Charles Snow - The Affair

Martin asked if Julian was there.

No, she was alone, he had gone off for a meal at a pub.

Could we come in, since Martin wanted to leave a message for him?

“You’ve caught me on the wrong foot,” Mrs Skeffington repeated, as we sat there in the living-room. I thought I knew why she was so embarrassed. It wasn’t, or at least not immediately, because Julian had gone off alone. She had lived a long time with a marriage which had worn dry, so that she had forgotten how to conceal it, if indeed she had ever tried. No, it was something much sillier. She had been sitting by herself in that little parlour, with a tray in front of her, scrambled eggs on toast and a good stiff whisky: and the sound of voices which we had heard in the lane outside came from the television set. It was now safely turned off, but Mrs Skeffington looked like a great, chapped-cheeked schoolgirl caught in the act: her hearty, brickdropping, county assurance had dropped from her quite. She couldn’t believe that men like Martin and me would have spent such an evening. She had an impression, which filled her with both ridicule and awe, that her husband’s colleagues spent their entire existence at their books. She was certain that if we saw what she had been enjoying, we should despise her. With dazzled relief, she realised that we were not going to question her or comment. She poured out whiskies for us both, drank her own and helped herself to another. She drank, it seemed to me, exactly as her brothers would have done after a day’s hunting.

Martin was set on getting her to understand his news. “Look, Dora, this is important.” Next morning, by the first delivery, Julian would get the Court’s decision. Martin told her the form of words.

“That’s a slap in the eye for some of you, isn’t it?” she said. “They’re as good as saying that old Uncle Cecil wasn’t up to any monkey-business, aren’t they?”

“Yes, they’re certainly saying that.”

“Well,” said Dora Skeffington, “I must say I’m rather glad. None of my family ever thought much of Cecil. My mother used to say that he was a bit common, though I never understood how she made that out. But still, he did more than some of them and he was always decent to me when I was a little girl.”

She sat back, basking in the comfort of family piety and several drinks. But she was neither stupid nor, except when she felt it was due to herself, obtuse. She felt the absence of response. She said: “What’s the matter? Don’t you believe the old man’s all right?”

“Not for a minute. Nor will Julian. That’s why I don’t want him to fly off the handle—”

Martin told her that this meant that the affair had only got worse. None of the revisionists could accept this verdict, neither Julian, nor he, nor Francis, nor any of their followers. All it meant was that they were back where they started, with passions higher. The danger was, Julian might make things worse, if he insisted on behaving like a “wild man”. Martin’s plan was to call a meeting of the majority by the end of the week. Would she tell Julian to keep out of action until then?

“I’ll tell him,” said Dora. “Mind you, I don’t know what good it’ll do.”

She sounded both sad and jocular. Sad because it was a disappointment that old Palairet wasn’t going to be left in peace, and sad too because she couldn’t answer for her husband and spoke of him as one might speak of a not-very-close friend. And at the same time amused, because somehow she thought of her husband, not only as someone worth a certain kind of admiration, but also as a bit of an ass. Superb, handsome, high-minded, priggish, high-principled, extravagantly brave — that was how others saw him, but not she. Yet she was utterly loyal. Loyal partly because it was both her nature and training to be so: but also, oddly, just because their marriage had worn so thin and dry. Somehow that strengthened their knockabout, not-very-close friendship, instead of weakening it. They had become allies, neither of them humorous, each of them priding themselves on “seeing the joke” in the other. It meant that, when she had to choose between Palairet’s good name and her husband’s principles, or even her husband’s whims, there was no choice for her. She would make higher sacrifices than that for him. With her own kind of clumsy devotion, she was with him whatever he wanted to do. Others might admire him more, other women might long for the chance of admiring him, but she happened to be married to him.

THE next evening, Walter Luke and I came back from a day of negotiations late but pleased with ourselves. It was too late to talk in our rooms: we went straight into the combination room, affable because, as Luke was saying, most of what we had come for was “in the bag”. As soon as we entered the room, however, no one could have stayed affable. We had walked right into the hiss and ice of a quarrel. G S Clark was standing there, his useless leg braced against the table, Nightingale behind him. Two or three of the young scientists were talking angrily and did not lower their tone as we came in. Francis Getliffe was listening, with an expression fine-drawn, distressed, furious. One of the young men was saying that it was “an outrage”.

“Aren’t you going in for propaganda?” replied Clark.

“I’ve got to say,” Getliffe interrupted, “that I’ve never seen anything worse handled.”

“What do you mean, worse handled?” said Nightingale, smiling, more in control than the others.

“Do you really think you can fob us off without an explanation?” said a scientist.

“Do you really think the Court didn’t consider that?” G S Clark was asking.

“Do you know better than we do what they considered?”

“I’m prepared to trust them,” said Clark.

“I should like to know why.”

“I’m sorry,” said Clark, “but that seems a little adolescent. I should have thought it reasonable to trust a Court of Seniors of this college to behave at least as responsibly as you would yourself.”

For some instants, Luke had been standing, for once looking stupefied and incapable of action, on the edge of the fracas. He asked: “What is all this?”

“I don’t know how much you ought to hear, Luke, not being a Fellow—” Nightingale began.

Luke broke in: “Oh, come off it, Alec. Is it the business I was talking to Crawford about two nights ago—?”

“I think you’re bound to be told this some time,” said Nightingale. “The Seniors have been sitting on an appeal on behalf of a man called D J Howard. We’ve just informed the college that we’ve had to decide against him.”

Luke stared round at the angry faces.

“Well,” he said, “I hope to God you’ve got it right.”

He was oddly at a loss. He had forgotten, if indeed he had ever paid much attention to it, how intense and open the emotions could show in a closed society like this. For fifteen years he had been used to high scientific affairs. He had seen great decisions taken, and had at least twice forced a great decision himself. He had been in the middle of a good deal of politics, but it had been controlled, official politics, with the feelings, the antagonisms, the hates and ambitions, kept some distance beneath the skin. It hadn’t been different in kind from the college’s politics, but there was a difference — Luke had forgotten how much — in nakedness and edge. The curious thing was, in terms of person-to-person conflict, when one moved from high affairs to the college one moved from a more sheltered life to a less.

It was the precise opposite of what most of us would have imagined. Just as, I thought, most of us would never have imagined another move, from a more sheltered life to a less. Observe the lives of tycoons, like my acquaintance Lord Lufkin, or boss administrators, like Hector Rose; they had much power, they carried responsibility, they were hard-working to an extent that the artists I knew could not begin to conceive. And yet, in a special sense, they were also sheltered. Neither Lufkin nor Rose had met a direct word of hostility for ten years: they did not have to listen to a breath of criticism of themselves as persons. While people whom they, the bosses, thought passed happy-go-lucky lives, the artists living right out of “the world”, had to take criticism, face to face, as straightforward as a school report, each week of their lives as part of the air they breathed.