Charles Snow - The Affair

I replied: “I wish I understood the scientific evidence better. I suppose understanding that does make it a bit easier, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose it might,” said Martin, with a tucked-in smile. He did not say any more that day. At the same time the following afternoon, when again we were having a respite from the children, we were sitting with Irene and Margaret. The rain was slashing the windows and the room had turned dark except for a diffused gleam, reflected from the garden, of green and subaqueous light.

“This is a wretched business,” said Martin at large, not with worry so much as annoyance. Again I knew he had not been thinking of much else.

“Tomorrow morning I shall have to have this talk with Skeffington,” he said to me.

“Can’t you put him off?” said Irene.

“What are you going to tell him?” I said.

He shook his head.

Margaret said: “I can’t help hoping you’ll be able to agree with him.”

“Why do you hope that?” Irene broke out.

“If Skeffington’s right, it must have been pretty shattering for Howard, mustn’t it? And I should have thought it was even worse for her,” said Margaret.

“What are you going to say tomorrow?” I came back at Martin.

Margaret asked: “Is Skeffington right?”

Martin looked straight at her. He had a respect for her. He knew that, of all of us, she would be the hardest to refuse an answer to.

He said: “It makes some sort of sense.”

She said: “Do you really think he could be right?” Her tone was even, almost casual: she did not seem to be pressing him. Yet she was.

“It seems to make more sense,” said Martin, “than any other explanation. But still, it’s very hard to take.”

“Do you believe he’s right?”

Martin replied: “Possibly.”

Unexpectedly, Margaret burst into laughter, laughter spontaneous and happy. “Have you thought,” she cried, “what awful fools we should all look?”

Martin said: “Yes, I’ve thought of that.”

“All of us thinking how much we know about people!”

For once Irene did not see any sort of joke. Frowning, she said to Martin: “Look here, have you got to get yourself involved too much with all this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Suppose Skeffington goes ahead. There’s going to be a row, isn’t there?”

Martin glanced at me. “That’s putting it mildly.”

“Well, have you got to get into it? I mean, have you got to start it? It isn’t your business, is it?”

“Not specially, no.”

“Whose is it?” Margaret asked.

He told her that constitutionally it would be for the sub-committee — Nightingale and Skeffington — to take the first steps.

“Well then,” said Irene, “do you need to do much yourself?”

“No, I don’t need to,” said Martin. He added: “In fact, if I don’t want to quarrel with half the society, I can keep out of it more or less.”

“ Can you?” said Margaret. She had flushed. She said passionately to Irene, “Do you really want him to sit by?”

Almost as though by reflection, Irene had flushed also. Surprisingly, she and Margaret got on well. Neither then nor at any time could Irene bear to have her sister-in-law disapprove of her, much less to think her crude and selfish. For Irene, despite, or to some extent because of, her worldliness, had both a humble and generous heart.

“Oh,” she said, “someone will put it right if there’s anything to put right. If old Martin were the only chap who could, I suppose he’d have to. But let Julian S do the dirty work, that’s what he’s made for. Those two won’t mind getting in bad with everyone here. All I meant was, we’re settling down nicely now, we haven’t got any enemies for the first time in our lives.”

“Isn’t there a danger — you’re frightened that if Martin makes a fuss over this — it might stand in his way?”

Irene replied, shamefaced with defiance: “If you want the honest truth, yes, I’m frightened of that too.”

Margaret shook her head. Even now, after marrying me, and meeting my colleagues, and getting a spectator’s view of the snakes and ladders of power, she could not quite credit it. Her grandfather and great-uncle had resigned Fellowships over the Thirty-Nine Articles. I sometimes teased her, did she realise how much difference it had meant to them and even to her, that they had both been men of independent means? Yet she stayed as pure as they had been. She did not think that Martin or I were bad men: because she loved me, she thought that in some ways I was a good one: but she could not sympathise with the shifts, the calculations, the self-seekingness of men making their way.

“Do you think,” she said, apparently at random, “that Laura ever had any doubts about him?”

“No,” I said.

“She’s totally wrapped up in him,” said Martin. “I don’t imagine she ever had a second’s doubt.”

“In that case, she must be the only person in the world who didn’t. I wonder what it’s been like for her?”

Margaret, I knew, was deliberately playing on our human interest. She, too, was subtle. She knew precisely what she wanted Martin — and, if I could take part, me also — to do.

But Irene sidetracked her by saying casually: “Well, she’d never tell me . She just can’t bear the sight of me.”

“Why ever not?” I asked.

“I just can’t think.”

“I expect she fancies,” said Martin, “that you’ve cast an eye at Donald.”

“Oh, she can’t think that! She can’t! ” cried Irene, as usual hilarious (though she detested Howard and had been for years a faithful wife) at the bare prospect of adultery.

Then she said to Margaret: “It isn’t going to be fun, doing anything for them, don’t you see that?”

“I tell you, that’s putting it mildly,” said Martin.

“You won’t stick your neck out if you don’t need to? That’s all I’m asking you. Will you?”

“Do you think I ever have done?” said Martin.

None of us was certain how he proposed to act, or whether he proposed to act at all. Even when he sounded for opinion that night at the Master’s dinner table, he did it in the same ambiguous tone.

Until Martin began that sounding, the dinner had been a standard and stately specimen of the Crawford régime. It would not have happened if I had not been in Cambridge, for the Crawfords had only returned to the Lodge late on Boxing Day. But Crawford, who had never been a special friend of mine, had a kind of impersonal code that ex-Fellows who had achieved some sort of external recognition should not stay in Cambridge uninvited: so that night, in the great drawing-room at the Lodge, ten of us were drinking our sherry before dinner, the Nightingales, the Clarks, Martin and Irene, me and Margaret, and the Crawfords themselves, the men in white ties and tails, for Crawford, an old-fashioned Cambridge radical, had refused in matters of etiquette to budge an inch.

He stood, hands in pockets, coat-tails over arms, warming his back at his own fireplace, invincibly contented, so it seemed. He was a heavy, shortish, thickly made man who still, at the age of seventy-two, had a soft-footed, muscular walk. He looked nothing like seventy-two. His Buddha-like face, small-featured and round, had something of the unlined youthfulness, or rather agelessness, that one sees often in Asians, but very rarely in Europeans: his hair, glossy black, was smoothed down and did not show any grey at all.

He talked to each of us with impersonal cordiality. He said to me that he had “heard talk” of me in the “club” (the Athenaeum) just before Christmas, to Nightingale that the college had done well to get into that last list of American equities, to Martin that a new American research student seemed to be highly thought-of. When we had gone in to dinner and settled down to the meal, with the same cordiality he addressed us all. The subject that occurred to him, as we ate an excellent dinner, was privilege. He went on: “Speaking as the oldest round this table by a good few years, I have seen the disappearance of a remarkable amount of privilege.”