Charles Snow - The Masters

We climbed a staircase in the third court to Nightingale’s rooms. He was a teetotaller, the only one in the college, and he had no drink to offer, but he gave me a cigarette. He asked a few uninterested questions about my holidays. But though he tried, he could not keep to his polite behaviour. Suddenly he broke out: ‘What are Chrystal and Brown up to about the Mastership?’

‘I thought Brown had been telling us — at some length.’

‘I know all about that. What I want to hear is, has one of those two got his eye on it for himself?’

‘I shouldn’t think so for a minute,’ I said.

‘We’re not going to be rushed into that, are we?’ he asked. ‘I wouldn’t put it past them to try.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said. He was irritating me. ‘They made it clear enough — they’ll run Jago.’

‘I’ll believe that when I see it. I’ve never noticed them exert themselves much for anyone else. I’ve not forgotten how they squeezed Brown into the tutorship. I was two or three years junior, but there’s no doubt I had the better claim.’

Suddenly he snapped out the question: ‘What are you going to do?’

I did not reply at once.

‘Are you going to propose Chrystal as a bright idea at the last moment?’

He was intensely suspicious, certain that there was a web of plans from which he would lose and others gain. If I had told him I, too, was thinking of Jago, he would have seen meanings behind that choice, and it might have turned him from Jago himself. As it was, Jago’s seemed the one name that did not arouse his suspicion and envy that night.

I looked round his sitting-room. It was without feature, it was the room of a man concentrated into himself, so that he had nothing to spend outside; it showed nothing of the rich, solid comfort which Brown had given to his, or the eccentric picturesqueness of Roy Calvert’s. Nightingale was a man drawn into himself. Suspicion and envy lived in him. They always would have done, however life had treated him; they were part of his nature. But he had been unlucky, he had been frustrated in his most cherished hope, and now envy never left him alone.

He was forty-three, and a bachelor. Why he had not married, I did not know: there was nothing unmasculine about him. That was not, however, his abiding disappointment. He had once possessed great promise. He had known what it was to hold creative dreams: and they had not come off. That was his bitterness. As a very young man he had shown a spark of real talent. He was one of the earliest theoretical chemists. By twenty-three he had written two good papers on molecular structure. He had, so I was told, anticipated Heitler-London and the orbital theory; he was ten years ahead of his time. The college had elected him, everything seemed easy. But the spark burnt out. The years passed. Often he had new conceptions; but the power to execute them had escaped from him.

It would have been bitter to the most generous heart. In Nightingale’s, it made him fester with envy. He longed in compensation for every job within reach, in reason, and out of reason. It was morbid that he should have fancied his chances of the tutorship before Brown, his senior and a man made for the job; but it rankled in him after a dozen years. Each job in the college for which he was passed over, he saw with intense suspicion as a sign of the conspiracy directed against him.

His reputation in his subject was already gone. He would not get into the Royal Society now. But, as March came round each year, he waited for the announcement of the Royal elections in expectation, in anguish, in bitter suspiciousness, at moments in the knowledge of what he might have been.

It began to thaw that night, and by morning the walls of my bedroom carried dank streaks like the tracks of a snail. Lying in bed, I could hear the patter of drops against the window ledge. ‘Dirty old day underfoot, sir,’ Bidwell greeted me. ‘Mr Calvert sends his compliments, and says he’d send his galoshes too, if he could persuade you to wear them.’

I had scarcely seen Roy Calvert alone since he returned; he called in for a few minutes after breakfast on his way to pay visits round the town. ‘They’d better know I am alive.’ He grinned. ‘Or else Jago will be sending out a letter.’ It was one of Jago’s customs to ‘send out a letter’ whenever a member of the college died; it was part of the intimate formality which, to Roy Calvert, was comic without end. He went out through the slush to pay his visits; he had a great range of acquaintances in Cambridge, and he arranged to visit them in an order shaped partly by kindness, partly by caprice. The unhappy, the dim, the old and passed over, even those whom anyone else found tedious and ordinary, could count on his company; while the important, the weighty, the established — sometimes, I thought in irritation, anyone who could be the slightest use to him — had to wait their turn.

Before he went out, he arranged for us both to have tea in the Lodge, where he was a favourite. He would go himself earlier in the afternoon, to talk to the Master. So at teatime I went over alone, and waited in the empty drawing-room. The afternoon was leaden, the snow still lay on the court, with a few pockmarks at the edges; the fire deep in the room behind me was reflected in the heavy twilight. Roy Calvert joined me there.

It had been worse than he imagined, and he was subdued. The Master had been talking happily of how they would collaborate — the ‘little book on the heresies’. This was a project of the Master’s which Roy had been trying to avoid for years. Now he said that he would do it as a memorial.

When Lady Muriel came in, she began with her inflexible greetings, as though nothing were wrong in the house. But Roy took her hand, and his first words were: ‘I’ve been talking to the Master, you know. It’s dreadful to have to pretend, isn’t it? I wish you could have been spared that decision, Lady Mu. No one could have known what to do.’

She was taken aback, and yet relieved so that the tears came. No one else would have spoken to her as though she were a woman who wanted someone to guide her. I wished that I had been as straightforward.

She was already crying, she said that it was not easy.

‘No one could help you,’ said Roy. ‘And you’d have liked help, wouldn’t you? Everyone would.’

He took care of her until Joan joined us, and then they began to argue about the regime in Germany. ‘Just so,’ said Roy, to each of Joan’s positive statements. Both women knew that he had no liking for disputation; both laughed at the precise affirmative, which had once been affected but now was second nature.

Joan’s tenderness for Roy was already near to open love, and her mother indulged him like a son. She must have known something of his reputation, the ‘vine leaves in his hair’ (as the Master once quoted), the women who pursued him. But she never said to Joan, as she had said about any other man whom her daughter brought to the Lodge, ‘My dear Joan, I can’t imagine what you can possibly see in him.’

I talked about Joan as we walked out of the Lodge into the dark, rainy night.

‘That girl,’ I said, ‘is falling more in love with you.’

He frowned. Like many of those who attract passionate love, there were times when he wanted to forget it altogether. And that night, despite his sadness over the Master, he felt innocent and free of the shadows.

‘Come and help me do some shopping,’ he said. ‘I need to buy some presents at once.’

We walked along Sidney Street in the steady rain. Water was swirling, chuckling, gurgling in the gutters; except by the walls, the pavements were clear of snow by now, and they mirrored the lights from the lamps and shopfronts on both sides of the narrow street.