The Affair

33: The Sight of a Blank Space

THE bell tolled, sunlight spotted the carpet, as I came into the combination room on the Monday morning. The Seniors were all there, standing by the fireplace. Even as we exchanged good mornings, one could feel the strain in the air. It was not the specific kind of strain that one meets going into a group of acquaintances, when they are hiding bad news from one. I had no guide as to what had been said among themselves, either the night before or that morning; but I knew almost at once that they were split.

Dawson-Hill came in, not from the college door as I had done, but from the inner one which led to the Master’s Lodge. I was wondering, how early did this conference begin? Dawson-Hill’s hair was burnished, he smelled of shaving lotion: “Good morning, my dear Lewis,” he said, with his bright, indifferent smile.

We took our places at the table. Slowly, with neat fingers, Crawford packed and lit a pipe. He sat back in his chair, his face as unlined as ever, his body as still: and yet, as soon as he spoke, I was sure that for once his complacency was precarious.

“I’m inclined to think,” he said, “that certain statements made by one of our colleagues involve us in a certain amount of difficulty. I’m going to ask you to address your minds to the wisest way of removing the difficulty, remembering, of course, the responsibility before the Court.”

He sucked at his pipe.

“Eliot, these statements concern your side of the case. Are you able to give us a lead?”

Although I was looking at Crawford, I could feel Nightingale’s gaze upon me. This had been pre-arranged, I thought. They were leaving the move with me. As for an instant I hesitated, a voice came from Crawford’s right: “With your permission, Master.”

Crawford turned, face and shoulders, to look at old Winslow.

“Do you wish to speak now?” Crawford asked him.

“If you please. If you please.”

Crawford held up his hand in my direction, as though I needed shutting up. Winslow bent his head down over the table, like a great battered bird investigating the ground for food; then, twitching his gown away from his collar, he stared up at us from that bent posture. His eyes were bold, unconcerned, almost mischievous.

“As you all know, Master,” he said, “I speak as a complete ignoramus. When I hear the interesting subjects discussed so intelligently by everyone else on this Court, I marvel slightly at how remarkably little I know of these matters. However, there are limits even to my incapacity. Yesterday afternoon, of course I may delude myself, I thought I captured the general drift of what Francis Getliffe was trying to tell us. Unless I am considerably mistaken, he was trying to tell us something which is perhaps a shade out of the ordinary run. He appeared to be giving us, as his considered opinion, that the unfortunate Howard might conceivably have been what I believe is nowadays known as ‘framed’. And that if this possibility should happen to be true, then it appears that one of the Fellows, one of our singular and reputedly learned society, must have been guilty of suppressio veri. To put it with the maximum of charity, which is probably, as is usually the case, totally uncalled-for.

“I have been considering these rather unusual possibilities, but I see no reason to invent complexities where no complexities can reasonably exist. It seems to me impossible, much as one perhaps might wish it, to pretend that Getliffe did not mean what he said. It seems to me a fortiori impossible for this Court not to act accordingly. No, I have to correct myself. No doubt nothing is impossible for this Court, or for any other committee of our college. Shall I simply say that it is impossible for me? Of course, I know nothing of Getliffe’s subject. But I have always understood that he is a man of great distinction. I have never heard anyone suggest that his character is not beyond reproach. For what little my opinion is worth, I have always thought very highly of him. Indeed, Master, may I bring it to a point?”

“Naturally.”

“Thank you, thank you. I need only remind you of what I think is common knowledge. Shortly, my dear Master, your remarkable reign is coming to a close and you will subside into obscurity with the rest of us. In the ensuing election, I have never so much as contemplated another candidate than Getliffe. If you will forgive the turn of phrase, I soon both expect and hope to see him in your place.”

Winslow gave a grim, nutcracker smile at Crawford, reminding him of supersession and mortality. He gave another past Crawford at Brown, reminding him of Winslow’s opinion of his chances.

“I confess,” Winslow went on, “I should find a certain inconsistency in supporting Getliffe as our next Master and not paying attention to his statement of yesterday afternoon. I do not propose to exhibit that inconsistency. I should therefore like to give notice, Master, that on this Court I intend to vote for the reinstatement of Howard, or if you prefer it, the quashing of his deprivation, whatever peculiar form of procedure we find it appropriate to use. I suggest that this is done forthwith. Of course,” said Winslow, “it will make the Court of Seniors look slightly ridiculous. But then, the Court of Seniors is slightly ridiculous.”

Quiet. Whatever else had been talked about and decided, this hadn’t, I was certain. No one there had expected Winslow’s démarche. Further, I was certain, after watching the others respond to Winslow, that among themselves much had been left unspoken. Was that because Nightingale had not left them? Hadn’t Crawford and Brown talked by themselves?

“Is that all?” enquired Crawford, flatly but politely.

“Thank you, Master. That is all.”

It had sounded like an outburst, like a free, capricious act. Yet in fact, Winslow was running along an old groove: it wasn’t often or for long that men of eighty could get out of the grooves their lives had worn, and despite his spirit, gusto and relish, Winslow had not done so that morning. He had always had a standard of suitable behaviour. His tongue made that standard sound odder than it was. Actually, it was as orthodox as Brown’s, and in depth not so independent: for Winslow believed what responsible people told him, as now with Francis Getliffe, while Brown, however comfortably he spoke, in the long run believed no one but himself.

No, Winslow’s standard of behaviour had nothing special about it. Nor, as far as that went, had the history of his life. It was not in those terms, but below them, that he was interesting.

His life had, of course, been by his own criteria a failure. He was fond of saying so. He explained how, of three inadequate bursars in succession, he had been the worst. He was prepared to expand on his “lifetime of singular lack of achievement”. He believed he was telling the truth. In reality, except when he spoke of his son, living God knows how in Canada, nearly forty and without a job, taking his allowance and never sending a letter, he liked talking about his failure. “I always felt I was slightly less crass than most of my colleagues. And indeed that was not making a superlative claim. Nevertheless, even compared with their modest efforts, I’ve done quite remarkably worse.” Speaking like that, he got the feeling of being unsparing and honest. Yet he wasn’t. As he talked he believed he was a failure: but his fibres told him otherwise.

He had never been easy with men. He had never made close friends. He was both too arrogant and too diffident. And yet, at eighty, he still kept a kind of assurance that many disciplined, matey and, by his criteria, successful men never attain at all. It was the kind of elemental assurance of someone who had after all lived according to his nature. It was the kind of assurance that one meets sometimes in rakes and down-and-outs — very likely, now I came to think of it, in his own son. It was the kind of assurance that both gave, and at the same time derived from, the strongest animal grip on life.

Crawford looked at Brown and said: “I think we must take note that our senior colleague has declared his intentions.”

“If you please, Master,” said Winslow. “If you please.”

I too had been looking at Brown. He knew, both of us knew, that Winslow would from now on never budge.

“I suppose it is slightly premature for the Court to try to formulate its decision,” said Crawford. He said it with the faintest inflection of a question. From his left hand Brown, for once, did not help him out: Brown sat back, receptive, vigilant, without a word.

Without a word, we all sat there. For an instant I felt triumph. The case had cracked. Then, in a tone slightly harsh but businesslike, Nightingale said: “I should regard it as premature, of course. I totally disagree with almost everything we’ve heard from Mr Winslow. I can’t begin to accept that that is a basis for a decision. I move that proceedings continue.”

At last Brown spoke, steadily and with weight: “I have to agree with the Bursar.”

“In that case,” said Crawford, in resignation, “I’m afraid we come back to you, Eliot.”

Again, before I started speaking, I was interrupted: this time by Dawson-Hill.

“Master, with apologies to my colleague, may I—”

Crawford, who was getting fretful, shut his eyes and nodded his head, like one of the mandarin toys of my childhood.

“I would like to make just one plea,” said Dawson-Hill. “I haven’t the slightest intention of depriving my colleague of an argument on his side of the case. I am sure he knows that I haven’t the slightest intention.” He gave me his groomed, party smile. “But I would like to ask if he can see his way to leaving Sir Francis Getliffe’s statement as it stands. Naturally this statement can’t be ignored by the Court. But with great respect and humility, I do suggest that if my colleague takes it further we face a prospect of getting into situations of some delicacy, without any gain either to his arguments or mine. I’m fully aware that anything said to this Court is privileged. Nevertheless, I do urge on my colleague that we avoid delicate situations where we can. I know he will agree with me, it is quite obviously incontrovertible, that none of Sir Francis Getliffe’s speculations are provable in law. With great respect, I do suggest that we leave them now.”

Again Nightingale was watching me. He was wearing a new butterfly bow, red with white spots, jaunty under the stern masculine jaw. In his eyes the pupils were large. This was the second version of his appeal to me.

I had made my choice long since. I said: “I’m sorry, Master. I can’t present a fair case for Howard with one hand tied behind my back.”

“All right!” It was Nightingale who said it, his voice gravelly. This was the first time violence, open violence, had broken into the room. He was furious, but furious not so much from a sense of danger as because he had been turned down. “Put your cards on the table. That’d be a change for us all.”

“If you don’t mind,” I said — I was playing to provoke him — “I’d rather put Palairet’s notebook on the table.”

“I should like a simple answer to a simple question,” Nightingale cried. “How much of all this is intended for me?”

“I don’t think,” I said, “that the Bursar should conduct my case for me.”

“I’m afraid that’s reasonable,” said Dawson-Hill, sounding both embarrassed and not used to being embarrassed, across the table to Nightingale.

But Nightingale was a daring man. Passions, long banked down, were breaking out of him. They were not, or only in part, the passions of the night before. Then he had spoken to me, an old enemy, with the intimacy that sometimes irradiates enmity. Now he wasn’t speaking to me personally at all. He hated me, but only as one of many. He was speaking as though surrounded by enemies, with himself all set to hack his way out. He had lost his temper: but as with some active men, having lost his temper made him more fit for action, more capable of looking after himself.

“I want to know,” he said, “whether what Getliffe said yesterday was intended for me? Or what this man is telling us this morning?”

Deliberately I did not answer. I asked Crawford if he minded my having Palairet’s notebook open on the table. “Perhaps,” I said, “the Bursar can help me find the place.” I got up from my seat, went round the table behind Crawford, took the notebook and stood with it at Nightingale’s side.

“It’s somewhere near halfway through,” I said. “We ought to have had it tagged.”

Nightingale was watching the leaves as I furled them through. “Later than that,” he said, not pretending that he was lost.

“There it is, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yes,” said Nightingale, gazing carefully at the page but without expression.

Everyone was watching him as he studied the page.

I brought back the open notebook into the centre of the room, and placed it on the table in front of Crawford’s place. The right hand page was numbered in ink, a hundred and twenty-one. The date, also in ink, stood on the left of the top line. Two thirds of the page was empty, except for the trace of gummy paper marking out the sides of a rectangle, where the photograph had been. At the bottom of the rectangle, nearer the middle than the left-hand corner, was a scrap of the print, perhaps a quarter of an inch square. Getliffe and the rest had agreed that this scrap told nothing. Beneath the rectangle, in the bottom third of the page, the caption took up three lines of holograph, in the neat spiky Edwardian script. It was written in pencil, and looked fainter than when I had seen it before. It also looked insignificant, something domesticable that couldn’t cause trouble.

“There, gentlemen,” I said.

I had judged my line by now. I began: “You heard Getliffe give you his opinion yesterday. No one gives that kind of opinion lightly: and you all know Getliffe as well as I do. He said it was possible that the photograph which used to be on this page” — I had put a finger on the notebook — “had been torn out. Not by chance.”

“I want to know whether that was intended for me.” Nightingale’s voice swept across the room.

“Of course,” I said, not replying to him directly, “Getliffe felt justified in saying that the photograph might have been torn out. Not by chance. But he didn’t feel justified in speculating about — by whom? We can’t know. I should think it quite likely that we shall never know. From the point of view of this case, or for those who have been convinced for so long of Howard’s innocence, it doesn’t matter. All that I need remind you of is that this notebook passed through several hands before it looked like this. It’s not my function to attribute motives. I assume, as Getliffe does, as other physical scientists in the college do, but not the Bursar, that there was a faked photograph on that page. That faked photograph could have been seen by several people. As Getliffe said, someone who was pro-Palairet, or anti-Howard, might have desired that photograph out of the way. That is as much as anyone has any right to say. But I think I might remind you of the history of the notebook.”

