Charles Snow - The Affair

For the first time that evening Howard grinned.

I went on to say that anything he could tell us about Palairet might be a point in argument. Even people whose minds were not closed couldn’t be swung over until they had some idea what had happened. None of us seemed to have a completely clear idea: I certainly hadn’t myself.

“Why should you think I have?” asked Howard. “I didn’t have anything to do with him apart from the work. He was always decent to me. I don’t pay any attention to what other people say about a man. I take him as I find him, and by how he is to me.”

“And you’re satisfied with the result?” I could not resist saying, but he did not see the point. He described how Palairet had given him the photograph which he had used in his thesis — the photograph with the dilated pin-marks. According to Howard, Palairet had said that it would “help out” the experimental evidence. Howard had not wondered for an instant whether it was genuine or not. He had just taken it with gratitude. Even now, he could not imagine when Palairet had faked the photograph. He said, with a curiously flat obstinacy, that he was not certain it was a conscious fake at all.

“What else could it be?” said Martin sharply.

“Oh, just an old man being silly.”

“No,” said Martin.

I was thinking that Howard was one of the two or three worst witnesses I had listened to. So bad that it seemed he could not be so bad. Once or twice I found myself doubting my own judgment.

Howard said that he had seen another photograph of the same kind: he had repeated that often enough. But this photograph could not have been the one missing from the notebook. Whatever the photograph in the notebook had been, he had never seen it.

“You’re positive about that?” I said.

“Of course I am.”

“It’s a pity,” said Martin.

“Then it’s got to be a pity,” said Howard.

Martin said, “If that photograph was still in the notebook, there might have been a bit of resistance but there’s no doubt we should have got you home in the end.”

As Martin spoke, not with any special edge, saying something which we all knew, Howard’s expression had undergone a change. His eyes had widened so that one could see rims of white round the pupils; the sullen, dead-pan, sniping obstinacy had all gone; instead his face seemed stretched open, tightly strained, so exposed that he had lost control over his eyes and voice. In a high, grating tone he said: “Perhaps that’s why it isn’t there.”

“What do you mean?” Martin asked him.

“Perhaps the people who wanted to get at me found it convenient to get rid of that photograph. Perhaps it isn’t an accident that it isn’t there.”

I had heard someone, in. a state of delusion, speak just like that. Martin and I glanced at each other. Martin nodded. We both knew what had to be said, and Martin began: “You must never say anything like that again. That is, if you want to have a fighting chance. We can’t do anything for you, we couldn’t even take the responsibility of going on, if there’s the slightest risk of your saying that again.”

“I don’t see why not.”

“It’s time you did,” said Martin. I broke in: “Don’t you see that it’s a very serious accusation? Don’t you see that, if it once got round the college, you’d have to answer for it—”

“So would the people who were standing up for you,” said Martin. “Either you cut it out, or we should have to wash our hands of the whole business.”

Without speaking, without any sign of acquiescence, Howard had lost the wild open look. He had slumped back again, his eyes looking at his feet, his head on his chest.

“All right?” said Martin.

Howard raised his eyes and Martin was satisfied. The classroom clock showed five to six, and he said that it was time to go out for a drink. As he led us out of the room, Martin said: “All aboard,” like a cricket captain calling his men out to field, or like an old leader of mine before we went into court. He could put on that kind of heartiness very easily. That evening, it worked better with Howard than anything I could have done. In the pub, he was less suspicious than I had seen him. It was a new and shining pub, as bright, as freshly built as the school. Among the chromium plate and the pin-tables, Howard sank into a corner as though he were for the time being safe, and put down a pint of bitter. The second tankard was soon in front of him, and he was replying almost good-naturedly to Martin, who had abandoned his normal carefulness and was questioning him head on. Did he like teaching? Yes, said Howard surprisingly, he wouldn’t have minded making his career at it. Why had he settled in a Cambridge school? Was it just to embarrass the college? Howard, who had previously shown no sense of humour, thought that was a good joke.

Martin, who had drunk a couple of pints himself, asked if he were deliberately following the good old college pattern. There had only been one other Fellow in living memory who had ever been dismissed. Did Howard know the story? Howard, prepared to think Martin a remarkably good comedian, said no. Martin said that he was disappointed. He had hoped Howard was following suit. The story was that during the ’90s, the college had elected someone from outside, actually from as far away as Oxford, as a Fellow. He had turned out to be an alcoholic of a somewhat dramatic kind, and his pupils, attending for supervision at five o’clock, had found him not yet out of bed and with empty bottles on the floor. So the college sacked him. He had promptly married a publican’s daughter and set up in a fish-and-chip shop two hundred yards from the college’s side gate. I remembered hearing the story used, forty years later, by one of the old men as an argument against electing a Fellow from outside.

“Don’t you admit the precedent is rather close?” Martin said to Howard. “You must have decided that by staying in Cambridge you could make more of a nuisance of yourself. Now didn’t you?”

“Oh, well,” said Howard, “if I’d cleared out it would have made things easier for them. I was damned if I could see why I should.”

That reminded me of another question, which Nightingale had brought up at the Lodge.

“In that case,” I said, “I wonder you didn’t think of appealing to the Visitor, and then bringing an action for wrongful dismissal.”

“I did think of it.”

“Why didn’t you bring it, then?”

“Should I have won it?”

“I don’t think so. But it wouldn’t have made things easier for them, would it?”

He hedged. He did not want to answer straight. I was nothing like so good with him as Martin was. He prevaricated, became embarrassed and wrapped up in his own thoughts. He said that he had preferred other methods. I did not begin to understand why he was suddenly so shy. I asked again: “I should have thought, when nothing happened, you might have brought an action?”

“I wasn’t keen on washing this kind of dirty linen in public.” That was all I could get out of him. After we had all three taken a bus into the town, he left us in the Market Place. He offered to drop my bag in the college, where I was sleeping, since I wanted to go off with Martin to have supper at his house.

“Do you mind?” I said.

“Do I mind putting my head in the porter’s lodge,” said Howard, prickly but not at his most offensive, “is that what you mean? The answer is, I don’t.”

As Martin and I were walking towards the Backs, Martin said: “Not as useful as it might have been, was it?” He meant the last few hours.

“Have you ever got anything more out of him?”

“Nothing to speak of.” Martin went on: “I suppose we might have got someone more difficult to work for, but off-hand I can’t think of one.”