Charles Snow - The Affair

“Escaping the cold supper at home, as a colleague of mine used to say?” he greeted us.

“Not entirely,” I said.

“We don’t expect the singular pleasure of the company of married men on these occasions, my dear Eliot.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to get it,” I said.

When I had lived in the college, I had got on better than most with Winslow. Many people were frightened of him. He was a savage, disappointed man who had never done more than serve his time in college administrative jobs. When he was Bursar, people had been more frightened of him than ever. After he retired, it seemed for a time that the old sting had left him. But now at eighty, with the curious second wind that I had seen before in very old men, he could produce it again, far more vigorously than ten years before. Why, no one could explain. His son, to whom he had been devoted, was living abroad and had not visited him for years: his wife had died, and in his late seventies he had come back to live in college. By all the rules he should have been left with nothing, for the bitter, rude old malcontent had had a marriage happier than most men’s. But in fact, whenever I met him, he appeared to be in some subfusc fashion enjoying himself. He looked very old; his cheeks had sunk in; his long nose and jaw grew closer together. To anyone unused to old men, he might have seemed in the same stage of senescence as M H L Gay. Yet, as one talked to him, one soon forgot to take any special care or make any allowances at all.

“My dear Tutor,” he was saying to Martin, “I suppose we ought to consider ourselves indebted to you — for producing your brother to give us what I believe is known as ‘stimulus’ from the great world outside.”

“Yes, I thought it was a good idea,” said Martin, in a polite but unyielding tone. Like me, he did not believe in letting Winslow get away with it. “Perhaps I might present a bottle afterwards to drink his health?”

“Thank you, Tutor. Thank you.”

Tom Orbell came in, deferential and sober, and after him the chaplain, a middle-aged man who was not a Fellow. Then two young scientists, Padgett and Blanchflower, whom I knew only by sight, and another of the young Fellows whom I did not know at all. “ Doctor Taylor,” Winslow introduced him, inflecting the “doctor” just to make it clear that he, in the old Cambridge manner, disapproved of this invention of the Ph.D. “Doctor Taylor is our Calvert Fellow. On the remarkable foundation of Sir Horace Timberlake.”

It did not strike strange, it sounded quite matter-of-fact, to hear of a Fellowship named after a dead friend. Taylor was stocky, small and fair: like all the rest of us except one of the scientists, he was wearing a dinner-jacket, since that was the custom when the college dined in the combination room on Christmas Day. I was thinking that, since the college, which in my time had been thirteen, had expanded to twenty, some of the young men seemed much more like transients than they used to. Blanchflower, for example, stood about like a distant acquaintance among a group of people who knew each other well.

I was thinking also that, if Martin and I had not dropped in by chance, no one present would have had a wife. One old man who had lost his: one bachelor clergyman: and the rest men who were still unmarried, one or two of whom would never marry. About them all there was that air, characteristic of bachelor societies, of colleges on days like this, of the permanent residents of clubs — an air at the same time timid, unburdened, sad and youthful. Somehow the air was youthful even when the men were old.

We took our places at table, Winslow at the head, me at his right hand. We were given turtle soup, and Tom Orbell at my side was muttering, “Delicious, delicious.” But he was on his best behaviour. Champagne was free that night, as the result of a bequest by a nineteenth-century tutor: Tom, shining at the thought of his own lack of self-indulgence, took only a single glass.

Smoothly he asked Winslow if he had been to any Christmas parties.

“Certainly not, my dear Orbell.”

“Have you really neglected everyone?”

“I gave up going to my colleagues’ wives’ parties before you were born, my dear young man,” Winslow said.

He added: “I have no small talk.”

He made the remark with complacency, as though he had an abnormal amount of great talk.

Just then I heard Taylor talking in a quiet voice to his neighbour. Taylor was off to Berlin, so he was saying, to see some of the Orientalists there: he produced a couple of names, then one that, nearly twenty years before, I had heard from Roy Calvert, Kohlhammer. The name meant nothing to me. I had never met the man. I did not know what his speciality was. Yet hearing that one word mumbled, in a pinched Midland accent, by Taylor, I was suddenly made to wince by the past. No, it was not the past, it was the sadness of the friend dead over ten years before, present as it used to be. That single name gave me a stab of grief, sickening as a present grief — whereas the name of Roy Calvert himself I had heard without emotion. Often enough in the college, I had looked up at the window of his old sitting-room, or as at the feast made up my own Charlusian roll-call of the dead — all with as little homesickness as though I were being shown round a new library. But at the sound of that meaningless German name, I felt the present grief.

When the table, the glasses, the fire, which had retreated to the far distance, came back and focused themselves, I could still hear Tom Orbell deferentially baiting Winslow.

“Have you been to any services today, Winslow?”

“My dear young man, you should know by now that I don’t support these primitive survivals.”

“Not even for the sake of gravitas ?”

“For the sake of what you’re pleased to call gravitas — which incidentally historians of your persuasion usually misunderstand completely — I am prepared to make certain concessions. But I’m not in the least prepared to give tacit support to degrading superstitions.”

The chaplain made a protesting noise.

“Let me bring it to a point, my dear chaplain. I’m not prepared to lend my presence to your remarkable rituals in the chapel.”

“But I’ve seen you set foot in the place, haven’t I?” I said.

Winslow replied: “I’ve now been a Fellow of this college for slightly more than fifty-eight years. I was elected fifty-eight years last June, to be precise, which is no doubt not a date which many of my colleagues would feel inclined to celebrate. During that period I have attended exactly seven obsequies, or whatever you prefer to call them, in the chapel. Each of those seven times I went against my better judgment, and if I had my time again I should not put in an appearance at any one of them. I believe you have never gone in for these curious superstitions, Eliot?”

“I’m not a believer,” I said.

“Nor you, Tutor?”

Winslow turned to Martin with a savage, cheerful grin.

“No.”

“Well, then, I hope you will keep my executors up to the mark. In my will, I have given strict instructions that when I die, which in the nature of things will be quite shortly, there is to be not the faintest manifestation of this mumbo-jumbo. I have endeavoured to make testamentary dispositions which penalise any of my misguided relatives who attempt to break away from these instructions. I should nevertheless be grateful to men of good sense if they keep an eye open for any infringement. Your co-believers, my dear chaplain, are remarkably unscrupulous and remarkably insensitive about those of us who have come perfectly respectably, and with at least as much conviction as any of you, to the opposite conclusion.”