Charles Snow - The Affair

I was too much of an odd man out to believe that. In fact, doing so seemed to me one of the less dramatic but most dangerous of all the temptations of power. Yet I had lived that disciplined life for nearly twenty years. Perhaps I was the last person to see the changes it made, just as one doesn’t see the changes in one’s own face, and then, in a photograph, notices an ageing man — can that be me?

I could fairly think to myself that I had no responsibility about Howard. It just was not my business. If I did as Margaret was pressing me, some of my old friends would resent it, because I was being a busybody. They would resent it more, incidentally, because I was being a busybody on the opposition side. I was not likely to be in Arthur Brown’s confidence again. That would be a sacrifice, nothing like so heavy a one as Skeffington risked in the line of duty, but still a sacrifice. Why should I make it, when I had lost any taste for exhibition that I ever had, when I plain disliked even the prospect of being thought officious?

If I had added up the arguments, there would scarcely have seemed any in favour. True, I was inquisitive, acutely so, and my inquisitiveness was not weakening: the only way I could satisfy it in this business was to get right inside. Also I knew, and I knew it with the wreckage and guilt of part of my life behind me, that there were always good, sound, human, sensitive reasons for contracting out. There is great dignity in being a spectator: and if you do it for long enough, you are dead inside. I knew that too well, because it was only by luck that I had escaped.

As I stood there, though, gazing down on the road, Margaret’s arm round me, I was not searching down into my experience. I was merely aware of a kind of heavy vexation. I was thinking, I had met few people who, made aware beyond all self-deception of an inconvenient fact, were not at its mercy. Hypocrites who saw the naked truth and acted quite contrary — they were a romantic conception. Those whom we call hypocrites simply had a gift for denying to themselves what the truth was. On this occasion, that was a gift which I did not possess.

I said to Margaret, ungraciously, that I would think it over. She had heard me say, often enough, that choices never took as long to make as we pretend: the time was taken in finding the reasons to justify them. She was watching me, face averted, looking out into the dark. She knew precisely what was going on. She knew that I was fretted and sullen because she had not let me evade, or put off, the choice — and that I was not willing to admit to her that it was already made.

THERE was another result of the disciplined life, I thought when I was in a better mood, as well as its temptations. It was a week before I could manoeuvre even a day or two free in Cambridge. So far as leisure went, I was living my life backwards: while Martin and the others in the college were no more tied than I had been as a young man.

On the Thursday afternoon following Laura’s visit, Martin, to whom I had telephoned, had arranged for us both to meet Howard at his school. My train was late: the taxi slithered through the wet streets, the shop windows already spilling pools of light on to the pavement; through the streets of Romsey town, in which I could not recall, in my time at Cambridge, having been before, which seemed as remote from the collegiate Cambridge as the town where I was born. The school was right at the edge of the suburb: as the taxi drove up, there outside the gates, in the February murk, stood Martin.

He wanted a word about some questions we should ask Howard. While the rain drizzled on us, we agreed how to try it. Then we started to push our way through crowds of children, rushing and squealing into the corridor, just set free from the last lesson of the afternoon.

A boy took us into the physics classroom, where Howard was sitting on the lecture table. As we went in, he muttered some sort of greeting, but, if he looked at us, it was only out of the corner of his eye. To make conversation I said, glancing round the room, that it was an improvement on those I had been taught in as a boy.

“If they had some apparatus,” said Howard, “you might begin to talk.”

“Still, it’s better than nothing—”

“Not much,” he said.

That seemed the end of that. It was, in fact — I was gazing round for want of anything to say — a model of a room, new, bright, shining, with seats at a good rake and windows taking up the two side walls. On the blackboard behind the table Howard had been writing: the smell of chalk hung in the air. His writing was high, stiff, broken-backed. There were calculations I couldn’t follow: this must have been a sixth-form lesson. One word stuck out — “inductence”. Could that be right? It didn’t seem possible, even in scientific English. Was he one of those people, without visual memory, who just couldn’t spell?

“Can we talk here?” said Martin.

“I don’t see why not.”

Martin settled himself against one of the desks in the front row.

“I don’t think I’ve got any news for you yet awhile—” he began.

“Why did you want to see me, then?”

“There are one or two things we’d like to ask—”

“I’m sick and tired of going over stuff you know as well as I do,” said Howard, not meeting Martin’s eye, staring unfocused beyond the darkening windows.

“It’s mainly for my benefit,” I said.

“I’m not clear where you come in.”

“Perhaps Lewis had better tell you,” said Martin, glancing at me.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s very simple. I should like to say that I believe you are in the right in this business. I’m sorry that I doubted you before. If I can be of any use at this stage, I should like to do what I can.”

For an instant, Howard’s eye flickered in my direction and then away again. He said: “You don’t expect me to be exactly overcome with gratitude, do you?”

As a rule I was not touchy, but Howard had a knack of getting under my skin. Martin intervened.

“Come off it, Donald.” His tone was hard but comradely. “We’ve got enough to cope with, without you.”

Howard, whose head had been turned away, brought it round to face us: but it sank down on to his chest and he was gazing, not at the window, but at his feet.

“Anyway,” he said, without a mollifying word, “I don’t see what you can do.”

He was speaking to me, and I replied: “I’ve known some of these people a long time. I’ve arranged to see Francis Getliffe tomorrow morning, I thought it might be worthwhile.”

“A fat lot of good that will do.”

“I’m glad you’re doing that—” Martin was saying, but Howard interrupted: “I don’t believe in seeing these people. The facts are on paper. They can read, can’t they? Well, let them get on with it.”

The curious thing was that, though he spoke with such surliness, he was full of hope. It wasn’t simply one of those flashes of random hope that come to anyone in trouble. This was a steady hope that he had kept from the beginning. At the same time he managed to be both suspicious and childishly hopeful.

Martin started to question him about the missing photograph. It seemed to be old ground for both of them, but new to me. Had Howard still no idea when old Palairet could have taken such a photograph? Had he never seen one which fitted the caption at the bottom? Couldn’t he make his memory work and find anything that would help?

“I’m not a lawyer,” he said, gibing at me, “it’s no use asking me to cook up a nicer story.”

“That isn’t specially valuable, even in the law,” I replied. Martin, who knew him better, was rougher with him.

“We’re not asking you that. We’re asking you to use what you’re pleased to call your mind.”