Carefully, for I had a double purpose, since I had at once to keep the suspicion on Nightingale and leave simultaneously both him and the Court a valuable way out, I went through the history step by step. The last entry was on April 20, 1951. Palairet had died after a long but not disabling illness, on January 5, 1952. He might — I said it casually — but I could feel a jolt — have ripped the photograph out himself. Why not? He might have got tired of being silly. If it were still there when he died, the notebook stayed in his laboratory for months: a laboratory assistant could have had access: would he have known or cared? Palairet was a solitary worker, but there were two or three research students about. No one had thought of talking to them.

“Red herrings,” said Nightingale.

Some time in the summer of ’53, a time probably impossible to define now, I said, the executor had moved the notebook, part of the last batch of scientific remains. The executor was a clergyman of eighty, quite unscientific. On December 11, 1953, the notebook and other papers had reached Palairet’s solicitors. On December 15, 1953, it had arrived at the Bursary.

“And now,” I said to Crawford, “may I ask the Bursar one or two questions?”

“Are you prepared for that, Nightingale?” Crawford asked.

“Of course I am.”

I spoke diagonally across the table. “You were the first person in the college to see the notebook?”

“Of course I was.”

“Do you remember when?”

“Probably the day it arrived.”

“Do you remember — this page?”

“You’ll be surprised to know I do.”

“What did it look like?”

“I might as well say, I hadn’t much time to get down to Palairet’s papers. I happened to be busy at the Bursary. Some of my predecessors managed to do the job in two hours a morning, but I’ve never been clever enough.”

His eyes rolled, so that I could only see crescents of dark against the whites. It was the kind of spite that one used to hear from him when he was a younger man, when everything had gone wrong. It was spite against Winslow, who had been a mediocre Bursar while Nightingale was an exceptional one. It was revenge against Winslow for his speech that morning.

But Nightingale, though at his tensest, sounded matter-of-fact as he went on. “I didn’t have much time to get down to the papers. But I think I remember skimming through the notebook. I think I remember one or two things on the right-hand pages.”

He was speaking like a visualiser. I asked: “You remember this page?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“What did it look like?”

“Not like that.”

Everyone there was taken right aback. Though I went straight on, I was as astonished as the rest.

“What then?”

“There was a photograph there, top half of the page.”

“What sort of photograph?”

“Nothing like the one in Howard’s thesis. Nothing wrong with the pinhole. Nothing wrong with it at all.”

“What did you do?”

“I just glanced at it. It wasn’t very interesting.”

“You say there was nothing faked in the photograph. What about the caption?”

“I was too busy to worry about that.”

“Too busy?”

“Yes, too busy.” His voice rose.

“You just looked at this photograph? The rest of the page was like this, was it?” I pushed the notebook towards him.

“Yes.”

“You looked at the photograph? Then, what did you do?”

He stared at me. In an instant he said: “Just put the book back with the rest of the Palairet dossier, of course.”

The night before, in the violence of his feeling, I hadn’t known what I believed. So now, gazing at the empty page, I lost my sense of fact. I could see him, on a December morning, also gazing at the page: either at the photograph securely there, or at the gap after he had torn it out. Everything seemed equally probable or improbable. It was a sort of vertigo that I had felt as a young man, when I did some criminal law: and since, in the middle of official security: or dazzled by the brilliance of suspicion. Somehow, immersed in facts, in the simple, natural facts of a crime, one found them diminish, even take the meaning out of, the lives in which they played a part.

In the midst of the facts of the crime, there were times when one could believe anything. Facts were hypnotic, facts were neutral, facts were innocent. Just as they were for those who had done a crime. If Nightingale had ripped out this photograph, it could seem such a simple, such an innocent act. It might seem unfair that there was all this fuss about it. It was more than possible, it was easy — I had known many who had managed it, I had myself, when I had performed an act which damaged others — to forget, because the act itself was so innocuous, that one had done it at all.

“You put it back with the photograph still there, you mean?”

“Of course I mean that,” Nightingale cried violently.

“But the photograph had disappeared when the notebook was next opened?”

“That’s what we’ve heard.”

Up to that point, Nightingale had given me nothing. Suddenly I saw him enraged, his eyes rolling with hostility again.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “have I misunderstood? The next person to look at the notebook was Skeffington, wasn’t it?”

“I’ve been told so.”

“Well, then, when he looked at the notebook the photograph was missing?”

“We’ve heard a lot,” said Nightingale, “of no one making allegations against any particular person. Two can play at that game. I’m not going to make an allegation against any particular person. But why shouldn’t one of Howard’s friends have taken out the photograph? The perfectly genuine photograph? Just to get this started again? Not to make any bones about it, just to point their fingers at me?”

“But that could only be Skeffington?”

“You’re saying that, I’m not.”

“Could anyone call him one of Howard’s friends?”

“You can answer for them. I’m not going to.”

“Can you imagine Skeffington doing any such thing for any man or any purpose in the world?”

“Some of them have imagined things against me, haven’t they?”

It was past one o’clock. There I left it. As soon as the afternoon sitting began, I knew that, though I hadn’t broken through, I had done something. The last five minutes of the morning, Nightingale’s accusation against Skeffington — those were what Dawson-Hill was trying to wipe out. The accusation was fantastic, Dawson-Hill was as good as telling Nightingale as he questioned him: wouldn’t he reconsider and retract it?

For a long time Nightingale was obdurate. He had made no allegations against anyone, obstinately he repeated. Dawson-Hill handled him with gentleness and respect. Gradually one could see the lineaments of Nightingale’s face changing in response. But Dawson-Hill did not get the retraction, the total return to the place of efficiency and reason, that he was working for. Later, he was working for another answer which he did not get. He was anxious because Nightingale had admitted to seeing the photograph. How much could Nightingale trust his memory? Couldn’t this particular recollection be wrong? Wasn’t it possible, or even likely, that the photograph was already torn out when the notebook first came under Nightingale’s eyes? Dawson-Hill wanted an open, easy yes. It took him all his time to make Nightingale tolerate the bare possibility.

The open, easy answers came at last, in reply to the last two questions.

“You see nothing to make you believe that Palairet faked any photograph at any time?”

“Of course I don’t.”

“You still believe that Howard was guilty?”

“I believe that,” said Nightingale, in a fierce, daring and tireless tone, “as much as I believe anything.”

Letting down the tightness in the room, Dawson-Hill then asked Crawford about the time-table for the next day, Tuesday. G S Clark had already been told to be ready first thing in the morning. After that, Dawson-Hill presumed, he and I would make our final remarks?

“That sounds reasonable to me,” said Crawford.

That afternoon he had wilted, much more so than Winslow, who spoke next: “My dear Master, I confess the word ‘reasonable’ doesn’t seem to me to be specially appropriate. I seem to remember remarking this morning that, without further mummery, we should reinstate this man. With your permission, may I repeat that?”

“I’m afraid the consensus of opinion this morning was that the hearing should go on,” said Crawford.

“We hadn’t the benefit, I might point out,” Winslow snapped, “of today’s interesting proceedings. I should like to hear others’ views.”

Crawford was going through the motions of presiding.

Nightingale broke in: “You know mine.”

“It is?” Crawford asked.

“It doesn’t need saying. I stick to the Court’s decision.”

“So the Bursar and you,” Crawford said to Winslow, “appear to cancel each other out.”

“Very remarkable,” Winslow replied.

“Brown?”

Crawford turned to his left. All day long Brown had been quiet, quieter than I had ever seen him at a meeting. He had passed no notes to Crawford. Now he said, still sitting back, his expression heavy but his voice practised and level: “I’m inclined to think that we’re gone too far to try to short-circuit things now. This may be a time when it would be a mistake to spoil the ship for a ha’porth of tar. As for my opinion, Master, I should like to reserve it until Wednesday.”

“Well then,” said Crawford, “we meet tomorrow.” He had suddenly begun to look like an old man. In a tone sharp and petulant, he went on: “I wish I could see more agreement among us. As far as my own opinion goes, I shall attempt to give some indication of it tomorrow afternoon.”

34: Cripple Walking on the Lawn

“HE’S all man,” said Irene with glee. She was not talking of a lover, but of her son, away at his preparatory school. She and Martin and I were sitting on their lawn before dinner on the Monday evening. I had not long arrived. Martin, whose face had caught the sun, was lying back in his deck-chair, his hand to his eyes, squinnying towards the bottom of the garden.

Martin also was talking about the boy. He was out of comparison more protective than she was. In the weekly letter home Martin read undertones of trouble, concealed from parents, which she laughed off.

“He’s all man,” she cried. “He’ll be as wild as a hawk, one day. That will be something.”

Martin smiled. Even he, the most cautious of men, did not find the idea unpleasant. As for her, she adored it. I was thinking, Martin’s love for the boy was tenacious, deep, more spontaneous than any other affection he had ever had. She loved the boy too, perhaps as much as Martin did, but in a way that was not in the ordinary sense maternal. She was a good mother; she was conscientious, to an extent that people who had known her in her raffish days could scarcely believe. And yet really she loved the boy looking upwards, not downwards, looking towards the time when he was a man, and would take her out and tell her what to do.

Once, when she was young and chasing a man twice her age, I had heard her squeal with delight and say that she was good at daughtering, not at mothering. It was truer than she thought. Somehow, in her own family, where she looked from the outside a bulky ageing woman, she would feel younger than any of the men.

That was already so in her marriage. In calendar years she was older than Martin: she looked older. But, now they had been married fifteen years, she had come to behave like a daughter to a father, who was wilful, capricious, but who was her one support: to whom under the teasing and the disrespect, she felt nothing but passionate respect.

It seemed to suit them both. Against all the prophecies, against the forecasts of wiseacres like myself, the marriage had worked. As she walked back into the house to put dinner on, stoop-shouldered, thickening, still active and light on her feet, from his chair Martin’s eyes followed her. It was not till then that he asked me about Nightingale. He had kept from her, I felt sure, how he had been more scrupulous, more gentle, than the rest of us. Perhaps he knew that that was an aspect of him, surprising to his friends, surprising even to himself, that she would not wish to see.

“How did Nightingale take it?” As he asked the question, he was puzzled to see me grin. It just happened that his tone had not been at all gentle. Somehow it brought back to mind one of old Gay’s saga men enquiring how some unfortunate hero had faced an ordeal, such as having his house burned over his head.

“Well, how did he take it?” Martin repeated.

I described the day. Martin listened with concentration. He was careful not to say whether he thought Nightingale’s behaviour pointed to guilt or innocence. He was too experienced to worry me with doubts just then. I was in the middle of it; he was not going, even by a fraction, to weaken my will. As usual, he was leaving nothing to chance. It rested with Crawford and Brown now: what were they going to say?

“It ought to be all right,” I said.

Dawson-Hill was dining with Crawford that evening, wasn’t he? Martin asked.

“I don’t know that I like that,” he reflected. He insisted that I ought to see Brown alone on the following, Tuesday, night. After all, Brown was a friend and a good man. Despite all this faction, I could still talk to him as a friend. It might be worth doing. Martin was sure that it was worth doing. I was not eager, but Martin pressed me. Would I mind if he fixed it up straight away? I said that anxiety was running away with him. “Never mind,” said Martin, and went away to telephone.

He returned across the grass with a furtive smile.

“Uncle Arthur wasn’t any keener on it than you are. But he’ll see you in his rooms tomorrow night at nine o’clock.”

After dinner, the four of us were sitting near the window looking out over the wide lawn. On the further side, G S Clark had come down his own steps and was walking near the edge — so that he kept in the full evening sun, out of the shadow of the elms. He was walking slowly, dragging his useless leg. It took him minutes to reach the bottom of the garden, turn, go on with his exercise. Yet his locomotion, though it was painful and laborious, did not look so. There seemed a jaunty, almost wilful air, in the way he pulled up the bad leg and then set off for his next step, as though this wasn’t a very good way to walk, but one that, out of eccentricity, he happened to prefer.

There was a murmur of voices from inside the house, and Irene left us. I heard her saying from the passage between her kitchen and the Clarks’, “Yes, he’s here.”

“I know it,” came Hanna’s voice, clear, the intonation off-English.

The two women came into the drawing-room and walked towards us, Hanna neat and catlike by Irene’s side. The previous year, Hanna had been letting herself go: but now her hair, which had strayed grey and wispy, was glossy black again, trim on the shapely Hamitic head. Despite her age she had preserved, or re-attained, something of the look of a student — an intelligent, well-groomed student, eager, argumentative, ratty.

“I can’t stay long,” she said, refusing to sit down.

I pointed to her husband, doing another limp across the lawn. “I know. He will tire himself.” For an instant she spoke like a nurse.

