-down, as though I had put my shoulder against a door which was on the latch. Also I felt embarrassed, because Francis was so ashamed of himself, stiff with me because he was ashamed.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“It’s done.”

“What have you done?”

“I’ve just sent this out. It went off before I came to see you.”

“This” was a mimeographed note with “Confidential: to All Fellows” in the top left-hand corner. It read: “I have now studied the new evidence relating to the thesis and publications of D C Howard and the notebooks of the late C J B Palairet, FRS. In my view, Dr Skeffington is right in representing that there is a case to answer. I think it is urgent that the college should request the Court of Seniors to consider this case without delay. FEG. 19.2.54.”

This note, as I knew, would be taken round by the college messenger. It would reach most of the Fellows by the lunchtime delivery, and all of them that day.

“I should have thought,” I said, “that ought to collect the majority for re-opening the case, anyway.”

“I should hope so,” Francis said.

“I notice you don’t say that you’re a hundred per cent convinced yourself?”

“That was as far as I felt inclined to go.”

In silence we walked through to the inner lawn, right at the bottom of the garden, close to the college wall. In the greenhouse in the corner great carnations shone into the aqueous morning, into the green and grey. Francis suddenly broke out, his voice tight with anger: “This man Howard must be as stupid as they come.”

I asked what had gone wrong now. Francis paid no attention and went on: “I want you to realise one thing. It’s his fault we’ve got into this absurd position. I mean by that, if he had had the scientific judgment of a newt, he’d never have taken the old man’s experiments on trust. It’s almost unbelievable that anyone working in his field accepted them without having another look. If Howard’s innocent, which I’m inclined to think he is, then he must break all records for stupidity. I must say, there are times when stupidity seems to me the greater crime.”

We did another turn across the lawn. Francis broke out again: “Of course, we never ought to have elected him in the first place.”

I told him, because I wanted to make him easier, that that reminded me of his father-in-law on an occasion we both knew, looking for a first cause. Francis gave a reluctant grin, but his voice did not soften.

“Now we’ve got to clear up this mess,” he said. “All I hope is that it doesn’t take too long.”

“Why is the time it takes worrying you so much?”

I asked him straight out, not knowing whether he wanted to reply. We had been friendly for nearly thirty years, and I had not seen him at such a disadvantage before. I was bewildered to know why. True, he didn’t like being wrong, even less than most of us. Like most men of his granite-like integrity, he had a streak of vanity inextricably fused within it. He did not like falling below the standard he set himself, either in his own eyes or anyone else’s. He did not like my having to make this visit, to remind him of his duty. It was the first time it had happened, though several times in our friendship he had reminded me of mine. None of that seemed to explain a malaise as strong as his, as we walked backwards and forwards across the lawn. We had walked like that before. The inner lawn was not overlooked by any window, and as young men we used to go there at night and talk out our plans or troubles undisturbed.

After a time, he said in a voice no longer angry but quiet and surprised: “You’re quite right. I didn’t want any friction in this place just now.”

I did not say anything. On the next turn he went on: “I’m afraid it’s only too simple. When those two came to see me, I wasn’t as completely impressed by their case as they were. That was genuine, and to a limited extent it still is. But if I’d been reasonably responsible, I should have got down to what they had to say. The fact was, Lewis, I didn’t want to.”

He was speaking with the candour, the freshness, which sometimes comes to men not given to introspection when they talk about themselves.

“No, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want the risk of making myself unpleasant to everyone who counts for anything here. I just didn’t want to blot my copybook. I needn’t tell you why, need I?”

I did not say anything.

“You know, Winslow and Nightingale and those others, they’re my backers. The election’s coming on this autumn, and the fact of the matter is” — he hesitated — “I should like it.”

As we turned, he went on: “The curious thing is, I can’t really tell why I should like it so much. I should make a pretty fair job of it, as good as anyone else they’re likely to put in the Lodge, by and large. But that doesn’t come into it. It’s not really the sort of thing that matters to me, I should have said. All I seriously wanted was to do some adequate research and leave some sort of record behind me. Well, I haven’t done as much as I should have liked, but I’ve done something. I believe I’ve got ten more years’ work in me, and I shall do some more. The work’s come off pretty well, all things considered. Looking back to the time we both started, I should have been moderately content with what I’ve been able to do. That’s all that ought to matter. As for the rest, I’ve had more than my share of the honours going round. I didn’t think I was specially greedy: and so why should I want the Mastership into the bargain? But I do, you know. Enough to make me put up a disgraceful exhibition about this wretched case.”

As we went on walking, in a silence more relaxed than before, I was thinking, I could have given him one reason why he wanted it. Francis, who had gone through so many struggles, in college, in government, even in public, was not a rebel by nature. His politics had come through duty and intellect, not through a passion of nonconformity, not even through that residue of identification with those outside, pushing their noses against the shop-window, that I, on the surface a more compromising man than Francis, and one who had lived closer to the Establishment, still preserved. In the long run Francis, who out of principle would stick out as one dissenting voice in the council of the Royal or any group of respectable bosses, wished to end his days with them. His intellect, his duty, would not let him alter his opinions, but in a curious sense he wanted to be “respectable”, and to be received by the respectable. He would be soothed, a final uneasiness assuaged, if the men he had argued with so long, the Winslows and Nightingales and Arthur Browns, made him Master. He still would not qualify anything he said: but he would have come home.

Suddenly I was reminded of another person who, comically different in temperament, also wished for what Francis did. It was Irene, who in her youth had been a reckless man chaser and who now wanted nothing better than for her and her husband to end up staidly in the Lodge. The resemblance pleased me, but, as I walked with Francis in the quiet damp garden — his face lighter but surprised because he had made a confession, the first I had heard from him, his voice comradely and quite free from resentment, as though glad to have me there — I did not tell him so.

14: Two Views of Retirement

AFTER Francis, there was no one else I had arranged to see that Friday until I dined in hall. So in the afternoon, with nothing to do, I went on a round of bookshops. It was in the third of these, not Heifer’s, not Bowes and Bowes, that, as I was glancing at the latest little magazine, I heard a voice I used to know well.

“I’m sure you’re right. I’m sure you’ve laid your finger on it.”

The voice was plummy, thick and muffled, but it spoke warmly, with teasing affection. I was standing by the rack of periodicals near the door: as I looked up I saw in the inner room, just visible behind the main display shelf Paul Jago talking to his wife.

As I looked up, so did he. I was certain that he had seen me. But he darted his eyes back to his wife, talked to her rapidly and intimately as though pretending that they were quite alone, as though hoping that I should not notice or disturb them.

Should I slip out, I thought? It would be easy to get into the street, so that he would not be embarrassed. Then I revolted. I had known him well once, and had been fond of him. He had been Senior Tutor during my time at the college and had just missed the Mastership, when Crawford was elected. That had been a traumatic blow to him. He had gone on with his routine duties, but he had given up dining and — so I had heard — no one, not even his closest friends, had seen much of him.

I went into the inner room and said: “Well. It’s a long time since we met.”

Not for ten years, not since Roy Calvert’s memorial service. Jago’s appearance had altered since then, but in a way I could not define. He had always looked older than his age, and now his age was catching up with him; he was bald, the fringe of hair had gone quite white, but he was sixty-eight and looked no more. His cheeks and neck were fleshy, but the moods seemed close beneath the skin, so that his expressions were liquid, and even now one could not say that it was a sad face. Behind thick lenses his eyes were still brilliant.

“Why, it’s you!” he cried. Even though he was prevaricating, even though he wanted to evade me, he could not help the warmth flowing out.

Then I thought I saw what had changed. He had become much fatter, but fatter in a way that did not suggest self-indulgence. As a younger man he had had a paunch, but moved lightly: now he showed that special kind of discouraged heaviness which sometimes seems linked with a life of dissatisfaction or strain.

“Darling,” he turned to his wife with an elaborate mixture of protectiveness, courtesy and love, “I think you remember—” Formally he introduced me. “I think you know him, don’t you?”

Of course she knew me. I must have been inside her house twenty or thirty times. But she dropped her eyes, gave me a limp hand and what appeared to be her idea of a grande dame being gracious to someone who might, in the multitude of her acquaintances, conceivably be one.

