The Affair

25: Address from the Moderator

IN the Fellows’ Garden, the tea-roses, the white roses, the great pink cabbage-roses glowed like illuminations in the heavy light. The garden, when I entered it that afternoon, had looked like a steel-engraving in a Victorian magazine, the sky so boding, the roses bulbous. A week earlier, there would have been young men lying on the grass, staying in college to receive their degrees: but this was the last Friday in June, and as I strolled by the rose bushes, scuffing petals over the turf, the garden was dead quiet, except for the humming by the bee-hives.

It was a cold day for midsummer, so cold that I could have done with a coat. I had seen no one since I arrived in Cambridge that lunch-time. In fact, I had taken care to see no one. This was my last chance to get my thoughts in order before tomorrow, the first day of the Seniors’ hearing.

The college clock struck four. The time had gone faster than I wanted, the garden had a chilly, treacherous, rose-laden peace. It was irksome to be obliged to leave: but there had been an invitation waiting for me in the guest room, asking me to tea with the Master to meet my “opposite number”, Dawson-Hill.

As I walked through the college it seemed deserted, and I could hear my own footsteps, metallic on the flag-stones. The only signs of life in the second court were a couple of lights (Winslow’s for one) in the palladian building. Once past the screens, though, and the first court was as welcoming as on a February afternoon, with windows lighted in the Bursary, in Brown’s set, Martin’s, the drawing-room and study in the Lodge. As I let myself into the Lodge and went upstairs, I could hear Crawford’s laugh, cheerful, pawky, and quite relaxed.

In the study, Dawson-Hill was in the middle of an anecdote. Crawford was contentedly chuckling as I came in. At once Dawson-Hill, slender and active as a young man, though he was a year my senior, was on his feet shaking my hand.

“My dear Lewis! How extremely nice to see you!”

He spoke as though he knew me very well. It was not precisely true, though we had been acquaintances on and off since we were pupils in the same Inn over twenty-five years before.

Looking at him, one found it hard to believe that he was fifty. He stood upright in his elegant blue suit, and with his Brigade tie discreetly shining he might have been an ensign paying a good-humoured, patronising visit to his old tutor. His face was smooth, as though it had been carved out of soapstone; his hair, sleekly immaculate, had neither thinned nor greyed. His eyes were watchful and amused. In repose, the corners of his mouth were drawn down in an expression — similar to that of someone who, out of curiosity, has volunteered to go on to the stage to assist in a conjuring trick — surprised, superior, and acquiescently amiable.

He said: “I was just telling the Master about last weekend at—” He mentioned the name of a ducal house. Crawford chuckled. He might be an old-fashioned Edwardian liberal, but he wasn’t above being soothed by a breath from the high life. The ostensible point of the story was the familiar English one, dear to the established upper-middle classes — the extreme physical discomfort of the grand. The real point was that Dawson-Hill had been there. Crawford chuckled again; he approved of Dawson-Hill for being there.

“She is rather sweet, though, isn’t she, Lewis?” Dawson-Hill went on, appealing to me as though I knew them as well as he did. He wasn’t greedy or exclusive about his social triumphs. He was ready to believe that nowadays I had them too. His own were genuine enough; he had been having them since he was a boy. He never boasted, he just knew the smart world, more so than any professional man I had met: and the smart world had taken him into themselves. Why, I had sometimes wondered? He had been born reasonably luckily, but not excessively so. His father was a modest country gentleman who had spent a little time in the army, but not in the kind of regiment Dawson-Hill found appropriate for himself in the war. Dawson-Hill had been to Eton; he had become a decently successful barrister. He had agreeable manners, but they were not at first sight the manners one would expect to make for social triumphs. He was no man-pleaser, and he wasn’t over-given to respect. His humour was tart, sarcastic, and as his hosts must have known by now, not what they would describe as “loyal”. And yet — to an extent different in order from that of any of the tycoons I knew, or the bureaucrats, or the grey eminences, the real bosses of the establishment, or even of the genuine aristocrats — he was acceptable everywhere and had become smart in his own right.

That must have been the reason, I thought, why, when Crawford and Brown were, out of the college’s three or four QCs, choosing one to advise them at the Court of Seniors, they had picked on him. At one time Herbert Getliffe, Francis’ half-brother, would have been the automatic choice: but Brown was too shrewd not to have smelled the air of failure, not to have suspected, as I had heard Brown say, that “the unfortunate chap does seem to be going down the hill”. Nevertheless, the college, usually pretty good judges of professional success, had overestimated Dawson-Hill’s — not very much, but still perceptibly. He was a competent silk, but not better. He was earning, so my old legal friends told me, about £9000 a year at the Common Law bar, and they thought he’d gone as far as he was likely to. He was clever enough to have done more, but he seemed to have lacked the final reserve of energy, or ambition, or perhaps weight. Or conceivably, just as the college was dazzled by his social life, so too was he.

“Well,” said Crawford, loth to say goodbye to high life, “I suppose we ought to have a few words about this wretched business.” He began asking whether we had been supplied with all the “data”.

“I must say,” said Dawson-Hill, suddenly alert, “it isn’t like being briefed by a solicitor, Master. But I think I’ve got enough to go on with, thank you.”

“I fancy our friend Eliot, who has been in on the ground floor, so to speak, has the advantage of you there.”

“That’s the luck of the draw.” Dawson-Hill gave a polite, arrogant smile.

“About procedure, now,” said Crawford. “You’ll appreciate that this isn’t a court of law. You’ll have to be patient with us. As for your own procedure,” he went on massively, “we were hoping that you’d be able to agree at least in principle between yourselves.”

“We’ve had some talk on the telephone,” said Dawson-Hill. I said that we proposed to spend the evening after hall working out a modus operandi.

Crawford nodded, Buddha-like. “Good business,” he said. He went on to ask if he was correctly informed that Wednesday night, June 30th, five days hence, was the latest Dawson-Hill could spend in Cambridge. If that were so, we had already been told, had we not, that the Court was willing to sit on all the days between, including Sunday? We had already received the names of the Fellows who wished to appear before the Court? We both said yes.

“Well, then,” said Crawford, “my last word is for your ear particularly, Eliot. My colleagues and I have given much thought to the position.” He was speaking carefully, as though he had been coached time and time again by Arthur Brown. “We feel that, in the circumstances of this hearing, the onus is on you, representing those not satisfied with the Seniors’ previous and reiterated decision, to convince the Court. That is, we feel it is necessary for you to persuade a majority of the Court to reverse or modify that decision. There are, as you know, four members, and if we can’t reach unanimity I shall be compelled to take a vote. I have to tell you that, according to precedents in the Court of Seniors, which so far as we can trace has only met three times this century, the Master does not possess a casting vote. Speaking not as Master but as an outside person, I’m not prepared to consider that that precedent is a wise one. But those are the conditions which we have to ask you to accept.”

All this I knew. The college had been seething for weeks. Minute-books, diaries of a nineteenth-century Master, had been taken out of the archives. I contented myself by saying: “Of course I have to accept them. But it doesn’t make it easy.”

“The only comfort is,” said Crawford, “that, whatever rules one has, sensible men usually reach a sensible conclusion.”

Dawson-Hill caught my eye. He was deeply conservative, snobbish, perfectly content to accept the world he lived in: but I thought his expression was just a shade more like a conjurer’s assistant’s, just a shade more surprised.

“And now,” Crawford shrugged off the business and Arthur Brown’s coaching, and became his impersonal, courteous self, “I should like to say, speaking as Master, that the entire college is indebted to you two for giving us your time and energy. We know that we’re asking a good deal of you without any return at all. I should like to thank you very much.”

“My dear Master,” said Dawson-Hill.

“I wish,” said Crawford, still with imperturbable dignity, “that the next stage in the proceedings were not an extra tax on your good nature. But, as I expect you know, we have to reckon with a certain amount of personalia in these institutions. In any case, I think you have had due notice?”

Yes, we had had due notice. I felt irritable — for I was anxious enough about next day to have lost my taste for farce — that it was something we could have been spared. The college had had to buy old Gay off. The way they had found, the only way to placate him and prevent him from insisting upon his place on the Court, was to resurrect the eighteenth-century office of Moderator. This was an office I had never heard of, but the antiquaries had got busy. Apparently, in days when the Fellows had been chronically litigious, one of the Seniors had been appointed to keep the ring. So solemnly in full college meeting, M H L Gay, Senior Fellow, had been elected “Moderator in the present proceedings before the Court of Seniors” — and that evening after tea, Crawford, Winslow and Nightingale in one taxi, Brown, Dawson-Hill and I in another, were travelling up the Madingley Road to Gay’s to be instructed in our duties.

I said that this must be one of the more remarkable jaunts on record. Brown gave a pursed smile. He was not amused. Not that he was anxious: in times of trouble he slowed himself down, so that he became under the surface tougher and more difficult to shift. No, he was not anxious. But he was also not viewing the proceedings with irony. For Brown, when one was going on a formal occasion, even on a formal occasion he had himself invented, the ceremonies had to be properly performed.

We filed, Crawford leading us, into the old man’s study. Gay was sitting in his armchair, beard trimmed, shawl over his shoulders. He greeted us in a ringing voice.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen! Pray forgive me if I don’t rise for the present. I need to husband my energies a little nowadays, indeed I do.” Then he said disconcertingly to Crawford: “Tell me, my dear chap, what is your name?”

Just for a moment Crawford was at a loss. His mouth opened, the impassive moon of his face was clouded. He replied: “I am Thomas Crawford, Master of the College.”

“I absolutely remember. I congratulate you, my dear chap,” said Gay, with panache. “And what is more, I absolutely remember why you have attended on me here this very evening.”

He had not asked us to sit down. The room was dark. Out of the window, one saw, under the platinum sky, more roses. That day the town seemed to be full of them.

“I trust you had a comfortable journey out here, gentlemen?”

“Where from?” Crawford replied; he was still off his stroke.

“Why, from the college to be sure.” Gay gave a loud, triumphant laugh. Someone said that it was a cold afternoon and an awful summer.

“Nonsense, my dear chap. Bad summer? You young men don’t know what a bad summer is. Indeed you don’t. Now, ’88, that was a bad summer if ever there was one. Why, I was in Iceland that summer. I was just getting into the swim of what some critics have been kind enough to call my great work on the Sagas. Great work — ah, indeed. Mind you, I’ve always disclaimed the word ‘great’. I’ve always said, call the work distinguished if you like, but it’s not for me to approve of the higher appellation. Certainly not. I was telling you, gentlemen, that I was in Iceland, that bitter summer of 1888. And do you know what I found when I got there? None of you will guess, I’ll be bound. Why, they were having the best summer for a generation! It was fifteen degrees warmer than in our unfortunate Cambridge. Iceland — that country was very poor in those days. They were living hard lives, those poor people, like my Sagamen. Do you know, that year they managed to grow some fresh vegetables? And for those poor people that was a luxury and a half. I remember sitting down to a meal with a dish of cabbage, I can taste it now, and I told myself, ‘Gay, my boy, this country is welcoming you. This country is giving you all it can.’ I’m not ashamed to say it seemed like an omen for my future work. And we should all agree that that was an omen which pointed true.”

We were still standing up. Crawford coughed and said: “Perhaps I ought to introduce my colleagues to you—?”

“Quite unnecessary, my dear chap. Just because one has a slip of memory with your face, it doesn’t mean that one forgets others. Indeed it doesn’t. Welcome to you all.”

He waved magnanimously to Brown, Winslow and Nightingale, who were standing together on Crawford’s left. None of us was certain whether he really knew who they were. “In any case,” Crawford started again, “I expect you don’t remember our legal advisers here. May I present—?”

“Quite unnecessary once more. This is Eliot, who was a Fellow of the College from 1934 until 1945, although he went out of residence during the war and then and subsequently did service to the State which has been publicly recognised. He has also written distinguished books. Distinguished, yes; I never protested about people calling my own work that. It was when they insisted on saying ‘great’ that I felt obliged to draw in my horns. And this must be Dawson-Hill, whom I don’t recall having had the pleasure of meeting, but who was a scholar of the college from 1925 to 1928, took silk in 1939, became a major in the Welsh Guards in 1943, and is a member of the Athenaeum, the Carlton, White’s and Pratt’s.”

The old man beamed, looking proud of himself.

“You see, I’ve done my homework, my dear—?” He looked at Crawford with a smile, unabashed. “I do apologise, but your name obstinately escapes me.”

“Crawford.”

“Ah, yes. Our present Master. Master, I’d better call you. I’ve done my homework, you see — Master. Who’s Who, that’s a fine book. That’s a book and a half. My only criticism is that perhaps it could be more selective. Then some of us would feel at liberty to include slightly fuller particulars of ourselves.”

He turned in the direction of Dawson-Hill. “I apologise for not welcoming you before.”

Dawson-Hill who, unlike Crawford, was quite at ease, went up and shook hands.

“I attended a lecture of yours once, Professor Gay,” he said.

“I congratulate you,” said Gay.

“It was a bit above my head,” said Dawson-Hill, with a mixture of deference and cheek.

Gay was disposed to track down which specific lecture it had been, but Winslow, who had managed to support himself by leaning on a chair, enquired: “I confess I’m not quite clear about the purpose of this conference—”

“You’re not quite clear, my dear chap? But I am. Indeed I am. But thank you for reminding me of my office. Yes, indeed. I must think about my responsibilities and the task in front of you all. Ah, we must look to the immediate future. That’s the place to look.”

“Do you wish us to sit round the table?” Brown asked.

“No, I think not. I shall very shortly be addressing you about your mission. I shall be giving you your marching orders. This is a solemn occasion, and I shall make every effort to stand up for my work. Yes, I want to impress on you the gravity of the task you are engaged in.” He moved his head slowly from left to right, surveying us with satisfaction. “I remember absolutely the nature of my office and its responsibilities. I remember absolutely the circumstances that have brought you to me this evening. Meanwhile, I’ve been refreshing myself by the aid of some notes.” From the side of his chair he pulled out a handful of sheets of paper, held them at arm’s length, catching some light from the window, and studied them through a large magnifying glass. This took some time.

He announced: “To what I have to say in the preliminary stages, I must request Eliot and Dawson-Hill to pay special attention. I should like to call them our Assessors. Assessors. That’s a term and a half. But I find no warrant for the term. However. The Court of Seniors — as I hope you have been informed — it would be gross remissness on someone’s part if you have not been so informed — has recently decided upon the deprivation of a Fellow. That decision hasn’t been received with confidence by a number of Fellows. Whether they would have had more confidence if the Court of Seniors, as by right it should, had had an older head among them — it’s not for me to say a wiser one — whether in those altered circumstances the Fellows would have had more confidence, why, again, it’s not for me to say. This isn’t the time to cry over spilt milk.” Viewing his papers through the magnifying glass, he gave us a history of what had happened. It was a surprisingly competent history for a man of his age, but again it took some time.

