Charles Snow - The Affair

“I’m sorry about that,” Martin replied, but easily and without indignation.

“I think I can understand the position you’re all in. I mean, you two and Getliffe. I exclude Skeffington, because I don’t pretend to know how his mind works. And I’m not convinced that he’s a man of any judgment. But you others were in a genuinely difficult position, I can see that. You had to balance the possibility that there’s been a certain amount of individual injustice — you’ve had to balance that against the certainty that if you raise the point, you’re going to do a much larger amount of damage to us all. I can see that you were in a difficult position. Granted all your preconceptions and back histories, I can understand what you chose to do. But, with great respect, I’d like to suggest that it was the wrong choice.”

“We’re tied up with the word ‘possibility’,” Martin said.

“You’re not prepared to say ‘certainty’,” said Clark.

“Can’t I explain to you the nature of scientific evidence?” said Martin. But he was more respectful to Clark than to most men. There was no doubt that, in some fashion, Clark had the moral advantage over him.

“I must say,” I put in, “your view seems to me almost unbelievably perverse.”

“We’ve got different values, haven’t we?” he said, with sweetness and composure.

“I told him that I disagreed,” Hanna said to me.

“Of course you disagree, my dear. Of course these two do. As I say, with your preconceptions and back histories, it would be astonishing if you did anything else.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you and the Eliot brothers and Getliffe have been what you’d call liberals all your lives. I haven’t, and I don’t pretend to be. That’s why I can understand some of your attitudes, which you all think are detached and based on the personal conscience, but which really aren’t quite as detached as you’d all like to think. In the long run, anyone who has been as tinged with liberal faiths as you have is bound to think that by and large the left is right, and the right is wrong. You’re bound to think that. It’s the whole cast of your minds. And it shows itself in quite small issues like this present one, which sub specie aeternitatis isn’t quite as earth-shaking as we’re making out. Of course you want to think that this man has been a victim. Of course all your prejudices, your life-histories, your weltanschauung are thrown in on his side. You must forgive some of us if we’re not so easily convinced.”

“Do you really think a scientist of international reputation, like Francis Getliffe, is quite as capable of deceiving himself on a point like this?” I said.

“I’ve got to be persuaded that he isn’t.”

“You would seriously take Nightingale’s opinion rather than Getliffe’s — that’s what it amounts to, doesn’t it, G S?”

Martin was talking to him better-temperedly than I could. It struck me that there was a protective tone in Martin’s voice. I wondered — it was the kind of thing near the physical level, that one did not easily recognise in a brother — whether if, like many robust men, he wanted to turn his eyes from a cripple and so had to go out of his way to compensate.

“Yes, I think that’s fair. It amounts to that.”

“Forgetting Skeffington,” said Hanna. “Whom even you could not regard as a man of advanced opinions, I should think.”

“Forgetting Skeffington.” He brushed her aside more contentedly than anyone I had seen. “You see, I can respect Getliffe’s opinions and the Eliots’, even when I disagree with them. But I’m not going to give equivalent weight to playboys.”

“That’s special pleading,” I said.

“Take it as you like,” said Clark. “In my view, and you’re naturally at liberty to think it’s wrong, the question is very much as Martin put it. If I’ve got to take a side, I’ve got to decide between Nightingale’s opinion and Getliffe’s. Now I’d be the last person to say that Getliffe wasn’t by far the more distinguished scientist. People competent to judge have decided that for me, and of course there’s no room for reasonable doubt. But, with respect, it seems to me that their scientific merits aren’t under discussion. So far as I’m concerned, there is room for reasonable doubt about whose guidance I accept on a piece of scientific chicanery.”

“How well do you know Nightingale?” I was provoked enough to say it. As soon as I did, I knew it was a false step.

“I know them both well enough to form my own judgment. And that’s something one must do for oneself, isn’t it?” He looked around with his fresh smile, the smile edged with physical strain. “Well, we shan’t convince each other, shall we? I think this is the time to agree to differ, don’t you?”

After Clark had said that he was going to play us some Berlioz, I was left out of the party. All of the others were musical, Clark passionately so: while as soon as he had put on the record, I drifted into the kind of wool-gathering that music induced in me. On the bright wall opposite I caught sight of a couple of Piranesi prints. They set me speculating on what sort of inner life Clark had, Berlioz and Piranesi, the march to the scaffold, the prisons deep under the earth.

Why in the world had Hanna married him? Throwing over a husband, a healthy man with, I recalled, a sly eye for women, to do so. There Hanna sat, curled up on the sofa, in her mid forties, her body, lean, tense, still young, her face still young apart from the grey in her hair which, before she married Clark, when she was one of the most elegant of women, she would never have left there. Why had she married him? She was not happy here. It did not need her ambiguous relation to Tom Orbell to say she was unhappy. She had not taken Clark into her confidence, even at the start, so far as I could see. There had been a time when she was far more politically committed than he thought. When he spoke of her as in the same political grade as Francis Getliffe, he did not know what Martin and I knew.

Did he know that once she had been fond of Martin?

Yes, Martin had been fond of her in return. A good many men were roused by her sharp, shrewish charm and wanted to tame her. But though she liked such men, they were not the ones she disrupted her life for. Instead she seemed to be searching for someone to look after. It must have been that, it could only have been that, which led her to break one marriage and take on Clark.

As the music went on, I felt both indulgent to her and impatient. For, of course, the irony was that she could scarcely have picked worse. She was so brave, much more than most of us, she was intelligent, she had her farouche attractions. But she had no insight. She was a good judge of men’s intellects, but compared with a hundred stupid women she despised, she had no idea what men were like. It did not take a clairvoyant to see that, though Clark might be crippled, he had a character like a rock. Not an amiable character; one fused out of bad luck and pain, not giving pity to others, and not wanting it himself. One might help him across a room, but he would not like one the better for that. As for offering him tenderness — one ought to know that gently, inexorably, he would throw it back in one’s teeth.

Sitting there, daydreaming in the sound, I believed Hanna knew that now. She had no insight, but she learned. I was not specially sad for her. She was younger than most women of her age, she still had force and nerve and the hope of the fibres. She was capable of sacrificing herself and enduring more than others could take. In the past she had gone on with a sacrifice for years, and then come to a snapping-point. Then she had saved herself. Could she do so again?