Charles Snow - The Affair

“What is the point?”

“I want to draw your attention to a very remarkable feature in this communication.”

“What is it?”

“Come and look here. Over my shoulder. You see those words — ‘The Court of Seniors’? You’re sure you see them?”

I said yes.

After I had gone on saying yes, he let me go back to my chair.

“Well, now. What do those words suggest to you?”

I was at a loss, and shook my head.

“Come now. This isn’t being on the spot. This isn’t what I expect from a lawyer. Tell me, who is the Senior Fellow of this college?”

“You are, of course.”

“Indeed I am. Now that is the point, my dear chap. Does it surprise you to hear that when the Court of Seniors was meeting — over this little trouble of Getliffe’s, I presume, but that’s neither here nor there — when that Court was meeting I was not invited to take my rightful place?”

Gay threw back his noble head.

“I’d never thought—” I began.

“But you should have thought. Does it surprise you that I was not only not invited to take my rightful place, but absolutely discouraged? I had letters from the Master implying that it might be too much for me, if you please. Letters full of flattering sentiments, but fine words butter no parsnips, my dear chap. They even implied that I could not make the journey into college. Stuff and nonsense! Why, the Court could meet in the summer, couldn’t it? Or if they were in a special hurry, what was to prevent them meeting here? If Mahomet can’t go to the mountain! Yes, indeed. No, they are treating me as though I were not compos mentis . That’s the long and the short of it. And I think it’s time they were taught a lesson.”

I tried to soothe him, but Gay, his scarf slipping from his shoulder, had taken a second wind.

“This is where you come in, Eliot,” he said in triumph. “Tell me, am I or am I not entitled to sit on the Court of Seniors, unless I withdraw of my own free will?”

I said that I must re-read the statutes.

“Tell me, have they or have they not deprived me of my place without my consent?”

“So it seems.”

“Tell me, will or will not the fact that I have been deprived of my place be known to all the Fellows of the college?”

“Certainly to some of them.”

“Tell me, will or will not that fact be taken to mean that in the opinion of the Master and his advisers I am no longer compos mentis ?”

“Not necessarily—”

“That’s what it will be taken to mean. I have been libelled, Eliot. That is why I am contemplating seeking legal redress from the college.”

I had been expecting various things, but not this. Trying to humour him, I said that it could not, in technical terms, be a libel. Gay was not to be humoured.

“I believe there must still be justice in England. You remember Frederick the Great — there are still judges in Berlin. A fine city, they gave me an honorary degree in that city. I am positive that damaging a man’s reputation cannot be done with impunity. And that ought to be true of people who have achieved some little distinction, quite as much as of anyone else. Indeed it ought. Not letting a man take a place which is his of right — that is a comment on his fitness, my dear chap, and I am absolutely convinced people cannot make such comments with impunity.”

He was becoming more obstinate. Incredulously, I began to think that he might not forget this. How far, I was calculating, with a faint suppressed schadenfreude at Arthur Brown’s expense, could he go before he was stopped?

“If I proceed against them,” said Gay, “that will be an action and a half.”

I said the situation was complicated.

“You’re too genteel, you young men.”

Gay was chuckling with gusto and malice. Oddly enough, it did not sound like senile malice. I was astonished at how much vigour he had summoned up. The prospect of litigation had made him younger by twenty years. “You’re too genteel. I’m absolutely positive that this action of mine would lie. Indeed it would. That would teach them a lesson. I don’t believe in being too genteel, my dear chap. That’s why I’ve attained a certain position in the world. It’s a great mistake, when one has attained a certain position in the world, to be too genteel about teaching people a lesson.”

THE following afternoon, Saturday, Martin rang me up in college. Some progress, he said. No special thanks to us: after Francis’ circular, we couldn’t avoid it. Anyway, two people had come over — Taylor (the Calvert Fellow) and another man I did not know. On paper the score was now ten to nine against. That is, nine men were pledged to sign the request for re-opening the case. “I think we’re pretty well bound to pick up another. Then the real fun begins,” came Martin’s voice with a politician’s mixture of optimism and warning.

For reasons of tactics — “just to show we mean business” — Martin was anxious to get the majority decided soon. Would I have a go at Tom Orbell? Would I also dine in hall and see if there was anyone I could talk to? It would be better if he and I were acting separately. We could meet later that night at his house.

I obeyed, but I drew blank. In the mizzling afternoon, so dark that the lights were on all over the college, I walked through to the third court. For an instant I looked up at Tom Orbell’s windows: I could have sworn that they were lighted too. But when I climbed the stairs his outer door was sported. I rattled the lock and called out that I was there. No response. I had a strong suspicion that Tom had seen me coming.

Frustrated, irritated, I gazed at the name above the door, “Dr T Orbell”. The letters gleamed fresh on the unlit landing. I remembered faded letters there, and the name of Despard-Smith, who had been a Fellow for fifty years. He had been a sanctimonious old clergyman. At that moment I felt a mixture of rancour and disgust; it seemed that the rancour, long suppressed, was directed at that old man, dead years before, not at Tom Orbell who kept me waiting there.

However, I met Tom before the end of the afternoon. I had been invited to tea by Mrs Skeffington, to what, I discovered when I arrived, was something very much like an old-fashioned Cambridge tea-party. That was not the only odd thing about it. To begin with, the Skeffingtons were living in one of a row of two-storied houses just outside the college walls, which used to be let to college servants. Why they were doing it, I could not imagine. They were both well-off: was this Skeffington’s notion of how a research Fellow ought to comport himself? If so, they were not making all that good a shot at it: for in the tiny parlour they had brought in furniture which looked like family heirlooms, and which some of the guests were cooing over. Sheraton? someone was asking, and Mrs Skeffington was modestly admitting: “Oh, one must have something to sit on.”

Round the wall there were pictures that did not look at all like heirlooms, and I recalled that I heard Skeffington had taste in visual things. There was a Sickert, a recent Passmore, a Kokoschka, a Nolan.

So, in the parlour, smaller than those I remembered in the back streets of my childhood, we sat on Sheraton chairs and drank China tea and ate wafers of brown bread-and-butter. Another odd thing was Mrs Skeffington’s choice of guests. I had imagined that Skeffington wanted to talk over the case with me and that everyone there would be on his side. Far from it — there was Tom Orbell, hot and paying liquid compliments, and also, though without their husbands, Mrs Nightingale and Mrs Ince. To balance them, Irene was there without Martin. Did Mrs Skeffington think it was her duty to pull the college together? Quite possibly, I thought. Not through policy. Certainly not through doubts of her husband’s case: she was as firm as he was. But quite possibly through sheer flat-footed duty, as though to the tenantry.