At last he said to Dawson-Hill and me: “That’s as much counsel as I’m able to give you. The details of this regrettable incident — why, that’s the task you’ve got to put your minds to. It’s a task and a half, I can tell you. Now I propose to give you all my parting words.”

He gripped the arms of his chair and tried to struggle to his feet.

“No, come, you needn’t stand,” said Brown.

“Certainly I shall stand. I am capable of carrying out my office as I decide it should be carried out. Indeed I am. Will you give me an arm, Eliot? Will you give me an arm, Dawson-Hill?”

With some effort we got him to his feet.

“That’s better,” cried Gay. “That’s much better. Pray listen to me. This is the last chance I shall have of addressing you before your decision. As Moderator in this case of a deprived Fellow, being re-examined before the Court of Seniors, I give you my last words. To the Court of Seniors I have to say: This is a grave decision. Go now and do justice. If you can temper justice with mercy, do so. But go and do justice.”

He stopped for a breath, and went on, turning to Dawson-Hill and me: “To these gentlemen, members of the College, experienced in the law, I have to say this. See that justice is done. Be bold. Let no man’s feelings stand in your way. Justice is more important than any man’s feelings. Speak your minds, and see that justice is done.”

Then he called to us, and we helped him back into his chair. “Now I wish you all success in your tasks. And I wish you goodbye.”

He whispered to us, as the others began to leave the study: “Was that well done?”

“Very well done,” I said.

Dawson-Hill and I had followed the others and were almost out of the room, when the old man called us all back.

“Ah! I had forgotten something essential. Indeed I had. I must insist on your all hearing it. This is positively my last instruction.” He looked at one of his pages of notes. “You intend to reach a decision on or before Wednesday next, am I right?”

“That’s what we hope. But, speaking as Master, I can’t guarantee it,” said Crawford.

“Well spoken,” said Gay. “That’s a very proper caution. That’s what I like to hear. In any case, the time’s of no consequence. There will come a time when, I hope and pray, you’ll be able to reach your decision. Stick to it, all of you, and you’ll get there in the end. This is where my instruction comes in. I wish to be informed, before there is any question of your decision taking effect. As Moderator, I must be the first person to receive your decision. I do not feel inclined to insist on the whole Court of Seniors making this journey to my house again. It will meet my requirements if these gentlemen, Eliot and Dawson-Hill, are sent to me with the findings of the Court. Is that agreed?”

“Is that all right with you two?” Brown said under his breath.

“Agreed,” said Dawson-Hill. I said yes.

“Our two colleagues have undertaken to do that,” said Crawford.

“I shall be waiting for them day or night,” Gay cried with triumph. “This is my last instruction.”

As we went out, he was repeating himself, and we could hear him until we were out on the step. All this time the taxis had been waiting. When Brown got into ours, he peered at the meter and whistled through his teeth.

That was the only comment Brown allowed himself. Otherwise, while the taxi jingled back over the bridge, he did not refer to the next day, or the reason why the three of us were bundled incongruously together, driving through the Cambridge streets. He just domesticated this situation as he had done others before it. He enquired roundly, affably, prosily, about my family as though there was nothing between us. With banal thoroughness he asked if I or Dawson-Hill would find the time to see any of the university match: he speculated about the merits of the teams. It was all as flat and cosy as a man could reasonably manage. I wondered if Dawson-Hill saw through, or beneath, the cushioned prosiness of Brown.

There was nothing flat or cosy about dinner in the combination room that night. There were eight Fellows dining, beside Dawson-Hill and me. Those eight were split symmetrically, four for Howard, and four against. The sight of Dawson-Hill and me seemed to catalyse the clash of tempers. A harmless question by Tom Orbell — how many nights would they be dining in the combination room before they went “back into hall” — brought a snub from Winslow. G S Clark was asking Skeffington, politely but with contempt — “How can you possibly believe that? If you do, I suppose you’re right to say so.” This was not over anything to do with the affair, but upon a matter of church government.

Someone made a reference to our visit. Winslow, who was presiding, said: “Yes, I must say that this is a very remarkable occasion. But I suppose we oughtn’t to ventilate our opinions while this business is what I believe in the singular language of our guests’ profession is called sub judice.”

“It’s all one to me,” said Dawson-Hill nonchalantly, “and I’m sure I can speak for Lewis.”

“No, I suggest we’d better restrain ourselves for the time being,” said Winslow. “Which, since I am credibly informed that some of our number are not now on speaking terms, may not be so difficult as might appear.”

The air was crackling. Dawson-Hill set himself to make the party go, but instead of getting less, the tension grew. At the end of the meal, I told Winslow that he would have to excuse the two of us, since we wanted to discuss the procedure. He seemed glad to see us go. As we left the combination room, I noticed that Winslow was lighting his pipe, and Skeffington reading a newspaper. No one was willing to sit round to talk and drink wine.

26: Definitions by a Window

IN the court, as we walked to my rooms, the sky was lighter than it had been that afternoon. On the breeze came a smell of acacia, faint because the blossom was nearly over, faint because the evening was so cold and dry. Immediately we went into my sitting-room, Dawson-Hill said: “I must say, they’ve given you the Number 1 dressing-room.”

It was true, they had given me the college’s best spare set. Dawson-Hill, so he said, observing mine, had to put up with one much inferior. He observed it with a dash of surprise and no discernible rancour. In fact, he seemed to draw an obscure pleasure from changes of fortune, from the sheer worldliness of the world.

When we had first met, he had been the young man with the future, the brightest catch among young barristers. I had been a young provincial, said to be clever, but not in his swim. He had been polite, because that was his nature: he had laid himself out to amuse, because he had rather people round him were happy than unhappy: but he hadn’t expected to see much of me again. Our acquaintanceship had gone on like that for years. Then I left the bar, and he went on. He thought he had done pretty well. But he was a little surprised to find that, somehow, by processes which to him were pleasurably mysterious, I had become better-known. He was surprised, but not in the least hipped. This was the world. Clever chaps bobbed up when you didn’t expect them. It just showed that one often judged wrong. He was not an envious man, and nothing like so much a snob as he looked. He was ready to accept that I deserved what had happened to me. It made him like me more.

But, though he liked me more, he was as tough as he had ever been. He wasn’t the opponent I should have chosen. Partly because he was in practice, and I had not done any real legal work for years. But much more because, though he sounded a playboy, he was hard-willed, the least suggestible of men.

As we sat in the window-seat, gazing into the garden on the cloud-grey summer evening, chatting casually before we started business, I had only one advantage. It was not just that I knew the background of the case much better: that didn’t count for much against a lawyer of his class. But I also knew the people better. That might cut both ways: it wasn’t all gain: but it was all I had to play with.

“Perhaps we’d better settle one or two things,” I said. We faced each other on the seat. It all looked slack, informal: it wasn’t as informal as all that, and it went very quickly. “We can’t expect them to keep to the rules of evidence, can we?” said Dawson-Hill.

“That won’t happen,” I said.

“We’d better tell them, when something wouldn’t be evidence in court. Agreed?”

I nodded.

“Apart from that, it’ll have to be catch as catch can. Agreed?”

Again I nodded.

“It’s taken for granted we talk to members of the Court as and when they want us to? For instance, I am invited to dine with the Master on Monday night. I won’t pretend the case isn’t likely to crop up. Any objections?”

“None.” He needn’t have asked. There wasn’t any analogy in law that I could think of. He had been asked down to advise the Seniors, who were also the judges: what was to stop him talking to them?

“Well, then, Lewis, I think it’s for you to start tomorrow.”

“What about your starting the case against Howard first?”

“No, no. You’re arguing against a decision.” Dawson-Hill gave his superior, mouth-pulled-down smile. “The Master made that clear at tea-time. And if he hadn’t, it stands out a mile from the papers. No, no. You start tomorrow.”

I should have to give way in the end; I might as well give way quickly. But it was a point to him. In this case, I would much rather he had to make the running.

“So who are you going to bring in tomorrow?” he asked, after I had acquiesced. This wasn’t mild curiosity. He wanted to know the schedule of my case, and he was within his rights.

“Howard.”

“You’re starting with him, are you?” He was smiling. It was another point to him. He knew what it meant, the instant I said it — I was not confident of my chief witness.

“I fancy,” he went on, with a touch of neutral professional malice, “that if I spend a bit of time on him, that might keep us most of tomorrow.”

“I fancy it might,” I replied. On Sunday, I reported, I should bring in Skeffington, Martin, Francis Getliffe. I didn’t see why we shouldn’t get them all into the morning session. Who was he going to call?

“Only one. The man Clark.”

“What’s he going to say?”

Again this was a professional question, and this time it was I who was within my rights.

“Character-evidence. Character-evidence of a negative kind, I’m afraid. Reports of your chap Howard discussing his work.”

“Can you possibly think that that’s admissible?”

“My dear Lewis, we’ve agreed, you can tell them what wouldn’t be allowed in law.”

“It’s going pretty far.”

“It’s not going as far,” said Dawson-Hill, “as Mr Howard and his supporters seem to have gone. Or am I wrong?”

Sitting there in the subdued light, his face even more unnaturally youthful because one could not see the etching beneath his eyes, he might have been asking me to have a drink. And yet, I suddenly realised that he was committed. He was not just acting like an eminent lawyer doing a good turn for his old college. That was true, but it wasn’t all.

Up to that moment, I had been taking it for granted that, as a natural conservative, his feelings would be on the side of authority. I had also taken it for granted that, as a good professional, he would want the side that brought him down to win. Both these things were true — but they were nothing like all. Reasonable and dégagé as he sounded, he was as much engaged as I was. He was dead set against Howard, and perhaps even more against “his supporters”. Another phrase which he used, in the same high, light, apparently careless tone, was “the Howard faction”.

It was a warning. Now I had had it, I stopped that line of conversation.

Instead I said that it was time we defined what was “common ground”. If we didn’t, there was no chance of old Winslow keeping up with us, or even Crawford, and there would be no end to it.

“I can’t for the life of me,” said Dawson-Hill, once more offhand, professional, “see how they’re going to spin it out beyond Tuesday morning. And that’s giving them all Monday to natter, bless them.”

“Tuesday morning?” I told him he had never lived in a college.

The spirit of personal feeling had passed. We were down to business again.

“All right,” said Dawson-Hill. “Common ground?”

“Do we agree that the photograph in Howard’s thesis, reproduced in his paper, was faked? That is, a deliberate fake by someone?”

“Agreed.” This was the photograph, with the expanded drawing-pin hole, which had set the affair going.

“Your line, of course, is that it was faked by Howard. Mine is that it was faked by old Palairet. Agreed?”

“Not within the area of common ground,” said Dawson-Hill, sharp on the draw. It was the way we were going to argue, he conceded, but he wouldn’t agree to more. I hadn’t expected him to.

“But I think this,” I said, “must be common ground. The missing photograph in Palairet’s notebook. The caption under that photograph refers, in the opinions of the scientists I’m calling, to a photograph similar to the one in Howard’s thesis and by definition faked. I don’t expect you to admit that the caption does necessarily bear that meaning. But assume that the photograph were not missing and that it was faked — then is it common ground that it must have been faked by Palairet?”

“I don’t see any need to accept that.”

“I see great need.”

“I’m sorry, Lewis, I’m not playing.”

“If you don’t, I shouldn’t be able to leave it there. You see, the Court have listened to the college scientists often enough. I should have to insist on getting scientists from outside to examine Palairet’s notebooks—”

“You can’t do that.”

“Can’t I?”

He stared at me.

“You can’t wash this dirty linen in public, simply to prove a platitude? If there really had been a faked photograph stuck in the old man’s notebook, then it wouldn’t need outside scientists to tell us that in all reasonable probability he must have produced the photograph himself—”

“That’s all I’m asking you to agree on.”

“It’s extremely hypothetical and extremely academic.”

“Well, if necessary, I should want responsible scientists to confirm it.”

“The Seniors wouldn’t be pleased if you brought them in.”

I was sure — and I was counting on it — that he had been warned by the Master and Brown that, whatever he did, none of the proceedings must leak outside.

“I shall have to bring them in,” I said, “unless you and I agree on this as common ground.”

“Do you think the Court would dream for a moment of letting you?”

“In that case, I shall have to make myself more unpleasant than I want to.”

“You wouldn’t do your case any good,” he said. “You wouldn’t do yourself any good, as far as that goes. And it’s remarkably academic anyway. I’m sorry, but I don’t believe you mean it.”

I replied, “Yes, I mean it.”

Dawson-Hill was studying me, his eyes large, not as gay as the rest of the young-seeming face. He had met me as an acquaintance for nearly thirty years. Now he was trying to decide what I was like.

“Right,” he said lightly, without a change of expression. “It’s too trivial to argue over. Common ground.”

Each of us said he had no other point to raise. We smoked cigarettes, looking out into the garden. Soon afterwards, with a cheerful, social good night, he left.

Through the window I caught the scent of syringa mixed with the late-night smell of grass. For an instant it pulled a trigger of memory, flooding me with feelings whose history that night I could not recall. Then my mind started working again in the here and now. I had not told Dawson-Hill that, over the missing photograph, I held a card whose value I was not certain of, and which I was still undecided whether or how to play. But I might have to.

One night a few weeks before, sitting with Martin, working up what I should say before the Seniors, both of us comfortable because we were on the same side, I had asked — what I was sure he had asked himself too — just why that photograph happened to be missing. I had said that of course it could have been an accident. I had gone on to ask whether it could have been deliberate. Neither of us replied: but I believed the same answer was going through our heads.

It had been a half-suspicion of mine for months, ever since, perhaps before, Martin and I had listened to Howard’s outburst, and Martin had threatened him that if anyone else heard him it would ruin his case. It was the kind of suspicion that others must have had, so fantastic, so paranoid, that one did not bring it to the surface. With me, it had flared up as I listened to G S Clark at Brown’s dinner-party.

Last Christmas, before Palairet’s notebooks reached Skeffington, there had only been one person with the chance to handle them. That was Nightingale. Was it credible that Nightingale had seen the photograph first, realised that it was a fake which proved Howard’s story true, and pulled it out?

It didn’t matter what I believed, but only what I could make others believe. If I were going to do the slightest good in front of the Court, I could not myself let out even the hint of a suspicion. That was simple tactics. To Crawford, Brown and Winslow, such a suspicion coming from me, as I acted as Howard’s lawyer, doing my best with his case, would kill that case squalid dead.

And yet, that suspicion might have to be set to work within them. Staring sightlessly at the dark garden, I wasn’t hopeful, I didn’t see the way through. I couldn’t do it. Who could, or would?