Then she said: “He appears before the Court tomorrow? You know that?”

I replied that of course I did.

“This is all beastly!” cried Hanna. “This is rotten!” She was angry with me because she was having to be disloyal. Whatever feeling she had had for Clark had been corroded: but she was a woman who wanted to be loyal, who thought she would have been happy being loyal, and somehow luck and history had always tripped her up. She wanted to be loyal to a cause, to be loyal to a man. She did not like to lead a shabby life. Her politics were pure and unpersonal, she was not predatory in her human relations. And yet, for reasons which with all her intelligence she did not understand, she was constantly finding herself in traps like this.

“I thought you must be warned. He will say” — she glanced with black eyes on to the lawn — “that Howard does not know what truth is. He will give examples about Howard talking of his scientific work.”

She went on: “He believes that no one with Howard’s opinions has any conception of truth at all. Or any other of the private virtues. He believes that. He means what he says. That is the strength.”

She cried: “Are you ready for that, Lewis?”

“I think so.”

“Don’t underestimate him.”

I said that I didn’t, which was true. But Hanna would have liked a more fiery response. With an ill-tempered toss of her head she said: “I never know where I am with you Anglo-Saxons. I never know when you’re going to be soft and when you’re going to be tough. Living your life, Lewis, I suppose you must have had to be tough in your time.”

Martin told her gently: “He’ll have it in hand.”

“Will he?” she asked.

Once more she refused to sit down. She could not stay long, she said, watching for Clark to begin his climb into the house. But she did stay just long enough to give a display of subtlety. How many of the younger Fellows had I seen, said Hanna, mondaine, brimming with the sophistication of Central Europe, travelled, experienced, twice-married, since I arrived in the College? She didn’t mean Howard, of course — for whom, being vixenish as well as subtle that night, she expressed contempt. “The dullest sort of left-wing camp-follower.” She didn’t mean Howard — but which of the others, she said with an inconsequence so airy that it knocked one down, had I managed to see?

It showed the subtlety of a schoolgirl of sixteen. I saw Irene’s eyes, narrow and sly, glinting towards Martin. They were both amused, but they were amused with a touch of concern. For Martin and I were fond of Hanna, and so, more oddly, was Irene. And here Hanna was trying, by guile, to get us to talk of Tom Orbell.

When he had first begun to lavish worship on her, she hadn’t paid much attention. Then she had come to like him. With her usual lack of instinct, she had let her imagination dwell on Tom. She was at a stage — perhaps for the first time in her life — when being loved could compel love. Maybe already the first crystal of feeling had become sharp within her. I hoped not. She was hard, she could be viperish, but she was also generous. She had never begrudged those she knew the good things that had come their way — not successes which she didn’t mind about, but the serenity and the children she had never had. I was afraid, I was sure Irene was afraid, that this was another of her boss-shots. Tom was a gifted man, and a man of force: but I believed it suited his nature to give his love without return. Once she responded, with a vulnerable, impatient, mature love, he might be frightened off. That would mean humiliation for him — but for her, it could be worse than that.

35: The Inner Consistencies

FROM the beginning of the Tuesday morning session, G S Clark was sitting opposite the Master, his face fresh, his eyes sky-blue, looking frail, like one of Dickens’ saintly, crippled children in the midst of able-bodied men. As I listened to him, he did not seem either saintly or crippled. He was the best witness who had come before the Court. He knew exactly what he had come to say, and without fuss, qualification or misgiving, said it. He did not believe in Howard’s honesty, he told Dawson-Hill; he made no bones about it; he did not believe he was straight either as a man or a scholar. That was true in general and in particular. Clark said he couldn’t trust a scientist who said there might be “something in” Lysenko, who went in for complicated apologetics when faced with attacks on the truth. To Clark that chimed with all he knew of Howard, and with one piece of evidence in particular.

This piece of evidence he wanted to give the Court. Clark did not claim much for it; but it did show, he said, what Howard thought about his science. The incident had happened four years before, while Howard was in the middle of his work with Palairet. Clark could date it precisely, because it took place on the first day of the Yorkshire match at Fenner’s.

“I was walking across Parker’s Piece,” said Clark. Listening, I remembered hearing that he never missed a match. He took a passionate, vicarious joy in the athletic life. “And Howard caught me up. That’s not very difficult, at the pace I have to go.” He gave his fresh smile, with the absence of self-pity so complete that it was embarrassing. “I was surprised to see him, because I knew he was working up in Scotland. But he told me he was staying in college for the weekend. I asked him how his research was going. He said that he was fed up. I tried to encourage him a bit — I said that not even a scientist could expect a new discovery every day of the week. I don’t want to put words into his mouth, but I think I remember how he replied. He said something very close to this: ‘I’m not interested in any damn’ discoveries. All I’m interested in is cooking up a thesis. Then I can publish a paper or two by hook or by crook. That’s the way everyone’s playing this game. And I’m going to play the same game too.’”

It sounded the literal truth. As Clark spoke, he had the expression, open-eyed, credulous and observant, that I had seen in professional security officers. He was not the man to invent: and indeed, if anyone had wanted to invent evidence, they would have invented something more damaging than that. It did not seem very damaging. It was an anticlimax after all the preparation. Yet I felt that everyone there was trusting his word, and at the same time liking him.

Soon it was my turn. I asked at once: “I accept the conversation you’ve reported, completely. But is it really significant?”

“Recalling it in the light of what’s happened,” said Clark, “I think it may be.”

“I should have thought,” I said, “that those remarks are just what you might expect, from a young man disappointed, in a bad patch, with his work not coming out? I should have thought a lot of us at that age might have said very much the same?”

“With respect, and admitting that my own standards of behaviour haven’t been what I should like — I don’t think I should.”

“Have you forgotten,” I said, “what it’s like to be chafing because things aren’t going right? Did you never make a cynical remark when you were in that state?”

“Not that kind of remark,” said Clark. He gave me a sweet smile. I had to keep my voice from getting rougher. He provoked me more than most men did. Yet his manner towards me stayed benign and friendly.

“What’s more,” he said, “I’ve never heard a scientist talk like that about his scientific work.”

“You can’t seriously believe that Howard announced to you — you’ve never been a special friend of his, have you? — that he was going in for fraud?”

“All I’m entitled to believe, on the strength of what he said that morning, is that he’s not a man of good character.”

“What do you mean by good character?”

“Yes,” G S Clark replied, “I was afraid that you and I might not see alike on that.”

“I’m sure we don’t.” I spoke harshly and I made sure that the Court recognised the harshness. I had decided that my only tactics were to change my tone. With the same edge, I asked: “Why did you want to appear here at all this morning?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, still equable, “but I understood any Fellow had a right to do so. Perhaps the Master will correct—”

“Of course you had a right to,” I said. “But most Fellows didn’t exercise it. Why did you?”

“I can’t answer for others’ sense of their responsibility, can I?”

“I’m talking about your sense of your responsibility. Why did you want to come?”

“Under correction,” said Clark, “I thought I had something to tell the Court.”

“Why did you think it was worth telling?”

My tone had hardened further. The Master was stirring, clearing his throat, ready to stop me. Clark stayed unbullied, obdurate.

“That is what,” he said, “I’ve been trying to explain.”

“You didn’t appear just through personal animus?”

“I’m sorry, Eliot—” Crawford was beginning, but Clark said: “I’m quite prepared to answer, Master. I can honestly say that I have no personal animus whatsoever against this man.”

His confidence was unshaken. Brown was frowning; the Court was against me. But he was going where I wanted to lead him.

“I accept that. It might be less dangerous if you had,” I said. “But you have political animus?”

“I don’t approve of his political convictions.”

Still the Court was against me.

Still they felt — one could sense it in the room — that what he stood for, not always what he said, was right.

“I meant rather more than that,” I said. “Don’t you really think that a man of his convictions is a bad man?”

G S Clark was so set that he didn’t budge. He said: “I’m never quite happy at judging character outside the Christian framework.”

“You’ve got to. Don’t you really believe that a man of Howard’s convictions isn’t to be trusted in any circumstances?”

“In many circumstances, I believe his convictions would be an obstacle to my giving him trust as I understand it.”

“Don’t you really believe that he’s not a man of the same kind as yourself?”

Clark gave a smile sweet and obstinate. “I believe there are certain differences.”

“Don’t you really believe that such men ought to be got rid of?”

“Really, Master,” Dawson-Hill protested, “you can’t permit that question—”

Clark was still smiling. I let it go at that.

In my last speech, which was a short one, but which was interrupted by lunch, I tried to make use of Clark’s special kind of prejudice. Could the Court really give the faintest encouragement to the view that character and opinion went hand in hand? Wasn’t this nonsense, and dangerous nonsense? Didn’t we all know scientists — and I named one — whose opinions were indistinguishable from Howard’s, and whose integrity was absolute? Wasn’t it the chronic danger of our time, not only practical but intellectual, to let the world get divided into two halves? Hadn’t this fog of prejudice — so thick that people on the two sides were ceasing to think of each other as belonging to the same species — obscured this case from the beginning? Hadn’t it done harm to the college, to Howard himself, and to the chance of a just decision?

I said this without emollient words. G S Clark had given me the opening, and I was talking straight at Crawford, some of whose beliefs I thought I might still touch. But it was not only tactics that made me speak out so. Just as tenaciously as Clark believed what he had said that morning, I believed this.

Then I said, and this time I was talking straight at Brown: “As a matter of fact, I’ve come to know Howard moderately well on account of this business. I don’t say that he would be my favourite holiday companion, but I think he’s an honest man.”

It was then that we stopped for lunch, which was a sombre, creaking meal. Nightingale, alone of the four Seniors, did not look tired; he seemed buoyed up by the energy of strain, just as, in an unhappy love-affair, one is as springy as though one had been taking benzedrine. Outside the Master’s dining-room the sunlight was brilliant. Crawford and Brown, not altering their habits by a single tick, drank their ritual glasses of wine, but I noticed that old Winslow, as though determined to keep his lids propped up, drank only water.

When we were back in the combination room I did not go on long. I said that, in the whole hearing, there had been just one critical piece of testimony — Francis Getliffe’s. He hadn’t produced a new fact: but he had produced a new and dangerous possibility. What he had said couldn’t be unsaid. He had deliberately told the Seniors it mustn’t be. No one wanted to bring up new suspicions, which would only fester because they couldn’t be proved. No one wanted to institute new proceedings. Surely the best, and as far as that went the only, course was to declare a moratorium. Howard’s innocence had to be officially recognised. Those I represented could not be content with less. But they were quite prepared to regard anything else that had been said or done as though it had not been. I finished, looking across the table: “I don’t believe there’s any other course for the Court which is either prudent or just. If the Court doesn’t do it, I can’t see how the college will be worth living in for a decade. Just for policy’s sake, even if there were a shade of doubt about Howard, I should try to persuade you to avoid that. But in my view there is no shade of doubt — so it isn’t only policy or ordinary human sense that I’m asking you to act on. Those would be good reasons for altering your decision about Howard. But the best reason is that the decision — although most of us would have made it in your place — happened to be unjust.”

Dawson-Hill was quite unjaded. He had the stamina of a lawyer trained for trials. He showed less wear and tear than anyone present. Yet, like me, he chose to cut his speech short. Partly, I thought, he felt the elder men were exhausted. Partly, like me, he couldn’t get any response in that strained but deadened room. His tone throughout, under the casual mannerisms, was sharper than at any previous time, sometimes troubled, and often edged.

“Can Sir Francis Getliffe be wrong, I ask myself?” he demanded, at his most supercilious. “I can only conclude that, just occasionally, in the world of mortal circumstances, the answer might conceivably be yes. Of course, I recognise that Sir Francis is most high-minded. Even those of us who disagree with him on public issues recognise that he is more high-minded than is given to most of us. But I ask myself, can a man so high-minded, so eminent as a scientist, conceivably be wrong? Is it possible to be high-minded and at the same time rather curiously irresponsible?”

Dawson-Hill was sitting upright, with his head thrown back. “I have to conclude that the answer may be yes. For after all, his speculations before this Court — and with all my veneration, my heartfelt veneration for Sir Francis, I am not able to call them more than speculations — might involve the good name of others. They might, by a fantastic stretch of improbability, involve the good name of a most respected member of this Court. Dr Nightingale faced this issue plainly yesterday morning, and it would, I know, be going against his wishes, it would be less than fair to the respect that we all ought to bear him, if I didn’t state it just as categorically now.” He inclined his head to Nightingale, whose eyes lit up. “I put to you this possibility. It might be considered by some that, if this Court reverses its decision, if it reinstates Howard, then it is giving some weight to Sir Francis’ speculations. It might even be considered by some that it indicated a lack of confidence in Dr Nightingale. Could one blame Dr Nightingale if he took that line himself? I am not authorised to say that he or others will take that view. I mention it only as a possibility. But I suggest that it exists.”

