Charles Snow - The Affair

On the pavement in Bateman Street we could hear the noise of the party three storeys above. After I rang the bell we could still hear the noise, but no footsteps coming downstairs. It took minutes of ringing before Ince came down to let us in. Out of the hall, lights streamed into the dark and dripping street. “Hallo, Lew,” said Lester Ince. There were two prams in the hall, and the smell, milky and faecal, of small children. As we climbed up the stairs of the old, high, narrow-fronted Victorian house, Martin and I were whispering. “You needn’t bother,” said Ince in his usual voice, “it would take the crack of doom to wake them up.”

Bits of the wall were peeling, a banister leg was loose. The four children were sleeping “dotted about”, said Ince, on the first two floors. He owned the whole of the shabby house, and let off the basement. When we got into the party, it seemed to me — I thought it must have seemed to Martin — like going back to parties we used to know when we were poor young men in the provincial town. Beer bottles on the table: the room, which in earlier days would have been a main bedroom, cleared for dancing: a gramophone in the corner: the floor full of couples. There were just two differences. Ince’s gramophone was a handsome new record-player, and the couples were jiving.

Ince picked up a glass of beer from the table, drank it, grinned all over his robust, pasty face, and said: “I’m not going to miss this.” He crooked his finger at a pretty young woman, and began swinging her round with vigour. His wife winked at him. About the whole party, certainly about Ince, there was a cheerful, connubial, sexy air.

Like his wife, I was thinking, even more than his wife, Ince was a bit of a social fraud. But a fraud in reverse, so to speak. Instead of wanting to be taken for something grander than he was in fact, he seemed to be aiming at the opposite. He was actually a doctor’s son, born in the heart of the middle classes, educated like the quintessence of the professional bourgeoisie, middling prep school, middling public school. He insisted on behaving, talking, and often feeling, as though he had come up from the ranks. Just as with the other kind of social mimic, one listened to his speech. Beneath the curious mixture of what he thought, often not quite accurately, to be lower-class English or happy-go-lucky American, one could hear the background of an accent as impeccably professional as Arthur Brown’s.

One odd thing was, that while the Inces imitated those lower down the social ladder, they were not in the least political. I had been used, years before, to upper-class left-wingers, conscientiously calling each other Des, and Pat, and Bert, and on envelopes punctiliously leaving off the “Esquire”. But this was nothing like the same thing. It was not a “going to the people”. The Inces did not even trouble to vote. They weren’t making an intellectual protest. They just felt freer if they cut the ties of class.

It seemed to suit them. If they weren’t happy that night, they gave a remarkable impersonation of being so. Between each dance Lester Ince drank a bottle of beer; he had the sort of heavy, games-playing physique, not unlike Martin’s, that could mop it up. He danced with his wife as though he were uxorious and glad of it. Ugly, frog-like, cosy, she had such appeal for him that she took on charm for us watching. The temperature of the room, thermometric and psychological, was rising. The young dons were getting off with the women. Married couples, research students with an eye for girls, intellectual-looking girls with an eye for the research students — I was speculating about the curious idée reçue dear to men of action, business men and people in the great world, that intellectual persons were less interested in sex than they were. So far as one could generalise at all, in my experience the opposite was true.

In the taxi, Martin had said that we should have to talk to Ince. It wasn’t a good time, but in view of Crawford’s “wobbling” we mightn’t have another. And so, after we had been there an hour, Martin caught him on the landing outside the room and beckoned to me.

“Christ,” Ince was saying, “I’d a hell of a sight sooner go back to my wife.”

“Two minutes,” said Martin. Then he said straight out that Getliffe’s note had “put the cat among the pigeons”, and he wanted just one more vote.

“You’ve got a one-track mind, Marty. Strike me pink you have.”

“I shouldn’t have thought so,” said Martin, “but still—” Ince had drunk a lot of beer but he was not drunk, just cheerful with drink. Standing with heavy legs firmly planted, he considered and then said: “It’s no go. I’m not playing.”

“You can’t dismiss it like that, you know.”

“Can’t I hell?”

I did not know him well, but I felt that at heart he was decent, sound and healthy. It came as a shock to find his tone not only flippant, but callous. I said that I was surprised.

“It’s good for you to be surprised, Lew. If it comes to that, why in Christ’s name are you messing about here?”

I replied just as rudely: “Because people like you are behaving like fools or worse.”

“I won’t take that from you or anyone else.”

“You’ve damned well got to take it,” said Martin.

Ince stared at us, legs immovable, with a matey smile. He was neither abashed nor at a loss.

“I’m just not playing, Marty,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t feel obliged to give a reason. I didn’t know they’d made you a sort of confessor for anti-God men—”

For an instant I saw Martin’s face go pale. He was more provoked than I was by the insolence of younger men. But though his temper had risen he did not let it go. He would not do that, except as a tactical weapon or at home.

“I think you are obliged to give a reason,” he said.

“Why?”

“If you want to be taken seriously. Which I hope you do.”

For the first time, Ince’s expression was clouded. He was a strong character, but he gave me the impression that he had not often crossed wills with other strong characters: while for Martin, this was nothing new.

“I’m not interested,” he said.

“That’s a meaningless thing to say,” Martin replied.

“So far as I’m concerned, this is a squabble among scientists. All I want is for you to go and sort it out among yourselves, and good luck to you and a nice long goodbye kiss.”

“It’s not a squabble among scientists,” I said. “That’s just letting yourself out. We’re telling you, you can’t—”

“I’m telling you, can’t I hell?”

“Look,” I said, “you must admit, there’s a chance, we think it’s a near certainty, that an innocent man has been victimised. Do you think that’s so good?”

“Oh, if that sort of thing happens, it always comes out all right in the wash.”

“Good God above,” I said, “that’s about the most optimistic statement on human affairs that I’ve ever heard.”

“Oh, it’s not true of your sort of affairs. Not the big stuff. Not on your life,” said Ince. “How many people have you seen done down in your time?”

“Quite a lot,” I said, “but not quite—”

“Then why the sweet hell don’t you go and put that right?”

“I was going to say,” I replied, “not quite in this way. And just because a lot of people are done down inevitably, that’s no reason to add another.”

“If you really want to know, that’s why I wash my hands of this schemozzle,” said Ince. “There’s too much Pecksniffery about it for me. Christ knows what you’ve seen, Lew, but then you come here and do a Pecksniff on me. And you’re not the worst of them. There’s too much Pecksniffery about your scientists, Marty. You think you can do anything you like with the rest of us, and switch on the moral uplift whenever you feel good. That’s why I’m bleeding well not playing. You go and do good, I shan’t get in your way. But I don’t want to hear about it. I’m nice and happy as I am, thank you very much.”