27: Combination Room in the Morning

NEXT morning I had breakfast late, as I used to when I lived in college. The kidneys and bacon, the hard toast, the coffee: the sunlight through the low windows: the smell of flowers and stone: it gave me a sense of déja vu and in the same instant sharpened the strangeness of the day. Under the speckled sunshine, I read my newspaper. I had asked Martin and the others to leave me alone this first morning before the Court. All I had to do was ring up the head porter and tell him to see that Howard was available in college from half past ten. Then I went back to my newspaper, until the college bell began to toll.

The single note clanged out. It was five to ten, and we were due in the combination room on the hour. I walked through the fresh, empty, sunny court, the bell jangling and jarring through my skull. Through the door which led to the combination room, Arthur Brown, gown flowing behind him, was just going in. Following after him, from the lobby inside the door I borrowed a gown myself.

The bell tolled away, but in the room the four Seniors and Dawson-Hill had all arrived and were standing between the table and the windows. At night, the table dominated the room: but not so in the morning sunlight. The high polish on the rosewood flashed the light back, while outside the lawn shone in the sun. Seven chairs were set at the table, four on the side near the windows, the others on the fireplace side. Before each chair, as at a college meeting, were grouped a blotter, a pile of quarto paper, a steel-nibbed pen, a set of pencils. In addition to the college statutes, in front of the Master’s place loomed a leather-bound Victorian ledger with gold lettering on the back, a collection of Palairet’s notebooks, a slimmer green book also with gold lettering, and at least three large folders stuffed out with papers.

Good mornings sounded all round as I joined them. If these had been my business acquaintances, it crossed my mind, they would have shaken hands: but in the college one shook hands at the most once a year, on one’s first appearance each Michaelmas term. Arthur Brown observed that it was a better day. Nightingale said that we deserved some good weather.

Suddenly, with an emptiness of silence, the bell stopped. Then, a few seconds later, the college clock began to chime ten, and in the distance, like echoes, chimed out other clocks of Cambridge.

“Well, gentlemen,” said Crawford, “I think we must begin.”

Upright, soft-footed, he moved to the chair. On his right sat Winslow, on his left Brown; Nightingale was on the far right, beyond Winslow. They took up the places on the window side. Crawford pointed to the chair opposite Brown, across the table — “Will you station yourself there, Eliot?” Dawson-Hill’s place was opposite Nightingale and Winslow. The seventh chair, which was between Dawson-Hill’s and mine, and which faced the Master’s, was to be kept — so Crawford announced — “for anyone you wish to bring before us”.

Crawford sat, solid, image-like, his eyes unblinking as though they had no lids. He said: “I will ask the Bursar, as the Secretary of the Court of Seniors, to read the last Order.”

The leather-bound ledger was passed via Winslow to Nightingale, who received it with a smile. It was a pleased smile, the smile of someone who thoroughly enjoyed what he was doing, who liked being part of the ritual. Nightingale was wearing a bow-tie, a starched white shirt, and a new dark suit under his gown: he might have been dressed for a college wedding. He read: “A meeting of the Court of Seniors was held on April 22nd 1954. Present the Master, Mr Winslow, Mr Brown, Dr Nightingale. The following Order was passed: ‘That, notwithstanding the decision reached in the Order of April 15th 1951, the Court of Seniors was prepared to hold a further enquiry into the deprivation of Dr D J Howard, in the presence of legal advisers.’ The Order was signed by all members of the Court.

“That is all, Master,” said Nightingale.

“Thank you, Bursar,” said Crawford. “I think it is self-explanatory. I also think that we are all seized of the circumstances. Speaking as Master, I have nothing to add at this stage. Our legal advisers are now sitting with us. I have explained to them, and I believe the point is taken, that it is for Eliot to show us grounds why we should consider overruling a decision already given to the College. Eliot, we are ready to hear from you now.”

I had expected more of a preamble, and I was starting cold. I hadn’t got the feel of them at all. I glanced at Brown. He gave me a smile of recognition, but his eyes were wary and piercing behind his spectacles. There was no give there. He was sitting back, his jowls swelling over his collar, as in a portrait of an eighteenth-century bishop on the linenfold, the bones of his chin hard among the flesh.

I began, carefully conciliatory. I said that, in this case, no one could hope to prove anything; the more one looked into it, the more puzzling it seemed. The only thing that was indisputable was that there had been a piece of scientific fraud; deliberate fraud, so far as one could give names to these things. No one would want to argue about that — I mentioned that it had been agreed on, the night before, by Dawson-Hill and me, as common ground.

“I confirm that, Master,” came a nonchalant murmur from Dawson-Hill along the table.

Of course, I said, this kind of fraud was a most unlikely event. Faced with this unlikely event, responsible members of the college, not only the Court, had been mystified. I had myself, and to an extent still was. The only genuine division between the Court and some of the others was the way in which one chose to make the unlikely seem explicable. Howard’s own version, the first time I heard it, had sounded nonsense to me; but reluctantly, like others, I had found myself step by step forced to admit that it made some sort of sense, more sense than the alternative.

I was watching Brown, whose eyes had not left me. I hadn’t made them more hostile, I thought: it was time to plunge. So suddenly I announced the second piece of common ground. If the photograph now missing from Palairet’s Notebook V–I pointed to the pile in front of the Master — had been present there, and if that photograph had been a fraud, then that, for there would be no escape from it, would have to be a fraud by Palairet.

“No objection, Master,” said Dawson-Hill. “But I’m slightly surprised that Eliot has used this curious hypothesis in the present context.”

“But you agree to what I’ve said? I haven’t misrepresented you?” I asked him.

Dawson-Hill acquiesced, as I knew he would. Having given an undertaking, he would not be less than correct.

While he made his gibe about the “curious hypothesis”, I had glanced at Nightingale, who was writing notes for the minutes. Apart from the sarcastic twitch, his expression did not change; the waves of his hair, thick and lustrously fair for a man of sixty, seemed to generate light, down at the dark end of the table. Like a faithful functionary, he wrote away.

I went on: Who had done the fraud? Howard? or — we had all turned the suggestion down out of hand, but some of us couldn’t go on doing so — Palairet? As I’d started by saying, I couldn’t hope to prove, and possibly no one alive was in a position to, that Palairet had done it. The most I could hope to persuade them was that there existed a possibility they couldn’t dismiss, at any rate not safely enough to justify them breaking another man’s career. I should be able to prove nothing, I said. All I could reasonably set out to do before the Court was to ask a few questions and sharpen two or three doubts.

“Is that all for the present, Eliot?”

“I think it’s enough to be going on with, Master,” I said. I had spoken for a bare ten minutes.

Crawford asked Dawson-Hill if he wished to address the Court next. No, said Dawson-Hill: he would reserve his remarks, if any, until the Court had heard testimony from the Fellows that Eliot was bringing before them.

Crawford looked satisfied and bland. “Well,” he said, “at this rate it won’t take too long before we put our business behind us.” Then he added: “By the way, Eliot, there is one point I should like your opinion on. You repeated the suggestion which has of course been made to the Court before, and also to me in private — you repeated the suggestion, unless I misunderstood you, that it was Palairet who might have falsified his experiments. And you suggested it, again if I understood you correctly, not simply as a hypothesis or a ballon d’essai, but as something you thought probable. Or have I got you wrong?”

“No, Master,” I replied, “I’m afraid that’s so.”

“Then that’s what I should like your opinion on,” he said. “Speaking as a man of science, I find it difficult to give any credence to the idea. I oughtn’t to conceal that from you. Let me remind you, Palairet was moderately well-known to some of the senior members of the college. I should be over-stating things if I said that he was the most distinguished man of science that the college has produced in our time—” Just for an instant, I could not help reflecting that Crawford reserved that place for himself and to one’s irritation was dead right. “—but I have talked to men more familiar with his subject than I am, and I should not regard it as far wrong if we put him in the first six. He had been in the Royal Society for many years. He had been awarded the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society. Several of his researches, so I am informed on good authority, are classical beyond dispute. That is, they have been proved by time. The suggestion is now that, at the age of seventy-two, he went in for cooking his results.”

(Suddenly Crawford’s Scottish accent, overlain by fifty years in Cambridge, broke through and we heard a long, emphatic “cooking”.)

“You think he could possibly, or even probably, have produced fraudulent data? Where I should like you to give us your opinion, is this — what reason could such a man have for going in for a kind of fraud that made nonsense of the rest of his life?”

I hesitated. “I didn’t know him,” I said.

“I did know him,” Winslow put in.

He looked at me from under his lids. He had been staring at the table, his neck corded like an old bird’s. But his hands, folded on his blotting-paper, stood out heavy-knuckled, the skin reddish, and neither freckled nor veined by age. “I did know him. He came up the year after the college had the ill-judgment to elect me to a Fellowship on the results of my Tripos.”

“What was he like?” I said.

“Oh, I should have said that he was a very modest young man. I confess that I thought also that he had a good deal to be modest about.” Winslow was in early morning form.

“What was he like afterwards?” I went on.

“I didn’t find it necessary to see him often. With due respect to the Master, the men of science of my period were not specially apt for the purposes of conversation. I should have said that he remained a very modest man. Which appeared to inhibit his expressing an interesting view on almost anything. Yes, he was a modest and remarkably ordinary man. He was one of those men who achieve distinction, much to one’s surprise, and carry ordinariness to the point of genius.”

I gazed at him. He had been a very clever person: in flashes he still was. Despite his disgruntlement and the revenges he took for his failure, he was at the core more decent than most of us. Yet he had never had any judgment of people at all. It was astonishing that anyone who had met so many, who had such mental bite, who had lived with such appetite, who had strong responses to almost anyone he met, should be so often wrong.

Nightingale raised his head from his notes.

“Eliot hasn’t answered the Master’s question, I think.”

“No—” I was beginning, but Nightingale went on: “You’ve suggested, though of course we know the suggestion isn’t your own invention, and we’re none of us holding you to blame—”

He smiled quite openly, smoothing the lines from his face — “But you’ve suggested that a distinguished old man has gone in for a bit of scientific forgery, so to speak. And mind you, and I want to stress this once again to everyone here, a very petty bit of scientific forgery at that. I mean, this work of Howard’s, or the work that’s referred to in Notebook V, is trivial compared with the old man’s real contribution. Nothing of this kind could possibly have added one per cent to his reputation. You’re asking us to believe that a man absolutely established, right at the top of his particular tree, is going to commit forgery for the sake of that? Putting it in its lowest terms, I’m sorry, but it just doesn’t wash. I think it’s up to you to answer the Master’s question.”

Brown turned his head towards Nightingale. Crawford nodded.

Until then, I had not known how the Court worked among themselves. I had had no sense of the balance of power. It was clear, the instant one noticed the others listening to Nightingale, that we outside had underestimated him. He carried more weight than I liked. Not that he had been offensive to me; he was brisk, efficient, impersonal, speaking to me as though we were acquaintances doing a piece of business. That impersonal tone was a strength. And it was another strength, of course, that he was immersed in the detail. More than anyone there, he knew what he was talking about.

“I can’t say anything very useful, as I didn’t know Palairet,” I replied to Crawford. “But do you want me to say why I don’t think it’s impossible?”

“We should be interested,” said Crawford.

I caught sight of Dawson-Hill along the table. His eyelids were pulled down in a half-smile of ridicule, or perhaps of professional sympathy. It seemed incredible to him, not used to academic meetings, that they should have rushed off in chase of this red herring. No rules, no relevance, in Dawson-Hill’s terms, but instead they had obstinately got their heads down to the psychology of scientific fraud.

I did my best. I reproduced the names and anecdotes Francis Getliffe had told me, when we first talked about the affair, before the Audit Feast. Those frauds had happened. We knew nothing, or almost nothing, about the motives. In no case did money come in — in one, conceivably, the crude desire to get a job. The rest were quite mysterious. If one had known any of the men intimately, would one have understood?

Anyone’s guess was as good as mine. But it didn’t seem impossible to imagine what might have led some of them on, especially the more distinguished, those in positions comparable with Palairet’s. Wasn’t one of the motives a curious kind of vanity? “I have been right so often. I know I’m right this time. This is the way the world was designed. If the evidence isn’t forthcoming, then just for the present I’ll produce the evidence. It will show everyone that I am right. Then no doubt in the future, others will do experiments and prove how right I was.” The little I had picked up about Palairet — it didn’t seem right out of his nature. I knew, I said to Winslow, that he gave one the impression of being a modest man. I should be prepared to believe that was true. But there was a kind of modesty and a kind of vanity which were hard to tell apart — and mightn’t they, in fact, be one and the same thing? Reading the rubrics in his notebook, couldn’t one at least think it possible that the aura of his personality had that particular tinge? Couldn’t one at least imagine him getting old and impatient, knowing he hadn’t much time, working on his last problem, not an important one, if you like, but one he was certain he knew the answer to? Certain that he knew how the world was designed? Almost as though it was the world designed by him. And mixed with that, perhaps, a spirit of mischief, such as one sometimes finds in the vain-and-modest — “this is what I can get away with”.

Catching Brown’s gaze, I knew that I had made a mistake. It was not just that his mind was made up against Howard. It was also that he didn’t like or trust what I was saying. He was a man of genuine insight, the only one on the Court. He knew the people around him with accuracy, compassion and great realism. But, although he had that insight, he had no use for psychological imaginings. As a rule, even when we were on opposite sides, he thought me sensible about people. This time, he was dismissing me as too clever by half.

It had been an awkward situation, and I had mishandled it. Under the pressure from Crawford and Nightingale, I had had no option except to take a risk, but I had shown bad judgment. Looking round the Court, I had to recognise that I had done more harm than good.

28: The Sound of Falsity

AFTER the aside on Palairet, Crawford pushed the combination room bell, and the butler carried in a tray, on which a coffee-pot and jug struck sparks from the sunlight. He was followed by a servant, carrying cups upon another of the massive college trays. The Court settled down to drink their coffee. Dawson-Hill was interested in the silverware. What was the date of the trays? he asked, and Brown, behaving as though this were a comfortable party after hall, replied with care. Dawson-Hill began asking about eighteenth-century silversmiths. Each appeared to regard it as the most reasonable of conversations.

It was the kind of phlegm, oblivious of time, that I had met, chafed against and envied, learned to imitate without truly possessing, all my official life. Men of affairs weren’t sprinters: they weren’t tied to the clock: if you hurried them when they didn’t propose to be hurried, you were not one of them.

The college clock was chiming a quarter past eleven before the trays were taken away. Crawford, settled in his chair, addressed me: “Well, Eliot, I understand this is the stage in our proceedings when you would like to bring Howard in?”