“Do you spend much time in Cambridge—?” and she addressed me in full style as though it were a condescension on her part.

“I think he’s kept pretty busy in Whitehall,” said Jago. She knew it perfectly well.

“I wish we could offer you better weather,” said Alice Jago. “Cambridge can look very attractive at this time of year.”

Now she was speaking as if I did not know the town. She too had grown fatter, but she was stronger-boned and muscled than her husband and could carry it better. She was a big woman with a plain, white, anxious face. She had a sensibility so tight-drawn that she could detect a snub if one said good morning in the wrong tone; but it was the kind of sensibility which took it for granted that though her own psychological skin was so thin, everyone else walked about in armour. She was so insecure that the world seemed full of enemies. In fact, she had made many. She had done her husband much harm all through his career. But for her, he might have got the Mastership. They both knew it.

His manner to her, which had always been tender, had become more so. When he spoke, he was trying to make her happy, and even while he listened to her he seemed to be taking care of her.

“How are you?” I asked him.

“I’ve quite retired now, I’m thankful to say.”

“He has to spend all his time with me,” said Mrs Jago.

“We’re reading all the books that we’ve always wanted to read,” said Jago. “I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.”

I asked: “Do you see any of our old friends?”

“Oh, I run into them now and then,” said Jago. He said it as though he wished to drop the subject.

“Don’t you think they miss him?” I let slip the remark to Alice Jago.

“If you think I try to prevent my husband going to the college, then you’re very much mistaken.”

“No,” said Jago, “I was glad when I’d shaken hands with my last pupil. The chains had been chafing for a long time, can you understand that? When I used to go into my study in the morning, for my first tutorial hour, I used to think, I shall only have to do this another thousand times. Then another hundred. Then another ten.”

I had seen many people get through years of routine, and come to their last day. Nearly all of them were sad. I asked, didn’t he feel just a tinge of regret at the end?

“Not for a single instant,” said Jago with a flash of pride. “No, I felt that for a good many years I had been wasting too much of my life. Now I was ceasing to. And I was also ceasing to be reminded of some associations that I should willingly forget.”

He looked at me. He was a man of quick human sympathy and recognised it in others. He knew that I had followed him.

“Mind you,” he went on, “I’d taken care not to be reminded of them more than I could help. It was one thing to go on with my pupils and do my best for them. It was quite another to inflict myself on some of our colleagues. I hadn’t seen some of them for years, apart from college meetings, which I couldn’t cut until I gave up office—”

“And now you needn’t go to any more of them,” cried Alice Jago triumphantly.

“I think I can bear that deprivation, don’t you?” he said to me.

“I suppose, while you were still attending, you heard of this Howard business, didn’t you?”

I hesitated about trying it. Mrs Jago looked blank and resentful, as though the name meant nothing and I was shutting her out.

“I couldn’t very well help hearing, could I? I might have had to waste some time over it, because I was third Senior and was due to serve on the Court. But I thought that that was another deprivation I could bear, and so I begged leave to be excused.”

“I should think you did,” she said.

He seemed quite uninterested in the case. I wanted to find out if Francis Getliffe’s circular had reached him: but apparently he did not open his college documents until days after they arrived.

He asked after my doings. He still couldn’t keep back his interest and looked friendly when I spoke about my wife and son. But he brought out no kind of invitation. He did not suggest that I should see him again.

“Well,” he said, a little over-busily, “we mustn’t take up your time. We must be going ourselves.”

“I hope,” said Alice Jago graciously, “that you enjoy the rest of your visit.” She added, “And good luck in your career,” as though I were one of her husband’s pupils and she was safely projecting me into the future.

Getting back to my rooms after tea, I found a letter on the table. It was addressed in an old man’s hand that I had either forgotten or did not know. When I opened it and looked at the signature, I saw to my astonishment that it was M H L Gay. The handwriting was bold in outline, only a little shaky, and the letter read:

My dear Eliot,

I learn upon good authority that you are residing temporarily in the college. I must ask you most urgently to visit me tonight after my evening meal, which I take at six-thirty upon medical advice, and before eight, which is the time when I nowadays have to suspend my labours for the day. Pray regard this visit as having first priority. The question we have to discuss will brook no delay. You are essential to me because of your legal studies.

I shall await you at seven-fifteen or thereabouts.

Yours ever sincerely,

M H L GAY.

I was irritated even more than astonished. Perhaps it wasn’t so odd that he should, out of the blue, remember who I was: even when he was less senile, his memory had come and gone. Why should he want me? I was irritated, because I had planned to see Arthur Brown in hall and on the side pick up such gossip as was going. I didn’t fancy missing my dinner for the sake of conversation with someone who might not recognise me. Still, there seemed nothing for it. One could not refuse the very old. I had to telephone Brown, saying that instead of that night in hall it would have to be Sunday. I explained why, and Brown, who had guessed the reason for my visit and was at his most impenetrable, nevertheless gave a fat man’s chuckle over the wire. “You’ll find him pretty exigent, old chap. He’ll never let you get away at eight o’clock. If I were you, I should make sure that there are some sandwiches waiting for you in your rooms when you get back.”

The joke seemed even more against me as I walked up the Madingley Road. I had made a mistake in walking at all, because it had begun to rain, a steady seeping rain; the road was dark, Gay’s house was close to the Observatory, and the lights of the Observatory seemed a long way off. The rain was percolating inside the collar of my overcoat: I could feel the damp against my neck, and wet sleeves against my wrists.

In the hall of Gay’s house, the pretty young housekeeper gazed at my clothes. In a foreign accent she asked if I wanted a towel.

From an open door, Gay’s voice resounded: “No, indeed, he doesn’t want a towel! He wants to get down to business! You be sure he does.”

Her brow puzzled, she led me through the door into his study, where Gay, a scarf round his neck, was sitting in an armchair by an enormous fire. Fitting on the armchair was an invalid’s tray, and he still had spoon in hand, working away at his meal.

“That’s the man,” said Gay. He seemed to know my face. “You’re not wet, are you? You’re not wet, I’ll be bound.” He felt the shoulder and arm of my jacket. “Ah, that’s nothing,” said Gay, “that’s not what I call wet. You don’t understand about our English climate yet, my dear,” he said to his housekeeper. “A fine climate ours is, it’s a climate and a half. It makes us the men we are, I’ve not a shadow of a doubt about that.” He gazed at me with faded eyes. “Pray sit down, Eliot. Pray sit down and enjoy yourself.”

I was too much occupied with discomfort, crude physical discomfort, to be amused. As for his housekeeper, pretty as she was, she did not seem to be amused in any circumstances. She kept her puzzled frown.

“Please to offer our guest some cocoa,” Gay said to her.

No, I put in rapidly, I didn’t drink cocoa.

“Now that’s an error on your part, my dear boy. A splendid drink, cocoa is. Why, I sometimes drink a dozen cups a day. Indeed I do.”

Did he mind if I smoked? I asked.

“Ah, now that’s not good for you. It’s not good for me either. I have to be careful with my bronchials at this time of year. I don’t want bronchial trouble at my time of life. It could turn to pneumonia, the doctors say. Old man’s friend, they used to call pneumonia, where I was born. Old man’s friend — no, I don’t like the sound of that. I’m not prepared to give up all that easily, I assure you I’m not.”

I sat in my armchair, not smoking, steam rising from my trouser-legs, while Gay finished his supper. He finished it in an unusual fashion. On one plate he had what appeared to be some sort of trifle, on another a piece of Cheshire cheese and two slices of bread. Methodically Gay cut the cheese into thin sections and put them in the trifle. Then he took a slice of bread and crumbled it over the mixture, which he stirred vigorously with his spoon and then swallowed in six hearty mouthfuls.

“It all goes the same way home,” he explained himself to me.

I had known some old men, but not anyone as old as this. Sitting there, watching him, I thought he was pretty far gone. Then all of a sudden he seemed at least as lucid as he would have been at eighty. He had rung a hand bell to fetch his housekeeper back. She removed the tray and went out again, followed by cries of: “Splendid! That was a splendid supper you gave me!”

