Charles Snow - The Affair

“That is all, Master,” said Nightingale.

“Thank you, Bursar,” said Crawford. “I think it is self-explanatory. I also think that we are all seized of the circumstances. Speaking as Master, I have nothing to add at this stage. Our legal advisers are now sitting with us. I have explained to them, and I believe the point is taken, that it is for Eliot to show us grounds why we should consider overruling a decision already given to the College. Eliot, we are ready to hear from you now.”

I had expected more of a preamble, and I was starting cold. I hadn’t got the feel of them at all. I glanced at Brown. He gave me a smile of recognition, but his eyes were wary and piercing behind his spectacles. There was no give there. He was sitting back, his jowls swelling over his collar, as in a portrait of an eighteenth-century bishop on the linenfold, the bones of his chin hard among the flesh.

I began, carefully conciliatory. I said that, in this case, no one could hope to prove anything; the more one looked into it, the more puzzling it seemed. The only thing that was indisputable was that there had been a piece of scientific fraud; deliberate fraud, so far as one could give names to these things. No one would want to argue about that — I mentioned that it had been agreed on, the night before, by Dawson-Hill and me, as common ground.

“I confirm that, Master,” came a nonchalant murmur from Dawson-Hill along the table.

Of course, I said, this kind of fraud was a most unlikely event. Faced with this unlikely event, responsible members of the college, not only the Court, had been mystified. I had myself, and to an extent still was. The only genuine division between the Court and some of the others was the way in which one chose to make the unlikely seem explicable. Howard’s own version, the first time I heard it, had sounded nonsense to me; but reluctantly, like others, I had found myself step by step forced to admit that it made some sort of sense, more sense than the alternative.

I was watching Brown, whose eyes had not left me. I hadn’t made them more hostile, I thought: it was time to plunge. So suddenly I announced the second piece of common ground. If the photograph now missing from Palairet’s Notebook V–I pointed to the pile in front of the Master — had been present there, and if that photograph had been a fraud, then that, for there would be no escape from it, would have to be a fraud by Palairet.

“No objection, Master,” said Dawson-Hill. “But I’m slightly surprised that Eliot has used this curious hypothesis in the present context.”

“But you agree to what I’ve said? I haven’t misrepresented you?” I asked him.

Dawson-Hill acquiesced, as I knew he would. Having given an undertaking, he would not be less than correct.

While he made his gibe about the “curious hypothesis”, I had glanced at Nightingale, who was writing notes for the minutes. Apart from the sarcastic twitch, his expression did not change; the waves of his hair, thick and lustrously fair for a man of sixty, seemed to generate light, down at the dark end of the table. Like a faithful functionary, he wrote away.

I went on: Who had done the fraud? Howard? or — we had all turned the suggestion down out of hand, but some of us couldn’t go on doing so — Palairet? As I’d started by saying, I couldn’t hope to prove, and possibly no one alive was in a position to, that Palairet had done it. The most I could hope to persuade them was that there existed a possibility they couldn’t dismiss, at any rate not safely enough to justify them breaking another man’s career. I should be able to prove nothing, I said. All I could reasonably set out to do before the Court was to ask a few questions and sharpen two or three doubts.

“Is that all for the present, Eliot?”

“I think it’s enough to be going on with, Master,” I said. I had spoken for a bare ten minutes.

Crawford asked Dawson-Hill if he wished to address the Court next. No, said Dawson-Hill: he would reserve his remarks, if any, until the Court had heard testimony from the Fellows that Eliot was bringing before them.

Crawford looked satisfied and bland. “Well,” he said, “at this rate it won’t take too long before we put our business behind us.” Then he added: “By the way, Eliot, there is one point I should like your opinion on. You repeated the suggestion which has of course been made to the Court before, and also to me in private — you repeated the suggestion, unless I misunderstood you, that it was Palairet who might have falsified his experiments. And you suggested it, again if I understood you correctly, not simply as a hypothesis or a ballon d’essai , but as something you thought probable. Or have I got you wrong?”

“No, Master,” I replied, “I’m afraid that’s so.”

“Then that’s what I should like your opinion on,” he said. “Speaking as a man of science, I find it difficult to give any credence to the idea. I oughtn’t to conceal that from you. Let me remind you, Palairet was moderately well-known to some of the senior members of the college. I should be over-stating things if I said that he was the most distinguished man of science that the college has produced in our time—” Just for an instant, I could not help reflecting that Crawford reserved that place for himself and to one’s irritation was dead right. “—but I have talked to men more familiar with his subject than I am, and I should not regard it as far wrong if we put him in the first six. He had been in the Royal Society for many years. He had been awarded the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society. Several of his researches, so I am informed on good authority, are classical beyond dispute. That is, they have been proved by time. The suggestion is now that, at the age of seventy-two, he went in for cooking his results.”

(Suddenly Crawford’s Scottish accent, overlain by fifty years in Cambridge, broke through and we heard a long, emphatic “cooking”.)

“You think he could possibly, or even probably, have produced fraudulent data? Where I should like you to give us your opinion, is this — what reason could such a man have for going in for a kind of fraud that made nonsense of the rest of his life?”

I hesitated. “I didn’t know him,” I said.

“I did know him,” Winslow put in.

He looked at me from under his lids. He had been staring at the table, his neck corded like an old bird’s. But his hands, folded on his blotting-paper, stood out heavy-knuckled, the skin reddish, and neither freckled nor veined by age. “I did know him. He came up the year after the college had the ill-judgment to elect me to a Fellowship on the results of my Tripos.”

“What was he like?” I said.

“Oh, I should have said that he was a very modest young man. I confess that I thought also that he had a good deal to be modest about.” Winslow was in early morning form.

“What was he like afterwards?” I went on.

“I didn’t find it necessary to see him often. With due respect to the Master, the men of science of my period were not specially apt for the purposes of conversation. I should have said that he remained a very modest man. Which appeared to inhibit his expressing an interesting view on almost anything. Yes, he was a modest and remarkably ordinary man. He was one of those men who achieve distinction, much to one’s surprise, and carry ordinariness to the point of genius.”

I gazed at him. He had been a very clever person: in flashes he still was. Despite his disgruntlement and the revenges he took for his failure, he was at the core more decent than most of us. Yet he had never had any judgment of people at all. It was astonishing that anyone who had met so many, who had such mental bite, who had lived with such appetite, who had strong responses to almost anyone he met, should be so often wrong.