That was bold. Bolder than I counted on, or wanted. Afterwards, the rest of Dawson-Hill’s speech went according to plan. Dismissing Getliffe’s speculation, he said, he came back to the much more natural alternative, which sensible men had taken for granted all along, that the photograph had disappeared by accident, that probably it had disappeared before the Bursar saw the notebook, and that he had, to his own inconvenience, suffered a trick of memory, that it had been a genuine photograph, and that the caption was just an old man’s ill-judged comment, “perhaps a shade too optimistic, for his own private eye”. Surely that was the rational explanation, for rational men who weren’t looking for plots and conspiracies and marvels?

“Which brings me to the very simple alternative with which the Court had to cope in the beginning,” he said. “Regrettably, there has been a piece of scientific chicanery. We all know that, and it is a misfortune which the college didn’t deserve. The Court previously had to choose, and still has to choose, between attributing this chicanery to one of two men. One was a man rightly honoured, an eminent scholar, devout and pious. The other is a man whom we can form our own opinions of. Master, I am a rather simple man. I don’t possess the resources of my distinguished colleague. I don’t find it easy to denigrate good old men, or to find virtues in those who have renounced all that most of us stand for. If I had been a member of the Court, I should have made the same choice as the Court has made before. I now suggest to the Court that in spite of the painful circumstances, all it can do is repeat that same choice and reiterate that same decision.”

As he stopped, the grandfather clock in the corner racketed, coughed, whirred, and then gave a stroke just audible like the creak of a door. It was a quarter past three. Crawford blinked, and said: “Thank you, Dawson-Hill. Thank you both.” Staring straight in front of him he said: “Well, that brings us to the last stage of our labours.”

“Master,” said Brown, quick off the mark, “I wonder if I might make a suggestion.”

“Senior Tutor?”

“I don’t know whether you or our other colleagues feel as I do,” said Brown, “but as far as I’m concerned, listening to what to all of us have been difficult and distressing arguments, I think I’ve almost shot my bolt. I wonder whether you would consider breaking off for today, and then the Seniors could meet in private tomorrow morning when we’re a little fresher?”

“In private?” Crawford looked a little bemused, listening, as he had done for so many years, to Brown’s guidance.

“I don’t think we need call on our legal friends. We’ve got to reach a settlement on the basis of what they’ve said in front of us. Then we can perhaps discuss the terms of the settlement with them tomorrow, later in the day.”

For an instant Crawford sat without responding. Then he said: “No, Senior Tutor. I gave notice yesterday that I should have something to say this afternoon. Speaking as Master, I wish to say it before we finish today’s hearing.”

He said it with a mixture of dignity and querulousness. In exhaustion, he was letting something out. Right through his Mastership, for fifteen years Brown had held his hand, told him which letters to write, advised him whose feelings wanted soothing. He had used Brown as a confidential secretary: had he noticed how much he depended upon him? Until the affair, it had been a good Mastership. Did he know that he had Brown to thank for that? Now, when for once he asserted himself and upset Brown’s protocol, one saw that he did know; but he didn’t thank Brown for it. It was the kind of service which no one ever thanks a grey eminence for.

“As I’ve just told the Senior Tutor,” Crawford announced to the room at large, “I wish to make a statement myself. But first of all, am I right in assuming” — he turned to Winslow — “that you are of the same way of thinking as you were yesterday?”

Nightingale’s voice came from beyond Winslow.

“I certainly am. I should like the Court to know that. I agree with every word of Mr Dawson-Hill’s.”

“You’re continuing to vote against reinstatement?” said Crawford.

“Of course.”

Winslow leaned forward, hands clasped on the table, looking under his eyebrows with a subfusc pleasure: “For myself, Master, I can only acknowledge the Bursar’s most interesting observation. Like him, however, I find it remarkably difficult to change my mind. I think that answers your question, Master?”

Crawford sat back in his chair. His physical poise stayed with him, the poise of a man who had always been confident of his muscles. But his voice had lost its assurance altogether.

“Then we cannot avoid a disagreement. I think, as I thought yesterday, that it is time for me to speak.” He was looking straight in front of him, past the chair, now empty, where the witnesses had sat. “And speaking not as Master but as a man of science, I have to say that there are things in this hearing which have given me cause for much regret. Not only having to deal with this distasteful business of scientific cheating, which is, by its nature, a denial of all that a man of science lives for or ought to live for. But apart from that, there have been other things, straws in the wind, maybe, which give reason to think that contemporary standards among a new scientific generation are in a process of decline. We have had a report this morning, of this man Howard, whom we elected a Fellow in a scientific subject in all good faith, expressing lack of interest in his research, as though that were a permissible attitude. It would not have been a permissible attitude in the laboratories here fifty years ago. When I was beginning my own research, I used to run to my laboratory. And before that, I used to run to my lectures. That was how we felt about our work.”

I had never heard Crawford reminisce, or show the slightest trace of sentimentality. For an instant, he was maundering. He jerked himself together: “But we must give our minds to that decline in standards on another occasion. We now have to conclude the deplorable business for which we’ve been sitting here. I find it almost intolerable to have had to devote thought and attention to this deplorable business. There have been times, I confess, when it has seemed like asking bloodstock to draw a cart. But it has not been possible to escape. I cannot assess how much nearer we have been brought to wisdom. For myself, speaking as a member of the Court, all I know is that I can see my own course of action.”

Someone stirred. Crawford’s face and body were quite still.

“I find it distressing not to have more factual certainty. I do not take the view, held apparently by some, that in matters of this kind one can usefully see into other people’s minds. Speaking as a man of science, I do not apprehend the suggestions made why such and such a person may have done such and such. For myself, I have to fall back on first principles. My first principle is to discount what may have been happening in people’s minds and to give weight to the man who knows most about the concrete phenomenon.”

He went on: “That brings me straight away to our colleague, Getliffe. Here I might add something, from my own position, to what has been said by the senior Fellow present. As he rightly told us, Getliffe is a distinguished man of science. He has served twice on the Council of the Royal Society, overlapping on one of those occasions with myself. He has not yet been awarded the Copley Medal” — said Crawford with satisfaction, who had — “but in 1950 he won the only slightly less distinguished Royal Medal. I must say, I cannot find it within me to disregard a man of such credentials. We have known for some time, of course, that he was uneasy about the Court’s original decision. I was never comfortable, as my colleagues will remember, that he was not altogether with us. But I was under the impression, which I believe was not completely false, that he was prepared to concede that there was a genuine margin for disagreement. Speaking both as Master and as man of science, I feel that on Sunday, before the Court, he removed that impression. I have hoped all along that this wretched business could be settled without too much disturbance. But though nothing we can do now will please everybody, I think there is only one thing I for myself can say or do. I do not know that Getliffe convinced me that Howard was, beyond the possibility of doubt, innocent. He did convince me, however, that no body of sensible men, certainly no body of men of science, could say that he was guilty. Therefore I find myself obliged to believe that he has received less than fairness, and that he should be reinstated by this Court. I have to say so now.”

I lit a cigarette, looking across at Brown. Was it all right? I was thinking, Crawford, who for so long had been permanently middle-aged, had suddenly seemed old. I had seen the same change and the same symptoms in predecessors of his: men quite different from him except that they had just come to the critical point. He was thinking now only of the mainstay of his life: and for him, the mainstay had been his science, his position among scientists. Not that he was a man, one would have thought, who needed to buoy up his self-esteem: yet that had been the purpose, the meaning, the lustre of his life, and in his seventies, when he thought about it, as he did increasingly, it gave him happiness.

He had enjoyed being Master, just as he enjoyed any honour that came his way: but to him it had really been an honour, not a job: his only ambition in the Lodge had been a quiet reign and no fuss. He had no involvement in other people, and very little feeling for them. Like many men whose human interests burn low, he was often, for that very reason, comfortable to be with, just because he made no demands. It was from the same source that he derived his dignity, his kind of impersonal tact. And yet, in the end, it had let him down. Throughout the affair, he hadn’t been able to draw on enough reserves of feeling to give the college the leadership it needed. This was painful to him, it had aged him: not so much because he felt inadequate as because, step by step, he had found himself dragged into scenes of personal emotion. For, again like many men themselves not involved, he had a dread, superstitious or pathological, of feeling in others. The undertow of violence, of suspicion, of passion, had dragged at everyone in the Court: but he was the only one who had felt it like an old man’s illness.

Without any hurry, as though he were discussing giving a grant of ten pounds to a choral exhibitioner, Brown said: “Master, I’m afraid this puts me in a rather awkward position.”

He meant that the decision now rested with him. He said it without anxiety, for though he was far-sighted he was not anxious. He said it without drama, for no one was less histrionic. Yet his expression was full of care and feeling.

“I admit,” said Brown, still in a round, conciliatory tone, which contradicted his expression, “that I am a little sorry that everyone has committed himself rather further than I should be prepared to do this afternoon. I am right in thinking, Master, that we shall have an opportunity to exchange views tomorrow? That is, when the Seniors meet in private?”

“If you wish it, Senior Tutor.”

“Thank you, Master. I don’t feel able to come down finally one way or the other, until I’ve slept on it.”

Crawford was gathering his gown round him, ready to rise, when Brown went on: “If you will allow me one last thought today. I have a feeling that it is only fair to Eliot, who has given us so much of his time and trouble.” He faced me with a slight smile. “I have listened most carefully, as we all have, to his representations. We are all seized, as I am sure he knows, of the complexities of this case and its repercussions. Some of those repercussions, I am certain that he will recognise, are no fault of this Court. We have been given very pointed warnings by our other friend, Dawson-Hill. Of course Eliot will realise the responsibility those warnings put upon us. In most circumstances, as everyone in this room knows, I think, I should be the first person to look for a compromise. But I’m afraid I should have to stick in my heels against a compromise, if and when it might imply casting even the insinuation of approval upon blame thrown against valued colleagues and innocent men.”

36: Special Kind of Irritation

AT six o’clock, in the Howards’ flat, as I listened to them talking to an Indian, I was preoccupied by the news which I had had no chance to break. If it had been good news, I would have somehow slipped in a word. Did they know that? They were both, Howard especially, more anxious than when they waited in Martin’s room in April. Howard had taken two stiff drinks in a quarter of an hour.

The Indian, whose name was Pande, had been in the room when I arrived. He had a small, delicate, handsome head; by the side of the Howards he looked quiveringly fine-nerved. He was drinking orange-juice while the rest of us drank whisky. Laura was trying to persuade him to sign some protest. He was too polite to say that he did not want to, too polite even to change the conversation. As Laura got up to fill a glass, I noticed that she was pregnant. With her strong, comely figure, she carried the child lightly; she might be already six months gone. She saw my glance, and gave, to herself, not to me, a smile that was a mixture of triumph and pudeur.

“You must see—” she said to the Indian, standing over him.

Very politely, Dr Pande did not quite see. I was thinking, he would have called himself progressive, as they did: but he was nothing like at home with them. They were too positive. With his nerves, at least, he would have been more at home with a quiet reactionary, like G S Clark. Once more the useless rat race of anxiety went on in my mind: what words exactly had Brown used? Could they mean anything but their obvious meaning, that he had decided against us and that we had lost? Was he warning me that it was no use trying to move him that night?

The Howards, though they had not swerved from trying to persuade the Indian, kept slipping glances in my direction, making attempts to read my face. But they were so tough and disciplined that they stopped themselves trying to hurry Dr Pande out.

Howard was replying to one of his expressions of doubt.

“That’s all very well. But objectively, it’s holding up things. We haven’t got time for that.”

Howard was a shade less pertinacious than his wife. Soon he was telling Pande that he needn’t add his signature until next day. Pande gave a sigh, and with a jubilation of relief, looked round him.

“This is a jolly luxurious flat!” said Dr Pande.

“You’ll sign tomorrow?” said Laura.

“I will talk to you. Perhaps on the telephone,” said Dr Pande, as, very light, very ectomorphic, he went out of the room.

We could hear his footsteps down the stairs. They looked at me.

“Is it all right?” asked Laura.

“No,” I said. “I’ve no comfort to give you.”