I was studying the drawings on the walls, drawings of the Saga heroes that he had made himself some of which I remembered from my visits before the war, when he said: “Ah, I thought today — it’s very fortunate we have Eliot here. Eliot is a lawyer by training, he’s the man to go to for legal guidance. Indeed he is.”

“How did you know I was here at all?”

“Ah ha! I have my spies. I have my spies.” (How in the world, I wondered, did the old man pick up jargon of the ’40s and ’50s, like that phrase, or “first priority”?)

He stroked his beard with self-satisfaction and asked: “Do you know, Eliot, why I thought of you today? He’s the man, I thought. No, you can’t be expected to see the connection. Why, I’ve just received a remarkable communication from one of our Fellows. If you go to that desk, my dear chap, you’ll find this communication under the paper-weight. Certainly you will. I don’t mislay important communications, whatever certain people think.”

The “communication” was Francis Getliffe’s note. I handed it to Gay who, from the interstices of his chair, brought out a reading glass.

“There it is. To all Fellows. No, I don’t like that. I think a special copy should have been sent to me, what? Initialled at the bottom by ‘FEG’. I have looked up our college list, and I find that must be young Getliffe. To all Fellows. These young men aren’t careful enough. Indeed. But still, this isn’t a time to think of our amour propre. These are important issues, Eliot, important issues.”

“Do you mean,” I said, “that you’re concerned about what Getliffe says?”

With cunning, with a certain grandeur, Gay replied: “I’m concerned in a very special way about what Getliffe says.”

“You mean, you’re interested in forming a majority?”

“Oh, no, my dear chap. I’ve seen too many fly-sheets in my time. What do you think of that? I must leave these minutiae to the younger men. They must make up their own majorities. I trust them to get on with their own little squabbles, and I expect they’ll do very well. Fine young men we’ve got. Getliffe’s a fine young man. Brown’s a fine young man. Oh no, I’m not the one to take part in little differences within the college. They all come right in a few years. But no, my dear chap, that isn’t the point at all.”

“What is the point?”

“I want to draw your attention to a very remarkable feature in this communication.”

“What is it?”

“Come and look here. Over my shoulder. You see those words — ‘The Court of Seniors’? You’re sure you see them?”

I said yes.

After I had gone on saying yes, he let me go back to my chair.

“Well, now. What do those words suggest to you?”

I was at a loss, and shook my head.

“Come now. This isn’t being on the spot. This isn’t what I expect from a lawyer. Tell me, who is the Senior Fellow of this college?”

“You are, of course.”

“Indeed I am. Now that is the point, my dear chap. Does it surprise you to hear that when the Court of Seniors was meeting — over this little trouble of Getliffe’s, I presume, but that’s neither here nor there — when that Court was meeting I was not invited to take my rightful place?”

Gay threw back his noble head.

“I’d never thought—” I began.

“But you should have thought. Does it surprise you that I was not only not invited to take my rightful place, but absolutely discouraged? I had letters from the Master implying that it might be too much for me, if you please. Letters full of flattering sentiments, but fine words butter no parsnips, my dear chap. They even implied that I could not make the journey into college. Stuff and nonsense! Why, the Court could meet in the summer, couldn’t it? Or if they were in a special hurry, what was to prevent them meeting here? If Mahomet can’t go to the mountain! Yes, indeed. No, they are treating me as though I were not compos mentis. That’s the long and the short of it. And I think it’s time they were taught a lesson.”

I tried to soothe him, but Gay, his scarf slipping from his shoulder, had taken a second wind.

“This is where you come in, Eliot,” he said in triumph. “Tell me, am I or am I not entitled to sit on the Court of Seniors, unless I withdraw of my own free will?”

I said that I must re-read the statutes.

“Tell me, have they or have they not deprived me of my place without my consent?”

“So it seems.”

“Tell me, will or will not the fact that I have been deprived of my place be known to all the Fellows of the college?”

“Certainly to some of them.”

“Tell me, will or will not that fact be taken to mean that in the opinion of the Master and his advisers I am no longer compos mentis?”

“Not necessarily—”

“That’s what it will be taken to mean. I have been libelled, Eliot. That is why I am contemplating seeking legal redress from the college.”

I had been expecting various things, but not this. Trying to humour him, I said that it could not, in technical terms, be a libel. Gay was not to be humoured.

“I believe there must still be justice in England. You remember Frederick the Great — there are still judges in Berlin. A fine city, they gave me an honorary degree in that city. I am positive that damaging a man’s reputation cannot be done with impunity. And that ought to be true of people who have achieved some little distinction, quite as much as of anyone else. Indeed it ought. Not letting a man take a place which is his of right — that is a comment on his fitness, my dear chap, and I am absolutely convinced people cannot make such comments with impunity.”

He was becoming more obstinate. Incredulously, I began to think that he might not forget this. How far, I was calculating, with a faint suppressed schadenfreude at Arthur Brown’s expense, could he go before he was stopped?

“If I proceed against them,” said Gay, “that will be an action and a half.”

I said the situation was complicated.

“You’re too genteel, you young men.”

Gay was chuckling with gusto and malice. Oddly enough, it did not sound like senile malice. I was astonished at how much vigour he had summoned up. The prospect of litigation had made him younger by twenty years. “You’re too genteel. I’m absolutely positive that this action of mine would lie. Indeed it would. That would teach them a lesson. I don’t believe in being too genteel, my dear chap. That’s why I’ve attained a certain position in the world. It’s a great mistake, when one has attained a certain position in the world, to be too genteel about teaching people a lesson.”

15: “Never be too Proud to be Present”

THE following afternoon, Saturday, Martin rang me up in college. Some progress, he said. No special thanks to us: after Francis’ circular, we couldn’t avoid it. Anyway, two people had come over — Taylor (the Calvert Fellow) and another man I did not know. On paper the score was now ten to nine against. That is, nine men were pledged to sign the request for re-opening the case. “I think we’re pretty well bound to pick up another. Then the real fun begins,” came Martin’s voice with a politician’s mixture of optimism and warning.

For reasons of tactics — “just to show we mean business” — Martin was anxious to get the majority decided soon. Would I have a go at Tom Orbell? Would I also dine in hall and see if there was anyone I could talk to? It would be better if he and I were acting separately. We could meet later that night at his house.

I obeyed, but I drew blank. In the mizzling afternoon, so dark that the lights were on all over the college, I walked through to the third court. For an instant I looked up at Tom Orbell’s windows: I could have sworn that they were lighted too. But when I climbed the stairs his outer door was sported. I rattled the lock and called out that I was there. No response. I had a strong suspicion that Tom had seen me coming.

Frustrated, irritated, I gazed at the name above the door, “Dr T Orbell”. The letters gleamed fresh on the unlit landing. I remembered faded letters there, and the name of Despard-Smith, who had been a Fellow for fifty years. He had been a sanctimonious old clergyman. At that moment I felt a mixture of rancour and disgust; it seemed that the rancour, long suppressed, was directed at that old man, dead years before, not at Tom Orbell who kept me waiting there.

However, I met Tom before the end of the afternoon. I had been invited to tea by Mrs Skeffington, to what, I discovered when I arrived, was something very much like an old-fashioned Cambridge tea-party. That was not the only odd thing about it. To begin with, the Skeffingtons were living in one of a row of two-storied houses just outside the college walls, which used to be let to college servants. Why they were doing it, I could not imagine. They were both well-off: was this Skeffington’s notion of how a research Fellow ought to comport himself? If so, they were not making all that good a shot at it: for in the tiny parlour they had brought in furniture which looked like family heirlooms, and which some of the guests were cooing over. Sheraton? someone was asking, and Mrs Skeffington was modestly admitting: “Oh, one must have something to sit on.”

Round the wall there were pictures that did not look at all like heirlooms, and I recalled that I heard Skeffington had taste in visual things. There was a Sickert, a recent Passmore, a Kokoschka, a Nolan.