I said yes. Crawford rang. After a wait of minutes, the door opened. First the butler, with a figure behind him. At the first sight, entering at the dark end of the room, Howard looked pale, ill-tempered, glowering. With one hand he was pulling his gown across his chest.

“Good morning,” said Crawford, “do sit down.”

Howard stood still, undecided where he should go, although there was only the one chair vacant in front of him.

“Won’t you sit down?” said Crawford, as though standing up might be a curious preference.

Polite, active, Dawson-Hill jumped up and guided Howard into the chair. Once again, Crawford seemed disinclined to take part himself. He merely asked Howard if he would mind answering questions put to him by “our colleagues”, and then called on me to begin.

Turning half-left in my seat, trying to make Howard look at me — he was a yard away along the table — I could not get his eye. He was staring, and when I spoke to him he continued to stare, not at Brown but past him, into the corner of the room, where motes were jigging in parallel beams of sun. He was staring with mechanical concentration, as though he were watching a spider build its web.

All I could do with him, I had decided in cold blood weeks before, was to make everything sound as matter-of-fact as I could manage. So I started off on his career: he had come up to the college in 1939, hadn’t he? And then he had joined the Army in ’41? He could have stayed and gone on with his physics — how had he managed to avoid being kept as a scientist?

His reply, like his previous one, was slow.

“I knew someone who got me put down for his regiment.”

“Who was it?”

“As a matter of fact, one of my uncles.”

“Did he find it easy?”

“I expect he knew the ropes.”

Even then, he was ready to sneer at the influence which had always been within his reach. In a hurry I passed on. He had returned to the college in ’45, taken Part II of the Tripos in ’46? Then he had gone off to Scotland to do research under Palairet? Why?

“I was interested in the subject.”

“Did you know him?”

“No.”

“You knew his name and reputation?”

“But of course I did.”

It would be fair to say that he had been impressed by Palairet’s reputation and work? I had to force him. Just as young men are when they are looking for someone to do their research under? Was that fair? I had to press it. Reluctantly and sullenly, he said yes.

“When you arrived in his laboratory, who suggested your actual field of work?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Can’t you?”

Already I was feeling the sweat trickle on my temples. He was more remote and suspicious even than when I talked to him in private. “Did you suggest it yourself?”

“I suppose not.”

“Well, then, did Palairet?”

“I suppose so.”

I persuaded him to agree that Palairet had, in fact, laid down his line of research in detail, and had supervised it day by day. More than a professor normally would? Maybe. Had he, Howard, found research easy?

“I shouldn’t think anyone ever does,” he said.

Some of the results he, or they, had obtained were still perfectly valid, weren’t they? A longer pause than usual — no one’s criticised them yet, he said. But there was one photograph which was, beyond any doubt, a fraud? He did not reply, but nodded. Could he remember how that photograph got into the experimental data? Palairet must have brought it in, he said. But could he remember how, or when? No, he couldn’t. Would he try to remember? No, he couldn’t place it. There were a lot of photographs, he was trying to write his thesis and explain them.

“This was a more striking bit of experimental evidence than the rest, though, wasn’t it?”

“But of course it was.”

“You can’t remember Palairet first showing it to you?”

“No, I can’t.”

It was no good. To the Court, he must have seemed deliberately to be refusing an answer. To me, trying to pull it out, he seemed not to want to remember — or else his whole memory was thinner-textured than most of ours, did not give him back any kind of picture. Didn’t he preserve, I thought to myself, any sense of those days in the laboratory, the old man coming in, the time when they looked through the photographs together? This was only five years behind him. To most of us, intimations like that would have flickered in and out, often blurred, concertinaed, but nevertheless concrete, for a lifetime.

I tried to gloss it over. I asked him if he found the fraud hadn’t come to him as a major shock? Yes. He gave me no help, but just said yes. I went through his actions after the first letters of criticism had come in from the American laboratories, doing my best to rationalise them. When he was first accused, I was leading him into saying, he had just denied it. Why should he do any more? Fraud had never crossed his mind: why should he invent explanations for something he had never imagined? The same was true the first two occasions he had appeared before the Court. He had simply said that he had faked nothing. It did not occur to him to think, much less to say, that Palairet had done the faking. It was only later, when he was compelled to recognise that there had been a fraud, that he began to think that only one person could have done it. That was why, belatedly, so belatedly that it seemed an invention to save his skin, he had brought in the name of Palairet.

How much of this synoptic version I was managing to suggest — how much the Court took in, not as the truth, but as a possible story — I could not begin to tell. I had to do it almost all through my questions. His answers were always slow and strained, and sometimes equivocal. Once or twice he sounded plain paranoid, as in the public house with Martin, and I had to head him off.

All the time, I was thinking, another five minutes, a question which sets him going, and it might sound more credible. But that kind of hope was dangerous. This was tiring them; it was boring them. I was accomplishing nothing. If I went on, it could be less than nothing. I felt frustrated at having to surrender, but I gave it up.

Crawford looked at the grandfather clock in the corner of the room. It was nearly twenty-five to one.

“I am inclined to think,” he said, “that is as far as we can go this morning. We shall have to trouble you” — he was speaking to Howard — “to join us again this afternoon. I hope that doesn’t upset any other arrangements?”

Howard shook his head. This automatic courtesy, such as he received from the Master or Brown, was too much for him.

When the door had closed behind him, Crawford invited us to lunch with him in the Lodge. I wanted to say no, but I daren’t leave them. As usual, one couldn’t afford to be absent. So I listened to Dawson-Hill entertaining the others at the Lodge dining-table. Someone mentioned that a couple of heads of houses would be retiring this next year. “Which reminds me,” said Crawford, “that I suppose my own successor will have to be elected at the end of the Michaelmas term. I take it there won’t be any hitch about that, Brown?”

“I think it’ll be looked after properly, Master,” said Brown. He gave no sign that he was himself involved. He spoke as though he were making arrangements for the appointment of the third gardener.

As we walked in the Master’s garden after lunch, Crawford discussed his plans for moving out of the Lodge. All clear by Christmas: his old house would be waiting for him. “Speaking as a husband,” he said, “I shan’t be sorry to get back. This” — he waved a short-fingered hand across the lawn, over which tortoiseshell butterflies were performing arabesques, towards the Lodge — “is not a convenient house. Between ourselves, no one knew how to build a house until the nineteenth century, and moderately late in the nineteenth century at that.”

A butterfly traced out a re-entrant angle in front of us. On my face I felt the sun, hot and calming. We walked beside the long Georgian pond, the water-lilies squatting placidly on the water, and Crawford was saying: “No, I don’t know why anyone consents to come into the Lodge. As for any of you with a wife, I should advise very strongly against it.”

Back in the combination room at a quarter past two, the sun was beginning to stream into my eyes. Nightingale drew a blind, which up to then I had never noticed, so that the room took on the special mixture of radiance, dark and hush such as one meets in Mediterranean salons.

As soon as Howard was back in his chair, Dawson-Hill started in. The tone in his questions wasn’t unfriendly; it had a good deal of edge just below the flah-flah, but so it had when he spoke to his friends. He kept at it for over two hours. His attack was sharp enough to hold them all, even Winslow, awake, alert, through the slumbrous afternoon. Dawson-Hill was having a smoother job than mine, I thought once or twice, as though I had been a young barrister again, with professional envy, professional judgment, resurrected. He was doing it well.

He limited himself to four groups of questions, and his line — any lawyer could have told — had been plotted out in advance. He sounded insouciant, but that was part of his stock-in-trade. There was nothing of the dilettante about his work that afternoon. He began by asking Nightingale to give him “the thesis”.

This was a copy of Howard’s Fellowship thesis, which according to custom had been deposited in the college library. It was about a hundred and fifty pages long, typed — neatly typed, by a professional — on quarto paper. It was bound in stiff green covers, with the title and Howard’s name in gold letters on the outside front cover and also on the spine.

“This does seem to be your thesis, doesn’t it, Dr Howard?” said Dawson-Hill, handing it to him.

“But of course.”

Dawson-Hill asked how many copies there were in existence. The answer was, three more. In the Fellowship competition, the college asked for two copies. He had used the remaining two for other applications.

“This is the show copy, though?”

“You can call it that.”

“Then this” — there was a slip of paper protruding from the thesis and Dawson-Hill opened it at that page — “might be your star print?”

It was the positive which everyone in that room knew. It was pasted in, with a figure 2 below it and no other rubric at all. It stood out, concentric rings of black and grey, like a target for a small-scale archery competition.

“It’s a print, all right.”

“And this print is a fraud?”

I wished Howard would answer a straight question fast. Instead he hesitated, and only at last said, “Yes.”

“That doesn’t need proving, does it?” said Dawson-Hill. “All the scientific opinion agrees that the drawing-pin hole is expanded? Isn’t that true?”

“I suppose so.”

“That is, this print had been expanded, to make it look like something it wasn’t?”

“I suppose so.”

“What about your other prints?”

“Which other prints?”

“You can’t misunderstand me, Dr Howard. The prints in the other copies of your thesis?”

“I think I re-photographed them from this one.”

“You think?”

“I must have done.”

“And this one, this fake one, came from a negative which you’ve never produced? Where is it, do you know?”

“Of course I don’t know.”

For once articulate, Howard explained that the whole point of what he had said before lunch was that he couldn’t know. He had not seen the negative; Palairet must have made the print and the measurements and Howard had taken them over.

At that, Nightingale broke in.

“I’ve asked you this before, but I still can’t get it straight. You mean to say that you used this print as experimental evidence without having the negative in your hands?”

“I’ve told you so, often enough.”

“It still seems to me a very curious story. I’m sorry, but I can’t imagine anyone doing research like that.”

“I thought the print and the measurements were good enough.”

“That is,” I broke in, “you took them on Palairet’s authority?”

Howard nodded.

Nightingale, with a fresh, open look of incomprehension, was shaking his head.

“Let’s leave this for a moment, if you don’t mind,” said Dawson-Hill. “I’m an ignoramus, of course, but I believe this particular print was regarded — before it was exposed as a fraud — as the most interesting feature of the thesis?”

“I shouldn’t have said that,” said Howard. (I was thinking, why didn’t the fool see the truth and tell it?) “I should have said it was an interesting feature.”

“Very well. Let me be crude. Without that print, and the argument it was supposed to prove, do you believe, Mr Howard, that the thesis would have won you a Fellowship?”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Do you agree it couldn’t have stood the slightest chance?”

Howard paused. (Why doesn’t he say Yes, I thought?) “I shouldn’t say that.”

Nightingale again intervened: “There’s not a great deal of substance in the first half, is there?”

“There are those experiments—” Howard seized the thesis and began staring at some graphs.

“I shouldn’t have thought that was very original work, by Fellowship standards,” said Nightingale.

“It’s useful,” said Howard.

“At any rate, you’d be prepared to agree that without this somewhat providential photograph your chances could hardly have been called rosy?” said Dawson-Hill.

This time Howard would not reply.

Dawson-Hill looked surprised, amused, and broke away into his second attack.

“I wonder if you’d mind giving us some illumination on a slightly different matter,” he said. “This incident has somewhat, shall I say, disarranged your career?”

“What do you think?” Howard replied.

“Not to put too fine a point upon it, it’s meant that you have to say goodbye to being a research scientist, and start again? Or is that putting it too high?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“And you must have realised that, as soon as this Court first deprived you of your Fellowship?”

“But of course I did.”

“That was nearly eighteen months ago, seventeen months, to be precise?”

“You must have the date.” Howard’s tone was savage.

“So far as my information goes, during that time, that quite appreciable time, you never took any legal action?”

It was the point Nightingale had challenged us to answer, at the Master’s dinner-party after Christmas. I had no doubt that Nightingale had put Dawson-Hill up to it.

“No.”

“You’ve never been to see your solicitor?”

“Not as far as I remember.”

“You must remember? Have you been, or not?”

“No.”

“You never contemplated bringing an action for wrongful dismissal?”

“No.”

“I suggest you weren’t willing to face a court of law?”

Howard sat, glowering at the table. I looked at Crawford: for an instant I was going to protest; then I believed that would make things worse.

“I always thought,” Howard replied at long last, “that the college would give me a square deal.”

“You thought they might give you much more of the benefit of the doubt?”

“I tell you,” Howard said, his voice strained and screeching, “I didn’t want to drag the college through the courts.”

To me this came out of the blue. When Martin and I had pressed him, he had never said so much. Could it be true, or part of the truth? It did not ring true, even to me.

“Surely that would be more magnanimous than any of us could conceive of being,” said Dawson-Hill, “in the circumstances as revealed by you?”

“I didn’t want to drag the college through the courts.”

“Forgive me, but have you really this extreme respect for institutions? I rather gathered that you had slightly less respect for existing institutions than most of us?”

For the first time that day, Howard answered with spirit.

“I’ve got less respect for existing society than most of you have, if that’s what you mean. It’s dying on its feet, and none of you realise how fast it’s dying. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t got respect for some institutions inside it. I can see this university going on, and this college, as far as that goes, long after the system you’re all trying to prop up is sunk without trace, except for a few jeers in the history books.”

Nightingale whispered to Brown. Crawford, not put off by unplacatory statements, suddenly had his interest revived and was ready to argue, but Dawson-Hill got back to work. “Yes, and your interesting attitude towards what I think you called — existing society, wasn’t it? — brings me to another question. What really were your relations with Professor Palairet?”

“All right.”

“But you’ve given me the impression that they were slightly more intimate than one would naturally expect, between a very senior professor and, forgive me, a not yet remarkable research student. That is, the impression you’ve tried to give us is of someone coming in and out of your room, giving you pieces of experimental data and so on, very much as though he were a collaborator of your own standing. Does that sound likely?”

“It’s what happened.”

“But can you suggest any reason why we should think it likely? Didn’t you give Professor Palairet sufficient grounds to be less intimate with you than with other research students, not more?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you must know. Isn’t it common knowledge that Professor Palairet was in ordinary terms a very conservative man?”

“He was a conservative, yes.”

“Surely, actively so?”

“If you put it that way.”

“Didn’t he ask you to stop your open political activities while you were in his laboratory?”

“He said something of the sort.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I couldn’t.”

“Didn’t he object when you appeared as one of the backers of what I believe is called a ‘Front’ organisation? Scientists’ World Peace Conference — wasn’t that the eloquent name?”

“I suppose he did.”

“You must know. Didn’t he give you an ultimatum that, if you appeared in any such organisation again, you would have to leave his laboratory?”

“I shouldn’t have called it an ultimatum.”

“But that is substantially true?”

“There’s something in it.”

“Well, then, does all this correspond to the picture, a rather touching picture, I must say, of professor — student intimacy and bliss, on which your whole account of these incidents appears to depend?”

