Charles Snow - The Affair

“Well, we’ve put our names down,” I said.

Skeffington nodded, as though for the time being placated.

He did not appear to resent it, when Lester Ince, who had broken away from his own group, put in: “Well, I call that a nice Christmassy programme for old Lew.”

No one, either living or dead, had been known to call me Lew before. I was senior enough, however, to find it agreeable. It was not often that I met anyone as off-handed as this young man. He had a heavy, pasty, cheerful face. Although his stance was slack, he was thick-set and strong. He was not really a “ lourdon ”, as Hanna thought. He had a sharp, precise mind which he was devoting — incongruously, so it seemed to most people — to a word-by-word examination of Nostromo . But though he was not really a “ lourdon ”, he liked making himself a bit of a lout.

“Come to that,” he said to Skeffington, “how do you propose to celebrate the Nativity?”

“Much as usual.”

“Midnight service with all the highest possible accompaniments?”

“Certainly,” Skeffington replied.

“Stone the crows,” said Lester Ince.

“It happens to be a religious festival. That’s the way to do it, you know.” Skeffington looked down at Ince, who was not a short man, from the top of his height, not exactly snubbingly, but with condescension and a gleam of priggishness.

“I tell you what I’m going to do,” said Ince. “I shall have to do my stuff with wife and kiddies, confound their demanding and insatiable little hearts. I shall then retire with said wife — who’s doing herself remarkably well over there in the corner, by the way — I shall retire with her and three bottles of the cheapest red wine I’ve been able to buy, and the old gramophone. We shall then get gently sozzled and compare the later styles of the blessed Duke with such new developments as the trumpet of Miles Davis. You wouldn’t know what that means, any of you. You two wouldn’t know, it’s since your time,” he said to Skeffington and his wife. “As for old Lew, he’s certainly non-hep. I sometimes have a suspicion that he’s positively anti-hep.”

Soon after, just as the Skeffingtons were leaving, Tom Orbell wafted himself towards me again. “I wish I could get Hanna to myself,” he confided, “but she’s holding a court and they won’t leave her alone, not that I’m in a position to blame them.” He was the only person in the room who had been drinking heavily, and he had now got to the stage when, from second to second, he was switched from exhilaration to fury, and neither he nor I knew which way he was going to answer next. “It is a great party, I hope you agree that it’s a great party, Lewis?” I said yes, but he wanted more than acquiescence. “I hope you agree that the people here ought to throw their weight about in the college. These are the people who ought to do it, if we’re not going to let the place go dead under our feet.” He looked at me accusingly.

I said, “You know the position, and I don’t.”

“That’s not good enough,” said Tom Orbell.

He seemed just then — did this happen often? — to have changed out of recognition from the smooth operator, the young man anxious to please and on the make. He nodded his head sullenly: “If that’s what you think, then that’s all right.” He said it as though it were at the furthest extreme from being all right.

“What do you want me to say?”

“I’ve told you, I want something for this college. There are some people I’ll choose for my government, and some people I’ll see in hell first.”

He spoke of “my government” as though he were a Prime Minister who had just returned from the Palace with the job. His own studies of history seemed to be taking possession of him. “Some of these chaps I’ll have in my government straight away. There are some in the college we’ve got to keep out, Lewis, or else the place won’t be fit to live in. I know he used to be a friend of yours, but do you think I’m going to have Sir Francis Getliffe in my government?”

“What do you mean? Now then, what is all this about?” I spoke brusquely, to make him talk on the plane of reason.

Without paying attention he went on.

“There are one or two others who think as I do, I can tell you. I wish we knew what your brother Martin thought.”

He was still enough in command of himself to be trying to sound me. When he got no response, he gave his sullen nod.

“Martin’s a dark horse. I should like to know what he wants for the college. I can tell you, Lewis, I want something for it.”

“So you should,” I said, trying to soothe him.

“Give me your hand,” he said. But he was still obscurely angry with me, with Martin, with the party, with — I suddenly felt, though it seemed altogether overdone — his own fate.

Just then I noticed that Skeffington, though he was wearing his overcoat, had still not left the house. For once he looked dithering, as though he was not sure why he was hanging about. All he did was to check with Martin, in the peremptory tone he had used to me, that we were likely to be dining in college the following night.

THE Cambridge clocks were striking seven when, on Christmas Day, Martin and I walked through the Backs towards the college. It was a dark night, not cold, with low cloud cover. After the noisy children’s day, we, who were both paternal men, breathed comfortably at being out in the free air.

As we made our way along the path to Garret Hostel Bridge, Martin said, out of the dark, in his soft, deep voice: “Stinking ditches.”

We smiled. We had not been talking intimately: we had not done so for a long time: but we still remembered what we used to talk about. That was a phrase of a colleague of Martin’s when he first started his researches, an Antipodean who had come to Cambridge determined not to be bowled over by the place.

“Wouldn’t some of these boys like Master Ince think that was a reasonable description?”

“I must walk along the Backs with him and see,” said Martin. He sounded amused. I asked him more about the people I had been speaking to the night before. Yes, he found Ince’s knock-about turn a bit of a bore: yes, he wished Ince had settled down rather less and Tom Orbell considerably more.

Of course, said Martin, G S Clark was the strongest character among them.

If so, I had quite misjudged him. It set me thinking, and I asked: “What are they like inside the college?”

“Well, it’s never been altogether an easy place, has it?”

Whether he had his mind on politics at all, I still did not know. If he had, he was not going to show it. Nevertheless we were both relaxed, as we went through the lane, all windows dark, to the back of the Old Schools and out into the marketplace. There it was empty: no one was walking about on Christmas night, and the shop-windows were unlighted. It was the same down Petty Cury: and in the college itself, entering the first court in the mild blowy evening, we could see just one window shining. Everything else was dark under the heavy sky. The Lodge looked deserted, nothing but blank windows in the court: but between the masses of the Lodge and the hall there was a window glowing, dull red through the curtains, golden through a crack between them.

“Cosy,” said Martin.

It was the combination room. Unlike most colleges of its size, ours kept up the tradition of serving dinner every night of the year; but in the depth of vacation, the Fellows dined in the combination room, not in hall. When we entered, the table, which at this time on a normal night would be set out for the after-dinner wine, was laid for the meal. The napery gleamed under the lights; the side of the table-cloth nearest the fire had a rosy sheen. In the iron grate, the fire was high and radiant, altogether too much for so mild a night. Old Winslow, the only man to arrive before us, had pulled his chair back towards the curtains, out of the direct heat. He gave us a sarcastic smile, the lids hooded over his eyes.