Charles Snow - The Affair

Laura’s letters were a curious mixture of business-like information and paranoia. Margaret said: “Has it ever struck you that when people get persecution mania, they usually have a good deal to feel persecuted about?”

It all seemed to be going slowly, but on the lines one could have forecast. It was clear that Martin could not risk putting forward a formal motion for re-opening until he had his majority secure.

One Friday evening in February, I arrived home later than usual, tired and jaded. It was raining hard, and I had had to walk from Marble Arch the quarter of a mile or so along the Bayswater Road. The warmth of the flat was comforting. From the nursery I could hear Margaret playing with the little boy. I went into the drawing-room looking forward to the quiet, and there, sitting under the standard lamp by the window, the light full on her face, was Laura Howard.

I saw her with surprise, and with something stronger than surprise, involuntary recoil. I had a phobia of entering a room expecting to be by myself, and finding someone there. For an instant I was inclined to gibber. Was Margaret looking after her? I asked, my tongue feeling too large for my mouth, resentfully wishing to push her out, knowing — what usually I did not know at all — exactly what it is to be pathologically shy. Of course Margaret was looking after her, said Laura, firm, composed, utterly unflirtatious. She added: “We’ve been putting our heads together.”

“Have you?”

“I’m not satisfied with the way things are going. I don’t want them to get stuck, and they will get stuck unless we’re careful.”

I was recovering myself. She did not think of explaining what “things” were. She was as single-minded as ever. I had never seen a woman of her age so inseparably fused into her husband’s life. She sat there, pretty, healthy, and most men would have felt that beneath her skin there was the inner glow of a sensual, active, joyous woman. Most men would have also known that none of that inner glow was for them.

When Margaret came in, she heard Laura repeating that “things were getting stuck”.

“Yes,” said Margaret, glancing at me guiltily, her colour high, “Laura rang me up and so I thought it might be useful if she came along.”

“I see,” I said.

“Would you like to hear what she’s been telling me?”

I could not refuse.

Succinctly, competently, Laura brought out something new. According to “information from the other side”, there had been a suggestion that, if the feeling became strong enough, the Seniors ought to offer to re-open the case before a majority asked for it. I nodded my head. That sounded reasonable, precisely the sort of step that experienced men would consider. Apparently the suggestion had been made by Crawford first, and “the other side”, or rather, the more influential members, Arthur Brown, Nightingale and Winslow, had spent some time discussing it. Now they had decided that it wasn’t necessary: the feeling was not more than “a storm in a teacup”, it would soon blow over. All they had to do was “stick in their heels”.

Even the phrases sounded right.

“Your intelligence service is pretty good, isn’t it?” I said to Laura.

“I think it is.”

“Where does it come from?”

“I’m not at liberty to say,” she replied without a blench.

She was not worried. The situation was less promising than three weeks before — “We’ve gone backwards,” she said. But, like so many active people, like Margaret herself, she was freed from worry just by taking action. Why had things deteriorated, I was trying to get her to explain. So far as I could gather, it must have been the effect of the reports. Nightingale’s seemed to have been fair in tone, but uncompromising in its conclusion, and that had gone home.

What were Martin and Skeffington doing? I asked her. Martin was “plugging on”. She did not complain of the way he was handling the tactics. To her, men were good or bad. Skeffington and Martin, who had been bad men the first time she came to our house, had now been transformed into good. When she trusted, she trusted absolutely. But she wanted “to put on some more pressure”. One waverer had decided not to vote for re-opening: they were now four short of a majority. Who was against, of the people I knew, I asked? The old men and the reactionaries, she said with passion (whether she started with any politics I could not tell, but she had taken over her husband’s), Arthur Brown, Winslow, Nightingale of course. One or two — such as Gay, because he was “too old to understand”, and Crawford from magisterial neutrality — would not vote either way, but that was equivalent to voting against. The “young reactionaries”, like G S Clark and Lester Ince, were flat against. So was Tom Orbell. As she mentioned his name, Laura swore and Margaret joined in. Abusing him, they made a united front — “Blast the fat snake,” said Margaret.

Francis Getliffe? I asked. Laura cursed again. “He’s still sitting on the fence.” She gave an account, second-hand from her husband, with the pained, knowing smile of the innocent being cynical, of how one can never trust people who pretend to be liberal. They were always the worst. It seemed hardly tactful of her, since she was disposing of Margaret, Martin, and, Skeffington apart, their entire side.

Meanwhile Margaret was frowning, not because Laura was being heavy-footed, but because Francis was a favourite of hers. Of my old friends, he was the one she respected most.

While Laura was with us, Margaret did not ask me anything direct. I could see that she was anxious for Laura to go. Once or twice Laura missed her cue. Then Margaret promised to ring her up during the week, and at last we were alone.

I had gone to the window, and was looking down on the road, over the centre of which the vapour lamps were swinging in the wind. A bare and lurid glimmer reached the trees opposite, but it was too dark to make out the fringes of the park. As I stood there, Margaret had put her arm round me.

“This isn’t going too well, is it?” she said.

“Well, it looks as though it might take some time.”

“Is that fair?”

“I should have thought so.” I was being evasive, and we both knew it. She wanted us to be loving, but she was too much committed to stop.

“No,” she said. “Doesn’t it look as though it might go wrong?”

“Everything that can be done is being done, you needn’t worry about that. Martin knows that place like the palm of his hand.”

“But it can go wrong, can’t it?”

“However do I know?”

Just for an instant, she smiled at me, the smile of marriage, the smile of knowledge. Then, with all her ardour, she broke out: “Do you feel like taking a hand yourself?”

She knew, just as well as I did, that I should be cross, should feel trapped. She had known that, when she let Laura stay there, so that I was plunged into the middle of it. She knew, better than I did because she had struggled with it, how I disliked a choice forced upon me, not approached by myself “in my freedom”. Now she had done precisely that.

The choice was there. Left to myself I could have blurred it. I wasn’t unused to living with situations which were morally ambiguous, or aspects of myself that I didn’t specially like. I didn’t have so much self-regard as Martin, and thus I hadn’t so much compulsion to make a gesture. I had lived for a long time in the corridors of power. It was a condition of living there that the gestures were not made. Most of my colleagues, the men who had the power, would not have considered interfering about Howard. They would have said it wasn’t the business of anyone outside the college. They were not cynical, but they kept their eyes on the sheet of paper in front of them. They were not in the least cynical: they believed, quite humbly though comfortingly for themselves, that “the world was usually right”.