Howard stared. Dawson-Hill went on: “Further, I suggest to you that your whole account of these incidents doesn’t make sense, whichever way one looks. If we assume, just for an instant, that Professor Palairet did perpetrate a ridiculous fraud, and we also assume the reality of this very touching picture of the professor— student intimacy, then we have to accept that he just gave you some experimental data and you quietly put them into your thesis and your papers as your own? Is that correct?”

It sounded like another point of Nightingale’s. It was a valid one. From the start, Francis and Martin had been troubled by it.

“I made acknowledgments in everything I wrote.”

“But it would mean you were living on his work?”

“All the interpretations that I made were mine.”

“Does it sound likely behaviour on Professor Palairet’s part — or on yours, as far as that goes?”

“I tell you, it’s what happened.”

Dawson-Hill smoothed back his hair, already smooth.

“I shan’t keep you much longer, Dr Howard. I know this must be rather irksome for you. And the Court has had a tiring day.” It was well past four. The sun, wheeling over the first court, had begun to leak into the further window behind Nightingale’s back, and during the last questions he slipped away from the table and drew another blind.

“Just one final question: when your work was criticised, did you take the advice of any of your scientific colleagues here? Did you take any advice at all?”

“No.”

“You did nothing. You didn’t produce the idea that Professor Palairet was in the habit of providing you with photographs. You didn’t produce that idea for some weeks, if I’m not mistaken. My friend along the table” — Dawson-Hill smiled at me superciliously, affably — “has done his best to make that seem plausible. Tell me now, does it really seem plausible to you?”

“It’s what happened?”

“Thank you, Master. I’ve nothing more to ask Dr Howard.”

Dawson-Hill leaned back in his chair, elegant, degagé, as though he hadn’t a thought or a care in the world.

“Well,” said Crawford, “as has just been said, we’ve had a tiring day. Speaking as an elderly man, I think we should all do well to adjourn until tomorrow. The members of the Court of Seniors have all had opportunity to question Howard on previous occasions.” (Crawford had been punctilious throughout in calling Howard by his surname alone, as though he were still a colleague.) “I don’t know whether any Senior wishes to ask him anything further now?”

Winslow, eyes reddened, but surprisingly unjaded, said: “I regard that as a question, Master, asked with the particle num.”

“What about you, Eliot?” Crawford said.

During Dawson-Hill’s cross-examination, I had been framing a set of questions in reply. Suddenly, looking at Howard, I threw them out of mind.

“Just this, Master,” I said. I turned to Howard. “Look here,” I said. “There’s been a fraud. You didn’t do it?”

“No.”

“It must have been done, in your view, by Palairet?”

Even then he could not answer straight out. “I suppose so,” he said at length.

“Of anything connected with this fraud you are quite innocent?”

He said, in a high, strangulated tone: “But of course I am.”

As I signalled to Crawford that I had finished, Howard fell back in his chair like an automaton. I felt — as on and off I had felt all day — something so strange as to be sinister. I had heard him speak like that when I believed him guilty. Now, so far as I was convinced of anything about another person, I was convinced that he wasn’t. Yet, listening to him at that moment, I felt not conviction, but mistrust. What he said, although with my mind I knew it to be true, sounded as false as when I first heard it.

29: Disservice to a Friend

BACK in my rooms after the day’s session, I lay on the sofa. On the carpet the angle of the sunbeams sharpened, while I made up my mind. At last I put through two telephone calls: one to the kitchens, to say that I should not dine that evening: the other to Martin, asking him to collect the leaders of the pro-Howard party after hall.

“In my rooms?” said Martin, without other questions. For an instant I hesitated. In college, nothing went unobserved. The news would go round before we had finished talking. Then I thought, the more open the better. This wasn’t a trial-at-law, where an advocate mustn’t see his witnesses. The only tactics left to us were harsh. So, after eating alone, I went to Martin’s rooms in the full, quiet evening light.

As I was going up the staircase, Francis Getliffe followed me, on his way across from the combination room. We entered Martin’s sitting-room together. There Martin was waiting for us, with Skeffington and — to my surprise — Tom Orbell.

It was Tom who asked me first: “How did it go?”

“Badly,” I said.

“How badly?” put in Martin.

“Disastrously,” I said.

As we brought chairs round by the windows, from which one looked westward over the roofs opposite to the bright, not-yet-sunset sky, I told them that Howard was the worst witness in the world. I added that I had been pretty inept myself.

“I find that hard to believe,” said Francis Getliffe.

“No,” I said. “I wasn’t much good.”

I went on: “A lot of people would have done it better. But, and this is what I wanted to talk to you about, I’m not sure that anyone would have done the trick. I’ve got to tell you that, as things are and as they look like going, I don’t believe that this man stands a chance.”

In the golden light, Skeffington’s face shone effulgent, radiant, furious.

“That simply can’t be true,” he cried.

“As far as I can judge, it is.”

Skeffington was in a rage, which did not discriminate clearly between Howard, the Seniors and myself. “Are any of us going to wear this? Of course we’re not.”

As for Howard, Skeffington was ready to abuse him too. In fact, I had noticed in Skeffington the process one often sees in his kind of zealot. He was still, as he had been from the day of his conversion, more integrally committed to getting Howard clear than anyone in the college. His passion for giving “that chap” justice had got hotter, not more lukewarm. But as his passion for justice for Howard boiled up, his dislike for the man himself had only deepened. And there was something else, just as curious. For Howard’s sake — or rather, for the sake of getting him fair play — Skeffington was prepared to quarrel with his natural associates in the college: the religious, the orthodox, the conservative. All this on behalf of a man whom Skeffington, not now able to bear him and not given to subtle political distinctions, had come to think of as the reddest of the red. The result of this was to make Skeffington, in everything outside the affair itself, more conservative than he had ever been before. He had taken on a rabid, an almost unbalanced, strain of anti-communism. It was said, I did not know how reliable the rumour was, that he was even having doubts about voting for Francis Getliffe at the magisterial election — after all, Francis had been known to have a weakness for the left.

So he was lashing out at the Court, at Howard, and, somehow, projecting all his irritation, at me.

“I can’t credit that you haven’t got it wrong,” he cried.

“I wish I had,” I said.

“They can’t help giving him his rights. Anything else — it’s dead out.”

“Listen,” I said, “this is the time that you must believe me.”

Francis said: “We do.”

Martin nodded his head, so did Tom. I was sitting at the end of the semicircle, watching them as they faced the glowing cyclorama of the sky — Francis fine-featured and deep-orbited, Tom like a harvest moon, Martin composed, his eyes screwed up and hard. I looked at Skeffington, his head rearing handsomely above the others.

“You must believe me—” I said.

He said: “Well, you’ve been in there all day.” It was an acquiescence, it occurred to me, about as graceful as one of Howard’s.

Martin intervened: “Right, then. Where do we go next?”

He knew that I had come with something to propose. What it was, he had not guessed.

Then I started. I wanted to shock them. It was no use going in for finesse. I said that the only question which might make the Court think twice was a question we had all thought about and kept to ourselves. That is, how had the photograph got removed from the old man’s notebook? Could it have been removed deliberately? If so, by whom?

“The answer to that is simple,” I said. “If it was removed deliberately, then it was by Nightingale.”

I looked at Martin and reminded him that we had asked ourselves those questions. I believed that, even to stand a chance of getting Howard off, it had to be asked in Court. I could not guarantee that it would work. It was risky, distasteful, and at the best would leave rancour behind for a long time. Nevertheless, for the short-term purpose of justice for Howard, I had to tell them that there was no alternative move at all.

The point was, were we justified in making it? It might do Nightingale harm — no, it was bound to do him harm, innocent or guilty. How certain were we of our own ground in suspecting him? Were we going to take the responsibility of harming a man who might be innocent?

The room was hushed. Martin looked at me, brilliant-eyed, without expression. Francis’ face was dark.

It was Julian Skeffington who broke the silence.

“I’ve never been able to see how that photograph came unstuck,” he said, without his loftiness or confidence. “I don’t know what could make a chap do a thing like that. It’s not a thing I expected to think of a chap doing. Especially when he’s your senior and you’re used to seeing him at dinner.”

“Well?” I asked him.

“I don’t pretend to like it. I wish there was another way.”

“There’s no other way of giving Howard a chance. Well?”

“If you put it to me like that,” said Skeffington, reluctant but straightforward, “then I say we’ve got to go ahead.”

“So do I,” said Tom Orbell. “The trouble is, we’ve been too scrupulous all along!”

Francis cleared his throat. He disregarded Tom, and spoke straight to me.

“You were asking if we were justified, Lewis? I should like to say we weren’t. But I can’t do that.”

This startled me.

“You really think we’re right to do it?” I said.

“I’m afraid I’ve had a suspicion, from very early days.”

“Since when?”

“I’m afraid — since the three of you came to see me in the lab. last Christmas.”

That was a shock. Then, an instant later, I had another, when Martin remarked: “I’m sorry, but I disagree with you all.”

“Have you altered your mind?” I broke out.

“No, I thought about it when we last talked, but I came down on the other side.”

Mixed with my irritation, I was moved by sarcasm at my own expense. I had felt telepathically certain that we had agreed. It hadn’t been necessary to say the words. It seemed bizarre to have been so wrong, about someone one knew so well. In the whole course of the affair, this was the first occasion when Martin and I had not been at one.

“What are you holding back for?” said Tom.

“I don’t believe we’re entitled to do it.”

“Don’t you think it’s possible that Nightingale pulled that photograph out—?” Skeffington’s voice was raised.

“Don’t you remember that it was Nightingale who had it in most for Howard?” Tom joined in.

“Yes, I think it’s possible,” Martin replied to Skeffington. “But I’m not convinced it happened.”

“I’m afraid I think it’s ninety per cent probable,” said Francis.

“I don’t,” said Martin. “You’ve always distrusted Nightingale, I know. So have you, even more so,” he turned to me. “From what you’ve told me, it would have been remarkable if you hadn’t. But you don’t really believe in people trying to make a better job of their lives, do you? I know Nightingale isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, let alone yours. He’s close, he’s narrow, he’s not very fond of anyone except himself and his wife. Still, I should have thought he’d tried to become a decent member of society. I’m not prepared to kick him downstairs again unless I’m absolutely sure.”

Of these four, I was thinking, Martin was by a long way the most realistic. Yet it was the men of high principle, Skeffington and Francis, whom no one could imagine doing a shady act, who could themselves imagine Nightingale doing this. While Martin, who had rubbed about the world and been no better than his brother men, could not believe it. Was it that realistic men sometimes got lost when they met the sensational — as though they had seen a giraffe and found that they couldn’t believe it? Or was it more personal? In being willing to defend Nightingale’s change of heart, in showing a heat of feeling which came oddly from him, and which had surprised us all, was Martin really being tender to himself? For he, too, of course, had tried to make something different out of his life.

“I think there’s substance in what Martin says,” said Francis, “but still—”

“Look here,” cried Tom, eyes flat, face thrust forward, with the touch of cheerful hypomania which sometimes changed trigger-quick into temper, “from what old Lewis tells us, you’ve got this choice. Either you raise a doubt about Nightingale — which I must say seems to me a perfectly legitimate one, and it ought to have been brought out long ago — or else you leave Howard to be done down. What do you say, Martin? Is that all right?”

“It’s a hard choice,” said Martin.

“Well, you’ve got to make it.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” Martin replied, without any cover at all, “Howard’s case will have to take its chance.”

“I can’t and won’t sit down under that,” said Skeffington.

“So that’s what you’d let happen, is it?” said Tom.

“No,” said Francis, “I’m afraid I’ve got to choose the other way. What about you, Lewis?”

“I’m with you,” I said.

So we settled it. Then I came to the harder part. Who was going to “raise the doubt”? I told them that it would be useless for me to do it: I gave them the reasons I had thought over to myself the night before. And also, Nightingale and I had once been enemies. Though it was years ago, men like Brown would not have forgotten that. Did they agree?

There were frowns and heavy faces as they nodded. They had all seen where this must lead. “So it’s got to be one of us,” Tom said.

“Yes,” I replied: the doubt would have to come out in Court next day, while I examined one of them.

Tom Orbell said the one word: “Who?”

There was a long pause. The sky in the west was a luminous apple-green shading into cobalt blue above the college.

“I’m damned if I like it,” said Skeffington, “but I’d better do it.”

“I don’t know enough about it, do I?” asked Tom. He was glad to be out of it, and yet half-disappointed.

Of them all, Skeffington was the last I should have selected. He did not carry weight. He had been so much the head and front of the Howard party that men did not listen to him any more. They would just dismiss this as another outburst, and the last.

I gazed at Martin. He would have been far more effective. He shook his head. “No, I can’t go back on what I said. I’ll do anything else I can: but not that.”

Just as I was turning to Skeffington, resigned to making do with him, Francis said, in a tone strained, embittered and forced: “No. I’m the best person to do it.”

Martin looked at him in consternation. They had never been specially fond of each other, but Martin said with a touch of affection, almost protectively: “But it’s not much in your line, you know.”

“Do you think I shall enjoy it?” Francis said. “But they’ll listen to me, and I’m the best person to do it.”

No man would more detest doing it. He was a man so thin-skinned that he didn’t like the ordinary wear and tear of a college argument, much less this. He was less cushioned than the rest of us. Although he had played a part in scientific affairs, he had done so by force of will, not because he fitted in. He had never toughened his hide, as most men do for self-protection, when they live in affairs. He had never acquired the sort of realistic acceptance which I, for example, could switch on. He continued to be upset when men behaved badly.

Yet despite all that, or really because of it, he was, as he said himself, the man the Court would have to listen to. Not only for his name, his seniority, but also because he was a little purer than most men.

Martin asked him to think again, but Francis was impatient.

His decision was made. He didn’t want any more talk. He wanted to do it and get it over. He knew, just as well as the politically minded, Martin and Tom Orbell, what in practical terms he was losing. All of us knew that up to that night he had a clear lead in the magisterial election. By this time next day, he would have lost one vote for sure, possibly more.

In Martin’s room, no one mentioned the election. But I did, later that night. As soon as Francis had said that he was “the best person to do it”, he got to his feet. All of us were constrained. There was some relief, certainly some expectancy in the air, but even a fluent man like Tom couldn’t find any easy words. While they were saying goodnight, Francis asked me if I would care to drive out with him and see his wife.

On our way out to their house, the same house I used to visit when we were young men, we scarcely spoke. I looked from the dashboard to the beautiful grape-dark dusk. Francis, silently driving, was both resentful at the prospect of next day, and also diffident. He had been in authority for so long, sometimes people disliked him for being overbearing, and yet he still curled up inside.

