Charles Snow - The Affair

The fraud could not be accidental, said Francis. Neither he nor Martin had worked on Howard’s subject, but they had looked at the photograph. It was only too straightforward. The technical opinion that Nightingale and Skeffington had given was the one that any other scientist would have had to give, and it was on this technical opinion that the Court of Seniors had acted. The Court of Seniors, so Francis and Martin told me, had been the Master, Arthur Brown, old Winslow, and Nightingale, this time in his capacity as Bursar. “Of course,” said Francis, “they had to go on what the scientists told them. Nightingale’s the only one of them who’d have any idea what a diffraction photograph was.

“Still,” he added, “they went into it very thoroughly. If it hadn’t been a clear case, they would still have been at it.”

Somehow a question of mine set him reflecting on other cases of scientific fraud. There hadn’t been many, he said, less even than one might expect. Considering the chances and the temptation, the number was astonishingly low. In the last fifty years, he could tick off the notorious ones on the fingers of two hands. He produced names at which Martin nodded, but which, of course, meant nothing to me. Rupp, the J-phenomenon (“but that, presumably, was an honest mistake”): Francis spoke of them with the incredulous relish which professional scandals often evoke in a hyper-scrupulous man. He was wondering about the motives of those who perpetrated them, when the college bell started clanging for the feast.

As we picked up our gowns and went downstairs into the court, Francis was saying: “But there’s no mystery why Howard did it. He just wanted to make his marble good.”

Sitting in hall in the candlelight, I let the story drift comfortably out of mind. It was over and tied up now, and the college was going on. I was enough of a stranger to draw an extra pleasure out of being there. I was also enough of a stranger to be put up on the dais among the old men. This was not such a privilege as it looked: for my next-door neighbour was so old that the places beside him were not competed for.

“Ah,” he said, gazing at me affably. “Excuse me. Do you mind telling me your name?”

The colour in his irises had faded, and they were ringed with white. Otherwise he did not show the signs of extreme age: his cheeks were ruddy pink, his hair and beard silky but strong.

I said that I was Lewis Eliot. It was the second time since dinner began that he had asked the question.

“Indeed. Tell me, have you any connection with the college?”

It was too embarrassing to tell him that we had been Fellows together for ten years. This was M H L Gay, the Icelandic scholar. In his presence one felt as though confronted by one of those genealogical freaks, as I once felt when I met an old lady whose father, not as a boy but as a young man, had been in Paris during the French Revolution. For Gay had been elected a Fellow over seventy years before. He had actually retired from his professorship before Tom Orbell and half a dozen of the present society were born. He was now ninety-four: and in a voice shaky, it is true, but still resonant, was loudly demanding a second glass of champagne.

“Capital. Ah. That’s a drink and a half, if ever there was one. Let me persuade you, sir” — he was addressing me — “to have a glass of this excellent wine.”

He began to speak, cordially and indiscriminately, to all around him: “I don’t know whether you realise it, but this is positively my last appearance before my annual hibernation. Indeed. Yes, that is a prudent measure of mine. Indeed it is. I adopted that prudent measure about ten years ago, when I had to realise that I was no longer as young as I used to be. So after this splendid audit feast of ours, I retire into hibernation and don’t make the journey into college until we have the spring with us again. That means that I have to miss our fine feast for the Commemoration of Benefactors. I have suggested more than once to some of our colleagues that perhaps the summer might be a more opportune time for that fine feast. But so far they haven’t taken the hint, I regret to say.”

For an instant his face looked childish. Then he cheered up: “So I retire to my own ingle-nook for the winter, indeed I do. And I listen to the great gales roaring over the Fens, and I thank God for a good stout roof over my head. Not one of those flat roofs these modern architects try to foist off on us. A good stout pitched roof, that’s what a man wants over his head. Why, one of those flat roofs, our Fenland gales would have it off before you could say Jack Robinson.”

A few places along the table, a distinguished Central European architect was listening. “I do not quite understand, Professor Gay,” he said, with a serious, puzzled and humourless expression. “Are you thinking of the turbulent flow round a rectangle? Or are you thinking of the sucking effect? I assure you—”

“I am thinking of the force of our Fenland gales, sir,” cried Gay triumphantly. “Our ancestors in their wisdom and experience knew about those gales, and so they built us good, stout, pitched roofs. Ah, I often sit by my fire and listen, and I think, ‘That’s a gale and a half. I’d rather be where I am than out at sea.’”

Old Gay kept it up throughout the feast. Sitting by him, I found it impossible to feel any true sense of the past at all. The candles blew about, in the middle of the table the showpieces of gold and silver gleamed; all, including Gay’s conversation, was as it would have been at a feast twenty years earlier. The food was perhaps a little, though only a little, less elaborate, the wines were just as good. No, I got pleasure out of being there, but no sense of the past. True, I now knew half the Fellows only slightly. True, some of those I had known, and the one I had known best, were dead. But, as I sat by Gay, none of that plucked a nerve, as a visitant from the true past did. I could even think of the Baron de Charlus’ roll-call of his friends, and say to myself, “Despard-Smith, dead , Eustace Pilbrow, dead , Chrystal, dead , Roy Calvert, dead .” Not even that last name touched me; it was all a rhetorical flourish, as though one were making a nostalgic speech after a good dinner. Now I came to think of it, wasn’t Charlus’ roll-call just a flourish too?

In the shadows on the linenfold, I noticed a picture which was new since my last visit. Above the candlelight it was too dark to make out much of the face, although it did not look any better done than most of the college portraits. On the frame I could, however, read the gold letters:

Doctor R T A Crawford, FRS, Nobel Laureate, Forty-First Master.

Master 1937 –

My eyes went from the picture to the original, solid, Buddha-faced, in the middle of the table. His reign, so they all said, had been pretty equable. There did not seem to have been much to scar it. Now it was nearly over. They had prolonged him for three years above the statutory age of seventy, but he was to go in a year’s time: he would preside at the next Michaelmas audit feast, and that would be his last.

“Ah, Master,” Gay was calling out. “I congratulate you on this splendid evening. I congratulate you. Indeed I do.”

From his previous conversation, I thought he was not clear which, of all the Masters he had known, this was. Masters came and Masters went, and Gay, who was telling us that port did not agree with him, applied himself to the nuts.

In the jostle of the combination room afterwards, I felt my arm being squeezed. “Nice to see you,” came a round, breathy, enthusiastic whisper. “Slip out as soon as you decently can. We still finish up in my rooms, you know.”

It was Arthur Brown, the Senior Tutor. Some time passed before I could get free and when I entered Brown’s sitting-room it was already full. Brown gripped my hand.