Charles Snow - The Affair

Myself, I believed that Martin had two motives. The nearer one was to him, the more often he seemed hard, selfish, cautious, calculating. With his wife, for instance, he was so inconsiderate that it could be harassing to be in their house. And he could not stop himself planning the next move ahead on the chessboard of power. I was pretty sure that the rumours about him were right, that he had not been able to resist working out the combinations for the next magisterial election. I was pretty sure that he had decided it was worth trying for Brown as Master, so that if it came off, he could walk into the Senior Tutorship himself.

That was all true. But it was not all. There was something else within him which made him a more interesting man. At its roots it might not be more amiable than those other roots which made him a hard self-seeker; but it certainly made him more surprising and more capable of good. It was something like a curious kind of self-regard. He knew as well as anyone else that he was hard, selfish, obsessively careful: but he knew, what no one else did, that he had sometimes wanted to be different from that. This self-regard, “romantic” if you like, had twice in his life made him step right out of his ordinary casing. He had, as it were deliberately, made an imprudent marriage, not only by his own standards but by anyone else’s. He had been more than imprudent when humanity got the better of him and, with real power waiting on his table, he had quit the atomic establishment and come back to hide himself within the college.

Now he was doing it again. Not out of patrician high principle edged with contempt, as in Skeffington. Martin, who was not such a lofty character, had no contempt for his brother men. No, out of that special kind of self-regard, tinged with and disentangleable from his feeling that he had to be responsible. He did not like being pushed so — out of the predictable, calculating life, with its pickings, small-scale but predictable for years ahead. That would be disturbed now. He did not like it: that was why he had been so bad-tempered the night before. But he was pushed, and he could not stop himself.

That was one motive. The other, it seemed to me, was much simpler. Martin was a natural politician. Inside the college, there was no one in his class, except Arthur Brown. Like anyone with a set of unusual skills, Martin enjoyed using them. This was a perfect opportunity. He felt like an opening bowler on a moist morning, his first two fingers itching for the ball. It looked to Martin a situation adapted to his talents. Skeffington would certainly mishandle it. If anyone could take it through to success, Martin could.

There was one other thing, I thought. Martin enjoyed using his political skills. As a rule, he had used them for his own purposes, sometimes petty, often selfish. It was a treat for him — and I believed that unless one understood that, one didn’t understand him or other worldly men — to think of using them for a purpose which he felt, without any subtlety or complexity at all, to be nothing but good.

AS we sat in the sunny room after Irene had cried, “I knew you would,” Martin got down to tactics. He reiterated what he had already told Skeffington, that getting a majority to re-open the case was only the start. This wasn’t the sort of argument that would be settled by “counting heads”. The essential thing was to bring in men who would “carry weight”. Could Skeffington, or Martin himself, persuade Nightingale to stay neutral? Even after the night before, Martin thought it worth trying. Above all, Francis Getliffe was a key man. Get him active, and all the scientists, the Master included, would have to listen.

Within half an hour, Martin had telephoned the Cavendish, and he and Skeffington and I were on our way there. At first I was surprised that Martin had not only asked if I would care to come with them, but pressed me to. Then I realised that he had a reason. He wanted Francis at his easiest. He knew that with me Francis still sometimes talked like a young man, like the young man I still — with the illusion that invests a friend one has known since twenty — half-thought him to be. But his juniors in the college, even Martin, did not think of him in the least like that. To them — it struck me with one of the shocks of middle-age — he had become stiff and inaccessible.

Yet, when we had climbed up the steps of the old Cavendish, and walked down the dingy corridors to his room, we found him lit up with happiness. The room, which was not his laboratory but his office, was dark and shabby, a room that minor Civil Servants would have refused to live in. On the walls were graphs, scientific photographs, pictures of scientists, one of Rutherford. At one side stood two packing-cases covered with dust. On the desk, under two anglepoise lamps, were pinned down what looked like long stretches of photographic print, with up and down curves in white clear upon them.

“Have a look at this,” called Francis. No man could have been less stiff. “Isn’t this lovely?”

He explained to them, he explained to me as though I knew as much as they did, what he had found out. “It’s a new kind of source,” he was saying. “I’ve been keeping my fingers crossed, but this is it.”

They were all three talking quickly, Martin and Skeffington asking questions which were incomprehensible to me. Out of it all I gathered that he was “on to something”, not as big as his major work, but scientifically both unexpected and sharp-edged. He had made his name by research into the ionosphere, but since the war he had moved into radio astronomy; he was over fifty, he was keeping on at creative work when most of his contemporaries had stopped. As I watched him, his long face warm with delight, I thought this discovery was giving him as much joy as those of twenty years before — perhaps a purer joy, because then he had not satisfied his ambitions. Now he was free to be enraptured with the thing itself.

“Really it is beautiful,” he said. He smiled at us all, shamefaced because he was so happy.

Then reluctantly, in a sharp brisk tone, he broke off: “But I mustn’t go on talking all morning. I think you had something to see me about, Martin?”

“I’d rather go on with this,” said Martin.

“Oh, this can wait — that is, if your job is important. Is it?”

“In a way, it might be. But we want your advice on that.”

“You’d better go ahead.”

With dexterous care, Francis was fitting a plastic cover over the print; he was still studying the trace, and his eyes did not leave it as Martin spoke.

“As a matter of fact, it’s Julian’s show more than mine.”

“Well then?”

Skeffington began to explain, much as he had done on the night of Christmas Day. The story was better organised than it had been then; he had had time to get it into proportion. The instant he said that they had been blaming the wrong man, Francis looked up from the print. He gazed at Skeffington without any interruption or gesture, except to draw at his pipe. As he gazed, his expression, which had been happy, receptive and welcoming when we first saw him, changed so much that one did not know what to expect.

When Skeffington paused, Francis said in a harsh voice: “That all?”

“Yes, I think it puts you in the picture,” Skeffington replied. “Is that what you call it?” Francis broke out. “It’s just about the most incredible picture I’ve ever heard of.” He was flushed with resentment. His courtesy, which was usually just a shade more formal than most of ours, had quite left him, and he was speaking to Skeffington with the special hostility kept for those who bring bad news. In fact, he spoke to Skeffington as though he, and only he, were the culprit and that it was his duty to obliterate the bad news and restore the peace of the morning.