In the drawing-room, as soon as I went in, his wife Katherine cried out with pleasure. When I had first known her, nearly thirty years before, she had been a sturdy pony of a girl; now she was a matriarch. The clear, patrician Jewish features were still there, the sharp, intelligent grey eyes: but she sat statuesque in her chair, a big, heavy woman, her children grown up, massive, slow-moving, indolent, like those aunts of hers, other matriarchs, whom I had met at her father’s dinner-parties when she and I were young. And yet, though the physical transformation was dramatic, though time had done its trick, and she sat there, a middle-aged woman filling her chair — I did not quite, at least not with photographic acceptance, see her so. I did not see her as I should have seen her if I had that night come into her house for the first time, and been confronted with her — as I had been confronted with those great matriarchs of aunts, having no pictures of their past. Somehow anyone whom one has known from youth one never sees quite straight: the picture has been doubly exposed; something of themselves when young, the physical presence of themselves when young, lingers till they die.

We talked about our children. It seemed to her funny that her two eldest should be married while mine was six years old. We talked of her brother, to whom she was, after a break of years, at last reconciled. We talked of her father, who had died the year before. Then I said, in the warmth of associations flowing back: “Katherine, my dear, I’ve just done Francis a bad turn.”

“That’s pretty gross, isn’t it?” She glanced at her husband with her penetrating eyes. “What have you been up to, Lewis?”

“No,” said Francis, “we’ve all got trapped. It’s not his fault.”

“In effect, I’ve done him a bad turn.”

I explained what had happened. She knew all about the affair: she was vehemently pro-Howard. Morally, she had not altered. She still kept the passion for justice, argumentative, repetitive, but quite incorruptible, that I remembered in her and her brother when they were young. At that time, that sharp edged passion had seemed to me to be specifically Jewish: had I ever met non-Jews who felt for justice just like that? But now I had lived with Margaret for years. She had the same passion, just as contemptuous of compromise, as any of my Jewish friends. If Margaret had been present that night, she would have judged the case precisely as Katherine did.

“You hadn’t any option,” she said to Francis. “Of course you hadn’t. Don’t you admit it?”

“No doubt that will comfort me a bit, when it comes to tomorrow afternoon.” Francis, who still loved her, made that gallows-joke as though with her he had managed to relax.

“But it’s an intolerable nuisance. No, it’s worse than that—” I began.

“It’s monstrous to have to make yourself unpleasant in just that way, of course it is,” said Katherine to her husband.

“I meant something less refined,” I put in. The way I spoke recalled to her, as it was meant to recall, a private joke. When I had first entered the great houses in which she was brought up, I had been a poor young man determined to get on. I had had to play down my sensibilities, while she and her friends had been free to indulge and proliferate theirs. So they had made a legend of me, as a sort of Bazarov, unrecognisably monolithic, utterly different from what I really was, and from what they knew me to be. Somehow this legend had lasted half a lifetime: so that Katherine, whose fibres were tougher than mine, sometimes pretended at odd moments that she was a delicate, fainéante relic of a dying class being attacked by someone implacable and raw.

“Much less refined,” I said. “Look, Katherine, if Francis doesn’t become Master next autumn, it will be because of what he’s going to do tomorrow. Perhaps he’ll still get it. But if he doesn’t, it’ll be on account of this business. I want you to realise that I am partly responsible.”

“Why, I suppose he is,” she said to Francis, in a tone I did not understand — angry? sarcastic?

“It’s neither here nor there,” he replied.

“If I’d not spoken as I did tonight—”

“It would have added up to the same thing in the end.”

“Anyway,” I said to Katherine, “I’m sorry it had to be through me.”

She had been gazing at me. Her eyes were keen, appraising. Suddenly she laughed. It was a maternal laugh, a fat woman’s laugh.

“You don’t think I mind all that much, do you? I know the old thing wants it” — she grinned affectionately at Francis — “and of course anything the old thing wants he ought to get. But between ourselves I’ve never really understood why he wants it. He hasn’t done so badly anyway. And it would be an absolutely awful nuisance, don’t you admit it? I don’t mind telling you, I’m not panting to live in any beastly Lodge. Think of the people we should have to entertain. I’m not much good at entertaining. I’m getting too old to put up with being bored. Why should we put up with being bored? Answer me that.”

She chuckled. “To tell you the truth,” she said, “I’ve only got one ambition for the old thing now. That is, for him to retire. That’s the only one.”

Francis smiled at her. It had been a good marriage. But just at that instant, as she said “that’s the only one”, he couldn’t lie to himself or even pretend to us that it was the only one for him.

30: The Word “Mistake”

THE next morning, Sunday, the Court of Seniors were sitting at the combination room table waiting. They were waiting for Skeffington. He had been asked to be ready at half past ten. There was no sign of him.

Impatiently, on edge because he was my witness, I went to the window and gazed into the sunny court. Turning back to the table, I asked Crawford if he would like me to ring up Skeffington’s house. Just as he was replying, the butler came in. He told the Master that Dr Skeffington was in the college; the head porter had seen him enter the chapel nearly half an hour before; he had still not reappeared.

“Thank you, Newby,” said Crawford. “Bring him in as soon as he’s available, if you don’t mind.”

When we were alone again, Brown told us that there was no service in chapel between eight and eleven that day. “He must be praying,” said Brown. “That’s what I get round to. He must be praying.”

He added: “Well, God forbid that I should cause any of His little ones to stumble, but I wish the man weren’t such an infernal time about it.”

“I’m very ignorant of these necromantic proceedings,” said Winslow, “but I take it that Skeffington isn’t attempting to bring supernatural influences to bear on our actions in this room? Or am I wrong?”

The old man was happy. He felt as though back in the Cambridge of the ’90s, when unbelief, rude, positive unbelief, was fun. As he proceeded to inform the Court with relish, he still had exactly as much interest in “religious exercises” as he had in the magic of savage tribes.

“I suppose Skeffington would like us to see a difference between his activities and rain-making. But I confess I think it’s a major intellectual error to endow his activities with a sophistication that they don’t inherently possess. I must say, praying before giving evidence does seem a singular example of sympathetic magic. I find it a very remarkable thing for a supposedly intelligent man to do.”

So, in private, did Crawford. Did Brown, who punctiliously attended college chapel, but, I often thought, out of social, not religious, piety, out of attachment to established things? It was neither they nor Nightingale who protested — but, from the opposite side of the table, Dawson-Hill, who said: “I don’t find it remarkable in the least, you know.”

“Really?”

“I should have thought it was entirely natural.”

Dawson-Hill smiled, self-possessed, unabashed. I should have remembered that he was a devout Catholic. I was ready for him to remind us that he had been to Mass that morning, but at that moment the butler loudly called out Skeffington’s name.

I cut my own examination short. Skeffington had nothing new to say, the Court had heard his opinion, fervent and lofty, times enough before. Everything fitted into place, once one saw Palairet had done it: the thing clicked, as it had clicked for him when he went through the notebooks: the missing photograph “told its own story”: Palairet had done it, and nothing else was “on the cards”.

I passed him on to Dawson-Hill, expecting them to be easy with each other. From the first question and answer, they couldn’t get on. It wasn’t that Skeffington gave anything away; it wasn’t that Dawson-Hill had thought of anything subtle. No, they just twitched a nerve of resentment in each other. Their eyes met only perfunctorily. Their handsome profiles were half-averted. Each of them was aware of his looks, I thought — to an extent which apparently irritated, not only more homely men, but also each other. Dawson-Hill took considerable care of his; his hair, that morning showing not a sliver of grey, was as burnished as an elegant undergraduate’s. Was it the other’s vanity each didn’t like? They were both looking-glass vain.

There was more to it than that. Dawson-Hill saw someone “out of the same stable” as himself, belonging to just the same pocket of the upper middle-class, where smartness was making its last stand. That made the nerve of resentment quiver, when he found him hostile, in the enemy camp, in a case like this. Despite his tolerance, his free and easy sense of fairness — Dawson-Hill was not devoid of either — he could not help feeling that this man should be on his side.

Then I thought again what I had thought the night before. What made Skeffington resentful was that, in everything but his sense of honour, he felt it too. Speaking before the Court that morning, he would have liked not to have quarrelled with their ruling. He wanted to become one of them — or rather, he did not so much want it as think that was his proper place. One could hear that wish-to-accept in his voice; it made him angrier with Dawson-Hill, with the Court, with all who disagreed with him. It made his rebellion more peremptory.

Round the table the Seniors were listening to him with formal politeness, not attention. He hadn’t made much effect that day, but such as it was, it had been negative.

I was relieved to see him go.

Martin, who came in next, said precisely what he had contracted to say. He did not speak about the missing photograph. On all other points, he was careful, considerate, and unbudging. For himself, he said, he was convinced an injustice had been done. He could understand why others might not be convinced: wasn’t it enough for them to see that an injustice might have been done? He was too practised a committee man to overstate his case: but he was also too practised to seem compromising where he didn’t intend to be.

Dawson-Hill tried a few sighting-shots of questions, but then left him alone, with the final word: “What it boils down to, if I understand you, is that, in a matter which is full of room for different opinions, you are giving the Court yours?”

“I think,” said Martin, “it is rather more than that.”

Crawford asked him the questions he had asked me, about Palairet and scientific fraud. Martin, more cautious than I had been, and a better judge of the Court, would not be drawn, except to say that he was forced to think Palairet had done it.

“Well, Martin,” said Crawford, with a cordiality not so impersonal as usual, “that may be the point where we have to agree to differ.”

When Martin had gone, and the rest of us went into the Lodge for lunch, I was sure that Dawson-Hill believed it was all over. He showed me the teasing and slightly guilty kindness that one shows to a rival who has done his best, when the best isn’t good enough. I was also sure that not one of the Court was ready to change his mind. It was true, Brown as well as Crawford had not been quite unaffected by Martin. The most Martin had done was to make Brown reflect that they hadn’t “handled the responsible chaps on the other side” too well. After they had “dug in their heels about this case” — Brown felt immovably that that was his duty — then they would have to spend some time and care “building bridges”.

Brown sipped a glass of hock with sober content, Dawson-Hill reminisced about travels down the Rhine, old Winslow put away three glasses. Then Brown noticed that I was not touching mine. “You’re not drinking, Lewis?”

“It’s very fine,” Dawson-Hill said. “You oughtn’t to miss it, you really oughtn’t to.” I said, not in the middle of the day. Brown was peering at me. He had noticed that I had been sitting silent. Did he suspect that I had not yet given up?

The Court regrouped itself in the combination room; the blind was pulled down; there was a smell of beeswax, furniture polish, Crawford’s tobacco, honeysuckle from the terrace.

The butler cried out, as though rejoicing in the title: “Sir Francis Getliffe!”

As Francis sat down, Crawford said: “We are very sorry to drag you here on a Sunday afternoon.”

“I should be distressed if anyone worried about that, Master.”

“We know it’s an infliction, but we hope you realise that we’re grateful for your assistance.”

“It couldn’t possibly be an infliction, Master, if I can be of the slightest help—”

It was some time since I had seen Francis at a meeting. I had forgotten that, especially when uneasy, he took on a curious, stylised courtesy like a Spaniard in a play by Calderón.

Looking at him, my eyes made fresh by the tension so that I might have been looking at him for the first time, I thought that his face, also, might have been a seventeenth-century Spaniard’s. In shape, that is: long, thin, without much of a dome to the head. Not in colouring: the skin under the sunburn was pale and the eyes in the arched orbits were a kind of tawny yellow that I had seen only in Anglo-Saxons. They were splendid eyes, I suddenly realised, idealist’s eyes, conceptualiser’s eyes. Under them the skin was stained sepia and furrowed: those were the stains of anxious wear, the demands he had made upon himself, and they would not leave him now. The whole face was that of a man who had ridden himself hard, driven by purpose, ambition, and conscience.

Examining him, I began slowly. I wanted to get the courtesy peeled away. It didn’t matter whether the Court thought I was spinning out the routine, making the best of a bad job. As I went over the old history, asking when he had first heard of the scandal, whether he had looked at Howard’s published papers, formal questions of no interest, I could see Dawson-Hill, lounging in his chair as though this was dull stuff.

“For some time you took it for granted that Howard had faked the photograph in his paper?”

“Certainly.”

“Accordingly, you accepted the verdict of the Court of Seniors, when they first deprived him?”

“In any circumstances I should want very strong reasons not to accept the verdict of the Court of Seniors of this college,” said Francis, inclining his head to the Master and Brown, “and in these circumstances I thought their verdict was inevitable.”

“When did you begin to think otherwise?”

“Later than I should have done.”

That was better. His voice, light-toned and clear, had suddenly hardened.

“You began to think a mistake might have been made?”

“I should like to be clear about the word ‘mistake’.”

“Let me ask you this instead. You began to think the Court had made a wrong decision?”

“I tried to explain that to them. Obviously I didn’t go far enough.”

Francis was now speaking with full authority. This was it, I thought. I was just going in for the coup, when, maddened, I had to stop. There was one person who was not listening, either to full authority or anything else. Old Winslow, sedated by the heat and the glasses of hock, had nodded off, his nutcracker chin sunk low on his chest.

I stopped the question after the first word. Crawford enquired: “Eliot?”

I pointed at Winslow.

“Ah,” said Crawford, without expression. “None of us is as young as he used to be.” Gently he tugged at Winslow’s gown.

The old man reluctantly, with saurian slowness, pulled up his head. Then he gave a smile rueful, red-lidded, curiously boyish.

“I apologise, Master,” he said.

Crawford asked with medical consideration if he was all right. “Perfectly all right, I thank you,” said Winslow snappily, reaching out for the carafe of water in front of the Master’s place. “Please resume your remarkable proceedings,” he said to me.

With an eye on him, intent on keeping him awake, I asked Francis: “You were saying that you hadn’t gone far enough?”

“Certainly not.”

“What do you now think you should have done?”

Francis answered, clear and hard: “You asked me just now about a ‘mistake’. I didn’t accept the word. I ought to have drawn the Seniors’ attention to what may — I do not say it was, but I do say most seriously that it may have been worse than a mistake.”

There was no noise. Along the table I saw Nightingale, pen over the foolscap, in the middle of a note. He did not look up at Francis.

“I’m afraid I’ve not quite caught the drift of this,” said Crawford. “Could you elucidate?”

“I’ll try,” said Francis. “I’ve never concealed my view that throughout this business Howard has behaved like an innocent and not very intelligent man. I’ve told you before that I believe his account of what happened is substantially accurate. I believe that most scientists who studied the facts would come to the same conclusion. They would, of course, as a consequence, have to accept that Palairet did this fraud.”

“As the Master was saying to Martin Eliot before luncheon,” said Brown, “that is just where we fundamentally disagree with him.”