So, in the parlour, smaller than those I remembered in the back streets of my childhood, we sat on Sheraton chairs and drank China tea and ate wafers of brown bread-and-butter. Another odd thing was Mrs Skeffington’s choice of guests. I had imagined that Skeffington wanted to talk over the case with me and that everyone there would be on his side. Far from it — there was Tom Orbell, hot and paying liquid compliments, and also, though without their husbands, Mrs Nightingale and Mrs Ince. To balance them, Irene was there without Martin. Did Mrs Skeffington think it was her duty to pull the college together? Quite possibly, I thought. Not through policy. Certainly not through doubts of her husband’s case: she was as firm as he was. But quite possibly through sheer flat-footed duty, as though to the tenantry.

The case was not referred to. What was referred to, was a string of names, as though everyone were playing a specifically English kind of Happy Families. Someone mentioned an acquaintance in the Brigade: Mrs Skeffington trumped that by having known the last Colonel. County names, titled names, token names, they all chanted them as though the charmed circle were tiny and as though one kept within it by chanting in unison. And yet those who were chanting the loudest needn’t have done so. There was nothing bogus about the Skeffingtons’ social roots: Tom was the son of an Archdeacon, Irene the daughter of a soldier. I discovered that Mrs Ince, whom I rather liked, had been to a smart school. That I shouldn’t have guessed. She wore spectacles, like her husband she had adopted a mid-Atlantic accent, she was cheerful, ugly, frog-faced, and looked as if she enjoyed a good time in bed.

The only person not chanting was Mrs Nightingale. With unfailing accuracy Mrs Skeffington asked if she knew –

“Oh, no,” said Mrs Nightingale, impassive, exophthalmic.

Had she known — or—?

“Of course not,” said Mrs Nightingale with complete good temper. “We were living in Clapham Junction at the time.”

“Were you, now?” Mrs Skeffington could not help speaking as though a junction were a place that one passed through. She brightened. “Then you may have known the — s when they had one of those nice Georgian places over in the Old Town?”

“Oh, no, my father could never have lived there. That was before the big money started to come in.”

Tom guffawed. Soon afterwards he slipped out. When he found that I had followed him and caught him up on the cobbles outside, he said, in a defiant tone: “Hullo, Lewis, I didn’t know you were coming.”

I had just been quick enough to prevent him letting himself into the college by a side gate, to which I did not have a key. Instead we walked round by the wall. Under a lamp, I caught sight of his eyes, blue, flat and mutinous. I said: “What were you doing this afternoon?”

“What do you mean, what was I doing?”

“I came up to your rooms. I wanted to talk to you.”

“Oh, I was working very hard. I did some really good work. I was extremely pleased with it for once.”

“I’m glad of that—”

“Hanna’s always bullying me to produce more, you know she is. But you know, Lewis, I’m really producing quite as much as anyone of my age—”

He was steering the conversation into a comparison of the academic output of young historians. I interrupted: “You know what I wanted to talk about, don’t you?”

“Don’t you think I’ve had enough of that?”

“Who from?”

“Hanna, of course. She says that I’m behaving like a beast.”

I had not realised till then that she was taking such an open part. That remark was right in her style. I wondered, did she think he was weaker than he really was? He seemed — it might have crystallised by now — in love with her. It would be like Hanna to assume that he was easy to persuade. But in fact, though he was so labile, he was also intensely obstinate. When one dug deeper into him, he became both less amiable and less weak.

“I don’t think you’re behaving up to your usual standard.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I’ve always thought you tried to be detached, when it came to a personal issue,” I said.

“I’m sorry we don’t agree on this. I mean that very sincerely.” He was speaking with hostility.

“Look here, won’t you talk this over on the plane of reason? Preferably with Martin—?”

“I haven’t the slightest desire to talk to Martin. I shall only hear what you’ve just said and what Hanna says, ten times worse.”

We had come round to the front of the college. Tom caught sight of a bus slowing down before the stop. “As a matter of fact,” he said, moving towards it, “I’ve got to go off to see a pupil. He’s not well and I said I’d supervise him in his rooms. Perhaps I shall see you in hall. Is that all right?”

I did not expect to see Tom return from his putative visit, and I did not expect to see him in hall. In fact, there were only six names on the list when I arrived in the combination room, and one was that of an old member of the college up for the weekend. Of the four Fellows dining, three were young men whom Martin had already made sure of. The other was old Winslow. He had a bout of sciatica and was in a temper that made ordinary civil conversation hard enough. The six of us sat chastened at the end of the high table; Winslow was scarcely speaking, the young men were over-awed. As for the old member making a pious return to the college, it seemed to be a sad Saturday night.

Down in the body of the hall the undergraduates were making a hubbub. Winslow roused himself.

“To what do we owe this curious display?” he asked.

Someone thought the college Fifteen had won a cup-tie.

“I’ve never been able to see why we should encourage dolts. They would be far happier at some decent manual work.” Winslow regarded the old member. “I apologise if you’ve ever been concerned with this pastime. Have you?”

The old member had to say yes. Winslow made no further comment.

Back in the combination room after dinner, Winslow announced that his complaint made wine seem like poison. “Poison,” he said. “But don’t let that deter the rest of you.”

It did. Lugubriously we sat, Winslow’s chin sunk down as though he were studying the reflection of his coffee-cup in the rosewood, two of the young Fellows talking in low voices.

Leaving the room in that devastated hush, I reached Martin’s house so early that he thought I must have news. I said that I had never spent such a useless day. As I described it, Martin grinned with brotherly malice.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve got one last treat for you. We’re going next door to see G S.”

I cursed, and asked to be let off.

“He says we can have some music.”

“That doesn’t add to the attractions.”

Martin smiled. He knew that I was tone-deaf.

“No,” he said, “we must go.”

He was too realistic to think there was a chance of winning Clark over. But he was acting on rule-of-thumb experience. In this kind of struggle — neither of us needed to tell the other — the first maxim was: forget you’re proud, forget you’re tired. Never be too proud to be present.

Between their half of the house and the Clarks’, they had kept a communicating door and Irene unlocked it and came with us. As soon as we crossed into the Clarks’, it was like going from Italy into Switzerland. The Clarks’ passage, even, was immaculate and bright: the drawing-room shone and glistened, with the spotlessness of a house without children. Clark struggled to his feet to greet us, but there was pain tucking up his mouth as he stood in his brace, and soon Hanna helped him back into his chair.

Coffee and Austrian cakes were waiting for us. When we all three refused drinks, it was a relief to them both. Clark was a hospitable man, he liked displaying the bottles on the sideboard, but he had never forsaken his Band of Hope piety. While as for Hanna, she could not, after twenty years in England, eradicate her belief in both Anglo-Saxon phlegm and Anglo-Saxon alcoholism.

“Delicious,” said Irene, munching a cake, glancing at Hanna. She sounded mischievous: was she deliberately mimicking Tom Orbell?

“Before we start to enjoy ourselves,” said Clark gently, “I think we’d better put one thing behind us, hadn’t we?”

He was looking at Martin, then at me, with his beautiful afflicted eyes.

“If you like,” said Martin.

“Well, I’ve thought over this démarche of Getliffe’s. I don’t think I ought to make any bones about it to you two. I’m very much afraid that my answer has to be no.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Martin replied, but easily and without indignation.

“I think I can understand the position you’re all in. I mean, you two and Getliffe. I exclude Skeffington, because I don’t pretend to know how his mind works. And I’m not convinced that he’s a man of any judgment. But you others were in a genuinely difficult position, I can see that. You had to balance the possibility that there’s been a certain amount of individual injustice — you’ve had to balance that against the certainty that if you raise the point, you’re going to do a much larger amount of damage to us all. I can see that you were in a difficult position. Granted all your preconceptions and back histories, I can understand what you chose to do. But, with great respect, I’d like to suggest that it was the wrong choice.”

“We’re tied up with the word ‘possibility’,” Martin said.

“You’re not prepared to say ‘certainty’,” said Clark.

“Can’t I explain to you the nature of scientific evidence?” said Martin. But he was more respectful to Clark than to most men. There was no doubt that, in some fashion, Clark had the moral advantage over him.

“I must say,” I put in, “your view seems to me almost unbelievably perverse.”

“We’ve got different values, haven’t we?” he said, with sweetness and composure.

“I told him that I disagreed,” Hanna said to me.

