Charles Snow - The Affair

So now I understood why he had enticed me there.

She looked at me with steady, bright, obstinate eyes.

“You don’t see much of them there nowadays, do you?” she asked.

“Not very much,” I said.

“You can’t possibly be really in touch, I should think, can you?”

I said no.

“I don’t see what you could expect to do.”

She said it dismissively and with contempt. Contempt not for Tom Orbell, but for me. I felt a perceptible pique. It was not agreeable to be written off quite so far. But this young woman had decided that I was no good at all. She did not seem even to be considering whether I was well-disposed or not. She just had no faith in me. It was Tom in whom she still had her faith.

When we returned to the reading-room, even she, however, was deterred from forcing him any more. Tom sat there, his face cherubic, sketching out visions of the future like roseate balloons, high-spirited visions that seemed to consist of unworthy persons being ejected from positions of eminence and in their places worthy persons, notably the present company and in particular Tom himself, installed. I thought Laura would start on him again as soon as she got him alone. But for that night, at any rate, he was secure. For he had revealed to us that he was staying in the club, and at last it became my duty to take Laura out into Pall Mall and find her a taxi.

She said a cold good night. Well, I thought, as I went along the street, looking for a taxi for myself, it would not be easy to invent a more unsatisfactory evening. None of the three of us had got away with what he wanted. Laura had not cornered Tom Orbell. He had not managed to slide her off on to me. And I had not done any better. I was not much interested in this story of her husband: it did not even begin to strike me as plausible that there had been an injustice of that kind. No, I was not thinking of that at all, but I was faintly irked. No one likes to be treated as a vacuum inhabited solely by himself.

A few weeks after the evening in Tom Orbell’s club, I was sitting in my brother’s rooms in college. It was a routine visit: I had gone down, as I did most years, for the Michaelmas audit feast. It gave me a curious mixture of comfort and unfamiliarity to be sitting there as a guest; for I had once used that great Tudor room as my own dining-room, and had sat talking in it as I now sat talking to Francis Getliffe, on October nights like this one, with draughts running under the wainscot, the fire in the basket grate not quite hot enough to reach out to the window seats.

In the study next door, my brother was interviewing a pupil, and Francis Getliffe and I were alone. He was a couple of years older than I was, and we had known each other since we were young men. I could remember him thin-skinned, conquering his diffidence by acts of will. He still looked quixotic and fine featured; his sunburned flesh was dark over his collar and white tie. But success had pouched his cheeks a little and taken away the strain. In the past few years the success which he had wanted honourably but fiercely as he started his career, and which had not come quickly, had suddenly piled upon him. He was in the Royal Society and all over the world his reputation was as high as he had once longed for it to be. In addition, he had been one of the most effective scientists in the war. It was for that work, not his pure research, that he had been given the CBE whose cross he wore on his shirtfront. For a combination of the two he had, two years before, been knighted.

He was chatting about some of our contemporaries who also had done well. He would always have been fair about them, because he had a strict code of fairness: but now, it occurred to me, he was just a shade more fair. He was showing that special affection which one who has in his own eyes come off feels towards others who have done the same.

Martin came in through the inside door. He had changed before his tutorial hour, and was already dressed for the feast. Straight away he began to ask Francis’ advice about the pupil he had just been seeing: was he, or was he not, right to change from physics to metallurgy? Martin worried away at the problem. He had recently become junior tutor, and he was doing the job with obsessive conscientiousness. He enjoyed doing it like that.

Unlike Francis, whose prestige had been rising for years past, Martin’s had been standing still. A few years before, he had had the chance of becoming one of the atomic energy bosses. He had got the chance, not through being a scientist in Francis’ class, which he never could be, but because people thought he was hard, responsible and shrewd. They were not far wrong: and yet, to everyone’s surprise, he had thrown up the power and come back to the college.

He did not seem to mind having a future behind him. With the obsessive satisfaction with which he was now speaking of his pupil’s course, he applied himself to his teaching, to the bread-and-butter work that came his way. He looked very well on it. He was getting on for forty, but he might have passed for younger. As he spoke to Francis, his eyes were acute, brilliant with a kind of sarcastic fun, although everything he said was serious and business-like.

Then he mentioned another pupil called Howarth, and the name by chance plucked at something at the back of my mind to which, since it happened, I had not given a thought.

“Howarth, not Howard?” I said.

“Howarth, not Howard,” said Martin.

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I heard something about your ex-colleague Howard. In September young Orbell introduced me to his wife.”

“Did he now?” said Martin, with a tight smile. “She’s a pretty girl, isn’t she?”

“She was crying out loud that there had been a miscarriage of justice. I suppose that’s all nonsense, isn’t it?”

“Quite nonsense,” said Martin.

Francis said: “There’s nothing in that.”

“She seemed to think that he’d been turned out because of some sort of prejudice, which I never got quite clear—”

“That’s simple,” said Francis. “He was, and I suppose he still is, a moderately well-known fellow-traveller.”

“He wouldn’t be the favourite character of some of our friends, then, would he?”

“If I’d thought that was deciding anything, I should have made a noise,” said Francis. “I needn’t tell you that, need I?”

He said it stiffly, but without being touchy. He took it for granted that no one who knew him, I least of all, would doubt his integrity. In fact, no one in his senses could have done so. In the ’30s, Francis himself, like so many of his fellow-scientists, had been far to the left. Now he was respectable, honoured, he had moved a little nearer to the centre, but not all that much. In politics both he and Martin remained liberal and speculative men, and so did I. It was a topic on which the three of us in that room were close together.

“I don’t want to give you a false impression,” Francis said. “This man was disliked inside the college, of course he was, and there’s no getting away from it, with most of them his politics made them dislike him more. But that wasn’t the reason why we had to throw him out. It was a reason, if you like, why we found it difficult to get him elected in the first place. We had to be pretty rough with them, and tell them that politics or no politics, they mustn’t shut their eyes to an Alpha man.”

“In which,” said Martin, “we don’t seem to have done superlatively well.”

Francis gave a grim smile, unamused.

“No,” he said, “it’s a bad business. He just went in for a piece of simple unadulterated fraud. That’s all there is to it.”

So far as he could make it intelligible to a layman, Francis told me about the fraud. A paper of Howard’s, published in collaboration with his professor, an eminent old scientist now dead, had been attacked by American workers in the same field — and the attack had said that the experimental results could not be repeated. Francis and some of his Cavendish colleagues had had private warning that there was something “fishy” about Howard’s published photographs. Two of the scientists in the college, Nightingale and Skeffington, had had a look at them. There was no doubt about it: at least one photograph had been, as it were, forged. That is, a photograph had been enlarged, what Francis called “blown up”, to look like the result of a totally different experiment: and this photograph became the decisive experimental evidence in Howard’s Fellowship thesis and later in his published paper.