Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

Better for them if they had not come, I had thought all along. I had tried to persuade them, for I had interviewed the four of them more than once. But the young man Pateman, who was the strongest character among them, was also a good deal of a sea lawyer: there were other sea lawyers among the union leaders: they were insisting on appearance before the Court as an inalienable right. I found it distinctly tiresome. So far as the four had any chance at all, they would worsen it if they came and argued: I knew the impression they would make: I knew also that one of the girls had already lost her nerve.

As Arnold Shaw had said, picking up the official phrase, the facts were not in dispute. They could hardly have been less in dispute. About 3.0 a.m. on a winter morning (actually it happened early in March) the assistant warden of one of the women’s hostels had gone into a sitting-room. It was pure coincidence that she should have done so; she was having a sleepless night, and thought she remembered seeing a magazine there. She had switched on the light; on the sofa lay one naked pair, on an improvised bed another. What conversation then took place didn’t seem to have been put on record. The assistant warden (who was both sensible and embarrassed) knew both girls, they were members of the hostel and had their own rooms upstairs. Presumably she found out the men’s names at once: at any rate, next day she had no option but to report them. It was as simple as that.

We had better have the students in straight away, Arnold Shaw was saying. He pressed a bell, told the attendant to bring Miss Bolt.

Myra Bolt came in. She was a big girl, pretty in a heavy-featured, actressish way: at close quarters she rolled her eyes and one noticed that her skin was large-pored. She was quite self-possessed that morning. I had not yet seen her otherwise: it wasn’t she whose nerve had snapped. She was hearty and loud-voiced, and her parents were much better off than those of most of the students. Her father was a stockbroker who had a country house in Sussex. It was easy to imagine her, a little younger, taking riding lessons and being eager to have a roll in the bushes with the groom. She hadn’t exactly boasted or confided, but let me know that something of that kind had duly taken place. At this time, she was twenty, in her second year, academically not much good.

The table was bad for interviewing, far too long, the candidate (or, that morning, the appellant) much too far away. Arnold Shaw, though a good chairman, was a bad interviewer. He just snapped out questions, his mind channelled as though he were wearing blinkers. That morning he was not only a bad interviewer but a hostile one, and he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

“Miss Bolt,” he said. “We understand that you have representations to make to the Court. What are they?”

Myra Bolt wasn’t overawed, but she wasn’t specially used to formal speeches. I had told them the kind of questions to expect, but not that one, not as the first.

“Well—” she began inconclusively, like someone saying goodbye at a railway station.

I thought that I had to step in. She wasn’t a favourite of mine: there was only one of the four whom I was really fond of, and it wasn’t she. But it was my job to see they got a hearing. I said — “Vice-Chancellor, I wonder if I can help the Court a little, and Miss Bolt? Perhaps I could take her through what the students wish to say?”

How often had I seen others start a clash like that, voices smoothed down by official use? Arnold Shaw glanced at me with aggressive eyes — but he couldn’t have stopped me easily. He seemed to like having an adversary, me in particular. He nodded, and projected my name.

I began by one or two innocuous questions: how long had she been living in the hostel? How well did she know the other girl, Joyce Darby? Not all that well, said Myra: just to have coffee with, or go out with for a drink. I had two objectives: I wanted to domesticate the whole business, to make them look more acceptable, so that they might express some sort of regret (which I knew that two of them at least, Myra among them, weren’t inclined to do). Then I wanted them to make a responsible case about their careers: what would happen to them if they were thrown out of this university, and so couldn’t get into another? The more professional it all sounded, the easier for them — and, I had hoped until the night before, the easier for Arnold Shaw.

How had they ever got into it? They didn’t usually have this kind of party, did they? I was speaking casually. Myra answered: no, there’d never been anything like it before. She added: “I suppose we all got carried away. You know how it is.”

“Had you been drinking?”

“A bit. I must say, it was a bit off.”

That was mollifying. But she was preoccupied — as she had been when I talked to her — by the fact of the two couples in the same room, what in her language they called an orgy.

“If David and I had gone off in my car that evening, and the other two in somebody else’s, then I don’t suppose we should have heard another word about it.”

That was less mollifying. Across the table, nearer to Myra, one of the women members of the Court broke in. She had a beaky profile, fine blue eyes, and a high voice. She said, in a sharp, sisterly, kindly tone: “You didn’t think you were doing anything wrong?”

“That depends on how you look at it, doesn’t it?”

“But how do you look at it?”

“Well,” said Myra, “I’m sorry other people got dragged in. That wasn’t so good.”

The women member nodded. “But what about you?”

“What about me?”

“I mean, do you think you’ve done anything wrong?”

Myra answered, more lucidly than usual: “I don’t think there’s anything wrong in making love, if you’re not hurting anybody else.” She went on: “I agree with Mrs What-do-you call her, wasn’t she an actress, that it doesn’t matter what people do so long as they don’t stop the traffic.”

It was like her, in her bumbling fashion, to get the reference wrong. Some of the Court wondered, however, where she had picked it up. Probably from one of their student advisers, trying to rehearse them.

But, bumbling or not, when Denis Geary asked her about the consequences of the punishment, she did her best. Denis was playing in with me: he was experienced, he knew the tone of the people round this table much better than I did: he didn’t sound indulgent or even compassionate: but what did the punishment mean? To herself, she said, nothing but a headache. She could live at home or get a job with one of her father’s friends (what she meant was that she would find someone, probably someone quite unlike her student fancies, to marry within a year or two). But to the others, who wanted careers, it meant they couldn’t have them. Unless some other university would take them in. But they were being expelled in squalid circumstances: would another institution look at them? David Llewellyn, for instance (he had been Myra’s partner: she didn’t pretend to love him, but she spoke up for him) — he wanted to be a scientist. What chance would he have now?

“Has any member of the Court anything further to ask Miss Bolt?” Arnold Shaw looked implacably round the table. “Have you anything further you wish to say, Miss Bolt? Thank you.”

With the next girl, I had one aim and only one, which was to get her out of the room with the least possible strain. She wasn’t in a fit state to be interviewed. That she showed, paradoxically helping me, by beginning to cry as soon as Arnold Shaw asked his first formal question. “Miss Darby, we understand—” She was a delicate-looking girl, actually a year older than Myra, but looking much younger. She appeared drab and mousey, but dress her up, make her happy, and she would have her own kind of charm. She came from a poor family in industrial Lancashire, a family which had been severe with her already. She was a bright student, expected to get a First, and that, together with her tears, made Shaw gentler with her. All she said was: “I was over-influenced. That’s as much as I can tell you.”