“Of course you disagree, my dear. Of course these two do. As I say, with your preconceptions and back histories, it would be astonishing if you did anything else.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you and the Eliot brothers and Getliffe have been what you’d call liberals all your lives. I haven’t, and I don’t pretend to be. That’s why I can understand some of your attitudes, which you all think are detached and based on the personal conscience, but which really aren’t quite as detached as you’d all like to think. In the long run, anyone who has been as tinged with liberal faiths as you have is bound to think that by and large the left is right, and the right is wrong. You’re bound to think that. It’s the whole cast of your minds. And it shows itself in quite small issues like this present one, which sub specie aeternitatis isn’t quite as earth-shaking as we’re making out. Of course you want to think that this man has been a victim. Of course all your prejudices, your life-histories, your weltanschauung are thrown in on his side. You must forgive some of us if we’re not so easily convinced.”

“Do you really think a scientist of international reputation, like Francis Getliffe, is quite as capable of deceiving himself on a point like this?” I said.

“I’ve got to be persuaded that he isn’t.”

“You would seriously take Nightingale’s opinion rather than Getliffe’s — that’s what it amounts to, doesn’t it, G S?”

Martin was talking to him better-temperedly than I could. It struck me that there was a protective tone in Martin’s voice. I wondered — it was the kind of thing near the physical level, that one did not easily recognise in a brother — whether if, like many robust men, he wanted to turn his eyes from a cripple and so had to go out of his way to compensate.

“Yes, I think that’s fair. It amounts to that.”

“Forgetting Skeffington,” said Hanna. “Whom even you could not regard as a man of advanced opinions, I should think.”

“Forgetting Skeffington.” He brushed her aside more contentedly than anyone I had seen. “You see, I can respect Getliffe’s opinions and the Eliots’, even when I disagree with them. But I’m not going to give equivalent weight to playboys.”

“That’s special pleading,” I said.

“Take it as you like,” said Clark. “In my view, and you’re naturally at liberty to think it’s wrong, the question is very much as Martin put it. If I’ve got to take a side, I’ve got to decide between Nightingale’s opinion and Getliffe’s. Now I’d be the last person to say that Getliffe wasn’t by far the more distinguished scientist. People competent to judge have decided that for me, and of course there’s no room for reasonable doubt. But, with respect, it seems to me that their scientific merits aren’t under discussion. So far as I’m concerned, there is room for reasonable doubt about whose guidance I accept on a piece of scientific chicanery.”

“How well do you know Nightingale?” I was provoked enough to say it. As soon as I did, I knew it was a false step.

“I know them both well enough to form my own judgment. And that’s something one must do for oneself, isn’t it?” He looked around with his fresh smile, the smile edged with physical strain. “Well, we shan’t convince each other, shall we? I think this is the time to agree to differ, don’t you?”

After Clark had said that he was going to play us some Berlioz, I was left out of the party. All of the others were musical, Clark passionately so: while as soon as he had put on the record, I drifted into the kind of wool-gathering that music induced in me. On the bright wall opposite I caught sight of a couple of Piranesi prints. They set me speculating on what sort of inner life Clark had, Berlioz and Piranesi, the march to the scaffold, the prisons deep under the earth.

Why in the world had Hanna married him? Throwing over a husband, a healthy man with, I recalled, a sly eye for women, to do so. There Hanna sat, curled up on the sofa, in her mid forties, her body, lean, tense, still young, her face still young apart from the grey in her hair which, before she married Clark, when she was one of the most elegant of women, she would never have left there. Why had she married him? She was not happy here. It did not need her ambiguous relation to Tom Orbell to say she was unhappy. She had not taken Clark into her confidence, even at the start, so far as I could see. There had been a time when she was far more politically committed than he thought. When he spoke of her as in the same political grade as Francis Getliffe, he did not know what Martin and I knew.

Did he know that once she had been fond of Martin?

Yes, Martin had been fond of her in return. A good many men were roused by her sharp, shrewish charm and wanted to tame her. But though she liked such men, they were not the ones she disrupted her life for. Instead she seemed to be searching for someone to look after. It must have been that, it could only have been that, which led her to break one marriage and take on Clark.

As the music went on, I felt both indulgent to her and impatient. For, of course, the irony was that she could scarcely have picked worse. She was so brave, much more than most of us, she was intelligent, she had her farouche attractions. But she had no insight. She was a good judge of men’s intellects, but compared with a hundred stupid women she despised, she had no idea what men were like. It did not take a clairvoyant to see that, though Clark might be crippled, he had a character like a rock. Not an amiable character; one fused out of bad luck and pain, not giving pity to others, and not wanting it himself. One might help him across a room, but he would not like one the better for that. As for offering him tenderness — one ought to know that gently, inexorably, he would throw it back in one’s teeth.

Sitting there, daydreaming in the sound, I believed Hanna knew that now. She had no insight, but she learned. I was not specially sad for her. She was younger than most women of her age, she still had force and nerve and the hope of the fibres. She was capable of sacrificing herself and enduring more than others could take. In the past she had gone on with a sacrifice for years, and then come to a snapping-point. Then she had saved herself. Could she do so again?

16: The Government

WHEN the butler came into the combination room on the Sunday night and ritually announced, “Master, dinner is served,” Crawford told me that, since there were no visitors dining, I was to follow him in and sit at his right hand. As we stood in our places waiting for the grace to finish, I saw the heavy face of Arthur Brown, dead opposite to me.

It was a full Sunday night, and we had scarcely spoken in the combination room. Once we had sat down to our soup, he gave me a smile of recognition, and told me that he had already asked the Master’s permission to present a bottle after dinner to drink my health. He knew why I was in the college, but he was at the same time too warm-hearted and too cunning to let that affect his welcome. Crawford nodded, with impersonal cordiality. He liked a glass of port, he didn’t mind me, he wasn’t what Gay would have called “on the spot” as to what had been going on that weekend.

Brown gazed down the table. He noticed, just as I did, that neither Francis Getliffe nor Nightingale were dining. Martin was there, so were Tom Orbell and most of the younger Fellows: there were also several members of the college present who were not Fellows but had university jobs. Brown must have been calculating that, until and unless they dispersed, there was no chance of a show-down that night. Whether he found the thought satisfactory, I could not guess. As though it were the only trouble on his mind, he was informing the Master that Winslow’s sciatica was worse.

“Ah, well,” said Crawford, who was inclined to take a biological, or alternatively a cosmic, view of human miseries, “a man of eighty ought to expect that bits of the machine are beginning to run down.”

“I don’t think he’d find that much consolation just at present,” said Brown.

“Speaking as one trained in medicine, I should have thought he’d been remarkably lucky with his physical constitution. And with his medical history, if it comes to that I can’t think of many men who’ve lived as long and had so little wrong with them.”

“The old chap seemed rather sorry for himself when I dropped in on him before hall,” Brown said.

“That was very considerate of you, Senior Tutor,” said Crawford. Without irony at his own expense, or anyone else’s, he said: “Do you think I ought to visit him?”

Brown considered: “There’s certainly no need to put yourself out. No, I’m inclined to think he’s had enough visitors for twenty-four hours. But if you could send round a note? And perhaps a book? He complained of being short of reading matter.”

“That shall be done,” said Crawford. He kept his Buddha-like, contented smile. He was either oblivious that he was being told how to do his job, or else he accepted it. He was capable of thinking “Brown is better at these personalia than I am”, and it would not disturb him in the least.

This was the way things worked, I thought. Since Chrystal’s death, those two had been the government of the college. No doubt other people had been let in, sometimes and for some things — Nightingale now and then, after he became Bursar, and occasionally Francis Getliffe. But if I knew Brown, they would never have been let right in. Nor should I, though he liked me better, if I had stayed in the college.

The curious thing was, as men, Crawford and Brown had not much use for each other. Crawford was not one to whom friends mattered: he probably thought of Brown as a dullish colleague, a run-of-the-mill administrator, one of those humble persons who kept the wheels going around. While Brown had once had a positive dislike for Crawford. Deep down, I believed — Arthur Brown was loyal and tenacious in all things, including his antipathies — that it remained. He had opposed Crawford’s election with every resource that he could pull out. When he lost, people thought that his days of influence in the college were over. They could not have been more wrong. Crawford was arrogant, not overactive, not interested in men’s motives, but quite a fair judge of what they could do. He was also human enough to like the support of a man who had previously been all against him. It was not a friend to whom a normal man wanted to give the spoils of office, but an enemy who had just come over. So when Crawford saw Brown settling himself to help, the supreme college manager, he took him with open arms.

