Charles Snow - The Affair

His reply, like his previous one, was slow.

“I knew someone who got me put down for his regiment.”

“Who was it?”

“As a matter of fact, one of my uncles.”

“Did he find it easy?”

“I expect he knew the ropes.”

Even then, he was ready to sneer at the influence which had always been within his reach. In a hurry I passed on. He had returned to the college in ’45, taken Part II of the Tripos in ’46? Then he had gone off to Scotland to do research under Palairet? Why?

“I was interested in the subject.”

“Did you know him?”

“No.”

“You knew his name and reputation?”

“But of course I did.”

It would be fair to say that he had been impressed by Palairet’s reputation and work? I had to force him. Just as young men are when they are looking for someone to do their research under? Was that fair? I had to press it. Reluctantly and sullenly, he said yes.

“When you arrived in his laboratory, who suggested your actual field of work?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Can’t you?”

Already I was feeling the sweat trickle on my temples. He was more remote and suspicious even than when I talked to him in private. “Did you suggest it yourself?”

“I suppose not.”

“Well, then, did Palairet?”

“I suppose so.”

I persuaded him to agree that Palairet had, in fact, laid down his line of research in detail, and had supervised it day by day. More than a professor normally would? Maybe. Had he, Howard, found research easy?

“I shouldn’t think anyone ever does,” he said.

Some of the results he, or they, had obtained were still perfectly valid, weren’t they? A longer pause than usual — no one’s criticised them yet, he said. But there was one photograph which was, beyond any doubt, a fraud? He did not reply, but nodded. Could he remember how that photograph got into the experimental data? Palairet must have brought it in, he said. But could he remember how, or when? No, he couldn’t. Would he try to remember? No, he couldn’t place it. There were a lot of photographs, he was trying to write his thesis and explain them.

“This was a more striking bit of experimental evidence than the rest, though, wasn’t it?”

“But of course it was.”

“You can’t remember Palairet first showing it to you?”

“No, I can’t.”

It was no good. To the Court, he must have seemed deliberately to be refusing an answer. To me, trying to pull it out, he seemed not to want to remember — or else his whole memory was thinner-textured than most of ours, did not give him back any kind of picture. Didn’t he preserve, I thought to myself, any sense of those days in the laboratory, the old man coming in, the time when they looked through the photographs together? This was only five years behind him. To most of us, intimations like that would have flickered in and out, often blurred, concertinaed, but nevertheless concrete, for a lifetime.

I tried to gloss it over. I asked him if he found the fraud hadn’t come to him as a major shock? Yes. He gave me no help, but just said yes. I went through his actions after the first letters of criticism had come in from the American laboratories, doing my best to rationalise them. When he was first accused, I was leading him into saying, he had just denied it. Why should he do any more? Fraud had never crossed his mind: why should he invent explanations for something he had never imagined? The same was true the first two occasions he had appeared before the Court. He had simply said that he had faked nothing. It did not occur to him to think, much less to say, that Palairet had done the faking. It was only later, when he was compelled to recognise that there had been a fraud, that he began to think that only one person could have done it. That was why, belatedly, so belatedly that it seemed an invention to save his skin, he had brought in the name of Palairet.

How much of this synoptic version I was managing to suggest — how much the Court took in, not as the truth, but as a possible story — I could not begin to tell. I had to do it almost all through my questions. His answers were always slow and strained, and sometimes equivocal. Once or twice he sounded plain paranoid, as in the public house with Martin, and I had to head him off.

All the time, I was thinking, another five minutes, a question which sets him going, and it might sound more credible. But that kind of hope was dangerous. This was tiring them; it was boring them. I was accomplishing nothing. If I went on, it could be less than nothing. I felt frustrated at having to surrender, but I gave it up.

Crawford looked at the grandfather clock in the corner of the room. It was nearly twenty-five to one.

“I am inclined to think,” he said, “that is as far as we can go this morning. We shall have to trouble you” — he was speaking to Howard — “to join us again this afternoon. I hope that doesn’t upset any other arrangements?”

Howard shook his head. This automatic courtesy, such as he received from the Master or Brown, was too much for him.

When the door had closed behind him, Crawford invited us to lunch with him in the Lodge. I wanted to say no, but I daren’t leave them. As usual, one couldn’t afford to be absent. So I listened to Dawson-Hill entertaining the others at the Lodge dining-table. Someone mentioned that a couple of heads of houses would be retiring this next year. “Which reminds me,” said Crawford, “that I suppose my own successor will have to be elected at the end of the Michaelmas term. I take it there won’t be any hitch about that, Brown?”

“I think it’ll be looked after properly, Master,” said Brown. He gave no sign that he was himself involved. He spoke as though he were making arrangements for the appointment of the third gardener.

As we walked in the Master’s garden after lunch, Crawford discussed his plans for moving out of the Lodge. All clear by Christmas: his old house would be waiting for him. “Speaking as a husband,” he said, “I shan’t be sorry to get back. This” — he waved a short-fingered hand across the lawn, over which tortoiseshell butterflies were performing arabesques, towards the Lodge — “is not a convenient house. Between ourselves, no one knew how to build a house until the nineteenth century, and moderately late in the nineteenth century at that.”

A butterfly traced out a re-entrant angle in front of us. On my face I felt the sun, hot and calming. We walked beside the long Georgian pond, the water-lilies squatting placidly on the water, and Crawford was saying: “No, I don’t know why anyone consents to come into the Lodge. As for any of you with a wife, I should advise very strongly against it.”

Back in the combination room at a quarter past two, the sun was beginning to stream into my eyes. Nightingale drew a blind, which up to then I had never noticed, so that the room took on the special mixture of radiance, dark and hush such as one meets in Mediterranean salons.

As soon as Howard was back in his chair, Dawson-Hill started in. The tone in his questions wasn’t unfriendly; it had a good deal of edge just below the flah-flah, but so it had when he spoke to his friends. He kept at it for over two hours. His attack was sharp enough to hold them all, even Winslow, awake, alert, through the slumbrous afternoon. Dawson-Hill was having a smoother job than mine, I thought once or twice, as though I had been a young barrister again, with professional envy, professional judgment, resurrected. He was doing it well.

He limited himself to four groups of questions, and his line — any lawyer could have told — had been plotted out in advance. He sounded insouciant, but that was part of his stock-in-trade. There was nothing of the dilettante about his work that afternoon. He began by asking Nightingale to give him “the thesis”.