Laura flushed with shock. For the first time I saw tears in her eyes. While Howard stood there, his mouth open, not putting a face on it, not aggressive, for once undefiant. But I did not feel protective to either of them. For him I felt nothing at all, except a special kind of bitter irritation. It was the kind of irritation one feels only for someone for whom one has tried to do a good turn and failed: or for someone for whom one has tried to get a job, and who has been turned down.

Laura recovered herself. What had happened? I told them there had been a division on the Court. That was as far as I felt like going or could safely go. Howard pressed me for names, but I said that I couldn’t give them. “Damn it,” he said, “are you an MI5 man?” It seemed to me that he was capable of believing that literally.

The Court would issue its finding the next day, I explained. Laura was back in action. So it wasn’t all settled? So there were still things that might be done?

“Are you doing them?” she cried.

I said that I was doing all I could think of. I did not tell them that I was seeing Brown that night. Their hopes were reviving, despite anything I said. I repeated, I didn’t believe anything I could do was relevant now: I had no comfort to give them.

As soon as I left their flat and got down into the street, I felt an anger which couldn’t find an outlet, a weight of anger and depression such as made the brilliant summer evening dark upon the eyes. I was not angry for Howard’s sake: he remained more an object of anger than its cause. I didn’t give a thought about injustice. No, the thought of Howard, the thought of Laura, the thought of seeing Brown, they were just tenebrous, as though they had added to my rage, but were looked at through smoked glass. There was nothing unselfish, nothing either abstract or idealistic about my anger, nothing in the slightest removed from the frets of self. I was just enraged because I hadn’t got my way.

Slowly I walked by St Edward’s Church and out into the Market Place. I bought a newspaper, as automatically as one of Pavlov’s dogs, at the corner. I went into the Lion, drank a glass of beer, and was staring at the paper.

A thick, throaty voice came from over my shoulder.

“Why, it’s the man himself!”

I looked up and saw Paul Jago, heavy, shabby, smiling.

He asked me to have another drink and, as he sat down beside me, explained that his wife had gone off to a sick relative. It was a long time, he said, since he had walked about the town alone in the evening, or been into a pub. He was studying me with eyes which, through the thick lenses, were still penetrating, in the lined, self-indulgent face.

“Forgive me, old chap,” he said, “am I wrong, or are you a bit under the weather?”

The quick sympathy shot out. Even when he was at his most selfish, one felt it latent in him. Now it was so sharp that I found myself admitting I was miserable. About the Howard case, I said.

“Oh, that,” Jago replied. Just for an instant his tone contained pride, malice, an edge of amusement. Then it softened again. “I’m rather out of touch about that. Tell me about it, won’t you?”

I did not mind being indiscreet, not with him. I did not even rationalise it by thinking that, as a Fellow entitled to a place on the Court, he had a right to know. I let it all spill out. It seemed natural to be confiding in this ageing, seedy man, with the wings of white hair untrimmed over his ears, with the dandruff on the shoulders of his jacket. Yet we had never been intimates. Perhaps it seemed more natural just because he was seedy, because he had allowed himself to go to waste, had made a cult of failure and extracted out of it both a bizarre happiness and a way of life. It was not only his sympathy that led me on.

He soon grasped what had happened in the Court. His mind was as quick as his sympathy, and, although he had perversely misused it for so long, or not used it at all, it was still acute. About Getliffe’s statement and Nightingale’s answers the day after, he asked me to tell him again.

“I want to be sure,” he said. He gave a curious smile.

It was after half past seven, and I had already told him that I was calling on Brown at nine. He invited me to have dinner at an hotel. When I said that I didn’t want much of a meal, he humoured me. He went back with me to the college, where we called at the buttery and, like undergraduates, came away with loaves of bread, a packet of butter and a large slab of cheese. In my room, Jago greedily buttered great hunks of crusty loaf. At the same time, his eyes lit up, he listened to me repeat in detail what Nightingale had said the day before and what Brown had said that day.

37: Appeal

EATING a crust, butter sliding on to his fingers, Jago listened to me. Although the sun shone outside, in the room it was cool twilight, and the diffused light gave delicacy and sharpness to his face. He did not criticise or doubt. Once or twice he asked for an explication. He nodded. Suddenly he broke out: “Say no if I’m imposing myself—”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you mind if I come with you to see Brown?”

It was a surprise and not a surprise. He was immersed in the drama. I had known that he was wanting to take a part. Was it just good-nature? He was a man of charm: maybe he still, just for an evening out, so to speak, liked proving that the charm wasn’t lost. Or was it remorse, having turned me down before? Remorse, and the self-satisfaction that things would have gone better if the college had been in his hands?

“I’ve got a feeling,” said Jago, “that Arthur Brown might pay some attention to me. We were close, once.”

On the stroke of nine, we walked together over the cobbles at the foot of Brown’s staircase. After the week’s heat, the smell from the wallflowers beneath the ground-floor windows was dusty and dry. When we had climbed the stairs, I went first into the room. Brown’s greeting was friendly, but not open. When he saw Jago behind me, he grimaced with astonishment.

“My dear Paul!” he cried. He crossed the room and shook hands with Jago. “How ever long is it since you’ve been in here?”

“Longer than I like to think,” said Jago lightly. “And I mustn’t come in now on false pretences, must I?”

“What’s this?” But Brown had known as soon as he saw Jago.

“I’m afraid I’ve come to add my representations to Eliot’s, you know.”

“Is that fair?” asked Brown.

“Don’t you think it is?” said Jago, without self-consciousness.

“Anyway,” said Brown, “it’s very good to have you here, whatever you’ve come for.”

Brown’s affection and pleasure were genuine. Tactically, he was on his guard. He did not need teaching that Jago would try to work on him; nor that, without a purpose, Jago would not have come. It was he who warmed to the reconciliation, if that was what it was, not Jago. And yet Brown had watched Jago let himself slip; he had watched him contract out of all human obligations, except one. To Brown, whatever his luck, any indulgence like that was outside his nature. He was a stoic to the bones; whatever tragedy came his way, the King’s government, the college, his relations with his friends, had to be carried on. He disapproved of Jago’s abandonments; he scarcely understood them and in a sense he despised them. (Perhaps he also envied someone who could so totally let his emotions rip?) Further, he knew, no one better, that Jago had turned against him. But none of this, though it might have tinged Brown’s affection for him, had uprooted it. Brown’s affections, in spite of — or more truly, because of — their being so realistic, were more tenacious than any of ours. He could not change them as he did a suit of clothes or a set of tactics. It was a handicap to him, I used to think, as a politician: perhaps the only handicap he had.

Brown went through the ritual of drink-offering without hastening his pace.

“I’ve got a little white Burgundy waiting for you,” he said to me. “I had an idea it might be rather restful after the work you’ve had to put in. Paul, unless my memory escapes me, you never cared much for it, did you?”

Brown’s memory did not escape him. Jago asked for a sip of whisky.

“I don’t think that’s very difficult,” Brown replied, going out to his gyp-room and bringing back whisky bottle, siphon and jug of water to put by Jago’s side.

“There we all are!” said Brown, settling into his chair. He told Jago that he was looking well. He asked after his garden. He was ready, just as though he were an American businessman, for an indefinite exchange of cordialities before getting to the point. Whoever first came to the point, it would not be he. But it was not really a battle of patience. Jago would have lost it anyway, but he was not playing. Very soon he gave a smile and said: “I’ve been hearing a good deal about this case tonight.”

“Have you, Paul?”

“And about what’s happened in the Court — of course, I don’t question what Eliot’s told me—”

“I’m sure,” said Brown, “that you’re right not to.”

All of a sudden, Jago’s tone sharpened.

“Am I right, Arthur,” he leaned forward, “that you’ve seen this case all along in terms of people? In terms of your judgment of the people concerned?”

Brown’s stonewall response did not come quite so pat. He said: “That may be fair comment.”

“You have always seen everything that way.”

Jago spoke affectionately, but with weight of knowledge, as though drawing on their associations of the past and on history each could remember, as though he still possessed the moral initiative he had had when they were both young men. If I had used the same words to Brown, they would not have meant the same.

“I shouldn’t regard that,” said Brown, “as entirely unjust.”

“But for once, in this case, it may have made you entirely unjust.”

“You can’t expect me to accept that, Paul.”

“I put it to you,” all Jago’s reserves of force were coming out of him, together with a sadic spirt, “that you’ve never been vain about much except your judgment of people?”

“I shouldn’t have thought that I claim much for myself in that respect.”

“Don’t you?”

“I hope not,” said Brown.

“More than you think, Arthur, more than you think.”

“Only a fool,” said Brown, “claims that he knows much about people.”

“Only a fool,” Jago darted in, “claims it in the open. But I’ve known wise men, including you, who claim it to themselves.”

“I can only say again, I hope that isn’t true.”

“Haven’t you assumed all along that young Howard couldn’t be innocent?”

“That’s not quite fair,” said Brown steadily, “but I don’t want to shilly-shally. Put it another way: everything I know about the man makes me think that he could possibly be guilty.”

Jago had an intent, sharp smile.

“As for Nightingale. Haven’t you assumed all along that Nightingale was above reproach? Haven’t you closed your mind to what Getliffe said? Haven’t you refused to believe it?”

“I should find it very hard to believe.”

“Why do you find it hard?”

Brown’s high colour went higher still. He started in a burst of anger, his first that night.

“I regard it as abominably far-fetched.”

“Were you always so convinced that Nightingale was above reproach?” Jago spoke quietly, but again with weight and knowledge. When Brown had been his closest friend and had run him for the Mastership, it had been Nightingale, so they thought then, who had done them down.

After a pause Brown replied: “You have good reason not to like him, Paul.” He paused again. “But we should never, even then, have thought him capable of this—”

“I should have thought him capable of anything,” said Jago. “And I still do.”

“No.” Brown had recovered his confidence and obstinacy. “I can’t see him like that.”

“You’re being blinder than you used to be—”

“You mustn’t think that I’m specially fond of him. I don’t mind telling you, we haven’t got much in common. But it sticks in my gullet not to do one’s best for the chap with a record like his.”

A military record, Brown meant. Was this one of the reasons, I suddenly thought, for what had baffled me all along — Brown’s loyalty to Nightingale and the origin of it? Brown, who on medical grounds missed the first war, had the veneration for physical courage of those who doubted their own. But, more than that, he had a kind of veneration for the military life. Tory, intensely patriotic, he believed, almost as simply as he might have done as a child, that, while he was sitting in his college rooms during two wars, men like Nightingale had kept him safe. He was one of those rare men who liked recognising their debts. Most of us were disposed to deny our gratitude. Arthur Brown was singular because he actually liked not denying his.

“I feel,” Brown said, “a man like that deserves a bit of looking after.”

“You mean, that you won’t let yourself see him as straight as you let yourself see anyone else?”

“I mean,” Brown replied, unmoved, “that when I sit next to him in hall I am prepared to make a few allowances.”

“Arthur,” said Jago, “do you realise how much you’re evading me?”

“He’s not an easy man. And I like an easy man,” said Brown, with impenetrable obstinacy. “But I feel he’s entitled to a bit of protection.”

“You mean, you won’t let yourself entertain any suspicion of him, however reasonable?”

“I do not admit for a second that this is reasonable.”

“You won’t even admit the possibility, not even the possibility, that he did this?” Jago said with violence.

“As I think I’ve told you, I should find it very hard to admit that.”

It was then I thought Jago had come to the end, and so had we all.

Jago switched again.

“I should like to tell you something about myself, Arthur.”

He had spoken intimately. Brown, still on guard, said yes.

“I should like to tell you something about my wife. I’ve never said it to anyone, and I never thought I should.”

“How is she, Paul?” asked Brown. He said it with warmth.

“You never liked her much, did you? No” — Jago was smiling brilliantly — “none of my friends did. It’s too late to pretend now. Oh, I can understand how you feel about her. And I hope you understand that I’ve loved her all my life and that she is the only woman I have ever loved.”

“I think I knew that,” Brown said.

“Then perhaps you’ll know why I detest speaking of her to people who don’t like her,” Jago flashed out, not only with love for his wife, but with intense pride. “Perhaps you’ll know why I detest speaking of her in the way I’ve got to this very moment.”

“Yes, I think I do.” Now Brown was speaking intimately.

“I’ve never spoken to you or anyone else about the last election. I suppose I’ve got to now.”

“It’s better to let it lie,” said Brown.

“No. I suppose everyone still remembers that this man Nightingale sent round a note with a reference to my wife?”