As for Brown, he loved managing so much, that, whoever had been Master, he could not have avoided waiting there at his side. For people like him, who lived in affairs, it was part of the rub of life to put loves and hates, particularly hates, out of sight, and almost out of mind. Brown’s happened to be unusually strong, stronger than a politician’s ought to be: even so, he could behave, not for days but for years, as though he had forgotten. For the practical purpose, like running the college, in front of him, he seemed able to conceal from himself an inconvenient personal dislike. I thought that if I reminded him what he really felt for Crawford, he would be shocked, he would take it as a blemish on good taste.

Through dinner, Crawford, in good world-historical form, was enquiring of me, of Brown, of anyone at large, how China could avoid becoming the dominant power on earth? Not in the vague future, but in finite time: perhaps not in our time, but in our sons’. It was not until we were sitting round the table in the combination room that Brown got in much of a word.

The company had dwindled. I watched Brown peer inquisitively as several of the younger Fellows, not waiting for wine, said good night and went out in a bunch. There was a party at Lester Ince’s house, Martin told Brown. “In my young days,” said Brown, “our seniors would have looked down their noses if we hadn’t stayed in the room on Sunday night. Still, it leaves a nice little party to drink Lewis’ health.” In fact, it left him and the Master, Martin, Tom Orbell and me, and a couple of non-Fellows. “Which means one glass apiece,” said Brown. “That’s rather meagre for a beastly winter night and an old friend. I think I should like to ask permission, Master, to order another bottle.”

“Very generous of you, Senior Tutor, very generous indeed.” I was now certain that Brown wanted to keep the non-Fellows at the table and so avoid an argument. He did not manage it. They each of them drank their port but, quite early, before half past eight, they had got up and gone. The rest of us were alone, one of the bottles still half-full. I glanced at Martin, who gave the slightest of nods. I was just going to lead in, when Crawford himself addressed us round the table: “I suppose you’ve all had the opportunity to read Getliffe’s fly-sheet by now, haven’t you? I seem to remember, Eliot—” he said, imperturbably gazing at me — “that you’re familiar with this unfortunate business.”

“I think we can take it,” said Arthur Brown, “that Lewis is quite familiar with it. I fancy he was able to study Francis Getliffe’s production at least as soon as any of us.”

He spoke with his usual lack of hurry, but he was irritated that the Master had opened the subject. Himself, he would have let others make the running.

“I know the situation pretty well,” I said to Crawford. “I think I ought to say straight away that I am parti pris.”

“What exactly do you mean, Eliot?”

“I mean, that if I were a Fellow now, I should be in favour of re-opening this case, without any qualification at all.”

“I’m surprised to hear you say that,” Crawford said. “You must forgive me, Eliot, but it does sound like a premature judgment.”

“I’m surprised to find that you feel in a position to make any judgment whatever,” said Brown sternly. “Do you think that the people who decided this issue were altogether irresponsible? I think you might remember that we spent several months devoting as much care to our decision as I for one have ever devoted to anything.”

“It’s not a decision which anyone in a position of trust could have taken lightly,” said Crawford.

“Do you seriously think,” said Brown, “that we were as irresponsible as what you’ve just said seems to indicate? I should like you to consider that question too, Martin.”

Martin met my eye. This was going to be rough. Tom Orbell, who had been quiet all the evening, was effacing himself and listening. I thought the only thing was to take the offensive.

“All you say is fair,” I replied. “Of course you’re not irresponsible men. I’ve never known people less so. But on your side, do you think that Francis Getliffe is a man to go in for premature judgments? Do you think he would have written as he did, unless he were convinced of it?”

“To an extent, I think you have a point there,” said Crawford. “Getliffe is a distinguished man of science—”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t accept that as a reason for giving up our own responsibility.” Brown’s voice was steady and full. “I’ve known Francis a long time. Of course we all recognise how distinguished he is. But I have known him make mistakes in judgment. If you were a scientist, Lewis, and were giving your opinion on this case, I should be disposed to give more weight to it than I feel able to give to Francis’. Put it another way. There are two of you who are trying to make us take what to my mind would be a false step. Francis is a scientist and a master of technicalities, but gives me some reason to have reserves about his judgment. While I have respect for your judgment, Lewis, but I know you can’t master the technicalities any more than I can.”

Conciliating, flattering, dividing and ruling, even when he was angry — he was very angry, but he had not lost his touch.

“Of course, I’m in general agreement with you, Senior Tutor,” said Crawford, “but for the sake of fairness we ought perhaps to remember that this isn’t simply a matter of one individual’s judgment. I still consider we were right to resist them, but several men of science in the college, not only Getliffe, have suggested there was a case for enquiry. That’s still your feeling, for instance, Martin, isn’t it?”

“It is, Master.”

“I’m obliged to say,” Brown put in, “that I’m not specially happy about the way all this is being done. I exempt you from that remark, Martin. I can’t pretend I think you’ve been well advised” — he gave his jolly laugh, but his eyes were sharp — “but I’m prepared to admit that any step you’ve taken has been correct. But I’m afraid I can’t say as much for most of your associates. I’m very disappointed in Skeffington. I should have thought he’d have known the way to do things. When we elected him, I didn’t imagine for a second that he’d turn out to be a trouble-maker. As for Francis Getliffe, he’s done nothing more nor less than put a pistol to our heads.”

“The danger about pistols,” said Crawford, “is that sometimes they go off.”

That was as near to a joke as I had heard him make. Tom Orbell gave a suppressed snort, and for an instant Crawford beamed, like a humorist who is appreciated at last. Brown was not beaming, and said: “In a small society, I’ve always felt that it’s a mistake to rush your colleagues as he’s tried to do. Some of us are not all that fond of being threatened.”

“Agreed,” said Crawford.

“If he’d come to see you about his difficulty, Master,” Brown was now turning his full weight on to Crawford, “I might feel differently about it. That would have been the proper thing to do. He ought to have spoken to you before he put a word on paper. Then perhaps we could have smoothed things down in a reasonable fashion. But the way he’s gone about it, it’s making the college into a bear-garden.”

“Again, I agree,” said Crawford. “One would have thought that Getliffe wouldn’t have wished to create unnecessary commotion. I’ll try to have a word with him next Thursday at the Royal Society.”

“Meanwhile,” Brown was continuing to talk, not to the rest of us but to the Master, “I’ve thought about the proper position to adopt, and I think I can say I’ve come down to this. If the college chooses to let itself be rushed, and there’s a majority for asking the Seniors to re-open the case, then by the statutes the Seniors naturally have to do so. That’s all cut and dried. But I don’t see the college losing its head like that. I believe we’re interpreting the wishes of the college if we go on resisting attempts to sweep us off our feet against our better judgment.”

“Are you sure you’re interpreting the wishes of the college?” asked Martin.

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to do too much counting heads,” Martin went on, speaking Brown’s own language, “but there are nine out of nineteen feeling the other way.”

“Is that a firm figure, Martin?” Crawford asked.

“There are nine Fellows willing to vote for re-opening.”

“I confess I should be happier,” said Crawford, “if there were clearer weight of opinion one way or the other.”

“I accept Martin’s figures,” said Brown. Well he might, I thought: those two knew each other’s measure and also the score, ball by ball. “But I’m sure he’d agree with me when I say that the nine he’s referred to don’t include, apart from Getliffe and himself, any of our more influential and senior members.”

“That’s quite true,” said Martin. He was not going to overstate his case.

“Still,” said Crawford, “it would be more satisfactory to all concerned if the numbers were wider spaced.”

Once again Martin and I glanced at each other and saw that we agreed. It was time to stop. Quickly I got in before Brown and said that they might be in for another kind of trouble. I explained that old Gay was asking advice about how to sue the college.

