Charles Snow - The Affair

It was a cold day for midsummer, so cold that I could have done with a coat. I had seen no one since I arrived in Cambridge that lunch-time. In fact, I had taken care to see no one. This was my last chance to get my thoughts in order before tomorrow, the first day of the Seniors’ hearing.

The college clock struck four. The time had gone faster than I wanted, the garden had a chilly, treacherous, rose-laden peace. It was irksome to be obliged to leave: but there had been an invitation waiting for me in the guest room, asking me to tea with the Master to meet my “opposite number”, Dawson-Hill.

As I walked through the college it seemed deserted, and I could hear my own footsteps, metallic on the flag-stones. The only signs of life in the second court were a couple of lights (Winslow’s for one) in the palladian building. Once past the screens, though, and the first court was as welcoming as on a February afternoon, with windows lighted in the Bursary, in Brown’s set, Martin’s, the drawing-room and study in the Lodge. As I let myself into the Lodge and went upstairs, I could hear Crawford’s laugh, cheerful, pawky, and quite relaxed.

In the study, Dawson-Hill was in the middle of an anecdote. Crawford was contentedly chuckling as I came in. At once Dawson-Hill, slender and active as a young man, though he was a year my senior, was on his feet shaking my hand.

“My dear Lewis! How extremely nice to see you!”

He spoke as though he knew me very well. It was not precisely true, though we had been acquaintances on and off since we were pupils in the same Inn over twenty-five years before.

Looking at him, one found it hard to believe that he was fifty. He stood upright in his elegant blue suit, and with his Brigade tie discreetly shining he might have been an ensign paying a good-humoured, patronising visit to his old tutor. His face was smooth, as though it had been carved out of soapstone; his hair, sleekly immaculate, had neither thinned nor greyed. His eyes were watchful and amused. In repose, the corners of his mouth were drawn down in an expression — similar to that of someone who, out of curiosity, has volunteered to go on to the stage to assist in a conjuring trick — surprised, superior, and acquiescently amiable.

He said: “I was just telling the Master about last weekend at—” He mentioned the name of a ducal house. Crawford chuckled. He might be an old-fashioned Edwardian liberal, but he wasn’t above being soothed by a breath from the high life. The ostensible point of the story was the familiar English one, dear to the established upper-middle classes — the extreme physical discomfort of the grand. The real point was that Dawson-Hill had been there. Crawford chuckled again; he approved of Dawson-Hill for being there.

“ She is rather sweet, though, isn’t she, Lewis?” Dawson-Hill went on, appealing to me as though I knew them as well as he did. He wasn’t greedy or exclusive about his social triumphs. He was ready to believe that nowadays I had them too. His own were genuine enough; he had been having them since he was a boy. He never boasted, he just knew the smart world, more so than any professional man I had met: and the smart world had taken him into themselves. Why, I had sometimes wondered? He had been born reasonably luckily, but not excessively so. His father was a modest country gentleman who had spent a little time in the army, but not in the kind of regiment Dawson-Hill found appropriate for himself in the war. Dawson-Hill had been to Eton; he had become a decently successful barrister. He had agreeable manners, but they were not at first sight the manners one would expect to make for social triumphs. He was no man-pleaser, and he wasn’t over-given to respect. His humour was tart, sarcastic, and as his hosts must have known by now, not what they would describe as “loyal”. And yet — to an extent different in order from that of any of the tycoons I knew, or the bureaucrats, or the grey eminences, the real bosses of the establishment, or even of the genuine aristocrats — he was acceptable everywhere and had become smart in his own right.

That must have been the reason, I thought, why, when Crawford and Brown were, out of the college’s three or four QCs, choosing one to advise them at the Court of Seniors, they had picked on him. At one time Herbert Getliffe, Francis’ half-brother, would have been the automatic choice: but Brown was too shrewd not to have smelled the air of failure, not to have suspected, as I had heard Brown say, that “the unfortunate chap does seem to be going down the hill”. Nevertheless, the college, usually pretty good judges of professional success, had overestimated Dawson-Hill’s — not very much, but still perceptibly. He was a competent silk, but not better. He was earning, so my old legal friends told me, about £9000 a year at the Common Law bar, and they thought he’d gone as far as he was likely to. He was clever enough to have done more, but he seemed to have lacked the final reserve of energy, or ambition, or perhaps weight. Or conceivably, just as the college was dazzled by his social life, so too was he.

“Well,” said Crawford, loth to say goodbye to high life, “I suppose we ought to have a few words about this wretched business.” He began asking whether we had been supplied with all the “data”.

“I must say,” said Dawson-Hill, suddenly alert, “it isn’t like being briefed by a solicitor, Master. But I think I’ve got enough to go on with, thank you.”

“I fancy our friend Eliot, who has been in on the ground floor, so to speak, has the advantage of you there.”

“That’s the luck of the draw.” Dawson-Hill gave a polite, arrogant smile.

“About procedure, now,” said Crawford. “You’ll appreciate that this isn’t a court of law. You’ll have to be patient with us. As for your own procedure,” he went on massively, “we were hoping that you’d be able to agree at least in principle between yourselves.”

“We’ve had some talk on the telephone,” said Dawson-Hill. I said that we proposed to spend the evening after hall working out a modus operandi .

Crawford nodded, Buddha-like. “Good business,” he said. He went on to ask if he was correctly informed that Wednesday night, June 30th, five days hence, was the latest Dawson-Hill could spend in Cambridge. If that were so, we had already been told, had we not, that the Court was willing to sit on all the days between, including Sunday? We had already received the names of the Fellows who wished to appear before the Court? We both said yes.

“Well, then,” said Crawford, “my last word is for your ear particularly, Eliot. My colleagues and I have given much thought to the position.” He was speaking carefully, as though he had been coached time and time again by Arthur Brown. “We feel that, in the circumstances of this hearing, the onus is on you, representing those not satisfied with the Seniors’ previous and reiterated decision, to convince the Court. That is, we feel it is necessary for you to persuade a majority of the Court to reverse or modify that decision. There are, as you know, four members, and if we can’t reach unanimity I shall be compelled to take a vote. I have to tell you that, according to precedents in the Court of Seniors, which so far as we can trace has only met three times this century, the Master does not possess a casting vote. Speaking not as Master but as an outside person, I’m not prepared to consider that that precedent is a wise one. But those are the conditions which we have to ask you to accept.”

All this I knew. The college had been seething for weeks. Minute-books, diaries of a nineteenth-century Master, had been taken out of the archives. I contented myself by saying: “Of course I have to accept them. But it doesn’t make it easy.”