“I hope that’s all long forgotten,” said Brown, as though to him it really was a distant memory, one pushed for good sense’s sake deep down.

“I can’t believe that!” cried Jago.

“People don’t remember these things as you think they do,” said Brown.

“Do you imagine I don’t remember it? Do you think that many days have passed when I haven’t had to remember every intolerable thing that happened to me at that time?”

“It’s no use saying so, but I’ve always wished you wouldn’t dwell on it.”

“It’s no use saying so. Don’t you think my wife remembers everything that happened? Most of all, the note that this man Nightingale sent round?”

Brown nodded.

“If it hadn’t been for what Nightingale did then, she believed then and she still believes things might have gone the other way. So she thinks she ruined me.”

“Looking back,” said Brown, “for any comfort it may be worth, I don’t believe it made a decisive difference—”

“That’s neither here nor there,” said Jago, brilliant, set free. “My wife does. She did so at the time. That is what I have to tell you. Do you know what she did, three months after the election was over?”

“I’m afraid I can guess,” said Brown.

“Yes, she tried to take her life. I found her one night with her bottle of sleeping-pills empty beside her. And a note. You can imagine what the note said.”

“I can.”

After an instant’s pause, Jago glanced straight at Brown and said: “And so I feel entitled to ask you not to rule out the possibility, the bare possibility, that this man Nightingale may have done something else. I admit there’s no connection. So far as I know, he may have been spotless ever since. But still I feel entitled to ask you not to rule the possibility out.”

Brown said: “You’re not making this easy for either of us, are you?”

“Do you think,” cried Jago, “that it’s been easy for me to tell you this?”

Brown did not reply at once. I heard the hiss and tinkle as Jago refilled his glass.

Then suddenly Jago, as though in a flash he had seen Brown’s trouble, made another switch.

“You won’t admit the possibility, not even the possibility, that in any circumstances Howard might be innocent?”

For an instant Brown’s face lightened, as though he welcomed Jago’s question, put that way round.

He said: “Will you repeat what you’ve just asked me?”

When Jago had done so, Brown sat without expression. Then he said, slowly and deliberately: “No, I can’t be as positive as that.”

“Then you do admit the possibility that the man’s innocent?” Jago threw back his head in triumph.

“The bare possibility. I think I shouldn’t be comfortable with myself unless I do.”

I lit a cigarette. I felt the anticlimax of relief.

“Well, what action are you going to take?” Jago pressed him.

“Oh, that’s going much too far. I shan’t even have my own mind clear until tomorrow.”

With friendly roughness Jago went on: “Never mind the formalities. There’s some action you must take.”

“I’ve still not decided what it is.”

“Then it’s pretty near time you did.”

Jago drank some whisky, laughing, exhilarated because he had got home.

“An old dog can’t change his tricks. I’m not as quick as some of you,” said Brown, domesticating the situation. “You mustn’t expect too much. Remember, both of you, I’ve only admitted the bare possibility. I’m not prepared to see other people blackguarded for the sake of that. And that’s as far as I’m able to go tonight. Even that means eating more of my words than I like doing. I don’t mind it with you, Paul, but it isn’t so congenial elsewhere. Still, I’ve got this far. I think I shouldn’t be entirely easy if we didn’t make some accommodation for Howard.”

Brown did not like saying he had been wrong. He liked it less than vainer men: for, genuinely humble as he was, believing without flummery that many men were more gifted, he nevertheless had two sources of pride. One was, as Jago had told him, in his summing-up of people: the other was in what he himself would have called his judgment. He believed that half his colleagues were cleverer than he was, but he didn’t doubt he had more sense. Now, for once, that modest conceit was deflated. And yet he seemed, not only resentful, but relieved. For days, I suspected, maybe for weeks, his stubbornness — which, as he grew older, was becoming something more than tenacity, something more like an obsession — had been fighting both with his realism and his conscience. Brown had had his doubts about the Howard case. Perhaps, as with many characters of exceptional firmness, he had them and did not have them. He didn’t mind, in secret he half-welcomed, the call Jago had made on his affections. For Brown had been able to use it as an excuse. Just as Jago was not above working his charm, his intensity, for his own purposes (was this half-revenge, I had been thinking? had he exaggerated the story he had just told?), so Brown was not above working the strength of his own affections. He was really looking for an excuse inside himself for changing. The habit of stubbornness was becoming too strong for him. He was getting hypnotised by the technique of his nature. He was glad of an excuse to break out. His affection for Jago gave him precisely that. It allowed him, as a visit from me alone almost certainly would not have done, to set his conscience free.

There was another reason, though, not so lofty, why Brown welcomed an excuse to change. His own stubbornness, his own loyalties, had been getting in the way of his political sense. He knew as well as anyone that during the affair he had mismanaged the college. If he “stuck in his heels”, he would go on mismanaging it. In the end, since much of Brown’s power depended on a special kind of trust, it would take his power away.

It had been astonishing to me, throughout the affair, how far stubbornness could take him. He was a supreme political manager. Nevertheless, his instincts had ridden him; they had ridden him right away from political wisdom; for the only time in his career as a college boss, he had not been sensible.

But now at last, triggered by that night, his conscience and his sense of management, which pulled in the same direction, were too strong.

In euphoria, Jago was talking about the college, rather as though he were visiting it, from the loftiest position in the great world outside, after a lapse of years. He mentioned Tom Orbell, who had been his last bright pupil. Brown was unbuttoned enough to say: “Between ourselves, Paul, I hope that young man gets a very good job elsewhere.” None of us needed an explanation of that sinister old college phrase. It meant that a man, even though a permanency as Tom was, would be under moral pressure to apply for other posts. It was getting late, and Jago and I stood up to say goodbye.

“Don’t let it be so long before you come in again,” said Brown to Jago.

“It shan’t be long!” Jago cried.

I wondered how long it would be.

“It shan’t be long!” Jago hallooed back up the stairs.

When we got into the court, I realised that he was unsteady on his feet, on feet abnormally small and light for such a heavy man. I had not paid attention, but he had been drinking hard since we arrived. I should have liked to know how much he drank with his wife at home. Cheerfully he weaved his way at my side to the side gate.

The fine spell had broken. The sky was overcast, a bleak wind blew into our faces, but Jago did not notice.

“Beautiful night!” he cried. “Beautiful night!”

He fumbled his key in the lock, until I took it from him and let him out.

“Shall you be all right?” I asked.

“Of course I shall be all right,” he said. “It’s a nice walk home. It’s a beautiful walk home.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “Go and sleep well,” he said.

38: An Order in the Book

OUT of the window, as I sat at breakfast next day, the garden was dark; the room struck cold. All the morning the room struck cold, while I waited for a message from the combination room, where the Seniors were having their last meeting. To myself, I had given them an hour or so to find a formula. By twelve o’clock there was still no news. I couldn’t judge whether the delay was good or bad. I rang up Dawson-Hill, who also was waiting in his room: no, he had heard nothing.

There were no books in the guest room. I had read the morning papers twice over. I ate the relics of the bread and cheese which Jago and I had brought in the night before. Between one and half past I telephoned the porter’s lodge. The head porter told me that the combination room lights, which had been on most of the morning, were now turned off. The Seniors must have gone to lunch.

As soon as I heard that, I went quickly through the courts to the college library, took out a couple of books, returned to my rooms. I was anxious enough to telephone the porter’s lodge again: had there been a message during the minutes I had been away? When they said no, I settled down to read, trying to stop myself speculating: but I was ready to hear the college clock each time it struck.

It had just struck half past three, when there was a knock at my door. I looked for the college butler. It was Dawson-Hill.

“I must say, Lewis,” he said, “the old boys are taking their time.”

He was not cross, not in the least worried, except that he had to catch the last train back to London.

“I suggest,” he said, “that we both need a breath of fresh air.”

Leaving the window open on the garden side, we should, he said, be within earshot of the telephone. So we walked on the grass between the great chestnut and the palladian building. The wind was rough, the bushes seethed, but Dawson-Hill’s glossy hair stayed untroubled. He set himself to entertain me with stories which he himself found perennially fascinating: of how the commanding officer of his regiment had mistaken X for Y, of how Lord Boscastle had remarked, of a family who were the height of fashion, “Whatever made them think they were aristocrats?” He was setting himself to entertain me. His laugh, which sounded affected and wasn’t, cachinnated cheerfully into the wind-swept March-like garden. By this time I was worrying like a machine that won’t run down. I could have brained him.

At half past four his stories were still going on, but he had decided that we both needed a cup of tea. Back in my rooms, he rang up the kitchens: no one there yet, in the depth of vacation. He took me out to a café close by, leaving a message with the porter. No one had asked for us when we returned. It was after five when, sitting in my room, Dawson-Hill cachinnating, I heard another knock on the door. This time it was the butler.

“The Master’s compliments, gentlemen, and he would be grateful if you would join him in the combination room.”

As he walked in front of us through the court, it occurred to me that this was how the news of my Fellowship had come. I had been waiting in Francis Getliffe’s rooms (without suspense, because it had been settled beforehand), the butler had knocked on the door, given me the Master’s compliments, and led me in.

Again, this dark summer afternoon, the butler led us in. On the panels, the wall-sconces were shining rosily. The Seniors sat, Winslow with his head sunk over the table, Brown bolt upright, Nightingale with his arms crossed over his chest. Crawford gazed at us, face moonlike, back to his normal composure. When he spoke his voice was tired, but nothing like as jaded or spiky as on the day before.

“Pray be seated, gentlemen,” he said. “We apologise for keeping you all this time. We have had a little difficulty in expressing our intention.”

In front of him and Brown were sheets of foolscap, written on, passages crossed out, pages of holograph with lines across them, attempts at drafting, discarded resolutions.

The butler was leaving the room, when Brown plucked at Crawford’s gown and whispered in his ear.

“Before you go, Newby!” called Crawford.

“Thank you very much for reminding me, Senior Tutor. We are under pledge, as I think the Court will remember, to communicate our decision to Professor Gay, who was appointed by the College Moderator in this case. I believe it was agreed that our legal colleagues here would report our decision to the Moderator, as soon as it was signed and sealed. Is that correct?”

“Certainly, Master,” said Dawson-Hill.

“In that case,” Crawford said to the butler, “I should be obliged if you would give a message to Professor Gay’s house asking him to expect these two gentlemen this evening.”

No one was smiling. No one, except me, seemed to resent this final interruption.

The door closed.

“So that’s all in train,” said Crawford, and Brown steadily nodded.

“Well, gentlemen,” said Crawford, “perhaps now we can dispatch our business. I should like to make a preliminary observation. Speaking not as Master but as a member of the college, and as one who has spent half a century in academic life, I have often felt that our internal disagreements sometimes generate more heat than light. I seem to recall making a similar comment on other occasions. But, with deference to my colleagues, I doubt if that has ever been more true than in this present one, which, I am thankful to say, we are now concluding. Speaking as an academic man, I am sometimes inclined to believe in the existence of a special furor academicum. However, speaking now as Master about this special and unfortunate occasion, I have to say that it is one of our responsibilities to diminish the heat which it has generated. In the course of our very protracted and careful discussions in this Court, especially today, I need hardly remark that no one has ever entertained a thought that any Fellow of the college — with the solitary exception of the man whom the Court originally deprived — could possibly have acted except with good intentions and according to the code of men devoted to science or other branches of learning.”

This wasn’t hypocrisy. It was the kind of formal language that Crawford had been brought up in. It was not very different from the formal language of officials. It meant something like the opposite of what it said. It meant that such thoughts were in everyone’s mind: and that for reasons of prudence, face-saving and perhaps a sort of corporate kindness, the thoughts had to be pushed away. Crawford went on. Maddened for him to come to the point, I heard phrases of Brown’s put in for Nightingale’s benefit. I heard the damping-down of crises, the explaining away of “misunderstandings”, the respectful domestication of Francis Getliffe.

At last Crawford said: “I hope that conceivably these few superficial remarks may give our legal colleagues some idea of the difficulties we have found ourselves in, and of the way in which our minds have been working. I think it remains for me now, as Master of the College and President of the Court of Seniors, to let them know our finding. This finding has already been composed in the form of an Order. When we have heard any observations our legal colleagues may have to make, the Order will be inscribed in the Seniors’ Order Book.”

He scrabbled among the papers in front of him. He picked up one sheet.

“No, Master, fortunately not,” said old Winslow. “This is one of the resolutions, one of the perceptible number of resolutions, if I may say so, that you and I didn’t find altogether congenial.”

“This is it, Master,” said Arthur Brown, as unmoved as a good secretary.