Crawford did not think that that was funny. He went to a cupboard and fetched a copy of the statutes. He showed us that, in order to disqualify Gay from the Court of Seniors, the college would have to pass a formal motion. That had never been done, so far as the college history had been traced. So they — not only the Master, but Brown and Winslow — had visited him, written him letters, assuming that he was withdrawing of his own free will. He had not made much protest, once or twice he had verbally acquiesced: but, with a kind of old man’s cunning, more animal than senile, he had not acquiesced on paper.

I had a feeling that Brown felt the Master had not been resourceful or punctilious enough. When Crawford asked me what the legal position was, I said that they didn’t have much to worry about. I could help them string the old man along for a time. If he went to his solicitors, they wouldn’t let him bring such an action. It was just possible that, if he had enough stamina, he could get into touch with an unscrupulous firm — but I couldn’t imagine a man of ninety-four keeping up a grudge long enough, not even Gay.

“I shan’t believe we’re out of that particular wood until we’ve attended his memorial service in the chapel,” said Arthur Brown. His previous annoyance made him less emollient than he would normally have been. Conscientiously he added, “Not that he hasn’t been a grand old boy in his way.”

17: Contracting Out

A few minutes later, Martin and I were in a taxi on our way to Lester Ince’s house in Bateman Street. Martin was asking: didn’t I think that, when the argument over the case got sharp, Brown had spent all his effort keeping the Master up to scratch? Yes, I said. It wouldn’t take much, probably one conversation with Getliffe, for the Master to decide that the case ought to be re-heard.

That meant the majority was in the bag, said Martin. He went on: “But we don’t want it to come like that, do we? They’ve made a mistake, not offering a re-hearing the minute three or four people wanted it. Just for once, Arthur hasn’t played his hand right. It’s a point to us if we can force this majority on them, so that they’re up against it as soon as they start the case again. We don’t want them to let us have it as a favour.”

On the pavement in Bateman Street we could hear the noise of the party three storeys above. After I rang the bell we could still hear the noise, but no footsteps coming downstairs. It took minutes of ringing before Ince came down to let us in. Out of the hall, lights streamed into the dark and dripping street. “Hallo, Lew,” said Lester Ince. There were two prams in the hall, and the smell, milky and faecal, of small children. As we climbed up the stairs of the old, high, narrow-fronted Victorian house, Martin and I were whispering. “You needn’t bother,” said Ince in his usual voice, “it would take the crack of doom to wake them up.”

Bits of the wall were peeling, a banister leg was loose. The four children were sleeping “dotted about”, said Ince, on the first two floors. He owned the whole of the shabby house, and let off the basement. When we got into the party, it seemed to me — I thought it must have seemed to Martin — like going back to parties we used to know when we were poor young men in the provincial town. Beer bottles on the table: the room, which in earlier days would have been a main bedroom, cleared for dancing: a gramophone in the corner: the floor full of couples. There were just two differences. Ince’s gramophone was a handsome new record-player, and the couples were jiving.

Ince picked up a glass of beer from the table, drank it, grinned all over his robust, pasty face, and said: “I’m not going to miss this.” He crooked his finger at a pretty young woman, and began swinging her round with vigour. His wife winked at him. About the whole party, certainly about Ince, there was a cheerful, connubial, sexy air.

Like his wife, I was thinking, even more than his wife, Ince was a bit of a social fraud. But a fraud in reverse, so to speak. Instead of wanting to be taken for something grander than he was in fact, he seemed to be aiming at the opposite. He was actually a doctor’s son, born in the heart of the middle classes, educated like the quintessence of the professional bourgeoisie, middling prep school, middling public school. He insisted on behaving, talking, and often feeling, as though he had come up from the ranks. Just as with the other kind of social mimic, one listened to his speech. Beneath the curious mixture of what he thought, often not quite accurately, to be lower-class English or happy-go-lucky American, one could hear the background of an accent as impeccably professional as Arthur Brown’s.

One odd thing was, that while the Inces imitated those lower down the social ladder, they were not in the least political. I had been used, years before, to upper-class left-wingers, conscientiously calling each other Des, and Pat, and Bert, and on envelopes punctiliously leaving off the “Esquire”. But this was nothing like the same thing. It was not a “going to the people”. The Inces did not even trouble to vote. They weren’t making an intellectual protest. They just felt freer if they cut the ties of class.

It seemed to suit them. If they weren’t happy that night, they gave a remarkable impersonation of being so. Between each dance Lester Ince drank a bottle of beer; he had the sort of heavy, games-playing physique, not unlike Martin’s, that could mop it up. He danced with his wife as though he were uxorious and glad of it. Ugly, frog-like, cosy, she had such appeal for him that she took on charm for us watching. The temperature of the room, thermometric and psychological, was rising. The young dons were getting off with the women. Married couples, research students with an eye for girls, intellectual-looking girls with an eye for the research students — I was speculating about the curious idée reçue dear to men of action, business men and people in the great world, that intellectual persons were less interested in sex than they were. So far as one could generalise at all, in my experience the opposite was true.

In the taxi, Martin had said that we should have to talk to Ince. It wasn’t a good time, but in view of Crawford’s “wobbling” we mightn’t have another. And so, after we had been there an hour, Martin caught him on the landing outside the room and beckoned to me.

“Christ,” Ince was saying, “I’d a hell of a sight sooner go back to my wife.”

“Two minutes,” said Martin. Then he said straight out that Getliffe’s note had “put the cat among the pigeons”, and he wanted just one more vote.

“You’ve got a one-track mind, Marty. Strike me pink you have.”

“I shouldn’t have thought so,” said Martin, “but still—” Ince had drunk a lot of beer but he was not drunk, just cheerful with drink. Standing with heavy legs firmly planted, he considered and then said: “It’s no go. I’m not playing.”

“You can’t dismiss it like that, you know.”

“Can’t I hell?”

I did not know him well, but I felt that at heart he was decent, sound and healthy. It came as a shock to find his tone not only flippant, but callous. I said that I was surprised.

“It’s good for you to be surprised, Lew. If it comes to that, why in Christ’s name are you messing about here?”

I replied just as rudely: “Because people like you are behaving like fools or worse.”

“I won’t take that from you or anyone else.”

“You’ve damned well got to take it,” said Martin.

Ince stared at us, legs immovable, with a matey smile. He was neither abashed nor at a loss.

“I’m just not playing, Marty,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t feel obliged to give a reason. I didn’t know they’d made you a sort of confessor for anti-God men—”

For an instant I saw Martin’s face go pale. He was more provoked than I was by the insolence of younger men. But though his temper had risen he did not let it go. He would not do that, except as a tactical weapon or at home.

“I think you are obliged to give a reason,” he said.

“Why?”

“If you want to be taken seriously. Which I hope you do.”

For the first time, Ince’s expression was clouded. He was a strong character, but he gave me the impression that he had not often crossed wills with other strong characters: while for Martin, this was nothing new.

“I’m not interested,” he said.

“That’s a meaningless thing to say,” Martin replied.

“So far as I’m concerned, this is a squabble among scientists. All I want is for you to go and sort it out among yourselves, and good luck to you and a nice long goodbye kiss.”

“It’s not a squabble among scientists,” I said. “That’s just letting yourself out. We’re telling you, you can’t—”

“I’m telling you, can’t I hell?”

“Look,” I said, “you must admit, there’s a chance, we think it’s a near certainty, that an innocent man has been victimised. Do you think that’s so good?”

“Oh, if that sort of thing happens, it always comes out all right in the wash.”

“Good God above,” I said, “that’s about the most optimistic statement on human affairs that I’ve ever heard.”

“Oh, it’s not true of your sort of affairs. Not the big stuff. Not on your life,” said Ince. “How many people have you seen done down in your time?”

“Quite a lot,” I said, “but not quite—”

“Then why the sweet hell don’t you go and put that right?”

“I was going to say,” I replied, “not quite in this way. And just because a lot of people are done down inevitably, that’s no reason to add another.”

