Charles Snow - The Affair

Baffled, I said that he knew he had my sympathy –

“Not good enough, my dear chap. Not good enough for the needs of the moment. Time is not on our side. Indeed it isn’t. You see, I’ve got a little surprise for you. You could absolutely never guess what my little surprise is, could you?”

I had an awkward feeling that I could.

“I’ll put you out of suspense. Yes, indeed. It’s no use talking to me about solicitors. I’ve already provided myself with one. A fine solicitor he is. Not the man to let the grass grow under his feet. If I tell him you’re our man, you’ll get a letter from him before you can say Jack Robinson. So I can’t give you long to make up your mind. That’s as plain as a pikestaff, isn’t it?”

Triumphant, he seemed ready to go.

“This is the time for action,” he cried. “Action, that’s what I want to see!”

UNDER the chandeliers in Brown’s room, eight of us sat at the dinner-table. The names themselves would have had a simple eloquence for anyone inside the affair: Nightingale, Winslow, Clark, and Brown himself, on one side; Getliffe, Martin, me, and yes, though I hadn’t expected it, Skeffington, on the other. It meant, and everyone present knew that it meant, some attempt at peace-making, it was a kind of response, almost instinctive and yet at the same time calculated, which all of us had seen before in the college when feeling ran high. Perhaps Brown had a point to score or a bargain to make: that was more likely than not. But also he wanted, unsentimentally but also unquestioningly, out of a desire for comfort as well as piety, to prevent “the place getting unliveable-in”, to ensure that it “didn’t come apart at the seams”.

On the other side, men like Francis Getliffe and Martin wanted the same thing. In bodies like the college, I was thinking, there was usually a core with a strong sense of group self-preservation. That had been true in the struggles I had seen there. Passions had gone from violence to violence, the group emotions were spinning wildly, and yet, from both sides of the quarrel, there had come into existence a kind of gyroscopic flywheel which brought the place into stability once more. This was the fiercest quarrel I had seen in the college. It was not accidental that Brown and the others, the bitterest of partisans, were behaving at dinner as though they were not partisans at all.

It was such a dinner as Brown liked to give his friends. Not lavish, but carefully chosen: only Brown could have got the kitchens to produce that meal at twelve hours’ notice. There was not, by business men’s standards, or writers’, much to drink: but what there was was splendid. Brown was a self-indulgent man in a curious sense; he liked drinking often, but only a little, and he liked that little good. That night he brought out a couple of bottles of a ’26 claret. Very rare, he said, but drinkable. Winslow made a civil remark as he drank. With most of them, I thought, it was going down uncomprehending crops. No one in the college nowadays, except Brown himself and Tom Orbell, cultivated a taste in wine.

As I ate my devils on horseback and drank the last of the claret, I was wondering whether, if he had not made his démarche to Brown the night before, Tom Orbell might have been at this dinner. True, he was junior to everyone there. But still, he was committed in the affair, and yet in all other respects was a Brown man. I couldn’t help feeling that Brown would have seen good reasons for having him along. Nightingale, Winslow and Skeffington had, so I had heard, attended the first Getliffe caucus; Clark was the only man present pledged to vote for Brown. Seeing them together, seeing how differently, while they were fighting out the affair, the alignment ran, I couldn’t begin to prophesy how many of these allegiances were going to survive intact until the autumn.

While dinner went on, no one mentioned the Howard case. The nearest anyone came to it was myself, for, sitting next to Brown, I gave him a précis of my talk with Gay and said that in my view they had no choice but to placate the old man, and the sooner the safer. Brown asked Winslow if he had heard.

“No, my dear Senior Tutor, I have been sunk in inattention.”

Did he realise how often that happened to him now? Was he brazening it out?

“I think we may have to ask you to form a deputation of one and discuss terms with the Senior Fellow.”

Winslow roused himself.

“I have done a certain amount of service for this college, most of it quite undistinguished, in a misspent lifetime. But the one service I will not do for this college is expose myself to the conversation of M H L Gay. It was jejune at the best of times. And now that what by courtesy one refers to as his mind appears to have given up the very unequal struggle, I find it bizarre but not rewarding.”

There were grins round the table, though not from Skeffington, who throughout the meal had sat stiffly, participating so little that he surrounded himself with an air of condescension. Winslow, encouraged because his tongue had not lost its bite, went on to speculate whether Gay was or was not the most egregious man who had ever been awarded fifteen honorary degrees. “When I was first elected a Fellow, and had quite a disproportionate respect for the merits of my seniors, he was in his early thirties, and I simply thought that he was vain and silly. It was only later, as the verities of life were borne in upon me, that I realised that he was also ignorant and dull.”

In an aside, Brown told me that Gay would have to be “handled”. “I blame myself,” he whispered, while the others laughed at another crack by Winslow, “for having let it slide. After the first time you gave us the hint.”

Quietly, his voice conversational, he began talking to the party, when for an instant everyone was quiet. There did seem a need, said Brown, for a little discussion. He was glad to see them all round his table, and he had taken the liberty of asking Lewis Eliot for a reason that he might mention later in the evening. All sensible men were distressed, as he was, by the extent to which this “unfortunate business” had “split the college”.

Then Brown, with dignity and without apology, made an appeal. He said that the Court of Seniors had spent months of their time and had now reached the same decision twice. “I needn’t point out, and I know I am speaking for my two colleagues among the Seniors present tonight, that if we had felt able to modify our decision on Tuesday, we were well aware that we should make personal relations within the college considerably pleasanter for ourselves.” But they had felt obliged to reach the same decision, without seeing any way to soften it. They knew that others in the college — including some of their own closest friends — believed that they were wrong: “It’s even worse than voting on plans for a new building,” said Brown, with the one gibe that he permitted himself, “for dividing brother from brother.” But still the decision was made. He didn’t expect their critics to change their minds. Nevertheless, wasn’t it time, in the interests of the college, for them to accept the decision at least in form? It had been a deplorable incident. No doubt some of the trouble could have been minimised if the Seniors had been more careful of their friends’ sensibilities. He felt culpable himself on that score. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t have affected the decision; that was made now. In the interests of the college, couldn’t they agree to regard the chapter as closed?

Martin and Getliffe, who were sitting side by side, glanced at each other. Before either had spoken, Skeffington broke in. “So far as I’m concerned, Senior Tutor, that’s just not on.”