“Thank you, Senior Tutor.” Crawford took off his glasses, replaced them with another pair, settled back in his chair, quite relaxed, and read.

“June 30th, 1954. At a Meeting of the Court of Seniors, held this day, present the Master, Mr Winslow, Mr Brown, Dr Nightingale, it was resolved with one dissentient; that, after the hearings on June 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th, held in the presence of legal advisers, the testimony is not sufficient to support the Order for the Deprivation of D J Howard, dated October 19th, 1952, and that the Order for such Deprivation is hereby quashed. It was further resolved that Dr Howard’s Fellowship should be presumed to have continued without interruption during the period of deprivation and that he should be paid dividends and commons allowance in full: and that his Fellowship shall continue until it lapses by the effluxion of time.

“Is that all right, Dawson-Hill?” Crawford asked, as he put down the paper.

Just for an instant, Dawson-Hill flushed. Then, nonchalantly, with his kind of patrician cheek, he said: “I don’t pretend to be entirely happy about it, Master.”

“If you have anything further to say—?”

“Would that be the slightest use?”

“We are very grateful to you both,” Brown put in, “but I really think we’ve got as far as discussion can reasonably take us.”

“Are you satisfied, Eliot?” Crawford asked.

As I listened, I had felt nothing but elation, savage elation, the elation of victory. But it was a long time since I had heard the singular eloquence of college Orders. It took me a moment to realise that it was not all victory. Like the other research fellows since the war, Howard had been elected for four years. We had assumed that, if he were reinstated, the period of deprivation wouldn’t count against his term. They were counting it, by the simple method of paying him, so that he would slide out as early as the statutes allowed: this device had occurred to no one before.

“When does his Fellowship run out?” I enquired.

Brown, who saw that I had taken the point, replied: “December 13th this year.”

“Well,” I said, “you’re giving him half a loaf.”

“No, Lewis,” said Brown, “we’re giving him a reasonable deal according to our lights. We think we should be ill-advised to give him more.”

“He will, of course,” said Crawford, “still be eligible for an official Fellowship if and when a vacancy crops up. Though I doubt whether it would be in his own best interests to hold out much hope of that.”

Brown spoke to me: “No, Lewis, he’s getting more than half a loaf. He’s getting the substance of what he wants. He won’t have a black mark against him, his Fellowship will have run its course. As for the way we’ve done it, we’re entitled to consider ourselves.”

They all waited. The clock ticked in the silence, as I made up my mind.

“For myself,” I said, “I think I can accept that. But I’m not certain that all the Fellows I am representing will do.”

“They’ll be seriously irresponsible if they don’t,” Brown said. He added in a tone unusually simple and direct: “This isn’t altogether plain sailing, you know. You’ll do your best to persuade them, won’t you?”

Crawford, still relaxed in his chair, inclined his head, not his body, first to the right, then to the left. With a satisfied smile he said: “Well then. That is agreed.”

He went on: “I will now ask the Bursar to enter the Order in the book.” The draft was passed along to Nightingale, who had the order book already opened. He said, as though he were excited, but excited in a not unpleasurable way: “I take it that I enter my own dissent. I don’t know whether anyone’s ever had the chance to do that before!”

Fair hair bent over the book, he dutifully wrote. Winslow, turning away from him, was making remarks sharp with mischief about the resolutions that Nightingale wouldn’t have the “trouble of inscribing”. I got the impression that much of the day Brown had been drawing up forms of words by which the Seniors ruled out most of the evidence, and by inference protected Nightingale: but that when they became specific, Winslow had said that he would enter his dissent; and when they were woolly, Winslow, with some aid from Crawford, had jeered them away. All his life Winslow had loved drafting. This had been his day.

Nevertheless, fighting Brown on those clauses, Winslow and Crawford had given way about Howard’s tenure. That was a compromise, and the more one thought of it the more indefensible it seemed. It wasn’t like Brown, even, though it was his work. He was both too shrewd and also too magnanimous not to know that when one admitted being wrong, one ought to go the whole hog and be generous. I didn’t believe that they were aiming at keeping Howard from voting at the election, though incidentally they would do just that. No, I believed that, in some fashion which, in the future, Brown himself would be hard put to it to disentangle, much less justify, this was an attempt to make a gesture in favour of Nightingale, against the man who, even if he were innocent, had caused the trouble.

Meanwhile, Winslow was expecting Nightingale to resign. Winslow had been brought up in a Cambridge stiff with punctilio, pique and private incomes, and where, when men were criticised, they had a knack of throwing resignations on to the table, as in fact Winslow had done himself. It seemed incredible to him that Nightingale should not resign. Each minute, with relish, the old man was expecting it. I was not. I didn’t doubt that Nightingale, who had still four years to go as Bursar, would finish his term of office down to the last second of the last day. If there were coldness, or something like ostracism, from Winslow and others, he would take that, thickening his carapace, under which he would feel ill-used, perhaps at times persecuted, imagining attacks, becoming offensive in return.

Nightingale finished writing, and placed the book in front of Crawford. I got up, and when they had signed, stood behind them and studied the page. The Order was as Crawford had read it, written in Nightingale’s neat, school-mistressish hand. Underneath were the three signatures, R T A Crawford, MC, G H Winslow, A Brown. At the bottom of the page ran two lines inserted by Nightingale before the others signed: “Dr Nightingale, Bursar of the College and Secretary of the Court of Seniors, wished to have his dissent recorded. Alec Nightingale.”

Everyone was standing up. Nightingale reverentially put a large piece of blotting-paper on top of the order and closed the book. Then he looked out of the window into the gloomy evening and said to no one in particular, with the meteorological interest that never seemed to leave him: “Well, we’ve had the last of the summer.”

The Court, despite the day-long sitting, did not seem anxious to break up. It was the disinclination to part one sometimes sees in a group of men, gathered together for whatever purpose, never mind what the disagreements or inner wars have been. Crawford asked us all if we would like a glass of sherry. While the butler brought in decanter and glasses, Winslow was saying that, as soon as the Long Vacation term began, he must summon the first full pre-election meeting.

“You’ll soon be vanishing into oblivion,” he said to Crawford, with an old man’s triumph, prodding him with his retirement. “You’ll soon be no one at all!”

We stayed and talked. They went on about the timetable of the election, though no one mentioned the candidates’ names. It was nearly seven, and I said that Dawson-Hill and I must soon be off on our mission to old Gay. As I said that, Brown, whom I could not remember ever having seen gesticulate, covered his face with his hand. He had just thought, he said, that under the statutes Gay, as Senior Fellow, still had the prescriptive right to convene the election and to preside at it. “After our experience with him over this business,” said Brown, “how are we going to dare to try and keep him out? How are we going to keep him out at all? I wish someone would answer me that.”

Dawson-Hill was shaking hands all round. As Brown saw us ready to leave, he had another thought. He spoke to Crawford: “If our friends are going out to Gay’s, then I think we ought to send a copy of the Order to Howard himself. I have a feeling that it’s only right and proper.”

It was the correct thing to do; but it was also good-natured. Brown detested Howard, he had behaved to him with extreme prejudice, but he was not the man to see him kept in unnecessary suspense.

39: View of an Old Man Asleep

IN the taxi, along the Madingley Road, through the dense, grey, leafy evening, Dawson-Hill sat with an expression impatient and miffed. He did not like losing any more than most people; he was bored by having to visit Gay.

“Well, you’ve got away with it, Lewis,” he observed.

“Wasn’t it right that I did?”

But Dawson-Hill would give no view about Howard’s innocence. He went on talking in an irritated, professional tone.

“I must say,” he said, “you played it very skilfully on Monday morning. I don’t see how you could have got away with it unless you’d used that double-play. You’d obviously got to raise the dust about Nightingale and give them an escape-route at one and the same damned time. Of course, if you’d gone all out against Nightingale, it would have been absolutely fatal for your chap. That stood to sense. But still, I must say, you did it very neatly.”

He added: “You’ve always been rather lucky, haven’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“My dear Lewis, people say you always have the luck.” He broke off: “By the way, I confess I think Nightingale’s had a rough deal. The one thing that sticks out a mile to my eye is that he’s as blameless as a babe unborn.”

The trees, the garden hedges went by. I had been thinking, how odd it was if acquaintances thought one lucky. It was the last thing anyone ever thought about himself.

Then, sitting complacently back, tired and smug with winning, I heard what Dawson-Hill said of Nightingale. Could it be true? All my instincts told me the opposite. Sitting back, I let in only the trickle of the question, could it be true? If so, it was one of the sarcasms of justice. One started trying to get a wrong righted; one started, granted the human limits, with clean hands and good will; and one finished with the finite chance of having done a wrong to someone else. And yet, in the taxi, windows open to the chilly, summer-smelling wind, it was I who was smug, not Dawson-Hill.

He was enquiring what nonsense we should have to listen to from old Gay. How long would he keep us? Dawson-Hill could not miss his train, Gay or no Gay, senile old peacocks or no senile old peacocks. Dawson-Hill had to be in London for a late-night party. He told me the names of the guests: all very smart, all reported with that curious mixture, common to those who love the world, of debunking and being oneself beglamoured. It was remarkably tiresome, he said, to have to endure old Gay.

The taxi went up the drive. As Dawson-Hill and I stood on the steps of the house, he said, like the German officers on the night the war began: “Nur fang es an.”

The housekeeper came to the door. Her first words were: “I am so sorry.” She looked distressed, embarrassed, almost tearful. She said: “I am so sorry, but the Professor is fast asleep.”

Dawson-Hill laughed out loud, and said, gently and politely: “Never mind.”

She went on, in her energetic, Central European English, “But he had been looking forward to it so much. He has been getting ready for you since tea-time. He was so pleased you were coming. He had his supper early, to be prepared. And then he goes to sleep.”

“Never mind,” said Dawson-Hill.

“But he will mind terribly. He will be so disappointed. And I dare not wake him.”

“Of course you mustn’t,” said Dawson-Hill.

She asked if we would like to see him, and took us into the study. The room was so dark it was hard to see anything: but there Gay lay back in his chair, shawl over his shoulders, beard luminescent in the vestigial light, luminous white against the baby-clear skin. His head was leaned against the sidewing of the chair. His mouth was open, a dark hole, but he was not snoring. With all of us dead silent, we could hear his breaths, peaceful and soothing.

We tiptoed out into the hall. “What is to be done?” said Dawson-Hill.

We could leave the copy of the Order with a note signed by us both, I said.

“He will be so disappointed,” said the housekeeper. Tears were in her eyes. “He will be heart-broken like a little child.”

“How long before he wakes?” asked Dawson-Hill.

“Who can tell? When he has what he calls his ‘naps’ in the evening, it is sometimes one hour, sometimes two or three.”

“Don’t worry, Mrs Nagelschmidt,” said Dawson-Hill, “I will stay.”

She flushed with happiness. He had remembered her name, he was so polite, and all was well. I said it was very hard on him: I would volunteer myself, but I was dining with my brother, and afterwards might have to do some persuasion with the Howard faction.

“That’s important,” said Dawson-Hill. “No, you can’t possibly stay. It’s all right, I will.”

“And your party?”

“I suppose,” said Dawson-Hill to the housekeeper, “I may telephone, mayn’t I?”

“You shall have everything,” she cried. “You shall sit in the drawing-room. I will make you a little dinner—”

I asked how he was going to get back to London. He said that he would have to hire a car.

It was pure good-nature. Half an hour before, we had seen Brown’s good-nature; that one took for granted, it fitted deep into his flesh and bone. But Dawson-Hill’s came as a shock. I remembered the stories of his good turns to young men at the Bar, done secretively, and with his name kept out. Those stories, whenever I met him and heard his prattle, I only half believed. Now I broke out: “You’re a very kind man, aren’t you?”

Dawson-Hill coloured from hairline to collar. He was delighted to be praised, and yet for once uncomfortably shy. His face seemed to change its shape. The lines, which as a rule ran downwards, giving him his air of superciliousness and faint surprise, suddenly went horizontal, broadening him out, destroying his handsomeness. He looked like a hamster which has just filled its cheek-pouches, shifty, but shining with chuff content. In a manner as gauche as an adolescent’s, he said, in a hurry: “Oh, I don’t think we’d better talk about that.”

40: Walking Out of the Lodge

WHEN I got to Martin’s house, Margaret was there to welcome me. She had come up to take me home next day. She was bright-eyed because we had won; she wanted nothing except for us to be by ourselves. Irene was yelping with general irreverent glee: the room was warm, swept by currents of slapdash content.

