Charles Snow - The Affair

“I tell you,” said Skeffington, temper near the surface, “that he’s been telling the truth.”

“Can you prove it?” said Martin sharply.

“I can prove it enough to satisfy myself. Damn it, do you think I want to blackguard the old man?”

“That’s fair comment,” said Martin. “But have you got a hundred per cent proof that’ll satisfy everybody else?”

“Have you?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know what you intend to do,” I said, “but can you do anything without what a lawyer would think of as a proof? Have you got one?”

He looked flushed and haughty.

“In that sense,” he said, “I’m not sure that I have. But it will be good enough for reasonable people.”

“Then what do you intend to do?” Martin took up my question.

“The first thing is to get this chap Howard a square deal. That goes without question.”

He said it simply, honourably, and with his habitual trace of admonition and priggishness.

“When did you decide that?”

“The moment I realised that there was only one answer to the whole business. That was yesterday afternoon, though for forty-eight hours I hadn’t been able to see any other option.”

“I’m sorry,” said Martin, turning to him, “but it’s not so easy to accept that there can’t be one.”

“Don’t you think I’ve made sure that I’ve closed all the holes?”

“Don’t you think you might be wrong? After all, you’re saying you’ve been wrong once before, aren’t you?”

“You’ll see that I’m not wrong,” said Skeffington. “And there’s one point where I’d like your advice, both of you.”

He began answering the question Martin had asked first — what had made him “go into the business again”? It happened that, though Skeffington’s wife had not often seen her uncle Palairet while he was alive, she was on good terms with his solicitors. A partner in the firm had mentioned to the Skeffingtons that the last box of the old man’s papers was being sent to the college. Skeffington had, of course, thought it his duty to go through them.

As he explained, I thought, as I had done before, that his voice did not live up to his looks. It was both monotonous and brittle. But his mind was more competent than I had given him credit for. It was precise, tough, not specially imaginative, but very lucid. People had given me the impression that he was an amateur, and lucky ever to have been elected. I began to doubt it.

I was interested in his attitude towards old Palairet. Obviously he had not known him well. Skeffington seemed to have had an impersonal respect for him as a scientist of reputation, such as Skeffington himself longed to be. For Skeffington felt a vocation for science. He might be rich, he might be smart: he was not at ease with the academics, he could not talk to them as he had been able to talk to his brother-officers: the reason why he could get on with Martin and me was that he had met us in the official world, and knew some of the people we knew. Yet for all that, though he could not in his heart accept most of “those chaps” as social equals, he longed to win their recognition. He longed to do good work, as Palairet and Getliffe had done; he might have said this was setting his sights too high, but he was seeking exactly that kind of esteem.

“How did your wife get on with her uncle?” I asked, just as he was leading off into the scientific exposition.

“Oh,” said Skeffington, “he never saw her jokes.”

For a second I caught a sparkle in Martin’s eye. As I had heard him give both Skeffingtons maximum marks for humourlessness, I wondered what astonishing picture that reply conveyed.

As Skeffington went on, I found both him and Martin agreeing that whatever the old man was like, most of his scientific work was sound and safely established on the permanent record. His major set of researches were “textbook stuff”, Skeffington insisted.

“That’s what I don’t understand,” said Skeffington, simple, high-minded, incredulous. “Because, assuming that he cooked this other business, it couldn’t have done him tuppence-ha’pennyworth of good. It just doesn’t count beside the real good, solid stuff he’d got behind him. Was he crackers , do you think?”

The old man had done first-class scientific research, they told me: his major work, on the diffraction of atomic particles, was “quite water-tight”: some of the photographs were reproduced in the standard books. Martin fetched down a couple of volumes, and showed me the photographs, rather like rifle targets with alternate rings of light and dark. Those results were beyond dispute: they had been repeated, time and time again, in laboratories all over the world.

It was also beyond dispute that Palairet had become interested in an extension of his technique — not an important extension, something which only counted “marginally”, by the side of his established work. He had expected to be able to apply his technique to a slightly different kind of particle-diffraction. “For a rather highbrow reason, that no one could possibly have thought up a year ago, we now know it couldn’t work,” said Skeffington. But the old man had expected it to work. So had Howard, doing his research under the old man’s eye. The photograph in Howard’s paper demonstrated that it did work, said Martin, with a grim chuckle: demonstrated it by the unorthodox device of taking a genuine diffraction photograph and “blowing it up”, just like enlarging an ordinary photograph, so as to increase the distances between the light rings and the dark. It was from these distances that Howard in his paper had calculated the wave-lengths of the particles. “After blowing it up, someone got the results he expected,” said Skeffington.

For the first time I heard how the fraud had been detected. When the negative had been “blown up”, the hole left by a drawing-pin which had held it up to dry had been expanded too. As soon as the result had been proved to be theoretically impossible, the Americans had enquired why the white blob at the top centre of the photograph seemed so singularly large. It was just as simple as that.

According to Howard, when at last he gave the Court of Seniors his explanation, that photograph had not been the first the old man had shown him. He had told me the same.

To credit his story, one had to assume that he was absolutely trusting. If it were feasible at all, it meant that he had been indoctrinated beforehand. However uncritical he was, he must have been ready to believe in the evidence, he must have taken for granted that the technique was “on”, before he put that final photograph into his paper.

“Even so,” said Martin, “he would have to be pretty wooden.”

“That’s as may be,” said Skeffington, who had until a few days before thought the whole account so preposterous as to be an insult. It was only out of mechanical duty, automatic conscientiousness, that when he heard that more of the old man’s manuscripts had reached the college, he went into the Bursary, borrowed the key of the Palairet box, and took them away.

“Had the Bursar told you they’d arrived?” asked Martin.

“The usual piece of formal bumf,” said Skeffington. As soon as any scientific document arrived from Palairet’s executors, Nightingale sent a reference number to Skeffington, so I gathered.

Without interest Skeffington had sat in his rooms, reading through the last notebooks.

“Have we got them all now?” asked Martin.

“So far as they know, we’ve got them all.”

Without interest, Skeffington had read on. “Old man’s stuff, most of it,” he said. Jottings about researches which Palairet would never do: occasional sets of data, corrections of earlier papers. But at last, on the Saturday afternoon before Christmas, something had turned up. “I don’t mind telling you, I didn’t take in what it meant. I was sitting in my rooms in the Fellows’ building, and I went out and walked in the garden, and I couldn’t see anything that made sense. I don’t mind telling you, I wasn’t very bright about it.”