Charles Snow: The Affair

“This is more like it,” he said. “I’ve been telling them, people got into the habit of dropping in here after feasts more years ago than I care to remember. I take it amiss that you haven’t been here since this time last year. You mustn’t forget us altogether, you know. Now I hope I can tempt you to a drop of brandy? I always think it’s rather soothing after a long dinner.”

He was a man of sixty-three, padded with flesh, broad-jowled, high-coloured. The residual wings of hair were white over his ears. He looked kind, he looked like someone who enjoyed seeing others happy: and that was true. He looked a bit of a buffer — to those who did not notice the eyes behind his spectacles, sparkling with inquisitiveness, or how, under the paunchy flesh, he carried his stomach high. In fact, when I had been a colleague of his in the college, I thought that he was one of the shrewdest managers of people that I had met. I still thought so, after meeting a good many more. He contrived to be at the same time upright, obstinate and very cunning.

The room was cosier, the temperature higher, than in most college sets. On the walls hung a collection of English watercolours, of which Brown had come to be a connoisseur. There were so many men in the room that they had split up into groups: that would not have happened in the first after-feast parties which I had attended there. The college was larger now, the average age of the Fellows lower, the behaviour just perceptibly less formal. Glass in hand, Francis Getliffe was talking to a knot of three young scientists; Martin and a handsome man whom I recognised as Skeffington were away in a corner with two arts Fellows, Clark and Lester Ince, both elected since I left.

By the fire, Brown and I were sitting drinking our brandy when Tom Orbell came and joined us. His face was pink, flushed and cheerful, but in Brown’s presence he was comporting himself with decorum, with a mixture of expansiveness and caution. What could be done about the chaplain? he was asking. Apparently there was a danger that he would be enticed away. He was intelligent, so Tom was saying, and it wasn’t all that easy nowadays to find an intelligent man in orders.

“Of course,” he turned to me with a flush of defiance, “that wouldn’t matter to you, Lewis. You wouldn’t mind if every clergyman in the country was mentally deficient. I expect you’d think it would make things easier if they were. But Arthur and I can’t take that view, can we?”

“I should have thought it was slightly extreme,” said Brown.

But he was not prepared to let Tom flaunt his piety at my expense. Brown was a “pillar of society”, conservative and Anglican, but he went to church out of propriety more than belief, and he was not entirely easy when young men like Orbell began displaying their religion. So Brown told a story in my favour, designed to show how careful I was about others’ faith.

“I’m sorry, Lewis,” said Tom, at his jolliest and most repentant, instantaneously quick to catch the feeling of someone like Brown, “it was absolutely monstrous of me to accuse you of that. You’re frightfully good, I know you are. And by the way, it was absolutely monstrous of me to inflict that evening on you with Laura Howard.”

“What’s that?” said Brown, his eyes alert and peering. “How did you come to be meeting Mrs Howard, Lewis?”

“I saddled him with it, I’m afraid,” Tom replied. “You see, she was wanting me to raise Cain in the college about her husband — which, as I believe all those protests of hers are just sheer nonsense, I couldn’t very well do, could I? Just sheer nonsense which she’s managed to make herself believe because she loves him, God knows why. So I didn’t want to make it easy for her to get to work on me, did I? Mind you, Arthur,” he said, “if I thought there was the slightest bit of sense in her case or even the chance that there could be a bit of sense in it, I’d have come and told you straight out that I was going to bring it up. I do mean that. I think it’s very important that people of my age should be ready to throw their weight about. I know you agree, Arthur, don’t you?”

Soon afterwards, Tom attached himself to Martin’s group. I was thinking that, as he explained himself to Brown, he had shown a delicate blend of the deferential and the man-to-man; beautiful to listen to. In private, out of hearing of persons in authority, few people rebelled as eloquently as Tom Orbell. In the hearing of persons in authority, the eloquence remained, but the rebellion not. In the company of Arthur Brown, Tom seemed above all desirous of growing into someone just like Arthur Brown — solid, rooted, statesmanlike, a man on top.

“So our young friend has been involving you with the Howards, has he?” asked Arthur Brown.

“You’ve been having more trouble than I thought, haven’t you?” I said.

“I need hardly say,” said Brown, “that none of this ought to be so much as mentioned outside the college. I needn’t tell you that, I know. Put it another way: I should have thought it was safer, if you only talked about it, even in this place, with Martin or the people you know well.”

“What’s this man Howard like, Arthur?” I asked.

The colour, heavy puce, deepened in Brown’s cheeks. He was frowning as though angry with me even for asking the question.

“He’s an unmitigated swine,” he said.

For an instant I was both astonished and thrown off my stride. I did not know many people more tolerant of others than Brown was. Also, he had spent so many years guarding his speech that it often seemed he couldn’t speak any other way.

Even Brown himself seemed startled at hearing his own outburst. He said, once more judicious, weighing his words: “No, I don’t think I feel inclined to withdraw what I’ve just said. I never have been able to find anything to set down in his favour. He’s a twister, but there are plenty of twisters that have some redeeming qualities, and I can’t recall this chap showing a single one. He’s graceless, he’s never been able to get on with anyone, and I shouldn’t be surprised if that’s why he wants to pull the world down round our ears. But I might have been able even to put up with that, if he hadn’t behaved so vilely to the people he owed everything to. When he started biting the hand that fed him, I decided I wasn’t going to look for any more excuses or listen to anyone else making them. He’s no good, Lewis. I don’t mind telling you that I considered at the time, and I still do, that we ought to have gone the whole hog and struck his name off the books.”

Brown had been speaking in a reasonable, moderate tone, but heavily, almost as though he had been giving his judgment to the other seniors. He added: “There’s only one good thing to be said about this wretched business. The whole college was absolutely solid about it. I don’t need to tell you that that’s not exactly common form. But if the college hadn’t been solid for once, it would have made things difficult. The place wouldn’t have been any too comfortable to live in. And I don’t want to exaggerate, but we might have walked straight into trouble outside. This is just the kind of thing that could have got us into the papers, and if that had happened, it would have done us more harm than I like to think about.”

Francis Getliffe had already gone, and the party was breaking up. Just as Martin said goodnight to Brown, and waited to take me across the staircase to his rooms, I was remarking on the new picture of the Master in the hall. “There’s exactly room for one more beside it,” I said as I stood up to go, “and then you’ll have to think again.”

I noticed Brown glancing sharply at me. Still sitting in his armchair, he tugged at my sleeve.