“How can you?” Francis spoke in a quiet tone, brittle but inflexible. “You’ve only been able to go on persuading yourselves because of one single fact. If that one photograph were present in Palairet’s notebook, not one of you could even pretend to think that he wasn’t responsible.”

“The photograph, however, is not present,” Crawford replied. “That is what I meant by something possibly being worse than a mistake.”

“If I understand your innuendo correctly,” said Brown, “you—”

“I am not making an innuendo. I am stating a possibility as clearly as I can. I believe the Court would be culpable if it did not take this possibility into account. It is: that the photograph now missing from Palairet’s notebook was removed not by accident, but in order either to preserve Palairet’s reputation or to continue justifying the dismissal of Howard.”

“That is a very grave thing to say,” said Arthur Brown. He was frowning, but not showing anger. I had no doubt that all the implications of what Francis had said were running through that cunning, politic mind — and at the same time outraging his feelings, because, tough and obstinate as he was, he was not willing that people should think he had done wrong or that he should think so himself.

“I know it,” said Francis.

Beyond Winslow, Nightingale was no longer writing and was gazing, together with the entire Court, at Francis. The lines on Nightingale’s skin were visible, but no more than usual on a tiring day. The furrows ran across his forehead.

“I know it’s a grave thing to say,” Francis repeated. “I must ask the Court to remember that I’ve said it.”

31: Stateliness of a Man Presiding

WITHOUT another question, I told the Master that I had finished. Crawford turned to Dawson-Hill.

“Will you kindly proceed, then?”

Crawford’s speech was as deliberate as usual, his moonface took on its formal, meaningless smile: but behind his spectacles his eyes had a smeared, indecisive look.

Dawson-Hill was in a dilemma. He was too shrewd a man, too good a lawyer, not to have seen the crisis coming. It was not, however, the kind of crisis with which he had been trained to deal. Behind closed doors: the shut-in, senatorial faces: not an open word from any of the Court: not a name mentioned. And yet the feeling in the room had tightened like a field of force. Without any guide he had to judge that feeling.

It seemed to me that he had two choices. Either take the risk, come right out with it, ask who could have touched the photograph: or else damp the whole thing down, be respectful and polite to Francis, but get him out of the way and play for time.

The instant Crawford called on him, he began speaking, quick on the uptake, sounding quite casual. “This is extremely interesting, Sir Francis,” he said, allowing himself a few seconds to make up his mind. Then he went on as though he had decided to take the risk. The notebook — Dawson-Hill kept referring to it, eyebrows stretched, as “this famous notebook”. How much could Sir Francis help the Court about its history?

“I know no more than the Court does,” said Francis.

Did Francis know anything of Palairet’s habits or about how he’d kept his notebooks?

“I never even visited his laboratory.”

Sensibly, Dawson-Hill was skipping the question about legal proof. When the old man died, all his papers had been sorted out by his executor?

“So far as I know,” said Francis.

Dawson-Hill glanced at Nightingale, who nodded.

The executor was himself an old man, a clergyman? And he had sent them, with long intervals between, in batches to Palairet’s solicitors? The famous notebook being in the last batch? And the solicitors had passed each batch in turn to the college?

As he asked these questions, Dawson-Hill was leaving gaps for the Seniors to break in. He was feeling his way, sensing how far he could safely go. If he gave them the lead, and one of them asked Francis just where and how he believed the photograph had been tampered with, then everything was on the table.

“And so the notebook arrived at the college?”

Francis said, “Of course.”

Dawson-Hill looked across the table at the Court. Winslow was listening, hand propping up his jaw. Crawford sucked at his pipe. Brown sat back in his chair, firm and patient. Nightingale met Dawson-Hill’s gaze. None of them volunteered a word.

Dawson-Hill had to make his decision. He could force the confrontation now — who had seen the notebook in the college? First Nightingale, then Skeffington, wasn’t it? And so, what was Sir Francis Getliffe intending to say?

For any fighting lawyer, it was a temptation. But Dawson-Hill, trying to get the sense of the Court, felt that he mustn’t fall into it. He drew back and went off on to an innocuous question. If I had been in his place I should have done just the same.

But, as he asked questions about Francis’ opinion of Howard, he made what seemed to me a mistake in judgment, the first he had made since the hearing began. Francis had said that Howard’s actions had been those of an “innocent and not very intelligent man”. Dawson-Hill went in for some picador work. Was that really Francis’ opinion? How long had it been so? Presumably he had not always thought Howard innocent? Not, in fact, until quite recently? Presumably, also, he had not always thought him “not very intelligent”? When he supported him for his Fellowship, he could scarcely have considered him not very intelligent? Francis’ estimates, both on character and ability, appeared to vary rather rapidly?

It would not have mattered that these questions were irrelevant. It did matter, or at least I thought it might, that Dawson-Hill let his temper show. Some of that temper came, of course, from pique. Until Francis spoke out that afternoon, Dawson-Hill had been certain that he had won. Now, looking round the uneloquent faces, he couldn’t guess the end, but at least it was all to play for.

Yet there was something deeper than pique that made him more supercilious, sharpened the edge of his voice, drew him into addressing Francis with irritation as Sir Francis, with the accent on the title, as though Dawson-Hill had suddenly changed from an upper-class Englishman into a Maltese. It was deeper than pique, it was sheer dislike of Francis. For Dawson-Hill, despite his snobbisms and although he accepted the world, had a curious streak of emotional egalitarianism. He didn’t like seeing people too miserable, and on the other hand he became irritated when he saw others in his view too well-endowed. He got on better with sinners than with the high-principled. He liked men best who were battered by life, had some trouble on their minds, were still high-spirited and preferably short of money. To him, Francis was a living provocation. He was too scrupulous, too virtuous: he was too conscientious, too far from common clay; he had done altogether too well; he had had success in everything he touched; he had even married a rich wife and had abnormally gifted children. Dawson-Hill could not bear the sight of him.

So Dawson-Hill, for once in his suave career, lost his temper. There was also a perceptible surge of temper on Francis’ side. Francis, much nearer common clay than Dawson-Hill supposed, had a good robust healthy appetite for disliking those who disliked him. Further, he had no use for men as elegant as Dawson-Hill, as beautifully dressed, as youthful-looking, men whom he dismissed as flâneurs.

Their exchanges became more caustically smooth from Dawson-Hill, more contemptuous and impatient from Francis. I saw Brown peering at them both. He began to write on the paper in front of him.

“Sir Francis,” Dawson-Hill was asking, “don’t you agree that Dr Howard, whose character you have praised so generously, showed a really rather surprising alacrity in accepting his professor’s data?”

“I see nothing surprising in it.”

“Should you say it was specially admirable?”

“It was uncritical.”

“Shouldn’t you say it was really so uncritical as perhaps to throw some doubt on his moral character?”

“Certainly not. A good many stupid research students would have done it.”

“Do you really think it specially creditable?”

“I didn’t say it was creditable. I said it was uncritical.”

Just then Brown had finished writing his note. He placed it carefully on top of Crawford’s pad. Crawford looked down, scrutinised the note, and, as Dawson-Hill was beginning another question, cleared his throat: “I think there may be a measure of feeling among my colleagues,” he said, “that this might be as far as we can usefully go this afternoon. Speaking as Master, I’m inclined to suggest that we adjourn.”

Winslow inclined his head. Crawford then asked Brown if he agreed, as though Brown’s note had had no more effect on his, Crawford’s, action than if it had been a love-poem in Portuguese.

“I am also inclined to suggest,” Crawford said, once more as though the idea had occurred to him out of the blue, “that this is a point where the Seniors might spend a little time gathering the threads together. I think it might be convenient if you let me provide you with tea in the Lodge—” He looked along his side of the table, from Winslow to Nightingale. “So shall we let Eliot and Dawson-Hill off for the rest of the afternoon?”

There was a murmur. There were ritual thanks from the Master to Francis Getliffe. Then the Seniors, led by Crawford, filed through the inner door of the combination room into the Lodge.

That left Dawson-Hill, Francis and me alone together. Not one of us could find a word to say. For an instant, Dawson-Hill’s social emollience had left him quite. As for me, it was a long time since I had felt so awkward. Heavy-footedly, I asked if he would be dining in hall. “Alas, no,” he said, getting back into his social stride, telling me the house where he was going.

Francis said to me that he would see me before I returned to London. Nodding to Dawson-Hill, he left the room. I went out after him, but I did not want to catch him up. I did not want to speak to anyone connected with the affair. I walked quickly through the court, beating it to the shelter of my rooms.

I knew well enough what I was doing. It did not look like it, but I was touching wood. People thought that I was cautious and wary, easily darkened by the shadows of danger ahead. So I was. But also, all my life, I had been capable of being touched by too much hope, and in middle age I was so still. In fact, as I grew older, some of my inner weather reminded me more and more of my mother’s. She too had been anxious and had over-insured: over-insured literally, in her case, so that years after her death I kept coming across pathetic benefits she had taken out in my name, with the Hearts of Oak and the other insurance companies, into which she, like the poor of her time, paid her pennies a week.

While at the same time, more superstitious each year she lived (and I believed that in my fibres the same was true of me), she invented formulae for good-luck every week, as she filled in her forms for the competitions in John Bull, Titbits and Answers. She had hours and days astrologically chosen, in which to write her great bold clumsy words: and another lucky hour in which to post the envelopes. She used to take me to the pillar-box when I was a child. I would hear the envelope flap-thud into the dark: and then she would look at me, and I knew that in her heart she had already won the prize. “When our ship comes home,” she would say, and at once sternly warn me about “counting our chickens before they were hatched”. With an air of harsh realism, she told me that we mustn’t expect the first prize every week. Yet she not only expected it; as she warned and reproved me for too much hope, she was simultaneously working out the ways to spend it.

I was very like her. It sometimes seemed to me that it was the anxious, the far-sighted, the realistic, who were most susceptible to hope. Certainly I could still be drunk with it. And the word “still” really had no meaning. In middle age I was invaded by hopes exactly as I had been as a young man. No one had learned more about the risks, the probabilities, the realistic expectations of careers: and yet, in secret moments, I had learned nothing. For a long time, as I came to know more about myself, I had developed strategies to protect me and others from these surgent moments which — in their own existence, their own euphoria — I could not suppress.

By myself that evening, therefore, I would not allow a thought to stray towards the case. If I did so, I should just feel that it was in the bag. Much more I wished to avoid meeting Martin or Skeffington, above all the Howards. If I did so, I should warn them how, in situations like this, anything could still happen. In the words I used, in the reasons I gave for staying in suspense, few people would be more guarded. And yet beneath the words there would be a feeling which completely contradicted them, and anyone who heard me would know it. It didn’t take a perceptive person, as I had learned to my own and others’ cost, to catch and believe the tone of irresponsible hope.

So I kept to myself, had a bath, took a book out into the garden and read till dinner time. When I arrived in the combination room I found, and was glad to find, that none of the principals was dining. Winslow, still in the Lodge, so the butler told me, had just sent word for them to strike his name off the list. Tom Orbell was the only partisan whose name was there. As soon as he entered he said, seeing me alone, “How is it going now?”

“Oh, it’s still early days,” I said in a judicious, reproving tone, the model of a middle-aged, responsible, experienced man, a man with a public face.

I did not let him say any more about the affair, and no one else wished to. It was a small party, and a very young one. When Tom picked up the list, and noticed that Lester Ince was presiding, he said: “Now that isn’t exactly my idea of the douceur de la vie.”

Two or three of the young Fellows came in, among them Ince, who, turning upon me a bland, benevolent and ceremonious gaze, said: “I’m very pleased that you’re able to be with us tonight. We’re all very pleased.”

It might have been the Master or Brown speaking. For an instant, Tom Orbell and I were taken by surprise. It even occurred to me that Ince was mimicking. But he was just feeling his position as senior of those present. He addressed me in full: he did not feel it right to call me “Lew”. He knew that he was in the chair, and he had set himself to make a proper job of it.

Dinner proceeded with decorum. After the meal was over he announced: “I think I should like to present a bottle to mark the first time that I have presided in this room.”

Nothing could be more stately. On hot summer nights like this, it was a college custom to go on to the terrace outside the combination room, sit on a balustrade abutting the Master’s garden, and drink white wine. In his less reverential moods, I had heard Lester Ince object to this practice, on the simple but severe grounds that sitting on stone gave him piles, and that white wine was better described as cat’s piss. Not so that night. He led the way on to the terrace, planted a firm, masculine, Trollopian backside on the balustrade, proposed his first toast in Barsac and inclined his head gravely, with ceremonial pleasure, when Tom Orbell toasted him as donor of the wine.

Looking up, one saw, over the roof of the hall, the sky so densely blue that it seemed tangible. The air was quiet. As five of us sat there on the terrace it was — especially to me, basking in it — the most placid of evenings.

Two of the young men got up to go.

“Must you leave us?” said Ince.

They said they had work to do.

“We shall miss you,” said Ince, as a kind of presidential blessing. With disappointment he looked at Tom Orbell, the only Fellow left. “I was going to ask them, I thought tonight was a good night for it, isn’t it time we really began to think about this election?”

He meant, of course, the magisterial election. To Tom, who had been thinking of it for a couple of years past, the question seemed astonishingly cool.

“I suppose we ought to pay some attention to these things. It’s our own fault if we’re too lazy and then find that other people have been ganging up. It’s a bore, but we probably ought to get hold of things and put some weight behind them. We’d better see that we get something sensible done.”

It appeared as though he had been preparing for this speech as soon as he found that he was senior for the night. I was thinking how, like most apolitical men, he thought politics were very easy. He didn’t see any complexities about them. For him, it was just the righteous but inert against the unrighteous but active. If only he and other men of good will applied themselves, all would come right.

It was an approach that could scarcely have been less endearing to Tom Orbell, who wrote about politics, whose dream-life was a politician’s, and who, except in his persecuted moments, knew by instinct what the texture of politics was like.

Tom looked flushed and cross. In the warm evening, beads of sweat were standing out above his temples, where the hair-line was going back.

“I think,” he said, at his most mellifluous, “that there is something obviously sensible to be done. But then, I’ve always declared my interest.”

Sitting dignified between us, Ince did not pretend, as in his more intransigent turns, not to comprehend the phrase.

“Who are you thinking of, then?” he said.

“I’ve made it quite clear, I should have thought,” replied Tom Orbell. “I’m voting for Arthur Brown.”

“No,” Ince reflected. “I don’t think I want him.”

“But why ever not? He’s—”

“He’s been here a bit too long,” said Ince. “No, we’ve got to take some action before things go too far.”

