Charles Snow - The Affair

I was not leaving them alone. Mrs Jago gazed at me, uncertain how to guard him, protect herself. With her most lofty impersonation of a grande dame , she said: “May I offer you a cup of coffee?”

I said that I would love one.

“It will be cold, needless to say.”

It was not cold. It was excellent. As I praised it, Alice Jago said with rancour: “When I was obliged to entertain because of Paul’s position, no one ever wanted to come to see me . So naturally I had to give them decent food.”

“Darling,” said Jago, “that’s all past history.”

“I expect,” said Alice Jago to me, “that now you’ve had your coffee you’d like to talk to Paul alone.”

“I hope he doesn’t expect so,” said Jago. He had not sat down again, and now he moved, on soft slippers, towards her.

“I think he’ll appreciate that I don’t see anyone alone nowadays. Anything he wants to say, I’m sure he’ll be ready to say to us together.”

“Of course,” I said. To myself, I was wishing it wasn’t so. While I was thinking about it again, I noticed the books on their two reading-racks. As with others who had waited a lifetime “to catch up with their reading”, Jago’s didn’t appear very serious. There were half a dozen detective stories, a few of the minor late nineteenth-century novels, and a biography. On Mrs Jago’s rack stood the Archer translations of Ibsen, together with a Norwegian edition and dictionary: it looked as though she were trying to slog through the originals. She used to be known in the college as “that impossible woman”. She could still put one’s teeth on edge. But it was she who had the intellectual interest and the tougher taste.

“I suppose,” I said, “you did receive a letter from Crawford this morning?”

“Yes,” Jago replied, “I received a letter from the Master.”

“Have you answered it?”

“Not yet.”

“I hope you won’t,” I said, “until you’ve listened to me.”

“Of course I’ll listen to you, Lewis,” said Jago. “You were always a very interesting talker, especially when the old Adam got the better of you and you didn’t feel obliged to prove that there wasn’t any malice in you at all, at all.” His eyes were sparkling with empathy, with his own kind of malice. He had scored a point, and I grinned. He went on: “But I oughtn’t to conceal from you that I don’t feel inclined to accept the Master’s kind invitation.”

“Don’t make up your mind yet.”

“I’m very much afraid it is made up,” said Jago.

Mrs Jago was sitting in the chair next to mine, both of us looking out to the garden as to the sea. He was sitting on her chair-arm, with his hand on hers.

“I don’t feel inclined,” he said, “to get involved in college affairs again. I can’t believe it’s good for them, and it certainly isn’t good for us.”

“I’m asking you to make one exception.”

“When I was looking forward to retiring,” he replied, “I thought to myself that I would make just one exception. That is, I should have to drag myself away from here and set foot in the college once more. But not for this sort of reason, my dear Lewis.”

“What was it, then?”

“Oh, I think I shall have to cast my vote when they elect the next Master. This autumn. It would be misunderstood if I didn’t do that.”

“Yes,” said Alice Jago. “It’s a pity, but you must do that.”

At first hearing it seemed strange. The last time those votes had been cast — that was the wound, which, except perhaps in this room, the two of them had not been able to get healed. And yet, it was the sort of strangeness one could, at least viscerally, understand. I had heard more than once that he was committed to vote, not for his old friend Arthur Brown, but for Getliffe — as though choosing the kind of distinction which he didn’t possess and which had been thrown up against him. I thought of asking, and then let that pass.

“Look,” I said, “this is a human situation.” I told him, flat out, why I wanted him on the Court of Seniors. He was much too shrewd and perceptive a man to dissimulate with. I said that I believed Howard was innocent. Jago might not agree when he heard the complete story and studied the evidence — all his prejudices, I said, for I too knew how to dig in the knife of intimacy, would be against Howard. Nevertheless, Jago had more insight than any of them. I wanted to take the chance. If he happened to decide for Howard, that would make it easier for the others to change their minds than anything I could say.

“I don’t see what claim you have on me,” said Jago. “It would be different if I knew anything about this man already.”

“Don’t you feel some responsibility?”

“Why should I feel responsibility for a man I don’t know and a college I’ve had no control over for seventeen years?”

“Because you have more sympathy than most people.”

“I might have thought so once,” he replied simply and gravely, “but now I doubt it.”

“You like people.”

“I used to think so,” said Jago, in the same unaffected tone, “but now I believe that I was wrong.” He added, as though he were speaking out of new self-knowledge and as though I deserved the explanation: “I was very much affected by people. That is true. I suppose I responded to them more than most men do. And of course that cuts both ways. It meant that they responded to one. But, looking back, I seriously doubt whether I genuinely liked many. I believe that in any sense which means a human bond, the people I’ve liked you could count on the fingers of one hand. I’ve missed no one, no one now living in this world, since we thought we hadn’t enough time left to waste, and so spent it all with each other.” He was speaking to his wife. It sounded like flattery, like the kind of extravagant compliment he used to give her to bring a touch of confidence back. I believed that it was sincere.

“Haven’t you found,” he turned to me again, in a tone lighter but still reflective, “that it’s those who are very much affected by people who really want to make hermits of themselves? I don’t think they need people. I certainly didn’t, except for my own family and my wife. I’ve got an idea that those who respond as I responded finally get tired of all human relations but the deepest. So at the end of their lives, the only people they really want to see are those they have known their whole lives long.”

He glanced at me, his eyes candid, amused and searching.

“If your man has had the atrocious bad luck you think he has, I’m sure you’ll persuade them, Lewis. But, as far as I’m concerned, I think you can see, can’t you? — it would have to be something different to make me stir.”

It was no use arguing. I said goodbye almost without another word. I thanked Alice Jago for putting up with me.

“Not at all,” she said, with overwhelming grandeur.

I went out into the street, the blossom dazzling under the leaden cloud-cap. I felt frustrated, no, I felt more than that: I felt sheer loneliness. I wasn’t thinking of the affair: it would mean working out another technique, but there was time for that. Under the trees, the sweet smell all round me, I couldn’t stay detached and reflect with interest on the Jagos. I just felt the loneliness.

IN the Fellows’ Garden, the tea-roses, the white roses, the great pink cabbage-roses glowed like illuminations in the heavy light. The garden, when I entered it that afternoon, had looked like a steel-engraving in a Victorian magazine, the sky so boding, the roses bulbous. A week earlier, there would have been young men lying on the grass, staying in college to receive their degrees: but this was the last Friday in June, and as I strolled by the rose bushes, scuffing petals over the turf, the garden was dead quiet, except for the humming by the bee-hives.