But Margaret was bright-eyed, not only with joy, but with a kind of comic rage. Within five minutes of her arriving at the house — so they told me — Laura had been on to her by telephone. The Seniors’ decision was an outrage: of course Donald’s tenure ought to be prolonged by the entire period during which he had been deprived. Would Margaret see that that was done? and would she also sign a letter which, when Margaret mentioned it, I recognised as the one they had been forcing upon Dr Pande?

“It may be a perfectly reasonable letter,” cried Margaret. “But I’m sick and tired of being pestered by that awful woman.”

“I thought you got on rather well with her?” said Martin, with a glint of malice.

“That’s what you think,” Margaret said. “I’ve had more of her than I can stand. What’s more, I don’t believe, as some of you do, that she’s under her husband’s thumb. I believe she’s the bloodiest awful specimen of a party biddy, and I never want to see her again as long as I live.”

On the tenure of Howard’s Fellowship also, Margaret’s conscience had worn thin. She would have struggled to the last to get him justice. But she did not see, she was saying happily, still pretending to be irascible, why he should get more. The way he had done his research, his lack of critical sense, his taking his professor’s evidence — that wasn’t even second-rate, it was tenth-rate. The man was no good. He ought to count himself lucky to get what the Seniors were giving him: he ought to count himself lucky and keep quiet.

Martin said that he hoped we could convince the others so. As he spoke, we were eating dinner.

“You haven’t got to go out again tonight?” Margaret asked me. “You’ve had a horrible day, you know you have.”

In fact, I was very tired. But I was not too tired to think, with the disrespect of love, that Margaret was not above a bit of rationalisation when she wanted something for herself. Was she really so sure that Howard had got his deserts? Was she really speaking as impartially as her academic relatives would have done? When she wanted to forget it all, stop them wearing me out, and be together?

Martin had already called a meeting. It would be dangerous, he said, not to “tie up” the offer at once. By a quarter to nine we were back in college, sitting in Martin’s rooms, cold that night after the house we had just left.

Francis Getliffe arrived soon after. We had brought our chairs round the table, which stood between the chimney-piece and the windows, the curtains of which were not drawn, so that one could see the cloudy, darkening sky. A standard lamp stood by the table, leaving one end in shadow: Martin switched on a reading-light on a desk nearby. As Francis sat down he said: “Of course, we’ve got to accept it.”

“I don’t know whether there’s going to be any trouble,” said Martin. “But look—” he was speaking to Francis, “you’d better let me run this. You’ve done enough already.”

He said it in a considerate tone. I believed he was speaking out of fairness. Though he had not told me, I still fancied that, when the election came, he intended to vote for Brown: but he knew, no one better, that, in saving Howard, Francis had done himself harm. Martin had, of course, foreseen it on the evening when Francis volunteered to speak out. Martin, with the fairness into which he was disciplining himself as he grew older, was not prepared to let him do more. Certainly Francis seemed to take it so, for he said: “Good work.” It was the most friendly interchange between the two that I had seen.

Skeffington and Tom Orbell came in together, Tom with that air of being attached to balloons by invisible strings, which emanated from him when he had been drinking. He gave us a euphoric good-evening. Then Howard followed, with a nod, but without a word, and sat in the remaining chair, head bent on his chest, eyes glancing to the corner of the room.

“I couldn’t collect any of the others who signed the memorandum,” said Martin. “They’re nearly all away, but this is a quorum. I suppose you all know the terms of the Seniors’ decision?”

“I should think we do,” said Tom ebulliently.

“It seems to me to give you” — Martin was addressing himself down the table to Howard — “everything essential. What do you think?”

“I think,” said Howard, “that it’s pretty mingy.”

“It’s a bad show,” said Skeffington, paying no attention to Howard, almost as though he were invisible. Loftily he bore down on me: “It’s a bad show. I can’t understand how a man like you could let them give us a slap in the face like that.”

“Do you think it’s quite as easy?” I said in temper. It occurred to me that I had not received a word of thanks, certainly not from the Howards. It occurred to me simultaneously that I did not remember seeing a group of people engaged in a cause they all thought good, who did not end in this kind of repartee.

“It ought to be,” said Skeffington.

“You’re not being realistic, Julian,” Martin said.

“If this is being realistic, then I’m all in favour of trying something else,” said Skeffington. “What do you think?” he asked Francis Getliffe.

“I agree with the Eliots,” said Francis.

“Really,” replied Skeffington, with astonishment, with outrage.

It was Francis’ remark, made quietly and without assertion, that sent Tom Orbell over the hairline — the hairline which, when he was drunk, separated the diffuse and woofy benevolence from a suspicion of all mankind. He was not very drunk that night: he had come in exuding amiability and good-will. Of all the young men in the college, he was the most interesting, if one had the patience. He had by a long way the most power of nature; he was built on a more abundant scale. Yet it was hard to see whether that power of nature would bring him through or wreck him. Suddenly as he heard Francis’ remark, he once more saw the lie in life.

“So that’s what you think, is it?” he said, talking down his nose.

“We’ve got no option,” said Francis.

“That’s all right. If you think so.” Tom thrust his great head forward. “But some of us don’t think so. We’ve got the old men on the run, and this is the time to make them behave decently for once. I don’t know what Lewis was doing not to make them behave decently, except” — his suspicions fixed themselves on me — “that’s the way you’ve got on, isn’t it, playing safe with the old men?”

“That’s enough, Tom.” Martin spoke sharply.

“Who says it’s enough? Haven’t you done exactly the same? Isn’t that the whole raison d’être behind this precious bargain? I don’t like the Establishment. But I’m beginning to think the real menace is the Establishment behind the Establishment. That’s what some of you” — he looked with hot eyes at Martin, at Francis, at me — “are specialists in, isn’t it?”

“Can it,” said Skeffington. He was the only man who could control Tom that night. “What I want to know is, how are we going to set about it?”

“Set about what?” asked Martin.

“Getting this decision altered, of course.”

Gradually, as Tom sobered himself, the two of them began to shape a proposition. The time ticked by as we sat round the shadowed table. Only Howard, at the end removed from the rest of us, did not speak at all. The argument was bitter. Martin was speaking on the plane of reason, but even his composure grew frayed. Francis was getting imperative. I heard my own voice sounding harsher. While Skeffington would not budge from his incorruptibility. Somehow absolute and full recompense had to be given, pressed down and running over.

“We’re going to have our pound of flesh,” cried Tom. “We insist on complete reinstatement. Payment in full for the period of deprivation. And the Fellowship to run from this day with the period of deprivation added on. We won’t be fobbed off with less.”

“That’s stretching it,” said Skeffington. “We can’t ask for payment for the deprivation if we get the period tagged on. That’s the decent thing.”

“So that’s what you think,” said Tom, turning on his ally.

“It’s not on, to ask for money too.”

“Very well, then.” Tom lowered at us across the table. “Julian Skeffington’s willing to let you off lightly. I’d disown you first, but I’ll come in. You’ll have to go back to your friends and make them give us what he’s pleased to call the decent thing.”

“You’re seriously suggesting that we go back to the Master straight away?” said Martin.

“What else do you think we’re suggesting?” Tom burst out.

“Look here,” I intervened, “I’ve sat through the whole of these proceedings. I know, and you don’t know, what the feeling is. I tell you that we shouldn’t stand a chance.”

“You want to make it easy for everyone, don’t you?” Tom attacked me again.

“He’s dead right,” said Francis.

“Now we listen to the voice of Science, disinterested and pure, the voice of Intellect at its highest, the voice that we shall always associate with Sir Francis Getliffe,” Tom declaimed.

“Hold it,” said Skeffington. “You say,” he turned to me, angry with Tom as well as with us, stiff-necked, “that if we go back to them we shan’t get any change?”

“Not the slightest,” I said.

Tom was beginning another burst of eloquence, but Skeffington stopped him.

“I’ll take that,” he said to me. “We’ve got to take that. You know what’s what. But that doesn’t write us off—”

“What else can you do?” said Martin.

“It’s pretty clear,” said Skeffington. “We start all over again. We beat up a majority of the Fellows, and we send the Court another memorandum. We accept their withdrawal, but we tell them we’re not satisfied. We tell them they’ve got to do the decent thing. We’ll put in the proper terms of reinstatement, just to leave no room for argy-bargy.”

“That’s what I like to hear!” cried Tom.

There was a pause. Martin glanced at me, then at Francis, and began to speak: “No. I’m sorry. You can’t do it.”

“What do you mean, we can’t do it?”

“How do you think you’re going to get your majority?”

“We’ll beat them up just as we did before.”

“You won’t,” said Martin. “Not to put too fine a point on it, you won’t get me.” They were interrupting him, but he said sternly: “Now listen for once. We’ve been in this too, every inch of the way. I haven’t done much. But if it hadn’t been for Lewis, I doubt if we’d have got any sort of satisfaction. If it hadn’t been for Francis Getliffe, I’m quite sure we shouldn’t. Well, we’ve done our piece. And that’s enough.”

Both Skeffington and Tom were speaking, the voices were jangling round the table, when there came an interruption. Howard, who after his first remark had not said a word, who had been sitting with jaw sunk into chest, noisily slammed his hand on the table and pushed back his chair.

He said in a grating tone: “I’m fed up.”

“What?” cried Tom.

“I’m fed up with being talked about. I’m not going to be talked about any more by any of you,” he said. He went on: “They seem to have decided that I’m not a liar. I suppose that’s something. I’m not having any more of it. You can go and tell them that it’s all right with me.”

On heavy feet, he clumped out of the room.

He was innocent in this case, I had no doubt. And he had another kind of innocence. From it came his courage, his hope, and his callousness. It would not have occurred to him to think what Skeffington and Tom had risked; and yet anyone used to small societies would have wondered whether Skeffington stood much chance of getting his Fellowship renewed, or Tom, for years to come, any sort of office. Howard did not care. He still had his major hopes. They were indestructible. Men would become better, once people like him had set the scene. He stamped out of the room, puzzled by what had happened, angry but not cast down, still looking for, not finding, but hoping to find, justice in this world.

Martin, with face impassive, eyes sparkling, said: “Well, that appears to settle it.”

Haughtily Skeffington announced: “I shall write to the Master on my own.”

“I advise you not to, Julian,” said Martin.

“I shall have to,” Skeffington replied, obdurate and sea-green.

“But still,” said Martin, “as far as we’re concerned, that’s settled it?”

Skeffington nodded. He said: “It’s all you can expect of a chap like that. He’s got no guts.” It was the first recognition of Howard’s existence he had made all the evening. He did it seriously, his head uptilted, without a glint of humour, whereas Tom, his great frame shaking, his cheeks moist and roseate in the cool room, was billowing with laughter. He tried to speak, and emitted little squeals. All he could say was: “Give me your hand, Martin. Give me your hand, Lewis.”

When we went down into the court, there was a light shining in the Master’s study. “We’d better get it over,” said Francis, and he, Martin and I walked across to the Lodge. The front door was unlocked, and we went in and climbed the stairs. As soon as I opened the study door, I saw Crawford on one side of the fireplace, Brown on the other.

“Good evening to you, gentlemen,” Crawford said. He offered us a nightcap of whisky, but I said that we had not come to stay.

“Perhaps I can act as spokesman,” I said. “It’s straightforward, Master. We’ve been talking to some of the signatories of the last memorandum. We’ve been talking about today’s decision of the Court. All I need say is that it’s been accepted.”

“Splendid,” said Brown. He got up, stood beside me, and took my arm. He had noticed what I had not said. Quietly, as Crawford was talking to the others, Brown said in my ear, “You’ve done us all a service, you know.”

Crawford was saying at large: “Well, I’m glad this business is settled without breaking too many bones.” He called to me as though he had never had a doubt in his life: “I think I remember saying to you in this room last week, Eliot, perhaps we worry too much about forms of procedure. I think I remember saying that in my experience sensible men usually reach sensible conclusions.”

He said it with invincible content, with the reverence of one producing a new truth. Martin, who was in high spirits, glanced at me.

We went down the study stairs. Crawford pulled back the great oak door. Out in the court the chilly wind was blowing, so strong that the staircase lanterns sprayed and shook in the midsummer dark. Crawford walked out of the Lodge with Brown on his right hand, Getliffe on his left. Following after them, Martin once more glanced at me, eyes sharp, half-sarcastic, half-affectionate. Did he mean what I thought he meant? That, within six months, Crawford would be walking out of the Lodge for good, and one of those two would be walking in?