“Don’t you realise,” Tom asked, with an expression of ‘God give me patience’, “that things have gone pretty far already? Don’t you realise that it’s a moral certainty that it’s going to be either Brown or Getliffe—”

“No, I won’t have Getliffe,” remarked Ince, as though that settled it.

“Why not?” I put in.

“I won’t have a scientist,” said Lester Ince. “I’ve got quite a different idea—”

“Who is it?” cried Tom.

Ince gave us a long, slow, subtle, satisfied smile. “G S Clark.” He sat back, with the confidence of M. de Norpois mentioning the name of Giolitti, with the modest expression of an elder statesman who has produced the solution, obvious but so far concealed from others of less wisdom, out of his hat.

“God love my blasted soul!” Tom broke out. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that the man’s a monster? Hasn’t it occurred to you that he’s a ridiculous monster? Look here, I’m a Tory and I suppose you’d say you weren’t. I love my religion and so far as I know, you haven’t got any. But do you want, any more than I do, a man who sees a communist under every bloody bed?”

“Everyone’s got some bee in his bonnet,” said Ince, temperately.

“Well, please enlighten me as to what you do see in him,” Tom went on, beginning to show his silken, unstable courtesy and talking down his nose.

“He’s independent.”

“With great respect, I doubt it.”

“I’m afraid,” said Ince, in his new, stately manner, “I have to take people as I find them. I find him original. I find that he’s not one of anyone’s gang. And I’d like to tell you what a lot of people are thinking nowadays. It’s time we got outside the gangs. We’ve got to keep our eyes open for men who stand on their own. And we shan’t get a man in this college who stands on his own more than G S Clark does.”

“So that’s what you think, is it?” said Tom.

“I should like to hear your opinion of him,” Ince turned to me.

I shook my head. “If I’d been asked to imagine an improbable nomination,” I said, “I couldn’t have imagined one as improbable as that.”

“Look here,” Tom broke out furiously, “I suppose you haven’t given the faintest thought to the consequences, if you go ahead with this spectacular idea? I can tell you, and it’s useless to deny it, things look pretty even just now between Brown and Getliffe. It looks like nine votes certain for Getliffe and seven for Brown, and the others not yet committed. If you go ahead with this spectacular idea, all you’ll achieve is perhaps subtract a vote or two from Brown, including making Clark withhold his own vote. So with classical ingenuity, you will give Getliffe a long lead and probably let him in by default. Which is exactly the result you say you want the least. I suppose you hadn’t thought of those consequences? Or I suppose that isn’t the intention behind your spectacular idea?”

Tom was ready, as usual too ready, to smell out a conspiracy. Ince’s face, up to that point rubbery, benevolent and composed, had taken on a frown.

“I’ve been listening to that kind of talk until I’m sick and tired,” he said. “I’m just not prepared to play. All I’m prepared to do is to pick out the man I think best and say so and stick to it.”

“Thus cleverly producing the consequences that you say you don’t want?”

“Damn the consequences. As for what you’re telling me, there’s only one answer to that.” Suddenly Ince’s stateliness had dropped away. His presidential manners had got lost. He said: “There’s only one answer. Stuff it.”

As they were glaring at each other, the butler came out on to the terrace.

“Mr President,” he said to Ince, “may I have permission to deliver a telephone message?”

“By all means,” replied Ince, shining with sedateness once again.

The butler came to my side, and his clear confidential whisper said: “Dr Nightingale’s compliments, and he would much appreciate it if you could do him the favour of calling in his rooms as soon as you conveniently can tonight.”

32: One Enemy to Another

WALKING through the third court to Nightingale’s rooms, I was getting ready for a scene I did not like. In the golden pacific air my nerves were sharpened. I felt the mixture of combativeness, irritation and fear. My thoughts were all over the place: I even found myself thinking, with a childish sense of being ill-used, it’s too nice a night to go and have a quarrel.

After the warm, flower-scented court, the staircase, not yet lighted, struck dank as a well. As I climbed to the third floor, the landing was bright, flooded by the sunset. My eyes were dazzled, coming up from the dark floors beneath, and I could scarcely read Nightingale’s name above the door. When I knocked and went in, he had the curtains drawn and both the reading-lamp and an old-fashioned central chandelier switched on. He stood up, and in silence gave me an eager and charming smile.

He asked me to sit down, pointing to the one good armchair in the bare room. There was a church hush.

I was the first to make conversation. I said that I had glanced up at the Bursary expecting to find him there.

“No,” said Nightingale. “I don’t believe in living over the shop.” He went on to say that he had occupied these present rooms ever since he was first elected and added: “And that’s longer ago than I’d care to think. If it comes to that,” he spoke to me civilly, as though we shared a rueful pleasure, “it must be a long time since you were up here last. That must be longer ago than either of us care to think.”

It had, in fact, been before the war. I had only been inside that room twice during the time we were both Fellows. Our relations had made it unlikely that I should visit him. And yet, Nightingale seemed to remember that period, when he was bitterly miserable, when he and I were barely on speaking terms, not sentimentally, not with affection, but with something like respect.

Perhaps he was one of those men, so self-absorbed that everything that has happened to them is precious, who don’t want to dismiss an enemy from their minds, provided they have known him long enough. The bare fact of knowing him long enough gives him some claim upon them. Just then, he was speaking to me — whom he had always regarded as an enemy, that night with specific cause, and who in turn disliked him more than most men — as though we had something in common.

I looked round the room. It was as I dimly recalled it, bleak, both less cosy and less personal than most Fellows’ rooms. An oar, relic of undergraduate rowing, was hung along one wall. On his desk stood a large photograph of his wife, pudgy, amiable, full-eyed, which couldn’t have been there in my time. I noticed on the walls photographs which must also have been recent, groups of officers in the desert. In one Nightingale sat in the middle, wearing shorts and a beret. In another he was placed two from the left of a famous soldier, whom I happened to have met. I asked about him.

“Oh, they’d kicked me upstairs by then,” said Nightingale. “They’d decided I was an old man, and no good for fighting any more.”

It occurred to me, he was oddly modest about his war. He had been a field officer in his mid-forties; I couldn’t think of many amateurs who had done as much. I said that I knew his commander, Lord Gilbey. During the war, stories had collected in Whitehall, among officials not given to hero-worship, about his personal bravery. I asked Nightingale about this.

“Oh, he didn’t much mind being shot at,” he said. He added: “After all, he’s been paid to be shot at all his life, hasn’t he?”

“But still,” I said, “he must have quite abnormal physical courage.”

“I suppose he has,” said Nightingale.

“I must say I envy it.”

“I don’t think you need,” said Nightingale.

Suddenly I realised, what had been at the back of my mind all along, that I was talking of one very brave man to another. Like it or not, one had to admit that Nightingale’s courage in both wars was absolute.

“I’ve seen too much of it to be impressed,” he remarked. “I don’t think you need envy it.” He said it with something like a sneer, but quite kindly. He was not a man with any interest in understanding others: he was too knotted in himself for that. Certainly he had no interest in me, except as one who filled him with resentment. Yet, just for an instant, he seemed to understand me better than if he had been fond of me. He spoke — it was bizarre, in the tension of that evening — as though he were reassuring me.

There was another, and a longer, church-like hush. We had finished all the conversation we could make. We had not, we never had, a thought in common. We were both controlling ourselves, ready to wait.

At last Nightingale said: “I wanted to talk to you about this afternoon.”

“Do you?” I replied.

“I should like to know why Getliffe said what he did.”

“He must have felt it was his duty,” I said.

“I take it you were responsible for this?” His voice was still controlled, but there was a strained, creaking note within it.

“I think that, for anything that concerns his actions, you’ll have to ask Getliffe himself. Isn’t that right?”

“Do you imagine for an instant that I can’t see the power behind the scenes?”

“Do you imagine that I or anybody else could persuade Getliffe to say a word he didn’t believe?”

“I want to know why he said this.”

“Now look,” I said, speaking as violently as he had done but more quietly, “this will get you nowhere. The point is, Getliffe has said it. And what he says it’s quite impossible for the Seniors to ignore. That’s the brute fact—”

“Do you think we’re trying to ignore it? What do you think we’ve been doing since we adjourned?”

He emphasised the “we” as though, through being on the Court, he still drew not only strength but pride. I looked straight at him. The bones of his forehead, under the thick, wavy fair hair, were strong. He had crows’ feet beneath his eyes, fine lines on his eyelids. The delicate etching of his skin seemed not to match the heavy, almost acromegalic, bones. His eyes stared full into mine — they were lustrous, innocent eyes, they held feeling but no insight. As we gazed at each other, the corners of his mouth stretched, as if he were using his muscles, his whole physical force, to master himself. He spoke in a voice which, though monotonous, was low, and said: “I hope you’ll listen to me, Eliot.”

I said yes.

“I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye. I don’t know how much I was to blame. I don’t mind telling you this — if I had my time over again, I should try not to say some of the things I’ve said.”

It wasn’t an intense statement. It didn’t contain remorse. Yet it sounded sincere, and curiously business-like.

Before I could reply, he asked me: “I suppose there are some things you’ve said you’d like wiped off the record, aren’t there?”

“Of course.”

That seemed to satisfy him.

“We haven’t always seen eye to eye,” he repeated. “That’s agreed on both sides, but it oughtn’t to affect the issue.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re no man’s fool, Eliot,” he replied, still in the same level, business-like fashion. “You know as well as I do, and better, I shouldn’t be surprised, that this afternoon got us into deep water.”

In contrast to his tone, his stare was illuminated.

“Now I’m asking you to help us out of it,” he said. “I’m asking you to put the past into cold storage and help us out of it.”

I was having to keep myself matter-of-fact. All his energy, his strained obsessive energy, was pouring out of him. His words were flat, yet one wasn’t listening to them but to the force behind them. It made the air in the room seem denser, the light more dim.

“So far as I can see,” I said, “there’s only one conceivable way out.”

He took no notice of me.

“We’ve got into deep water,” he went off again. “You know as well as I do, and a good deal better, that a suspicion was raised this afternoon. We’re intended to suspect that someone may have falsified the books to do this man Howard down. We’re intended to suspect someone. Someone? It might be me.”

I looked at him without speaking.

There was a pause.

He said: “I don’t expect you to worry about that. Why should you? But I tell you that it isn’t the issue. It isn’t what we think of one another. We’ve seen a lot of things happen to one another. I’m not talking about what might happen to either of us now. I don’t expect you to worry about that. But I do expect you to worry about something else.”

He went on: “If this goes on, what’s the end of it going to be? If people begin suspecting as you want them to, then I can tell you the result, and I hope it’s one you haven’t thought of. They suspect someone. All right. I tell you, it might be me. Someone in this college. An officer of this college. What is going to be the effect on the place?”

He was speaking very fast, half-inarticulately, but with passion.

“I’d give a lot to keep the college out of danger, Eliot. I hope you would. I don’t mind saying, it’s done everything for me. I don’t mean when I was a young man. A bright young man ought to be able to look after himself. No, it’s done everything for me when I was afraid I was going to peter out. They trusted me. They gave me an office. It’s the only thing anyone’s ever elected me to. I’ve done my best not to let them down. I tell you, that office is the best thing that ever happened to me. Do you wonder that I’m not prepared to see anything bad happen to this place? That’s why I’m talking to you. I’d give all I’ve got to keep it safe.”

I believed him. I believed him without the flicker of a doubt. It wasn’t the easy-natured who were most seized by this kind of loyalty. It wasn’t the successful: old Gay had as little as a man could reasonably have. It wasn’t the self-sufficient. No, most of all it was those like Nightingale who were self-absorbed without being self-sufficient. For an instant, I wondered, was that also true of Howard? When I heard his mumbling statement that he was thinking of the college, I had thought he was confused, I had dismissed it. Was I being too sceptical, were these two alike in that one spot? Was it possible, when Howard gave his reason for not suing the college, a reason which he only half-admitted to himself, that it was true?

With Nightingale, the force of his feeling beat down on me. It was so strong that, not only recognising it but overcome, I lost all certainty of what he was like, much less what he had, or had not, done. I could not be sure at that moment whether I believed he had ripped out the photograph in cold blood. All I was sure of was this ferocious, self-bound loyalty. Whether I suspected him or not, had become remote or indeed meaningless. And yet I could simultaneously and quite easily imagine that if the photograph had come his way, and if it seemed to threaten his idea of the college’s honour, then he would have had it out — without his conscience being troubled, even though it meant victimising Howard, because this was an act of conscience too.

I had to struggle to keep detached, that is, detached enough not to give a point away.

I replied: “No one wants to do the college the slightest harm.”

“I’m glad to hear you say it.”

“No one,” I said, picking out the words, “would want to press the suspicion you mentioned further than he had to. But—”

“Yes?”

“As I said before, there’s only one conceivable way out. If the Seniors can change their decision against Howard, then no one’s going to cause any unnecessary trouble. But if the Seniors can’t change their decision, then I’m afraid it would be very difficult to stop.”

He was waiting for me to continue, but I had finished. The telephone rang. I could hear him replying to the porter’s lodge, saying that he wouldn’t be long. He looked at me, his eyes shining: “Is that all?”

“I can’t say any more tonight.”

“Do you want to speak to your — friends?”

I said: “That would make no difference.”

He acted as though exhilarated, and not disappointed. He seemed only to have heard the half of my reply, the anodyne half. He seemed not to have grasped what the reply meant. Or perhaps he was still borne up by the excitement of having spoken without restraint. Cheerfully, in a tone hearty and almost friendly, he said that he would have to go, his wife was waiting for him in the car outside the college. Together we walked down the stairs and through the courts. Nightingale looked up at the sky, where the first stars were coming out: “Now I call this something like weather.”

We were walking as though I might never have left the college, as though we were a pair, not of friends exactly, but of friendly acquaintances, who had been colleagues for twenty years, and were, without noticing it, getting old together.

Outside the main gate, the car was drawn up by the kerb, the door open, Mrs Nightingale looking out.

“Hullo,” she said, “what have you boys been up to?”

“Oh, just talking a bit of shop,” said Nightingale.

She got out on to the pavement, so that Nightingale could climb in to drive. As he did so, she patted him affectionately and then stood chatting to me. She was as unselfconscious as anyone I had known. She was so easy that, though at sight she was not specially attractive, she took on an attraction of her own. And yet, the instant I heard her ask what we had been doing, and saw her great eyes glance at him, I was positive about two things. First, that she had known exactly what we had been talking about, and second, that, in the midst of the suspicion about him, she did not suspect but know. I was positive about something more. She was easy, she was good-natured, she would far rather the people round her were happy than unhappy. If he had not done what he was suspected of, she would be glad. But if he had done it, then she would not only know, she would talk about it with him, she would enjoy the complicity, and she would — for though she had good feelings, she had no kind of conscience — amiably approve.