Charles Snow - The Affair

Everyone was quiet.

“I’d like to clear up two or three points, simply for my own satisfaction,” I said to Howard. “May I?”

“I don’t mind,” he said.

“Thank you. According to my information, you actually appeared before the Court of Seniors several times. Is that true?”

He nodded his head.

“How many times?”

“I suppose it must have been three.”

“That agrees with what I’ve been told. The first time you appeared there you were told that the scientists had decided that one of your photographs in your paper was a fraud. Were you told that?”

“I suppose that is what it amounted to.”

“It must have been clear one way or another, mustn’t it? It’s important. Were you told in so many words that the photograph was a fraud?”

“Yes, I suppose I was.”

His eyes had not dropped but risen. They were fixed on the picture-rail in the top left-hand corner of the room. It was a long time since I had examined a witness, but I caught the feel of it again. I knew that he had gone on the defensive right away: he was hostile, slightly paranoiac, beating about to evade the questions. I asked: “Was it, in fact, a fraud?”

He hesitated: “I don’t quite get you.”

“I mean just what I say. Was that photograph a fraud? That is, was it faked to prove something in your paper?”

He hesitated again: “Yes, I suppose you could say that.”

“Is there any shade of doubt whatsoever?”

Just for a second, his upturned, averted eyes looked at me sidelong with enmity. He shook his head.

“Did you agree with the Court of Seniors, then, when they told you it was a fraud?”

“Yes, I told them so.”

“My information is that you denied it totally the first couple of times you appeared before them. Is that true?”

“I told them.”

“On your third appearance?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you deny it?”

“Because I didn’t believe it was true.”

“Yet every other competent scientist who saw the evidence didn’t take long to be certain it was true?”

He broke out: “They were glad of the chance to find something against me—”

“That won’t get us anywhere. Why did you take so long to be certain? Here was this photograph, you must have known it very well? But even when you’d been told about it, you still didn’t admit that it was a fraud? Why not?”

He just shook his head. He would not answer: or rather, it seemed that he could not. He sat there as though in a state of hebephrenia. I pressed him, but he said nothing at all.

I took it up again: “In the long run, you decided it really was a fraud?”

“I’ve told you so.”

“Then when you decided it was a fraud, you were able to produce an explanation?”

“Yes, I was.”

“What was it?”

“You must have picked up that,” he said offensively, “among the other information they’ve given you.”

“In fact you blamed the fraud on to your collaborator?”

He inclined his head.

“Who’d just died, at the age of, what was it, seventy-five? Your explanation was that he had faked one of your own photographs in your own thesis?”

“Yes, it was.”

“Did that seem to you likely?”

“Of course it didn’t,” Laura broke in, her expression fierce and protective. She spoke to her husband: “You had a great respect for him, of course you had.”

“Did you have a great respect for him?” I asked.

“Not specially,” he answered.

“What reason did you think he could have, at that age and in his position, for this kind of fraud?”

“Oh, he must have gone gaga,” he answered.

“Were there any signs of that?”

“I never noticed.”

“One last question. When you decided that he had faked this photograph of yours, you also said that you’d seen similar photographs before — did you say that?”

“Yes.”

“Who had taken those photographs?”

“The old man, of course,” he said.

“How many had you seen?”

He looked confused. His reactions seemed very slow.

“I can’t tell you,” he said at last.

“Many?”

“I shouldn’t think so.”

“Only one?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re sure you saw one? At least one more, besides yours?”

“I’ve told you I did.”

“Did you know there are no signs of any such photographs in the whole of his scientific notebooks?”

His face went vague and heavy. “I suppose they told me that,” he said. Then he asked: “What I want to know is, who looked?”

Then I stopped. “I don’t think it’s any use going further,” I said.

Margaret tried to make some conversation, I joined in. Howard fell into silence, with an expression that looked both injured and apathetic. Even Laura had lost her nerve. She did not refer to the case again. The evening creaked slowly on, with gaps of strained silence as Margaret or I invented something to say. I offered them whisky within half an hour of the end of dinner: Laura took a stiff one, he would not drink at all. At last, it was only a few minutes after ten, she said that they must go. Margaret, usually gentle-mannered and polite, was out of her chair with alacrity.

As we stood by the door, waiting for Howard to come out of the lavatory, Laura suddenly looked up at me.

“Well? Will you talk to Getliffe or your brother?”

I was startled. Even now, she did not know when she was beaten.

“What do you think I could say?”

“Can’t you just tell them that they’ve got to open this business all over again?”

Her eyes were wide open. She looked like a woman making love. She was so fervent that it was uncomfortable to be near her.

“I shall have to think whether there’s anything I can do,” I said.

By then Howard was on his way towards us, and she did not speak any more.

As the door closed behind them, Margaret remarked, “ Of course there isn’t anything you can do.”

“Of course there isn’t,” I said.

“He hasn’t got a leg to stand on, has he?”

“Less than that, I should have thought.”

We sat down, neither of us in good spirits, and held hands. “No one,” I said, “could call that a particularly agreeable party.”

“Anyway,” said Margaret, “you’re not required to see them again.”

I said no.

Margaret was smiling.

“I must say, I thought you got pretty rough with him.”

“I couldn’t think of anything else to do.”

“That’s not quite all, is it?”

I smiled. We knew each other’s intuitive likes and dislikes too well.

“I can’t pretend,” I said, “that he’s exactly my cup of tea.”

“Whereas, if he hadn’t done what he unfortunately has done, you wouldn’t be surprised if I thought he’d got a sort of integrity, would you?”

We were laughing at each other. The fret of the evening was passing away. We were reminding each other in the shorthand of marriage that, when we made mistakes about people, they were liable to be a specific kind of mistake. As a young man, I had been fascinated by, and so had overvalued, the ambivalent, the tricky, the excessively fluid, and even now, though they no longer suggested to me the mystery of life as they once did, I had a weakness for them. I saw value in Tom Orbell, for instance, that others didn’t. Certainly not Margaret, whose own weakness was the exact opposite. The moral roughneck, the mauvais coucheur , often seemed to her to have a dignity and elevation not granted to the rest of us. She was not taken in by the fluid, but on the other hand, just because a character was not fluid, was craggy in its egotism, she was likely to think it specially deserving of respect. If, as she said, grinning at her own expense, Howard had come to us with different credentials, I could easily have imagined her regarding him as a man of fine quality.