“If you really want to know, that’s why I wash my hands of this schemozzle,” said Ince. “There’s too much Pecksniffery about it for me. Christ knows what you’ve seen, Lew, but then you come here and do a Pecksniff on me. And you’re not the worst of them. There’s too much Pecksniffery about your scientists, Marty. You think you can do anything you like with the rest of us, and switch on the moral uplift whenever you feel good. That’s why I’m bleeding well not playing. You go and do good, I shan’t get in your way. But I don’t want to hear about it. I’m nice and happy as I am, thank you very much.”

18: Conversion

NEXT day, when Martin came to my rooms to take me to lunch, neither of us had any more news. In hall, where half a dozen Fellows were already sitting, no one spoke a word about the case, though there were some there, such as Nightingale and Tom Orbell, who must have known each move that had been made. Apart from an old man, a deaf clergyman from a village outside the town, who had come in to lunch each day since before my time, the rest of them had been lecturing or working in the laboratories. Lester Ince announced that he had been talking to a class about Beowulf. “What have you been telling them?” asked Tom Orbell.

“That he was a God-awful bore,” said Ince.

Below the high table, relays of undergraduates came in and out. The doors flapped, the servants slapped down plates. It was a brisk, perfunctory meal, the noise level in the hall very high: afterwards only four of us, Martin and I, Nightingale and Orbell, went into the combination room for coffee.

After the cosiness of the room at night, it looked bleak, with no fire to draw the eye, no glasses on the table to reflect the light. Through the windows one could see the head and shoulders of a young man running round the court; but the room seemed darker than at night, the beams of the ceiling nearer to one’s head.

The four of us sat round the gaping fireplace, with the coffee jug on a low table close by.

“Shall I be mother?” said Nightingale, as though he were in the mess, putting on a cockney accent. As he poured out, he seemed in high spirits, quite unresentful of my presence, less worried by the situation than either Crawford or Brown had been the night before. He was not exactly indifferent to it, but full of a suppressed, almost mischievous satisfaction. He behaved like a man with inside knowledge, concealed from us, which if it were disclosed would make us recognise that we did not stand a chance.

He was talking about his plans for a new building. He had an ambition, perhaps the last ambition he had left, to leave his mark upon the college. He wanted to put up a building with another eighty sets of rooms.

“If we’re going to do it, we’ve got to do it properly,” said Nightingale, “I intend to do the young gentlemen well.”

Of course, he said, in the minatory tone of someone talking about past waste of money, if the college had built in the ’30s it would have cost only seventy thousand. “That’s what we ought to have done in your time, Eliot.” As it was, the building he was determined on would “run us in” for a quarter of a million. “But the college has got to pay for its mistakes,” said Nightingale. “I won’t have bed-sitters. I mean to put up a building that we shall be proud of when we’re all dead and gone.”

He explained his scheme for choosing an architect. He intended to select two “orthodox” men and two “modernists”, and ask them to submit plans. “Then it will be up to the college!” said Nightingale triumphantly.

“Do you know, Bursar,” I said, “I’m prepared to have a modest bet in bottles that I’ve just the faintest sneaking suspicion which the college in its taste and wisdom will prefer?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that, Eliot. I don’t know about that.”

Brisk and busy, Nightingale stood up, said that he had a Bursar’s meeting at two-thirty, and must spend half an hour in his rooms briefing himself beforehand. He glanced at Tom Orbell. Nightingale was a little chary of leaving him with Martin and me.

“Coming, Orbell?” he said affably.

“Not just yet, Bursar. Will you excuse me?” said Tom in his most honeyed tone. “As a matter of fact, I’ve got a letter I ought to send off. Is that all right?”

I was puzzled that he was willing to face us. I was even more puzzled when, after we had heard Nightingale’s steps down the passage, Tom said: “Well, now, how is the Affair going?”

“From whose point of view?” Martin was on his guard.

“It came over me, when we were here last night, that it is pure Dreyfus, you know. At least, there really is something similar between Dreyfus and poor old Howard. And Julian Skeffington would make a reasonably good Picquart, at a pinch. I can’t cast you, Martin, you don’t seem to fit in. And one’s got to stretch a point to cast the others, I suppose. But still, hasn’t it ever struck you, either of you, that it is a bit like ‘l’Affaire’?”

Tom Orbell was flushed, excited, apparently with the sheer beauty of the historical analogy. Martin shook his head.

“No, it hadn’t,” he said. “Actually, things are going none too badly—”

“I’m very glad. I mean that, very sincerely.”

“How do you cast yourself?” I said.

“No, that isn’t so easy either.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” I was saying, when Tom gave me what seemed a defiant stare, and said: “You haven’t got your majority yet, have you?”

“Not yet,” said Martin, “but we shall.”

“How are you going to do it?”

Tom knew too much of the detail for Martin to bluff.

“If the worst comes to the worst, the Master will have to make it up. Just to give us a hearing—”

“That’s exactly the kind of thing he would do,” Tom burst out. He rushed on: “Yes, that’s what he was chewing over last night, God rot those awful old men and their beastly, puritanical, unbelieving, Godless, so-called liberal souls. Well, I can save him the trouble, or alternatively we can stop him having the satisfaction. I’ll come in with you, by God I will!”

“You’re sure?”

“I mean it.”

“Do you need some time to change your mind?” said Martin deliberately.

“By God, I’ve got to come in with you. I can’t stand awful old men. When I heard Crawford talking about ‘troublemakers’, that was the last straw. Troublemakers! What else in the name of heaven and earth do they expect honourable men to be? Have they forgotten what it was like to think about one’s honour? God knows I don’t like Howard; but was one word said last night, was one word even thought, about the man himself? It was so de-humanised it made my blood boil. Have they forgotten what it’s like to be human?”

“This business apart,” I said, “Arthur Brown is a very human man.”

“I’m very glad to hear you say that,” said Tom, “because it’s only on this business that I’ve changed sides, remember. Mind you, I don’t agree with either of you on many things. We think differently. Nothing’s going to persuade me that Getliffe ought to be the next Master of this college. What I’m saying now isn’t going to affect what I do this autumn. I’m not going along with you about him — that is, presuming you want him?”

Martin did not reply, and Tom stormed on: “I’d sooner have Arthur Brown a hundred times. Even though some of your friends say he’s a stick-in-the-mud. But as for the rest of the old guard, I just can’t sit down under them. Troublemakers. Judgment. Keeping us in our places till we’re fifty! I can’t abide it, and I won’t. It’s about time someone spoke up for honour. By God, this is the time to do it!”

With a smile both forced and curiously sweet he said: “Anyway, it’ll be nice being on the same side as you two again. We’re all in the same lobby this time, aren’t we?”

We had known, for minutes past, almost from his first question, that he was changing sides. But his tone was not what one might have expected. He kept some of his desire to please; he was trying to sound warm, to feel what most of us feel when we are giving our support. He did not manage it. He had thrown away his prudence, his addiction to keeping in with the top; but he had not done it out of affection for us. Nor out of devotion to Hanna. Nor out of the honour that he was protesting about. Instead he seemed to be acting partly from direct feeling for a victim, partly from frustrated anger. One felt, under the good-living, self-indulgent, amiable surface, how violent he was to himself. He was a man who couldn’t take authority just as it was; he surrounded it with an aura, he longed for it and loathed it. He couldn’t listen to the Master as though he were just a brother human being speaking. In fact, he listened wrong. The phrase which had inflamed him — “troublemakers!” — he attributed to the Master, but it had actually been spoken by Arthur Brown.

“Good,” said Martin. But he was less at home with natures like Tom’s than I was. Now that Tom had committed himself, my instinct would have been to trust him. Martin’s wasn’t. He was not as easy as usual, as he said: “Look here, I’d like to get this cut and dried. It would be a good idea to tell Crawford tonight that we’ve got a majority signed, sealed and delivered. I wonder if you’d mind writing me a note?”

Tom flushed. “You’d like it on paper, would you?”

Martin said, “Well, it would be a final piece of ammunition—”

“Very well,” said Tom. He went, shoulders pushing forward, eyes hot, to the writing-desk by the window. He wrote a few lines, signed his name, put the sheet of paper in an envelope. Then, with his back to us, he started laughing. It was a loud laugh, both harsh and hearty.

“I told Nightingale I was going to stay to write a letter, didn’t I?”