Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

“I’ve told you before, I don’t believe in climates of opinion,” said Shaw. “That seems to me a dangerous phrase. But even if opinions have changed, are you maintaining that moral values have changed too?”

I had had too much practice at committees to be drawn. Arnold Shaw wore a curving, sharp-edged smile, enjoying the debate, confident that he had had the better of it. So he had. But, with some, he was doing himself harm. They wanted a bit of give-and-take, not his brand of dialectic.

I was having to make my next, and final, move. I looked across at Denis Geary, the only useful ally there, wishing that we could confer. I was trying to think of two opposite aims at once, which was a handicap in any kind of politics. On the one hand, I didn’t want Shaw to do himself more harm (about that Geary would have been indifferent): if we pressed it to a vote, the Vice-Chancellor would get his support, but — as I had told him flatly the night before — it would be remembered against him. On the other hand, I wasn’t ready to surrender. For the students’ sake? For the sake of the old-Adam-ego, for after all I was fighting a case? That didn’t matter. Someone was saying, and this time the words were clear: “If only it hadn’t happened on the University premises .”

I had been reflecting only for moments. There wasn’t time to delay. But I found myself infected by a subterranean amusement. Arnold Shaw had made me think back to my college in the thirties: and, hearing that single comment, I was thinking back again. A college meeting. Report of a pyromaniac. He had set fire to his sitting-room once before, and that was thought to be accidental. Now he had done it again. One of the senior fellows, our aesthete, old Eustace Pilbrow, raised his voice. The young man must be got out of college at once. That day. But he must be found (since Pilbrow was a kind man) a very good set of lodgings in the town .

“Vice-Chancellor,” I said, returning to the occasion, “I have a simple proposition to make.”

“Yes?”

“I suggest we take no formal action at all. Let’s leave it over till the next meeting of the Court” (which was due to take place two months ahead, in June).

“With respect, I don’t see the force of that.” Shaw’s lips were pouting.

“There is a little force in it.” I explained that to me, and I thought to some others, the formality and the procedures were not important. We should be content, if we could save some chance for the students’ careers. Given two months, Leonard Getliffe could talk to his physicist colleagues in other universities: come clean about the events: some department might be willing to take Llewellyn in. And so with the others. Many of us had contacts. Then, if and when they were placed elsewhere, the Court would be happy, or wouldn’t worry further about its own disciplinary step.

“Not satisfactory,” said Arnold Shaw, but Geary broke in: “Vice-Chancellor, in the circumstances nothing is going to be satisfactory. But I must say, I’ve never heard of a compromise which made things so easy for the powers-that-be. You’re not being voted against, you’re just being asked to wait a minute.”

“It’s not even rational.”

“Vice-Chancellor,” Geary was speaking heavily, “it will be difficult for me, and I know I’m speaking for others, if you can’t accept this.”

Hargrave coughed. Under his white hair with its middle parting, his face, often quietly worried, looked more so. He was more distressed by the hearing than anyone there. He rarely spoke on the Court, but now he forced himself.

“It’s usually right to wait, if one is not hurting anyone.”

“You’ve listened to those four this morning,” said Shaw.

Hargrave kneaded his temples, like one with a migraine, and then said with surprising firmness, “But if we wait a little, we shan’t hurt anyone, shall we?”

Even then, I doubted whether Shaw was going to budge. At last he shook his head.

“I don’t like it,” he said. “But if you want me to put your motion (he turned to me) to the Court, I’m willing do to so. As for myself, I shall abstain.”

With bad grace, he sat in the chair while the hands went up. Only three against. There was a susurration of whispers, even giggles, as people stirred, ready to leave.

It wasn’t a rational compromise, Arnold Shaw had complained. But then he was expecting too much. I had twice heard an elder statesman of science announce, with the crystalline satisfaction of someone producing a self-evident truth, that sensible men usually reached sensible conclusions. I had seen my brother cock an eyebrow, in recognition of that astonishing remark. I had myself reported it, deadpan, to others — who promptly came to the conclusion that I believed it myself.

It was not even a rational compromise. I packed up my papers, quite pleased with the morning’s work. Others were talking, glad to have put it behind them. They were used, as people were in a society like ours, highly articulated, but so articulated that most lives touched only by chance, to hearing names, even to meeting persons in the flesh, once, twice, then not again. To most of the Board, the four we had interviewed were strangers, flickering in and out. Myra Bolt, David Llewellyn — they had swum into others’ consciousness that morning, like someone sitting next to one in an aircraft, talking of where he had come from and where he was going to. To people round the table, the names they had heard weren’t likely often to recur. That seemed entirely normal to them, just as it so often seemed to me.

YET for me, later that day, one of the names flickered, not out, but in again. I had arranged to spend another night at the Residence, in order to have my ritual drink with George Passant, and was sitting alone in the drawing-room after tea. Vicky had not returned from hospital, and Arnold Shaw had gone to his vice-cancellarial office for another of his compulsive paper clearing spells.

I was called to the telephone. This was Dick Pateman, a voice said, lighter and more smooth than it sounded face to face: he was anxious to see me. He knew about the result, or rather the non-result? Yes, he had been told: he was anxious to see me. Well, I accepted that, it was all in the job. In any case, I couldn’t stay with him long. Where, I asked? At the Residence? Not much to my surprise, he said no. Would I come to his own home? I asked for the address, and thought I remembered the road, or could find it.

Getting off the bus at the Park gates, I looked down into the town. There was a dip, and then a rise into the evening haze: lights were coming out, below the blur of roofs. On the left, down the New Walk, I used to go to Martineau’s house. I must have looked down, at that density of lights and roofs, many times in those days: not with a Rastignac passion that I was going to take the town, any more than I had felt it looking down at London roofs (that was too nineteenth-century for us), but with some sort of pang, made up of curiosity and, perhaps, a vague, even sentimental, yearning.

I had been over-confident about my local knowledge, and it took me some time to identify the road. This was a part of the town which in the last century had been a suburb, but was so no longer; it certainly wasn’t a slum, for those had gone. It was nothing in particular; a criss-cross of tidy streets, two-storeyed houses, part working-class, part the fringe of the lower middle. I asked my way, but no one seemed clear. So far as I could remember, I had never set foot in those particular backstreets: even in one’s native town, one’s routes were marked out, sharp and defined, like the maps of underground railways.

At last I saw the street sign; on both sides stood terraced houses, the same period, the same red brick, as those my son and I had passed on the way to my father’s room. At the end of the road some West Indians were talking on the pavement. That would have been a novelty years before. So would the sight of cars, at least three, waiting outside houses, including the house I was searching for. The window of the front room gave on the pavement: as in the window of the Residence the night before, a light was shining behind the curtains.