Charles Snow - The Affair

“I grant you that he’s not two-faced,” I said. “But what’s the use of that, when the one face he has got is so peculiarly unpleasant?”

DURING our parting from Laura Howard, when she was demanding that I talk to my brother, we had not told her that we were spending Christmas in his house. In fact, we arrived there on Christmas Eve, and after dinner Martin’s wife and I were for a few minutes alone in the drawing-room. Or alone, to be more exact, in a room of which the drawing-room was only half: for Irene had invited some of the Fellows and their wives for wine and cheese at nine o’clock, and she had already furled back the bronze doors between drawing-room and dining-room. Yes, bronze doors: the house, before the college acquired it, had been a piece of luxurious modernist building of a generation before. Now it was divided into two sections, and let out to college officers. By the standards of the ’50s, Martin’s section, which was the larger one, was sizeable for a professional man’s house.

The children were all in bed, their boy and girl, Margaret’s son by her first marriage, and ours. Margaret was upstairs: Martin was uncorking bottles in the kitchen: Irene and I sat alone on opposite sides of the fire. She had been asking me about my work, and presumably I gave a heavy reply, for she broke out with a yelp of glee: “The trouble is, Margaret doesn’t make fun of you enough!”

If one had just heard her voice without seeing her, one would have guessed that she was a very young woman, mischievous, light, high-spirited. Actually, as I glanced across the fireplace, I saw a woman in the early forties, looking much more worn than her husband. She had always been tall and big-framed, but recently her shoulders had rounded and she had put on weight; not only had her bosom got full and shapeless, but she had thickened through the middle. By contrast to this body, comfortably slumped into middle-age, her face seemed thinner and fined-down; the skin of her cheeks had lost its bloom, and underneath the make-up there was a faint, purplish undertint. And yet, it was still a reckless face. Some men would still find her attractive. Underneath full lids, her eyes were narrow, treacle-brown, disrespectful and amused.

Nevertheless, when Martin came in with a complaint, she was not amused, but dead serious. Where was the specimen he had picked up yesterday on Wicken Fen? Who could have moved it? Martin was for once off-balance. There was a distraught, hare-like look in his eye. As a small boy he had been more of a collector than any of us. Now the addiction was coming back. Was it because he was reconciling himself to not making a go of academic physics? Was that why he concentrated so much on his pupils, and then in his spare time went of in search of botanical species? Anyway, he was methodically ticking off the English flora. That night he thought he had lost one: he was showing the signs of phobia of loss.

Worried, active, Irene started from her chair and went out with him. Within three minutes she was back.

“That’s all right,” she said, her expression relieved and earnest.

“The trouble is,” I said maliciously, “you don’t make fun of him enough.”

Irene giggled, but she did not really think that it was funny. She broke out: “But how do you think he is?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I think so,” she said honestly, “but I’m never sure.”

I nodded. He was a secretive man: people, even those nearest to him, thought him cautious, calculating, and capable of being ruthless.

“I don’t believe you need worry,” I said. “I fancy he’s pretty happy.”

“Do you?” She shone with pleasure.

“I should be surprised if he wasn’t.”

“I must say,” she cried, “I should like to bring off something for him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Wouldn’t it be good if he could get something?”

For a second, I was surprised at her. She was no fool. She knew that, after throwing away the chance of power, even if he had thrown it away for a qualm or set of qualms that she did not share or understand, he must have times when he would like the chance back again. So, with the energy she had once scattered on her own adventures, she was now not only longing, but working, for him to get another kind of job. It was mildly ironic, when one thought how, as a young woman, she had shocked the bourgeois, to find her set on seeing him a cosy, bourgeois success. She had closed her mind to what she used to think of as “the big world”: she wanted him to climb in the college’s little one.

“That’s what this is in aid of,” she said, pointing to the glasses in the dining-room.

She was doing it without hypocrisy. She did not possess in the slightest degree the gift, so desirable in the life of affairs, of being able to keep the right hand from knowing what the left is doing. Her right hand knew, all right. Shamelessly, innocently, she wanted to help push him up the college ladder and install them both in the Lodge before the end.

When I realised what she was up to, I thought she was pitching her hopes far too high. The Mastership, the Vice-Chancellorship — her fancy was making pictures of them, just as it used to make pictures of the dashing ideal lover when she was a girl. But Martin had no chance at all of ever becoming Master. She was not cut out for politics, she did not know when to hope and when not to hope. The most she could expect for Martin was that, if Arthur Brown were elected next year (which I still could not believe was on the cards), Martin might get the senior tutorship. That was his ceiling, so far as the college was concerned. Then I remembered Laura Howard’s sneer, that Martin was planning to step into Brown’s shoes. Was that true, I wondered? I had seen my brother’s command of tactics when he was spending his time in the corridors of power. Why should I think he was committed to Francis Getliffe? Why should not Martin be preparing to come in on Brown’s side, incidentally freeing an agreeable niche for himself?

At any rate, I was prepared to bet that this was in Irene’s mind. Soon the first guests were coming into the room, and I could not get more out of her. But I began to watch those whom she had invited. Was it just a coincidence that the Getliffes were not coming? Were the people here going to form the hard core of Brown’s party?

Standing up, plate and glass in hand, overhearing a conversation about the English faculty, I found myself talking to G S Clark. Like the other Fellows at that party, he had been elected since the war; but unlike Tom Orbell and Ince, and two or three of the others, he was not a young man. I did not know for certain, but I guessed that he was over forty. He had been paralysed by poliomyelitis as a child, and his face had the gentle, petulant, youthful and hopeful expression that one sometimes sees in cripples; his skin was pink and fresh. Although his left leg was in a metal brace, he would not sit down. He stood there obstinately and argued with me.

“No,” he said, “with great respect, I don’t agree.”

I teased him. I said I had only made the modest suggestion that the examination system as it existed in Cambridge that night, December 24th, 1953, might just possibly not be perfect for all time. Was that so shocking? He smiled, a gentle, patient, invalid’s smile.

“But I’m making the modest suggestion,” he said, “that it’s easy to tamper with things just now and make them worse.”

Whenever I met him, which was fairly often, since he occupied the other section of Martin’s house, I liked his sweet and hopeful smile and then ran up against that kind of brick wall. But this was not the night for an argument: I asked him about his work. He was a don in Modern Languages, and he was writing a book about the German novelist Fontane. His accent became broader and flatter as he warmed up to the nineteenth-century romantic-realists: he came from Lancashire, his origins were true working-class. It was very rare, I had thought before, for anyone genuinely working-class to struggle through to the high table, though a sprinkling had come, as I did myself, from the class just above. In the whole history of the college, there could not have been more than three or four who started where he did.